Monday Morning Update 11/4/24

Top News

Maven Clinic, which offers virtual women’s and family health services, reportedly lays off 10% of its headcount weeks after it raised a $125 million Series F funding round at a $1.7 billion valuation.

Employees say on online forums that the layoffs are in preparation for an upcoming company IPO.

Maven posted an article last year about “Workplace Survivor Syndrome” that wrapped up with “How Maven can help you support employees following layoffs.”

Reader Comments

From Jerry Rigged: “Re: Oracle Health. Aren’t they just using a code generator to transform Millennium to new technology?” That was the original plan, but now it sounds like they are developing from scratch, or at least spiffing up the front end without changing the functionality and data schema. Competing with Epic will require more than just an improved UI with some AI thrown in – Epic could match that if it thinks that’s what the market wants. The “crumbling infrastructure” comment isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring to existing customers who Oracle expects to stick around while they create a replacement product like other big outsiders have previously failed to do.. Maybe someone can answer these questions:

• How much of Millennium’s functionality will be included in the new product, and how will integration work with those modules that won’t be part of the initial release? Pharmacy, surgery, pathology, and radiology have to be complete and error-free.
• How will the new system address existing user customization?
• Will the problematic revenue cycle system be rewritten, and if not, how will the existing one integrate with the new EHR? Why would you not first fix RCM when its weaknesses are obviously hurting product sales and retention?
• How will CCL customization, rules and alerts, MPages, and custom interfaces be addressed?
• How will users interact with the system if they don’t like voice navigation or it doesn’t work in some situation?
• What’s the incentive for an existing customer to serve as a beta site?
• How long will it take for the new product to get market momentum, which will require convincing some number of Epic customers to de-install? Epic is expensive and organization-altering – not to mention that de-installs have been few – so what’s the best guess of the length of the buying cycle where Oracle Health could be back on the table?

From Robert D. Lafsky, MD: “Re: NEJM article. Good, although I would dispute how much AI can make the derp filling up most of my shared EMR any worse. Although several primary care colleagues are using AI assistants in the room, I stubbornly stick with dictating a narrative and some concluding clinical reasoning using Dragon. If only their AI geniuses could figure out how to get it to distinguish between the words ‘in’ and ‘and’ it would be nearly perfect.” The NEJM perspective piece makes these points:

• The problem-oriented, click-driven medical record was supposed to help clinicians by organizing information to support decision-making, but has placed limits on conveying the “patient’s story” and hasn’t been proven to have improved quality.
• AI-generated chart information could reduce the quality and reliability of documentation.
• The clinician’s reasoning might be diminished if AI creates the documentation without requiring them to synthesize the information themselves.
• Transcription and chart summarization seem like low-risk uses of AI, but may not perform as well as clinicians in conveying which information is relevant and creating a concise clinical impression that conveys the clinician’s degree of confidence.
• AI is confident even when it is wrong, making it harder for clinicians to detect hallucinations.
• AI excels in a free-form environment, meaning that it might have worked better with old-school paper records rather than with EHRs.
• AI models may collapse when they are fed training data that was generated by AI in the first place.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HLTH attendance isn’t beneficial to patients and healthcare in general, according to 81% of poll respondents overall and two-thirds of those who actually attended. Steve says that the conference is more geared toward getting investors and CEOs in the same room, while UnHLTHy says that HLTH ends up being companies that are trying to sell stuff to each other – an exhibitor told them that just 270 providers were on the list of 9,000 attendees.

New poll to your right or here: What will be Oracle Health’s biggest challenge in developing a new EHR? Those of us who have been involved in designing or implementing a new clinical software product could have extended the choice list by dozens, but I tried to keep it high level.

Congrats to everyone who proudly sticks to always tagging times as “EST” — you have finally entered the 33% of the year when you are not wrong. Pro tip: switch to just “ET” and you’ll be right 100% of the time. Beyond the time change that affects all Americans except for those in Hawaii and most of Arizona, I wish you a belated happy Halloween, Diwali, and Día de Muertos.

I accidentally found some useful LinkedIn options given that I have never checked my profile settings. Click “Settings & Privacy” under your profile picture on the top toolbar, after which you can do several things:

• Turn off autoplay videos.
• Turn off sound effects.
• Don’t show profile photos of people who aren’t either a connection or in your network.
• Turn off seeing political content in your feed.
• Choose “most relevant” or “most recent” posts for your feed view (I changed to the latter).
• Under Settings/Visibility, you can also choose to hide your name when you visit someone’s profile, turn off the ability for connections to see your connections list or people you follow, hide your last name, and hide profile visibility from outside LinkedIn.
• Under Advertising data, you can turn off a bunch of options that LinkedIn uses to target ads and disallow showing personalized ads from outside of LinkedIn.

Thanks to these companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo to learn more or contact Lorre to join the list.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

UK-based Definition Health, which offers surgical workflow software, raises $7.5 million in pre-seed funding.

Cigna reports a “non-cash investment loss” of $1 billion related to its $2.5 billion investment in VillageMD in November 2022. The company wrote off nearly $2 billion of that investment in May 2024 when VillageMD majority owner Walgreens started closing its clinics.

Sales

• Children’s Mercy Kansas City begins its implementation of Epic, which will replace Oracle Health.

Announcements and Implementations

Oracle Health and Meharry Medical College announce plans to create a health technology education and research collaborative, a health innovation hub, and a community care and wellness center in Nashville.

Privacy and Security

In Ireland, whistleblowers report confidentiality concerns that employees of Children’s Health Ireland are using the GoToMyPC remote desktop software on personal phones and laptops to access confidential patient information on hospital systems.

Other

The rapidly aging population of Hong Kong, combined with China’s goal to care for 97% of its elderly citizens at home, is driving digital health innovation. Biometric sensor companies have developed wearables that monitor heart rate and blood oxygen levels, diagnose sleep apnea at home, function as non-prescription hearing aids, and detect heat stress. The company Well Being Digital focuses on earbud sensors, citing studies showing that earbuds are more commonly worn than watches or rings and offer more stable, accurate measurements compared to wrist- or finger-based devices. Additionally, earbuds – which the company calls “hearables” – allow interactive and intervention features, such as direct clinician communication.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore will participate in the CHIME Fall Forum this week.
• WellSky and the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disabilities Services publish the results of a survey that assess the readiness of states to comply with CMS’s Ensuring Access to Medicaid Services final rule.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a data and analytics governance capability maturity model.
• Clearwater and Guidehouse partner to offer solutions that help healthcare organizations mitigate cybersecurity risk.
• Vyne Medical publishes a case study titled “How Hurley Medical Center Expanded Services to Increase Access to Care.”
• Inovalon announces the winners of its 2024 Inovalon Impact Awards.
• Optimum Healthcare IT posts an episode of its “Healthy as Tech” podcast titled “4 Ways to Increase Epic ROI With ServiceNow.”

Contacts

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

News 11/1/24

Top News

Global Payments will sell EHR/PM vendor AdvancedMD, which it acquired in 2018 for $700 million, to Francisco Partners for $1.1 billion.

AdvancedMD President Amanda Sharp, who has been with the company for 19 years starting as an accounts receivable clerk, will take on the title of CEO.

Reader Comments

From Ralphie: “Re: Oracle Health. We are a long-time Cerner customer evaluating the potential of moving to Epic. The internal Epic champions are going to throw the ‘crumbling architecture’ comment at everything. How does Oracle Health justify the last few years of our expense implementing and enhancing their solutions? How does an organization do a cost analysis on OH vs Epic? Too many questions that will likely force more organizations in the midst of this analysis to pursue Epic.” That remarkably clueless comment came from Seema Verma, who as CMS administrator mostly took political shots against the very programs she was paid to oversee, and now she’s slamming the former Cerner with similar insider contempt. Imagine being an Oracle Health sales rep who is trying to stem the Epic tide who now has to explain why “crumbling architecture” shouldn’t be a concern. Maybe the plan is to admit an inability to compete with Epic and put all the marbles into the lucrative VA and DoD contracts, knowing that they are the only former Cerner customers who don’t care about the company’s longstanding revenue cycle struggles.

From Beelzebub: “Re: HLTH conference. The founder has started and sold several conferences and has already moved on to his next one.” Jonathan Weiner has not only sold a previous conference to HLTH acquirer Hyve, he also sold one to Informa, which recently bought the HIMSS annual conference. He’s now starting an AI conference while staying on with HLTH for whatever time the acquisition terms specify. Terms of the HLTH deal weren’t announced, but the number most often bandied about, based on the revenue of comparable events, is $100 million, continuing the string of startup-pitching conferences that are far more successful than the companies that they promote. As the old saying goes, the smartest person in a gold rush is the one who sells shovels.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

IRhythm Technologies reports Q3 results: revenue up 18%, adjusted EPS –$1.26 versus –$0.89, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings. IRTC shares have lost 11% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $2.2 billion.

Amwell reports Q3 results: revenue down 1%, EPS –$2.87 versus –$9.54, beating analyst expectations for both. AMWL shares have lost 67% of their value in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $137 million.

A Kansas City publication questions “What’s Going On With All The Empty Cerner Buildings?” in noting that Oracle has closed two of the former Cerner’s three campuses and uses the former Innovations Campus to house a limited number of employees who don’t work remotely. The article concludes, “What’s scarier than the empty Northland headquarters building and its futuristic metal spire? The prominent Cerner street signage that remains at the campus entrance, suggesting a false promise of a place that once provided livelihoods for thousands but doesn’t exist anymore.”

Sales

• Augusta Health (VA) will implement Meditech Expanse.
• Belgium’s UZ Leuven will implement digital pathology from Sectra.

People

1upHealth hires Andrew Boyd, PhD (Personify Health) as CEO.

Glynn Stanton is named CIO for Yale New Haven Health System, Yale Medicine, and Yale Health and will continue in his role as the health system’s CISO.

Announcements and Implementations

Oracle founder Larry Ellison says at the Oracle Health Summit that “Cerner took about 25 years to write their system. We have completely rewritten that system in 14 months.”

Athenahealth integrates ambient documentation from Suki and IScribe with AthenaOne.

A new KLAS report on EHRs for under-200 bed hospitals finds that 42% use legacy systems and most new considerations involve Epic Community Connect, Meditech Expanse, and Oracle Health. Most Oracle Health and TruBridge respondents say they wouldn’t buy the solution again. Meditech and Epic Community Connect customers are happiest with the value received.

Privacy and Security

Elon Musk asks his followers on X to submit their medical images to his AI platform Grok to be used for its training, raising significant privacy concerns. It would also give Grok free, immediate access to protected health information without requiring signed patient consent forms.

Other

The board of Jennie Stuart Health (KY) confirms to the public that its decision to seek acquisition by Deaconess Health was driven by its desire to implement Epic, which the small hospital can’t afford on its own. The health system says that its 2022 implementation of Altera Digital Health caused problems, with the hospital’s medical staff president adding that Altera had not lived up to its promises. He says that the hospital could be live on Epic through Deaconess in six to nine months. A community member had previously cited the hospital’s $8 million purchase of an “artificial intelligence boondoggle” as a significant financial issue.

Contacts

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

News 10/30/24

Top News

Oracle Health will release a voice-powered, AI-enabled EHR in 2025.

The new system will be developed from scratch rather than being built on Cerner Millennium architecture, which will then require existing customers to migrate to the new one.

The company says that it discovered that Millennium has a “crumbling infrastructure” that was not suitable for enhancement.

Reader Comments

From TooCuteByHalf: “Re: Oracle Health’s application to become a QHIN. This is great news for interoperability … eventually. The application process takes months at the earliest, and even at that, it won’t be till at least mid 2025 before the first Oracle Health hospital goes live. TEFCA is nearly a year old, with millions of documents being shared, and the founding QHIN’s have been in the game for literally years. What took Oracle so long, and why take a victory lap in a race you’re not winning?” I’m even more interested in how Oracle Health plans to release a from-scratch EHR in the next few months that does not use Millennium’s underpinnings. It seems challenging to develop, test, document, and install a brand new EHR that will require existing customers to migrate, which is probably why no company has succeeded in rolling out a competitive inpatient EHR in decades. It’s a high-wire act to put out a huge software platform that directly affects patient care, especially given significant loss of former Cerner subject matter experts, and it wouldn’t take many clinically unfortunate missteps to send Oracle Health’s remaining customers fleeing to Epic. Meanwhile, having thrown the only available product under the bus after what seems to have been poorly executed due diligence, Oracle won’t likely make many new sales until the replacement system goes GA, not that it is selling much anyway. 

From Big Dog: “Re: Epic. Is the shared version (where multiple clients are on the same instance) of Epic a reduced functional version of Epic when it’s a standalone version? Was talking to a nurse at a local hospital the other day and they recently converted from Cerner Community Works and the nurse was stating they must have purchased the cheap version as it was no better than what they had been using.“

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week is a first, in that both Jenn and I are away on vacation at the same time. I’ll put in enough hours to not miss anything important, but will keep it simple otherwise.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

London-based events operator Hyve acquires HLTH, whose HLTH USA conference will become its largest event by revenue. Hyve will take over HLTH USA (Las Vegas), ViVE (Nashville), and HLTH Europe (Amsterdam). Hyve says it has targeted HLTH for years as the top conference in healthcare, noting a post-pandemic trend in which the largest conferences are growing at the expense of smaller ones. Hyve will bring over 80 HLTH employees and founder Jon Weiner. Hyve was taken private by two private equity firms in June 2023.

Alpha II, which acquired RCxRules in October 2023, changes its name to Aptarro. 

A study by Peterson Health Technology Institute finds that digital hypertension management tools – which include blood pressure monitoring, medication management, and behavior change – don’t provide overall health spending value even though they can be effective. It concludes that solutions that send data to care teams for medication management are most effective, while those that focus on patient behavior change deliver substandard results compared to traditional care.

Sales

• Northeast Georgia Health System chooses Optimum Healthcare IT to support execution of its cloud strategy with Amazon Web Services.

People

Lissy Hu, MD, MBA (WellSky) joins healthcare learning solutions vendor Ascend Learning as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Oracle Health will apply to become a Qualified Health Information Network. The company says that it will continue to support CommonWell Health Alliance as a founding member. Epic welcomed Oracle Health to TEFCA, noting that Epic already has 700 hospitals live on TEFCA as a founding member and adding, “Epic hopes that today’s Oracle Health announcement indicates that they are finally ready to take interoperability seriously—and to deliver the technology that patients and providers deserve instead of making distracting, untrue statements.”

Altera Digital Health announces GA of Paragon Denali, a cloud-native EHR that runs on Microsoft Azure and is targeted to rural, critical access, and community hospitals.

Medscape announces a free, AI-powered scribe solution that transcribes and summarizes encounters.

Emory University and Emory Healthcare will consolidate their IT operations into a single organization under Alistair Erskine, MD, MBA,  who has been named to the newly created position of enterprise chief information and digital officer. He joined Emory Healthcare as chief information and digital officer in March 2023.

Inovalon announces new products for eligibility verification, network provider utilization, AI-powered record review, FHIR API connectivity for health plans, a research network, and expanded pharmacy functionality.

A new KLAS report on ambient speech solutions finds that Nuance is most often considered while Abridge is strong in affordability and physician acceptance,with both companies benefiting from their relationship and integration with Epic. Suki and Augmedix are often considered by Meditech users. 

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/28/24

Top News

UnitedHealth Group’s HHS OCR breach notice filing indicates that the information of 100 million Americans was exposed in Change Healthcare’s February 2024 ransomware attach.

The company had previously said only that the cyberattack had affected “a substantial proportion of people in America.”

Reader Comments

From Granular Argument: “Re: long-time Cerner customer Children’s National. Doing demos of Oracle Health and Epic.” Verified, assuming that the graphic the reader sent is legit.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents reported limited negative HR experience in the past couple of years, although with some dealt with RTO conflicts and layoffs.

New poll to your right or here: Is employer-paid attendance of the HLTH conference beneficial to patients and healthcare in general? I will disclose my bias, having never attended, that it seems to focus on socializing, being entertained, and sharing air with celebrities that include high-profile CEOs who are mostly selling themselves and their companies, all with the goal of coming back home “energized” having run up the expense account for questionable quantifiable benefit. Ironically, all of this took place smoky casinos, which surround attendees with just about every known health risk. I suppose the real question is the value of the strong networking component of any conference, other than companies seeking customers or health system attendees seeking jobs. I doubt that the life of a dying cancer patient would be enriched by the knowledge that their medical costs funded an IT person’s attendance at a concert by frequent incarceree Busta Rhymes.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

WellSky acquires Bonafide, which offers solutions for durable medical equipment and home medical equipment.

Hospital quality reporting platform vendor Pharos closes a $5 million seed funding round.

An Nvidia blog post says that the company is working with Deloitte to create digital health AI agents, which it refers to as “customizable digital humans.” The Ottawa Hospital is using an agent that it calls Digital Teammate to answer surgery patient questions about procedure preparation and post-op recovery.

Sales

• Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust will implement Sectra One Cloud.

Announcements and Implementations

Researchers find that AI-powered transcription, including ambient clinical documentation, contains a surprising number of errors and hallucinations even when the source conversation is short and clear. Research is also limited because the medical transcription products erase the audio recording immediately, leaving the AI-generated text version as the only artifact. Everybody involved urges doctors to review the AI draft carefully, which of course some won’t because it is “usually” OK.

A YouTube blog post says that Cleveland Clinic is testing new AI tools for easily publishing authoritative videos. The clinic’s digital marketing director says they are using the tools to recommend topic ideas by searching YouTube and the web and to suggest interview questions.

Sponsor Updates

• Alpha II’s RCxRules will exhibit at NextGen Healthcare UGM October 27-30 in Nashville.
• Vyne Medical publishes a new case study, “How Hurley Medical Center Expanded Services to Increase Access to Care.”
• Alpha II, Artera, Crossings Healthcare Solutions, Ellkay, FinThrive, Fortified Health Security, Healthcare IT Leaders, Impact Advisors, Nordic, and Surescripts will exhibit at the Oracle Health Summit October 28-30 in Nashville.
• Notable announces the 2024 Notable Impact award winners in six categories.
• Net Health adds Tali’s AI assistant and ambient clinical documentation capabilities to its Optima, ReDoc, TherapySource, and WoundExpert EHRs.
• UiPath honors customer AGS Health with a UiPath A125 Award for its innovative use of fax automation and AI.
• FinThrive achieves claims management certification for oracle health patient accounting.
• Guam Regional Medical City implements PerfectServe’s care team communications software.
• TruBridge  Senior Director of Revenue Cycle Solutions Laura Osborne joins the HFMA Voices in Healthcare Podcast episode “Lessons from Tribal Health.”
• Waystar publishes a new case study, “AnMed Health’s Way Forward.”
• A Black Book Research survey of 4,000 healthcare organizations and 2,500 coding professionals highlights leading HIM and coding vendors, including the following HIStalk sponsors: Redox (clinical data integration and interoperability solutions, Alpha II ( computer-assisted coding applications), Verato (enterprise patient master index and clean-up),  Wolters Kluwer Health (clinical surveillance and compliance applications), and Nuance (medical speech-recognition solutions.)

Blog Posts

• IT Networks and their Undeniable Impact on Patient Experience and the Bottom Line (CereCore)
• Under the Hood: Key Insights from Notable’s Technology Leaders (Notable)
• Implementing a Healthcare Workforce Management System: 5 Common Challenges and Practical Solutions | Part 4 (QGenda)
• LPN vs LVN: What’s the Difference? (SnapCare)
• Solving Some of Physicians’ Major Pain Points with Patient Engagement Technology (TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company)
• 3 Ways Medication History for Reconciliation is Making Prescribing Safer (Surescripts)

Health Data Movers at the CHIME Fall Forum

HDM will facilitate a focus group titled “Unlocking M&A Success: Merging Systems for Seamless Integration and Maximum Impact” with Curtis Cole, MD, chief global information officer at Cornell University; Doug Turner, MBA, VP of enterprise applications at UCI Health; and Mehul Malhotra, delivery director at Health Data Movers on Monday, November 4 at 2:30 p.m. We will also be hosting a Taco Tuesday event following the sessions on November 5- RSVP here.

Contacts

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

News 10/25/24

Top News

The Department of Defense will award Leidos a three-year, $1.13 billion sole-source contract for MHS Genesis / Oracle Health integration services.

Leidos will be paid an additional $263 million for a nine-month maintenance period if DoD decides to issue bids for a new integrator after the three-year term.

Deliverables of the new contract include cloud migration and process documentation.

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 telephone call automation vendor Infinitus Systems raises $51.5 million in Series C financing.

Healthcare workflow and task automation startup Penguin Ai emerges from stealth mode. The four co-founders have data and AI technical leadership experience with UnitedHealth Group. Industry long-timer Peter Longo is heading up sales.

Sales

• HCA Healthcare will implement ambient documentation from  Athelas/Commure, which acquired Augmedix in July 2024.
• Billings Clinic- Logan Health will expand its use of its Oracle Health EHR to all 30 of its hospitals, replacing Meditech at the former Logan Health sites. The systems merged in September 2023.

People

Healthmonix names Paul Grant (EMDs) as VP of sales.

BayCare Health hires Lynette Clinton, MBA (UT Medical Center) as CIO. She was VP of applications at BayCare until December 2023, when she took the SVP/CIO job at University of Tennessee Medical Center.

Tiffani Misencik (Greenway Health) joins MultiPlan as chief growth officer.

Lisa Dykstra (Lurie Children’s Hospital) joins CHIME as CIO strategic advisor.

Announcements and Implementations

WellSpan Health uses an AI agent from Hippocratic AI to boost colorectal cancer screening in underserved, at-risk people who are not actively engaged with the health system. Engagement rates and home test kit opt-ins were significantly higher for Spanish-speaking patients versus English speakers, which the health system attributes to language barrier elimination, convenience, and the ability to conduct higher-quality calls than human agents who are held accountable to call productivity targets.

ProPublica exposes a “denials for dollars” practice in which health insurers outsource prior authorization review work to companies that are incentivized to deny claims. Cigna-owned EviCore by Evernorth uses an AI algorithm, called “the dial” by insiders, to adjust denial rates based on the financial guarantees that it has promised an insurer. The algorithm rejects more requests if savings aren’t sufficient or increases approvals if complaints arise. The article also describes a lawsuit that was brought against Carelon, which is owned by Elevance Health, that alleges that the company intentionally limited its fax machines to accept no more than 10 pages so it could then reject those claims for not having complete documentation.

Optum Rx implements Rx PreCheckPrior Authorization, which uses Surescripts technology to reduce PA approval time for 25 specific drugs from 8.5 hours to under 30 seconds.

Government and Politics

KFF Health News reports that Kooth, a digital mental health app vendor whose California state funding has been threatened, covered $15,000 in travel expenses for state officials to visit its London headquarters. Mental Health Commission Director Toby Ewing, who has been placed on administrative leave following whistleblower complaints, supported preserving Kooth’s $271 million contract despite low usage of its app, which has facilitated just 2,800 coaching sessions.

The government of Saudi Arabia institutes a licensing initiative that will facilitate the use of medical software by eliminating the requirement that companies operate physical factories.

The FDA names Michelle Tarver, MD, PhD director of its medical device division. She replaces Jeffrey Shuren, MD, JD, who is retiring.

Other

A local group raises concerns about the planned acquisition of Jenny Stuart Health (KY) by Deaconess Health System. A member of Save Jennie Stuart says that the 194-bed hospital seeks new ownership because of “a recently purchased artificial intelligence boondoggle” from an unnamed vendor that cost $8 million. The hospital wants to implement Epic, which Deaconess uses.

Florida nurse Katelyn Watts, RN, DNP develops a human trafficking screening tool for Epic, which in her three-month doctoral project resulted in the identification of five trafficking victims and the arrest of three suspected traffickers.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart adds VNS Health’s predictive analytics for Hospice Visits in the Last Days of Life into its MyUnity EHR.
• St. Luke’s Medical Center in the Philippines implements Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise EHR.
• Ellkay, Consensus Cloud Solutions, Waystar, and Surescripts will exhibit at NextGen Healthcare UGM October 27-30 in Nashville.
• Avia Marketplace recognizes EVisit in its “Top Virtual Nursing Companies” report for 2024.
• Five9 opens a new office in San Francisco.
• Impact Advisors releases a new episode of “The Impactful Advisor” podcast, “Impactful AI.”
• Konza National Network will present at the NCQA Health Innovation Summit October 31-November 2 in Nashville.
• FinThrive earns claims management certification for Oracle Health Patient Accounting.
• The Digital Health Hub Foundation’s Digital Health Awards recognizes Linus Health as the best in class winner in the longevity category for its digital screening solution for mild cognitive impairment, and NeuroFlow as the winner in the mental and behavioral health category.
• Meditech releases a new “This Week Health” podcast, “Clarion Hospital shares care coordination success.”
• MRO joins the CHIME Foundation as a Premier partner.

Blog Posts

• A Sneak Peek into the eClinicalWorks 2024 National Conference (EClinicalWorks)
• Elevating Health Literacy: Empowering Patients to Act on Their Understanding of Trusted Health Information (First Databank)
• Top Technology Investments for Healthcare Organizations (FinThrive)
• Third-Party Risk Management in Healthcare: The “Must-Haves” (Fortified Health Security)
• The Buck Starts Here: Front-End RCM’s Contribution to Claims Denials (Inovalon)
• 3 Ways an EHR Enhances Hospital Disaster Preparedness (Medhost)
• Modern Efficiencies for a Modern Audit Team: MRO Experts Share How to Reduce Risk (MRO)
• AI in Physical Therapy: The Future of Operations and Patient Care (Net Health)

I received just one sponsor’s information about their participation in the CHIME Fall Forum in San Diego November 4-8, so I’ll just insert it here:

Ellkay is a recognized healthcare connectivity leader, serving as the single partner to healthcare organizations for their data management and interoperability solutions. Ellkay empowers hospitals and health systems, diagnostic laboratories, healthcare IT vendors, payers, and other healthcare organizations with cutting-edge technologies and solutions. Since 2002, Ellkay’s system capability arsenal has grown to over 58,000 practices connected and 750+ EHR/PM systems across 1,100+ versions. Schedule a meeting or contact Auna Emery, VP of marketing at Auna.Emery@ELLKAY.com.

Contacts

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

News 10/23/24

Top News

Remote patient monitoring company CopilotIQ acquires competitor Biofourmis to offer tech-enabled, home-based care to seniors with chronic conditions.

Reader Comments

From Suspicious Minds: “Re: HIPAA. Why is the excuse used everywhere? You can’t record our time together because of HIPAA?” The policy makes sense if the sign is hanging in the lobby, where a patient shooting video doesn’t violate HIPAA (they aren’t a covered entity) but would raise valid privacy concerns. HIPAA also doesn’t address patients recording their own encounter, although it prohibits the provider from doing the same without the patient’s permission. I’m not sure what the sign means by “recorded media,” although I’m guessing that it is awkwardly referring to audio recording.

From HLTH Bellth: “Re: HLTH. Where the substance at?” HLTH attendees do three things, according to the visual evidence that they provide: go to parties, mug for selfies with pals, and stand around vendor booths. Not to mention interviewing each other for podcasts and videos that nobody will consume and seeking celebrity elbows to rub. HLTH seems to be where high-level executives throw around vaguely futuristic ideas without fear of anyone remembering later when they turn out to be wrong (everybody’s a futurist in the short term). Substantive accomplishments are still mostly announced at HIMSS, or even better, immediately instead of holding them for PR reasons that ceased to be valid 10 years ago.

Webinars

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Medbridge, which offers patient education and care software, acquires AI-enhanced rehab app development company Rehab Boost. Paul Jaure, Rehab Boost’s founder, will join Medbridge as head of AI.

HealthEx launches its patient-centric health data preferences and consent solution with $14 million in funding.

Counsel Health, which offers asynchronous messaging with physicians, raises $11 million in a seed funding round. Founder and CEO Muthu Alagappan, MD was previously chief medical officer of healthcare intelligent agent workflow vendor Notable.

Cleveland Clinic will open a Northeast Ohio primary care office in affiliation with Amazon One Medical, which offers members same-day or next-day appointments, 24/7 on-demand care, care team messaging, and insurance billing.

HealthSstream announces Q3 results: revenue up 3.9%, EPS $0.19 versus $0.13, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. HSTM shares are up 36% in the past 12 months, valuing the workforce solutions company at $914 million.

Pelvic pain virtual care platform Zencape Health shuts down. Founder and CEO Abi Sundaram says that the company earned positive user feedback and signed a health system partnership, but ran out of money and found that its model was too reliant on expensive physician time.

Sales

• Palomar Health (CA) selects IKS Health’s Care Enablement Platform.
• Rush University System for Health (IL) will incorporate Clear’s identity verification software into its MyChart password reset within its My Rush app.

People

Enlitic hires Brenda Rankin (Nuvoke) as COO.

Jonathan Malek (Veradigm) joins Avodah as CTO. Malek co-founded Practice Fusion in 2004 and transitioned to Allscripts (now Veradigm) when it acquired the company in 2018 for $100 million.

Vitalchat Telehealth names Michael Raymer (Health Advisory Partners) CEO.

Orbita hires Jeff Taylor, MS (Innovative Consulting Group) as CEO.

Fullscripts names Chief Financial and Strategy Officer Ashley Koch to the additional role of president.

Moffit Cancer Center rehires its former CIO Beth Lindsay-Wood, MBA (City of Hope) as SVP and chief informatics and technology officer.

Derek Anderson (The HCI Group) joins HCTec as VP of sales.

William Hudson, MBA (Aidoc) joins Hippocratic AI as chief transformation officer.

Kaia Health hires Adam Pellegrini (Jasper Health) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Prairie Lakes Healthcare System (SD) will implement Epic through its affiliation with Sanford Health.

Cleveland Clinic adds Ayble Health’s digital care pathways and behavioral health content to its virtual care program for patients with chronic digestive diseases.

The Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services rolls out Epic across the state’s six psychiatric hospitals.

Laudio and the American Organization for Nursing Leadership publish a nurse manager trends report that uses the company’s 200,000-employee dataset and nurse manager interviews.

Confluence Health (WA) adds virtual visit capabilities from KeyCare to its virtual care services.

Blue Shield of California and Salesforce will offer a prior authorization platform as part of Salesforce Health Cloud. The system will assemble relevant EHR information into an electronic form that physicians can submit immediately to Blue Shield, which will approve or deny the PA request before the end of the visit.

Samsung enhances its Health app to allow users to collect their health records from providers electronically, after which the app will offer insights, alerts, and next best steps. The app will also add barcode scanning to its food tracker. Data access is provided by B.well Connected Health.

Government and Politics

England’s health secretary unveils a plan to issue “patient passports” for data-sharing across providers that will save an estimated 40,000 hours of NHS staff time each year and reduce wait lists. The government will also explore the use of patient wearables for self monitoring.

Other

Senators want drugmakers Pfizer and Eli Lilly to explain why their direct-to-consumer programs don’t violate anti-kickback statutes by offering telehealth prescribing for the drugs they manufacture.

A Black Book Research survey of 300 HLTH attendees finds that the majority are window-shopping for generative AI, machine learning, cybersecurity, and post-acute care technologies. Their organizations likely won’t invest in these areas for at least another 18 months.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas employees in Morrisville, NC pack 200 disaster relief kits for the American Red Cross.
• AGS Health, HealthMark Group, MRO, TruBridge, Vyne Medical, and Wolters Kluwer Health will exhibit at AHIMA October 27-29 in Salt Lake City.
• WellSky partners with Connect 211 to improve online data sharing and make community resources easier to find.
• Black Book Research shares the results of its latest survey of health information management professionals, revealing critical challenges confronting the medical coding industry in Q3 2024.
• St Jansdal hospital in the Netherlands extends its enterprise imaging software contract with Agfa HealthCare.
• Altera Digital Health publishes a new client story, “Inland Empire Health Plan brings benefits of data interoperability to 1.5M members.”
• Arcadia CTO Aneesh Chopra will present at the NCQA Health Innovation Summit October 31 in Nashville.
• Avia Marketplace recognizes AvaSure in its “Top Virtual Nursing Companies” report for 2024.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions, Netsmart, SnapCare, Waystar, and WellSky will exhibit at the LeadingAge Annual Meeting October 27-30 in Nashville.

Blog Posts

• Cybersecurity Risk Mitigation Suggestion: Share the Burden (CereCore)
• CMS Announces Resources for Hurricane Milton (AdvancedMD)
• How AI is Reshaping the Future of Medical Coding (AGS Health)
• Creating a Thriving Ecosystem for a Seamless Patient Experience (Artera)
• Q&A with Availity CISO Mike Green: Part 1 (Availity)
• Clearwater Cyber Briefing: Key Trends and Takeaways for October 2024 (Clearwater)
• Building an Interconnected Digital Corridor Beyond the Digital Front Door (Cordea Consulting)
• Building a Strong Employer Brand: Key Strategies for Recruitment Success (Direct Recruiters)
• AI, Outages, and Interoperability: Top Takeaways From a CMIO Summit (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/21/24

Top News

A US Senate subcommittee report finds that UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and CVS disproportionately denied prior authorization PA requests for post-acute care in their Medicare Advantage patients, often by using AI-driven tools.

• UnitedHealth’s denial rate doubled between 2020 and 2022 as the company  implemented “Machine Assisted Prior Authorization” and “[Healthcare Economics] Auto Authorization model.”
• CVS saved $660 million in one year by denying inpatient admissions. It tested and then abandoned a predictive model that was too generous in approving cases.
• Humana coached its reviewers in how to explain denials to the ordering providers. The Subcommittee was not able to assess the company’s use of technology to deny PA requests, but notes that Humana has been a NaviHealth customer for years.

The report recommends that CMS audit denials, especially for targeted services, and expand its regulation of utilization management committees to ensure that predictive technologies don’t exert undue influence on human reviewers who might be pressured to “rubber-stamp the recommendations of algorithms and artificial intelligence.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents don’t sneak looks at their phones during meetings except to check email or texts.

New poll to your right or here: What is the worst HR action you have experienced in the past two years? “Worst” in this case means whatever one you found to be most disappointing. I ran this poll three years ago and being laid off was the top answer, probably because it was peak COVID.

Most respondents to my one-off poll said that they would not listen to a NotebookLM-created podcast of the week’s top news. I was going to create another one for this week, but I found it frustrating that the “hosts” mispronounced HIPAA as “HYPE-uh.” The Google team has cranked out a lot of improvements to NotebookLM, so maybe they will add the ability to create a pronunciation guide. 

A Reader’s Notes from Nashville Health Care Council’s Sessions Conference

Toby Cosgrove (interviewed by Bill Frist)

• Cosgrove was unemployed for a period after his residency.
• He made a point about letting clinicians practice at the top of their license and pushing administrative burden down the chain by talking about his experience serving in Vietnam. He led a 100-bed field hospital there with a total of two physicians, 15 nurses, and an army of service members who took care of everything that didn’t require true clinical expertise.
• He’s a proponent of AI scribes and sees AI playing a larger role in clinical care in the coming years.
• At Cleveland Clinic, they started an initiative to find and follow up with the first 1,000 coronary bypass patients to assess their wellbeing and outcomes. It took hiring private detectives to track down some of the patients. They maintained this culture of review and continuous improvement until they made bypass a very safe procedure.
• He says that one of the top issues in healthcare is the explosion of knowledge and data and our inability to stay on top of it all.
• Provider burnout and the shortage of providers came up numerous times during the conference. Apparently one-third of nephrology residency slots go unfilled each year.

David Feinberg, Oracle Health

• He says that innovation hasn’t come to healthcare as much as other industries because we’ve skipped steps in the tech process. For example, with Meaningful Use, we paid people to use software, but didn’t evaluate whether the software is helpful.
• He advocated for a nutrition label of sorts for AI that tells you how the system was trained, and which data points it uses.
• He said that when Oracle was buying Cerner, Oracle made several decisions that made him question the success of the deal, so he felt incentivized to leave within a year to redeem his golden parachute. He even told his wife he was out within a year. But he says he stayed the course because those decisions were reversed and because Larry Ellison has allowed the Cerner team to be the healthcare experts while the Oracle team are the tech experts.
• He says that they applied previously created software and solutions to create the Clinical Digital Assistant and a new patient intake product. For the latter, they borrowed from work that Oracle has done in developing inmate intake systems for prisons.
• CDA has 70 customers using it since its June launch.
• He said a new EHR that is rooted in AI is coming, with more details to be shared at the Oracle Health Summit in a few days in Nashville. He says it’s ready for ambulatory and will be ready for inpatient sometime next year.

A Reader’s Notes from Vanderbilt’s Health AI Sessions

Brad Malin, professor of biomedical informatics, biostatistics, and computer science

• There is a real risk of LLMs, including GPT-4, divulging training data through a carefully crafted prompt. Providers need to be cognizant of this if they are providing identifiable data for model training; there’s a reasonable chance it could be exposed.
• Research has shown that introducing a little synthetic data into the training set for an AI model can reduce model bias, but you can reach a point where too much synthetic data eliminates any benefits.

Daniel Fabbri, assistant professor of biomedical informatics and computer science

• VUMC spends $5-10 million per year on chart abstraction. Reliant upon expensive abstraction staff and requires lots of time and manual review.
• Asked the question, “Can we build a system that allows non-technical users to attain 90% faster abstraction for a range of medical research tasks with human-level accuracy?”
• First tried a not-so-technical approach: crowdsourcing the work through a group of medical students. This was still slow and resource-intensive.
• Tried ChatGPT as a way to analyze and extract the pertinent data points; it was “okay”.
• Ultimately created a new tool called BRIM that has reduced abstraction time for cancer research from 5 minutes per note to 15 seconds. All Vanderbilt staff, faculty, and students can use the tool with IRB approval. They also achieved 80% time reduction in mental health case review with human-like accuracy, and they recently won an ARPA-H funding award.
• One key decision they made was to introduce a design requirement that every BRIM-generated data point must include the raw text from the source note, so that a human can quickly see where the LLM abstracted the information from and can easily verify accurate selection of pertinent information.

Jesse Spencer-Smith, director and chief data scientist for the Data Science Institute

• Gave a very helpful overview of what a transformer in AI actually is.
• He says that giving AI greater context (e.g., more input data or a longer conversation history) reduces hallucinations.
• He says that we are seeing small (“small” meaning lighter weight and with fewer parameters) open-source AI models that have similar performance to ChatGPT, which will open up AI to function on small devices such as smartphones).

Webinars

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CVS Health fires CEO Karen Lynch and promotes David Joyner, who runs its CVS Caremark pharmacy benefits management business, to replace her. The company also reduces guidance due to increased medical costs, sending CVS shares down more than 5% on Friday.

Cigna has reportedly restarts merger discussions with rival insurer Humana. The companies had ended those negotiations last year after failing to agree on terms.

Sales

• MaineGeneral Health chooses Sectra’s hosted enterprising enterprising solution.
• GaHIN migrates to InterSystems HealthShare.

People

Michael Raymer (Simulations Plus) joins Vitalchat Telehealth as CEO.

Providence CIO/EVP B. J. Moore announces his resignation.

Announcements and Implementations

Artera announces new AI co-pilots: Staff (translation, predictive text for patient inquiries, message shortening, and conversation summaries that can be saved to the EHR) and Insights (no-show reports).

Zoom announces Workplace for Clinicians, a paid offering that includes visit transcription with AI-generated clinical notes and displaying EHR data as a visit prep summary.

The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) publishes draft frameworks of how it will certify independent quality assurance labs and standardize their test results into what it compares to a nutrition label for AI product performance and safety.

Privacy and Security

Axis Health System alerts patients and employees that ransomware hackers have posted their data to the dark web after the health system declined to pay a $1.7 million ransom.

Sponsor Updates

• Revuud team members join Reynolds Baptist Church volunteers in their Hurricane Helene clean-up efforts in Asheville, NC.
• Wolters Kluwer Health adds AI search, robust analytics, and insights to the latest edition of its UpToDate Enterprise Edition.
• Nordic and BeeKeeperAI partner to accelerate AI-driven clinical decision support at the point of care.
• The EClinicalWorks Image AI Assistant saves York Primary Care (ME) over an hour per day on managing incoming faxes.
• Greater Houston Healthconnect will connect charitable clinics across Texas at no cost using technology and services from InterSystems and J2 Interactive.
• Netsmart and WellSky and exhibit at the National Association for Home Care and Hospice Conference and Expo October 20-22 in Tampa, FL.
• Health Data Movers posts a new episode of its “QuickHITs” podcast, “Healthcare Innovation and Informatics with Dr. Nitu Kashyap.”
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast, “Interview with Bryan Vartabedian, MD.”
• QGenda receives Authority to Operate certification from the Indian Health Service.
• Waystar publishes a new case study, “AnMed Health’s way forward.”

Blog Posts

• Innovation in Care Coordination: Bridging Gaps for Better Patient Outcomes (Netsmart)
• Get More Value Out of Your EMR With the ServiceNow Platform (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Implementing a Healthcare Workforce Management System: 5 Common Challenges and Practical Solutions | Part 2 (QGenda)
• From Complexity to Simplicity: One Clinic’s Journey to Corepoint (Rhapsody)
• How Predictive Scheduling Technology is Maximizing Efficiency and Improving Patient Care (SnapCare)
• Meaningful Innovation Starts with Collaboration (Surescripts)
• Community Champions: How West Feliciana Parish Hospital Is Improving Community Health (TruBridge)

Contacts

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

News 10/18/24

Top News

Epic asks a federal court to dismiss the antitrust lawsuit that Particle Health brought against it, citing these arguments:

• Particle’s customers violated patient privacy by accessing records for non-treatment purposes and Epic says that the lawsuit is intended to distract the industry from that issue.
• Particle accuses Epic of anticompetitive behavior, but limits its argument to payer software, which Epic says includes other interchangeable products and services that are not mentioned in the complaint.
• The lawsuit fails to prove that Epic’s actions served no purpose other than anticompetitive behavior.
• No illegal agreements were cited to support claims of a conspiracy.
• Particle doesn’t show market harm, just its own.
• The complaint’s tortious interference claims are not valid because Particle can’t prove that Epic had wrongful intent or made false statements.

Reader Comments

From My2cents: “Re: Qardio. I’m reading on Reddit that they went under, but haven’t seen anything in the news. The app seems to be unavailable in the Google Play and Apple stores.” CEO Mike Alvarez left the consumer ECG and blood pressure app company to become CEO at Glooko last month. The company’s website lists several executive team members who are no longer there, including its founder and CTO. Redditors report buying devices recently only to find that the app is not available and support is unresponsive.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I received a HLTH email update that touts their celebrity keynoters. I’m impressed that HLTH says that their talks are neither paid nor sponsored, although I question the healthcare relevance in some cases. On the list: Lance Bass, Kesha Carter, Halle Berry, Chelsea Clinton, John Legend, Lenny Kravitz, Jill Biden, Maria Shriver, and musical guest Busta Rhymes. Today I learned that Lance Bass’s manufactured former musical group NSYNC is correctly capitalized since it’s an acronym of the last character of the first name of each original member, of which Lance wasn’t one or else I suppose it would have been SYNCEN, which is actually kind of cool. Also TIL that Busta almost certainly holds the healthcare conference record for being arrested.

Dr. Jayne’s critique of LinkedIn made me ponder what will happen to Meta after Facebook inevitably implodes into MySpace II. I’m an infrequent user, but it seems to have become a pointless platform whose most active users are tech-challenged, sloppy-writing boomers and Gen X’ers and the scammers who swarm to them. The algorithm has seemingly been tuned to a higher level of revenue-seeking desperation given the ads, group suggestions, and rage bait that it pushes more prominently than updates from actual connections. I hope Facebook users don’t migrate to Reddit since that’s the only place left that doesn’t make me feel stupider for having read it.

Webinars

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual digestive care clinic operator Oshi Health raises $60 million in a Series C funding round.

Healthie, which offers EHR and scheduling systems for health and wellness providers, raises $23 million in a Series B funding round.

Biotech research center The Broad Institute of Cambridge, MA lays off 87 employees, almost all of them in software and IT. Microsoft ended its contract with the company in July 2024.

Shares of insurer Elevance Health fall sharply after the company reported lower-than-expected earnings, which it attributes to rapidly increasing healthcare cost trends in its Medicaid business. It also reported a membership decrease of 3% due to the restarting of eligibility redeterminations that had been paused during the pandemic. Other insurers have reported similar problems with higher-than-expected medical costs in their government lines.

Hospital medication tracking technology vendor Bluesight acquires Sectyr, which offers 340B audit and compliance tools.

Sales

• Lee Health (FL) will expand its virtual nursing program using infrastructure from Caregility.

People

Pivot Point Consulting hires Scott Sims, MBA (Kyndryl) as SVP of business development and recruiting.

Amwell names Mark Hirschhorn, MBA (Tapestry Health) as CFO.

Announcements and Implementations

Oracle announces Oracle Health Clinical Data Exchange for claims processing data exchange between providers and payers.

CVS Health’s Aetna announces SimplePay Health, a health plan for self-insured clients in which members pay a fixed co-pay for services that are priced as a bundled payment; can use the Personify Health (formerly Virgin Pulse) app to search for the lowest-cost, best-outcome providers; owe nothing at the time of service; and receive a credit card-like monthly statement that can be paid using zero-interest line of credit. Coupe Health acquired SPH, formerly known as SimplePay Health, in November 2021. Coupe Health’s parent is venture capital firm Stella Health, which is owned by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.

AMIA announces its 2024 Signature Award recipients, who will be honored at AMIA 2024 in San Francisco November 9-13.

Government and Politics

The board of supervisors of San Diego County, CA requests authorization to contract with OCHIN to implement Epic, which will be used across all Health and Human Services Agency departments in a $6.5 million project.

HHS OCR fines Maryland solo dental practice Gums Dental Care $70,000 for failing to provide a patient with timely access to their medical records. The practice didn’t provide the records even after being reminded by HHS OCR that it was obligated to do so, after which the patient filed a second complaint. The practice provided the records three years after the initial request and two months after it was notified of the $70,000 civil monetary penalty. The dentist there is Anna Gumbs, DMD, whose should have used her actual name for the practice since Googling “gums dental care” unsurprisingly returns a ton of unrelated pages.

Other

The Guardian takes an investigative dive into Indiana’s Parkview Health, whose aggressive expansion strategy is funded by some of the highest prices of any US hospital even though it is located in the country’s #1 most affordable metro area. The strategy of the health system, which has boosted revenue to $2 billion, includes taking over competing hospitals, buying up practices to increase referrals and insurer pricing leverage, buying naming rights to sports teams and venues, building expensive campuses, and buying practices and imaging centers and increasing prices as hospital-based outpatient departments. In other words, it does what most big health systems do. Insiders say that it ranks doctors by revenue metrics and bases their bonuses on increased patient volume, higher coding, and generating charges for procedures and testing. Nurses report that they are pressured to charge patients for batteries and tissues and are forced to comply with a “linen stewardship” program.

Sponsor Updates

• Inovalon launches a SaaS-based risk adjustment and analytics platform for health plans that reduces manual medical reviews by 50%.
• Arcadia announces new standards-based interoperability commitments to streamline data sharing and enhance customer value.
• A KLAS case study highlights the ways in which Surescripts technology enables greater workflow efficiency and faster approvals for prior authorizations for prescription medications.
• Redox announces that its data exchange platform has earned i1 certified status by HITRUST for all data transactions hosted on the Google Cloud Platform.
• Goliath Technologies partners with 1E to offer a complete IT observability solution that allows IT to identify and troubleshoot clinician EHR performance issues.
• Elsevier Health launches Sherpath AI, an advanced AI solution for nursing and healthcare education.
• Findhelp partners with Attane Health to support people with severe food allergies.
• Five9 will present at the MIT AI Conference October 26 in New York City.
• Fortified Health Security names Erin Martin content marketing manager.
• Healthmonix names Kate Joyce customer support specialist.
• Healthcare IT Leaders releases a new “Leader to Leader” podcast, “An Epic Journey at RWJBarnabas Health: Unlocking the Power of a Unified Patient Record.”
• MRO releases a new episode of “The MRO Exchange” podcast, “Data Quality with Frank Jackson, SVP of Clinical Quality and Payer Solutions.”
• NeuroFlow will present at the Behavioral Health Tech Conference November 5-7 in Phoenix.

Blog Posts

• Innovative partnerships: Pioneering solutions to increase clinician satisfaction (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Evolving Healthcare Operations To Unlock Patient Access (Tegria)
• Sunoh AI Medical Scribe is Transforming Documentation in Women’s Specialty Clinic (EClinicalWorks)
• From Go-Live to Thrive: The Importance of Post-Go-Live IT Support Planning and Working with a Partner Who Can Evolve with You (Impact Advisors)
• New Infection Prevention and Control Requirements: Is Your Hospital Ready? (Inovalon)
• Advancements in Liver Disease Treatment: Spotlight on MASLD and MASH (Lucem Health)
• Driving innovation in healthcare: Meditech’s global impact (Meditech)
• Rehab Therapy Burnout: Manage Stress Due to Staffing Challenges (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 10/16/24

Top News

Walgreens Boots Alliance reports Q4 results: revenue up 6%, EPS -$3.48 versus -$0.21, beating analyst expectations for both and sending shares sharply up.

WBA shares have lost 57% of their value in the past 12 months.

The company announced that it will close 1,200 of its 8,000 drugstores over the next three years. CEO Tim Wentworth said in the earnings call that the company is focused on “monetizing non-core assets to generate cash,” naming VillageMD as an example, to focus on its core retail pharmacy business.

Reader Comments

From Kim: “Re: the NotebookLM podcast you created. I enjoyed listening to the 5-minute weekly news summary and found it easier to digest than reading. Lately the amount of information has been overwhelming so I very much appreciated the summary at the end.” The AI-generated podcast that recaps the top five news item from the week (chosen by me) took me just a couple of minutes to create. I created a poll for readers to express their interest or lack of it. I’m happy to do it regularly if enough readers are interested.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HLTH USA attendees – consider connecting with HIStalk sponsors that are participating.

Webinars

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CVS Health will exit its infusion business and close or sell 29 related regional pharmacies. The company bought infusion company Coram for $2.1 billion in 2013.

UnitedHealth Group reports Q3 results: revenue up 9%, EPS $6.51 versus $6.24, beating expectations for both, but shares dropped sharply on the news. CEO Andrew Witty said in the earnings call that health system partnerships will provide significant opportunities. The company reported that the Change Healthcare cyberattack will cost it $705 million.

UK-based health tech market intelligence form Signify Research receives an $8 million investment from UK investment company BGF.

MDisrupt, which offers a health technology expert marketplace, receives a $1 million milestone-based investment from the American Heart Association’s newly created venture arm.

Practice management system vendor ClinicMind acquires ChiroDominance, which offers a marketing system for chiropractic offices.

People

Matthew Michela, MBA (Curve Health) joins Flywheel as CEO.

The Christ Hospital Health Network names Joyce Oh CIO and digital transformation officer.

RLDatix names Dan Michelson, MBA (InCommon) as CEO.

Industry long-timer David Wattling, who held leadership positions at Courtyard Group and Telus and served on the boards of several companies, died October 1. He was 69.

Symplr Chief Nursing Officer and former hospital executive Karlene Kerfoot, PhD, RN died Tuesday.

Announcements and Implementations

WhidbeyHealth (WA) goes live on Meditech Expanse with consulting assistance from Tegria.

In New York, Columbia Memorial Health, Glens Falls Hospital, and Saratoga Hospital will go live on Epic early next month, rounding out Albany Med Health System’s implementation.

Oracle Health introduces Clinical Data Exchange for the automated exchange of claims processing data between providers and payers.

Jupiter Medical Center (FL) implements Epic with help from Cordea Consulting Solutions.

Digital identity vendor AllClear ID launches Health Bank One, an app that allows people to collect their medical records — including images —  and then ask questions about the information, with answers provided by GPT-4o. The system processes digital and hard copy records from all providers, payers, and pharmacies, which are required to provide the information by the 21st Century Cures Act. A subscription costs $14.95 per month and a 30-day trial is free.

Government and Politics

The VA Fayetteville Coastal Health Care system in North Carolina opens a Virtual Health Resource Center to offer veterans assistance with digital health tools offered through the VA’s Connected Care program and VA clinicians training on how to incorporate them into care workflows. The VA offers 47 VHRCs across the country.

Privacy and Security

RCM, compliance, and coding vendor Gryphon Healthcare notifies 400,000 individuals of a third-party data breach that may have exposed patient information.

UMC Health (TX) restores its EHR after a ransomware attack several weeks ago forced it to divert ambulances and enact downtime procedures. UMC is still working to restore its patient-facing systems and internal patient care programs.

Sponsor Updates

• Clinical Architecture staff volunteer at the Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana, serving 1,947 households in the Indianapolis area.
• AGS Health announces that Everest Group has named it a leader in revenue cycle management operations for the fourth consecutive year.
• Arcadia publishes a new report, “The healthcare CIO’s role in the age of AI.”
• Artera debuts three new products at its Heartbeat Customer Conference.
• AvaSure honors the 2024 AvaPrize winners for virtual care excellence.
• Capital Rx announces that co-founder and CTO Ryan Kelly and SVP of Strategy Josh Golden have been named to the Class of 2024 BenefitsPro Luminaries in the Innovation & Technology and Education & Communication categories, respectively.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions will exhibit at the Arizona Hospital Leadership Conference October 16-18 in Tucson.
• CloudWave will present at and sponsor the HIMSS Central and Southern Ohio conference October 18 in Dublin, OH.
• DrFirst will exhibit at the NAACOs Fall Conference October 16-18 in Washington, DC.
• Netsmart announces the implementation of the 360X electronic closed-loop referral management standards with LifeWorks NorthWest (OR).
• AdvancedMD announces its Fall 2024 Product Release, with 30 updates and features that include new two-way patient messaging capabilities.
• Goliath Technologies partners with 1E to offer health IT end users a combined solution for EHR performance review and management.

Blog Posts

• Top seven considerations for leaders prioritizing patient engagement (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• 2024 MIPS Update – Once Per Reporting (AdvancedMD)
• Enhancing Healthcare Efficiency: Tackling the Challenges of Clinical Administrative Burdens (AGS Health)
• Rethinking burnout (Altera Digital Health)
• Key Takeaways from the CDO Era: How Health Systems Can Drive Real Innovation (Amenities Health)
• Unlocking the Power of Clinical Analytics: Insights from Lee Clark, CEO ASO Data Services (Ascom Americas)
• Improving Clinical Data Quality to Strengthen Patient Care Summaries and Outcomes (Availity)
• The Importance of a Flexible Biosimilar Strategy (Capital Rx)
• How to Win the Epic Staffing Game (CereCore)
• Can Data and AI Help Reduce Physician Burnout? (Dimensional Insight)
• Beyond the Resume: How to Stand Out in an Interview (Direct Recruiters)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/14/24

Top News

Ambient documentation vendor Abridge is reportedly raising a $250 million investment that values the company at $2.5 billion.

Reader Comments

From Snarkopotamus: “Re: Particle Health and Epic. Which one comes across as the protector of patient privacy?” Clearly Epic, considering that Particle got caught and admitted selling access to patient data to companies that had no business obtaining it. However, that misses the point – Particle’s customers are not necessarily motivated by patient privacy and instead are paying a middleman to give them perhaps their first unfettered access to patient data. Therefore, as a business model, I wouldn’t expect Carequality’s dispute findings to hurt venture capital-funded Particle. As a health system, I might be appalled that Particle signed up a malpractice law firm to trawl my patient data and be glad that Epic caught them. Then I would wonder whether companies other than Epic would have been equally zealous, if this incident will give data-sharing a black eye, whether legal or HHS OCR action might result, or how the nebulous definition of “treatment” could be sharpened. Meanwhile, Particle Health CEO Jason Prestinario posted this on LinkedIn following the Carequality dispute resolution:

While the resolution sets the stage for more transparent health information exchange, it does not change our conviction in our antitrust complaint against Epic, and in fact strengthens it.  Everything we’ve seen shows that Epic’s actions during the course of this dispute served their own monopolistic business goals over the needs of customers and patients.

From Mayonnaise: “Re: [health system name omitted]. CIO to retire effective November 1 with no interim named yet. Most staff caught completely by surprise. He’s largely already done.” Unverified, so I expunged the organization’s name until I can dig further. I am dismayed that Internet Archive is down from a cyberattack and Google has removed the ability to view cached versions of a webpage, so I can’t see if the leadership page has changed.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents aren’t buying the argument of Oracle Health EVP Seema Verma that her company is better positioned than Epic to solve the biggest problems of health systems.

New poll to your right or here: What apps do you sneak a look at >3 times per one-hour live or virtual meeting? I ran this awhile back and e-mail was the winner by far, suggesting that the respondents found it to be more interesting than the meeting.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Goliath Technologies. Goliath is the only purpose-built health IT observability solution providing complete provider experience visibly so health IT can proactively manage a high-quality EHR experience for providers and their corresponding patient interactions. We allow health IT professionals to anticipate EHR speed and reliability issues before they impact users, troubleshoot them quickly when they do with AI-enhanced contextual data, and document the root cause of issues so they can be fixed permanently. Only Goliath provides a common set of facts so clinical and HIT teams can have productive conversations around improving EHR speed and reliability for providers. Now, both clinical and HIT can know which providers are impacted, the frequency and duration, and root cause so issues can be resolved. Goliath is a member of the KLAS Arch Collaborative and the only health IT solution with purpose-built modules for the largest EHR applications, an exclusive partnership with Oracle Cerner, and is featured in the Epic Showroom Connection Hub. Thanks to Goliath for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a well-done explainer video for Goliath titled “Provider EHR Experience Observability.”

Webinars

October 15 (Tuesday) noon ET. “AI in Practice: How Privia Health Empowers Doctors to Win at Value-Based Care.” Sponsors: Navina and Athenahealth. Presenters: Dana McCalley, MBA, VP of value-based care, Navina; Michael McDonnell, strategic account executive, Navina; Francheska Feliciano, director of risk adjustment, Privia Health. The panelists will share practical insight from Privia Health’s experience that are applicable for users of any EHR, focusing on strategies to improve collaboration between clinical teams and coders, reduce administrative burden, and ensure accurate HCC capture at the point of care. The presenters will offer strategies for streamlining value-based workflows across clinical and coding teams, reducing friction and administrative burden, and improving value-based performance and risk adjustment accuracy by empowering clinicians with AI at the point of care.

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare advisory firm VMG Health acquires Carnahan Group, which offers provider advisory and technology services. 

Sales

• Riverside Health (VA) will implement Abridge.

People

Matthew Smith (Medhost) joins Health Systems Informatics as VP of business development.

Sheri Stoltenberg, who founded Stoltenberg Consulting and served as its CEO since 1995, retires.

Announcements and Implementations

Abridge will include links to relevant evidence from Wolters Kluwer Health’s UpToDate clinical decision support reference in Abridge-created ambient documentation notes.

Government and Politics

A federal jury finds that consulting firm Cognizant discriminated against US IT workers by exploiting H-1B visa loopholes to favor Indian employees in hiring, promotions, and terminations. The 11-year-old original complaint noted that 12% of the US IT industry employees are from Southeast Asia versus Cognizant’s 75%. Punitive damages will be imposed later. Cognizant says it will appeal.

Bloomberg reports that a federal magistrate judge has struck down as unconstitutional the 100-year-old Texas statute that has allowed Attorney General Ken Paxton to investigate businesses and non-profits, including out-of-state hospitals that provide gender-affirming care.

The Drug Enforcement Administration suggests that it will again extend rules that allow prescribing controlled substances from telehealth encounters.

Privacy and Security

A ransomware group threatens to publish patient data from Colorado-based behavioral and long-term care provider Axis Health System unless it pays $1.5 million.  

Sponsor Updates

• Redox adopts Google Cloud as part of a multi-cloud strategy.
• RLDatix sponsors the American Society for Health Care Risk Management 2024 Innovation Award presented to Advent Health.
• Sectra will exhibit at Pathology Visions 2024 November 3-5 in Orlando.
• Waystar will exhibit at the AMBA Annual Conference October 17-18 in Las Vegas.
• WellSky will exhibit at the ACMA regional conference October 12 in Richmond, VA.
• Altera Digital Health, Care.ai, CereCore, Clearsense, Clearwater, CliniComp, Divurgent, Ellkay, InterSystems, Meditech, Nordic, Optimum Healthcare IT, and Rhapsody will sponsor the CHIME Fall Forum November 4-8 in San Diego.

Blog Posts

• Best Practices, Automation, and Acceleration: 3 Key Takeaways from Noteworthy 2024 (Notable Health)
• Meaningful Automation Strategies for Empowering Clinical Staff (Netsmart)
• Beyond the Chart: EHR-Induced Burnout (and What to Do About it) (Nordic)
• Manage Your Data as a Strategic Asset (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Maximizing Efficiency with Part-Time IT Resources (Revuud)
• How Sophia Genetics Leverages Rhapsody to Revolutionize Genomic Data Interpretation (Rhapsody)
• 6 Ways TruBridge Encoder Beats the Competition (TruBridge)

Contacts

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

News 10/11/24

Top News

Carequality issues its final resolution on the Particle Health versus Epic dispute.

Particle is suing Epic, charging it with antitrust behavior for shutting off data to Particle customers to suppress competition in the payer software market. Epic countered by claiming that it caught Particle customers extracting data for non-treatment purposes, such as researching malpractice lawsuits, in violation of Carequality’s policies. Particle’s lawsuit remains active.

A summary of the resolution, which both companies accepted:

• Carequality found that two of Particle’s customers were accessing data for non-treatment purposes and is investigating the third company that Epic questioned. Particle had already ended its agreements with the two companies and Carequality banned them from network participation for 12 months. The company names were redacted in the published version of the resolution.
• Particle should require prospective customers to document their relationship with providers, such as copies of their business associate agreements.
• Particle had vetted the three questionable customers but failed to discover the inaccurate information that those customers had provided to it. Particle agreed to a six-month corrective action plan in which will send Carequality a list of new customers with their application documentation.
• Carequality reaffirmed that Epic can shut off data access for questionable users and determined that, contrary to Particle’s claims, it did not treat Particle any differently than other Implementers. Epic agreed to use consistent, objective criteria when it denies service and to share its Phonebook Policy and the outcomes of each entry that it reviews every month for the next 6 months. UPDATE: I originally referred to this as a corrective action plan, which it is not.
• The resolution sided with Particle on the technical issue of whether requests should be tagged as originating from Particle or should instead indicate the individual Particle customer’s ID. Epic had claimed that Particle was intentionally hiding the origina of the data requests.

Both companies declared that Carequality’s resolution was favorable to their organizations. Particle says that the resolution invalidates Epic’s original dispute filing and requires Epic to be more open and transparent. Epic says that the three Particle customers that it claimed were violating the treatment-only provision were verified by Carequality as indeed doing so and have either lost their access or face further actions.

Carequality will tighten its documentation process for new Implementers that relates to Applicant Business Rules and documentation of any claimed provider relationships.

Webinars

October 15 (Tuesday) noon ET. “AI in Practice: How Privia Health Empowers Doctors to Win at Value-Based Care.” Sponsors: Navina and Athenahealth. Presenters: Dana McCalley, MBA, VP of value-based care, Navina; Michael McDonnell, strategic account executive, Navina; Francheska Feliciano, director of risk adjustment, Privia Health. The panelists will share practical insight from Privia Health’s experience that are applicable for users of any EHR, focusing on strategies to improve collaboration between clinical teams and coders, reduce administrative burden, and ensure accurate HCC capture at the point of care. The presenters will offer strategies for streamlining value-based workflows across clinical and coding teams, reducing friction and administrative burden, and improving value-based performance and risk adjustment accuracy by empowering clinicians with AI at the point of care.

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Diabetes digital health vendor Glooko raises $100 million in a Series F funding round. The company also announced that it has replaced CEO Russ Johannesson with medical device executive Mike Alvarez, MBA.

Ambient documentation software vendor Suki raises $70 million in a Series D funding round that values the company at $500 million.

Laudio publishes a book titled “Leader Inspired Work: Insights and Tools by and for Healthcare Managers,” which was authored by Laudio co-founder Tim Darling.

Nutritional supplement ordering technology vendor Fullscript acquires Rupa, which offers a specialty lab ordering system.

Sales

• Griffin Health (CT) will implement EHR-integrated personalized patient experience software from Vyne Medical.

People

Healthmonix promotes Michael Lewis, MBA to VP of customer success.

TeleTracking Technologies promotes Anita Dressel, MS to president, replacing Nigel Ohrenstein.

Anthony Leon (Trove Health) joins B.well Connected Health as RVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Elsevier Health expands access to its ClinicalKey AI decision support tool to individual medical residents and physicians.

Duke Health will collaborate with NTT Data to create a technology-drive home care model that includes a virtual agent, automation, device interoperability, remote patient monitoring, and a patient app and portal.

Microsoft announces healthcare-related AI enhancements:

• Multimodal AI models that integrate medical imaging, genomics, and clinical records.
• Healthcare data solutions for Microsoft Fabric: conversational data integration, social determinants of health (SDOH) public dataset transformation, care management analytics, CMS  claim and claim line feed (CCLF) data ingestion, and data discovery and cohorting.
• A public preview of healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio to build Copilot agents for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, and patient triaging.

Sponsor Updates

• Findhelp customer and community success teams donate supplies to the little free food pantry at an elementary school in Austin, TX.
• Wolters Kluwer Health celebrates a decade of bringing VSim for Nursing virtual nursing education and innovation to students.
• Ellkay will sponsor the CommonWell Health Alliance Fall Summit November 4-5 in Nashville.
• Five9 publishes a new case study, “VSP Delivers Self-Service to 12M with Five9 IVA.”
• WellSky’s annual “Evolution of Care” report finds that hospitals are struggling to find post-acute care options for their patients.
• The Healthcare Market Matrix Podcast features Healthcare Growth Partners Managing Director Christoper McCord, “Navigating a Health IT Market in Flux: Key Insights as We Head Into Q4.”
• Healthmonix will exhibit at the NAACOS Fall 2024 Conference October 16-18 in Washington, DC.
• Impact Advisors will present at the OR Manager Conference October 29 in Las Vegas.
• Laudio publishes a new book, “Leader Inspired Work: Insights and Tools by and for Healthcare Managers” by Laudio co-founder and Laudio Insights President Tim Darling.
• Medicomp Systems announces the re-architecture of its Quippe Solutions to the W3C web component standard.
• Meditech staff take part in hands-on development and testing of FHIR during the HL7 International 38th Annual Plenary, WGM+, and HL7 FHIR Connectathon in Atlanta.

Blog Posts

• Sunoh.ai – A New Horizon in Pain Management (EClinicalWorks)
• Improving Collaboration Between Healthcare Providers and Payers (FinThrive)
• Healthcare Cybersecurity Threats: September 2024 (Fortified Health Security)
• Electronic Medical Records Retrieval Myths: Common Challenges and Misconceptions (Inovalon)
• Building Trust in Healthcare Data (Konza National Network)
• 6 Takeaways from Meditech Live 2024 (Meditech)
• Three Key Questions for Evaluating Healthcare Integration Engine Performance (Med Tech Solutions)
• Exploring the Future of Payer-Provider Data Exchange: Insights from MRO and CHIME’s Recent Research Report (MRO)
• Improve Patient Satisfaction by Empowering Your Rehab Therapy Team (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 10/9/24

Top News

ASTP says that information blocking and lack of interoperability progress is mostly due to behavior rather than technology and vows to increase oversight that includes these issues:

• Publicly accessible API documentation is not available or not usable.
• Developers are imposing fees, contractual terms, and intellectual property requirements that are not allowed.
• Some EHRs allow connection only to generic API endpoints, which makes it hard for API users to connect directly with health systems.
• Provider organizations and API developers are requiring patient access API developers to sign a HIPAA business associate agreement, which is not legally required.
• Providers and developers are not providing timely explanations when they deny data access.

ASTP reinforces that HHS OIG can fine developers, health information networks, and HIEs up to $1 million per information blocking violation, while CMS will apply disincentives to providers who have committed information blocking. 

Reader Comments

From Bol: “Re: Seema Verma. I wonder if Oracle Health gave her a line item for personal brand-boosting like HHS did?” Verma, best known for her attempts to kill the Affordable Care Act and criticism of the Medicaid program even as she was being paid by taxpayers to run those programs as CMS administrator, is second-best known for spending $5 million of taxpayer dollars on external PR consultants who were assigned to promote her “personal brand.” Maybe it worked since she ended up as the top executive of Oracle Health, which holds a $16 billion VA contract. Verma complained via X this week about the “political theater” in which members of Congress are questioning the VA’s spending and lack of success with their Oracle Health project. She advocates for aggressive go-lives, which of course would trigger milestone payments to her employer. Her entry in Wikipedia resembles a fact-checked tabloid expose.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Healthmonix. The company’s cutting-edge solutions simplify regulatory reporting and enhance performance in value-based care models. Its flagship product, MIPSpro, streamlines MIPS reporting with flexible data integration, helping healthcare providers maximize their Medicare reimbursements. MIPSpro supports the latest MIPS Value Pathways (MVPs), making it easier to align reporting with CMS priorities while improving scores and compliance. APP Impact consistently enhances APP scores by an average of 23%, ensuring organizations stay ahead in the complex healthcare landscape. For ACOs, ACO Measure Compliance solution offers actionable insights and ensures reporting compliance, improving care outcomes and financial performance. With seamless integration into popular EHRs like Epic, Healthmonix supports various data submission options, including direct EHR integration, QRDA I parsing, and standard spreadsheet uploads, ensuring flexible and accurate data reporting. Whether you’re navigating MVPs, MIPS, or APMs, Healthmonix provides the tools to succeed. Thanks to Healthmonix for supporting HIStalk.

I found this Healthmonix webinar recording from a couple of weeks ago titled “Tough Measures in 2024.”

Webinars

October 15 (Tuesday) noon ET. “AI in Practice: How Privia Health Empowers Doctors to Win at Value-Based Care.” Sponsors: Navina and Athenahealth. Presenters: Dana McCalley, MBA, VP of value-based care, Navina; Michael McDonnell, strategic account executive, Navina; Francheska Feliciano, director of risk adjustment, Privia Health. The panelists will share practical insight from Privia Health’s experience that are applicable for users of any EHR, focusing on strategies to improve collaboration between clinical teams and coders, reduce administrative burden, and ensure accurate HCC capture at the point of care. The presenters will offer strategies for streamlining value-based workflows across clinical and coding teams, reducing friction and administrative burden, and improving value-based performance and risk adjustment accuracy by empowering clinicians with AI at the point of care.

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Roon, which offers vetted, verified medical information from experts, raises $15 million in a seed funding round. The startup recently added an AI-powered Instant Answer feature to its app.

Value-based care workflow automation vendor Reveleer acquires Curation Health, a clinical insights company that is based in Maryland. Reveleer secured $65 million in new financing earlier this year.

Women and family health virtual clinic operator Maven Clinic raises $125 million in a Series F funding round that values the company at $1.7 billion.

Data management firm Harmony Healthcare IT acquires Trinisys, which offers data management and workflow automation solutions.

Sales

• Ardent Health (TN) selects Glytec’s diabetes management and insulin dosing software.
• Kettering Health (OH) will offer heart failure patients the option to participate in a remote patient monitoring program that is powered by Story Health.
• Mary Washington Healthcare (VA) will implement RCM software and services from Ensemble Health Partners.
• USA Health, University of South Alabama’s health system, will implement safety solutions from RLDatix.

People

Arcadia names Aneesh Chopra, MPP (CareJourney) chief strategy officer, Dave Szela (Datavant) chief growth officer, Luke Hansen, MD (Homeward) chief medical officer, and Vignesh Elamvazhuthi, MS SVP of engineering.

Jason Stenta, MBA (Optum) joins Walgreens as SVP and chief commercial officer.

Ada Health names Patrick Wetherille (Everyday Health) COO and Jacob Plummer (Datavant) chief commercial officer, and CTO Graham French to the additional role of chief quality officer.

Greenway Health hires Paul Ford, MSIT (Inovalon) as CISO.

Announcements and Implementations

Baylor Scott & White Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, Novant Health, and Providence form Longitude Health, which will “identify, develop, and scale capability-based solutions to enhance core operational functions and transform health system performance.”

TrustCommerce, a Sphere company, announces that its Cloud Payments product is now certified on all major US payment processing platforms.

Community Health Systems (TN) adopts Denim Health’s conversational AI as a part of inbound call workflows at its Patient Access Center.

Athenahealth launches AthenaOne for Behavioral Health.

UMass Memorial Health – Harrington reduces all-cause 30-day readmissions of CHF patients via its remote monitoring program that uses technology from Brook Health.

HLTH USA will feature college-uneducated healthcare experts Halle Berry and Lenny Kravitz at its upcoming conference. Next up in medical grand rounds: “Multifactorial Approaches to the Pathophysiology and Intervention of Polymicrobial Translocation in the Gastrointestinal Microbiome: Implications for Systemic Inflammatory Responses and Personalized Therapeutic Modalities,” featuring Pauly Shore and musical guest Marilyn Manson.

Government and Politics

Epic sues Epic Staffing Group, indicating in its complaint that the healthcare and life sciences staffing services company  company started using Epic-focused names in 2022 despite knowing that Epic had held the rights for those names for 40 years. Epic Staffing Group, the country’s 22nd largest healthcare staffing firm, was acquired by a venture fund owned by Hyatt Executive Chairman Tom Pritzker in 2022.

Other

UC Davis Children’s Hospital researchers determine that virtual access to family-centered rounds in the NICU increase parent attendance, particularly among minorities, families living in underserved areas, and those without a college education. Researchers will next study the effects of adding professional interpreters to the virtual family-centered rounds.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas staff collect cash donations and supplies to send to Western North Carolina for Hurricane Helene relief efforts.
• Mercy Health renews its medical imaging contract with Visage Imaging for an additional eight years.
• Dimensional Insight VP of Marketing Kathy Sucich will chair the Tech & AI Stage at Reuters Total Health October 8-9 in Chicago.
• Sant Boi Hospital in Barcelona, Spain implements Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging software.
• Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in England adds knowledge-based medication administration to its Altera Sunrise implementation.
• Capital Rx releases a new episode of The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast, “Navigating Flu Season! A Quick Update on Vaccines and Such, with Libbi Green, PharmD.”
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Streamlining Success: How OHH Achieved An 11-Month Epic EHR Transition.”
• The HealthBizCast Podcast features Clearwater CFO Baxter Lee.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions will sponsor the HIMSS North Carolina Conference October 10-11 in Wrightsville Beach.

Blog Posts

• Streamlining Success: How OHH Achieved An 11-Month Epic EHR Transition (CereCore)
• The Increased Risk of Ransomware (AdvancedMD)
• Leveraging Advanced Technologies in Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management (AGS Health)
• AI and cybersecurity: How safe are your systems? (Altera Digital Health)
• Workforce enablement tools for actionable health data (Arcadia)
• Proven Strategies for Boosting Learner Engagement: LMS, Analytics, and More (Divurgent)
• Journey Mapping: Your Key to Understanding Experiences (Tegria)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/7/24

Top News

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan tells a Madison TV station at a Wisconsin event that it’s too early to tell whether FTC will involve itself in Particle Health’s antitrust lawsuit against Epic.

Khan says that she has heard concerns about Epic from entrepreneurs and startups that are trying to enter the healthcare space.

She noted that FTC doesn’t usually get involved in litigation between companies, but adds that it’s “it’s too early for us to say” whether FTC will file an amicus brief that could help the court make a decision.

Reader Comments

From Circumspect: “Re: comments last week of Oracle Health EVP Seema Verma. Can you run her quote from the Forbes piece since it is paywalled?” She said in the article in discounting KLAS’s report of Oracle Health losing clients to Epic:

It takes more than an EHR on its own to solve the full scope of problems that healthcare networks face, which include everything from staffing, supply chain issues, finances, patient engagement, and security. Epic will never be in the business of solving these problems, and KLAS’s short-sighted research doesn’t take these challenges into account. It’s like counting yards run in football without accounting for touchdowns.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents say that Particle Health has a weaker argument than Epic in its lawsuit.

New poll to your right or here, inspired by the reader’s question above: Which company is better positioned to solve the most pressing problems of health systems, Epic or Oracle Health?

I used Google’s NotebookLM to turn my write-ups of last week’s biggest health tech news items into a five-minute podcast. The result isn’t perfect, but auditory learners might digest it more easily. What do you think?

Sponsors: tell me about your participation in the CHIME Fall Forum and/or HLTH and I’ll include your company in my guide.

Webinars

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Sales

• Indiana University Health will implement Epic, replacing Oracle Health.

People

Taylor Davis, MS, MBA (CareLuminate) joins Pivot Point Consulting, a Vaco Company as executive partner for client success.

Announcements and Implementations

Amazon sent me to a book that I didn’t know about, “Coded to Kill: A Techno-Medical Thriller,” which was written by Michigan Medicine CEO Marschall Runge, MD, PhD. The storyline is a hospital whose EHR is about to become a national standard, which a “former NSA honcho” sees as a tool that can help him gain power. It gets OK reviews, which probably makes it worth $0.99 for the Kindle version.

Government and Politics

HHS OCR imposes a $240,000 money penalty against Providence Medical Institute (CA) for a ransomware attack in early 2018 that affected the PHI of 85,000 people.

A federal judge revokes the bail of Ruthia He, the founder and CEO of telehealth company Done Global, for failing to disclose to authorities that she possessed documents that would have allowed her to return to China. She and and the company’s clinical president were were charged in June 2024 with fraud for selling $100 million worth of Adderall and other stimulants via monthly subscriptions to cash-paying customers, often for no legitimate medical purpose. The company has reportedly moved the business to China to allow it to continue operating. 

Other

A news site in India warns readers that while ChatGPT can interpret a paper prescription from a photo – a process for which it provides step-by-step instructions – its results should be checked with a medical professional before taking action.

Pediatric ED physician Jonathan Reisman, MD writes in a New York Times opinion piece that he has always assumed that AI and other machines would eventually outperform humans at the technical parts of medicine, but he has since seen his expected job security evaporate as tools like ChatGPT became better than doctors at patient communication.  He ruminates that pre-written scripts have always been used in communication, including in medical school training for delivering bad news. He concludes that it doesn’t really matter whether doctors feel compassion or empathy toward patients, only that they act like they do.

Sponsor Updates

• Arcadia adds J2 Interactive and Socially Determined to its data solutions marketplace.
• Wolters Kluwer Health releases the results of its third “Pharmacy Next: Health Consumer Medication Trends” survey.
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast, “Interview with Zeev Neuwirth, MD.”
• RLDatix will exhibit at the ASHRM 2024 conference through October 8 in San Diego.
• Verato and Zen Healthcare IT will exhibit at the Civitas Annual Conference October 15-17 in Detroit.
• Waystar will exhibit at the HFMA New Jersey & Metro Philadelphia Annual Institute October 9-11 in Atlantic City, NJ.

Blog Posts

• The Power of AI: Fueling Organizations and Elevating People, Part I (Netsmart)
• EPR training: Getting it right from the outset and throughout (Nordic)
• How CIOs Can Communicate Technical Debt Internally (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Nurses of Note 2024: The Associate Chief Nursing Officer (PerfectServe)
• Centralizing Medical Staff Data: Transforming Safety, Efficiency, and Speed to Service (QGenda)
• FNP-C vs. FNP-BC: Which Family Nurse Practitioner Certification is Right for You? (SnapCare)
• Why is HFMA Peer Review Such a Big Deal for Healthcare Products & Services? (TruBridge)

Contacts

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

News 10/4/24

Top News

Virtual care chronic disease management vendor Omada Health files SEC paperwork for an IPO that is planned for early 2025.

The 13-year-old company has raised $450 million. It was valued at $1 billion in its most recent funding round in 2022.

Omada offers coaching, connected devices, and care plan management for diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and joint pain.

Reader Comments

From We Need More Good Actors: “Re: Particle vs. Epic. It was truly interesting to hear ‘The Health Tech Talk Show’ take this perspective: ‘This is a total freaking stunt, and they [Particle] are skirting around the actually problem that is they are bad guys, doing bad things, and totally destroying trust in the market.’” We’re all cheap-seaters until Particle’s scattershot complaint gets legally fleshed out and Epic and Carequality tell their side of the story, but these are my thoughts as I look at this week’s reader poll, in which 80% of respondents think that Epic’s case is stronger:

• Particle appears to have knowingly either bent or broke the data-sharing rules of the road.
• Carequality’s guidelines allow companies like Epic to turn off exchange with an organization if they suspect problems with privacy and security practices, so one rogue Particle customer could cause all customers to be turned off.
• The most relevant verbiage in the complaint is this: “Just a few months after Epic began its conduct, however, Particle’s revenue growth dropped so sharply and so dramatically that it was barely able to meet one-third of its previous projections, which up to that point it had regularly exceeded. And, unfortunately, that downward trend is continuing, all because of Epic’s anticompetitive campaign.”
• I don’t think the lawsuit is a stunt since generating PR won’t really help Particle, but rather a last-gasp effort by Particle to try to extract settlement cash from Epic to mollify investors who have pumped $40 million into the now-struggling company.
• What were they thinking in signing on an ambulance-chasing law firm as a customer?
• I expect one of two outcomes: (a) Particle will drop its lawsuit as the proceedings drag on with the lawyer cash register ringing, especially if HHS rejects Particle’s complaint of Epic’s information blocking and/or Carequality’s rules and records seem to indicate that Epic followed its rules and Particle didn’t; or (b) Particle will go broke while trying to ride out an expensive, tough-to-prove antitrust lawsuit.
• The most relevant industry questions are: (a) how far does the “treatment” definition and that of secondary uses extend?; (b) what level of responsibility do companies like Particle have for vetting and monitoring their customers?; and (c) what are Carequality’s responsibilities in defining and monitoring acceptable user behavior?
• The T in TEFCA stands for “trusted” and Particle’s lawsuit may convince the industry that Epic has been a good steward of patient data and responded appropriately.
• Perhaps Particle hopes to rally the industry around the “Epic is a bully” theme that unsuccessful competitors repeat regularly, but I’m not sure that this lawsuit will accomplish that or that Particle will benefit as a result.

From Steve Stanic: “Re: Lake Charles Memorial Health System (LA). We went live with Epic on October 1, replacing Paragon and local niche ambulatory vendor IMed after an 18-month implementation that replaced decades-old technology.” Steve is CIO there.

From Karma Chameleon: “Re: CVS Health. I was inspired to write this since my fellow physicians and I, as well as our patients, are chronically having to endure BS from CVS.” This is masterfully poetic and acerbic:

I have no tears for CVS
Nor sadness that they’re in distress
Indeed, if they are in a mess,
I’m quite delighted (I confess)

For in their money-grubbing quest,
Their PBM denied with zest,
And now it seems they must divest.
Most will concur — it’s for the best!

Tons of money they should lose
For all the staff that they abuse
Consumer care is just a ruse
All of this should be old news

The other thing, if truth be told
(And at the risk of being bold)
That dreadful music while on hold
Should mandate CVS be sold.

And so, my friends, I will not wail
If CVS begins to fail
If its investors start to bail
And karma bites it in the tail.

Webinars

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Teladoc COO Michael Waters, MHA will leave the company as part of a restructuring under new CEO Chuck Divita. He joined the company in July 2022 after nearly 10 years at Providence.

Sales

• Connective Health will use Availity’s Fusion data transformation engine to normalize, enrich, and reorganize clinical data.
• Ardent Health will implement the perioperative solution of Qventus to optimize its robotics surgery program.

People

TigerConnect hires Marissa Carlson, MS (Intelerad) as chief marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Henry Ford President and CEO Robert Riney says that he is excited about implementing Epic at the former Ascension Michigan hospitals, naming that as one of his top priorities.

Rush Health announces Rush Connect, which offers virtual specialty care, virtual urgent care, E-visits via MyChart messaging, and self-scheduled cancer screenings.

Sponsor Updates

• First Databank staff volunteer at the Food Pantry at Riverside Park in Indianapolis.
• FeaturedCustomers names Artera, Backline by DrFirst, and PerfectServe as top performers in its “Fall 2024 Hospital Communications Software Customer Success Report.”
• Black Book Research’s latest survey of IT leaders lists eight technologies draining value from health systems.
• Ellkay will exhibit at the New England Epic User Collaborative October 8 in Waltham, MA.
• Clinical Architecture and 4medica partner to offer a harmonized, longitudinal whole-person medical record.
• Findhelp releases a new episode of “American Compassion The Safety Net” podcast, “The Broken US Safety Net.”
• Fortified Health Security names Caroline Nee business development representative.
• Healthcare Growth Partners publishes the September 2024 edition of its “HGP Observations.”
• Impact Advisors will present at the MGMA Leaders Conference October 7 in Denver.
• Inovalon previews its annual Empower Summit, taking place October 27-29 in Washington, D.C.
• “The Lead at the Top of Your Game” podcast features KeyCare CEO Lyle Berkowitz, MD discussing “How Tech-Empowered Virtual Healthcare Teams May Save Your Life.”
• The “NCQA Quality Matters” podcast features Konza National Network President and CEO Laura McCrary, “When Exchanging (and Trusting) Data Grows Up.”

Blog Posts

• Expert tips to take your healthcare data from chaos to clarity (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Sunoh.ai – The Ultimate AI Scribe Solution for your Healthcare Practice (EClinicalWorks)
• NYC Health + Hospitals & EVisit (EVisit)
• Good to Great: Crafting Killer Digital Experiences for Exceptional Results (Five9)
• Confused About Interoperability? We’ve Got You Covered (HealthMark Group)
• From a Single Point of Failure to Multiple Paths: Industry Shifts in Response to Major Disruption (Inovalon)
• The relative number of new healthcare managers is growing 7% per year (Laudio)
• FIB-4 Score: Exploring Current Limitations & Improvement Opportunities (Lucem Health)
• Insights from the AWS Executive AI Forum (Medhost)
• Three Key Questions for Evaluating Healthcare Integration Engine Performance (Med Tech Solutions)
• Types of Occupational Therapy: Specialties That Set the Profession Apart (Net Health)
• Lessons from the NeuroFlow Summit: As Industries Converge, Quality Behavioral Health Data Is Essential (NeuroFlow)

Contacts

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

News 10/2/24

Top News

Private equity firm Accel KKR acquires VisiQuate, which offers revenue cycle analytics and workflow automation.

Reader Comments

From Slivovitz: “Re: Particle Health versus Epic. Particle may be unhappy about Epic’s behavior, but it’s a Hail Mary to claim antitrust behavior, which is rarely  successful.” Particle will need to prove not only that Epic holds a monopoly in the payer platform market, but also that it gained it through illegal means and that consumers were harmed as result. Courts often side with the antitrust defendant company’s business justification, and Epic has a strong one in protecting patient privacy. Epic always defends itself vigorously at whatever legal cost is required, making it unlikely that they will pay Particle to settle the lawsuit. Also to Particle’s disadvantage is that the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice are not involved, the lawsuit was not structured as a class action, and Particle’s complaint is mostly limited to itself, which doesn’t seem to be a strong antitrust argument. These cases often take years to resolve, so I assume that Particle’s business litigation law firm is working on contingency in hopes of earning a cut of any damages that Epic pays. The lead attorney represented AliveCor in its successful patent violation case against Apple.

Webinars

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Autonomous medical coding company Nym announces $47 million in new funding.

Private equity firm TPG takes a majority position in Surescripts, which hired an investment bank to search for potential buyers in April 2024.

CVS Health will lay off 2,900 employees and is reportedly considering breaking up the company’s businesses.

Sales

• Ballad Health (TN) selects oncology treatment and care management software and consulting and professional services from Varian, which Siemens Healthineers acquired in 2021 for $16 billion.
• Novant Health (NC) will implement data, analytics, and digital services from CitiusTech.
• Open Mind Health will incorporate NeuroFlow’s behavioral health technology into its virtual health and wellness services.

People

Ashley Blankette (Highmark Health) joins CAQH as chief product officer.

Jeff Pearson, MBA, MBL (Solis Mammography) joins Catalyst Health Group as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

United Regional Health Care (TX) rolls out Care.ai virtual nursing technology in 16 emergency department rooms.

TidalHealth launches virtual nursing pilot programs at its Peninsula Regional and Nanticoke campuses.

Clearway Health launches a patient management system for specialty pharmacy programs that are operated by a health system.

My favorite big-picture healthcare analyst is Sanjula Jain, PhD, chief research officer of Trilliant Health. Her points from my March 2022 interview have aged well. Her new report highlights trends:

• The US health economy defies the laws of economics because employers have allowed the status quo to persist, have absolved state and federal governments from underpaying for healthcare services for Medicare and Medicaid enrollees, and via EMTALA have allowed the federal government to delegate responsibility for societal ills to hospitals.
• Value for money will be a defining trend of of the US health economy over the next decade. This is different from value-based care, which does not create value for the ultimate payer, such as the employer or federal government.
• The physical and mental health of Americans is deteriorating and the prevalence of chronic conditions is growing, even as the US spends more than other countries with worse results with costs growing, especially with Medicare.
• Healthcare administrative costs increased 40% to $278 billion from 2011 to 2021.
• HHS has been experimenting with value-based care for more than a decade and has implement other efforts to constrain costs, with limited effect on reducing cost or improving quality. CMS quality  measurement burden remains high and hospital quality reporting is expensive.
• Competition does not have a clear effect on hospital quality and negotiated rates are often lower in monopoly markets.
• Life sciences lobbying is 4.5 times that of other industries.
• The US pays 422% more for the same brand name prescription drugs than 33 other OECD countries.
• Use of CPT codes for AI indicates that its highest use is in cardiac conditions.
• Telehealth’s value as a clinical tool is limited. Patients don’t consider it a substitute for in-person care except for behavioral health, which accounts for 70% of telehealth volume.
• The shortage of primary care physicians could reach 40,000 by 2036.
• The average American doesn’t understand or use transparency efforts, which have had little impact on outpatient spending.
• Retailers have learned that delivering primary care is hard and running a specialty pharmacy is profitable.

A new KLAS report on population health management finds that health system interest has cooled considerably in recent years as they consolidate vendors and focus on value-based care. Arcadia is the most-considered solution. Systems from Lightbeam, Arcadia, Oracle Health, and HealthEC are most often being considered for replacement.

Government and Politics

The DoD’s Defense Health Agency is developing care delivery technology that will connect data and combat environments to MHS Genesis sometime next year, according to EHR optimization updates from the DHA.

The VA Inspector General and federal law enforcement are investigating at least 12 VA employees who violated HIPAA when they snooped into the medical files of veterans and vice-presidential nominees Senator JD Vance (R-OH) and Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) this past summer. Investigators are trying to determine if the records were shared and why the employees accessed the files. VA OIG found that the records are relatively easy to view because the system is set up to give quick access to doctors.

Privacy and Security

UMC Health (TX) continues to divert patients and utilize downtime procedures as it works to restore systems impacted by a ransomware attack that began last Thursday.

Other

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner, who at 81 says she isn’t planning to retire, tells Forbes how Epic will be run without her:

• Epic will remain private and her nearly 50% share of the company — along with all of Epic’s voting shares — will be moved to a trust that is run by her husband, three children, and five senior Epic managers.
• The rules of the trust prohibit an IPO, sale, or acquisition.
• Three long-time Epic customers will serve as trust protectors to make sure that the rules are followed.
• The next CEO will be required to be a long-term Epic employee who has software developer experience.

Oracle Health EVP Seema Verma disputes KLAS’s numbers on the company’s loss of customers to Epic, saying that Epic can’t solve major healthcare problems because its only offering is an EHR and that “KLAS’s short-sighted research” doesn’t reflect that.

Prisma Health opens a new convenience store using Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology at its Richland Hospital in South Carolina.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Oklahoma Heart Hospital and Their 11-Month Epic Implementation.”
• Surescripts recognizes 10 healthcare organizations with its 2024 White Coat Awards for their leadership in performance, innovation, and accuracy.
• Artera introduces the 2024 Artera Heartie Award Winners.
• Ascom employees join Team Ascom to participate in the Great Cycle Challenge and raise money to help kids fight cancer.
• Medicomp Systems re-architects its Quippe solutions to meet W3C web component standards.
• TrustCommerce, a Sphere company announces that its next-generation Cloud Payments product has been certified on all major payment processing platforms.
• Capital Rx announces that its enterprise health platform, JUDI, has earned certified status by HITRUST for information security.
• Health Level Seven elects Clinical Architecture EVP of Client Services Carol Macumber chair-elect of its Board of Directors.
• CloudWave will exhibit and present at the Central and Southern Ohio HIMSS Chapter Fall Conference October 18 in Dublin, OH.
• Divurgent will present at the HIMSS Virginia Annual Conference October 15-16 in Williamsburg.

Blog Posts

• Best Practices: How To Solve IT Issues When EHRs Touch More People (CereCore)
• Agfa HealthCare showcases Interoperability Expertise at the IHE Europe 2024 Connectathon. (Agfa HealthCare)
• Key Takeaways from the FY 2025 ICD-10-CM Code Updates (AGS Health)
• Automate Your RCM Like the Portfolio Companies of Audax, Shore Capital, and TA Associates (Alpha II)
• Defeating Downtime with the Power of Cloud Hosting (Altera Digital Health)
• Fostering Payer-to-Payer Data Exchange Through Collaboration and Testing (Availity)
• Cultivating a Technology-Driven Revenue Cycle Through the Right Partnership (Cardamom Health)
• Perspective on the Proposed Health Infrastructure Security and Accountability Act (Clearwater)
• An Attackers’ Perspective on Cybersecurity Exploits (CloudWave)
• The Role of AI in Discovering New Medicines (Dimensional Insight)
• In the Next 10 Years, You May Wish You Had These Business-Related Skills (Direct Recruiters)
• Overcoming Hurdles in Specialty Medication Access: Key Insights From Our Recent Webinar (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/30/24

Top News

Epic asks Carequality to publicly release its resolution regarding the dispute between Epic and Particle Health.

Epic filed a dispute with Carequality against Particle customers, which it says were downloading patient records for non-treatment purposes in violation of Epic’s policies. Epic blocked Particle’s access to its data, naming Particle customers such as Integritort, which it claims used EHR data to assist personal injury law firms in identifying potential class action lawsuits. Also named were Reveleer (risk adjustment) and Novellia (personal health records).

Epic asserts that Particle mischaracterized Carequality’s resolution and is urging Carequality to make those findings public. Particle says that Carequality had originally requested that the resolution remain confidential, but says it has no objection its release.

Particle filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Epic last week, accusing the company of leveraging its market dominance to block Particle’s entry into the payer platform market. Particle also lodged an information blocking complaint against Epic with HHS OIG.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The US is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not provide universal health insurance / healthcare, and poll respondents say that implementing that would be the best way to improve our collective health. That wouldn’t fix our issues with industrial-manipulated food and our general appetite for unhealthy behaviors, but at least it would start with fixing the symptoms and then moving upstream to the problems. Which will never happen, of course, because someone’s pocketing profit with every one of these.

New poll to your right or here: Which party seems to have a stronger case in the Particle Health vs. Epic lawsuit? This is a first reaction kind of poll since we’ve only seen Particle’s complaint and Epic’s brief response.

Webinars

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Digital musculoskeletal therapy provider Hinge Health hires investment bankers to take the company public next year. It was last valued at $6 billion in October 2021.

California-based telehealth startup Done Global, which prosecutors allege has operated as an Adderall pill mill, has reportedly moved its operations to China and shifted management to employees there to continue business as usual despite the arrest of its US executives. US-based clinicians are still issuing prescriptions, with some of them reporting minimal review of patient records. One nurse practitioner earned $43,000 in May 2024 alone by prescribing for 3,000 patients. Team members claim that the company instructed its Philippines-based customer care staff to sit in on patient appointments and shared patient information internally via WeChat, which raises concerns about potential US privacy violations. The company’s founders were arrested in June 2024 for illegal distribution of 40 million pills of Adderall, which earned them $100 million.

The investment firm owner of US-based, 12,000-employee health IT services firm AGS Health will seek a buyer for its five-year-old investment at a valuation of $780 million.

WW International (WeightWatchers) fires its CEO, who pivoted the company into digital health and GLP-1 prescribing with the $132 million acquisition of weight management telehealth provider Sequence in March 2023. Tech executive Sima Sistani took the CEO job in early 2022. 

Steward Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre, MD – who was held in contempt of Congress last week for refusing to comply with a Senate subpoena to answer questions about corporate greed and the financial struggle of Steward’s hospitals – will resign this week.

Sales

• Sectra will implement its Sectra One Cloud enterprise imaging solution in all of Quebec’s public hospitals.

Announcements and Implementations

ChristianaCare President and CEO Janice Nevin, MD, MPH confirms its Cerner-to-Epic switch via a video announcement. Go-live is planned for 2026.

Government and Politics

US Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) tells the technology modernization committee of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that the VA should not have shut down its $624 million, Epic-powered MASS appointment scheduling system project in 2019 (which it later downgraded to a pilot project) in a “disastrous” decision to move to Cerner. He also wants the VA to explain its decision to turn off the its $278 million WellHive external provider scheduling system due to budget problems.

The VA expands its tele-emergency care pilot nationwide after finding that it avoided an ED trip for 59% of callers.

Ireland’s competition regulator opens an investigation into 1,000-employee global healthcare software vendor Clanwilliam to review the company’s EHR, referral, and text messaging business. Clanwilliam launched as Medicom in 1996 and renamed itself in 2014 after making several acquisitions.

Privacy and Security

The Atlantic warns that 23andMe’s rapid company decline should concern “anyone who has spit into one of the company’s test tubes” since the only asset it has left to sell is the genetic information of 15 million customers. The company is not bound by HIPAA and its privacy policies state clearly that it can sell customer data if merged or acquired. 23andMe’s market cap, which was nearly $5 billion three years ago, is down to $150 million and its entire board quit last week, leaving CEO Anne Wojcicki as the only remaining member. 

The New York Times reports that behavioral health patients are feeling “stunned, ambushed, and traumatized” after learning that their progress notes are available to other clinicians on the patient portals of hospitals that have adopted OpenNotes data sharing.

Other

A San Francisco software engineering manager is convicted of tax evasion for offsetting his three-year income of $1.2 million with a claimed $1.1 million in medical expenses for a 2010 appendectomy that actually cost him just a few hundred dollars. DOJ didn’t say where he works, but a LinkedIn search suggests Apple.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks works with HealthEfficient to complete Hyndman Area Health Center’s (PA) UDS+ submissions to HRSA.
• Availity publishes a new whitepaper, “From Complexity to Connectivity: The Journey of Availity’s Payer-to-Payer Data Exchange Cohort.”
• Rhapsody announces that it has been recognized as Sample Vendor in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Real-Time Health System Technologies report in the Next-Generation EMPI category.
• Redox publishes a new report, “DIY or Outsource: EHR Integration Costs for Providers.”
• Verato will present at the Reuters Total Health Conference October 8-9 in Chicago.
• Waystar will exhibit at ACEP24 September 29-October 2 in Las Vegas.

Blog Posts

• BCA Best Practices: Strategies for Success with MEDITECH Business and Clinical Analytics (Tegria)
• Embracing AI in Healthcare: Overcoming Reluctance and Unlocking Potential (Netsmart)
• Why Secure Medical Texting Works Better for Patients (PerfectServe)
• Key Areas Where Technology Should Support Optimized Workforce Scheduling (QGenda)
• Unlocking Healthcare Innovation through Digital Health Enablement (Rhapsody)
• Nurses Corner: 5 ways to improve education views (Sonifi Health)
• Smooth Sailing: A Case Study on Medication Adherence (Surescripts)
• How to Get the Most Insights From Your Data (TruBridge)

Contacts

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

News 9/27/24

Top News

Graybill, a California-based primary care group, will split from Palomar Health Medical Group, citing that organization’s inadequate support following an April 2024 cyberattack that took systems offline for months.

Palomar disputes Graybill’s claim that some of its systems are not yet fully recovered. It also suggests that Graybill shares responsibility, noting that a Graybill physician serves as Palomar Health Medical Group CMIO.

San Diego-based Arch Health Medical Group and Graybill Medical Group joined Palomar Health to create the 170-physician Palomar Health Medical Group in November 2020.

Reader Comments

From A Frustrated Vet: “Re: VA. Happening as I write this on the House VA Technology Modernization Subcommittee: ‘Our veterans would have been much better served if the VA had not abandoned the Medical Appointment Scheduling System (MASS) in 2019. This project had implemented Epic’s scheduling system and patient portal in Columbus, Ohio, and they were working well. But the VA leaders at the time made a special effort to eliminate it, paving the way for Cerner to duplicate the work and install an inferior system. This was a disastrous decision that we are all still paying for.’ – Chairman Rosendale (R-Mont.)” Thanks. I will recap more fully in the weekend’s news once the hearing is finished.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Conference season is the ideal time to become an HIStalk sponsor and get year-round exposure to decision-makers instead of betting the farm on a booth rental. Lorre is likely offering incentives for new sponsors, startups, and former sponsors who return to my little fold, although she will also ensure that current sponsors, some of whom have supported me for more than a decade, don’t get shortchanged. Also for sponsors, if your company is attending HLTH 2024 in any capacity, send me your info soon to be featured in my online guide.

One last housekeeping item: hair-trigger spam filters always inappropriately unsubscribe readers from my spam-free update list. Drop your email here to stay in the loop—you won’t get duplicate emails regardless.

I got the ChatGPT update today with Advanced Voice Mode. It’s cool, though not revolutionary—it allows for natural voice conversations, pauses if interrupted, and adjusts its responses based on what you say. It’s fun that you can choose a voice with a personality that affects tone and word choice. Advanced Voice makes Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri seem even more primitive, and it’s convenient to interact with ChatGPT via voice. The microphone stays open until you turn it off, so my phone sits beside my keyboard, ready to respond without requiring a wake word or key press.

I politely declined the interview invitation of Kat McDavitt, Lisa Bari, and Melissa Denino, the boundless energy folks who are behind the “Health Tech Talk Show.” Reasons for no-ing: (a) I avoid the spotlight like a vampire shuns sun; and (b) I say everything I know right here and don’t see the value of repeating myself. Still, I offered to help them feed the content beast by inviting potential interviewees to email them at hello@healthtechtalkshow.com. It’s refreshing not to need to stab the eject button seconds-in on a host who is long on self-importance but short on industry knowledge and a compelling style.

Webinars

October 24 (Thursday) noon ET. “Preparing for HTI-2 Compliance: What EHR and Health IT Vendors Need to Know.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. Failure to meet ASTP’s mandatory HTI-2 certification  and compliance standards could impose financial consequences on clients. The presenters will discuss the content and timelines of this key policy update, which includes NCPDP Script upgrades, mandatory support for electronic prior authorization, and real-time prescription benefit. They will offer insight into the impact on “Base EHR” qualifications and provide practical advice on aligning development roadmaps with these changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

India-based Qure.ai completes a $65 million Series D funding round to expand into the US market and to pursue acquisitions.

Sales

• UAB Health System will implement Epic as its single EHR in a seven-year, $380 million project, replacing Oracle Health.
• ChristianaCare will implement Epic, replacing Oracle Health.
• Children’s Hospital of Orange County will deploy Oneview Healthcare’s Care Experience Platform on patient room TVs.

People

Susan Worthy (Amwell) joins Gainwell Technologies as chief marketing officer.

Former Cerner executive Maria Flynn, MBA, MS is named president and CEO of the Patterson Family Foundation, a $1.5 billion asset non-profit that focuses on rural health and was founded by Cerner founder Neal Patterson and his wife Jeanne, both deceased. She was also co-founder of Digital Health KC.

Announcements and Implementations

Cobb County, GA joins the Find Help social network to launch an online resource that connects residents with assistance programs.

Sonifi Health integrates NESA’s Epic-integrated virtual care system with its patient room TVs.

Meditech kicks off its annual customer leadership conference in Foxborough, MA.

A new KLAS report on smart IV pumps finds that BD Alaris recalls and the FDA’s approval of next-generation technology are driving earlier replacement and expansion decisions. EHR integration is the most important factor in purchasing, usage, and satisfaction, followed by cost and ease of use.

KLAS also takes an initial look at Epic’s Hello World integrated SMS messaging system. All interviewed organizations are satisfied, would recommend it, and would buy it again. Customers say it reduces appointment no-shows using reminders, speeds communication with patients, and is deployed via MyChart.

Government and Politics

HHS OIG finds that the use of remote patient monitoring for Medicare patients has increased dramatically, but needs additional oversight to prevent fraud as patients are not always receiving all required services and Medicare lacks the information to oversee its use. CMS agrees with OIG’s recommendations: (a) require a provider’s order for RPM that is included on claims and encounter data; (b) develop ways to identify the health data that providers say they are monitoring; (c) educate providers about billing for remote patient monitoring; and (d) identify and monitor those companies that are billing for RPM. OIG says that 43% of Medicare enrollees did not receive all three mandatory RPM components: education and device setup, collection of an adequate number of device readings, and use of the data to manage treatment.

The Senate unanimously votes to hold Steward Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre, MD in contempt of Congress for ignoring its subpoena to answer questions about his compensation as the bankrupt company’s hospitals struggled to deliver safe, effective care. A spokesperson for de la Torre says that he has the right to not answer questions under the Fifth Amendment and won’t be intimidated by Congress. He faces prison time as the first person to be held in contempt by the Senate since 1971.

Other

Allina physicians report problems that were caused by order entry confusion resulting from the health system’s switch of in-house outpatient lab work to Quest Diagnostics last week.

I truly enjoy reading the “Hey Judy” posts on Epic Share, where she has written these ruminations for September:

• She paid her 15-year-old son – who wrote contest-winning computer games from their home basement where Judy was working on Epic — $5 to develop a programmer test after hiring Epic’s first programmer and then realizing that people aren’t always as talented as they think. Epic used that test for 18 years to choose new employees, then expanded the question bank when they leaked out.
• She describes the origins of Share Everywhere, which Dave Furhmann created (he’s now SVP of R&D) after Judy learned that Cerner hospitals couldn’t exchange information with each other.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research ranks Inovalon #1 in its 2024 provider enterprise RCM analytics solutions survey, with top ratings across 12 KPIs.\
• A new KeyCare survey of 400 patients finds that the majority prefer telehealth to office visits for medical issues including urgent care, preventive care, chronic care, and specialty services.
• Black Book Research publishes the results of its 2024 supply chain customer experience survey, with Dimensional Insight taking the top spot for benchmarking and comparative analytics.
• Inovalon promotes Sandy Warford to director of product marketing.
• Five9 and Verint expand their partnership to deliver AI-driven customer experiences.
• Fortified Health Security will present and Healthcare IT Leaders will sponsor the Georgia HIMSS Conference October 1 in Atlanta.
• Linus Health unveils new tools for early dementia detection at AAFP’s FMX 2024 conference.
• Meditech customer Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences becomes the first hospital in Canada to implement Expanse Genomics.
• MRO will exhibit at the Medical Practice Excellence: Leaders Conference October 6-9 in Denver.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare’s Current State vs Perfection: Which is Best? (Vyne Medical)
• Revenue Cycle Management: Boosting Operational Efficiency and Productivity (EClinicalWorks)
• Addressing Healthcare Staff Satisfaction through Innovation and Support (FinThrive)
• A year of DAX Copilot: Healthcare innovation that refocuses on the clinician-patient connection (Microsoft)
• Embracing Generative AI as a Change Agent to Drive Clinical and Financial Value (Impact Advisors)
• Maximizing ROI on IT Required by CMS Rule 0057 Takes a Village (InterSystems)
• Solving Quality Issues in Healthcare Data: KONZA’s Leadership in NCQA DAV Accreditation (Konza National Network)
• NAFLD Guidelines: A Shift in Understanding & Focus (Lucem Health)
• Your Guide to HTI-1 (Medhost)
• Why We Need Proactive Technology And Human Collaboration To Combat Medicare Fraud (Medicomp Systems)
• One year in: How Suki and Meditech are transforming clinician workflows with voice AI capabilities (Meditech)
• Med Tech Solutions Broadens EHR Support Expertise (Med Tech Solutions)
• Hospital Physical Therapy: Empowering Patients Toward a Safe Transition Home (Net Health)

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