Monday Morning Update 11/6/23

Top News

Ransomware hackers claim to have taken Henry Schein down again, two weeks after the medical supply distributor’s systems went offline from a similar attack that it reported on October 15. The company is again directing customers to place orders by telephone.

The BlackCat ransomware group says it has re-encrypted 35 terabytes of the company’s just-restored data. It posted company data publicly but later deleted it, hinting that Schein is either actively negotiating with the hacker group or has already paid its demanded ransom.

New SEC rules require publicly traded companies to disclose cyberattacks that could have a material impact, which the company has not done. However, it has asked the SEC for more time in filing its quarterly report due to the malware-caused shutdown of some operations.

The same ransomware group was behind the May 2021 shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline that caused gas shortages until the company paid a $5 million ransom. It claims that its actions have already cost Schein $150 million, adding that its other attacks cost Clorox $500 million and Dole $200 million.

Reader Comments

From Enigmass: “Re: mission versus money. Anyone else hearing that this is a hotter and hotter topic at hospitals? Hearing lots of stories about hospital / systems closing money losing birthing centers, satellite offices, mobile health vans, etc. to help the bottom line. Also hearing when local residents find out about it the public backlash is extreme.” This seems to be a daily occurrence, except possibly for the “public backlash” part since the facilities or services that are being shut down are nearly always located in areas that have low political clout. I’ll run a poll below. I suppose one could argue that businesses in general have the right to close unprofitable locations, but hospitals get huge tax breaks for the limited charity care they provide and are seemingly becoming less worried about public reaction to pruning their portfolio, just as they are no longer shamed to be paying their executives multi-million dollar salaries.

From Kvetcher: “Re: anonymous comments about companies. I’d like to see an example.” Here’s a recent one from “Don Draper” that I have heavily redacted. I’ll explain below why it is problematic to run it unedited even though I appreciate receiving it:

Next up [after Olive] is [company name] and their sponsored [events] while they’re laying off people left and right. CEO [x] is out, CRO [x] is out, supposed data genius [x] is now a “consultant,” and they’re laying off many more. They’re no longer selling a platform that never existed, they’re just doing data archival. Word is they lost their biggest account due to issues similar to what Olive’s clients experienced. No delivery. Then they pump out an announcement that they landed [big health system] which is just a data archiving project. Big secret is, the CIO at [big health system] has a son that sells for [the company]. How do these hospitals not see that they’re getting fleeced by their own people making decisions that enrich themselves and not the hospitals. But no news about this stuff. Everybody just keeps it under wraps because nobody wants to be outed as the fool.

Notes:

• LinkedIn and the company’s executive page do not show any job changes for the three people named. 
• It shows that someone with the CIO’s last name sells for the company, so I’m sure that’s true, but not necessarily indicative of misconduct.
• No layoffs have been announced, but since just about every company has laid people off, that is almost certainly true to unknown degree.
• The company still markets a platform, so I’m not sure if the comment means that they retired it or that customers are buying services instead.
• My takeaway is that this comment is probably mostly or completely accurate, at least from the unstated vantage point of the commenter. I haven’t heard customer complaints, but those are usually communicated via reference site inquiries.
• Bottom line: companies nearly always overstate their capabilities and successes – which isn’t necessarily a scam — and it’s the prospect’s job to perform due diligence by contacting existing customers, which is easily done without waiting for breaking news.
• It’s my job to look for and responsibly report red flags in hopes of generating non-anonymous verification. The Axios report on Olive was paywalled, so my recap may have been news to many.
• Olive claimed to have 900 hospital customers, so now that the company is defunct, I would appreciate hearing performance details and/or seeing what their signed agreements promised. I would also like to see what KLAS had to say about the company after talking to its customers. 
• One last point. Sometimes reference sites are compensated for touting a vendor’s product. Talk to the people who actually work with it or who should benefit from its results, not C-level folks whose next job could hinge on not burning vendor bridges.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

LinkedIn is the only social media tool that poll respondents are using significantly more for work-related purposes than two years ago.

New poll to your right or here: has a local hospital or health system closed money-losing businesses or locations in the past year to the community’s detriment?

I hoped to like the new tune that is attributed to the Beatles, but George Harrison was right: it’s a sweet but “rubbish” poor-quality John Lennon demo that he rightfully discarded, reworked by AI into a fake Beatles reunion. About the only positive I can muster is that Yoko didn’t insist on shrieking along and it came with new nostalgia-inducing video showing Paul and Ringo recording their parts. Don’t let “Now and Then” be your final Beatles memory – re-watch “A Hard Day’s Night” or the video of their farewell rooftop concert or listen to “In My Life” or “Here, There and Everywhere” when they actually played together. The Fab Four’s jobs are safe from AI.

Happy end of Daylight Saving Time, with the falling back meaning that (a) driving home from work involves headlights; and (b) the time-challenged among us who incorrectly express times as EST for the full year can enjoy being right for the next four months.

Thanks to the following companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo to learn more about them.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Wall Street Journal reports that chain drugstore understaffing – exacerbated by reduced front-of-store sales as customers shop online and by investor focus on the newly acquired medical practices of drug chains – has cratered their customer satisfaction, caused medication errors, and created prescription filling delays.

People

Shahzad Safar, MBA (Rx Savings Solutions) joins Trualta as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

AMIA recognizes Susan Newbold, PhD, RN of Nursing Informatics Boot Camp with its Virginia K. Saba Informatics Award.

Other

A Washington Post review describes how hospitals hastily discharge elderly patients who lack immediate relatives by petitioning to have them assigned to court-appointed guardians. The guardians, who in Florida are required only to complete a 40-hour course, immediately gain control over the patient’s finances and assets. The article recounts a former pilot who was assigned a guardian through a hospital-retained attorney – who also served as the guardian’s counsel at $300 per hour – despite having living relatives. The guardian moved the patient to a nursing home, sold his house at a lowball price with help of a phony valuation report to a buyer who flipped it as-is for a 50% profit, and liquidated his belongings in a cash-only estate sale. The guardian claims that she never saw all the cards and gifts that were mailed to the patient’s home from family members. The state declined to pursue a criminal investigation, but the guardian was reprimanded for filing late reports and ordered to take eight more hours of training.

Sponsor Updates

• Symplr staff raise money for breast cancer research by participating in the Susan G. Komen More Than Pink Walk.
• NeuroFlow will present at Behavioral Health Tech 2023 November 15-17 in Phoenix, AZ.
• Notable announces the 2023 recipients of the Notable Impact Awards, which recognize health systems and executive champions who are driving tech-led transformation.
• Netsmart will incorporate ReThink Behavioral Health’s practice management software for applied behavioral analysis and pediatric therapy into its CareRecords software.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new case study, “UHealth: Supporting the unique ITSM needs of an Academic Medical Center.”
• PerfectServe’s Lightning Bolt achieves top marks for overall performance, ease of use, quality of support, and proactive service in the 2023 KLAS Physician Scheduling Report.
• Redox releases a new Diagnosing Healthtech Podcast, “Treating veterans and interoperability with former Secretary of the VA, Dr. David Shulkin.”
• Waystar will present at the HFMA Hawaii Chapter 2023 Revenue Cycle Seminar November 9 in Honolulu.
• West Monroe launches Nigel, a generative AI-powered internal chat platform designed to enhance employee productivity and efficiency.

Blog Posts

• The new dawn of senior care: Digital health’s role in aging in place (Nordic)
• Don’t Get Spooked by Cloud Call Center Solutions (PerfectServe)
• The Role of Medical Necessity in Healthcare (RCxRules)
• Through the Lens of Lynne Nowak, MD, Our New Chief Data and Analytics Officer (Surescripts)
• No Surprises Reboot (VisiQuate)

Contacts

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

News 11/3/23

Top News

The American Hospital Association, Texas Hospital Association, Texas Health Resources, and United Regional Health Care System sue the federal government over an HHS rule that prohibits health system from using web user tracking tools such as Meta Pixel and Google Analytics.

The plaintiffs note that the federal government, including HHS, uses those same technologies. They also claim that the new rule oversteps HHS’s HIPAA statutory authority.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor DrFirst of Rockville, MD. Since 2000, the healthcare IT pioneer has empowered providers and patients to achieve better health through intelligent medication management. It improves healthcare efficiency and effectiveness by enhancing e-prescribing workflows, improving medication history, optimizing clinical data usability, and helping patients start and stay on therapy. In the last few years, DrFirst has won over 25 awards for excellence and innovation, recognizing its game-changing use of clinical-grade AI to streamline time-consuming healthcare workflows and prevent medication errors. The company’s solutions are used by more than 350,000 prescribers, 71,000 pharmacies, 300 EHRs and health information systems, and 2,000 hospitals in the US and Canada. Visit their website and follow @DrFirst. Thanks to DrFirst for supporting HIStalk.

I’m thrilled when readers comment on HIStalk articles, but I should explain a ground rule. It wouldn’t be fair for me to approve anonymous comments that make specific legal or moral allegations about people or companies who are named specifically. Comments such as “Company X is all smoke and mirrors and knowingly sells a product that doesn’t work” or “CEO John Smith has had affairs with three consecutive assistants” may well be true, but I have no way of knowing (and comfortably publishing) that.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Bloomberg highlights Apple’s unfulfilled health ambitions even as the company uses health-centric selling points for its Watch and the company’s 2024 roadmap that includes hypertension and sleep apnea detection, turning AirPods into hearing aids, adding health capabilities to its Vision Pro headset, and launching an AI-driven paid health coaching service. Apple’s core market remains the “worried well,” and venturing into medical domains and patient care could embroil it in global regulatory complexities. Insider accounts reveal that Apple has shelved various health projects in fearing that a subpar consumer experience would tarnish its reputation. Apple even flirted with running in-store clinics staffed by employed doctors and engaged in acquisition talks with Crossover Health and One Medical for staffing them, but abandoned the idea because the cost was competitive only for young, healthy customers.

Meditech announces a return to office plan that requires employees to spend 40% of each pay period in the office — spread among Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday as full-time days — beginning in March 2024. That seems entirely reasonable to me, although an employee tells me that it’s a big jump from today’s twice-per-month requirement.

AdaptX, which offers AI-powered EHR analytics tools, raises $10 million in funding. CEO Warren Ratliff, JD was a co-founder and COO of Caradigm.

AI-enabled radiology performance measurement software vendor Covera Health raises up to $50 million in a Series C funding round and finalizes its acquisition of CoRead, a hospital AI quality assurance company.

Ambulatory practice technology vendor IKS Health acquires coding and documentation outsourcer AQuity Solutions for $200 million, increasing its headcount to 14,000 and its annual revenue to $330 million.

Doximity launches DocDefender, a free service for physicians that removes their personal contact information from public websites.

Waystar will delay its IPO due to market conditions, pushing the offering back to December at the earliest but more likely into next year.

Sales

• Inland Empire Health Plan and Molina Healthcare of California will offer 72,000 teens in two counties access to BeMe’s behavioral health platform.

People

Walgreens Boots Alliance hires Neal Sample, PhD (Northwestern Mutual) as EVP/CIO.

Luke Bonney steps down from the CEO position at Redox, naming Trip Hofer, MBA (Optum Behavioral Health Solutions) as his replacement.

Matt Cardoso, MS, MBA (Quest Diagnostics) joins WellStack as VP of product management.

Announcements and Implementations

DrFirst launches Fuzion, an enterprise-wide, AI-powered, Epic-integrated platform to streamline medication reconciliation, prescription price transparency, and prescription reminders. Baptist Health says it saved 19,000 hours of clinician work by using DrFirst solutions to convert nine million medication instructions in multiple EHRs to standard sigs during its conversion to Epic.

Government and Politics

In Australia, Victoria’s health department reports dozens of doctors to the country’s practitioner regulator for failing to perform a mandatory check its SafeScript prescription drug monitoring program to detect doctor-shoppers.

Privacy and Security

A Massachusetts medical management company pays $100,000 to settle HIPAA charges that it failed to protect patient information from a December 2018 ransomware attack that came 20 months after the malware was installed. The breach affected the information of 207,000 patients of covered entities with which Doctors’ Management Services is a business associate. The settlement is HHS OCR’s first that involves ransomware.

In Canada, five Ontario hospitals confirm that patient data that was stolen in a recent ransomware attack against their self-created shared services organization has been published online.

Other

A UCSF Health study finds that physicians who conducted visits by telemedicine due to the pandemic spent one additional hour per day working in the EHR, both during and outside of normal hours, despite not receiving an increased number of patient messages.

The Miami paper delves into the thriving business of cosmetic surgery in South Florida, which has created an underground network of illicit post-op recovery centers for medical tourists that are nestled within suburban homes, some of them rented. A recent raid of one such home found 17 recuperating patients who were each paying at least $250 per night. Some centers employ registered nurses, but others opt for untrained, underpaid staff. Despite the modest risk of being arrested due to a thinly spread four-person investigative unit that also investigates Medicare fraud, the recovery center operations can generate up to $90,000 monthly from a single inexpensive house. A review of emergency calls that were linked to terms “lipo,” “plastic surgery,” and “BBL” (Brazilian butt lift) over six years yielded 2,220 records, of which 1,500 patients required a hospital trip, 200 were bleeding, 19 had experienced a heart attack, and five were already dead by the time an ambulance arrived.

Sponsor Updates

• Availity’s “Big Brothers” and “Big Sisters” meet their new “Littles” at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northeast Florida.
• Elsevier Health’s first “Clinician of the Future 2023: Education Edition” finds that most medical and nursing students are planning careers outside of patient care.
• Findhelp announces that Navigate has incorporated its social care referral capabilities into Navigate’s wellness platform.
• Nordic publishes a new episode of its Healthcare Chronicles series, “Maximizing your investment in the EHR | Solving tomorrow’s problems today.”
• Netsmart integrates RethinkFirst’s practice management software that was designed for Applied Behavior Analysis and pediatric therapy into human services workflows into Netsmart CareRecords.
• FinThrive will present at the Florida Association of Health Plans 2023 Conference November 8.
• Zoom recognizes AdvancedMD as an ISV Partner of the Year for innovative use of its videoconferencing platform.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a case study titled “UHealth: Supporting the unique ITSM needs of an Academic Medical Center.”
• HCTec will host a CHIME Fall Forum cocktail hour November 10 in Phoenix, AZ.
• New research from Inovalon and Harvard University finds that Medicare Advantage beneficiaries have superior quality outcomes relative to traditional Medicare.
• InterSystems partners with analytics company BritHealth in Indonesia.
• JTG Consulting Group names Henry Ford Health System veteran Lisa Dwyer project manager.

Blog Posts

• Hospital-at-Home Programs Present New Opportunities & Risks (First Databank)
• How AI is Changing Contact Centers & How to Benefit (Five9)
• How to Successfully Navigate HIPAA Cybersecurity Requirements (Fortified Health Security)
• Your Guide to HIPAA Rules for Transferring Medical Records (HealthMark Group)
• Overcoming 5 Healthcare Marketing Challenges (Healthwise)
• Job Haunting: 5 Ways Candidates Scare Hiring Managers (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Rely on Workday Releases to Advance Your Spend Management Capabilities (Impact Advisors)
• HBMA 2023 wrap-up: Top challenges and opportunities for billing companies (Inovalon)
• 8 Ways Your EHR Can Transform Healthcare Efficiency (Medhost)
• Deeper Connections: Reflections on the KLAS Interoperability Summit (Meditech)
• From Inpatient to Outpatient: 5 Ways to Enhance Your Hospital Therapy Operations (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 11/1/23

Top News

Healthcare robotic process automation vendor Olive AI shuts down after selling its clearinghouse and patient access assets to Waystar and its prior authorization line to Humata Health.

Olive, which was once valued at $4 billion after raising $856 million from investors, previously sold its payer-facing prior authorization business to Availity and its business intelligence solution to BurstIQ.

Olive renamed itself from CrossChx in 2018 after divesting its legacy patient check-in technology to focus on AI. Co-founder Sean Lane told TechCrunch last year that Olive had pivoted its business model 27 times.

Axios reported in early 2022 that Olive’s automation software wasn’t saving health systems the millions of dollars it promised. Sources said that the sophisticated AI technology that it claimed to deploy was actually powered by 1990s-era screen scraping tools. They also reported that customers who were receiving a fraction of the expected benefits didn’t speak up because they were embarrassed. Epic made Olive stop using its name, which it said was being used to mislead prospects, and KLAS noted that Olive overstated its capabilities and was not proactive in addressing issues.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I received my renewal notice for dental insurance, which reminds me that we not only treat the oral cavity as a non-medical part of the body that requires its own specialists, we also buy “insurance” for their services that is really not insurance at all:

• It covers predictable, inexpensive costs fairly well (like cleanings), but pays little for major dental work, whether planned or not.
• Annual maximum benefits in the $1,500 range mean that the insurer rather than the insured is protected against financial catastrophe.
• There’s no risk pooling since anyone can sign up, and most customers know that they will use basic preventive services.
• The only real value of dental insurance is to provide treatment price discounts that dentists illogically don’t offer to cash-paying patients. Any dental practice could easily craft a better package — two cleanings each year plus best-offered price on everything else – and charge patients directly as a membership, cutting out the middleman while also locking their patients into receiving all their care at their particular practice.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kinsa, which offers smart thermometers that feed a tracking and resource prediction system for contagious illnesses, closes its doors. Founder and CEO Inder Singh is hoping to sell the company’s IP. 

Canada-based Kento Health will use $4.1 million in new funding to bring its AI-powered cardiovascular care software to the US market. Its offerings include predictive analytics, remote patient monitoring, and real-time feedback for cardiac rehab and cardiovascular disease support.

Commure acquires Mount Sinai spinoff Rx.Health and will integrate the company’s care coordination software with its Commure Engage automated care coordination technology. Rx.Health CEO Richard Strobridge is now Commure’s VP of sales.

Ambulatory-focused health IT vendor IKS Health acquires AQuity, which offers acute care organizations clinical documentation, coding, and RCM software and services, for $200 million.

Business Insider investigates Spora Health, a $10-per-month virtual-first primary care practice for people of color, after its readers questioned an interview it did with the company’s CEO Dan Miller. Miller claimed that the company had signed several large companies as customers and was seeing thousands of patients, but actually had shut the company down and laid off all employees in 2022 after failing to make payroll. Reporters found that the company allowed its business registrations to lapse in several states and that most of the clinicians that its website lists no longer work there.

GLP-1 prescription issuing startup Calibrate, which is restructuring under a new private equity investor, fires founder and CEO Isabelle Kenyon.

Virtual cardiac telemetry platform vendor InfoBionic will work with Mayo Clinic to enhance the company’s algorithms and analytics for cardiac monitoring from hospital to home. CEO Stuart Long is an industry long-timer with executive stints at imaging vendors, Philips Capsule, and Monarch Medical Technologies.

Sales

• Behavioral health treatment network Zinnia Health (RI) will use social care referral software from Unite Us as a part of its Healing for Heroes program for veterans and first responders.
• Missouri Department of Mental Health will implement Oracle Health’s EHR.

People

Chris Skiffington, MBA (Oracle) joins Annexus Health as chief commercial officer.

Mia Nease, DBA (Komodo Health) joins Trio Health as chief commercial officer.

Imad Nijim, MBA (Virtual Radiologic) joins United Theranostics as chief information and technology officer.

Jack Courtney, who served as an executive CTG for 25 years until his retirement in 1993, died on October 18 at 87. His daughter Kathy Hochul is governor of New York.

Announcements and Implementations

University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust in England delays its Oracle Health implementation, reportedly due to problems it unearthed during testing.

Flatiron Health will integrate Guardant’s genomic profiling tests into its OncoEMR oncology EHR.

Cleveland Clinic will use Zipline’s drones to deliver drugs to the homes of patients starting in 2025.

One-fourth of surveyed US medical students are considering dropping out, while more than half of students who are studying medicine and nursing are hoping to get jobs that don’t involve patient care.

Government and Politics

HHS proposes info-blocking penalties for providers that would result in the loss of Meaningful User status under the Medicare Promoting Interoperability Program, result in a score of zero in the Promoting Interoperability performance category of MIPS, and result in the loss of eligibility to participate in the Medicare Shared Savings Program, among other disincentives. Comments are due January 2.

Other

A New York Times article notes — in referencing the White House’s newly issued executive order to set AI standards — that FDA has authority over using AI tools for patient care only if they are commercially sold, leaving health systems and insurers free to build and use AI tools without government oversight or mandatory transparency. The order requires FDA’s parent HHS to establish an AI safety program.

More than half of surveyed CMIOs serve on the executive leadership team of their employers, while 80% say their responsibilities have grown to include digital transformation, AI tools, and analytics. Three-fourths continue to practice clinically to some degree, with most of those indicating that the revenue generated by their patient work helps cover their informatics compensation.

Symplr creates a “Moments that Matter” movie series that honors nurses who have been nominated for Daisy Foundation awards.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas employees help sort 28,000 pounds of apples at the Food Bank of Central & Eastern NC.
• Inovalon announces that customers using its cloud-based Converged Quality solution for quality measurement, reporting, and improvement outperformed other health plans on the 2024 Medicare Advantage Star Ratings released by CMS.
• AdvancedMD announces that DeepScribe has joined its marketplace as an integration partner.
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at CrisisCon November 13-16 in Charlotte, NC.
• Cardamom Health will sponsor the 365 Leadership Summit November 6-7 in Madison, WI.
• Censinet releases a new “Risk Never Sleeps” podcast titled “Implementing Effective Cybersecurity Measures.”
• Nordic releases an episode of its In Network podcast, “Designing for Health: Interview with Deepti Pandita, MD.”
• Clearsense announces that it is an Amazon Web Services Healthcare Partner.
• ConnectiveRx will sponsor the Access Insights Conference November 6-8 in Orlando.
• CloudWave and Divurgent will sponsor the Bluebird Leaders S.O.A.R. Without Borders Conference November 1-3 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Symplr announces that its technology has been recognized as the leading workforce management software for staff retention, clinician scheduling, time and attendance, and compliance in a recent series of awards and industry reports.

Blog Posts

• Integrating Clinical Documentation Improvement and Utilization Management (AGS Health)
• EPA Q&A with Christie Callahan: Putting patient-provider relationships first (Arrive Health)
• Navigating the Path to Health Equity Through Effective Patient Communication (Artera)
• Clearsense + AWS Marketplace: The Next Step in Healthcare Innovation (Clearsense)
• Leading versus Lagging in Healthcare AI Adoption (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/30/23

Top News

TT Capital Partners acquires a majority share of Cantata Health Solutions, which offers health technology for providers of behavioral health, human services, acute care, and post-acute care.

Healthcare Growth Partners advised Cantata in the transaction, which is its sixth deal in five months. 

Cantata was formerly Keane, then a division of NTT Data.

Reader Comments

From Breathe In and Hold: “Re: Epic. I’m a Epic-experienced physician and would love to get involved in a new customer’s build instead of fixing someone else’s setup. Wondering if you know about any possible Epic signings coming up?” I responded privately with a rumored deal that would be huge while also noting that Epic’s momentum outside the US is growing, but otherwise I’ll ask readers.

From Go Noles: “Re: Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare. Replacing Cerner with Epic, it seems.” Unverified, but they just posted several Epic-related jobs and some are for inpatient.

From Very Peeved: “Re: use of the word ‘very.’ Annoying to me. To you, too?” It is, and is among the words that I excise most often from interviews and reader-submitted articles where everything is “very good” or “really efficient.” 

From HIT Sleuth: “Re: [company name omitted.’’] Rumored to be making [industry CEO’s name omitted] to improve the company’s scale and stability.” Unverified, so I felt ethically bound to render this comment nearly useless by anonymizing it. The company is (or once was) valued at billions, while everybody knows the CEO.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Health IT folks don’t believe their wares have done much to influence quality, clinician satisfaction, cost, or equality, but instead of made it easier for consumers to engage with our high-cost, low-quality health systems.

New poll to your right or here: Which social media tools are you using more frequently now than two years ago for job-related tasks? I probably lurk more on LinkedIn than before, I have found YouTube to be surprisingly useful although mostly for non-work purposes and mindless entertainment, and Twitter/X to be less important than before.

It feels heretical to say out loud, but I’m contemplating skipping my first HIMSS conference (or is it the Informa conference?) in many years, disrupting my spring migratory pattern. I had already tapered off my HIMSS conference dosage by shortening my stay and my onsite wandering range, with that and my nagging dread leading me to question the value. I’m open to arguments either way. I’m pretty sure that if I break the habit by skipping Orlando, then I’m certainly unlikely to go to Las Vegas the next two years since I don’t like visiting there.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Revuud. The Charlotte, NC-based company – its name is pronounced as “reviewed” — is a leading healthcare IT staffing marketplace that helps healthcare organizations connect with top talent. Its mission is to revolutionize the way healthcare organizations hire IT talent by providing a faster, more efficient, and cost-effective solution. Streamline your hiring process by leveraging Revuud to find, hire, onboard, manage, and pay your IT contractors, all in a single platform at a fraction of the cost. Thanks to Revuud for supporting HIStalk.

I’m always happy to find a new sponsor’s explainer video, so here’s the one from Revuud.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Spok reports Q3 results: revenue up 5%, EPS $0.22 versus $0.15. SPOK shares are up 78% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 17% rise, valuing the company at $302 million.

The $1.5 billion acquisition of England-based healthcare software vendor Emis Group by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Health Systems UK closes.

Sales

• VHC Health chooses Vyne Medical’s Refyne Cloud Fax and Trace platforms to automate management of electronic records and images.
• NYC Health + Hospitals and Montefiore choose Findhelp to connect community members with social care services.  

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS report on financial improvement consulting finds that the most common engagement is for financial performance improvement, while the most common outcome is improved efficiency. Impact Advisors, which was 2023 Best in KLAS for financial performance consulting, topped the performance score list, while already high satisfaction with Guidehouse jumped dramatically since 2020.

Sponsor Updates

• Pivot Point Consulting sponsors the annual UVA Community Health Friends of the Foundation Golf Classic.
• NeuroFlow releases a new Bridging the Gap Podcast, “Making the Financial Case for Digital Health Innovation.”
• Nordic releases a new Making Rounds Podcast, “Lab information, at your service.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new case study, “Sentara: Strategic Portfolio Management with ServiceNow.”
• Spok publishes “The 2023 State of Healthcare Communications Report.”
• Waystar will exhibit at the HFMA Region 9 Annual Conference in New Orleans October 29-31.
• West Monroe will co-sponsor the HIMSS Washington Chapter’s Unleash the Future of Healthcare with Microsoft Technologies event November 2 in Redmond, WA.

Blog Posts

• Intelligent patient experiences, part 2: How easily can your patients manage their appointments and prescriptions? (Nuance)
• Securing healthcare data: The critical need for cyber resilience (Nordic)
• Reducing Burden on Your Maxed-Out Healthcare Technology Team (CereCore)
• Hot 7 with Larry King: A Listicle on Future-Forward Pharmacy (Surescripts)
• The Value of Time in Nursing: Maximizing Patient Care and Outcomes (Symplr)
• Sandwich Generation Caregiver Caring for Her Father with Parkinson’s (Trualta)

Contacts

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

News 10/27/23

Top News

Abridge, whose software converts patient-clinician conversations into clinical documentation, raises $30 million in a Series B funding round.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Jump on Lorre’s year-end, cherry-on-top deal and you’ll be among several smart new HIStalk sponsors who snagged the rest of 2023 free, shifted the expense to 2024 if they wanted, and will be outshining the competition as HIMSS approaches. In an industry that is rebounding, marketing prowess earns visibility and opportunity. HIStalk’s sponsor roster is second to none in digital health. I admit that my website is primitive and thrice-weekly industry news posts are so necessarily long at times that they send short attention-spanners to flee for time-wasting TikTok videos, but a lot of decision-makers get their news here and 94% of them say that doing so helps them do their job better.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Sage, which offers technology for caring for older adults, raises $15 million in Series A funding. Its care coordination platform for senior living residents, which allows users to report urgent issues and to communicate with their care team. The company says use of its system reduces resident and family complaints by up to 90%.

Sales

• Colorado’s public health department chooses Findhelp to create a Drug User Health Hub to reduce the transmission and consequences of viral hepatitis.
• Midwest Surgical Hospital selects the Simplifi 797 and Pharmacy Compliance suites of Wolters Kluwer Health to support sterile compounding.
• University Health Network, UVA Health, and Boston Children’s Hospital will implement Fujifilm’s Synapse digital pathology technology.

People

HCTec hires Peter Reynolds (Jeomise) as VP of strategic sales.

Niki Hall (Contentsquare) rejoins Five9 as chief marketing officer.

The Permanente Federation promotes Brian Hoberman, MD, MBA to EVP/CIO and national IT leader. He also services as CIO of The Permanente Medical Group and led Kaiser Permanente’s implementation of Epic in the early 2000s.

Announcements and Implementations

Data scientists at Bardavon provide a rare under-the-hood look at the predictive models they developed for optimizing care for physical and occupational therapy patients. Therapy providers, claims examiners, and case managers use the results to manage workers’ compensation cases.

AI-enabled workforce solutions vendor SnapNurse renames itself to SnapCare. The company offers healthcare organizations a less-expensive alternative to traveling and agency clinicians for managing float pools, PRN staffing, and permanent placement recruiting.

Advisory Board warns of “pharmacy deserts” as drug chains close hundreds of unprofitable stores in low-income areas.

A survey of healthcare finance professionals by AGS Health and HFMA finds that those who use or plan to use autonomous coding trust trust it, but 52% don’t know what it is.

Privacy and Security

Advocate Aurora Health will pay $12 million to settle a lawsuit over its use of user tracking tools from Meta and Google on its website and MyChart patient portal,

Other

Baystate Health implements a cashless policy that even covers its retail pharmacies and cafeterias, saying that card-only payment streamlines the payment process and reduces the risk of theft. The hospital says its policy is consistent with Massachusetts law that prohibits retailers from discriminating against a cash buyer. It’s interesting that some business offer customers a discount for paying in cash to avoid card processing fees, while others implement card-only policies.

Not healthcare specific, but pretty funny, is this “Last Week Tonight” skit about McKinsey. I haven’t watched broadcast TV in many years, so I don’t know anything about the show.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks announces that Integrated Medical Health (PA) has grown its multi-specialty practice using its EHR and Healow patient engagement solutions.
• Health Data Movers releases a new episode of its Quick HITs Podcast featuring Ganesh Persad.
• Nordic publishes new Healthcare Chronicles video titled “Maximizing your investment in the EHR | Aligning the EHR to enterprise strategy.”
• Lumeon announces that its Lumeon Conductor care orchestration platform has earned HITRUST certification.

Blog Posts

• AI Technology Takes Center Stage (EClinicalWorks)
• 5 Tips for a Successful Workday HR Implementation in Healthcare (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Human-centered design for Canadian healthcare technology (Nordic)
• Colorectal Cancer Screening Improvement by the Numbers (Lucem Health)
• YourCare Community: Bridging the Gap Between Patients and Providers (Medhost)
• ACOs prepare for ECQM quality reporting (MRO)

Contacts

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

News 10/25/23

Top News

Digital consulting firm Perficient acquires San Diego-based healthcare software development company Smedix.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Q&A: What’s new with the NSA? A No Surprises Act update.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Joseph Mercer, JD, managing director, Marwood Group; Heather Kawamoto, VP of product strategy, Waystar. The No Surprises Act created a lot of change,  and those changes are still coming. A panel of revenue cycle experts answer frequently asked questions and offer a concise update on the NSA, including legislative developments, FAQs, and tips for navigating changes.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

PicnicHealth, which uses patient-reported data to build datasets for research, acquires rare disease data aggregator and research firm AllStripes.

Akumin, a national outpatient radiology and oncology care services provider, announces a financial restructuring plan that includes filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and reverting to a privately-held company. Akumin experienced a ransomware attack in late September that is still impacting its ability to see patients at numerous locations.

HealthStream announces Q3 results: revenue up 5%, EPS $0.13 versus $0.12, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue.

Sales

• Delaware’s Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health will work with Bamboo Health to develop and implement behavioral healthcare coordination software.
• East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust in England will implement Epic.

People

Eskenazi Health promotes Randall Grout, MD to chief health informatics officer.

HealthEC names Chris Caramanico (JJCAL) CEO.

Karen Mellin (DrFirst) joins CTS Connected Technology Solutions as VP of sales and business development.

Announcements and Implementations

Northern Health in Melbourne, Australia, goes live on Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging through its new Northern Imaging Victoria service.

Netsmart develops an AI Data Lab that is built on Amazon Web Services, which will allow the company to develop new technologies for its CareFabric platform. Missouri Behavioral Health Council will contribute predictive analytics for population health and provision of care functions.

Privacy and Security

MultiCare recovers from a service outage that caused it to suspend surgeries and procedures at several facilities within its system. The Washington-based provider has attributed the outage, which affected multiple systems including its EHR, to an interruption in service from one of its vendors.

In Canada, the IT systems of five hospitals that formed their own IT provider organization go offline due to a cyberattack.

Other

Increased enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans has hurt critical access hospitals, which are paid lower, negotiated rates than those of traditional Medicare. Hospital executives say insurers are “slow pay or no pay” with their Medicare Advantage contracts. They also report that patients must drive long distances to find nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities that accept MA plans versus nearly universal acceptance of Medicare.

Sponsor Updates

• ConnectiveRx employees assemble several bikes for children in need as part of the company’s Customer Service Week events.
• Frost & Sullivan recognizes Wolters Kluwer Health with the 2023 Global Competitive Strategy Leadership Award for its work with conversational AI in healthcare.
• EClinicalWorks integrates with Sunoh.ai, an AI-powered ambient listening technology that generates clinical documentation during appointments.
• Dimensional Insight and Health Matrix partner to offer an intelligence and data analytics platform to the Middle East healthcare market.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Empowering healthcare leaders with data-driven decision-making.”
• Nordic publishes a new episode of its In Network podcast, “Making Rounds: Lab information, at your service.”
• Black Book Research recognizes vendors exhibiting at MGMA’s Leaders Conference who’ve received its 2023 awards for highest customer experience and user satisfaction in practice management, including HIStalk sponsors Availity, Dimensional Insight, EClinicalWorks, and Nuance.
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at the TAHP Conference November 6-8 in Houston.
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast, “In the Trenches of Healthcare Cybersecurity.”
• Consensus Cloud Solutions sponsors the annual Cognosante Charity Golf Tournament benefiting Final Salute.

Blog Posts

• Navigating the Challenges of Transcription: Finding a Solution That is Accurate, Timely & Secure (AdvancedMD)
• How Machine Learning Can Enhance the Healthcare Revenue Cycle (AGS Health)
• Make a good first impression: Keys to achieve long-term success in healthcare data analytics (Arcadia)
• HLTH 2023 Takeaways (Arrive Health)
• Meet Alexandra Ricciardiello – OCP Analyst (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Unlocking Patient Engagement: The Power of Advanced Communication Approaches (Artera)
• Securing healthcare data: The critical need for cyber resilience. (Nordic)
• Meet the Clinician – Julia Greer, VP, Clinical Strategy, Ascom Americas (Ascom)
• Fuel Your FHIR with Better-Quality Data (Availity)
• The Bardavon Index: How Does it Inform Better Treatment Decisions? (Bardavon)
• What CIOs Want ITSM Providers to Know (Clearsense)
• How Geek Squad Supports Care at Home (Current Health)
• Crafting Effective Job Postings (Direct Recruiters)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/23/23

Top News

Medication management company Cureatr shuts down without notice, blaming a lack of financing and a failed acquisition.

The company acquired SinfoniaRx in March.

Reader Comments

From Tolstoy: “Re: startups. The wave of shutdowns and fire sales is just starting as former stars run out of cash.” Agreed. Companies that ran big early-round raises in a go-go market are just now seeing the invisible investor strings that were attached – the moneyed folk are demanding profitability, growth, and proof that the company’s moat exists and is not drying up. Inexperienced operators, especially first-time founders, are new to a market that values being cash-stingy to ride out the storm. Some will attempt to pivot, which rarely works. The lowest-quality startups will shut down, but most will come hat-in-hand to established companies hoping to sell the business, its IP, or its office furniture at a dismal fraction of now-laughable historic valuation. Meanwhile, the valuation premium for startups versus publicly traded companies is narrowing and founders are packing up their rosy pitch decks being forcefully relocated from the CEO chair to the boardroom. The upside is that the cream floats to the top when irrational exuberance meets reality, so winners will emerge stronger.

From Belzer: “Re: Waystar IPO. Good timing?” It’s hard to say given the long IPO drought and SPAC distraction. The PE-owned company’s string of acquisitions has piled up quite a bit of debt, with the S-1 showing interest payments of $149 million in 2022 on $704 million in revenue, resulting in a $66 million pretax loss. The company was valued at around $3 billion in 2019 when a majority stake was sold. Rumors of an $8 billion valuation floated around last summer when the IPO plans leaked.

From Plowboy: “Re: Henry Schein. We are placing orders by phone while the company keeps its site offline.” The medical and dental supply vendor took its systems offline on October 14 due to a cybersecurity incident, although its practice management software was not affected.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents who quit because of non-job issues cite management ethics by far as their most common issue.

New poll to your right or here: Looking back five years, which aspects of healthcare have been significantly improved by technology? I ran this a few years ago, so let’s see how the responses differ.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Q&A: What’s new with the NSA? A No Surprises Act update.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Joseph Mercer, JD, managing director, Marwood Group; Heather Kawamoto, VP of product strategy, Waystar. The No Surprises Act created a lot of change,  and those changes are still coming. A panel of revenue cycle experts answer frequently asked questions and offer a concise update on the NSA, including legislative developments, FAQs, and tips for navigating changes.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

EClinicalWorks announces that it expects to generate $900 million in revenue in 2023, up from the previous year’s $800 million. The company will continue to invest in AI, including ChatGPT integration, an AI-based image model for document management, and RCM improvement.

Weight loss drug startup Calibrate will sell itself to a private equity firm and restructure the business, which recently pivoted from selling prescriptions directly to consumers to having employers offer its services as an employee benefit. The company has struggled with refund-demanding customers who couldn’t get their prescriptions filled due to short supplies, as well as those who found that their insurance wouldn’t cover the high cost of GLP-1 drugs.

Nomad, whose app connects travel nurses with hospitals, lays off employees for the second time this year as budget-challenged health systems reduce their use of expensive travel nurses. 

Sales

• The US Defense Health Agency awards Amwell and Leidos a contract valued at up to $180 million to provide a hybrid care platform that will replace MHS Video Connect.

People

Tony Ambrozie, MBA, MIM (Baptist Health South Florida) joins CVS Health as chief digital and technology officer, pharmacy and consumer wellness.

Net Health hires Ron Books (ECI Software Solutions) as CEO.

Matter Communications promotes Paul Berthiaume to SVP.

Privacy and Security

HealthAlliance Hospital (NY) discharges or transfers all of its inpatients and diverts ambulances following a cyberattack. Owner Westchester Medical Health Network says the incident also affected Margaretville Hospital and Mountainside Residential Care Center.

Other

Cedars-Sinai researchers develop an AI tool that can detect atrial fibrillation in people who don’t have symptoms, including in diverse settings and patient populations.

Sponsor Updates

• Inovalon partners with HealthVerity as part of its new Preferred Data Partner Program to advance the use of real-world evidence in research.
• NeuroFlow publishes a new case study, “Prudential Helps High-Risk Disability Claimants Access Support Through Population-Wide Suicide Risk Assessment & Prevention.”
• Surescripts shares a new podcast, “A Recap of NACDS Total Store Expo 2023.”
• Wolters Kluwer announces that its Emmi patient engagement and education solution has received a 2023 Black Book award for highest client/user satisfaction from managed care providers.
• InterSystems partners with Indonesian EHR vendor Zi.Care to provide expert services via the InterSystems Iris for Health – Indonesia Edition data platform.

Blog Posts

• What’s top of mind for healthcare executives now? (Notable)
• Intelligent patient experiences, part 1: How easy it is to use your patient portal? (Nuance)
• Healthcare workforce: Burnout, compensation, and strikes with Elizabeth Ojo on Diagnosing Healthtech (Redox)
• Supporting Med Access by Collecting Digital Patient Consent (RxLightning)
• 4 Reasons to Skip Paper and Switch to Online Incident Reporting Software (Symplr)
• Rev cycle 101 – Healthcare revenue cycle terminology: Denial prevention glossary (Waystar)
• A Provider’s POV: Can Technology Help Us Be Better Patient Advocates? (CereCore

Contacts

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

News 10/20/23

Top News

OptumInsight CEO Neil de Crescenzo leaves the company a year after it acquired Change Healthcare in a $13 billion deal, according to a LinkedIn post. He had been CEO of Change since 2013.

OptumInsight’s new CEO is Roger Connor, who will also continue his role as EVP of enterprise operations and services for parent company UnitedHealth Group.

A reader tipped me off to de Crescenzo’s s departure in mid-September, but the company did not respond to my inquiries.

OptumInsight offers transaction processing, technology, analytics, and revenue cycle management. Its annual revenue is nearly $5 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor FinThrive. The Plano, TX-based company helps 3,200 healthcare organizations increase revenue, reduce costs, improve patients financial experience, and ensure regulatory compliance across their entire revenue cycle continuum. Its SaaS-based RCM Platform delivers the industry’s widest breadth of capabilities, including integrated workflows supporting patient access, revenue integrity, claims management, contract management, and collections management teams within a centralized work environment. The company helps its customers bring modern digital experiences to their patients, including self-scheduling, virtual check-in, price estimations, patient payments and payment plans, and ongoing SMS-based secure communications – with no app downloads required. Its platform also leverages machine learning, robotic process automation, end-to-end RCM analytics, and billing and coding education resources to increase efficiency and drive sustained ROI. Thanks to FinThrive for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a FinThrive explainer that I found on YouTube.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Q&A: What’s new with the NSA? A No Surprises Act update.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Joseph Mercer, JD, managing director, Marwood Group; Heather Kawamoto, VP of product strategy, Waystar. The No Surprises Act created a lot of change,  and those changes are still coming. A panel of revenue cycle experts answer frequently asked questions and offer a concise update on the NSA, including legislative developments, FAQs, and tips for navigating changes.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Audience engagement platform vendor Uniquest acquires PCare, which offers interactive patient systems.

Henry Ford Health and Ascension Michigan form a joint venture to combine their Detroit-area operations, with the combined $10.5 billion business giving them 44% of the Detroit area hospital market by revenue. 

Private equity firm Ardian will increase its stake in Europe-focused healthcare software vendor Dedalus to 92%. Board member Albert Calcagno, who has no healthcare or software experience, has been appointed CEO, with Andrea Fiumicelli moved to board chair.

Sales

• Medicare Advantage insurer EternalHealth will implement Inovalon’s Converged suite for quality measurement and risk scoring.
• USA Health Children’s and Women’s Hospital goes live on AdaptX’s Obstetric Advisor to improve maternal health equity.
• Culbertson Memorial Hospital will go live on Oracle Health CommunityWorks next month.
• Virtua Health will allow its doctors to prescribe Woebot Health’s mental health support app to people who are waiting for behavioral health provider appointments.

People

Bamboo Health hires Jeff Smith, MBA (Lumeris) as CEO. He replaces interim CEO Jay Desai, MBA, who will continue as executive board chair. Former CEO Rob Cohen, MBA left the company in July 2023 to join Livara as CEO.

Adrian Agostini (Booster) joins Experity as chief revenue officer.

Industry long-timer Rob Titemore, most recently with Sonifi Health, died August 13 in a motorcycle accident. He was 52. Visitation will be November 18 in Burlington, MA.

Announcements and Implementations

Insurer Oscar Health describes in an excellent “Continuous Hackathon” website how it is using large language models in pursuit of three goals: creating better client experiences, impacting behavior to generate better outcomes, and automating processes to reduce cost. Some of its ideas for using AI to move care delivery outside of the medical office:

• Assign members to virtual primary care doctors.
• Use AI to interpret EHR lab results as an initial draft for the virtual care provider. Co-founder and CTO Mario Schlosser says in an X post that the response of providers is binary – either they delete the summary immediately or they accept it with minimal changes.
• Automate the creation of care summaries. Schlosser says that providers modify the AI-written summary often, adding their own personal style or adding context.
• Collect patient information before starting a virtual patient visit.

In Japan, Fujitsu and Toppan Holdings will collaborate to create research databases from de-identified EHR data and apply analytics to improve the efficiency of drug development and care delivery.

Ronin and MD Anderson experts describe the development of an AI-powered digital tool that identifies cancer patients who are likely to require an unscheduled ED visit within 30 days due to treatment side effects, concluding that 50% of those visits as well as 19% of hospitalizations are avoidable.

Prudential’s implementation of NeuroFlow’s technology for conducting remote clinical assessments of disability claimants triggered 4,200 self-harm or suicide alerts from 24% of the monitored population, enabling the insurer to promptly connect them with mental wellness resources and resulting in a 34% reduction in their symptoms of depression.

Government and Politics

HHS OCR publishes a checklist covering “Telehealth Privacy and Security Tips for Patients.”

Other

A survey of employers finds that health insurance premiums increased 7% in 2023, outpacing worker wage increases and inflation as family coverage averaged $23,968 per year. Employers paid an average of 71% of the cost, although 65% of workers were enrolled in self-funded plans in which the employer pays for health services directly. Employers say that the key health benefits concerns of their employees involve the high cost-sharing that they bear, their ability to schedule timely appointments, and the complexity of prior authorization. More than half of employers think that telemedicine will be important or very important for providing access to behavioral health services and primary care.

An interesting series of tweets from Science.io co-founder and CEO Will Manidis makes these observations in predicting healthcare’s “top deck of the Titanic” moment as consumers abandon the existing system and create their own:

• The status quo is that costs have increased constantly and clinic waitlists remained full because: (a) clinicians are in limited supply; (b) insurers pay rather than patients; (c) demand is inelastic and trust is high; and (d) regulatory capture.
• He says that all four factors are shifting as (a) LLM-assisted doctors will gain technology leverage; (b) the payer-PCP model will shift to online services that treat individual conditions; (c) patients who are disillusioned by the opioid epidemic and by poor treatment at physician offices will exit the system instead of calling for it to be improved; and (d) FDA’s healthcare regulation doesn’t reflect patient desires and instead rewards incumbents.
• Technology will allow new companies to be more efficient than incumbents as vendor overpromising fades.
• Amazon, Walmart, and CVS are building a cash-pay, free-market parallel care system.
• Margins on low-acuity care will increase due to telemedicine and consumerization, which will also offer cross-selling opportunities for high-margin lifestyle management plans.

A fascinating and potentially HIT-adjacent article in The Atlantic ponders the “failed experiment” of retail self-checkout, which mentions but does not primarily blame customer dishonesty as its main challenge. The initial promise of quick checkout and the ability to deploy freed-up cashiers to offer more customer assistance never materialized, as finicky technology, purchases such as alcohol that require employee review, and assigning a single staff member to oversee the enter kiosk area have diminished the technology’s potential. Snips:

• Self-checkout allows cutting back on low-wage cashiers, but the problem-prone technology requires a lot of expensive IT resources to keep running.
• It hasn’t been proven to be faster or more convenient, but customers are fooled because instead of just waiting in line, they fumble through the scanning and bagging process in doing the cashier’s job with a small fraction of their efficiency.
• Retail store owners used self-checkout as a reason to cut staff in general, resulting in messier stores, poorly stocked shelves, and lack of employees to assist customers.
• Retailers aren’t likely to abandon the concept because they spent fortunes installing the technology, but they will likely need to provide more human assistance.
• The article concludes, “A familiar limitation of many grand tech-industry promises endures: At the bottom of all the supposed convenience, you do actually just need a lot of people to operate a store.”

Sponsor Updates

• Divurgent releases a new The Vurge Podcast, “From Operations to IT: An Inside Look.”
• Ellkay will present at the CommonWell Health Alliance 2023 Annual Meeting and Fall Summit November 6-8 in Kansas City, MO.
• HealthMark Group employees volunteer at Operation Kindness.
• Optimum Healthcare IT posts a case study titled “Sentara: Strategic Portfolio Management with ServiceNow.”
• Censinet and First Health Advisory will partner to offer cybersecurity risk assurance solutions, including the Censinet RiskOps platform for managing and mitigating third-party and enterprise risk.
• Nordic releases a video titled “The Download | Restart, refuel, or hang tight: The EHR dilemma.”
• Inovalon collaborates with Amazon Web Services to develop software to support better healthcare outcomes and economics.
• MRO will exhibit at the NCQA Health Innovation Summit October 23-25 in Orlando.
• Heart of Florida Health Center realizes a 21% increase in payment collections with EHR and Healow Payment Services software from EClinicalWorks.
• Redox partners with healthcare-focused digital transformation consultancy Productive Edge to offer the Healthcare Data Strategy Accelerator and Healthcare Data Integration Accelerator programs.

Blog Posts

• Using Data to Champion Hospital Workers and Prevent Strikes (Dimensional Insight)
• The Role of Emotional Intelligence in the Hiring Process (Direct Recruiters)
• How Healow Self-Scheduling Helped a New Practice Fill 400 Appointment Slots (EClinicalWorks)
• Creating Effective Warnings for All (Everbridge)
• Supporting Colorado’s Drug User Health Hub (Findhelp)
• Navigating the Future with Contact Center AI Solutions (Five9)
• How to make cybersecurity training part of your healthcare culture (Fortified Health Security)
• The future is now: Healthcare IT needs a rapid evolution (HCTec)
• 4 time-saving features of an integrated RCM solution (Inovalon)
• Bridging a Legacy LIS to Epic Beaker: JTG Consulting Group’s Collaborative Effort with Atrium Health (JTG Consulting Group)
• Healthcare Orchestration Needs a Conductor (Lumeon)
• How to Deal with Angry Patients in Urgent Care (Experity)
• 3 Ways Hospitals Can Foster Exceptional Patient Experiences in the ED (Medhost)
• How an EHR partnership can improve efficiency, person-centered care and outcomes (Meditech)

Contacts

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

News 10/18/23

Top News

Waystar announces that it filed IPO documents in August that reportedly value the company at up to $8 billion.

Waystar says it booked $196 million in sales for the quarter ending June 30 versus $173 million for the same quarter last year.

The revenue cycle management company was formed in 2017 with the merger of Navicure and ZirMed. Waystar has since acquired Connance, HealthPay24, Patientco, PARO, Digitize,AI, and ESolutions. 

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Q&A: What’s new with the NSA? A No Surprises Act update.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Joseph Mercer, JD, managing director, Marwood Group; Heather Kawamoto, VP of product strategy, Waystar. The No Surprises Act created a lot of change,  and those changes are still coming. A panel of revenue cycle experts answer frequently asked questions and offer a concise update on the NSA, including legislative developments, FAQs, and tips for navigating changes.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The loss of a legacy customer and associated $4.5 million in annual revenue prompts RCM vendor Streamline Health Solutions to move forward with a corporate restructuring plan that includes a 24% reduction in its workforce and the promotion of Benjamin Stilwill to CEO. Former CEO Wyche “Tee” Green will transition to executive chairman. STRM shares have lost 40% of their value in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 31% gain, closing Tuesday at $0.30 and valuing the company at $18 million.

Aspirus Health will acquire St. Luke’s in signing a definitive agreement that has been unanimously approved by the boards of both health systems. The agreement calls for Aspirus to implement Epic and its other standard systems at St. Luke’s within 24 months of closing, which is expected in the spring of 2024. St. Luke’s went live on Meditech Expanse in mid-2019. The combined organization will operate 19 hospitals and 130 outpatient locations with 14,000 employees.

Drug chain Rite Aid files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and hires a new CEO as it struggles with slowing sales, debt, and a Department of Justice opioid lawsuit.

Sales

• AdventHealth will use tech-enabled clinical support from Wellvana to improve access and outcomes within its network of primary care clinics in Florida.

People

Samir Shah, MD (Envision Healthcare) joins Qure.ai as chief medical officer.

Cordea Consulting names Travis Earlywine (Lowes) regional VP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Highmark Health (PA) will implement Google’s new Vertex AI Search technology across its enterprise. It is initially using the generative AI tool as a part of an automated, post-visit medical documentation workflow pilot project.

King’s Daughters Medical Center (MS) implements BridgeHead Software’s HealthStore clinical data repository as a part of decommissioning its legacy Meditech Magic EHR. KDMC went live on Meditech Expanse last December.

Guelph General Hospital in Ontario goes live with Sectra’s cloud-based enterprise imaging technology.

Government and Politics

The VA will establish four AI centers to test and apply new AI solutions at partner VA medical centers. The centers support the VA’s recently announced AI strategy, which includes using AI to improve care outcomes and experiences for veterans.

Privacy and Security

Mt. Graham Regional Medical Center (AZ) works to restore computer systems after a September 27 ransomware attack.

University of Vermont Medical Center President and COO Stephen Leffler, MD tells lawmakers at a joint subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC that more federal grants should be made available to help health systems purchase stronger cybersecurity software. Leffler also shared the details of the hospital’s recovery from a 2020 ransomware attack, which led to 28 days of downtime and $65 million in costs.

Other

Epic employees complain on Reddit that the company has announced that it will no longer allow them to work from home during heavy snow days. Some of them note that Epic’s new hires often have never driven in snow and therefore are prone to creating automotive mayhem.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthwise posts a case study of how Duke Health used its health education to increase the success rate of its smoking cessation program.
• Availity offers RevSpring’s staff-assisted payment and merchant services as part of its Availity Essentials multi-payer platform.
• AvaSure will host its 2023 Symposium October 25-26 in Grand Rapids, MI.
• Inovalon’s Claims Management Pro solution is offered on the PointClickCare Marketplace.
• Baker Tilly publishes a new case study, “Handled with care: UT Health San Antonio’s Oracle HCM journey towards one cloud.”
• Nordic publishes another episode of its In Network podcast, “Designing for Health: Bre Loughlin.”
• Bamboo Health publishes a new case study, “Revolutionizing Nevada’s Behavioral Health Referrals: A Leap Forward for 988 Suicide Prevention and Crisis Lifeline Services.”
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast featuring cybersecurity expert Frank Riccardi.

Blog Posts

• Navigating the Challenges of Transcription: Finding a Solution that is Accurate, Timely & Secure (AdvancedMD)
• From Pain to Progress: Streamlining LIS Upgrades with JTG Consulting Group (JTG Consulting Group)
• Coding and Documentation Synergies: The Power of CAC and CDI Integration (AGS Health)
• How to create a trusted and consistent data foundation for healthcare (Arcadia)
• Building a Pan-European Paediatric Data Collaboration Network (Aridhia)
• Leveraging High-Quality Clinical Data to Safeguard HEDIS Quality Bonus (Availity)
• Why Injury Prevention Technology Used by Athletes is so Effective in the Workplace (Bardavon)
• Copay Adjustment Programs: What Brand and Hub Teams Need to Know (ConnectiveRx)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/16/23

Top News

Walgreens will close 60 of its drugstore-attached VillageMD clinics as it pursues $1 billion in cost reductions following a Q4 loss that is the first in its 122-year history.

Walgreens paid $5.2 billion in late 2021 to increase its stake in VillageMD. The Walgreens interim CFO insisted in Thursday’s earnings call that the company will “unlock the embedded profits at Village” by cutting costs, improving execution, and “right-sizing the footprint” in focusing on the highest-opportunity markets and expanding integration of the company’s digital assets.

Walgreens also says it will reduce retail inventory and optimize product mix, which might make one wonder why the highly-compensated executives waited for a crappy quarterly earnings report to do so. Actually, maybe the company agrees since they have already canned the CEO, CFO, and CIO.

Worth a read is the analysis by AI company founder Sergei Polevikov, who says half of the company’s 2023 loss of $3 billion is due to money-losing VillageMD while the remainder is because of “kitchen sinking,” where all of the company’s problems are blamed on previous management in an opportunity to clean up the ugly books. He previously wrote a brilliant piece titled “Why did I say No to 100 SPAC offers? Because SPACs are Ponzi schemes” in which SPAC salespeople pushed him to take his AI company public, but didn’t bother to ask questions about profits or ROI since their interest was pumping and dumping, fueled by insiders hyping the company to unload shares to retail investors who shortly after took it in the shorts.

Reader Comments

From Boyd Blender: “Re: PE firm acquiring a health system. That would be an unwelcome intrusion.” The intrusion has already occurred, as private equity firms already own health systems, physician practices, clinics, ambulance services, hospices, insurers, drug companies, ED staffing firms, health IT software vendors, pharmacy chains, dental and vision offices, and funeral homes. Meanwhile, ever-larger health systems are exhibiting PE-like behavior in closing less-profitable sites, running investment firms, and strong-arming patients to pay balances due while generously enriching their executives. Patient expectations of empathy, customer focus, and an emphasis of quality over revenue – even when the patient is an executive of the same health system — usually lead to disillusionment.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Many poll attendees wouldn’t attend any conferences if they had to pay their own way, but some say they would self-fund trips to a vendor’s user group meeting, HIMSS, or ViVE. I’ve long held that at least on the provider side, conferences are bestowed as paid vacations for executives with little expectation of ROI. I say that from experience, having enjoyed the budget and paid time off to traipse off to conferences about which my health system employer asked little and for which I held minimal expectation of benefit to my employer.

New poll to your right or here: Which of the following non-job issues were the main reason you left an employer? Everybody understands quitting over better opportunities, boss conflicts, or lack of challenge or inspiration, so I’m looking for broader, company-wide issues.

I’m never going to trust Google to lead AI innovation until it improves Gmail. I use it in the most basic ways possible, but still marvel that (a) selecting all items in Promotions and then clicking Delete All runs what looks like a primitive macro that leaves many emails undeleted; and (b) deleting emails on mobile brings up a pointless and unmovable “Conversation moved to trash” message that hides the next email. Only a UI-indifferent engineer could find Gmail easy to love. I’ve used it since mid-2005 and its appearance and sometimes frustrating behavior hasn’t changed much, like Google is reluctant to mess with it.

Sign up as a new HIStalk sponsor and Lorre will give you the rest of this year for free, a deal that rewards action rather than indecision.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Q&A: What’s new with the NSA? A No Surprises Act update.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Joseph Mercer, JD, managing director, Marwood Group; Heather Kawamoto, VP of product strategy, Waystar. The No Surprises Act created a lot of change,  and those changes are still coming. A panel of revenue cycle experts answer frequently asked questions and offer a concise update on the NSA, including legislative developments, FAQs, and tips for navigating changes.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Sphere will sell its Commercial Division to commercial enablement company NMI as a non-core business. UPDATE and correcting an earlier version of this item: the company is retaining the healthcare offerings as part of its specialized integrated verticals, selling only the Commercial Division that serves non-integrated SMB retail customers. Sphere says the sale will allow it to focus on fully integrated payment and software experiences, which in healthcare includes its TrustCommerce healthcare gateway and Health IPass patient engagement solutions.

UnityPoint Health and Presbyterian Healthcare Services end their plans to merge.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz provides vendor advice from health system digital health leaders on selling AI products:

• Frame the problem instead of assuming that buyers seek AI for AI’s sake.
• Identify the person who is charged with fixing the problem, not the one who is most excited about AI.
• Understand the buyer’s roadmap to solving problems, their buy versus build framework, and their value proposition for choosing a startup versus an incumbent vendor.
• Define the ROI case and KPIs to avoid “death by pilot.”
• Focus on user workflow since organizations aren’t interested in standalone solutions and those that add steps the clinician’s work.
• Be transparent about why you need data and how it will be managed.
• Pricing methods include mirroring the cost of an existing solution that will be replaced, API-based pricing that allow customers to build their own applications, a straight SaaS subscription, and charging based on what employees would be paid to achieve similar results.
• Raise investor funds based on the high cost of compute resources that are needed to develop products. Those funds are one form of product moat, along with hiring skilled AI people, gaining access to proprietary data, and achieving market lock-in where health system customers are reluctant to replace incumbent vendors.

Announcements and Implementations

A Kerala, India-based startup creates user-friendly scheduling software that updates the assigned appointment time with a prediction of when the visit will actually begin based on the doctor’s real-time schedule. The system also allows doctors to transfer their appointments.

Financial Times-backed European startup publication Sifted asks investors which digital health companies they like, although the investors don’t indicate any financial interest in the companies they name:

• Abtrace (UK) – preventive care monitoring.
• Floy (Germany) – radiology image analysis.
• Lighthearted.AI (UK) – wearables for heart condition detection.
• Lindus Health (UK) – clinical trial platform.
• Nabla (France) – ambient documentation.
• Nebu-Flow (UK) – smart nebulizers.
• Nelly Solutions (Germany)  – digital signatures and credit.
• Nyra Health (Austria) – digital stroke rehabilitation.
• Phare Health (UK) – medical coding.
• Sohar Health (UK) – insurance eligibility.
• Tortus.ai (UK) – EHR task automation for physicians.
• Upheal (Czech Republic) – note-taking for mental health professionals.
• Verisian (UK) – clinical data analysis.

Atrium Health surveys primary care users of Nuance’s DAX Copilot. Almost all report ease of use and an improved documentation experience, while two-thirds think it has improved their care delivery experience.

A LinkedIn post describes Northwestern Medicine’s pilot project for IT Locker, in which employees who forget their laptops at home can submit a quick form to receive a PIN that allows them to withdraw a loader.

Other

Doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants at Allina Health System’s clinics vote to unionize and will be represented by Service Employees International Union. Physicians who were involved in the organizing campaign complained that understaffing at the clinics is swamping them with managing refill requests, patient messages, and lab results.

The parents of 28-year-old Ohio hospital ED nurse Tristin Kate Smith, who died by suicide in August, discover and publish “A Letter to My Abuser,” which they found on her laptop. The abuser she references is profit-driven health systems, which she said compromise patient care by laying off staff, ignoring nurse input, and failing to supply security to protect workers, all while providing gratuitous pizza parties and “healthcare heroes” pens. She blames health systems for exploiting nurses who are constantly being asked to do more with less while lining their pockets delivering overpriced healthcare. She concludes, “If I stay, I will lose my sanity – and possibly my life – forever.”

Sponsor Updates

• NTT Data sponsors the US Marshals Golf Classic, supporting the families of fallen officers.
• The 2023 Surescripts White Coat Award recognizes 11 healthcare industry leaders in performance, innovation, and accuracy.
• Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya implements Meditech Expanse.
• Spok releases the 2023 State of Healthcare Communications Report.
• The Dermatology Specialists realizes a 50% reduction in claim submission lab and a 33% reduction in payer rejections after implement RCM optimization services from EClinicalWorks.
• Atrium Health reports that Nuance’s DAX Copilot solution has improved the documentation experience for almost 85% of physicians.
• Netsmart will exhibit at the National Association for Home Care and Hospice Conference and Expo October 15-17 in Washington, DC.
• PerfectServe will exhibit at the American Association of Physician Leadership Fall Institute October 26-29 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Sectra releases a new podcast, “The power of remote reading – why radiologists should never settle for less.”
• Symplr partners with the Daisy Foundation to celebrate nursing excellence with the Moments that Matter video series.
• Artera, Availity, Consensus Cloud Solutions, Dimensional Insight, EClinicalWorks, HealthMark Group, Linus Health, Meditech, MRO, and Nuance will exhibit at MGMA’s Leaders Conference October 22-25 in Nashville.

Blog Posts

• What Meditech’s top podcasts reveal about healthcare drivers (Meditech)
• The 5 Biggest Takeaways from ‘Bridging the Gap,’ Our First Ever user Summit (NeuroFlow)
• Burnout’s triple threat: Compromising care, clinicians, and cash flow (Nordic)
• Top 3 Considerations for an EHR Upgrade (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Highly Trained, Under-Utilized: Advocating for a Shift in Pharmacy Care (OmniSys)
• The healthcare executive’s guide to AI (Redox)
• NASP Recap: How Tech is Closing Info Gaps in Specialty Medication Fulfillment (Surescripts)
• For Epic Implementations the Right Project Manager is Crucial (CereCore)
• Revenue cycle 101: Referral status, authorizations vs. referrals + more (Waystar)
• The $150K Email (VisiQuate)

Contacts

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

News 10/13/23

Top News

FDA creates a nine-member Digital Health Advisory Committee that will advise it on topics such as AI, augmented and virtual reality, digital therapeutics, wearables, and remote patient monitoring technology.

Nominations will be accepted through December 11 online.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I have never listened to an industry podcast and don’t expect to, but chatty health IT celebrity-seekers are sure cranking out a ton of them. I don’t see how the pool of skilled hosts and expert guests is sufficient to fuel all of the amateur broadcasting that fills my X and LinkedIn feeds, but surely they wouldn’t bother if no one was listening. I can’t see spending 30 minutes listening to a conversation that could be distilled into a couple of sentences, especially if there’s a lot of self-promotion or vendor-paid endorsing going on.

Listening: Eloy, which turned up on a YouTube channel that covers rare progressive rock albums. That led me to happily discover that the band’s catalog is on Spotify. It’s fascinating to listen to music of the wildly creative and diverse 1970s, when bands focused on music rather than choreography, computer trickery, and marketing. The musical groups usually faded quickly into obscurity and unrelated day jobs, with their deepest and most creative thoughts from their teens and early 20s preserved on seldom-heard and rare LPs like insects in amber. The music can be wistfully naive and sometimes primitively executed, but it’s moving to hear knowing that their youthful creators have either died or are into their 70s and 80s.

Just about every social media post I’ve seen about HLTH involves parties, group hugs, and selfies. I’m wondering if anyone found solid business value from attending in lieu of doing actual employer work? It sits well down the list of “conferences I would pay out of my own pocket to attend” in my active poll. Conference attendees apparently set the ROI bar a lot lower than they would for a software purchase, requiring little beyond a target-rich networking environment.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cigna’s Evernorth Health Services acquires the asynchronous virtual care assets of Bright.md, which it will incorporate into its MDLive virtual care service that it acquired in April 2021 for a reported $1 billion.

RCM vendor Access Healthcare acquires Envera Health, which offers patient engagement solutions.

Yale New Haven Health asks the state of Connecticut to provide financing for its acquisition of three hospitals that are owned by cyberattack victim Prospect Medical Holdings. YNHH also wants Prospect to lower the $435 million acquisition price of the hospitals, whose financial condition is dire to the point of not being able to buy supplies and pay physicians.

Epic offers SmartUser, the renamed Power User program whose website allows any provider to register for 17 free virtual efficiency classes that offer 1 CME credit. Epic says that attendees report that each course attended saves them one hour per week.

WellSky acquires Corridor, which offers coding and RCM services to post-acute care organizations.

People

Rick LeMay, MS (Clearwater) joins First Health Advisory as EVP of enterprise security and technology.

Announcements and Implementations

Lumeon announces Conductor for clinical workflow automation, which includes command center orchestration, digital rounding, and a campaign builder.

Wolters Kluwer Health announces Health Language Platform, a FHIR terminology server that works with Microsoft Azure’s FHIR service.

Sutter Health will create an innovation center by early 2024, for which it is seeking a San Francisco location.

Philips announces interoperability between its Capsule Medical Device Information Platform and its Patient Information Center IX.

Israel’s Soroka Medical Center is using facial recognition to match trauma victims that it is treating to photos that have been sent to a hospital-created email address by concerned family members. Tele Aviv-based Corsight AI provided the technology at no charge.

Microsoft introduces new healthcare-related tools to its Fabric analytics platform that can assemble and standardize data from multiple sources – such as EHRs, imaging systems, lab systems, medical devices, and claims data – and present it in a single view. The company also announced Azure AI Health Bot, which can answer staff questions about treatments and protocols and patient portal queries about symptoms and medical terms. Microsoft also announced a text analytics solution, along with generative AI models that create a patient history, simply medical reports into patient-friendly language, and help radiologists identify possible radiology report errors.

Government and Politics

California’s Delete Act is signed into law, requiring data brokers to delete all information they have on file pertaining to the person who makes the request. The state is required to create a single webpage that routes the individual’s request to all data brokers. It also requires companies to delete all information on file, not just the data they collected about the requester themselves.

Other

A Nature comment article says that use of AI in clinical practice may be limited because developers focus on population-level predictive accuracy while failing to take individual patient differences into account, causing the tools to sometimes offer unreliable advice in failing to answer the “are you sure” question. That leaves clinicians to assess factors that may be misleading the technology.

Sponsor Updates

• Valley ENT reaches 10,000 patients with its first Text2Pay campaign using Healow Payment Services from EClinicalWorks.
• InterSystems welcomes eight new companies to its Startup Program, bringing the total number of participants to 35.
• MRO announces that it has been recognized as the top-performing company for release-of-information digital technology and vendor efficiency in the latest KLAS Release of Information Performance Report.

Blog Posts

• Burnout’s triple threat: Compromising care, clinicians, and cash flow (Nordic)
• Funding Social Care: Streamline Payments to Community-Based Organizations (Findhelp)
• Customer Experience in the New Health Economy (Five9)
• Creating Effective Health Education Content at Scale (Healthwise)
• A No-Fail Guide to Minimizing No-Shows (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 10/11/23

Top News

Private equity firm General Catalyst launches Health Assurance Transformation Corp., which will work with the firm’s 20-plus health system partners to test new care delivery and workflow optimization technologies developed by companies within its portfolio.

HATco will also eventually seek to purchase a health system through which it can pilot additional concepts.

General Catalyst’s portfolio includes Athelas, which recently acquired Commure; Aidoc; Imprivata; and Transcarent.

Former Intermountain Health CEO Marc Harrison, MD, MMM will serve as CEO of HATco.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The cycle of de-listing warnings, extensions, and appeals for failing to file financial reports continues for Veradigm, for which Nasdaq has granted a temporary de-listing stay pending a November 16 hearing.

Walmart will offer no-charge virtual primary care from Included Health to 1 million people who are covered by its employee health insurance plan. Walmart’s pilot project with the company saw an 11% reduction in total cost with only 10% of those treated moving to an in-person care setting. One-third of the visits related to chronic or preventative care.

Commons Clinic, which offers value-based specialty care for orthopedics from two Los Angeles area clinics, raises $19.5 million in a Series A round. The company vows to disrupt the “stagnant hospital-centric model” in favor of conservative treatment, digital-first services, and use of surgery centers for procedures.

Sales

• Citizens Medical Center (TX) will implement Meditech Expanse.
• Clemson Rural Health (SC) selects health information exchange and storage capabilities from Sync.MD.
• Intermountain Health will use Clearsense’s 1Clearsense data archival service to consolidate data from its legacy systems.

People

Ashlee DesJardins (StayWell) joins Cordea Consulting as regional VP of sales.

University of Cincinnati College of Medicine names biomedical informatics professor Rodrigo Deliberato, MD, PhD chief research information officer.

Munson Healthcare (MI) names Michael Saad, MBA (University of Tennessee Medical Center) CIO.

Mike Heckman, MBA (Rockcreek Way) joins Beterra Health as president.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthwise announces GA of Health Compass, a service that delivers educational healthcare content in any format to any digital channel.

In England, King’s College Hospital and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trusts go live on Epic, which Epic says is the largest single go-live in the world with 51,000 users involved.

Cedars-Sinai launches a virtual healthcare app for patients in California using technology from K Health.

Care.ai equips its Smart Care Facility Platform with Google Cloud’s generative AI and data analytics.

Northern California HIE SacValley MedShare works with Konza National Network to develop behavioral health analytics dashboards.

Orlando Health rolls out AndorHealth’s ThinkAndor Virtual Hospital technology.

Verato will incorporate Clear’s consumer-facing identity verification technology into its healthcare master data management solution.

Main Street Health, which provides an in-house care coordination navigator in each of its 900 mostly small and rural practices in 18 states to support value-based care, raises $315 million in new capital. Investors in the round include the five largest Medicare Advantage plans in the US. One of the company’s investors and builders is Russell Street Ventures, which also backs CareBridge, a provider of remote care to Medicaid patients who prefer at-home care to nursing home admission. That company is named as the fastest-growing in the US by Inc. 5000, with a 157,000% revenue increase last year to $873 million.

Government and Politics

The DEA extends a COVID-initiated rule allowing providers to prescribe select controlled substances via telemedicine through the end of 2024.

The Oklahoma Fraternal Order of Police sues Oklahoma Health Care Authority, claiming that its HIE is unconstitutional because it requires providers who treat Medicaid patients to submit details about the encounter. The plaintiff’s lawyer says the HIE is “the most dangerous attack on Oklahomans’ privacy in the history of the state” and questions its authority to mandate participation or to impose fees that should instead be appropriated by the legislature.

Privacy and Security

The state insurer of the Philippines, which has warned its 36 million members that a ransomware attacked has exposed their information, admits that it didn’t renew its antivirus software agreement in May before the incident because of new government procurement rules. PhilHealth has since asked the antivirus vendor for a 30-day trial of new software.

Other

Advocate Health will send 100 of its Epic experts to England, where they will help seven London hospitals transition to Epic.

Best Buy will partner with virtual care provider Wheel and pharmacy technology vendor HealthDyne to sell prescription continuous glucose monitors from its website. The retailer plans to allow customers to upload CGM prescriptions from their own physicians to their Best Buy health profile.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom staffers raise $5,000 by riding 10,000 miles in the Great Cycle Challenge to help fight pediatric cancer.
• Nym expands its suite of outpatient solutions for RCM automation to include outpatient surgery and visits.
• Veradigm becomes the first major EHR to join FDB’s Vela e-prescribing network.
• Nuance ranks as the leading vendor for mid-RCM healthcare providers, according to a recent Black Book Research survey.
• Baker Tilly publishes its “Healthcare M&A Update: H1 2023.”
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleep Podcast featuring Skip Sorrels.
• CloudWave wins the Managed Security Solution of the Year Award in the 2023 Cybersecurity Breakthrough Awards program.
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Vision and Value-Driven EHR Optimization: A Leadership Interview.”
• Current Health publishes a new case study, “The Geek Squad Effect.”
• Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust in England roll out Sectra’s enterprise imaging technology to a sixth trust.

Blog Posts

• Implementing a Revenue Cycle Maturity Framework: Best Practices (AGS Health)
• Data on FHIR: Interoperability standards for whole-person care (Arcadia)
• Are You Struggling with Interoperability Challenges? You’re Not Alone (AdvancedMD)
• Screen, stream, support: The tech-driven future of mental health (Nordic)
• Best Practices for Centralized Virtual Sitting (AvaSure)
• Building New Data Connections Helps Brands Lower Adherence Barriers (ConnectiveRx)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/9/23

Top News

The VA and 13 health systems pledge to share data to improve veteran healthcare via three objectives:

• Accurately identify veterans when they seek care from community providers.
• Connect veterans with resources that promote health and healthcare, especially with those VA services that lower their out-of-pocket expenses.
• Coordinate care and exchange information about care requested and provided, regardless whether they are enrolled in VA health benefits.

Reader Comments

From Supplicant: “Re: health system announcement forthcoming. Don’t run this until you hear it from another source because it might out me.” Sorry to be vague in avoiding exposing the reader’s identity. If you’re privy to details of an upcoming health system’s product switch that I haven’t mentioned, which includes some interesting hosting choices, email me. I’ll keep everyone anonymous while making sure it’s not just easily identified insiders who know.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents attribute different factors to the success of Epic. Some offered other choices:

• A demonstrated, take-charge implementation process.
• Software architecture that allows Epic to enhance and develop faster.
• Trying to do the right thing, even in the absence of financial reward.
• Connectivity among Epic sites.
• Being led by a founder instead of flipping owners or going public.
• Hiring smart people and motivating them to work hard for customers.
• Being the safe choice for health system C-level executives.
• Marketing in the “invite your friends” sort of way, like an exclusive club where clients want to connect to each other.

New poll to your right or here, featuring a question I ask every few years: Which annual conference would you attend if limited to one and paying your own way?

Topping my current list of annoying business terms: “unlock,” when vendors offer to sell the “key” to snatching some elusive business benefit if you just sign on the line which is dotted. Honorable mention goes to replacing the single-syllable and perfectly descriptive “use” with the bloviatory “utilize” or “leverage.” I’ll also nominate “currently” for superfluity – “I am currently working” adds nothing except three syllables to “I am working,” although maybe it’s an improvement over “at this point in time.”

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Canada-based health IT solutions provider LGI Healthcare Solutions acquires healthcare automation solutions vendor Boston Software Systems. 

Virtual rheumatology provider Remission Medical will offer services through KeyCare and coordinating patient care with Epic-using health systems.

Investment firm SAIGroup funds and launches RhythmX AI, which analyzes longitudinal data to make recommendations to doctors.

Announcements and Implementations

Black Book announces the top-performing vendors among HIM users surveyed in the areas of computer-assisted coding, clinical documentation improvement, speech recognition, transcription, and outsourced coding services.

Government and Politics

Cigna will pay $172 million to settle False Claims Act charges that it assigned diagnosis coders review patient medical records to find additional billable codes after its Medicare Advantage plan had already been paid. The Department of Justice says Cigna hired third-party vendors to send nurse practitioners into member homes to find additional billing opportunities, but did not allow them to perform diagnostic tests to support their conclusions or to treat the conditions they supposedly found. DoJ says Cigna inappropriately assigned diagnosis codes for morbid obesity, congestive heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and other chronic conditions without supporting documentation and failed to refund taxpayer money when it was caught.

Doctors push back on CMS’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) as quality standards toughen as was originally designed, pushing more doctors into penalties rather than rewards.

Privacy and Security

Hackers claim to have acquired user data from the 23andMe genetic service and are selling it online. This data was accessed through the website’s feature that allows users to share information with potential DNA-matched relatives. The hacker alleges that CEO Anne Wojcicki was aware of the breach two months prior and chose not to disclose it, claiming that her family members were shorting company shares in anticipation of a stock price slide.

Other

KFF Health News looks at Dollar General’s test of offering mobile healthcare services from the parking lots of its small-town stores. The company is partnering with New York-based DocGo, which is is being investigated by the New York attorney general after complaints about its treatment of asylum-seekers under a $432 million no-bid contract under which it providers housing and busing. DocGo CEO Anthony Capone resigned last month after a New York newspaper found that he lied about earning a graduate a degree in computational learning theory in pursuing a multi-billion dollar contract with US Customers and Border Protection. Publicly traded DocGo’s market cap is $623 million after shares dropped 44% in the past 12 months. I’m wondering if the van has a restroom for the nurse (and potentially patients) and how safe it is for a nurse to be sitting in the parking lot of stores whose headlines often involve OSHA fines and customer violence. I would not be comfortable welcoming some parking lot rando into the van for an exam.

Central Maine Medical Center settles a malpractice lawsuit that was brought by a patient who claimed that doctors ignored his elevated PSA results, allowing his prostate cancer to spread untreated. The lawsuit says that a computer system upgrade failed to import some lab results into the dashboard of the new system.

Stanford’s medical school dean says that AI will be medicine’s most important development since antibiotics, predicting that it will break down access barriers, improve quality and consistency, increase the efficiency and speed of clinical trials, and reduce rote memorization in medical education. He predicts that responsible AI deployment will create societal benefits and earn patient acceptance in 10 years.

California regulators find that Adventist Health Simi Valley’s administration of two doses of the blood thinner Lovenox within two hours probably caused the brain bleed death of an 81-year-old patient 18 hours later. The original Lovenox order was discontinued after one dose, causing it to disappear from the active profile and to be missed by a second doctor who ordered another dose. The orders were approved by separate pharmacies that didn’t communicate with each other, an Adventist corporate pharmacy and another that is local to the hospital.

The VA finds that a four-hour VistA downtime at the Kansas City VA was caused by a network technician’s keyboard-surfing cat, whose keystrokes deleted a server cluster configuration.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book’s survey of VC and tech investors reveals the top 50 rising stars in healthcare IT’s ecosystem of startups.
• MRO will present and exhibit at AHIMA 2023 October 8-10 in Nashville.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Evan Heigert.”
• Wolters Kluwer will add generative AI capabilities to UpToDate.

Blog Posts

• Introducing two new Conversation AI Services (Nuance)
• 6 Communication Channels for EHR Implementations (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Pharmacists, You Are Appreciated. (OmniSys)
• Nurses of Note 2023: The Regional Practice Administrator Celebrates 30 Years in the Field (PerfectServe)
• The State of Play: What Prescribing Trends Say About the Future of Primary Care (Surescripts)
• Do Family Caregiving Benefits Exist for Employees? (Trualta)
• Revenue cycle 101: prior authorization + referrals (Waystar)
• October 2023 Interoperability Monthly Update: TEFCA, QHINs, ONC’s Latest News (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 10/6/23

Top News

Workflow automation vendor Athelas acquires Commure and announces a $70 million investment from General Catalyst that values the combined company at $6 billion. The business will operate under the Commure name.

Commure offers analytics workflow tools and the PatientKeeper EHR, which it bought from HCA two years ago.

Athelas co-founder and CEO Tanay Tandon will continue as CEO of Commure. The 25-year-old started Athelas when he was 17, offering a malaria test kit for smartphones.

Commure CEO Ashwini Zenooz, MD will move to a non-executive role on the company’s board. The acquisition brings together 300 employees from Commure and 500 from Athelas.

Reader Comments

From Winky: “Re: insurance company IT issues. Anybody having lick getting them to fix their problems? Things are pretty bleak at just one insurer, just as the healthcare industry tries to automate revenue cycle.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Going to HLTH? So are my sponsors Best Buy Health, Biofourmis, Five9, Get-to-Market Health, Healthcare Growth Partners, Medicomp Systems, and Trust Commerce. They describe their activities in my HLTH 2023 guide.

I hadn’t use Skype for years, but it was the best choice for my video-tutoring a Ukraine woman in conversational English as a volunteer with ENGin (Ukraine has one of the lowest rates of speaking English in all of Europe, which limits its post-war market participation). Using the free, Microsoft-owned Skype was a better experience than I expected.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

RCM technology vendor Alpha II acquires RCxRules, which provides revenue cycle automation.

Autism provider company Cortica raises $40 million in a Series D extension, completing the round at $115 million.

A Black Book survey of venture capital and technology investors finds the 50 top-rated emerging health IT vendors for 2023.

The $217 million growth and opportunity fund of 7wireVentures – whose founders and managing partners are industry long-timers Glen Tullman and Lee Shapiro – closes its capital raise and will use its assets to move the firm’s high-potential investments to later states and to invest in other Series B and C companies. The fund has already invested in NOCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), Folx Health (a virtual healthcare platform for LGBTQUA+),  and Parsley Health (virtual chronic care).

Headway, which connects patients to in-network therapists, raises $125 million a Series C round that values the company at $1 billion.

Sales

• Four-hospital Wisconsin health system ProHealth Care outsources revenue cycle management, IT, informatics, analytics, and inpatient care management to Optum, which will take on the 800 employees who are involved.
• Fraser chooses Netsmart CareFabric to support its transition to a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic.

Announcements and Implementations

Medicomp Systems announces that its MEDCIN clinical relevancy engine features mapping of 10 million clinical codes and concepts across 12 terminologies.

PayZen offers PayZen Care Card with partners Geisinger and UTMB, which offers patients a zero-interest payment plan for outstanding balances in the form of an upfront debit card that pays providers immediately on use.

Elation Health announces GA of a unified EHR and billing solution for high-value primary care.

University Hospitals of Cleveland completes its transition from the former Allscripts Sunrise suite to Epic.

ChatGPT can now analyze images, as evidenced by this inquiry I made by posting a HIMSS conference exhibit hall photo. It proved to be more irony-aware than many humans, and more capable of explaining than I, when I asked why the HIStalk logo features a doctor who is smoking:

The image portrays a stylized and somewhat whimsical character. The pipe-smoking doctor might be an artistic choice to evoke a certain image, possibly hinting at an older, “classic” or “traditional” stereotype of a learned or scholarly individual. In literature and older media, a pipe has often been associated with contemplation, wisdom, or intellect. However, given the modern understanding of the health risks of smoking, such a depiction in a healthcare-related setting is likely intended to be ironic or tongue-in-cheek. It’s a design decision by the creators of the image and may be intended to make the character more memorable or to convey a specific tone or mood.

Government and Politics

CMS will restrict the use of predictive AI tools by Medicare Advantage plans to make coverage decisions. Patients and providers complained that MA plan operator UnitedHealthcare – which uses an algorithm developed by NavHealth, which it acquired in 2020 for a reported $2.5 billion – was using its predicted discharge date to cut off coverage without considering individual patient needs as traditional Medicare would have done. NaviHealth says its algorithm was designed to personalize post-acute charge discharge planning, not to drive coverage decisions. The new federal rules, which take effect in January, will allow such software to be used only if it takes individual patient circumstances into consideration.

HHS’s ARPA-H designates up to $50 million for funding for six contract awards for developing advanced technologies to secure healthcare data. The DIGIHEALS awardees submitted these projects:

• Develop an automated medical device patching system.
• Create a cognitive health assistant.
• Develop clinician-focused tools and techniques for use during ransomware attacks.
• Identify legacy medical device vulnerabilities.
• Discover and report parsing bugs in EHRs.
• Automate cybersecurity risk assessment for medical devices.

Other

UVM Medical Center’s tells a US House cyberthreat committee that managing its 2020 ransomware attack was “much harder than the pandemic by far” as the hospital lost internet, phones, and access to the EHR for 28 days at a cost of $65 million.

A ProPublica investigation finds that pharma giant GSK developed a vaccine for TB – which kills 1.6 million mostly poor people each year – then put it on the back burner to focus on the world’s most profitable market of the US, where higher incomes and insurers can afford products such as the company’s Shingrix vaccine that has generated $14 billion in five years. The TB vaccine was developed under contract with the US Army, after which GSK patented the active ingredient, took charge of the global ingredient supply, and accepted government and non-profit funding to develop the commercial product that won’t be widely available until 2028, 10 years after it was developed, and only then because the Gates Foundation is funding it. The vaccine’s co-inventor, who originally took his idea to GSK in hopes of getting the injections to people who desperately need them, says in criticizing how Big Pharma co-opts public health research, “You get a big company to take it forward? Bullshit. That model is gone. It’s failed. It’s dead. We have to create a new one.”

The problem-plagued EClinicalWorks EHR of Hawaii’s prison system may cause a deceased inmate’s malpractice lawsuit to be dropped because the state hasn’t been able to produce his medical records 18 months into the allowed 24 month discovery period. Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety admits that the system was down for two months in one stretch, broke down again two weeks after it was restored, and is still plagued by bugs and corrupted tables. The state says it is looking for a replacement system.

Marginally health IT related, but fascinating to me, is this description of Epic’s new audio production system. Epic uses an SSL C100 HD digital audio console to broadcast software introductions – including sound effects and musical cues — to 15 countries, also producing related media in an attached “live room.” Audio engineer Paul Micksch is a former musician who started with Epic in 2006 as a software trainer. You just know that Epic Deep Space Auditorium is loaded with cool behind-the-scenes stuff.

Sponsor Updates

• Surescripts publishes a new data brief, “Pharmacy Availability & Prescribing Patterns Hint at the Future of Primary Care.”
• Robbins Dermatology experiences streamlined payment collections and processing using Healow Payment Services from EClinicalWorks.
• Medicomp Systems directly maps over 10 million clinical codes and concepts across more than 12 terminologies to its Medcin clinical relevancy engine.
• First Databank names Steve Fite regional manager, Jessica Landis commercial operations manager, and Courtney Kessler digital customer success manager.
• Rhapsody announces the availability of Corepoint Integration Engine version 7.6.
• Nordic releases a new episode of DocTalk, “DocTalk Ep. 210 | Optimizing value from EHR investments.”

Blog Posts

• How to Deal with Angry Patients in Urgent Care (Experity)
• Data’s Crucial Role in Combatting the “Tripledemic” (Dimensional Insight)
• Navigating AI Adoption: Insights from UNC Health’s Chief Analytics Officer (Divurgent)
• Essential Checklist for Starting a Weight Loss Clinic or Medical Spa (EClinicalWorks)
• Meeting the Social Care Needs of Medicaid Beneficiaries (Findhelp)
• The Current Healthcare Landscape: A Paradigm Shift Driven by Technology (InterSystems)
• From brain injury to dementia: the evolution of the clock drawing test (Linus Health)
• Trending Cybersecurity Topics for 2024 (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 10/4/23

Top News

Providence launches Praia Health, which uses identity-driven personalization of consumer profiles for “digital flywheel” ongoing engagement between care episodes.

Leading the company is Justin Dearborn, who previously ran Merge Healthcare, Tribune Publishing, and PatientBond.

Reader Comments

From Barney Ruble: “Re: 3M Health Information Systems. Laid off 100-120 people as part of a corporate cutback. The HIS group that is being spun off is cutting back some teams and products due to slow sales.” Unverified.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I don’t use Twitter much and rarely venture from the useful “Following” feed to the crazy “For you” clickbait version, but I can say that despite my endless muting and flagging of posts as “not interested,” I’m stilled buried in tweets about (and by) Elon Musk, TSLA stock pumpers, and fanboys salivating about the still-unreleased Cybertruck. Musk had complained that the algorithms weren’t giving him the audience he deserved, so programmers have obviously devised an ego-stroking enhancement.

Listening: Scotland-based rockers Stiltskin, which hit pretty hard in grunge circles 30 years ago. Trivia: the band’s singer Ray Wilson was selected in 1996 at the age of 27 to lead Genesis, the former five-member group that was down to Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks following the departure of Phil Collins. They gave Wilson limited creative influence over their lackluster “Calling All Stations” album, which largely resembled Rutherford’s Mike and the Mechanics trying to sound progressive. Audiences snoozed and Genesis had to downsize and then cancel a planned US tour in a major hit to their egos. Years later, Rutherford, Banks, and Collins erased Wilson from their revisionist history books, omitting him from a BBC Genesis documentary and on streaming platforms. Wilson finally got to attend his first Genesis concert as an audience member later, where he watched Collins cover the songs he had recorded.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health Data Analytics Institute raises $31 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to nearly $50 million. The company offers AI-powered predictive risk and care optimization software.

Heywood Healthcare (MA) files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing operational and business challenges that have included a “costly and lengthy” EHR implementation and low reimbursement rates, as well as economic reverberations from the pandemic. The two-hospital system went live on Meditech Expanse in 2021.

Walgreens CIO Hsiao Wang leaves the company after a year on the job. Walgreens continues recruiting for a new CEO and CFO as well.

Sales

• HealtHIE Nevada selects health data aggregation and sharing software from Holon Solutions.
• La Paz Regional Hospital (AZ), Russell Medical Center (AL), and Memorial Hospital and Manor (GA) select CareCloud’s MedSR division as their Meditech implementation partner.

People

Emtelligent hires Jennifer Canfield, MBA (Kantar) as EVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Doctors Hospital Health System in the Bahamas implements Meditech Expanse with assistance from CareCloud’s MedSR division.

OCHIN offers EpicCare Inpatient software and implementation services to rural hospitals.

A Symplr survey of health system IT leaders finds that working with disparate IT systems is their top challenge, while clinicians name their top issues as nurse retention and satisfaction, optimizing technology efficiency, and the need to streamline workflows.

I interviewed Trilliant Health healthcare economist Sanjula Jain, PhD 18 months ago and found her really interesting, so I perked up at the company’s new trends report when I saw her name on it. It is brilliant, and names 10 trends:

1. The number of commercially insured Americans is declining steadily as declining birth rate fails to offset the aging into Medicare, and migration to Florida, Texas, and Utah will shift healthcare demand.
2. The physical and mental health of Americans has taken a hard turn downward, with higher under-40 mortality, rising cancer mortality, and rates of forgone care rise due to cost.
3. Most newly approved drugs target genetic diseases and cancer.
4. Utilization of care in all settings declined except for the ED, with the 2021 rebound mostly caused by testing and treatment of COVID-19. The relationship between the number of comoribidities and consumption of healthcare services is not linear.
5. The public’s dissatisfaction with healthcare is growing and younger patients are behaving more like consumers in seeking care from retail pharmacies and other non-traditional sources. Virtual care is being offered more widely, but demand is tapering, half of telehealth users have used it just once, and physicians perceive its quality as inferior to in-person care.
6. More consumers are using transactional delivery models such as urgent care, retail, and ambulatory surgery centers. Retailers are using low-acuity care as a loss leader.
7. Physician supply is constrained, as “payviders” Optum and Kaiser Permanente employee nearly 10% of US doctors and organizations compete to hire more doctors as supply drops. Nursing supply rebounded in 2022 and the number of allied health providers is increasing to help meet physician shortages. The number of primary care providers would need to increase by 218,000.
8. Some healthcare markets have a price problem, but all have a cost problem. Rates are often lower in monopoly markets. Spending on lobbying is increasing to influence federal policy on M&A. The federal measure of market concentration is limited to inpatient usage, which may not be reflective, and market concentration is not a clear driver of quality or price.
9. Employers are paying more for less as costs rise, with a growing rate of self-insurance. Employer-sponsored insurance leaves employees being financially responsible for 10% and more of their overall incomes.
10. US healthcare spending is unsustainable and value-based payments don’t equal value for money. Site-neutral payments could reduce Medicare payments by over $1 billion for one office procedure alone – lumbar epidurals. Procedures cost multiples when performed in hospitals rather than in an outpatient setting.

Government and Politics

An analysis of NHS Trusts in England finds that the government has spent over $1 billion on storing paper records over the last five years. NHS England digital lead Joe Harrison says that while some hospitals have become digital health trailblazers, others are working with “carrier pigeons and pen and paper.”

CMS says that 500,000 people in 29 states have regained Medicaid benefits after state computer systems failed to automatically re-enroll them once pandemic-related restrictions on terminating coverage were lifted.

Privacy and Security

McLaren Health Care (MI) confirms that it was the victim of a ransomware attack several weeks ago. It is now working to determine if any stolen data has been posted to the dark web, as the Black Cat/AlphV ransomware group claims. The attack impacted billing and EHR functionality at 14 facilities for nearly six weeks.

Other

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center uses $10 million in state funding to launch the Institute of Telehealth and Digital Innovation, which aims to serve rural patients by improving access to telehealth and remote patient monitoring services through community and academic partnerships.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD staff volunteer at The Green Urban Lunchbox, Encircle, St. Vincent De Paul Dining Hall, and The Road Home during the company’s day of service.
• The Toledo Clinic in Ohio successfully leverages RCM optimization services from EClinicalWorks.
• CrossWinds Counseling & Wellness (KS) adds NetSmart’s CareFabric technology, including the MyEvolv EHR.
• Symplr publishes its 2023 Compass Report, “From Imminent to Urgent: Aligning Clinicians & IT is Critical to Streamlining Healthcare Operations.”
• Aridhia publishes a new case study, “Leveraging Aridhia TRE for Identifying Pupils at Risk of Being Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET).”
• The AWS Health Innovation Podcast features Artera co-founder and CEO Guillaume de Zwirek.
• SteadPoint Insurance will offer its clients Bardavon’s Injury Prevention suite of products.
• Care.ai releases a new Smart from the Start Podcast featuring Houston Methodist EVP and Chief Innovation Officer Roberta Schwartz.
• Nordic publishes a new episode of its “In Network” podcast titled “Designing for Health: Interview with Evan Heigert.”
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast featuring Paul Connelly.
• CloudWave announces its commitment to cybersecurity education by participating in the 20^th Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

Blog Posts

• Realizing the Opportunities for a Clinical Service Desk (CereCore)
• RSNA 2023 – See imaging without barriers from Agfa HealthCare (Agfa HealthCare)
• Preparing for the FY2024 ICD-10-CM Code Updates (AGS Health)
• How data platforms help healthcare organizations leverage their massive data asset (Arcadia)
• Ascom Workflow Solutions Tested Hack-Proof at MISI Cybersecurity Conference (Ascom)
• Five Things to Consider when Selecting a Musculoskeletal Injury Prevention Partner (Bardavon)
• How Data + Research Will Drive Healthcare Forward (Clearsense)

Contacts

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

HIStalk’s Guide to HLTH 2023

Best Buy Health

Booth 4230

Contact: Donna Breault, senior manager of event marketing
donna.breault@bestbuy.com
You may pre-book a meeting with our team.

Best Buy Health is on a mission to enable care at home for everyone. Learn how we’re combining best-in-class retail strengths with an enterprise care-at-home platform to transform patient experiences and outcomes. Come meet our team and experience live demonstrations of our solution at our booth. Also, don’t miss, “Retail and Health, Sitting in a Tree” on Sunday, October 8, at 2:40 p.m. PT. Best Buy Health’s COO, Chemu Lang’at, joins a panel discussing how healthcare is embracing consumerization, mirroring disruptive models like Airbnb and Uber. This shift prioritizes personalization, convenience, transparency, and user experience, meeting the expectations of today’s digital-savvy consumer.

Biofourmis

Booth 3035

Contact: Tara Stultz, chief strategy officer, Amendola Communications
tstultz@acmarketingpr.com

Did you check out the coolest booth with the best coffee at ViVE? Biofourmis is at HLTH, showcasing their tech-enabled care delivery solutions and demonstrating how data to outpace disease for care at home solutions and clinical trials. Come for the coffee and stay for the experience – new solutions for Care in the Home, Digital Clinical Trials, and Remote Care Coordination.

Five9

Booth V-2943

Contact: Roni Jamesmeyer, senior healthcare marketing manager
roni.jamesmeyer@five9.com
972.768.6554

If you are moving your old, on-premise call center to the cloud, you want to visit the Five9 booth!  Five9 offers a HIPAA-compliant healthcare cloud contact center solution that empowers you to seamlessly monitor and report call volumes in real-time across critical areas such as patient access, scheduling, prescription refills, and revenue cycle management, enhancing your staff’s efficiency. The Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center seamlessly integrates with various back-end systems, including electronic health records, serving as a central hub to facilitate digital engagement, provide comprehensive analytics, optimize workforce performance, and leverage AI for improved outcomes and measurable business success. Come see us!

Get-to-Market Health

Contact: Steve Shihadeh, CEO and founder
steve@gettomarkethealth.net
610.613.4074

Get-to-Market Health helps healthcare technology leaders’ market, sell, and create sustainable, long-term relationships with their customers.

Healthcare Growth Partners

Contact: Chris McCord, managing director
chris@hgp.com
713.955.7935

Healthcare Growth Partners is an investment bank exclusively focused on the health IT market. We’ve advised 140 companies across the health IT landscape through M&A and capital transactions since our founding in 2006. We’re intentional, dedicated, and tenacious in all that we do in serving our clients. Excited to get out there and see some long-time contacts and friends and meet some new folks. I (Chris) am attending the show and happy to connect.

Medicomp Systems

Contact: James Aita, director of strategy and business development
jaita@medicomp.com
647.207.0080

Medicomp will showcase innovations in clinical usability and documentation workflow improvement, using clinical intelligence for EHRs to mirror the way clinicians think. Reach out to see how Medicomp is powering AI tools like ChatGPT for healthcare, along with enhanced FHIR/interoperability tools to make sense of incoming data by problem in health systems, breakthroughs in speech and NLP, taking freetext to structured data, and improvements in real-time compliance at the point of care.

We will not have a booth at HLTH, but email James for meetings.

TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company

Contact: Ryne Natzke, chief revenue officer
rynen@spherecommerce.com
657.383.7967

TrustCommerce, a Sphere company, is the leading financial technology company trusted by the nation’s largest health systems. The TrustCommerce integrated payment platform facilitates secure, compliant patient payments. Using TrustCommerce to enhance the patient financial experience and untangle payment workflows, clients can securely process payments anytime, anywhere and be connected with core software including EHRs like Epic, Veradigm, and athenaIDX. Our team is attending HLTH and will be available to meet with you and introduce you to our solutions. You can reach Ryne Natzke and Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships Sunil Shah at HLTH.

Monday Morning Update 10/2/23

Top News

The American Hospital Association asks Congress to withdraw HHS OCR’s December 2022 rule that prohibits hospitals from tracking their website users using third-party technology.

AHA says the rule violates HIPAA, harms patients and public health, and incorrectly extends HIPAA to cover website visitors who aren’t patients.

The organization says that third-party web user tracking tools such as Google Analytics and YouTube give health systems insight into community problems and website navigation issues, allow them to offer of educational videos, and help patients find service locations.

AHA says that Congress should change HIPAA to preempt state requirements as a uniform, nationwide standard, but otherwise shouldn’t make major HIPAA revisions since changes would “create more challenges than benefits.”

Reader Comments

From System CIO: “Re: Altera Digital Health. Like many Paragon customers, we’re switching to Epic. Altera say they won’t renew our maintenance agreement that we need until go-live in many months. I’ve switched EHRs many times in my long career and this is a first.” Unverified. I don’t understand why a vendor would reject another year or more of support revenue, other than just to be petty over being displaced. The upside is that they justified your decision.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents, presumably mostly health technology insiders, aren’t broadly convinced that technology will significantly improve US healthcare, and few of them expect it to reduce healthcare spending. Steve says its better than we think, as “innovation seems to progress glacially when you’re living it,” while Frank says that capital expenditures always increase costs.

New poll to your right or here: What is the single best reason that Epic dominates its markets? I’m not giving you the intellectually relaxed option of choosing more than one answer, so feel free to further elaborate in the poll comments after voting for the one best choice.

I was looking for a lazy way to compare various lists of my sponsors, so I tried ChatGPT instead of trying to remember how to do it in Excel or Word or finding an old source code comparison tool. Of course it works, leading me to consider downloading an archived copy of HIMSS23 exhibitors and comparing it to the HIMSS24 version to see which companies are new or dropping out. I then played around with downloading an AHA list of hospitals and cities in Alabama, pasting it unformatted into ChatGPT, and asked it which ones are in Birmingham, and then which ones are in the northern part of the state. It figured the answers and properly formatted the list with just the hospital names. However, it wasn’t able to tell me which ones are within 50 miles of Gadsden because it doesn’t have access to mapping services.

For the ladies who are optimizing their shoe wardrobe for the conference season, my little AI friend likes Clarks Un Loop Slip-On Shoe, Naturalizer Samantha Pointed Toe Flat, Skechers Cleo Bewitch Ballet Flat, New Balance 877 V1 Walking Shoe, and ECCO Soft 7 Tie Sneaker. However, when pressed to choose a potential winner for conference shoe contests, ChatGPT favors United Nude’s Mobius Hi (above), which seems like a good choice for Orlando and is not wildly expensive at $175 after discounts.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The New York Times reports how analytics firm Palantir is aggressively lobbying to win an NHS patient data system contract that could be worth $590 million. The company has also hired away NHS officials and enlisted the help of politicians to support its selection for the Federated Data Platform. Civil liberties groups have raised concerns about turning over patient data to a for-profit company whose products have been used for government surveillance, also labeling the selection process as a farce because of the company’s existing connections from its previous no-bid contract award and its advantage in a short procurement window. The bid winner is expected to be announced this month.

Biotech firm Biogen shuts down Biogen Digital Health and lays off 150 employees as the company cuts costs and restructures. The business was formed in 2021.

People

Wolters Kluwer Health hires Rafael Sidi, MA (Clarivate) as SVP/GM of its Health Research segment.

Other

A review of “Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care,” a new book by Stanford oncologist Ilana Yurkiewicz, MD, describes how “missing data kills” as patients are repeatedly asked to recite their medical history to new providers who can’t get it using technology. Snips:

• Technology-driven treatments have advanced dramatically, but doctors are still “operating in an era of oral history or as archeologists” in being forced to review CD-ROMs, faxed records, and the patient’s interpretation of important medical details “as though she were piercing together potsherds at a dig site.”
• The families of patients work as “unpaid secretarial assistants” to keep records and coordinate care that providers should be doing.
• Hospitals don’t often notice or report harmful errors that are caused by a lack of provider coordination.
• The doctor takes more time with patients than the insurance-paid 15 minutes “to prepare them to be living medical charts,” estimating that half of the primary care part of her job is unpaid work that happens outside the patient’s room.
• The review notes that Estonia requires use of compatible EHRs gives patient ownership of their chart, where they grant or revoke provider access and share data with family members without paying for copies.

A second  hospital in England reports that large numbers of digital documents weren’t sent to doctors and patients because a computer issue prevented them from being noticed for approval. Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust found 411,000 documents that remained unreviewed after several years, of which 23,000 contained action items for patients or doctors.

A 30-year-old woman sues Disney for negligence, claiming that her trip down a Typhoon Lagoon water slide left her with an “injurious wedgie” that required gynecologic treatment and denied consortium for husband, who is also suing. I am hereby announcing plans to add “injurious wedgie” to common business lexicon for describing layoffs.

Sponsor Updates

• Care.ai sponsors a new podcast series titled “The Smart Care Team Spotlight,” hosted by former Microsoft Chief Nursing Officer Molly K. McCarthy, MBA, RN.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Unlock Healthcare Benefits with Healow.”
• A new survey from KeyCare finds that consumers prefer virtual visits over in-office care for several types of visits.
• Meditech announces new AI use cases at a recent customer leadership event.
• NeuroFlow releases a new Bridging the Gap Podcast featuring BCollaborative founder and CEO Lili Brillstein.
• Nordic releases a new Making Rounds Podcast, “Under new (data) management podcast.”
• PMD reaffirms its commitment to health data security by passing the SOC 2 Type II evaluation.
• Ronin Chief Scientific Officer Christine Swisher will keynote the virtual NLP Summit October 4.
• Symplr adds Survey Management capabilities to its Compliance platform.
• Lindsay Zimmerman, PhD VP of Upfront Healthcare’s Bartosch Patient Activation Institute, wins three prestigious industry awards.
• West Monroe releases a new report, “The Digital Disconnect: Linking Vision to Real-World Execution.”
• Ellkay, HealthMark Group, Linus Health, Nuance, Sphere, and Surescripts will exhibit at Athenahealth’s Thrive conference October 9-11 in Austin, TX.

Blog Posts

• Navigating Digital: A Roadmap for Rural Hospitals (ReMedi Health Solutions)
• Look beyond the hype to find responsible AI solutions in healthcare (Meditech)
• Manage the Multi-Platform Dilemma with Fewer and Better Communication Tools (Mobile Heartbeat)
• Successful Value-Based Care Models Require Rich Data Insights into the Care Continuum (NeuroFlow)
• Chatbots vs conversational AI – what’s the difference? (Notable)
• Exploring quality assurance for AI diagnostic decision support technologies: Key takeaways (Nuance)
• 5 Questions for Receiving Community Connect (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• The Compounding Benefits of a Proactive Approach to Denial Management (RCxRules)
• Future-proof your healthcare strategy with a FHIR data store (Redox)
• The Difference a Day Makes: Accelerating Specialty Medication Access for Patients (RxLightning)
• How to Fax Without a Fax Machine (Surescripts)
• 5 Steps to Improve Contract Management in Healthcare Organizations (Symplr)
• 3 achievable strategies from Piedmont for healthcare collection success (Waystar)

Contacts

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