Morning Headlines 12/27/23

Constellation Software’s Harris Operating Group Acquires MEDHOST, Inc.

Medhost will be operated as a standalone business within Constellation’s Harris software group.

Mercy medical record transition heats up in bankruptcy court

Mercy Iowa City and Harris-owned Altera Digital Health argue the terms of continued EHR support as the hospital awaits its acquisition by University of Iowa.

Apple files appeal after Biden administration allows U.S. ban on watch imports

Apple stops selling its smart watches that offer pulse oximetry after losing a patent infringement dispute with medical device maker Masimo.

Why do doctors still use pagers?

NPR talks to doctors whose project to replace ED pagers with smart devices failed.

News 12/27/23

Top News

Constellation Software acquires EHR provider Medhost. Terms were not disclosed.

Medhost will be operated as a standalone business under Constellation’s Harris software group, where it joins Altera Digital Health, Amazing Charts, QuadraMed, Iatric Systems, Picis, and several other acquired health IT companies. 

Reader Comments

From Oracular Degeneration: “Re: Oracle Health. The former Cerner was blamed for missing revenue expectations. Expect license audits to follow.” Oracle is somewhat famous for turning innocent-sounding “license audits” into a sales channel, where the company collects customer usage information (voluntarily or otherwise) in coordination with a sales rep and then demands that the customer buy more licenses to avoid legal action. Palisade Compliance describes how the city of Denver was rushed into paying Oracle $4 million under an Oracle program that Palisade calls ABC audits (audit, bargain, cloud) in which the company forced the city to buy cloud services to avoid legal actions. NASA recently bought $15 million in unneeded Oracle software in fear that the company would find something amiss. Former clients of Cerner may be running under old contracts or those that weren’t prescriptive about M&A, hardware upgrades, virtualization, or moving services to the cloud, so it might be prudent – especially for any contracts that involve processor-based metrics – to assess your situation before Oracle does.

From Adapt or Die: “Re: changes at my primary care practice. They will now require holding a credit card on file, charge a $15 annual cash fee for services that insurance does not cover, and limit annual physicals to health screenings and risk management with no review of specific medical issues.” These changes seem entirely reasonable, although I would be nervous about leaving a credit card number on file given the unpredictable nature of the amounts and timing of physician billing. This practice says that the patient usually receives the EOB first and has time to resolve problems with their insurer. When the practice’s business office receives their copy of the EOB, the patient’s balance will be billed via InstaMed. Leaving a credit card on file is dangerous for the many or most Americans who can’t afford to pay unexpected (or even expected) medical bills, but patients who can’t afford to pay their legitimate healthcare expenses aren’t the practice’s problem. This state of affairs must be puzzling to the rest of the developed world that can’t understand how we allow every profitable aspect of healthcare to be milked financially by publicly traded companies, zillion-dollar health systems, and private equity firms. The status quo remains in place only because we peasants aren’t all sick at once and thus haven’t charged the healthcare castle carrying torches.

From VTViper: “Re: ModMed. Huge layoff last week. The entire podiatry team was let go.” Unverified.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Only 10% of poll respondents expect Oracle Health to be the owner of an improved former Cerner business in five years, with more than half expecting the company to sell or close most of it. Commenters note that Oracle will milk the business solely to keep VA/DoD taxpayer dollars flowing and ponder why David Feinberg is still pocketing millions with few signs of serious job responsibilities.

New poll to your right or here: Did you receive a holiday gift from your employer? My theory is that big-employer gifts are rarely more than a check-the-box effort (company-branded merchandise, a low-value gift card, or a box of candy), although individual bosses may go above and beyond to recognize their employees more personally. My experience is almost entirely within health systems, where the number and diversity of employees ensured low-effort corporate swag like a mug or tote bag. I have mixed feelings about the alternative of department pizza parties, which are tacky on the surface but often slightly fun for those whose schedule and location allows them to attend.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Harris Healthcare-operated Altera Digital Health petitions the bankruptcy court of Mercy Iowa City over the hospital’s planned transition to a new EHR upon completion of its acquisition by University of Iowa. The hospital, which partly blames the former Allscripts software for its poor financial condition as its AR jumped 40% after implementation, told Altera that it will be cancelling its agreement but requires access to company support through early 2025. Altera wants the court to either force the hospital to honor its existing agreement that runs through 2031 or declare it void. The company says the $8 million “cure amount” of the existing contract is insufficient and wants $12 million plus damages that are accruing at $207,000 per week.

Apple stops selling its Series 9 and Ultra 2 smart watches due a US International Trade Commission decision that the Watch’s pulse oximetry technology infringes on patents held by medical device maker Masimo. Apple has filed an appeal.

People

Baylor Scott & White Health promotes Nathan Winn, MPA to VP of IT.

Announcements and Implementations

NPR addresses the “why do doctors still use pagers” question, with these observations from doctors who led a failed hospital project to replace them in the ED:

• Pagers, as a 1980s relic from the Sir Mix-a-Lot days that even drug dealers have abandoned, should be easy to displace. Doctors don’t like receiving pages that contain only a phone number with no hint as to who they’re calling or what that person wants. Pages also can’t be verified as received. On-call residents are handed a pile of team-specific pagers for their “Rambo belt” and need to track down which one is beeping.
• However, pagers are “the cockroaches of communication” because they are cheap, nearly impossible to damage, run forever on a single AA battery, and are more reliable with fewer dead spots since they don’t use cellular networks.
• Doctors worry that patients will think they are screwing around if they look at their phones during a visit to read a message, but with a pager, “they know you’re doing doctor work.”
• Smart apps make communication among doctors too easy, where the sender doesn’t worry about bothering a colleague or phrasing a request succinctly
• Pagers provide control, or at least the illusion of it, as even junior residents can decide when and how to respond without the sender knowing if they have seen the message.
• A management professor says that technology isn’t just about the tools and instead is a project that involves RHIP (pronounced “rip”) – risk, habit, identity, and power. Doctors were being asked to change their routines, the change made them feel differently about their jobs, and it shifted power.
• The result was that the pager replacement system failed to reduce patient time in the ED, partly because the existing system was already efficient and also because many doctors had stopped using the new devices.

Other

A small, single-hospital study finds that inpatient satisfaction scores increased if their room’s guest chair was placed near the patient’s bed to encourage doctors to sit while visiting, which the authors call a “chair nudge.”

Contacts

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

News 12/22/23

Top News

Medical genetics company Invitae divests its Ciitizen patient-controlled health data business to that company’s leadership team and a group of investors who will operate it as an independent company. Terms were not disclosed.

The divestiture is part of an Invitae cost-cutting effort, which includes a 15% headcount reduction, following a $1.3 billion loss in the first three quarters of 2023.

Invitae bought Ciitizen in September 2021 for $325 million. NVTA shares have lost 98% of their value in the past three years. They are down 63% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $192 million.

Reader Comments

From Cernam: “Re: Oracle Health. GM Travis Dalton is leaving the company.” Unverified, but reported by several employees on social media.

From MD L: “Re: primary care training. It might be better for specialists to go straight into specialist training. Does an endocrinologist or cardiologist really need a full internal medicine residency before specializing? The hardest, least-appreciated, and most-important hallmark of a well-trained physician is the ability to think critically, synthesize disparate information, and eliminate the red herrings. You learn it by seeing patients under appropriate supervision. Students who are in abbreviated MD programs have trouble with this since they start clinical rotations without a good knowledge base. The idea that you can look up what you need is bogus – you need to know what you’re looking for and then understand it. Another concern I have about shortened medical training is that mine involved thinking for ourselves much earlier, where as a student I was doing medical and surgical procedures that are done by senior residents now, and by my second week of internship, I was the only ‘psychiatrist’ in the building at night for the unit and ED, where now attendings are in house 24×7 to see patients and sign them out. This is like kind of knowing a foreign language and trying out your skills with a native speaker who takes over the conversation at the first sign of struggle. For these reasons, I would be concerned about shortening training.”

From Data Holmes, PhD: “Re: AI-driven CDS. This JAMA paper disputes the idea that clinical decision support and AI don’t need to be all that accurate since doctors are making the final decision. That makes me nervous because I think people can turn their brains off too easily and place too much trust in the computer.” Researchers found that clinicians who are analyzing medical images get a slight bump in diagnostic accuracy with AI’s help as long as the AI wasn’t confused by the presence of case-irrelevant information. However, their diagnosis accuracy dropped by 11% when they used AI models that are systemically biased (meaning that the model used irrelevant information). The most important finding is that doctors didn’t read the explanation where the model showed its faulty work, so they assumed that the model’s conclusion was sound. An accompanying opinion piece concludes that the use of AI, even when limited to assistive purposes, should be evaluated before rolling it out widely.

From Jabroni: “Re: HIMSS24. Looks like they have removed the exhibitor count after you reported a rather low number.” That appears to be the case. I’m not interested enough to display the exhibitor list and count them manually.

From Glytec Employee: “Re: Glytec. The insulin titration software company is in turmoil with the departure of its CEO, CEO, CMO, and other leaders. The company is being run by investors and two-thirds of the staff have been laid off after the company failed to get funding after a multi-million dollar offer in October 2022.” Unverified, other than the leadership changes. Of the 11 executives who were listed on its webpage in July 2023, five remain. The CEO and CFO started in October 2023.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It is December 21 as I write this, the official beginning of winter and the day with the fewest hours of daylight. Happy Yalda Night — which anyone in the Northern Hemisphere can celebrate regardless of religious beliefs or human-drawn borders – or your choice of Christmas, Hanukkah, Three Kings Day, Advent, Kwanzaa, Las Posadas, or a belated Diwali or St. Nicholas Day (I learned about the latter from the Ukraine person I’m helping learn English over Skype). Hopefully the folks in Svalbard, Norway are in a festive mood during their polar night, where it stays dark from mid-November until the end of January (webcam here to prove it). Whatever you celebrate, even if it’s just another day above ground, enjoy.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Business Insider reports that Commure laid off staff in November shortly after its owner combined it with another of its holdings to create a $6 billion company. Commure (data exchange) and Athelas (revenue cycle management) said the combined companies would hire aggressively and even bring on health tech people who had been laid off elsewhere. Commure CEO Tanay Tandon, who came from the Athelas side of the combination, says the company will likely go public in the next two or three years.

Arcadia sells its MSO and value-based care service division to Guidehealth, which offers value-based care software.

People

Brian Bircher, MSEd (Tegria) joins DrFirst as VP of enterprise solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Rady Children’s Hospital – San Diego sign an agreement to merge to form Rady Children’s Health. The name suggests the dominant party, although in a show of collegiality and bad business judgment, the CEOs of both hospitals will serve as co-CEOs of the new one, at least for a few months until it becomes clear – as it always does – that the buck (literally) can only stop with one person.

Government and Politics

England’s health and secondary care minister says that its newly contracted, Palantir-provided Federated Data Platform of shared patient data will be more secure than any NHS system. He adds that Palantir won’t be allowed to control or use the data and the system will use patient anonymization technology from IQvia, the Durham, NC-based pharma data vendor that was previously known as IMS Health and Quintiles.

Seattle Children’s Hospital sues the Texas attorney general for requesting documents related any gender transition care that it provided to Texas children, in which the AG cited a Texas consumer protection act. The hospital says that the AG lacks jurisdiction for the request, the hospital has no ties to Texas, and that Washington providers are protected by state law from being required to provide information about gender-affirming care from states that restrict or criminalize the practice. The AG’s demand included all prescriptions, diagnoses, lab tests, and protocols that involve Texas children. The hospital also provided affidavits from its IT directors that its email and EHR servers are based in Seattle.

Privacy and Security

First responder software vendor ESO Solutions notifies 2.7 million people that their information – which ESO obtains from the healthcare organizations that use its software — was accessed by ransomware hackers in late September.

Drug chain Rite Aid settles FTC charges that it unfairly used facial recognition surveillance systems to subject shoppers to unreasonable searches and humiliation. FTC says Rite Aid scanned the faces of customers who entered its stores and matched them against a database of confirmed and suspected shoplifters to trigger closer observation. FTC says the system often mismatched images due to low quality CCTV and cell phone originals. Rite Aid says it only used the technology in a limited pilot project that it ended three years ago. Customer theft or “shrink” is starting to kill off self check-out and the displaying high-theft items on unlocked shelves, so maybe our societal dishonesty will lead us back to the days of Service Merchandise and its “pay first, then wait for your order at the conveyor belt” approach.

Liberty Hospital (MO) transfers some patients to other hospitals as it deals with an unspecified IT event that occurred Tuesday. A local TV station obtained a message that was sent to the hospital by an apparent hacker who gave the hospital 72 hours to pay an unspecified ransom.

Other

An NBC News investigation titled “Vital Signs vs. Dollar Signs” looks at HCA’s use of telemetry technicians who remotely monitor the vital signs of hospitalized patients. They found that the techs are assigned up to 80 patients, monitoring systems have gone down for as long as 26 hours, tech communication with nurses on the floor is slow or erratic, and monitoring stations are sometimes unstaffed due to scheduling problems or staff breaks.

A hospital patient is shot in the butt by a pistol that she had smuggled into her MRI exam after denying that she was packing any metal objects that the machine’s magnet would affect. The bullet did little damage, unlike the example from Brazil earlier this year in which a gun advocate who was undergoing an MRI hid a pistol in his waistband that went off during his procedure and killed him.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new set of podcasts focusing on “Transforming Patient Care with EClinicalWorks and Healow.”
• Symplr congratulates nearly 20 customers on achieving the highest status on CHIME’s 2023 Digital Health Most Wired list.
• Meditech announces its commitment to the HHS/ONC Cancer Moonshot initiative.
• Nym achieves excellent customer satisfaction scores for the second consecutive year.
• Verato earns HITRUST certification for information security.

Blog Posts

• Review, Revise, Resolve – A look at the 2024 updates for CPT (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• 5 Truths About AI-Driven Software Testing (Keysight)
• 40 Years of Community: A Retrospective (Medhost)
• Watch Meditech customers share how they are driving transformational change (Meditech)
• Reducing clinicians’ cognitive load to focus on their well-being (Nuance)
• 12 Ways to Keep Your Spirit Merry and Bright This Holiday Season (Netsmart)
• How a Pediatric Health System Leverages Technology to Combat Claim Denials (Vyne Medical)
• 20 years of Medicare Advantage with MA author Tom Scully on Diagnosing Healthtech (Redox)
• The Care Transition: A Crucial Time for Patient Safety (Surescripts)
• Reflecting on Trualta’s Transformative 2023 (Trualta)
• Revenue cycle 101: What is denial management in healthcare? (Waystar)

Contacts

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

News 12/20/23

Top News

Apple will stop selling its Ultra 2 and Series 9 Watches at least temporarily due to an International Trade Commission ruling related to a blood oxygen sensor technology patent dispute with medical device manufacturer Masimo.

Masimo accuses Apple of meeting for partnership talks with the intention of obtaining competitive information for developing its own technology, after which it paid huge money to poach several Masimo inventors and executives.

Masimo’s pulse oximetry technology earned FDA clearance, but Apple was able to bring its sensor to market without it by claiming that it provides information but doesn’t diagnose.

Reader Comments

From Sunny Daylight: “Re: healthcare AI experts. Who are the thinkers and researchers who are doing the best work? If you wanted to build the world’s greatest network of healthcare AI experts, who would be on that list?” I don’t usually think in terms of individual experts, with the exception of Eric Topol, MD, but I’ll open it up to readers. It likely depends on the area in which the person works – as a clinician with AI interest, an AI researcher who focuses on healthcare, or armchair experts who speak and write confidently on the topic without a relevant work history.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Remote patient monitoring and virtual care company CoachCare acquires RPM vendor Verustat, its fourth RPM acquisition within the last 12 months.

Molina Healthcare will acquire Bright Health Group’s California Medicare Advantage business for $500 million, rather than the originally proposed $600 million, in a previously announced deal expected to close January 1.

Lehigh Valley Health Network and Jefferson Health announce plans to merge to create a 30-hospital, 62,000-employee health system with annual revenue of $14 billion.

Sales

• In England, Birmingham and Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust will implement Epic in 2024, with expected go-live in 2025.
• CoxHealth (MO) will implement Epic, replacing Oracle Health.
• Wilbarger General Hospital (TX) selects operational and financial analytics from Sixth Sense Intelligence.

People

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (TN) hires interim SVP/CIO Tina Smith, MBA (Seattle Children’s) to the full-time position.

Physician compensation and contract management software vendor Ludi promotes Danielle O’Rourke to CEO.

Lisa Morella, MBA (Mass General Brigham) joins CodaMetrix as VP of data and analytics.

Amino Health promotes John Asalone, MS to CEO. He takes over from David Vivero, who has taken on the role of chairman.

Announcements and Implementations

Avera launches virtual nursing pilot programs at McKennan Hospital & University Center and St. Mary’s Hospital in South Dakota.

Multi-state Mercy health system launches a patient-facing chatbot dubbed Toni in memory of Mercy’s first CEO, a Sister of Mercy for 65 years who died in 2022.

A Wolters Kluwer Health study finds that nearly nine out of 10 Americans worry that generative AI is not transparent about where it gets the information that it presents or that it uses unvetted Internet data.

Adventist Health ends its ITWorks contract with Oracle Health, which will lay off 65 employees at Adventist’s Roseville, CA headquarters as the health system brings the services back in-house.

Other

The “Bill of the Month” of KFF Health News involves a patient of Mount Sinai (NY), which booked her a telehealth visit when she called in asking about sinus symptoms. Her five-minute visit yielded prescriptions for a nasal spray and an antibiotic along with a bill for $660, which her insurance declined to cover because the doctor – whose name and employer she could not determine – was out of network despite being affiliated with Mount Sinai, which had provided a pre-visit estimate of $60. She was billed for a moderate-level visit. The doctor’s office would not respond to her inquiries and the hospital told her they could send her a copy of the consent form that she had signed only by fax. Payment for the September 2022 visit remains unresolved.

The correct Jeopardy answer: “What company’s far-from-reality marketing claims made the term Watson synonymous with healthcare AI failure?”

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas helps to raise $7,500 for Duke Children’s Hospital during a local radiothon.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Healow Enables Seamless Interoperability for Foster Children’s Medical Records.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health and The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists launch the O&G Open journal.
• AvaSure publishes a new case spotlight, “A proven approach to reducing patient falls while driving staffing efficiencies.”
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast, “The Vital Partnership Between CISA and Healthcare.”
• Cegeka successfully completes its tender offer for CTG.
• HIMSS New England honors Divurgent VP Dana Locke with its Volunteer of the Year award, and Divurgent SVP Rebecca Woods with its Heyman Lifetime HIT Achievement award.
• FinThrive publishes a new guide, “How to Maximize Medicare and Medicaid Reimbursements.”
• Fortified Health Security names Jeff Brown regional director.

Blog Posts

• 2024 Healthcare Technology Industry Trends: Top Challenges for CIOs (CereCore)
• Underpayments in Healthcare: Causes and Implications (AGS Health)
• Leverage technology to reshape healthcare economics: A path to improved patient outcomes (Arcadia)
• Healthcare Communication Trends: Nearly 70% of Patients Prefer Conversational Messaging Over Basic Texting (Artera)
• Information Management: Digital Empathy, Bad Data, and More (Clinical Architecture)
• Urgent Care Conference 2024: How to Make the Most of Urgent Care Connect (Experity)
• Welcome Home: Helping Immigrant and Refugee Families Thrive (Findhelp)
• 5 Key Questions When Choosing a Digital Health Education Vendor (Healthwise)
• Buy or build? 4 crucial considerations for risk adjustment software decisions (Inovalon)
• The Year Ahead: Costs of Prescriptions, Treating Obesity, and AI in Healthcare (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/18/23

Top News

England’s Health Services Safety Investigations Body says that IT problems are among the most pressing in hospitals, noting that some of the reports it has reviewed involved patient deaths.

It gives examples of a patient who was found unresponsive and died being misidentified as DNR, a patient with cancer who died after IT problems prevented follow up, and a woman who died 18 days after she was given the wrong meds because of an electronic chart mix-up.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Few poll respondents have padded their resume with questionable recognition. After thinking about it, I am an outlier in viewing Chief membership as being in that category since its acceptance criteria involves the same items that already appear on resumes ((job title, reporting structure, and size of team managed). The only thing Chief membership proves is that your employer thinks highly enough of you to pay for vanity credential (only 30% of its members pay their own way and its unstated membership retention rate is reportedly unimpressive). It’s like buying the “certified CIO” credential in which applicants must already be a CIO, meaning the certification is pointless duplication unless employers are retaining dangerously unqualified CIOs and need them to pass a test to prove otherwise.

New poll to your right or here: What will Oracle Health look like in five years? Perhaps nuanced options exist, but basically Oracle will either still own the business (making it either better or worse over time) or it will sell or close it. Industry precedent is that the acquirer’s brash gate-crashing usually gives way to its embarrassing lack of healthcare knowledge, and after a few years of corporate incompetence and impatience, the business is sold entirely or piecemeal once enough time has passed to be able to blame the previous regime. I’m thinking Misys, Sage, GE Healthcare, Siemens, IBM, and even Microsoft and Google as as examples of companies whose desperation to prop up slowing growth illustrated Mike Tyson’s point that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

What people do to support my work on HIStalk:

• Join my spam-free mailing list.
• Connect on LinkedIn and join Dann’s HIStalk Fan Club,.
• Tell people in the industry that you get your news here.
• Share news and rumors that I might not know.

For your winter holiday reading pleasure, kindly refer back to 2022’s “Netflix and Reed Hastings: Ghost of Christmas Past,” a Readers Write by Chuck Dickens. Also, remember to stock up on pomegranates for Thursday night’s Yalda celebration, which I’m designating as the official winter holiday of HIStalk since it doesn’t exclude anyone. I’m not a Festivus guy since I’m also not a “Seinfeld” guy and thus haven’t seen that episode, but it’s apparently equally inclusive in its celebration on December 23.  

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Weight loss app vendor Noom, which labels itself as “the leading digital healthcare company helping people live longer, better lives,” replaces much if its C-suite following its hiring of a new CEO in July 2023. The company is pivoting into GLP-1 weight loss and selling services to employers.

Healthcare payment integrity solution vendor Trend Health Partners acquires Advent Health Partners, which offers technology for reviewing medical records for revenue cycle processes.

Certainly Health, which runs an online marketplace for booking medical and cosmetic procedures with guaranteed out-of-pocket pricing, raises $2.3 million in funding.

Medical University of South Carolina profiles the success of QuicksortRX, which was founded as an internal project by a MUSC network engineer and one of its pharmacists to bring drug pricing transparency to hospital pharmacies. The founders licensed the system from MUSC for commercialization and have sold it to 25 health system customers so far. The company is hiring around 40 new employees.

A former burn center director sues HCA for firing her after she notified her supervisors that 90 trauma nurses who were working in a newly opened burn unit were not named in state filings as required because they hadn’t earned the required credentials. Previous media investigations found that HCA sometimes charge fees in the tens of thousands of dollars for trauma center visits, making trauma care an important revenue center that encourages hospitals to seek Level 1 trauma center status. The lawsuit also claims that HCA was attempting a hostile takeover of profitable private burn centers by hiring their employees.

Sales

• NHS Services Scotland will implement Sectra’s cloud-based enterprise imaging solution.

Announcements and Implementations

Researchers find that the UK ranks 21st of 38 countries in key patient safety indicators, suggesting that thousands of patients die unnecessarily each year, but at least they finished well ahead of the US, which places 33rd in beating only Latvia, Costa Rica, Turkey, Colombia, and Mexico.

Government and Politics

Patients file a federal lawsuit that challenges New Jersey’s return to pre-COVID telehealth restrictions, noting that 10% of interstate telehealth visits involve cancer care. The plaintiffs say that they were denied follow-up care from their doctors in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania when New Jersey reinstated its rule that telehealth doctors who provide services to state residents must be licensed in New Jersey. At least 30 states either ban or restrict telehealth sessions with out-of-state doctors. The law firm also notes with wry cynicism the exception that exists for the doctors of sports teams, who are allowed to treat the athletes across state lines via in-person or telehealth consultations without licensure concerns. Utah also has an interesting exception in that doctors in any state can practice telehealth on its residents as long as they don’t charge them.

Other

A patient dies at HCA Florida Bayonet Point Hospital when a remote monitoring technician calls a code blue due to a displaced sensor, but responders couldn’t find the patient because an incorrect room number had been entered into its computer system. A state investigation found that the hospital was understaffed and failed to conduct remote vital signs monitoring appropriately. The review also noted that another patient was transferred for remote monitoring but wasn’t hooked up to the equipment until seven hours later. HCA responded to the findings by saying that it had replaced the CEO and chief medical and nursing officers.

The Seattle paper predicts that nurse shortages will worsen as 10,000 internationally hired nurses can’t enter the country because of delays and caps in obtaining a US visa. Green card processing takes several years even for employer-sponsored applicants and costs start at $10,000 before adding transportation and housing expenses. Sanford Health is waiting for the 160 nurses it has hired to enter the country, but has had to use travel nurses at triple the usual hourly wage due to the immigration delays. The health system is also running virtual sitting solutions and using AI to predict staffing needs.

Politico observes that mining companies offer their employees good health insurance that they then lose when mines close. Local hospitals and other providers thrive during mining boom times to the point that they may turn away people with lower-paying insurance such as Medicare and Medicaid, forcing them to travel long distances to receive care if they lose their mining jobs. The article observes that Williamson Memorial Hospital in the “heart of the billion-dollar coalfields” of southern West Virginia made major expansions in the mid-1990s as a medical showcase, but closed – along with most of the previously thriving town – when the mines closed, leaving locals with little access to care.

Sponsor Updates

• The National Health Insurance Authority in the Bahamas reports a significant uptick in cancer screenings since the implementation of its EClinicalWorks EHR and associated population health tools.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Lalita Abhyankar, MD.”
• Waystar publishes a new e-book, “A 4-step plan for denial prevention.”

Blog Posts

• A Look at HITRUST Version 11: Everything You Need to Know (Clearwater)
• How Emory Healthcare Built an Integrated Behavioral Health Program From the Ground Up (NeuroFlow)
• How to build an AI-powered digital front door (Notable Health)
• The Importance of Program Management When Moving Your EHR to the Cloud (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 2024 Outlook: The Future of Healthcare IT (Pivot Point Consulting)
• The Digital Front Door: Obstacles, strategies, and better patient access with Dr. Namrata Rastogi on Diagnosing Healthtech (Redox)
• The Vital Role of Patient Engagement in Specialty Medication Enrollment (RxLightning)
• How digital transformation impacts care team collaboration (Spok)
• Myth Busters: Pharmacists as Clinical Care Providers, Part 2 (Surescripts)
• Top 4 Quality Areas to Improve Health Outcomes in 2024 (Symplr)

Contacts

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

News 12/15/23

Top News

HHS and ONC approve the final HTI-1 rule that addresses:

• Algorithm transparency.
• Designation of USCDI v3 as the baseline certification standard.
• An enhanced information blocking requirement.
• A requirement that developers of certified health IT report interoperability-focused metrics.

Reader Comments

From Tax Bro: “Re: tech and health IT layoffs. Check out IRS Section 174 changes and ask executives if this has changed their company’s business.” An IRS change that took effect for the 2022 tax year no longer allows employers to expense their R&D costs in the same year in which they were incurred. Instead, companies must now amortize those expenses over five years, which triggers an immediately higher tax liability. Example: previously, a tech-heavy startup with $1 million in revenue and $750,000 in R&D costs (which is everything related to software development, including allocated overhead such as rent) would have paid taxes that year on $250,000. Now, that company will face an immediate IRS bill for taxes owed on $850,000, which creates a cash flow squeeze and a suddenly ugly balance sheet. It’s worse when paying offshore costs, where the deduction is spread over 15 years instead of five. In addition, companies must also amortize the capitalized cost of retiring or cancelling a software project over that same period. Folks in the know, how has that change affected your business, and has it triggered layoffs or hiring cutbacks?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Dear CEOs whose companies are laying people off right before Christmas. You speak confidently of right-sizing, becoming more corporately nimble, offsetting slowing growth, focusing on what matters to customers, and creating synergy from financial cuts. My question: shouldn’t you also lay off your executives, and perhaps yourself, for failing to predict and fix these problems back when you were wrong-sizing? Why drop a lump of coal into the stockings of your previously valued “associates” by pink-slipping them home for a miserable holiday? November and December layoffs are a strong indicator of executive incompetence or poorly masked corporate desperation.

Ah, the cliché but slightly seasonally fun hospital door decorating contest. It’s too late to vote, unfortunately, for the “Welcome to Whoville” door of the IT department of 171-bed McAlester Regional Health Center (OK), as requested by Interface Specialist Anthony Master who asked nicely on LinkedIn. Still, I wish them luck in the vote tally, although my inner teen also likes the lab department’s “12 Days of Christmas: Lab Edition” that includes five golden pees, seven swimmers swimming (snicker), and eight stools a-stinking. You will probably not understand the sentimentality of such a competition unless you’ve spent a lot of years working for a small, non-profit hospital, where the money isn’t great, but your patients are your neighbors, someone’s always bringing in food, and random employees give you a hug without being asked when they sense you need one.

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 hearings panel of Nasdaq extends the continued listing of Veradigm shares until February 27, 2024. The company blames an accounting software problem for missing its annual SEC filing for 2022 and three quarterly filings so far in 2023.

AI-powered cancer imaging analysis system vendor Lunit will acquire New Zealand-based Volpara, which offers breast cancer detection software, for $198 million in cash. Volpara’s CEO and managing director is industry long-timer Teri Thomas, RN, MSN, who spent 21 years as an Epic VP through 2016.

Telemedicine addiction treatment provider PursueCare raises $20 million in a Series B funding round and acquire the software-based therapeutic for substance use disorder that were developed by the now-defunct Pear Therapeutics.

An 86-year-old woman and another plaintiff file a class action lawsuit against for Humana, claiming that the insurer used AI to deny care to Medicare Advantage patients. The lawsuit says that Humana uses the same NaviHealth algorithm as UnitedHealth Group, which owns the algorithm and was named in a similar lawsuit last month.

Smartcare Software, which sells EHR and ERP systems for mobile care in the home, renames itself to Aaniie, a name it calls “unique and forward-thinking” that better represents its vision (and, it adds, is “a brand we could trademark.”) The company says it’s easy to remember the name and spelling because it stands for “An All-inclusive Network for Improving Insights & Engagement,” which creates a race to aabsurditiie between the chicken and the egg.

People

Clinical trials technology company Slope hires Terry Edwards (PerfectServe) as COO.

Industry long-timer Jerry McKenzie — whose 40-year health IT career included executive roles with Accu-Med, Apex, QuadraMed, T-System, and MedAssist — died December 9. He was 73.

Announcements and Implementations

An AMA survey of physicians finds that two-thirds believe AI offers advantage, especially for documentation and prior authorization, but worry about its potential impact on the patient-physician relationship and patient privacy. One-third of them are using AI in practice, most commonly for documentation, translation, or diagnosis assistance. Their five-year plans include using AI to generate summaries of patient messages and chart information and predicting patient demand to support employee scheduling.

Lucem Health releases Reveal for Stroke, which analyzes ECG and clinical data to identify patients who have undocumented atrial fibrillation. The solution was developed with ECG diagnostic company AccurKardia.

Government and Politics

The Illinois Supreme Court rules that hospitals can collect the biometric information of their workers, specifically their fingerprints for accessing drug dispensing machines, without being held accountable to the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) that requires that the individual be notified in advance and prevents disclosure of their information without their consent. The court ruled that employing fingerprint access to retrieve patient drugs and supplies falls under HIPAA, but warns that its decision does not broadly excuse hospitals from compliance with BIPA.

The White House announces that 28 provider and payer organizations have pledged their commitment to the safe, secure , and trustworthy purchase and use of AI in healthcare based on the principle of FAVES – seeking outcomes that are fair, appropriate, valid, effective, and safe.

Privacy and Security

In China, a hospital employee is fired and faces legal charges after sharing screen shots on social media of the hospital electronic medical records of a 57-year-old actress who died in the ED this week.

Other

Houston Methodist Cypress Hospital CEO Trent Fulin lays out his “future bets” on becoming a smart hospital.

A jury awards a former Kaiser NICU charge nurse $41 million in her lawsuit over being fired for placing her bare feet in a NICU isolette. She claimed that Kaiser’s real reason for terminating her as a 30-year employee of the hospital was that she had raised repeated concerns about understaffing.

Awell Health Partnership Manager Rik Renard describes the company’s hiring of a highly credentialed account executive who they fired three weeks later after his poor performance led them to dig deeper into his background, where he was found to be holding another similar full-time job. He similarly held two full-time jobs at same time on three previous occasions, claiming that he was such a superstar that he only needed to work half-time to deliver full-time results. The company’s lessons learned:

• Don’t skip calling the current employer for references. It turns out that his claimed six-year stint at another vendor was actually two since they fired him in 2020.
• Trust your instincts if something seems off.
• A slow start is a major red flag.
• Sales pros are good at selling themselves.

A liquidation trustee sues the former board chair, CEO, and CFO of Watsonville Community Hospital (CA), claiming that they forced the hospital into bankruptcy by pocketing $4 million of its dwindling reserves. The executives were appointed by the hospital’s for-profit acquirer as its only executives and board members, after which they allegedly paid $2 million to themselves and family members in consulting fees and reimbursed themselves for cars, restaurant expenses, and a beach house. They hired out IT management to a company with no experience that was owned by an executive’s friend, which the lawsuit says caused billing and medical records problems due to poor Internet access and the implementation of a problematic and “untested” cloud-based EHR. The executives amended their employment contracts just before the hospital filed bankruptcy to pay themselves $3 million in severance if the hospital changed hands. The local health district bought the hospital’s assets out of bankruptcy in September 2022, where it continues to struggle.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare IT Leaders hosts its annual Christmas tree giveaway that benefits families at Cristo Rey Atlanta Jesuit High School.
• The “Interop Now” podcast features Ellkay VP of Interoperability Solutions G.P. Singh.
• NCPDP’s Raising the Standard Podcast features First Databank VP of Editorial Content Julie Suko.
• Meditech announces that Healthcare Policy Program Manager Philip Alcaidinho has been named co-chair of TechNation’s Health Advocacy Committee.

Blog Posts

• Social Care Without Stigma: How Findhelp Supports People Living with HIV/AIDS (Findhelp)
• How Does AI Transform Business Customer Experiences? (Five9)
• Healthcare cybersecurity threats: November 2023 (Fortified Health Security)
• Leading the way in data-driven healthcare innovation (Inovalon)
• A Christmas Miracle: The Story of Lakeland Community Hospital (Medhost)
• How Sault Area Hospital uses technology to improve care by engaging patients before, during, and after their stay (Meditech)

Contacts

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

News 12/13/23

Top News

Oracle announces Q2 results: revenue up 5%, adjusted EPS $1.34 versus $1.21, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. CEO Safra Catz said the former Cerner business, acquired for $28 billion in June 2022, produced “a drag on Oracle growth.”

Shares dropped 12% on Tuesday as investors became concerned about the company’s two straight quarters of disappointing cloud revenue.

From the earnings call:

• Total revenue for the quarter grew 4%, but would have increased 6% excluding the contribution of the former Cerner.
• Catz once again mentioned the imperative to “drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards.” She says that Cerner’s impact on Oracle’s growth will be “sort of negative one to two points” this fiscal year, then it will end.
• Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison says that half of Cerner Millennium customers will move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure by February. He adds that a rewrite of Millennium will be completed next year and that HealtheIntent is now full SaaS.
  Ellison says that all Millennium applications will be moved to OCI and will switch to subscription pricing.
• He adds that Millennium is being upgraded and modernized “one piece at a time” and will be extended via applications for public health, pharma, and hospital inventory and workforce management as Oracle goes after a bigger piece of the healthcare ecosystem.
• Ellison says in responding to an analyst’s question about generative AI that it can create a patient visit summary from the conversation without using a human scribe, which he says “has shocked a great many people.”

Reader Comments

From Oracool Not: “Re: Oracle. The earnings report is not good news for whatever is left of Cerner.” I said a week ago that it would get ugly if ORCL shares reacted negatively to financial news that could be attributed in any way to the former Cerner business. The CEO’s reaction to Tuesday’s revenue miss was even more direct than I would have expected, where she threw Cerner under the bus for being an underperforming drag on company revenue. Given Wall Street’s quarter-by-quarter fixation and Oracle’s competitive AI and cloud battles with powerhouse tech companies, the obvious answer would seem to be cutting Cerner costs even more, and about the only ways that companies can do that is to reduce headcount, sell real estate, discontinue or sell lower-margin business, and reduce R&D. All of these actions are good for investors and bad for customers.

From Slambob: “Re: Health Gorilla. Co-founder and Chief Strategist Sergio H. Wagner has been relieved of his position and board seat following layoffs of 44% of the workforce and missing two consecutive quarters by more than 80%.” Wagner’s LinkedIn shows that he left the company this month. Health Gorilla was just named as one of the five initial QHINs.

From Banzai Bill: “Re: training doctors. Ask readers how they would shorten the training for primary care doctors.” I’ve asked Dr. Jayne to weigh in and invite physician readers to respond as well. The issues that come to my mind:

• Schools love to collect tuition and the post-graduate donations of physician graduates, but is it really necessary to earn a four-year degree and then attend a four-year medical school before beginning years-long hands-on training?
• Given the speed at which medical knowledge becomes obsolete and how little of it is used by the time a PCP reaches mid-level practice, would it be better to shorten the pre-practice education while moving to continuous learning in a CME-type model?
• Endless amounts of vetted medical data is available electronically and potentially by AI. Is rote memorization of a subset of that same information a waste of time?
• How much could the eight-year classroom time of graduate medical school – before another three or more years of residency – be shortened to create the same outcome?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Fruit Street files a $25 million lawsuit against former partner Sharecare, claiming that the company violated the terms of their agreement by launching its own diabetes prevention program rather than continuing to offer Fruit Street’s solution to its members. Both companies offer digital health and wellness programs to employers and payers. Sharecare, meanwhile, contends that Fruit Street owes it $3 million. I had a lot to say – none of it good, but all of it fun reading – about Fruit Street in 2014 and 2021.

Private equity firm KKR opens talks to acquire a 50% stake in healthcare payment and analytics software company Cotiviti from Veritas Capital in a deal that would value the business at between $10 billion and $11 billion. Veritas, which took Cotiviti private in 2018 at a $5 billion valuation, rejected a similar deal from Carlyle Group earlier this year. KKR has invested in such healthcare technology companies as Zeus Health, Clarify Health Solutions, and Therapy Brands.

Data and generative AI company ConcertAI will acquire American Society of Clinical Oncology subsidiary CancerLinQ, which offers real-world oncology data and quality-of-care technology services.

Kaiser Permanente lays off 115 IT employees, 65 of them in Northern California.

Sales

• WellSpan Health (PA) will use Arcadia’s data analytics software to enhance its value-based care efforts.
• Nascentia Health (NY) will implement the Biofourmis Care remote monitoring and care management platform as a part of its new care-at-home programs.

People

Tushar Hazra, PhD (EpitomiOne) joins Parker Health as CTO.

UC San Diego Health names Karandeep Singh, MD (Michigan Medicine) as its first chief health AI officer.

Eagle Telemedicine promotes Jason Povio to CEO. He takes over from Talbot “Mac” McCormick, MD who will take on the role of chief physician executive. CFO Timothy Horton will take on the additional title of EVP.

Impact Advisors hires John Lanari (Nordic) and Kristi Lanciotti, MBA (Optimum Healthcare IT) as VPs.

Howard Landa, MD (Sutter Health) joins Adventist Health as CMIO.

VCU Health hires Jeffrey Kim, MD (Loma Linda University Health) as CMIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Riverwood Healthcare Center (MN) will go live on an OCHIN-hosted Epic system next month.

Phelps Health (MO) begins offering virtual urgent care through KeyCare’s Epic-based technology.

Darena Solutions, Leidos, and SLI Compliance launch a verification process for AI applications that use SMART on FHIR to integrate with EHRs. 

Mitre, the independent trusted third party for the FDA’s voluntary Medical Device Information Analysis and Sharing (MDIAS) program, announces that Atrium Health has signed on as its first health system member.

Government and Politics

ONC and The Sequoia Project officially recognize KONZA National Network, EHealth Exchange, Epic Nexus, Health Gorilla, and MedAllies as QHINs.

A Verato-commissioned survey of 197 executives finds that two-thirds of healthcare organizations aren’t ready to meet Cures Act requirements such as sending electronic patient activity notifications, obtaining consent for sharing data, managing infrastructure for secure information exchange, and sharing patient-level information with patients and other healthcare organizations. Nearly all expect to receive more data requests, and more than half expect patient data-matching to be a major problem.

A congressional investigation finds that chain drug stores are handing over patient records to police and government investigators who present a subpoena rather than a judge-approved warrant. Legal experts raise concerns that chain stores share prescriptions across all locations, creating a national “digital trail” that could be used against patients or pharmacies by states such as Texas, which has threatened to file criminal charges related to the mailing of abortion-inducing drugs to state residents.

Other

London Health Science Centre officials come under fire for spending $50,000 to send 13 IT staff to Oracle Health and Oracle CloudWorld conferences in Las Vegas last September. The Canadian healthcare provider, which is in the midst of a staffing shortage and faces a $76 million deficit, is already under government investigation for spending $470,000 to send staff to conferences in Portugal, Australia, and the UAE.

Sponsor Updates

• Frost & Sullivan recognizes Inovalon’s One real-world data and analytics platform with its 2023 North American Product Leadership Award.
• Agfa HealthCare supports Leeds Teaching Hospitals in the UK in its education initiative.
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Ways to Overcome the Gap Between IT and Physicians.”
• Consensus Cloud Solutions achieves HITRUST risk-based, two-year recertification.
• Konza names Katy Brown director of marketing.
• EClinicalWorks announces its intent to become a QHIN.

Blog Posts

• Ways to Overcome the Gap Between IT and Physicians (CereCore)
• Leveraging Automation to Manage the No Surprises Act Dispute Process (AGS Health)
• Ripe for automation: How generative AI can enhance patient care (Arcadia)
• Meet the Clinician – Tiffany Kibbee (Ascom)
• A proven approach to reducing patient falls while driving staffing efficiencies (AvaSure)
• 1Clearsense Empowers Healthcare Organizations Across Cloud Environments (Clearsense)
• Active Incident Response Planning: Find It, Fix It, and Go Forward (Clearwater)
• You Can Have Both! How to Maintain Your Cybersecurity Framework While Undergoing Digital Transformation (CTG)
• 5 of the Hottest Digital Health Trends Predicted to Skyrocket in 2024 (Dimensional Insight)
• Reflecting on Progress: A Review of the Healthcare Technology Industry in 2023 (Direct Recruiters)
• Happy Culture, Happy M&A: Strategies for a Successful Cultural Merge (Divurgent)
• 3 Ways to Optimize Your Epic EHR (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/11/23

Top News

The board of Veradigm fires the company’s CEO and CFO for failing to comply with financial reporting and disclosure policies, following an investigation by its audit committee. Veradigm hasn’t filed financial reports for a year due to accounting software problems, which caused Nasdaq to repeatedly warn the company about the potential de-listing of MDRX shares.

The terminated executives are Richard Poulton, CEO, who also resigned from the company’s board, and Leah Jones, CFO. The company has named interim executives and has launched a search for their permanent replacements.

MDRX shares dropped 20% on the news Friday. They are down 46% in the past 12 months versus the S&P 500’s 16% gain, valuing the company at $1.1 billion.

Interim CEO Shih-Yin Ho, MD, MBA and interim CFO Leland Westerfield, who are both members of the company’s board, will be paid up to $770,000 and $1 million, respectively, for six months, with the option to extend the agreement. That includes $200,000 for each executive that is contingent on hiring their permanent replacements and filing the overdue SEC financial reports.

Severance for Poulton and Jones will total $2.1 million and $200,000 with accelerated share vesting, respectively, and Jones will provide consulting services for six months for $360,000.

Nasdaq has not announced the results of its November 16 hearing in which the de-listing of Veradigm’s shares was to have been decided.

Reader Comments

From Re-Joyce: “Re: R1 RCM. Quite a turnaround from its days as Accretive Health.” Accretive’s history is spotty – it had to settle FTC charges of poor data security, was banned from doing business in Minnesota for positioning bonus-incented debt collectors inside hospitals to press ED and breast cancer patients for payment while they waited to be seen, and had shares de-listed from NYSE for missing filings. The company renamed itself to R1 RCM in 2017 after getting a $200 million investment from Ascension and an investment firm and went public in March 2018. Shares have lost 60% since their highs in early 2021.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Health IT conferences are a long way from earning an A grade from poll respondents for their presenter diversity.

New poll to your right or here: Has your resume ever included a paid-for award or vanity article? (should membership in Chief count?). Many years ago, I was annoyed at the proliferation of diploma mill degrees being claimed by healthcare folks and ran links to their LinkedIn on HIStalk, which earned me some nasty letters and threats. Interestingly, those people left their phony credentials intact, apparently convinced that their deceit would remain undetected if I didn’t call it out.

I’ve read several health IT “interviews” lately that quoted the subject as magically speaking in bullet lists and parenthetical asides, clearly indicating that the interviewee was responding to questions in writing and probably with the help of a PR team. I don’t give interviewees my questions in advance (because that’s not an actual conversation) and I don’t allow pre-publication review or editing. Interviewees have to trust me and be confident that they can answer without help, but the end result is far more interesting.

My solution for Dr. Jayne’s “one space or two after a period” dilemma is to write like the imitative self-promoters on LinkedIn who waste reader time and patience by making each sentence its own paragraph in their attempt to seem patiently profound (not really — I move on quickly in assuming that a lot of white space in “content” means a lot of white space in the author’s thinking). I will also note that while Dr. Jayne is stricken with existential Gen X angst about unlearning now-illogical habits that she developed while using a machine that has been obsolete for 40 years, she can take comfort that Word removes the extra spaces, so they never showed up in her HIStalk posts anyway. Now do indented first paragraph lines.

John sent me a Donors Choose donation that, with matching funds, provided Mr. C’s middle school class in Pennsylvania with biology and physics hands-on activities.

I was snooping around the HIMSS conference website and noticed that HIMSS27 is now set for Chicago after two years in Las Vegas, so HIMSS24 will be the last stop in Orlando for a while. Exhibitor count is at 514 and most booths are showing as unavailable except the 10x10s that go for $6,000.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Mail order teeth straightening device “teledentistry” vendor SmileDirectClub shuts down, telling customers that they won’t get the treatments remaining in their two-year, $2,000 program (but still have to pay their balance). The company went public in September 2019 at a valuation of $9 billion, with shares tanking 27% on their first day of trading. The company made its two 30-year-old founders billionaires, never turned a profit, and amassed nearly $1 billion in debt before it filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late September and then failed to find a buyer. The founders, whose previous business experience involved running a car detailing service, were financially backed by two private equity fund operators, the father and uncle of one of the founders (the three are pictured above). The father held shares that were worth billions, at least for a short time.

Cigna ends its attempts to acquire insurance rival Humana when the companies fail to agree on a price. Cigna will instead buy back $10 billion of its shares, which the company says are “significantly undervalued,” and will seek bolt-on acquisitions.

People

Clarify Health Solutions promotes Terry Boch to CEO. She replaces founder Jean Druin, MD, who will remain on the board.

Privacy and Security

Cyberextortionists post a “proof pack” of patient information that they obtained from Tri-City Medical Center (CA) following a ransomware attack that took its systems offline for more than two weeks. Such groups often call patients whose information they’ve stolen to suggest that they urge hospital leaders to pay the ransom to avoid public release.

In a similar event, patients of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center are being emailed by hackers who demand payment of $50 to prevent their information from being sold.

Other

The New York Times reports that Bellevue Hospital (NY) is using aggressive marketing techniques and per-procedure surgeon incentive payments to create a bariatric surgery factory in which patients are scheduled for the OR after a single quick visit and little understanding of the risks involved. Some of the patients it recruited are prisoners who lave little chance of following the required post-surgery diet. The hospital is paid at least $11,000 for each surgery, sometimes much more, and expects to do 3,000 cases at an estimated revenue of $34 million. The Times says that the weight loss surgeries often get OR priority over patients with stab wounds and detached fingers.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart employees sort food donations at the Manna Food Bank in Asheville, NC.
• Pivot Point Consulting Senior Director Jim Hogan attains CDHE certification from CHIME in digital health.
• QGenda will exhibit at PGA 2023 in New York City through December 11.
• AdvancedMD earns its Electronic Prescribing for Controlled Substances recertification from the Drummond Group.
• Rhapsody publishes a new guide, “How to Reinvent Interoperability.”

Blog Posts

• Culture still eats strategy for breakfast: Insight from our roundtable discussion (NTT Data)
• Intelligent patient experiences, part 5: How strategic is your patient engagement strategy? (Nuance)
• Nurses of Note 2023: The Lead Director for Ambulatory Care Management (PerfectServe)
• A Year in Review: 2023 Trends and Challenges in Healthcare with a Glimpse of What’s to Come (Vyne Medical)
• Gig Economy: Where 9-to-5 is So Last Century (Revuud)
• How Patients Stay Well at StayWell Pharmacy (Surescripts)
• Overcoming Healthcare Staffing Challenges in 2024 (Symplr)
• Interview: Jennifer’s Journey of Caregiving for her Mother (Trualta)

Contacts

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

News 12/8/23

Top News

Providence will sell its Acclara revenue cycle management company to R1 RCM for $675 million in cash, warrants to purchase $135 million worth of R1 shares, and a 10-year contract to receive revenue cycle management services from R1.

R1 shares, which are up 11% in the past 12 months versus the S&P 500’s 16% rise, rose slightly on the news, valuing the company at $4.7 billion.

Reader Comments

From Green Slime: “Re: award. See this LinkedIn post about another vanity award.” Dayton Children’s CIO J.D. Whitlock is tongue-in-cheek proud to be nominated for “Most Pioneering Magnetic Leader Revamping The Healthcare, 2024,” which he can win by paying $2,800. I found a back issue from issuer The CIO World, which is full of grammatical errors and odd wording that makes it obvious that its editorial terroir is not nearby. It describes itself as “an archway that caters to Entrepreneurs’ quench of technology and business updates.” Still, what they are doing is legal and in fact is perhaps the perfect business – selling vanity strokes to folks who crave them, even those who work in The Healthcare. The downside is that you look like a loser when you’re caught bragging on an obvious pay-for-play award.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor SnapCare.SnapCare is an AI-enabled workforce marketplace that serves the entire continuum of care. Its platform offers healthcare facilities complete visibility into the ideal talent mix for their unique needs and associated costs. The company designed its workforce solutions to significantly improve client savings and efficiencies, minimizing the need for intermediate agencies, returning control to healthcare facilities, and ensuring total transparency in pay and pricing. Its pioneering technology and comprehensive staffing services offer a smarter way for facilities to manage their workforce needs and deliver quality patient care. Thanks to SnapCare for supporting HIStalk.

I found this SnapCare explainer video on YouTube.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Novant Health will outsource some of its IT department’s work to India-based Wipro, but declines to say how many positions will be affected.

People

Industry long-timer Brent Dover (Kalderos) joins AI-powered clinical data management technology vendor Carta Healthcare as CEO.

William O’Toole, JD (O’Toole Law Group) joins DrFirst as counsel.

Fortified Health Security hires Greg Breetz, Jr. (Valera Health) as CFO.

Sarah Jones, MBA (Firefly Health) joins B.well Connected Health as chief outcomes officer.

Announcements and Implementations

InterSystems announces GA of TrakCare Assistant, a search-based navigation tool for its TrakCare EHR. Internal testing shows that Assistant reduces EHR interaction time by up to 66%.

In Canada, Fraser Health will pilot the use of Google Cloud’s generative AI to help create clinical documentation in Meditech Expanse.

Three-fourths of ambulatory care physician leaders who were surveyed by WellSky say that their organizations don’t have relationships with post-acute care providers, and most referrals to them are sent by fax or telephone. Most respondents expect their participation in value-based care programs to increase, while more than half of those surveyed say they don’t participate in Medicare’s Transitional Care Management because of shortages of staff, data, or technology.

A new KLAS report on data and analytics services lists Chartis, CitiusTech, Impact Advisors, and Prominence as being broadly validated across four disciplines – advisory consulting, technology services, operations improvement consulting, and managed services.

Privacy and Security

HHS lays out its plan to improve cybersecurity in healthcare, which includes setting healthcare organization performance goals, providing financial incentives for implementing cybersecurity practices, and enforcing cybersecurity standards within Medicare, Medicaid, and HIPAA.

Epic raises concerns about an ONC proposal that would require EHR vendors and HIEs to remove reproductive health information from data-sharing programs upon patient request. Epic says that the proposal would increase clinician documentation burden and is not technologically feasible, while a family doctor observes, “EHRs have been working so hard to share data automatically that we’re now behind in thinking about how to not share when that data can be used to criminalize a patient.” Proponents say that patients and providers could be charged with felonies in states where abortion is illegal if information from abortion-legal states is shared across state lines.

Washington University (MO) sues the state’s attorney general over his demand for access to patient records from its transgender center, which he is seeking under a consumer protection law that addresses false advertising. The AG’s office says it is entitled to information about treatment, referrals, prescriptions, and compliance with standards of care, while the university says that HIPAA pre-empts state law and allows disclosure of PHI only to a “health oversight agency.”

Security researchers report that a security flaw in the DICOM medical imaging standard has caused millions of patient images and exam notes to be exposed to the Internet. The affected servers, most of them hosted in the cloud either did not have security measures enabled or used weak authorization.

Other

Ardent Health Services restores access to Epic after nearly two weeks of downtime following a November 23 cyberattack.

The local paper profiles Jonathan Hatfield, who graduated college with a degree in bible studies, became a night shift janitor at Klickitat Valley Health (WA), taught himself IT, started the hospital’s IT department, was assigned responsibility over other departments, and then was chosen to be CEO of the hospital. 

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research outsourcing services survey respondents recognize Dimensional Insight as the top outsourced analytics solution.
• First Databank’s FDB Vela e-prescribing network earns HITRUST risk-based, two-year certified status.
• Mobile Heartbeat announces that its cloud-based clinical communication and collaboration solution, Banyan, is now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
• Healthcare Growth Partners publishes a snapshot of the radiology software landscape, 2019-2023.
• KLAS Research recognizes Impact Advisors as a top provider of data and analytics services in its Data & Analytics Services 2023 report.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new “Tell Me Where It Hurts” podcast featuring Bob Taylor, DO, chief product strategies of TouchWorks EHR, Altera Digital Health.
• Meditech Lead Designers Tammy Coutts and Michael Shonty describe their work to advance disability inclusion within EHRs and to update the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association’s Personas Library to include accessibility in recent HIMSS EHRA blogs.

Blog Posts

• Smart Coverage Detection Equals Better Patient Care + Stronger Bottom Line (EClinicalWorks)
• “Living Positive” Film: a Community of Hope, Brought Together by HIV (Findhelp)
• 3 Ways to Optimize Automation in Revenue Cycle Management (FinThrive)
• Is Data Migration to the Cloud Inevitable? (Five9)
• Navigating incident response: Lessons from a hospital cyber attack (Fortified Health Security)
• 5 Reasons Why Consistent Health Education is Important (Healthwise)
• Leadership Through Service: Our 2023 Social Impact Report (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Empowering maternal and newborn health research with Inovalon data (Inovalon)
• Streamlining EMR Interactions with a Reimagined User Experience (InterSystems)
• Hiding in Plain Sight: Leveraging Existing Patient Data for Early Detection of Diabetes (Lucem Health)
• 3 Tips for Surviving the Holiday Emergency Department Rush (Medhost)
• How Cloud Technology is Changing the Face of Clinical Communication (Mobile Heartbeat)

Contacts

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

News 12/6/23

Top News

CVS Health will use the name CVS Healthspire for its health services business that include Oak Street Health, Signify Health, MinuteClinic, Caremark, and its recently created biosimilar company Cordavis.

The company is following the lead of competitors that offer both health insurance and health services, such as UnitedHealth Group (Optum), Cigna (Evernorth Health Services) and Elevance Health (Carelon).

CVS also announced that its pharmacy pricing formula will change to a more transparent cost-plus model, following the lead of Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs.

Reader Comments

From Joy DiVive: “Re: North Carolina’s NCCARE360. A non-profit human services organization says that that weaknesses in Unite Us’s referral platform is the biggest threat to the $24 million Healthy Opportunities Pilot as funded by federal taxpayers.” Verified, per the communication that HSO Reinvestment Partners sent to the state complaining of poor invoice tracking, deficiencies in protecting confidential patient information, deficient case tracking, and the inability to upload and export data. That’s one organization’s opinion, anyway.

From Ellipse: “Re: CareRev. Another reduction in workforce today, about one-fourth of the company.” Unverified. The nurse shift-bidding platform reportedly laid off 100 employees, about one-third of its headcount, in June. The decreased use of gig clinicians post-COVID was a problem, unnecessarily enhanced by the loose lips of the now-departed co-founder and CEO who told co-workers of his love for microdosing LSD.

From Tick Tock: “Re: Oracle Health. Have they lost interest in the VA or in healthcare in general? None of the promised improvements have been delivered and the company no-shows congressional hearings.” Either they are focusing on basic blocking and tackling with the VA or they have lost interest as the project struggles. Oracle closed its Cerner acquisition in June 2022, and after some initial lofty healthcare pronouncements from Larry Ellison, most of the news since has involved layoffs, an expressed fervor to milk Cerner’s profits harder in a provider climate where that will be difficult, and selling unrelated Oracle products to health systems. They were supposed to rewrite Millennium, deliver a new pharmacy system to the VA by April 2023, and switch to a voice-first user interface. The company also promised to grow Cerner’s community presence in Kansas City, which has gone the other way. It will get ugly if the VA can’t get its implementations going again or if ORCL shares tank for unrelated reasons and all-important investors demand a quick turnaround. Their best hope, given Oracle’s army of lobbyists, would have been federal government, except that not much is left after bagging DoD, VA, Coast Guard, and IHS. Second best hope is overseas sales, although Epic is growing in the most attractive areas. The company promised a couple of big sales this quarter that added up to $1 billion, although much of that may come as subcontractor to General Dynamics for the $2.5 billion Indian Health Service contract.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Generous donations from Michael and Natalie, matched with funds from multiple sources including those from my Anonymous Vendor Executive, fully and anonymously funded these Donors Choose teacher grant requests:

• Headphones for Mr. S’s elementary school class in San Antonio, TX.
• STEM and engineering tools for Ms. T’s elementary school class in Waluku, HI.
• Science materials for Ms. M’s high school class in Homestead, FL.
• Math supplies for Ms. C’s elementary school class in Peoria, IL.
• Books for the computer science lab of Ms. C’s elementary school in Revere, MA.
• Math workbooks for Ms. A’s elementary school class in Spring Valley, CA.
• Headphones for Ms. F’s elementary school class in San Diego, CA.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

KONZA National Network and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment are piloting the use of real-time alerts for incoming or transferred patients who are actively diagnosed with multi-drug resistant organisms. The alerts are delivered directly to a provider’s EHR in less than five minutes using Direct Secure Messaging, allowing immediate isolation and implementation of transmission-based protocols. 

Sales

• UofL Health (KY) will implement Verato’s healthcare master data management software to help improve identity management across its system.
• Emory Healthcare (GA) will use Nference’s Nsights de-identified patient data technology to support its research in several therapeutic areas.

People

Children’s Hospital Colorado promotes Amy Feaster to SVP/CIO and chief digital officer. She replaces Dana Moore, who will retire at the end of the month.

Ric Downs (Veris Health) joins Fuse Oncology as VP of sales.

Amenities Health names Scott Heatherly (Hyro) VP of sales.

Stanford University medical school professor and Stanford Health Care radiology informatics director Curtis Lanlotz, MD, PhD is named president of RSNA. He earned his medical degree, master’s in AI, and doctorate in medical information science from Stanford.

Announcements and Implementations

Ireland’s National Forensic Mental Health Service goes live on InterSystems TrakCare.

Government and Politics

HHS will name the initial group of Qualified Health Information Networks in a livestreamed QHIN Designation Ceremony next Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. ET.

Politico says that members of Congress are concerned that Google is using advanced AI in healthcare before the government has created guidelines for such use, with particular concerns about patient privacy. The article notes that Google is hiring former federal healthcare regulators —  such as former National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc and several former FDA officials — and is raising the concerns of startups that its deep pockets will squeeze smaller companies out.

Privacy and Security

Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center announces that it was the victim of a cyberattack just before Thanksgiving.

The Rhysida ransomware gang claims responsibility for a ransomware attack on London’s King Edward VII Hospital. The hackers allege that some of the stolen data, which they’ve threatened to put up for sale online, includes information pertaining to the British royal family. Hospital officials, on the other hand, insist that only a limited amount of “benign hospital systems data” was copied from its IT system.

Other

UCLA Health researchers find that 20% of patients whose electronic medical data showed them as suffering from serious illness were in fact dead. Researchers analyzed the health data of 11,700 patients across 41 UCLA Health clinics over two years, then compared it with data from California’s Department of Public Health Public Use Death File. A state law prohibits death file data from being shared with healthcare institutions, resulting in what the researchers deem “wasteful outreach that strains resources and healthcare workers’ time.” The authors say the problem could be easily solved if the state didn’t restrict death record sharing except for financial institutions.

A fascinating LinkedIn post by Chris Deacon, JD questions how big-brand, non-profit health systems (Cleveland Clinic, Brigham) are allowed to accumulate billions of dollars in hedge funds and overseas investments – generated from US tax breaks, astronomical patient charges, and charitable donations – to build massive medical palaces in London, UAE, and China. She calls for non-profit health systems to account for their international spending given that their local communities are footing the bill even as services to those local communities are curtailed or to overloaded to book. A comment by my favorite curmudgeon Matthew Holt speculates that big health systems hold $250 billion in hedge funds, with another $250 billion owned by non-profit insurers like BCBS and Kaiser Permanente.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Billy Nicolich.”
• Agfa HealthCare recaps its time at RSNA with daily updates.
• AvaSure publishes a new whitepaper, “Roadmap to virtual nursing: How UCHealth scaled its program and saved lives.”
• The HLTH Matters Podcast features Bamboo Health Chief Clinical Innovation Officer Nishi Rawat, MD.
• The Safeopedia Podcast features Bardavon Chief Clinical Officer Dorothy Riviere and VP of Injury Prevention Scott Coleman, “Revolutionizing Workplace Safety: The Power of Tech-Enabled Safety Cultures.”
• Black Book Research’s latest user satisfaction survey ranks MedEvolve as the leading vendor for RCM workflow optimization and automation services.
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast, “The Key to Job Fulfillment: Autonomy, Complexity, and Reward, with Matt Christensen, Senior Director Cybersecurity at Intermountain Health.”
• ConnectiveRx releases a new podcast, “Empowering Communities: Pharmacists’ Crucial Role in Patient Health.”
• Dimensional Insight will sponsor the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association’s Annual Women Leaders in Healthcare Conference December 7 in Waltham.
• Divurgent releases a new episode of The Vurge Podcast, “Coming Together for Women in HIT and Cybersecurity.”
• DrFirst publishes a new case study, “Cone Health Finds Medication History for 93% of Patients by Connecting with Local Pharmacies and Leveraging AI.”

Blog Posts

• Help Your Patients Pay Less for Their Prescriptions (AdvancedMD)
• Underpaid Claims: Navigating the Challenges (AGS Health)
• Future-forward healthcare: Data platform considerations (Arcadia)
• Digitize Medical Billing for Atypical Providers with Quick Claims (Availity)
• Advancing Health Equity: The Role of AI in Healthcare and Clearsense’s Approach to Value-Based Care (Clearsense)
• Why is Documentation Important in Healthcare? (Consensus Cloud Solutions)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/4/23

Top News

Intermountain Health spinoff Culmination Bio, which offers drug companies a clinical study recruitment platform that contains 40 years’ worth of de-identified EHR and biospecimen data, raises a $10 million investment from two drug company investment funds.

Reader Comments

From Spangler: “Re: physicians in rural areas. It’s concerning that we are facing a shortage even if telemedicine and AI try to help.” The real issue is that the dismal conditions of working as a corporate physician are driving many away from patient care or out of medicine. This exodus is tempered only by the need to repay massive school loans. It’s worth reconsidering the necessity of an eight-year education plus internships and residencies for primary care physicians (PCPs) that push their career entry into their late 20s or early 30s. Alternatives could include expanding the roles of nurse practitioners, physician assistant, and pharmacists. Additionally, integrating AI into medical training could accelerate training, especially given the rapid obsolescence of classroom work, and could be used to provide support as needed for more unusual cases. Meanwhile, the profit-obsessed US healthcare system is increasingly strained as major physician employers compete for the essential yet limited clinical workforce.

From Poppy: “Re: ChatGPT 4 Plus or Pro. You can now add any file type and it will analyze and even visualize the data for you. I’ve used it to sort DEI survey responses as either friendly or antagonistic and it works like a charm.” ChatGPT keeps adding features to the point I can’t keep up. I use custom instructions to ask it to include source links as well as its numeric confidence rating of its response, both of which are helpful. I’ve also upload images and files and asked it to perform simple functions, although I’m still using it mostly to analyze writing or to generate ideas, and while I wouldn’t call it mission-critical to my work, it’s getting there. I would like to hear from readers – what are some less-than-obvious ChatGPT capabilities that you are using to get work done? I’m still anxiously awaiting an easily installed, inexpensive chat/search function that would provide a front-end for searching HIStalk, which contains everything important that has happened in health IT since 2007.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The biggest PCP frustration among poll respondents by far is trying to book an appointment.

New poll to your right or here: How would you grade health IT conferences on their level of presenter diversity? An additional question that is more for commentary than polling – should conferences be held accountable for offering a diverse roster of presenters and panelists when the underlying cohort mostly involves white males? 

Generous donations from Karen, Bill, another Bill, and Mike, with matching funds from third parties and my Anonymous Vendor Executive, fully and anonymously funded these Donors Choose grant requests from teachers who are working in historically underfunded schools:

• A math book series for Ms. K’s middle school class in Fort Stockton, TX.
• STEM station materials for Mr. G’s middle school class in Greenacres, FL.
• STEM activity kits for Ms. G’s elementary school class in Baltimore, MD.
• A lectern for Mr. P’s high school class in Pharr, TX.
• Headphones and math manipulatives for Mr. W’s elementary school class in North Las Vegas, NV.
• Math games for Ms. C’s elementary school class in Jamaica, NY.
• A coding robot and math manipulatives for Ms. K’s elementary school class in Orlando, FL.
• Headphones for Ms. M’s middle school class in Glendale, AZ.
• Home health aide training books for Ms. W’s high school class in La Jara, CO.
• A bilingual STEM center for Ms. R’s elementary school class in Las Cruces, NM.
• Headphones for Mr. S’s elementary school class in Yonkers, NY.
• Headphones for Ms. K’s elementary school class in Tyler, TX.
• Science books for Ms. S’s elementary school class in Natchez, MS.
• STEM books for Ms. P, a librarian at a middle school in Coffeyville, KS.
• An achievement button making machine for Ms. E’s high school class in Goodyear, AZ.
• Books for Ms. K’s high school class in Bronx, NY.
• STEM development activities for Ms. F’s elementary school class in Indian Orchard, MA.
• STEM model building kits for Ms. W’s elementasry school class in South Ozone Park, NY.
• Programmable robots for Ms. J’s elementary school class in San Diego, CA.
• Headphones for Mrs. H’s elementary school class in Kinston, NC.
• Classroom supplies for Ms. G’s elementary school class in Mission, TX.
• Accelerated reading and anti-racism books for Ms. H’s elementary school class in Shreveport, LA.

You can do these things to support HIStalk:

• Join my spam-free mailing list.
• Connect on LinkedIn and join Dann’s HIStalk Fan Club, which tells me when you change jobs and gives you Swiftie-level influence points for favors asked.
• Tell my sponsors, or potential ones, that you value their support of what I do.
• Share news, rumors, and intriguing insights.
• Consider being interviewed if you are full of brash, eminently quotable expertise.
• Companies, consider booking my Top Spot Ad that lords over the entire HIStalk page and earns a commensurate number of reader clicks.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Hippocratic AI launches a development partnership program that includes OhioHealth, Roper St. Francis Healthcare, Evernow, HarmonyCares, and Guidehealth.

Potrero Medical, which offers medical devices and analytics for monitoring acute kidney injury, files Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Announcements and Implementations

Black Book posts results from its healthcare cybersecurity satisfaction analysis, with the overall KPI leader being CrowdStrike. The report concludes that cybersecurity solutions that were purchased before the beginning of 2023 may already be outdated in their ability to protect against hacks and breaches, with remote patient access systems and telehealth offering new entry points for cyberattacks. 

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart takes first and third place among 115 teams that competed in the AWS re:Invent Jam.
• Nordic expands its partnership with Fortified Health Security to strengthen security operations and deploy global response capabilities for customers.
• Wolters Kluwer Health expands its Sentri7 clinical surveillance suite to include the Sentri7 Drug Diversion solution, formerly Flowlytics from Invistics.
• Gartner names NTT Data a Leader in its 2023 Magic Quadrant Managed Network Services and a Leader in its 2023 Magic Quadrant Network Services, Global.
• Nuance shares success stories from early adopters using its PowerScribe Smart Impression generative AI solution for radiology reporting.
• Nym names Hen Sinai junior backend engineer, Adi Sivan software engineer, Yuval Shtechman medical data analyst, Barbi Elmore director of product, Zack Hechtman customer success associate, and Yuval Tov junior backend engineer.
• Rhapsody announces a long-term partnership with Blackford Analysis to enhance Blackford’s medical AI solutions platform by providing deeper clinical workflow integrations.
• RxLightning names Christopher Hemminger cloud data architect and Karen Outlaw project manager.

A Black Book Market Research survey of top cybersecurity customers ranks solutions according to highest user satisfaction. HIStalk sponsors include:

• Clearwater – cybersecurity advisors and consultants / compliance and risk management solution.
• Fortified Health Security – cybersecurity awareness training and education.
• CloudWave – outsourcing and security networked managed services.
• PerfectServe – secure communications platforms: physician practices
• Spok – secure communications platforms: hospitals and health systems.

Blog Posts

• How Technology Can Help Providers Get Paid and Common Challenges (CereCore)
• Two years later – what one hospital on Cerner learned from automating intake, registration, authorizations and more (Notable)
• How University of Michigan Health-West improved clinician wellbeing (Nuance)
• The Growth Equation – Boosting Your Operations to Scale for Growth (Netsmart)
• Before implementation, think about prehabilitation (Nordic)
• How Patient Journey Mapping Improves the Patient Experience (PerfectServe)
• Up in the Cloud: Future-Proofing Healthcare Data with Productive Edge and Redox (Redox)
• How Healthcare Organizations Can Offset the Labor Shortage with Sensing-as-a-Service (SmartSense by Digi)
• Supply Chain Experts Explore Top Priorities for Healthcare in 2024 (Symplr)
• Navigating SupportCaregiving.org: Insights and Federal Strategies on Caregiving (Trualta)
• Waystar Advisory Board: 5 takeaways from our inaugural True North conference (Waystar)

Contacts

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

News 12/1/23

Top News

Health insurers Cigna and Humana are negotiating a merger that they hope to finalize in the next four weeks, according to insider reports.

The companies are sure to face anti-trust challenges as they did in their failed 2015 merger attempt.

Humana focuses on Medicare Advantage plans, while Cigna recently announced its intention to exit that business to focus on its pharmacy benefit and commercial insurance offerings.

The value of the combined companies would approach $140 billion. Cigna and Humana shares dropped on the news.

Reader Comments

From Ex-HHC: “Re: Donors Choose. Can you re-post donation instructions?” I will, while adding that while I use the term “my Donors Choose project,” I don’t actually have a project and I don’t actively bug readers to support one (that constitutes “virtue signaling,” as one cynical reader stung me with). It’s a great cause in which you are donating directly to Donors Choose, I apply matching money from my Anonymous Vendor Executive, and I fully and anonymously fund STEM-related teacher projects of my choosing as that person requests. Above is a photo from Ms. D, whose Ohio middle school class has already received a tablet and 30 sets of headphones courtesy of Mark’s donation just two days ago. Anyway, long story short (too late):

• Purchase a gift card in the amount you’d like to donate.
• Send the gift card by the email option to mr_histalk@histalk.com (that’s my Donors Choose account).
• I’ll be notified of your donation and you can print your own receipt from Donors Choose for tax purposes.
• I’ll pool the money, apply all matching funds I can get, and publicly report here the projects I funded, including occasional teacher follow-up messages and photos.

From Litany of Brittanys: “Re: winter holiday. What was that one you mentioned last year?” That holiday is Yalda, which falls on December 21. Below is my explanation from last year, but I’ll also throw in an interesting and slightly related factoid — while the winter solstice signifies the fewest hours of daylight for those of us who are north of the equator, the earliest sunset occurs on December 8, for reasons that are too astronomically complicated to explain here. Back to Yalda:

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m getting inquiries lately from companies that want to pay me to do a video interview or podcast with an executive, highlight their product, or feature their press release. Other sites do this without disclosing the paid arrangement, they say, so they seem surprised when I tell them that my integrity isn’t for sale. I appreciate the interest, but it’s a no.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Meanwhile, a KFF article notes that some hospitals are dropping their acceptance of Medicare Advantage plans — even as seniors more frequently choose that alternative to traditional Medicare — because of low and late payments and bureaucratic approval and denial processes. This could be a significant issue because it isn’t easy for a consumer to switch from an MA plan to traditional Medicare with a Medigap policy, potentially leaving them insured but with no in-network hospital nearby.

Experian acquires Wave HDC, which captures patient insurance and demographics at registration.

Stat’s Bob Herman notes that UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Health provider division now employs 90,000 physicians, up from 70,000 one year ago.

Mayo Clinic will spend $5 billion to redesign its Rochester campus that features “health neighborhoods” that are more convenient for extended care and for patients who have multiple health issues. Technology will play a key role, Mayo says. The plan is built around Rochester’s “Destination Medical Center” 20-year economic development plan, not that US healthcare wasn’t already confusing enough to the rest of the developed, longer-lifespan world without hinging regional growth on selling medical services.

People

PeriGen hires John Parker, MD (OhioHealth) as chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Duke Health begins its use of Microsoft Copilot, with IT employees developing Microsoft 365 use cases involving email management, editing and creating documents and presentations, and creating summaries of virtual meetings.

St. Joseph’s / Candler Health System (GA) goes live on Meditech Expanse ambulatory and launches implementation of Expanse Oncology.

HFMA and FinThrive launch a peer-reviewed, five-stage Revenue Cycle Management Technology Adoption Model, with initial analysis indicating that 42% of health systems are at Stage 1.

HIMSS announces Alabama football coach Nick Saban as the HIMSS24 closing keynote speaker, trying to pre-refute “any willing celebrity” smirks with the dubious explanation that there exist “so many parallels from football to healthcare.” I’ll consider this as validation of my decision to skip attending the boat show for the first time in forever. The HIMSS24 exhibitor count is at 483 versus the 1,216 of HIMSS23, which suggests either exhibitor procrastination or a disastrous drop under conference operator (or is it owner?) Informa Markets.

A new KLAS report on PACS finds that 20% of health systems plan to replace their systems in moving from legacy systems and moving toward enterprise imaging strategies. Sectra leads by far in purchase energy due to peer recommendations, strong customer relationships, and EHR integration, although cost considerations sometimes discourage smaller organizations. Visage Imaging’s cloud-based diagnostic viewer is gaining momentum among large health systems who like its radiologist-friendly user interface and strong integration, although its recently introduced vendor-neutral archive has seen limited adoption. (click the image to enlarge).

Other

A survey finds that 72% of consumers are unable or unwilling to pay their medical bills immediately, two-thirds of them because of money problems. Half of the respondents say they have postponed care and prescription fills due to cost, while one-third have no confidence in their ability to pay a medical bill over $500.

Tech expert Robert Scoble highlights how a Texas prison is using AI mental health conversation analysis software from Savantcare to address the 1,300 inmates who are being unconstitutionally held because they can’t mentally understand the charges they face.

Sponsor Updates

• Health Data Movers announces a strategic partnership with Workday as a certified Workday Advisory Services Partner.
• CHIME selects Meditech vice chair Howard Messing for its CHIME Foundation Industry Leader Award.

Blog Posts

• The Sequoia Project Annual Meeting Recap: This Event Was FHIR! (HealthMark Group)
• Unlocking the full picture of patient care: The power of linked, comprehensive, and actionable insights (Inovalon)
• Get Proactive About Security with Malware Emulation (Keysight Technologies)
• From Data to Decision: How AI Streamlines Early Identification of Those at Highest Risk of Progression from Prediabetes to Type 2 Diabetes (Lucem Health)
• 5 Reasons Why Offering Online Bill Pay is a Game Changer for Your Healthcare Facility (Medhost)
• Maximizing data at Palo Pinto General Hospital (Meditech)
• 5 Keys to Choosing the Best Rehab Therapy EMR Solution (Net Health)
• Industry Insights: Mandi Wasik, Availity’s Data Connectivity Program Manager, on Clinical Data Aggregation, Quality Improvement, and DAV Certification (Availity)

Contacts

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

News 11/29/23

Top News

Ardent Health Services works to recover from a November 23 ransomware attack that forced it to take its computer systems offline across its six-state network of 36 facilities.

The health system specifically mentions in its latest data security update that it is working to restore access to Epic.

Numerous of its providers resorted to ED diversions and postponing surgeries and appointments.

Reader Comments

From Drupal: “Re: community hospitals that offer oncology and don’t use Epic or Cerner. I am looking to speak to a hospital contact who understands the market opportunity for chemotherapy ordering, medication preparation, and patient-reported outcomes. Can you offer advice or contacts?” I’ll ask readers who have ideas to contact me and I’ll connect you.

From Reese Peace: “Re: AI. It seems that use cases have polarized to the complex and theoretical on one end and and the rather dull effectiveness boosters on the other.” I expect initial AI successes to focus on that latter category, where solutions could be developed that are inexpensive, non-threatening to clinicians, free of FDA oversight, and non-intrusive to patients. Examples:

• Journal article search, although that will be limited by the paywalls of for-profit journals that will expect to be paid for allow their content – which was provided free by authors, many of them working under taxpayer grants – to be used for AI training and then for user access.
• EHR search, including PDFs and free text. This is simple and already being done to unknown extent.
• Creating patient-facing documents, including those specifically create clinician dictation and then formatted and optimized for patient-level reading.
• Pre-visit triage and summarization. In-person visits could be prefaced, as with telehealth, by a pre-visit chatbot interview or data collection to avoid wasting encounter time.
• Encounter transcription and data extraction, as with ambient clinical documentation.
• Continuous monitoring of data from wearables and remote patient monitoring.
• Streamline insurer prior authorization and initial claim validation.
• Monitoring during surgery with visual and audio alerts or responses to questions.
• AI-powered robotics for manual tasks.
• Improving and personalizing available clinical decision support.
• Inbox management, which is clearly the frontrunner for AI value in healthcare.
• Guide non-physicians through patient encounters via protocols and guidance under some level of supervision.
• Predict workload, staffing needs, patients who are likely to miss appointments, and scheduling preferences.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I added a previously unnoticed sort-by-date option to the HIStalk search function, which is powered by Google Site Search and is listed as a link at the top of the page. I’ll definitely use this.

Bitdefender offered me a one-year renewal for my soon-expiring five-device Total Security for $50, after which a quick Google search led me to find a two-year renewal on Best Buy for $31. You can buy a renewal at any time, and paste the key code into Bitdefender Central, where it tacks the additional years onto your expiration date.

Reader Mark once again celebrated the holidays with a generous donation to my Donors Choose teacher grant project, which I then boosted with GivingTuesday matching funds as well as those from my Anonymous Vendor Executive to fully and anonymously fund these STEM-related projects:

• Noise-cancelling headphones for Ms. D’s middle school science academy class in Youngstown, OH.
• Math games for Ms. O’s elementary school class in Rosharon, TX.
• Math manipulatives for Ms. R’s elementary school class in Redford, MI.
• Hydroponic gardening kits for Mr. K’s high school class in Burton, MI.
• STEM manipulatives for Ms. I’s elementary school class in Far Rockaway, NY.
• Gardening kits for Mr. H’s elementary school class in Paterson, NJ.
• STEM activity kits for Ms. A’s elementary school class in Savannah, GA.
• Math puzzles for Mx. R’s middle school class in Saint Cloud, MN.
• Geometry review books for Mr. H’s high school class in Bronx, NY.
• A laptop speaker for Ms. G’s elementary school class in San Lorenzo, CA.
• Math manipulatives for Ms. R’s elementary school class in Magna, UT

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

India-based Tata Consultancy Services, which was just assessed with $140 million in punitive damages for stealing Epic’s intellectual property by having its employees pretend to be hospital consultants, is hit with a similar $210 million judgment involving insurance software. The lawsuit alleges that a TCS employee copied a competing firm’s source code and documentation and sent it to colleagues who were struggling to figure out how to perform an insurance calculation.

Bloomberg says that Amazon has failed to disrupt healthcare while over-promising and under-delivering. Current and former employees say the company is overconfident that it can beat healthcare incumbents without hiring healthcare expertise or listening to experts, adding that its recently announced One Medical discount for Prime members isn’t much of a development.

Sales

• Baptist Memorial Health Care (TN) chooses Optimum Healthcare IT to lead its EHR implementation on Amazon Web Services.

People

PointClickCare Technologies promotes Travis Palmquist to SVP/GM of emerging markets.

Sondra Hornsey, MS (Stanford Health Care) joins Vanderbilt University Medical Center (TN) as chief privacy officer.

Hearst promotes Carolyn Simpkins, MD, PhD to president of its Zynx Health business.

Shally Pannikode, MBA (Liberty Mutual) joins Zelis Health as CTO.

Erica Drazen, MS, ScD — who retired in 2013 after a 40+ year health IT career that included roles at Arthur D. Little, First Consulting Group, and CSC — died November 25. She was 77. 

Announcements and Implementations

Klickitat Valley Health (WA) launches virtual consult technology from Eagle Telemedicine to support its ED, hospitalists, and nurses.

Nym makes its autonomous medical coding technology available to inpatient facilities.

Glacial Ridge Health System will go live on Meditech Expanse this week.

Amazon Web Services announces Amazon Q, a generative AI assistant for businesses.

Other

A technology conference is exposed for using AI to create fictitious female speakers to create the illusion of gender diversity and attract presenters who decline events with all-male lineups. The for-profit DevTernity conference brags that it selects speakers using the “Hollywood Principle” in which it replaces calls for papers with “don’t call us, we’ll call you.” The conference organizer says it was too hard to get women speakers for the $870 online conference and the phony bios were just a placeholder. The conference was cancelled after speakers and sponsors pulled out. The conference organizer is also suspected of creating a fake female tech Instagram influencer who mostly showed skin as she pitched the conference.

A South Dakota hunting lodge operator is gored by a bison and is evaluated and treated in the ambulance from an ED doctor who was 140 miles away. Jim Lutter, 67, was picked by a ambulance squad volunteer, who left his hardware store job to respond to the 911 call and used the state-funded ambulance telehealth system to get ED physician instructions and then alert the hospital that they were coming.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Transforming Care with RPM Seamless Integration.”
• Sydney Adventist Hospital in Australia enhances its MRI appointment utilization and patient care through Foxo and Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging platform.
• Dimensional Insight announces that it has been recognized as the top outsourced analytics solution in Black Book Market Research’s annual outsourcing services survey.
• Trillium Health Partners in Canada adds AI-as-a-Service capabilities from Sectra to its Sectra enterprise imaging technology.
• SouthLake Regional Health Centre clinicians in Ontario reduce time spent on medication reconciliation by 64% using DrFirst’s MedHx powered by SmartSuite technology, according to the results of a recent pilot study.

Blog Posts

• The Evolution of Patient Access: A Look at the Modern Landscape (Vyne Medical)
• Future-forward healthcare: Data platform considerations (Arcadia)
• Trusted Data Sharing and Collaboration for Health and Biomedical Research – Pick your acronym (Aridhia)
• Cameras and Computer Vision: Accurately Capturing Human Movement with Injury Prevention Tech (Bardavon)
• Beyond the Media Buy: Opening the Pandora’s Box of Point-of-Care Program Measurement (ConnectiveRx)
• Why Healthcare Organizations Should Pursue a Multi-Cloud Strategy (CloudWave)
• The Role of Data in Healthcare Performance Improvement (Dimensional Insight)
• The Evolution of Healthcare Technology Roles: A Guide for Hiring Managers (Direct Recruiters)
• AI, Analytics, and Burnout: CHIME 2023 Fall Forum Insights (Divurgent)
• Optimizing Medication Management Workflows in Your EHR (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/27/23

Top News

The Department of Defense completes the last of 23 MHS Genesis go-live waves.

The military’s final Oracle Health implementation is scheduled for March 2024 at Lovell Federal Health Care Center, which it jointly operates with the VA.

DoD says that its teams are anxious to move on to optimization and applying analytics at the site and enterprise levels.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents aren’t optimistic that any of the usual suspects can disrupt healthcare, but they choose retailers as the best hope. I’m intrigued that they chose employers as the least likely given that they are footing much of the bill and have the only significant amount of clout, which they never seem to use.

New poll to your right or here: What is your single biggest frustration with your primary care provider? I’m allowing only one answer to hide the noise of problems that aren’t the main one.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

London-based Phare Health, which offers medical coding tools, raises $3.1 million in a seed funding round.

Sales

• Memorial Hermann Health System will implement Laudio’s worklfow automation tool for frontline leaders and has invested in the company.

Announcements and Implementations

Researchers develop a wireless acousto-mechanical system whose wearable sensors continuously transmit data about body movement sounds such as breathing, digestion, and cardiac activity.

London-based digital-first home healthcare provider Cera says it will provide 5 million care visits this winter to help address hospital capacity problems. Founder and CEO Ben Maruthappu, BM BCh. MPH was trained at London School of Hygeine and Tropical Medicine, University of Cambridge, Harvard, and University of Oxford.

A health official in China touts the country’s digital health success, listing online diagnosis and treatment, prescription services, fever clinic information, and hospital wait time.

A16z lists the jobs that AI could perform to reduce provider burnout and increase effectiveness, which it says should be supported by CMS in the form of increased payment for AI-assisted or augmented care (click the image to enlarge).

Privacy and Security

Saint Joseph’s Medical Center (NY) pays $80,000 to settle HHS OCR charges that it provided photos and information of three patients in April 2020 to the Associated Press for a COVID-19 story without their approval.

A notice filed by Virgin Pulse-owned Welltok says that the personal information of 8.5 million people was exposed in a breach of its Moveit file transfer system. Affected customers include BCBS plans, Sutter Health, Stanford Health Care, and The Guthrie Clinic. Virgin Pulse acquired the company in November 2021.

Other

Politico notes that a physician shortage will force the federal government to stitch together a primary care system that is delivered by nurses, physician assistants, and virtual visits, with no promise that people can get, much less keep, a regular doctor. Long appointment waits are sending sick people to the ED, urgent care, or pharmacy-located clinic where services are purely transactional with no promise of prevention or taking the patient’s personal or even medical history into account.

Cigna creates public outcry when it denies transplant coverage to a 47-year-old woman who was being prepped for a double lung transplant after being rushed to Vanderbilt University Medical Center when a matching donor had been found. VUMC sent her home and took her off the transplant waitlist. Cigna had previously approved the procedure, but found that the woman had the unapproved condition of terminal cancer. As is often the case, the insurer paid more attention to the bad press than to the patient and doctors in reversing its decision that it declared to have been an “error.” The patient now requires additional tests, the donor lungs are no longer available, and her only hope is to be placed back on the waitlist. Cigna got the black eye, while VUMC has drawn no public ire for declining to perform the transplant in the absence of Cigna’s willingness to pay.

Sponsor Updates

• Health Data Movers appoints Curtis Cole, MD (Cornell University) to its board.
• Through partnerships with Redox and Xealth, Tidepool develops EHR integrations for its diabetes data visualization software.
• Five9 will present at the UBS Global Technology Conference November 29 in Phoenix and the Barclays Global Technology Conference December 7 in San Francisco.
• Fortified Health Security names Kameron McNicholas senior SOC engineer.
• Health Data Movers names Curtis Cole (Cornell University) to its Board of Directors.
• Healthcare IT Leaders releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Leading Through Growth and Change.”
• Inovalon develops Converged Analytics Benchmarking to provide health plans with monthly determinations of their relevant national and state benchmarking for quality measurement and improvement initiatives.
• InterSystems launches its HealthShare Health Connect Cloud solution in New Zealand.
• A recently published study on brain health, “Using digital assessment technology to detect neuropsychological problems in primary care settings,” features Linus Health’s Core Cognitive Evaluation digital assessment technology.
• Nordic names Claire Staple VP of strategy and country manager in Ireland.

Blog Posts

• ECW – Your AI-powered EHR (EClinicalWorks)
• Tech-Enabled Health Equity: Bridging Language Barriers in Health Education (Healthwise)
• Prevention is Key: How AI-driven Early Detection Can Enhance Population Health Outcomes (Lucem Health)
• The Hidden Recipe for Successful EHR Implementation (Medhost)
• Expanse Genomics: How we’re extending our industry-leading solution (Meditech)
• New Policy Changing the Mental Health Landscape: Better Mental Health Care, Lower-Cost Drugs, and Extenders Act (NeuroFlow)
• How NTT Data & Carpl.ai are revolutionizing medical imaging (NTT Data)
• DSN: Healing the Healthcare System (OmniSys)
• How Patient Journey Mapping Improves the Patient Experience (PerfectServe)
• Optimizing Workflows: 8 Benefits for Faster and Easier Credentialing (QGenda)
• California says goodbye to fax machines. Hello to DxF. (Redox)
• 6 Reasons Your Risk Reporting System is Failing You (Symplr)

Contacts

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

News 11/22/23

Top News

NHS England awards a consortium that includes Palantir and Accenture a five-year, $415 million contract to develop and operate the Federated Data Platform data-sharing platform across NHS trusts and care sites.

Medical groups and other watchdogs immediately expressed concern that a US firm that is best known for providing military and espionage software to the CIA and foreign governments will be handling sensitive patient information. They also noted that founder and chair Peter Thiel in on record as declaring that NHS “makes people sick” and should be privatized. He has also stated that NHS support by Britons is a form of “Stockholm syndrome.”

The contract, which follows extensive government lobbying by Palantir, does not include Scotland or Wales.

PLTR shares dropped on the news, valuing the company at $43 billion.

Reader Comments

From Ossifier: “Re: Forward Health’s CarePods. Maybe when they fail in the US and the company pivots once again, they can offload their unused pods to the French government.” France’s national railway will install appointment-only Loxamed telemedicine setups in 300 train stations that are located in medical deserts by 2028, which will feature on-site nurses who use connected medical equipment and sessions with virtual physicians, with services are billed to the national social security system. France’s physician union has objected strongly to the plan, saying that “There can be no good medicine that comes from the touch of a button, at a distance, from a doctor who does not know the patient.” Loxamed was formed in March 2020 by an equipment rental company to offer COVID-19 diagnosis and eventually vaccination. My take is that people could initiate their own telemedicine visits from home, so the advantage of this plan is the ability to be evaluated by an in-person nurse who can take vital signs and perform assessment before the remote physician takes over.

Webinars

December 7 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Waystar + Epic Workflow 101: How to Maximize your Epic Investment.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Christine Fontaine, solution strategist, Waystar; Lori Anderson, channel partner director, Waystar; Ashley Rose, associate director of client consulting, Waystar. Many users are curious about enhancing their Epic environments, but how do you know which features your organization needs? During this session, you will be provided a proven process to help you evaluate Epic-related decisions, tangible examples of need versus want criteria, and concrete steps to extract full value from Epic workflows and environment.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

AstraZeneca launches Evinova, a separate business that will further scale digital health solutions that are already used by the pharmaceutical company; and develop and market digital products in the areas of clinical trials, remote patient monitoring, and therapeutics.

UpHealth will sell Cloudbreak Health and its Martti telehealth language interpretation services to private equity firm GTCR for $180 million. UpHealth is in the process of selling off or winding down certain service lines, with its focus now on its behavioral health business in Florida. Several UpHealth subsidiaries filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September.

Novant Health (NC) will buy three South Carolina-based hospitals from Tenet Healthcare in a $2.4 billion deal that includes RCM services from Tenet subsidiary Conifer Health Solutions.

App-based chronic care company Vida Health raises $28.5 million, bringing its total raised to $216 million.

Clinical notes analysis startup Layer Health raises $4 million in seed funding. Its debut product, Distill, helps clinicians find and submit data to clinical registries. The company’s five co-founders all have MIT-related backgrounds in AI, machine learning, and computer science.

Likely sensing a vacuum since the departure of Cerner for greener Oracle pastures, non-profit Digital Health KC hopes to help launch or lure 20 digital health companies to the Kansas City area using $4 million in grants.

Sales

• NYU Langone signs a $115 million contract with Philips for enterprise informatics, pathology, AI-powered diagnostic imaging, and patient information technologies; as well as its Capsule Medical Device Information Platform.
• Oregon Health & Science University will implement Visage Imaging’s Visage 7 enterprise imaging software.
• McAlester Regional Health Center (OK) selects Smart Analytics from Sixth Sense Intelligence.
• Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC will use IT infrastructure services and technology from Kyndryl.
• The Florida Department of Children and Families will implement Juno Health’s behavioral health EHR at Florida State Hospital.
• Teladoc Health will open a virtual ED in a rural, remote part of Canada’s Newfoundland Labrador Health Services under a two-year, $16 million contract in which the patient will first see an in-person clinician, then be diagnosed and treated virtually.

People

Joe Murad (WithMe Health) joins Vida Health as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Washington County Hospital and Clinics in Iowa goes live on Epic.

Fifteen faculty members of UTHealth’s bioinformatics school are awarded $31 million in grants. $19 million of which came from NIH’s National Institute on Aging.

Lincata launches an in-room hospital entertainment system that features patient engagement and health system marketing opportunities. The company’s executive board chair is industry long-timer Tom White, MBA, who is best known as co-founder and CEO of Phynd until the company was acquired by Symplr.

Government and Politics

Tata Consultancy Services will pay $140 million in punitive damages to Epic related to a 2014 case in which Epic accused TCS of downloading confidential material from UserWeb by having its employees pretend to be Epic customer consultants. The original award of $940 million has been reduced several times in court reviews. The US Supreme Court rejected TCS’s appeal of punitive damages on Monday, where the company argued that it had already paid $140 million in compensatory damages from the original award.

HHS OIG warns consumers that scammers are cold calling Medicare enrollees to obtain their Medicare ID, after which they are signed them up for phony remote patient monitoring services that are billed monthly from pharmacies or durable medical equipment companies.

Other

The South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland celebrates the birth of the first baby born with an Encompass digital health record. The trust went live on Epic November 9. The system will be rolled out to remaining trusts over the next 18 to 24 months.

An AvaSure study of virtual patient sitting technology versus in-person sitting at Providence finds that virtual sitting is correlated to lower levels of burnout.

KFF’s Bill of the Month involves a woman’s first prenatal checkup, during which the nurse suggested having the standard panel of blood tests drawn at an office down the hall for convenience. The office belongs to a hospital that is run by religious non-profits Texas Health Resources and AdventHealth, whose lab billed her insurance at hospital rates for $9,500. Anthem BCBS negotiated the price to $6,700 and paid $4,300, leaving the patient to owe $2,400 for standard blood chemistry and STI tests. The average price of a CBC in Texas is $6 in an independent lab and $58 in a hospital, while the hospital in this case billed her insurance $207. She spent 10 months trying to ask questions, during which the hospital sent her bill to collections and ignored complaints that she had filed with the state’s attorney general. The hospital responded only when KFF started asking questions for its story, after which it cancelled all charges that, as it turn out, had been incorrectly submitted as diagnostic rather than preventive, which BCBS would have covered even at the inflated prices. Experts contacted by KFF questioned how well insurers negotiate hospital contract prices.

Sponsor Updates

• Baker Tilly publishes a new case study, “Healthcare organization tests technical security controls and internal security awareness training with phishing campaign.”
• Bamboo Health adds discharge summaries to its Pings real-time care notifications platform.
• Prisma Health integrates Artera’s patient communications platform with Gozio Health’s location-aware mobile engagement platform.  
• The Northern Virginia Technology Council recognizes DrFirst as a top technology company for the fourth year in a row.

Blog Posts

• How a Growth Mindset Can Drive Automation Success in Healthcare (Vyne Medical)
• The Journey to True Autonomous Coding (AGS Health)
• How the data lakehouse will revolutionize healthcare (Arcadia)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/20/23

Top News

NextGen Healthcare files WARN documents indicating that it will lay off 84 employees it St.Louis in the first months of next year.

Meanwhile, executives who are cashing in on the November 10 sale of the company to private equity firm Thoma Bravo by selling shares include President and CEO David Sides ($15 million), CFO James Arnold ($12 million), and board member Srinivas Velamoor ($9 million).

Reader Comments

From AnInteropGuy: “Re: Veradigm. Continues to miss their filing deadlines and met with NASDAQ about the delisting situation — no news on how they will rule — but they have not been able to restate any of the questioned quarters. Leadership continues to say ‘very close’ but the remains substantially quiet on what the timeline looks like. Their last claim in September was that they would file by early November ahead of the NASDAQ meeting. That was before the announcement of the delisting notice so they had been made aware that they were facing delisting. They are still trying to gather contracts, payments, etc for the previous quarters and years — now apparently reaching all the way back to 2015.” A final SEC de-listing hearing was held on Thursday, but the decision hasn’t been announced. I don’t know the extent of accounting work that is required, but it seems strange that a publicly traded company whose shares are about to be de-listed can’t muster the resources, as other firms have done, to meet ASC 606 revenue recognition requirements. As a skeptic, I wonder if other motivations may be in play.

From Epson: “Re: Forward Health’s CarePod. I’m interested in predictions.” OK, here’s mine: (a) the company will deploy less than 250 devices versus its 3,200 goal; (b) issues with maintenance, limitations of the clinical model it was developed around, and lack of member loyalty will stall rollouts and raise questions about the viability of that business; and (c) Forward will try yet another pivot and the CarePods will move from malls to landfills given that no other company would have a use for them. I could be wrong, but Forward Health’s core business doesn’t seem to be sound enough to warrant gadgetary distraction, not to mention that as an N-of-one analysis I can’t see myself paying for such a service as described.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents report seeing diminished influence across many of the newly established C-level technology roles within healthcare systems. What’s your experience with these positions being eliminated or downgraded? A LinkedIn wizard could probably find examples.

New poll to your right or here: Who is most likely to disrupt the US healthcare system to benefit patients?

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1. Join my spam-free mailing list to be first in the know.
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4. Share news, rumors, and intriguing insights.
5. Consider being interviewed, particularly if you’re a frontline worker or researcher.

Also, for companies that have 2023 marketing funds to spend, we can bill you now and you can send your ad and materials later when you are ready. You get a full 365 days of sponsorship starting when your ad is posted. I’m mentioning this because Lorre has received the question several times this week.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Digital staffing platform vendor Aya Healthcare acquires Winnow AI, which identifies physicians who are open to new positions and relocation who match open roles.

Mass General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s announce that they cannot accept new primary care patients because their appointment waitlists are months long.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Stanford Health Care, and Children’s Medical Center of Dallas implement Wolters Kluwer’s Ovid Synthesis for evidence-based practice workflow applications.

Open AI’s board fires high-profile co-founder and CEO Sam Altman for unspecified reasons in a surprise announcement that wasn’t shared in advance with investors such as Microsoft, which owns 49% of the company. The rumored issue was product safety versus profit and Altman’s work to raise funds to create AI hardware companies outside of OpenAI’s non-profit oversight. Greg Brockman, co-founder, president, and board chair, was removed from the company’s board and then resigned. Several senior scientists also quit. The blowback has reportedly convinced the board to negotiate for Altman’s return, although he says he’s not that interested and would require significant governance changes to return. Meanwhile, the action that has likely cost Open AI much of its $80 billion valuation and the confidence of developers who use its products has also resulted in speculation that Altman and the other departed executives will immediately start a competing company, along with speculation that Microsoft should save OpenAI by buying the rest of it.

People

Lynsi Garvin, MSN, RN (Google Health) joins Intermountain Health as associate chief clinical information officer.

Adrienne Morrell (SCAN Health Plan) joins MRO Corp. as VP of governmental affairs.

Announcements and Implementations

Oracle will hold a one-day health summit on February 13 in Nashville, where the company is significantly expanding.

A new report from Center for Connected Medicine at UPMC finds that the patient engagement potential of health system-owned ambulatory pharmacies is being threatened by drug chains and technology firms that offer more convenient and innovative services and digital tools. Top operational challenges are 340B limitations and staffing issues, while the biggest consumer issue is lack of physical accessibility due to location, lack of transportation, and limited hours of operation. Top tools include delivery service and text-based refill reminders, while telepharmacy kiosks and self-pickup lockers have low interest.

Government and Politics

Memorial Hermann Health System and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton settle the AG’s investigation into reports that its patient portal could not be accessed by the parents of patients aged 13 to 17. Texas law gives parents and legal guardians the right to access the medical records of their children except in specific circumstances where the child can indicate that they don’t want their information shared. The health system agreed to provide better instructions for accessing family records on its patient portal and also cited its planned migration to Epic.

Other

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, JD says that she has used ChatGPT to contest questionable medical bills. She didn’t say how she used it specifically, but ChatGPT suggests that it can provided detailed breakdown of charges, explain how insurance applies, identify discrepancies, offer negotiation tips, and draft appeal letters.

The Madison paper covers Nurse Disrupted, which offers a virtual nursing platform. The founder and CEO of the eight-employee company is Bre Loughlin, MS, RN, a former bedside nurse and Epic executive.

Sponsor Updates

• Vyne Medical publishes a case study titled “Cloud Fax Reduces IT Burden for Large Health System.”
• Mobile Heartbeat publishes a new customer success story featuring Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital.
• Lucem Health will incorporate AccurKardia’s ECG interpretation software into its Reveal solution to identify high-risk patients.
• NTT Data publishes a new report, “Innovation Index: How North American Organizations are Achieving Growth, Value, and High Performance.”
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Margaret Lozovatsky, MD.”
• PerfectServe congratulates customers Elmhurst Hospital, Beverly Hospital, and UNC Health Rex on receiving 24 consecutive “A” grades for safety from The Leapfrog Group.
• SmartSense by Digi’s second annual Live23 user conference sees a 300% increase in attendance year over year.

Blog Posts

• Overcoming 3 top workforce challenges driving RN turnover (Inovalon)
• Caring for the Caretakers: An Interview with Medhost SVP of Human Resources, Carla Stephenson (Medhost)
• Using Automation to Improve Payer Collaboration: On Air Insights (MRO)
• Intelligent patient experiences, part 4: How effectively can your clinicians manage patient care? (Nuance)
• How to Improve Compliance Processes in RCM with Transparent Medical Coding Automation (Nym Health)
• Beyond Gratitude: Ozark Center’s Transformative Impact on Veterans’ Lives (Netsmart)
• Empower with ServiceNow Knowledge (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Empowering Community Health and Revenue Growth: The Test and Treat Advantage for Pharmacies (OmniSys)
• Six reasons to consider cloud migration (Rhapsody)
• Biosimilars are Changing the Game (Surescripts)
• The Evolution of the CMIO Role in Hospitals & Health Systems (Symplr)
• Finding a Way: The ABC Act’s Aim for Easier Access to Caregiving Resources (Trualta)
• Don’t Miss the Opportunity: G2211 Primary Care Add On Payment in 2024 (VisiQuate)
• From Exhaustion to Empowerment: How to Alleviate Patient Burnout in Healthcare (Vyne Medical)
• Ensure Successful Service Desk Partnerships with Preparation (CereCore)

Contacts

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

News 11/17/23

Top News

VA CIO Kurt DelBene tells a House committee that despite improvements, he has “significant concerns” about Oracle Health related to new incidents, failing to meet standards, end user responsiveness, and workflow.

On the positive side, the VA has had no complete system outages in six months.

Also from the hearing:

• Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) cited a KLAS survey of VA employees in which only 26% said the EHR is available when they need it, leading him to question whether the VA’s help desk makes it too hard for employees to report problems.
• Deputy CIO Laura Prietula, MS, EdD  blamed VA-approved customization of the base Oracle Health platform for its implementation struggle compared to the private sector. She added that the VA is now trying to reverse that customization and go back to out-of-the-box functionality.
• Rosendale cited a report saying that it will take Oracle Health 15 more years to match VistA’s functionality. Prietula responded that she doesn’t think it will take that long.
• Rosendale says that Oracle “hold themselves out as the experts in this field” but the VA’s VistA has 99.9% uptime and “it’s baffling that anyone could pay billions of dollars and set a lower standard.”
• Rosendale noted that the committee invited Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia to attend the hearing, but he didn’t attend or send an alternate.

Reader Comments

From Chip Ludd: “Re: CarePod. Serious Silicon Valley Kool-Aid is being slurped by anyone who thinks this will work.” The likelihood of success for this clinician-less health app kiosk in malls has two dimensions – whether it’s a viable business (which I doubt) or if it’s a medical breakthrough (which I’m sure isn’t the case). My reactions:

• HealthSpot went bankrupt in early 2016 after failing to gain traction for a similar offering even after installing its gadgets at the facilities of its partners Cleveland Clinic and Rite Aid. Higi offers a national network of free Smart Health Stations, but it was acquired for nearly nothing in early 2022 by Babylon Health, whose share price is also approaching near-nothingness. And everybody remembers the endlessly hyped but modestly featured Scanadu Scout tricorder-like device, whose 2017 shutdown after an 18-month study led some to call it Scamadu.
• Memberships cost $99 per month, and don’t include in-person clinic access. Insurance is not accepted.
• Customers still have to drive to a physical location, although finding a parking space at a dying mall shouldn’t be a problem.
• I would be hesitant about having my orifices penetrated by a machine that has a single, non-licensed attendant who will probably be so bored between breakdowns and reboots that they’ll hang out at Cinnabon.
• I assume that the company will need to navigate a regulatory maze in performing scans and blood draws using self-developed equipment that operates without clinician oversight.
• The company is investor-hungry, so it adds the obligatory AI connection – the box will perform AI searches of medical literature and generate a care plan that clinicians review. I’m not sure most of primary and preventive care requires real-time literature review.
• The gadget is a pivot for the company, whose core business is running a few clinic locations that they like to compare Apple Stores.
• The functions the technology can assess are limited compared to what a skilled human can perform in a real examination. Only so many sensors and algorithms are available and approved.
• The target audience seems to be young, worried well people who prefer faceless machines and tons of prevention-focused data or congratulatory test results to interacting with a clinician. That actually is a pretty good business model. Reviews for the company’s in-person clinics are almost all from customers in their 20s and early 30s.
• Forward attracted a fresh $100 million from investors, but this is an entirely different, capital intensive, and less-certain business mode than its actual operating business of running clinics.
• From a societal health perspective, convincing people that running app tests in a mall is equal or better to seeing an actual clinician is not a positive accomplishment, nor is a system that cares so little about consumerism and preventive health that people flee to the healthcare equivalent of a photo booth in front of a defunct Sears.

Also interesting is that the company’s clinics have mediocre reviews from their $149-per-month members, with comments like these making you wonder if investors are watching the company’s member retention rate (independent PCPs, especially direct primary care docs, everything you need for your marketing plan is right here):

• There’s no way to talk to a real human being on the phone, it’s all done through chat, and often the people I were chatting with didn’t understand the issue I was trying to explain to them. Wait times to see a doctor are horrendous, usually longer than 2 weeks. The app that they offer is mediocre and is much worse than record keeping systems used by other medical providers.
• Slow followup on things like bloodwork and other tests. Billing issues. Inconsistencies on providers & quality of care/advice. 10 out of 10 do not recommend.
• Tone def. Limited communication channels – no one available on phone. Virtual experience – not in person. They define your health priorities and disregard the health priorities that are important to you. They do not solicit your medical records – they rely on the patient to share that information. Not data backed guidance. The app is not intuitive – very poor user experience
• At my 1 year checkup recently, all that happened was collection of lab blood by staff and a report on my app without any guidance from my doctor. Fortunately, things are going well for me, but I would like to keep that going. I am looking for more of a partner in healthcare instead of a monitor.
• Initially had potential yet with physician turnover, outsourced labor and a lack of continuity in records and communication you are no better off than dealing with the typical primary care physician. Save yourself the money and perhaps try a different concierge-like medicine platform.
• I had a membership for several years and always had frustrations, mostly about the doctors and their poor advice. Eventually though I got tired of not getting prompt replies and having physicians change repeatedly, the new ones never seeming to bother with reading your history. They contradict each other. It really doesn’t feel safe. For example, they can’t administer the Covid vaccine. They can’t handle simple things like annual skin cancer exams. They take pictures of your moles and send them to someone. They have to send you to a specialist outside of their system for EVERYTHING.

From Dockside: “Re: BJC. I work there and the CEO aid in a town hall this week that the merger with Saint Luke’s in Kansas City is set to close on January 1, 2024. For now, the systems will operate as BJC HealthCare in eastern Missouri and Saint Luke’s Health System in western Missouri.” Unverified, but previously rumored as planned “by the end of the year” The merger would create a 28-hospital, $10 billion health system. I think they’re both running Epic.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m noting with grammarian interest the sudden pervasiveness of the word “lovely,” which I actually kind of like despite (or maybe because of) its time capsule images of grannies sipping tea pinkies-up on lace doilies. I hereby propose the resurrection of the similarly aged “splendid.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Primary care chain Forward Health raises $100 million in growth capital to roll out CarePod, which it calls “the world’s first AI doctor’s office” for members who pay $99 per month for access to the app-equipped kiosks that will be installed in retail locations.

The estates of two deceased individuals sue UnitedHealth Group (UHG), alleging its AI algorithms, which came from its acquisition of NaviHealth in 2020, deny necessary care to Medicare Advantage seniors. The complaint highlights a 90% error rate in the AI system when its decisions are challenged, with the plaintiffs alleging that UHG’s Medicare Advantage patients receive substandard care compared to traditional Medicare patients.

The healthcare business that 3M will spin off in the first half of 2024 will be named Solventum.

Sales

• University of Miami Health System chooses Aidoc to identify and triage abnormalities in patient images.
• Lee Health (FL) will offer virtual urgent care from KeyCare, which patients can launch from MyChart.

People

Elation Health hires Tom Natt (ConnectRN) as chief growth officer.

Greg Tracy. MS joins Wondr Health (ResMed) as CTO.

VCU Health hires Jeffrey Kim, MD (Loma Linda University Health) as CMIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Rimidi will provide its remote patient monitoring technology to Atlanta-based non-profit Brighter Day Health Foundation, which will offer RPM and chronic condition management services to underserved communities from local churches. Rimidi CEO Lucienne Ide, MD, PhD founded the company in 2011, and before her medical training, served as a signals analyst for the National Security Agency.

California health and social data-sharing organization Connecting for Better Health restructures as a non-profit and announces its initial board of directors.

Sectra will integrate its enterprise imaging diagnostic application for radiology with GE HealthCare’s AW Family Advanced Visualization applications.

A new KLAS report on patient engagement finds that patient portals, patient surveys, and telehealth are widely adopted and health systems are moving on to implement provider search and patient self-scheduling. Two-thirds of respondents say their plans involve their EHR vendor, either alone or with third-party solutions, with 58% of Epic-using respondents and nearly as many Meditech customers saying that the vendor aligns with their plans, while one-third of Oracle Health’s customers say the same. Technologies most mentioned for consolidation are virtual care and patient communications.

Privacy and Security

Mail order pharmacy fulfillment vendor Truepill files a breach notice that the information of 2.4 million people was exposed in an August cyberattack.  

Other

Snips from the Digital Health Most Wired 2023 survey:

• Health system IT budgets have stabilized, with most returning to pre-pandemic levels and likely to increase as they acquire technology to address labor shortages, wage inflation, and reduced margins.
• They are looking for solutions that offer a clear, measurable ROI.
• The average Digital Health Most Wired score has increased steadily from 63% in 2019 to 77% in 2023.
• An ever-increasing amount of stored data has increased use of advanced analytics, although often involving multiple vendor solutions across locations and departments, with limited integration.
• End users need to improve their understanding of how to use data, but scaling education programs is hard as systems rapidly evolve.
• Health systems are trying to integrate data from patient-wearable devices into their EHR.
• The role of the CIO is becoming complex as cybersecurity, innovation, and analytics require leadership that may or may not fall under the CIO’s oversight.
• Few large health systems place cybersecurity under the CIO, as 90% of them have a CISO or other VP-level position.

Mark Cuban disagrees with a tweet that says Big Tech won’t disrupt healthcare, offering a detailed response that I’ll summarize:

• Tech companies that claim to “optimize” the system are improving only its rent-seeking aspects.
• Healthcare consolidation has used lack of transparency to “extract rents everywhere and anywhere they can” so that nobody can see who pays how much.
• PBMs and insurers add complexity and are not needed given the ability for employers to contract directly with providers, adding that “is it really insurance if they do everything possible not to pay claims?”
• Providers know that contracts, pricing, and network games that big insurers play are ruining the quality and cost of care, but they are too scared to speak up.
• Employer CEOs don’t understand that they are enabling the status quo by working with incumbents, but they are finally realizing the need to change for financial and employee wellness reasons.

UCLA sues Mattel for reneging on its 2017 pledge to donate $49 million to its children’s hospital, claiming that the toymaker is instead offering a few million dollars plus a bunch of toys. UCLA wants the full $49 million plus damages, but Mattel says the donation was earmarked for adding a new tower to UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital that UCLA decided not to build.

Sponsor Updates

• CHIME gives its 2023 collaboration award to Ellkay and Signature Healthcare. 
• Eric Sellari joins Health Data Movers as account manager.
• Biofourmis and HealthXL publish a report titled “Unlocking the Value of Digital Measures in Drug Development.”
• Ascom Americas names Kim Hendrix, RN regional director, Healthcare Alliance.
• The Outcomes Rocket Podcast features Availity AuthAI CTO Rob Laumeyer, “We Can’t Make Healthcare Error-Free, But We Can Make the Errors More Traceable.”
• AvaSure publishes a new guide, “AI Powered Enhancements for Your Virtual Care Workflow.”
• Nordic releases a new episode of its “In Network” podcast titled “Designing for Health: Interview with Margaret Lozovatsky, MD.”
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at the Medicare Star Ratings Summer December 6-8 in Orlando.
• Bardavon joins the National Safety Council’s TechHub Marketplace.
• Recent KLAS reports recognize Care.ai’s virtual care solutions based on the company’s expert staff, premium hardware, and advanced AI features.
• The This Week in Pharmacy Podcast features CereCore Physician Consultant Charles Bell, DO and CereCore Manager Andrea Corner, PharmD, “Pharmacists and Physicians Refining the EHR.”
• Clinical Architecture releases a new Informonster Podcast, “Documentation in the OR with AORN.”
• KLAS Research’s 2023 Data & Analytics Platforms Performance Report names Dimensional Insight a top performer.
• Divurgent releases a new Vurge Podcast, “Exploring the Power of Data and Analytics in Healthcare.”
• EClinicalWorks announces that Moreno Valley Physician Associates (CA) has successfully implemented its new AI assistant tools.
• First Databank receives the American Medical Informatics Association’s Silver Corporate Partner Award for its contributions to the association and the field of informatics.
• FinThrive relocates its corporate headquarters to Plano, Texas.

Blog Posts

• Minimizing administrative burden to maximize data insights and healthcare impact (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• The RCM Maturity Framework: A Path to Digital Transformation and Operational Excellence (AGS Health)
• Unlock healthcare productivity with data portability: A path to provider well-being and enhanced patient outcomes (Arcadia)
• Addressing Workforce Challenges and Keeping Patients Safer: How CHS is Deploying Virtual Patient Monitoring (AvaSure)
• How Technology Can Help Providers Get Paid and Common Challenges (CereCore)
• The Benefits of AI in Healthcare Are Vast, So Are the Risks (Clearwater)
• Using High-Impact Point-of-Care Messaging Without Third-Party Cookies (ConnectiveRx)
• Finding the Needle in the Tech Stack: What to Look for in a Platform Engineering Services Partner (CTG)
• 3 Takeaways from KLAS Research’s Data and Analytics 2023 Report (Dimensional Insight)
• The Evolving Role of Hiring Managers in Remote Work Environments (Direct Recruiters)
• Strategies to Prevent Coding Denials and Increase Revenue (EClinicalWorks)
• Beyond Alert Fatigue: Understanding Roadblocks to Customizing Medication Decision Support (First Databank)
• Supporting Mental and Behavioral Health (Findhelp)
• Improving the Efficiency of Healthcare RCM: A Key to Financial Health (FinThrive)
• Healthcare cybersecurity threats: October 2023 (Fortified Health Security)
• Hands Off! How You Can Protect Patient Data from Unauthorized Intruders (HealthMark Group)
• Tips for a Blended Content Strategy (Healthwise)

Contacts

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