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?

Five Easy Ways You Can Support HIStalk

1. Join my spam-free mailing list to be first in the know.
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3. Mention HIStalk to your colleagues and vendors or send me a testimonial about its value to you.
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

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

News 11/15/23

Top News

New York Governor Kathy Hochul proposes regulations that would require hospitals to establish a cybersecurity program led by a CISO, assess their cybersecurity readiness, and develop and test response plans.

The state budget includes $500 million for healthcare facilities to upgrade their technology.

Reader Comments

From Kvetcher: “Re: investigative reporting. I would like to see more of that.” I always appreciate reader ideas for doing more, while simultaneously noting that all the writing you see on HIStalk is done by a two of us part-timers, or about 1 FTE, who have to be careful about overcommitting.

From Spock: “Re: SPACS. Maybe you’ve posted before, but I’m curious on the logic and money flow. Seems like I read every day another whose value has declined tremendously.” My SPAC opinions summarized:

1. Special purpose acquisition companies were a popular, backdoor method of going public in a “blank check merger” while offering minimal opportunities for investor due diligence, thus attracting low-quality companies whose financials could pass only superficial examination. SPAC sponsors could and did make wild, unsupported financial projections and lit up their social media accounts with self-serving bunk the SEC couldn’t do anything about it because IPO rules don’t apply to mergers. Most people haven’t noticed that the now-bankrupt WeWork went public via a SPAC merger, taking investors for a rough four-year ride as its valuation sank from $47 billion to less than $100 million while making its former CEO a billionaire (everything you need to know about SPACs is contained in that last sentence).
2. SPACs mostly benefitted their hype-spewing sponsors, who skimmed 20% or more of the overvalued proceeds immediately as their fee and then left less-knowledgeable investors ending up like Halloween night homeowners at their front doors stomping out a flaming bag of excrement .
3. SPACs were legally required to find merger partners within two years or else shut down, and mating became desperate as closing time neared.
4. The result was the companies that couldn’t pass IPO muster often failed spectacularly, leaving investors holding the bag and SPAC sponsors moving on to find new ways to move money from investor pockets to their own.
5. Some of healthcare’s big SPAC mergers were Babylon Health (went public in mid-2021 at a $4.2 billion valuation, since declaring bankruptcy for key businesses and selling parts for scrap); Clover Health (valuation dropped from $7 billion to less than $500 million); Cano Health (once valued at nearly $3 billion, now at $38 million and likely to shut down); 23andMe ($6 billion to $400 million); Butterfly Network ($3 billion to $230 million); Sharecare ($3 billion to $400 million); SOC Telemed ($1 billion to being taken private for $300 million); and ETAO ($1 billion to $17 million).
6. Struggling digital health companies were a favored SPAC target because they were already overhyping their prospects and performance, making them the perfect partner for scammy SPAC sponsors.
7. My takeaway is that SPACs were just another manifestation of greed as usual. Nobody forced investors to buy shares in obviously poor-quality companies – they did so voluntarily hoping to find a greater fool down the road who would buy them at an even more inflated price.

From Bergamoot: “Re: HIMSS. What business are they in selling tech services to Taiwan?” HIMSS sold its annual conference and now seems to harbor ambition for doing global consulting, which doesn’t seem like a core competency of a membership group. They signed a deal with Taiwan’s national insurance organization to provide “subject matter experts, thought leadership, and advice” in cybersecurity, analytics, and national education programs. HIMSS would not come to my mind in thinking of organizations who provide these services regularly and arguably well, although I would likely list the names of companies that support HIMSS financially and now find themselves as its competitors. Maybe HIMSS sees revenue opportunity in offering a marketplace for vendors who pay it for matchmaking them with clients.

From Horse Pistol CIO: “Re: CHIME. Made a pretty big tactical error by running its fall forum from Friday to Sunday. The number of CIOs who exited early was palpable. The final event on Saturday night was basically a vendor fest which is not ideal for anyone. It’s probably not surprising that folks would prefer to not give up an entire weekend for a conference and then have to go to work the very next day. Rumor was that it ran through the weekend due to prior feedback and that they won’t do it again. To me it was a big miss. Lots of heavy hitters were gone by Friday. Bummer.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s funny how much stupider my Alexa devices and Google searches seem now that I’m using ChatGPT to selectively replace them.

Webinars

November 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Scheduling Helped Streamline Memorial Hermann’s Communication.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenter: Amee Amin, MD, hospitalist, Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. Dr. Amin will discuss the challenges she experienced in creating schedules for her team of hospitalists, and how an optimized solution transformed her workflow. Attendees will learn now TMC gleans crucial data and analytics from their scheduling system, the impact of real-time schedules being pushed out to other applications, and how Lightning Bolt’s optimized, auto-generated schedules improve provider satisfaction and work-life balance.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A former employee’s LinkedIn post says that Health Catalyst laid off another 120 employees this week, as suggested in last week’s earnings call in which the company said it would lay off 10% of its people in late Q4. The same call touted the company’s high level of employee engagement and winning five “best places to work” awards. HCAT shares are down 19% in the past 12 months versus the S&P 500’s 12% gain, valuing the company at $456 million.

Henry Schein reports Q3 results: revenue up 3.1%, adjusted EPS $1.05 versus $1.09, falling short of estimates for both even though the quarter was impacted by its October cyberattack. The company lowered full-year revenue and earnings estimates. It says it will file a cyber insurance claim, but its policy has a $60 million limit. Schein expects to restore online ordering next week, which represents most of its business, and said on the earnings call that it hopes to regain the 10 to 15% of its sales that were to customers who order exclusively electronically without a sales rep who took their business elsewhere when systems were offline.

Well Health reports Q3 results: revenue up 40%, adjusted EPS $0.05 versus $0.07.

Hackensack Meridian Health signs a partnership with Amazon’s One Medical primary care service, the latest of a couple of dozen big health systems opening brick-and-mortar locations together, sell One Medical memberships to employers (the same package that Amazon Prime members get for $99 per year), and then the health system gets the referrals for specialty care from all over the state in claiming to offer coordinated care and connected technologies. Amazon doesn’t like low-margin business, so it would be interesting to see contract details to know whether the health systems are paying Amazon for referral exclusivity or a share of the business it generates. Also, this deal seems to be based on signing up employers to pay the membership fee, which would seem to keep the health system from getting referrals of uninsured patients.

MIT spinoff Layer Health comes out of stealth mode with $4 million in funding. Its Distill product uses AI to use unstructured patient data for a variety of chart review tasks.

Sales

• Presbyterian Hospital (NM) chooses the social services referral platform of Unite Us.

People

Availity hires Sean Keneally, MBA (Elevance Health) as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Australian Capital Territory Government notes the one-year anniversary of its Epic go-live, listing statistics about MyDHR use, internal messaging, and turnaround time for diagnostic studies.

Surescripts applies to become a QHIN.

A Stat investigation finds that UnitedHealth group used a computer algorithm to cut off rehabilitation services to Medicare Advantage plan members, threatening to discipline or fire employees who failed to hit a 1% variation target even when Medicare coverage rules warranted more days of service. Ironically, the algorithm that was developed by NaviHealth – a company that UHG acquired in early 2020 – was designed to help patients meet their rehab goals, not to cut off their financial access to it. Algorithm-denied care isn’t exactly the poster child that AI healthcare proponents are seeking.

Marketing and PR firm Amendola Communications wins awards for its work with KeyCare, DrFirst, and Equality Health.

John Muir Health implements Epic integration with Ambience Healthcare’s ambient AI scribing system, which allows clinicians to view their Epic schedule in the Ambience app, record audio of their visits on desktop or mobile, and immediately view and edit AI-generated documentation within Epic.

FDA designates Mednition’s AI early sepsis detection solution as a breakthrough device.

Mercy launches The Chen Chemotherapy Model, which sends a daily text message to outpatient chemotherapy patients and uses their responses about symptoms to proactively manage their care. It was named after former Mercy data scientist Jiajing Chen, PhD, MPH, who developed it before dying of cancer in January 2023 at 42.

Other

The American Medical Association reviews at its interim house of delegates meeting a previously rejected member proposal to ban the corporate practice of medicine. A radiologist member who spoke on behalf of reviewing the measure said,

We are being picked clean by private equity. There are people who don’t know where their next paycheck is even going to come from because their groups have been flipped so often … [This resolution] is protecting both physicians and patients, it is preserving physician autonomy and preventing burnout. Seventy-four percent of physicians [are] employed; just four years ago it was 50 percent. Private equity has spent $1 trillion in the last decade on acquisitions in buying medical practices. We need to have something to talk about with respect to private equity at this meeting.

Andreessen Horowitz predicts that the “Google –> WebMD –> Friend” protocol of patients entering the health system via a doctor friend or relative will be replaced by personalized large language models that will use a few rules to send instructions to third-party software while simulating empathetic guidance. It describes a potential experience in referencing the Baymax healthcare robot from the movie “Big Hero 6,” which it argues could give companies control of revenue streams worth billions of dollars in connecting an LLM to a marketplace of services that consumers can book directly:

One day, you wake up with a hint of a headache and a sniffle. You sneeze. What do you do next? You turn to your Baymax-like app, input your symptoms, and after a few follow up questions, it predicts— given your current location, the weather, your recent sleep scores, your diet, and your personal trends—that you’ve got allergies. It offers you a same-day appointment with a nearby allergist covered by your insurance to confirm the diagnosis. In the meantime, it recommends you try an over-the-counter allergy medication, offering to have it delivered to your house. It orders extra tissues for you, for good measure.

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/13/23

Top News

Doximity reports Q2 results: revenue up 11%, adjusted EPS $0.22 versus $0.17, beating Wall Street expectations for both and sending shares sharply up.

DOCS shares are down 32% in the past 12 months versus the SP& 500’s 12% gain, valuing the company at $4.4 billion.

The company laid off 10% of its employees and reduced revenue guidance in August 2023.

Reader Comments

From Quite the Tenses: “Re: NextGen Healthcare. Thoma Bravo closed on its acquisition and immediately announced a 20% RIF in a town hall meeting. Details to be shared next week.” Unverified, but reported by multiple readers. TB paid $1.8 billion to take NextGen private. The company’s Mirth integration product line didn’t get a lot of airtime in the announcements even though it launched a cloud-based version a few months ago, so I’m wondering how that fits into the new owner’s expectations.

From Big Night: “Re: Amazon One Medical. Why do you call it concierge medicine?” Your $99 per year gets you no medical services except for telehealth visits, and should you show up in one of the company’s limited number of physical locations, either you or your insurance will be paying full price. One Medical’s annual fee was $199, so the only thing new is the $100 discount through Prime. The price is low for concierge medicine, but greater than the $0 memberships that most primary care practices charge. The company also offers Amazon Clinic, which is a marketplace for the telehealth services of paying advertisers. Everybody’s getting overly excited about Amazon’s monetizing of its $4 billion acquisition of One Medical early this year, but it could be a minimally seismic event like when it bought Whole Foods.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents confirm that it is common for health systems to shut down community-needed services that aren’t profitable.

New poll to your right or here: Which position seems to be losing popularity or influence the most in health systems?

I appreciate the comments of Kat McDavitt and Lisa Bari of the Health Tech Talk Show, who recapped my Olive implosion summary and described HIStalk as “still the reigning number 1 health tech hotsheet. Despite the 1998 UI.” That appearance-shaming assessment is accurate and I am pleased in an “all cattle, no hat” sort of way. I like to think of HIStalk’s quirks as being the velvet rope that industry leaders happily sidestep to join their peers in consuming what’s inside, while others flee for prettier, shorter content with all the abbreviations spelled out. 

My polls are mostly for entertainment and to generate timely reaction, but vendors who wrap advertising around a poll they have conducted should include this information to  support validity and thus newsworthiness:

• The way you chose and invited respondents and whether random sampling was involved.
• The sample size and response rate.
• The method of delivery.
• A sample survey instrument so it can be reviewed for bias, quality of wording, and verification that the lofty conclusion is supported by the actual questions.

Webinars

November 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Scheduling Helped Streamline Memorial Hermann’s Communication.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenter: Amee Amin, MD, hospitalist, Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. Dr. Amin will discuss the challenges she experienced in creating schedules for her team of hospitalists, and how an optimized solution transformed her workflow. Attendees will learn now TMC gleans crucial data and analytics from their scheduling system, the impact of real-time schedules being pushed out to other applications, and how Lightning Bolt’s optimized, auto-generated schedules improve provider satisfaction and work-life balance.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Value-based care and population health management company Cano Health reports Q3 results: revenue up 19%, EPS –$91.87 versus $0.23, sending shares sharply down as investors question its ability to stay in business. The company’s market cap is down to $32 million. It went public via a SPAC merger in November 2020 at a $4.4 billion valuation.

Elucid, whose AI-powered imaging analysis system assess cardiovascular diseases, raises $80 million in a Series C funding round.

People

Flatiron Health promotes Nathan Hubbard, MBA to chief business officer.

Courney Starnes, MBA (Saint Luke’s Health System) joins Kaleida Health as SVP/CIO.

CommonSpirit Health promotes Jamie Trigg, MSITM to system VP of primary EHR systems.

CHIME names Shafiq Rab, MD of Tufts Medicine as its 2024 John E. Gall, Jr. CIO of the Year.

Announcements and Implementations

A Healthcare IT Leaders survey of CHIME members finds that while AI adoption is in its early stages, two-thirds plan to implement or pilot projects with 12 to 24 months. Half expect AI to help alleviate worker shortages, while nearly all involve clinicians in their AI decisions.

In Canada, McGill University Health Centre goes back to paper and cancels appointments as its Telus Health Oacis clinical system crashes following a software update.

An AI system is used for the first time to autonomously negotiate a non-disclosure agreement between to companies with no human involvement, which took just a few minutes.

A new KLAS report finds that digital pathology is used in only 5% of US cases, but early users anticipate benefits such as better patient care, increased efficiency for pathologists, faster image access, reduced storage and delivery costs, and new opportunities for reference labs to attract hospital clients. They also foresee digital pathology paving the way for AI-assisted diagnostics, case screening, and improved quality assurance. The majority of these early adopters, typically having 30 or more pathologists, are progressively implementing digital pathology, initially focusing on applications that simplify pathologists’ tasks.

Privacy and Security

Tri-City Medical Center (CA) diverts ambulances following an unspecified cyberattack that is rumored to involve ransomware.

Other

The Verona paper summarizes its annual update from Epic:

• The company added 1,500 employees in 2023.
• Epic will open three new office buildings in 2024 that will provide 1,100 spaces.
• A sixth campus will be opened within two years.
• Software releases for 2023 focused on physician burnout and nurse staffing shortages, which included work with generative AI.
• The company trains 850 people on campus each week.

Sponsor Updates

• MRO sponsors a Stuffed Animal for Charity event at the recent HFMA Region 9 conference, benefiting Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital and Ochsner.
• HIStalk sponsors exhibiting at RSNA 2023, which will take place November 26-30, include Agfa HealthCare, Elsevier, Nuance, QGenda, Rhapsody, Sectra, Visage Imaging, and Wolters Kluwer Health.
• Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare adopts Optimum Healthcare IT’s IT Service Management.
• Wolters Kluwer Health launches Lippincott Partnership for Nursing Education and Testing, which offers a full curriculum suite of educational products and services for prelicensure nursing programs.

Blog Posts

• 3 strategies Cerner EHR-based organizations are using to improve patient access to healthcare (Notable)
• Intelligent patient experiences, part 3: How quickly can your patients get answers and advice? (Nuance)
• Apollo’s Curse: When AI Predicts and Doctors Resist (Nordic)
• Capturing the right data to power better healthcare (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Nurses of Note 2023: The RN Case Manager (PerfectServe)
• Why Healthcare Organizations Should Prioritize Centralized On-Call Scheduling (QGenda)
• Shaping the Future of IT Contracting in Healthcare: A Tale of Two Organizations (Revuud)
• RSNA 2023 spotlight: Sectra empowers improved work-life balance for radiologists (Sectra)
• Congress Eyes Policies to Bolster Pharmacists as Care Providers (Surescripts)
• The Evolution of the CMIO Role in Hospitals & Health Systems (Symplr)
• Visage Soars with CloudPACS at RSNA 2023 (Visage Imaging)
• California’s Path to Better Healthcare: Understanding the CA Data Exchange Framework (DxF) (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 11/10/23

Top News

Indian Health Service chooses General Dynamics Information Technology and Oracle Health for its new EHR, which will replace its VistA-based RPMS.

The 10-year contract is valued at up to $2.5 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: London-based all-female Hawxx, whose chaotic, cathartic punk-tinged alt-metal music addresses themes such as mental health struggles, societal norms regarding appearance and femininity, and why metal needs marginalized voices on stage and in the audience. The music is loud but smart, sometimes resembling Rage Against the Machine and at other times Nightwish. 

Webinars

November 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Scheduling Helped Streamline Memorial Hermann’s Communication.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenter: Amee Amin, MD, hospitalist, Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. Dr. Amin will discuss the challenges she experienced in creating schedules for her team of hospitalists, and how an optimized solution transformed her workflow. Attendees will learn now TMC gleans crucial data and analytics from their scheduling system, the impact of real-time schedules being pushed out to other applications, and how Lightning Bolt’s optimized, auto-generated schedules improve provider satisfaction and work-life balance.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Amazon launches One Medical for Prime, which offers access to its One Medical primary care business for $99 per year, which covers all virtual care visits. It offers little benefit for in-person primary care visits at the 24 One Medical locations since those will continue to be billed to insurance or as out-of-pocket costs. Non-Prime members can continue to sign up for $199 per person for an annual membership, so the Prime offer is really just a $100 annual discount. This would be a good time to remind folks of the difference between direct primary care (you pay your doctor a flat monthly fee that includes most services, easy access, and no use of insurance) versus concierge medicine (you pay to skip the line to see doctors who still bill your insurance or you personally at their usual rates). I have the former and question the value of the latter.

Eleos Health, which offers behavioral healthcare providers AI-powered clinical documentation and insights software, raises $40 million in a Series B funding round.

Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg and other high-profile investors launch Cercle, whose platform organizes unstructured medical data into a standard format to help clinicians develop personalized treatment plans for women’s health, especially fertility care.

CPSI announces Q3 results: revenue flat, EPS –$0.24 versus $0.15, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. CPSI shares have lost 52% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 29% gain, valuing the company at $164 million.

Sales

• Delaware Department of Health and Social Services chooses Findhelp to help residents find substance use disorder and mental health services.
• Resilience Healthcare will implement Altera Digital Health’s Paragon EHR and its Ventus contract management, compliance, and coding solutions.
• Mass General Brigham chooses Best Buy Health to support its hospital at home program with its Current Health care-at-home platform, coordination services, and personal emergency response solutions. 

People

Jeff Park (WellDyneRx) joins Waltz Health as president.

Announcements and Implementations

Enterprise Health announces the Wellby AI assistant to its occupational and employee health solutions, providing clinicians with a concise medical records summary, preparation of standard referral and return-to-work letters, and a proposed care plan based on encounter details.

Health system owned Truveta announces availability of 57 million clinical observations from 2.7 million ECG reports and 1.7 million de-identified patients

KLAS takes its first look at Epic Payer Platform, which extracts clinical data from providers and sends it to payers, finding that all six interviewed customers are satisfied and would buy the solution again.

Privacy and Security

US Radiology pays $450,000 to settle New York State charges that outdated computer hardware allowed a ransomware attack that exposed the information of 92,000 state residents.

Cook County Health notifies 1.2 million patients that their information was compromised in a data theft incident involving its transcription vendor Perry Johnson & Associates. The health system has terminated its relationship with the company.

Five Ontario hospitals whose IT shared services organization was taken offline in a ransomware attack on October 23 say they won’t have systems fully restored until late December. The hospital declined to pay the ransom demanded by the hackers, who have been publishing their patient data online.

Sponsor Updates

• Fortified Health Security and Nordic sponsor Valley Presbyterian Hospital’s golf tournament.
• Inovalon expands its Schedule Management software to include management of third-party agency staff.
• Ampla Health (CA) optimizes operational workflows using EClinicalWorks V12.
• Everbridge secures a new patient in the field of AI, relevant to technology used in analytics dashboards for critical event management software.
• Medical history platform vendor Hona will use Particle Health’s API for medical record retrieval outside of the provider’s EHR.
• First Databank names Andrew Anderson integration specialist, Sarah Callis technical writer, and Pranav Acharya advanced software engineer.
• Clinical Architecture publishes a new episode of its “The Informonster” podcast titled “Documentation in the OR with AORN.”
• Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation solution is listed on the Five9 CX Marketplace.

Blog Posts

• Understanding Nurse-to-Patient Ratios and How They Affect Quality of Care (SnapCare)
• Visage Soars with CloudPACS at RSNA 2023 (Visage Imaging)
• Embracing Technology for Startup Weight Loss and Medical Spa Clinics (EClinicalWorks)
• Addressing Medicare Bad Debt Reimbursement Issues in Healthcare (FinThrive)
• EHR Essentials: 5 Proven Steps for a Successful Epic Implementation (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Considering Cashless Check-Ins for Your Front Desk? (Impact Advisors)
• Can Software Testing Deliver ROI? (Keysight Technologies)
• What to Ask When Choosing a Healthcare Interoperability Partner (Medhost)
• Giving nurses a voice in EHR launch at Boone Health (Meditech)

Contacts

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

News 11/8/23

Top News

Surescripts acquires ActiveRadar, a prescription drug benefits data company that identifies therapeutic alternatives.

ActiveRadar’s original iteration was launched by Safeway Food Stores to help its union employees save money on prescription drugs. It was later sold to a private equity firm and rebranded as RxTE, ultimately becoming a standalone company ActiveRadar in 2017.

Reader Comments

From Poindexter: “Re: Amazon Clinic. I received this email. It’s a big step for Amazon.” The service, which recently expended to cover all 50 states, is not all that innovative since it’s just a virtual marketplace for Amazon’s telehealth partners. Still, Amazon’s reach and experience standardization should boost the business of those participating companies and make telehealth a more widely known option. Amazon sells $50 billion worth of ads each year with high margins, renting online space to feature “sponsored products,” company stores, and display ads within its store pages that steer Amazon customers to bigger-spending vendors, so this aligns with their strategy. Amazon says that 60% of its sales come from independent sellers, and some experts think its ad business will even surpass its cloud revenue.

From Chief Pixel Herder: “Re: chief digital officer. I read that the health system job title is being phased out just about as fast as it was phased in.” It’s probably not a good time to hold a newly created C-level position in money-challenged health systems whose primary expense is labor. I wouldn’t expect them to revert back to old titles for chief digital officers and chief innovation officers, but I can see eliminating those folks who occupy newly created positions. Health systems love chasing trends like making everybody and their brother a VP and now a C-leveler, but at some point the suit proliferation becomes embarrassing when pleading poverty from atop extravagant buildings.

From Sveltese: “Re: Olive. A friend worked for them, his job being to automate the denial of prior authorization requests.” That wouldn’t surprise me, in the vein of the brightest minds of a generation spending their days getting people to click on ads. Put your money on insurers versus patients and doctors in choosing a prior authorization winner.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor QGenda. The Atlanta-based company revolutionizes healthcare workforce management everywhere that care is delivered. QGenda ProviderCloud, a purpose-built healthcare platform that empowers customers to effectively deploy workforce resources, includes solutions for scheduling, credentialing, on-call scheduling, room and capacity management, time tracking, compensation management, and workforce analytics. In 2022 and 2023, QGenda won Best in KLAS for Physician Scheduling, as well as Nurse and Staff Scheduling. More than 4,500 organizations, including leading physician groups, hospitals, academic medical centers, and enterprise health systems, use QGenda to advance workforce scheduling, optimize capacity, and improve access to care. Thanks to QGenda for supporting HIStalk.

Lorre’s email has been on the fritz for a few weeks, we belatedly discovered, as emails to her histalk.com address were being delivered to the server but failed to complete the final leg of their journey to her Gmail account. I checked the server to find those that were stuck and set up an auto-forwarder as a backup, but email her again if she didn’t respond since she doesn’t just ignore emails. Email problems are never-ending and reliability has gone way down with the proliferation of complex setups, spam filters, and black lists.

Was Olive a scam, and if so, who are the victims?

The abrupt shutdown of one-time unicorn Olive have led to declarations that the company was an obvious scam all along. I agree that expectations were inflated with the encouragement of the company’s executives, but I don’t think it meets the definition of “scam” given that savvy customers and private investors voluntarily gave the company money without complaint.

Olive has sold off the remaining pieces of its business for an unreported and likely unimpressive price. Waystar has acquired most of it, but the buyer of  its prior authorization business is Humata Health, which was founded in February 2023, presumably with the specific purpose of buying that business. Humata’s company’s founder is  Jeremy Friese, MD, MBA, who was co-founder and CEO of Verata Health, which Olive acquired in December 2020 to form the business that he is now buying back.

Olive reported annual revenue of $49 million. It had raised $856 million, most recently a July 2021 Series H round with investors Vista Equity Partners, Tiger Global Management, and Base10 Partners that valued the company at $4 billion.

An Axios article quoted former employees and other sources who said that despite calling itself Olive AI, the company was actually using primitive screen-scraping and bot tools that frequently broke when vendors of the EHR and claims software they communicated with changed their systems.

The Axios article questioned the company’s cost savings projections, which rarely materialized. Olive’s sales executives knew that overpromises would still get its foot in the door, where health systems would then reassign employees and make it hard for them to change course and kick Olive out. Olive claimed to have 200 enterprise customers, although Axios reviewed internal documents that showed only 80.

Olive’s KLAS reviews are mostly bad overall, although it scored pretty well in the prior authorization business that it had acquired from Verata. Customers reported some successes, but complained of high executive turnover, lack of focus on customers, and layoffs that caught customers by surprise and reduced the company’s responsiveness. Still, the company featured testimonials from Gundersen, WVU Healthcare, Allegheny Health Network, Renown Health, and others.

I would argue that customers were not scammed. They could have demanded Olive’s full customer list and contacted them before buying. Poor KLAS scores were a lagging indicator, but a big red flag. Customer contracts should have included penalties for failing to hit cost-saving goals.

Public investors weren’t scammed because the company dismantled itself before it could rush an IPO or SPAC merger, which might suggest that the wheels had been coming off for some time. Its reputable, experienced investors had access to internal information that would have revealed warts and all, although the investment environment encouraged big bets of the “greater fool” variety rather than a forensic analysis of whether the company was blowing smoke in claiming to have invented “the Internet of Healthcare” and its ability to “deliver a new healthcare experience for humankind.”

Those who don’t know health IT history and thus are doomed to repeat it should note these lessons:

• Investors, prospects, or a prospective employees need to look beyond the glad-handers and perform due diligence.
• Customers should contractually obligate their vendor to meet whatever results and metric led them to buy in the first place. Cover the items that you need and fear most.
• Companies brag on their use of AI in hopes of commanding a higher valuation as a tech company, as did their late 1990s predecessors in appending .com to their names, but customers shouldn’t care whether a vendor uses AI or an army of offshore workers as long as they receive the expected benefits.
• Sketchy companies generate a lot of hype that is rarely echoed by their actual customers.
• Companies can be wheezing their last even as they pay big money for impressive exhibits and sponsored events at conferences.
• Rapid company expansion, acquisitions that look like an attention-diverting shell game, and a product line that is too confusing to summarize in a single “what does your company do” sentence are reasons for skepticism.
• All companies and investors look smart when the economy is booming.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health Catalyst acquires Electronic Registry Systems, which specializes in cancer registry services and software.

Bain Capital will acquire consulting firm Guidehouse for $5.3 billion from Veritas Capital. Modern Healthcare says that Guidehouse is the second-largest healthcare consulting firm.

Sales

• Accountable Health Partners, a clinically integrated network based in Rochester, NY, selects Health Catalyst’s Data Operating System, enterprise analytics, and professional services.
• NorthShore-Edward-Elmhurst Health (IL) will implement population health software from Lumeris.
• Emory Healthcare (GA) will roll out Andor Health’s ThinkAndor virtual sitter technology, initially piloting it at two hospitals.

People

Direct Recruiters hires Huntsville Magazine owner Christian Byrd, MA (BC Executive Search Firm) as leader of its medical device practice.

Ovation Healthcare names John Mason, MBA (OakHorn Solutions) president of Tempo Technology Services.

Kali Durgampudi, MS (Zelis) joins Apprio as president and CEO of its healthcare automation division.

Announcements and Implementations

Glacial Ridge Health System (MN) will swap out its Healthland EHR for Meditech Expanse on December 1.

Midwestern University Clinics in Illinois and Arizona replace four EHRs with Epic.

A majority of hospitals will turn to outsourcing certain services over the next five years, according to a Black Book poll of management representatives from 1,428 healthcare organizations.

A new KLAS report on data and analytics platforms finds that Dimensional Insight leads the category with an easy-to-use platform that creates digestible metrics that drive outcomes, while Epic and Oracle Health customers struggle with ease of use.

Government and Politics

NSW Health in Australia will spend $640 million to replace nine systems, predominantly Cerner solutions, with Epic over the next 10 years. The decision to make the switch was first announced in 2020 with an initial deployment goal of 2026.

A watchdog agency  reports that the bankrupt Idaho Health Data Exchange spent $92 million in federal funds with little oversight or accountability because the state created it as a private, non-profit corporation.

Privacy and Security

Duke University researchers find that it costs less than $0.50 to buy data about a military service member from a data broker, including their fully identifiable health and financial information. The authors note that the availability of such information could compromise national security and also note that the US lacks privacy regulation that would prohibit the practice elsewhere.

Other

Virginia Mason Franciscan Health launches an enhanced care registered nursing program at St. Anne Hospital (WA), its second this year. The ECRN virtual nursing program was developed to help combat staffing shortages and help prevent burnout. ECRNs joins bedside shift huddles via Zoom and then typically visit patients virtually twice per shift, largely focusing on home medication lists, care plans, and discharge details.

Sponsor Updates

• Consensus Cloud Solutions sponsors Cognosante’s charity golf tournament benefiting Final Salute.
• Southern Endocrinology Associates increases collections by more than 200% using EClinicalWorks and Healow.
• Netsmart showcases advancements driving value-based care success for senior living providers at LeadingAge 2023 through November 8 in Chicago.
• AdvancedMD receives the 2023 ISV Builder Partner of the Year Award from Zoom Video Communications.
• A Geek Leader Podcast features Arrive Health CEO Kyle Kiser.
• Symplr will host a happy hour at the CHIME Fall Forum on Friday, November 10 at the JW Marriott.
• Artera achieves SOC 2 Type 2 compliance for data security, availability, and privacy.
• AvaSure will sponsor the Insights Summit on Virtual Nursing November 15-16 in Washington, DC.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Navigating the healthcare financial landscape in 2024.”
• Bardavon publishes a new injury prevention case study on insurance carriers and brokers, “Reduce Musculoskeletal Claims Volume Using Wearable Technology and Data Analysis.”
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast, “Bridging the Education Gap in War-Torn Ukraine.”
• Current Health will host its US customer summit, This Way Home, November 15-16 in Boston.

Black Book’s top-ranked Q3 2023 managed services vendors include the following HIStalk sponsors:

• Symplr – credentialing and privileging
• Cloudwave – cybersecurity
• Dimensional Insight – data analytics
• Healthcare IT Leaders – ERP support
• Ellkay – integration and interoperability
• Clearwater – privacy, HIPAA, and compliance
• Experity – teleradiology and diagnostic imaging / urgent care
• Tegria – IT outsourcing/partial services

Blog Posts

• Rural Healthcare: Why Advocacy, Community Engagement, and Technology Matter (CereCore)
• Addressing Challenges in Implementing HCC Coding and Risk-Adjusted Coding Programs (AGS Health)
• 3 ways technology has evolved health care (Arcadia)
• Meet the Clinician – Huyen Cam, RRT, RCP (Ascom)
• 10 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Clinical Data Assets (Availity)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/6/23

Top News

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

Notes:

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

People

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 11/3/23

Top News

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Government and Politics

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 11/1/23

Top News

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Other

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/30/23

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

Sales

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 10/27/23

Top News

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 10/25/23

Top News

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

HealthEC names Chris Caramanico (JJCAL) CEO.

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/23/23

Top News

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

The company acquired SinfoniaRx in March.

Reader Comments

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Matter Communications promotes Paul Berthiaume to SVP.

Privacy and Security

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 10/20/23

Top News

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 10/18/23

Top News

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/16/23

Top News

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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