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News 9/29/23

September 28, 2023 News Comments Off

Top News

Patient engagement software vendor Tendo will acquire healthcare marketplace operator MDsave for $150 million.

Reader Comments

From Squeamish: “Re: Adventist Health. Heard from someone at the corporate office that they will replace Cerner with Epic in all markets.” Unverified, although reported by readers several times recently.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

From Provider Sider: “Re: ChatGPT Pro. I work in risk management for a large practice group. ChatGPT Pro has saved me lots of time with tasks that would ordinarily take hours. For example, I am able to take bullets from chart review and remove PHI and then construct professionally written, clinically relevant summaries in responses to insurance grievances. The pro feature lets you set a static prompt that applies to every new prompt such as, ‘Write all responses as if written by an expert, with a risk management lens.’ I also use it to write letters responding to patient complaints in patient-friendly terms using plain English. I’ve read opinions by AI experts that professionals who use AI like generative text will (eventually) outperform and leave behind those that don’t.” I agree. ChatGPT is great at analyzing documents and generating well-composed text from whatever input you throw at it, and for that alone it will have considerable healthcare value. I also agree that if implemented correctly, it should be invisible to patients in making humans better at their jobs.

I’m starting to receive the first HIMSS24 emails that include the name or logo of Informa Markets, which either owns or operates the conference, depending on the undisclosed structure of the deal. I also noticed that the HIMSS24 terms and conditions page references only Informa, not HIMSS, and that quite a few HIMSS folks have updated their LinkedIn profile employer this month to Informa Markets.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor MRO. The Norristown, PA-based company is accelerating the exchange of clinical data throughout the healthcare ecosystem on behalf of providers, payers, and users of clinical data. MRO uses industry-leading solutions and the latest technology to help providers and payers manage and exchange clinical data. The company, which has a 20-year legacy and is a 10-time KLAS winner, connects 200 EHRs, 120,000 providers, 35,000 practices, and 900 hospitals and health systems while extracting 1.3 billion clinical records. Its proprietary Clinical Data Exchange Platform (CDXP) provides a digital front door that enables bi-directional sharing of information and reduces operational costs by streamlining processes, an orchestration and configuration engine to centralize connectivity across clinical data repositories and automate actions previously performed manually, and an infrastructure to light up the network of providers and accelerate interoperability with providers and payers within the MRO network. Thanks to MRO for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Member engagement and wellness app vendor Virgin Pulse will merge with HealthComp, which provides health benefits administration.

Menopause virtual clinic operator Midi Health raises $25 million in a Series A funding round.

Two Connecticut hospitals that are owned by Prospect Medical Holdings urge legislators to approve their February 2022 agreement to sell the facilities to Yale New Haven Health, warning that they don’t have money to buy bed linen or laboratory supplies. Computer systems play a key role, as Prospect says it is still dealing with the financial effects a six-week cyberattack in August 2023 that has also caused Yale New Haven Health to question afterward whether the acquisition is prudent given the old systems the hospitals use. Prospect Medical says they can’t afford to upgrade.

Sales

Mercy will use Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to provide lab results to patients using conversational language, manage patient calls, and help employees access policy and procedure and HR information via a chatbot.

People

NeuroFlow hires Phil Vecchiolli (Capital Rx) as chief revenue officer and Robert Capobianco, MBA (NOCD) as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Case Western Reserve University goes live on Epic’s Lyceum EHR training system for its first-year medical and nursing students.

MHS Genesis goes live at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and Royal Air Force Lakenheath in the UK.

Darena Solutions announces the launch of MeldRx, a development and deployment platform for apps that use FHIR.

Microsoft-owned Nuance renames DAX Express — which creates clinical documentation using conversational, ambient, and generative AI — to DAX Copilot.

OptimizeRx enhances its HCP engagement platform with AI and renames it the Dynamic Audience Activation Platform, which activates provider messaging across marketing channels for its life sciences customers.

A new KLAS report on physician scheduling finds that PerfectServe’s Lightning Bolt Scheduling tops the list due to ease of use and strong support.

Other

A 25-year-old man dies of brain cancer after doctors ignored a mass they saw on his CT scan because they thought it was a computer error.

A deceased patient’s family sues Adena Health, claiming that the hospital propped up the dead patient in her hospital bed to hide the fact she had died earlier during a cardiac catheterization procedure in which the cardiologist cut into an artery. The family says that staff urged them to approve turning off life support even though they knew that the patient had died two hours earlier, as documented in records they saw.

Sponsor Updates

TLC Vascular adds RCM software and services from EClinicalWorks.
Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of The Informonster Podcast, “How Datapult is Tackling the Challenge of Electronic Lab Reporting.”
Divurgent will present at the North Carolina HIMSS Annual Conference October 3 in Raleigh.
Healthcare IT Leaders releases the first episode of its new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Doug Hires on Leadership Perspectives on RCM in Healthcare.”

Blog Posts

Highlights from the DIUC23 Keynote (Dimensional Insight)
Next stop: Nashville (EClinicalWorks)
Is the Drug You’re Dispensing a Controlled Substance or Not? (First Databank)
Meeting the Needs of New Yorkers (Findhelp)
Mastering Contact Center Metrics: A Guide for Success (Five9)
AI Jobs in Healthcare (Healthcare IT Leaders)
From Red to Black: Optimizing Healthcare Contract Management (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 9/27/23

September 26, 2023 News 7 Comments

Top News

Release of information service provider Datavant acquires Healthjump, which provides health data exchange for value-based care organizations.

Reader Comments

From Lillehammer: “Re: the apparent end of Oracle Health’s code Developer program. I suspect they are taking a similar route to Epic and will pare down their value-added offerings for API integrations and perhaps shut down the Cerner App Gallery. Cerner never seemed to be committed to making interoperability easy, as evidenced by years-ago mentions of non-FHIR APIs that never came to fruition and lack of documentation and support for non-FHIR integration methods, such as HL7v2.”

From Birdie: “Re: Robin Healthcare. Investors pulled $$, doors shut, doctors cut off from service. Just an overnight flameout. Ambient documentation was never really gonna succeed, was it?”

Webinars

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

People

McKesson-owned oncology real world evidence vendor Ontada hires Christine Davis, MS (Oracle) as president.

Clinical laboratory quality management software vendor MediaLab hires Tom Ormondroyd, MBA (Millennia Patient Services) as CEO.

Artera expands its executive team with promotions — Ashu Agte (CTO), Tom McIntyre, MS, MBA (COO), Adrianna Hosford (SVP of marketing and communications), and Zach Wood, MBA (SVP of product and partner ecosystem) – and hiring Nicole Ossey as VP of people.

Announcements and Implementations

Costco offers its members discounted, $29 primary care video visits from independent virtual provider marketplace Startup Health. Customers can also get a standard lab panel with virtual follow-up for $72 and book online mental health visits for $79. Sesame also offers virtual visits with specialists and a prescription refill service.

Open AI rolls out new ChatGPT capabilities for conducting voice conversations and analyzing photos.

Oncology data vendor COTA announces Vista, an EHR dataset for drug company research.

Tesla announces new capabilities for its Optimus robot, which can precisely locate its own limbs in real time and applies “video in, controls out” learning from its onboard neural network. The implication for industries that rely on an aging workforce that is trained to perform repetitive tasks in fixed environments using show-and-tell methods could be significant, as could the economic implications of relatively inexpensive 24-hour-per day employee replacements that have no geographic limitations. Elon Musk said in May 2023 that he expects the majority of Tesla’s value to come from Optimus, which he says could sell 10 to 20 billion units.

Privacy and Security

CommonSpirit Health, which operates 140 hospitals and 1,000 care sites, reports a $1.4 billion FY2023 loss, of which it attributes $160 million to its October 2022 ransomware attack. The organization acknowledges that it may face class action lawsuits related to the breach and does not yet know whether its insurer will cover some of the costs. CommonSpirit lost $1.2 billion in the previous fiscal year, when it paid its CEO $35 million.

Other

England’s Newcastle Hospitals blames its computer system for failing to send 24,000 letters to patients over several years that included test results, care needs, and discharge instructions that were never delivered. The trust says that drafts of the letters require a second clinician’s signature before sending, but the letters were stored in a computer folder that few doctors knew about. Officials didn’t name the EHR, but the trust is a long-time user of Cerner / Oracle Health.

Patients of hospitals in Pakistan complain that a shortage of X-ray film has forced hospitals to take phone pictures of their radiology computer screens to make copies for patients, which the patients note are still being charged to them at full price.

Sponsor Updates

EClinicalWorks supports community health centers with its continued progress towards enabling UDS Patient-Level Submission (UDS+) reporting via FHIR.
Nova Scotia Health in Canada upgrades to Agfa HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging Platform.
Availity CEO Russ Thomas joins the Definitively Speaking Podcast.
AvaSure publishes a new guide, “Fall Prevention in Hospitals: Key Results from Virtual Monitoring Programs.”
Nordic releases a new episode of its In Network podcast, “Making Rounds: Under new (data) management.”
Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Final Medicare hospital inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) and proposed outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS) changes for fiscal year 2024.”
Bamboo Health CEO Jay Desai will present at Health Evolution September 28 in Nashville.
Clinical Architecture will sponsor SNOMED CT Expo 2023 October 26-27 in Atlanta.

Blog Posts

Meditech Expanse Pharmacy: Wins and Benefits of Formulary Service Vendor Changes (CereCore)
Addressing Healthcare Staffing Shortages and Improving Productivity through Technology and Outsourcing (AGS Health)
Generative AI at point of care (Arcadia)
RDCA-DAP and the Aridhia DRE – A platform to accelerate rare disease therapy development and regulatory engagement (Aridhia)
How healthcare providers can implement a denials management program utilizing internal audit (Baker Tilly)
SNOMED CT Facilitates Public Health IT Initiatives (Clinical Architecture)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/25/23

September 24, 2023 News 1 Comment

Top News

Nasdaq sends Veradigm a delisting notice for failing to file financial reports, which the company says it expected and will appeal.

Veradigm expects to file the overdue reports by the end of Q4. It blames its failure to file its annual report for 2022 and the two following quarterly reports on accounting software problems.

Reader Comments

From Former Employee: “Re: ModMed. Acquired Klara last year for $135 million and has laid off 80% of the sales team. It’s an interesting story that unfolds on GlassDoor reviews.” Unverified. Specialty EHR vendor ModMed – formerly known as Modernizing Medicine – acquired the patient outreach messaging vendor Klara in February 2022. Privately held ModMed has raised a reported $400 million, none of it recently, and paid $45 million in November 2022 to resolve federal kickback charges related to referring business to a clinical lab partner.

From Interopguy: “Re: Oracle Health. Mysterious message on the end of code Developer program at Cerner, and uncertain path forward. What does this mean for app developers and for interop with Oracle Health?” The Open Developer Experience was created to help developers build apps for Millennium and HealthIntent that improve interoperability capabilities. Oracle Health developer Aaron McGinn, who appears to have had led the company’s presence with the developer community, has tagged his LinkedIn with “open to work.” Oracle moved its discussion forms to an Oracle site and users report lack of company response along with errors in the developer sandbox.

From Laminar Flow: “Re: Oracle Health. One of their recruiters says on LinkedIn that Adventist Health will end its Cerner ITWorks contract with Oracle in January 2024 and bring the IT function back in house.” The post seeks to hire people for Oracle now who will receive matching offer letters from Adventist Health. Adventist Health signed a big deal with Cerner in January 2018 to take over revenue cycle management and clinical applications, but terminated the RCM contract the following year and brought the 1,700 employees back in house, after which Cerner sold that business to R1 RCM.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A few poll respondents know or suspect that AI was used in a recent medical encounter.

New poll to your right or here: How will technology significantly improve US healthcare in the next five years? (multiple answers OK)

I greatly enjoyed reading Brian Too’s cynically relevant comments about VC folk in general and Epic-bashing Bill Gurley specifically:

You want investor capital and lots of it. There is a pathway to this that involves self promotion, a dynamic speaking style, outrageous theories that are unconventional and controversial, and chutzpah. Above all the chutzpah! When challenged on the facts, you just say something like, “It’s only a theory,” or you cite one fact that supports your story but doesn’t actually prove it. Then you get your skeptic to do all the lengthy, boring investigation. You drive off in your fully expensed Ferrari, confident you can stay ahead of any questions. These folks are fun at parties, but they will never come within a million miles of my money.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Federal Trade Commission sues US Anesthesia Partners and its private equity minority share owner, claiming that the companies executed an anti-competitive scheme to consolidate anesthesiology practices in Texas to drive up prices and profits. Legal experts say the action is notable because FTC included the private equity investor and not just the company itself in its lawsuit, potentially signaling a new type of federal scrutiny of healthcare.

People

Arrowhead Regional Medical Center (CA) hires CMIO consultant John Brill, MD as chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

AMIA announces the winners of its 2023 Signature Awards:

Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics — Noémie Elhadad, PhD, associate professor and chair of biomedical informatics, Columbia University.
Don Eugene Detmer Award for Health Policy Contributions in Informatics — Dean Sittig, PhD, professor, UTHealth Health Science Center at Houston.
William W. Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics — Atul Butte, MD, PhD, director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute and distinguished professor, University of California, San Francisco.
Virginia K. Saba Informatics Award — Susan Newbold, PhD, RN, director, Nursing Informatics Boot Camp.
AMIA New Investigator Award — Yifan Peng, PhD, assistant professor of department of population health sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine.

A Health Affairs article calls for healthcare ownership transparency so that patients will know if their physician practice is owned by – and perhaps likely to have their clinical judgment influence by — a private equity firm, insurer, health system, Amazon, or a conglomerate such as CVS Health or UnitedHealth. They also call for location transparency to support site-neutral payments, ending the practice of hospitals buying practices or ambulatory centers and then billing higher hospital prices using the parent facility’s provider number and thus preventing the payer from determining where services were provided.

CHIME offers a webinar to prepare potential ViVE 2024 speakers for submitting applications. The call for track speakers closes at the end of October.

Other

The Federal Trade Commission cracks down on the deceptive marketing claims of health influencers, one of them “The Liver King,” who claimed $100 million in annual sales of supplements to accompany his raw meat diet, which generated a net worth of $310 million. He later admitted that his ripped appearance was actually due to taking $11,000 worth of steroids each month, which is not exactly shocking since he sounds a lot like ‘roid rager Danny Bonaduce.

Marginally healthcare relevant, but interesting for a slow news day. Wired covers the “obituary pirates” who scrape death details from funeral home websites, create low-quality videos of themselves reading the deceased’s write-up, then use search engine optimization on the person’s name to draw in people who then hear about their death in the cheesiest possible way while being served ads. As has been noted, death is the ultimate total addressable market.

Sponsor Updates

EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Unlocking Reporting Capabilities in EBO.”
NeuroFlow publishes a new case study, “Magellan Healthcare Expands Real-World Impact of DCBT, While Improving Member Access & Engagement.”
Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Tricia Baird, MD.”
Waystar will exhibit at the NJ & Metro Philadelphia HFMA Annual Institute September 27-29
Wolters Kluwer nominates NextGen Healthcare President and CEO David Sides to its supervisory board.

Blog Posts

Meditech’s Traverse Exchange Canada network advances health information sharing (Meditech)
Conversational AI for healthcare is a significant step beyond the chatbot, here’s why (Notable)
10 Questions to Ask Autonomous Medical Coding Vendors (Nym Health)
Fighting Opioid Addiction – One Life at a Time (Netsmart)
Want to improve patient safety? Up your EHR’s usability (Nordic)
Three Ways to Prove ServiceNow ROI (Optimum Healthcare IT)
PLD Is Not Enough: Next-Best-Action HCP Engagement Needs the Patient (OptimizeRx)
Solving the Top Healthcare Transfer Center Challenges (PerfectServe)
4 best practices for boosting your HCAHPS scores (Spok)
Is Your Provider Data Getting Lost in Your Master Data Management? (Symplr)
Your complete guide to Meditech Expanse (Tegria)

Contacts

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

News 9/22/23

September 21, 2023 News 4 Comments

Top News

Digital-first care management and virtual care infrastructure vendor UpHealth files Chapter 11 bankruptcy after a court rules that it owes an investment bank $31 million for arranging a SPAC merger to take the company public.

UPH shares that peaked at $28 in late 2021 are now worth $1, valuing the company at $17 million.

Reader Comments

From Nasty Parts: “Re: Verinovum and Robin Healthcare. Both are being shut down by their primary funding entities. First time I’ve seen that.” Unverified, although several Verinovum employees recently added “open to work” to their LinkedIn profiles and Robin is no longer listed as a Khosla Ventures portfolio company. Verinovum offers healthcare data curation, while Robin Healthcare sells a smart assistant that creates clinical documentation for orthopedics.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Last call: sponsors who are participating in the HLTH conference can be included in my guide by completing a short form with their details.

I was checking something on the HIMSS24 website and noticed that it will offer exhibitors a reverse expo. I don’t recall that HIMSS has done this in the past, but HLTH and ViVE tout their hosted buyer programs and new HIMSS conference operator Informa specializes in that. I’m also reminded that HIMSS is no longer based out of Chicago, at least from a legal standpoint, having followed many corporations that moved their HQ to the tax haven of Netherlands.

A Reader’s Notes from the Nashville Healthcare Sessions

HCA says its nursing school will have 30,000 students when it reaches capacity by the end of the decade.
One investor says their firm is interested in behavioral health investments but is considering AI solutions for staffing and recruiting. They are worried that policymakers could pass knee-jerk AI regulations.
Another investor says they aren’t interested in point solutions and those that are narrowly focused on management of single conditions and will instead look at platforms or something that ties into bigger workflow and tools. They predict AI use in drug discovery, supporting payer-provider services, and radiology image analysis.
A Humana executive says interoperability will be a $1 billion opportunity by 2025.
A16Z sees a lot of AI noise that the industry can’t absorb and predicts that many of the ideas will fail or will be merged into something else. They are concerned about ONC’s proposed algorithm transparency rule and the requirement that EHRs implement risk management practices for third-party predictive models.
Aneesh Chopra thinks providers will be biggest beneficiary of AI, with the best opportunity being to help patients interpret their own data.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Live Ask Me Anything Webinar: 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 fragmented data impacting your organization and its ability to scale quickly? Our experts will discuss the advantage of having a 360-degree, real-time view of your patients. Access to analytic-ready data supports proactive care by enabling rapid clinical decision-making, stratifying high-risk patients, developing and using personalized treatment plans, lowering cost, and quickly closing care gaps.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Hospital-at-home technology vendor Inbound Health, which was spun out of Allina Health in late 2022, raises $30 million in a Series B funding round.

Denmark-based Corti, whose AI platform analyzes medically related telephone calls to make recommendations and generate documentation, raises $60 million in a Series B funding round.

Virtual digestive health vendor Vivante Health raises $31 million in Series B funding.

People

Angie Franks (About) joins Kalderos as CEO.

About hires Jonathan Shoemaker, MA (Allina Health) as CEO.

Impact Advisors promotes John Stanley, MBA and hires Roger Weems, MSHA, MBA (Premier) as chief growth officers.

Announcements and Implementations

Symplr adds survey management capabilities to its compliance platform, allowing healthcare organizations to conduct internal surveys to document conflict of interest, safety culture, and vendor compliance.

Biofourmis enhances its Digital Clinical Trials solution with AI-powered data management automations and integration with 40 devices.

The American Medical Association reviews the use of CPT codes for digital medicine, noting a lack of alignment across insurers and limited widespread use. The report finds that while payers are working directly with health tech companies to provide services for specific disease areas – hypertension, behavioral health, and physical therapy – those services are often disconnected from the patient’s PCP or medical home.

Meditech will add the Suki Assistant ambient listening solution to Expanse via a new Suki extension for Chrome.

Scripps Health will pilot the use of generative AI to draft responses to patient messages, saying that message counts have increased by 50% since the onset of COVID-19, with the average doctor receiving 44 per day.

Arcadia announces an AI assistant that creates patient summaries, which it says will save 50% of the case manager time that is required to gather and interpret medical record data.

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center launches the Institute of Telehealth and Digital Innovation.

The American Academy of Pediatrics warns about the unintended consequences of auto-populating a newborn’s EHR with pertinent data from the charts of the parents. It cites a newborn’s record in which one of the mother’s listed problems was intimate partner violence by the baby’s father, who didn’t have access to the mother’s records, but could have seen the entry via his legal access to the baby’s chart. An employee noticed the entry and removed it. It concludes that EHRs allow clinicians to limit access to potentially harmful information without running afoul of information blocking regulations.

Other

The Madison newspaper describes how Epic’s growth affects the Verona, WI area as the company begins construction on its sixth campus and considers building a seventh. Epic plans to increase its headcount to 13,300 by next year and has bought more farmland to expand its Verona footprint to 1,700 acres, requiring the construction of new roads, interchanges, and widened bridges that officials hope will ease traffic backups for commuters.

Penn Medicine internist Jeffrey Millstein, MD says that value-based care has made it hard to get short-notice appointment with PCPs who are paid to manage populations and meet payer metrics rather than treating infections and acute pain. Patients are turning instead to urgent care centers and EDs, disappointed that the doctor with whom they have developed a rapport is not available. He recommends limiting comprehensive annual visits to highest-risk patients and replacing routine physician visits with support team virtual outreach for low-risk patients.

The Marshall Project covers for-profit prison medical provider Corizon Care, which attorneys say is using the “Texas Two-Step” bankruptcy method to avoid paying malpractice claims and debts. Corizon created a new company, moved its debt to it, then filed bankruptcy for the new company. It offered plaintiffs $5,000 each to settle their lawsuits, advising them they would probably get nothing otherwise. Meanwhile, the now debt-free and malpractice-free part of the business, much of it involving taxpayer-funded contracts, was moved to another newly created company. Several companies have used the Texas-only tactic – including Johnson & Johnson, which was trying to dodge talcum powder lawsuits – but all were either rejected by federal courts or remain in litigation.

Sponsor Updates

RCxRules adds 11 private equity-backed specialty medical groups to its Revenue Cycle Engine customer base.
AGS Health publishes a white paper titled “Optimizing HCC Coding for Accurate Reimbursement in Healthcare.”
Findhelp releases a new report, “Meeting the Moment: Community Organizations Nationwide See Challenging Times Ahead.”
Lucem Health releases a new episode of the This Week in Clinical AI Podcast.
Medhost will exhibit at the TORCH 2023 Fall Conference September 26-28 in Round Rock, TX, and at the NRHA Critical Access Hospital Conference September 27-29 in Kansas City, MO.

Blog Posts

Want to improve patient safety? Up your EHR’s usability (Nordic)
The Top 4 Things Healthcare Organizations Want in an IT Vendor (Impact Advisors)
Embracing DE&I in Your Recruitment Strategy (Direct Recruiters)
Ensuring EMR Data Can Support Strategic Performance Improvement from the Start (Divurgent)
Leveraging Networking as a Strategic Approach for Patient Acquisition in Weight Loss and Medical Spa Clinics (EClinicalWorks)
Improve Your Call or Contact Center Experience (Five9)
Healthcare cybersecurity threats: August 2023 (Fortified Health Security)
Maximizing Your Investment: EHR/EMR Consulting (HealthTech Resources)
Defining Change Management for Your Organization (Impact Advisors)
Thoughts on AI Consciousness (Keysight)

Contacts

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

News 9/20/23

September 19, 2023 News 1 Comment

Top News

Oracle announces “the new Oracle Health EHR platform” at its annual conference, which it says will use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to offer a modern interface and intuitive processes.

The company says some of the announced new Millennium capabilities will be released in the next 12 months.

Oracle also announced Clinical Digital Assistant, which allows providers and patients to interact with its EHR solutions via voice commands.

Reader Comments

From Tech Bro: “Re: Bill Gurley’s comments about Epic. I have seen nothing indicating that CEO Judy Faulkner was a big Obama donor or that her donations landed her a spot on the Health IT Policy Committee.” Neither have I. Online contribution records show that she donated a couple of thousand dollars to the Obama campaign in 2008, but the big numbers that Gurley hinted at were the total donations of Epic’s employees and even those amounts were modest. Also notably incorrect in Gurley’s presentation:

Meaningful Use did not require doctors to buy software to earn payouts – they could “meaningfully use” the EHRs they already owned. Those who bought EHRs to cash in on MU weren’t buying Epic. All hospital EHRs were certified, so no Epic demand was created by federal action.
His assumption that ONC “took Epic’s feature set and plowed it into this spreadsheet” to create certification criteria is silly in many ways.
The EHR vendor fines that he listed weren’t levied because their products failed to meet ONC’s certification criteria, but rather for for falsifying EHR certification test results and paying kickbacks (EClinicalWorks and Greenway Health) and taking drug company kickbacks to use the EHR to push opiate prescribing (Practice Fusion).
President Obama did not say in an interview with Ezra Klein that creating a barrier to entry for EHRs was his biggest Affordable Care Act disappointment. He expressed regret before leaving office in 2017 that paying MU incentives still left a lot of paper records, indecipherable patient bills, and excessive data entry time for clinicians and also created interoperability challenges with the many EHRs that were being used. He also noted that providers are incented to hoard data.
The groundwork for HITECH was put in place by Republican President Bush, who also created ONC. ARRA and HITECH were signed four weeks after President Obama took office, a full year before ACA was passed, so the suggestion that HITECH was part of ACA is incorrect.

From Code Spewer: “Re: code generators. Most of us long-timers remember the bust of CASE tools in healthcare years ago.” The empty suits who ran the crappy vendor I worked for many years ago latched onto CASE tools as a competitive imperative, as whispered into their ears by bored techies who craved resume-enhancing experience. They eventually realized that you can’t just feed an old application’s code into a generator and have it create readable, technically efficient code that can be maintained and enhanced ongoing. They also eventually figured out that competitive advantage rarely springs from technology (despite what technology bigots claim) but rather functionality that requires subject matter expertise to design.

From Biliary Duck: “Re: cloud. Some of these companies will regret betting their future on the billing benevolence of cloud providers, who are free to increase fees any time their investors need a thrill.” Health IT vendors have historically regretted making third party software and services a key part of their products. You don’t really want outside companies having outsized influence over your pricing, technology strategy, and relationship with your customers. Cloud is great for quickly scaling up and adjusting for required performance with low capital expense, but you’re trusting cloud vendors to avoid turning the financial screws after you let them become critical to your business. The same goes for outsourcing.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Lorre thought that maybe one or two companies would take her up on the new-sponsor offer of getting the rest of 2023 free, but since four or five signed up quickly, she has decided to extend the deal beyond my initial limit of three companies. Everybody can get 25% off produced webinars as well, which generate ongoing views on our YouTube webinar channel. Spend little more than the cost of buying coffee for HIMSS booth staffers and you’ll enjoy a year-plus connection with HIStalk’s loyal readership of industry decision-makers plus the bonus of chatting with Lorre, to whom I wisely deflect calls since my single talent is analyzing and writing, not persuasively describing those offerings that make it possible.

Webinars

September 21 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Unlock open enrollment best practices to stop future denials.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Lauren Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. Nearly half of insured Americans consider changing their insurance coverage each fall, necessitating provider safeguards to stop increased denials, find hidden coverage, and prevent uncompensated care. This webinar will crack open enrollment best practices, such as using different data sources to get an accurate picture of benefit details; leveraging automation to identify hidden coverage, confirm active insurance, and avoid lost revenue; and simplifying eligibility workflows to reduce the financial burden on patients and strain on staff.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual patient observation and analytics company MedSitter rebrands to Collette Health. The company has also added new AI presence-detection capabilities to its virtual care solutions.

Summus, which offers virtual access to specialty consults, raises $19.5 million.

Telemedicine services company Avel ECare acquires Fident Health, a virtual hospitalist business based in Texas.

Veradigm reports that it is taking longer than anticipated to correct accounting errors that have led to de-listing warnings from Nasdaq, and will thus file yearly and quarterly reports later than expected. The company, which plans to ask a Nasdaq Hearings Panel for an extended file request, has revised its 2023 revenue impact from $40 million down to $20 million.

Amazon is reportedly planning a rapid rollout of healthcare-related subscription services and offering discounts on its One Medical primary care services to Prime members

Sales

HCA Healthcare selects remote patient monitoring services from Nudj Health.
Bryan Health (NE) will use KeyCare’s Epic-based network of virtual care providers.
UAE-based, publicly traded healthcare operator Burjeel Holdings signs a $34 million contract to implement Oracle Health’s EHR running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Emirates Health Services will implement Care.ai.

People

Chad Hendricks (Medecision) joins UpHealth as VP of business development.

Deloitte hires Michael Cleary (Workday) as VP/sales executive.

Direct Recruiters promotes healthcare IT and life sciences team members Rebecca Forristall and Ben Shamis to partners.

Drew Narayan, MS, MBA (PeriGen) joins Swift Medical as SVP of sales and marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

Excelsior Springs Hospital (MO) goes live on Oracle Health.

Tampa General Hospital (FL) implements Andor Health’s ThinkAndor Virtual Hospital technology within its ICU.

A new KLAS report on virtual sitting and nursing talks up AvaSure as an established vendor of solutions that are being used by large organizations going back five years, with a total hospital count of 1,100. Customers of the newly renamed Collette Health like the system for virtual sitting, but would like to see higher video resolution and better EHR integration. Care.ai was the only vendor in which all surveyed customers are using the solution for virtual nursing. All respondents say the product they use is part of their long-term plans.

Sponsor Updates

Total Health Care (MD) significantly reduces its patient no-show rate by implementing the EClinicalWorks Healow no-show prediction AI model.
Emirates Health Services will implement Care.ai’s virtual nursing and Smart Care Facility solutions.
AGS Health will exhibit at HFMA 2023 Biennial Tri-State Conference September 20-22 in Florence, IN.
Availity sponsors the American Heart Association’s 30^th annual First Coast Heart Walk in Jacksonville, FL.
Biofourmis releases its expanded Digital Clinical Trials solutions with its platform for biopharma and other life sciences companies.
CHIME releases a new episode of its Leader 2 Leader Podcast, “The Importance of Cybersecurity Policy Changes and Leadership Buy-In.”
Clearsense publishes a new case study, “Higher Physician Efficiency and Lower Costs to Patients.”
Clearwater CFO Baxter Lee joins the Tennessee HIMSS Board of Directors.
HIStalk sponsors participating in Meditech Live, September 20-22 in Foxborough, MA, include Access, CereCore, CloudWave, First Databank, Nuance, and CHIME.

Blog Posts

How to Stop Revenue Leaks with Meditech Automated Financial Testing (CereCore)
Why wouldn’t you take on fully delegated risk? (Arcadia)
9 Ways to Go Beyond Basic Texting and Deliver Better Conversations (Artera)
Meet the Clinician – Kenneth Catoe (Ascom)
Five Risks of Not Improving Clinical Data Quality (Availity)
Are Wearables Worth the Investment? 3 Critical Areas Where They’re Proving Their Worth (Bardavon)
Cloud Risk is Different Than Traditional IT Risk – Here’s What to Do About It (Clearwater)
Understanding How Prescribers Use Their EHR in Administrative Workflow and Patient-Visit Workflow (ConnectiveRx)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/18/23

September 17, 2023 News 14 Comments

Top News

Two senators ask the Department of Defense to explain how its MHS Genesis (Oracle Cerner) system has affected the time needed to get new military recruits into basic training.

The DoD says that medically clearing new recruits takes three days longer than it did before MHS Genesis went live. However, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), both of whom serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee, note that the Navy’s recruit processing time has doubled to 60 days after Genesis was implemented.

The senators say that Genesis retrieves historic patient records comprehensively, to the point that applicants are required to obtain medical waivers for old, healed injuries. A recruiter says that one enlistee had to wait an extra two months because she had sprained her wrist as a child.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Doctors seeing new patients transferred their existing records into their systems electronically about one-third of time, poll respondents say, falling short of the 40% of practices that transferred nothing by any means and instead just handed patients a stack of blank forms to fill out.

New poll to your right or here: Do you know or suspect that a provider used AI in a recent encounter with you?

HIStalk sponsors who are participating in the HLTH conference – send me your details by October 2 and I’ll include them in my conference guide.

A Reader’s Notes from AHIP’s Consumer Experience and Digital Health Conference – Day 2

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield says that virtual care went from 1% of behavior health claims before the pandemic to 60% and that high level of virtual care continues.
Payers won’t covered digital therapeutics just because they are FDA cleared. They want to see positive outcomes over a meaningful population size. Value-based care may be a way to cover more behavioral health interventions.
AI advancement may taper due to the huge amount of energy and electricity infrastructure it requires.
Digital therapeutics fall into two categories – cleared by FDA as a medical device, and software that powers humans. FDA’s bar seems to be set lower for the first category since randomized clinical trials aren’t required to prove that the tool works.
Peterson Health Technology Institute aims to be an independent assessor of digital health tools and has committed $50 million to the effort. Their assessment will include equity factors such as whether the tool reduces cost, if it is rolled out to Medicaid populations, and if it supports multiple languages.
Rural areas suffer from a low provider-to-patient ratio, low access to transportation, limited broadband access, and provider volumes that are too low to support fee-for-service.
National Coordinator Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP says QHINs will go live in November or December, initially for provider-to-provider treatment purposes, with FHIR-based exchanged to follow in Q1.
Former National Coordinator Don Rucker, MD, MS, MBA expressed concerns about the approach and director of TEFCA, saying that it relies too much on old standards and data formats.
Two panelists would like to see prior authorization and payer-to-payer data exchange as future TEFCA use cases.
Even though the conference was touted as representing consumer experience, little attention was paid to how payers will fix the consumer experience issues that we all hate, such as prior authorization and understanding your policy and benefits.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A BMJ survey finds that three-fourths of UK hospital trusts still relay on paper-based charts and patient notes, concluding that the UK government failed to meet its target of eliminated paper ordering by 2024. Most of the trusts have electronic systems, but still use paper to some degree. Experts say the NHS data set is widely admired, but is less useful than it seems because it is often stored in systems whose proprietary formats do not support interoperability.

People

Jeff Cutler (Ada Health) joins Validic as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Google announces that Chromebooks that were released after 2020 will automatically receive updates for 10 years, while older devices can be set to receive those updates by the user or IT administrator. An individual device’s Auto Update Expiration date can be displayed from the Settings menu or looked up in an online list.

Government and Politics

Indiana’s attorney general Todd Rokita sues Indiana University Health, alleging that it failed to enforce privacy standards when OB-GYN Caitlin Bernard, MD talked publicly about an abortion she had performed on a 10-year-old. Rokita had previously filed an action against the doctor, who was reprimanded by the state medical licensing board for violating state and patient federal privacy laws, and was unhappy that IU Health publicly disagreed with the decision. Rokita says that IU Health failed to protect the child’s privacy, thus violating HIPAA. The doctor had previously sued the Republican AG in an attempt to prevent hum from obtaining the medical records of her patients for damaging her reputation, which the judge dismissed but with an opinion that Rokita’s public comments about the doctor on Fox News violated state attorney confidentiality laws.

Other

Venture capitalist Bill Gurley rails against Epic in a swaggering presentation this week, which is so full of errors and unproven assumptions that I won’t bother wasting time correcting them (example: he says ONC was formed to oversee ARRA when in fact it predated it by five years; not to mention that his summary of why EClinicalWorks, Greenway, and Practice Fusion paid millions to settle federal charges is way off base.)

[Epic] is the largest player in medical or EHR software medical records. This is their CEO, Judith Faulkner. Now in 2009, Obama put her on his health IT council. She was the only corporate representative. It should not surprise you that she’s a major donor to Obama. Obama passed the American Recovery Act that was his big piece of stimulus, kind of like Biden’s inflation act that happened recently. Tucked underneath and easy to hide in this big bill is the acronym HITECH. It’s this health information technology thing. Then they created an agency called ONC that oversaw it. Now this is the part you’re not going to believe. They came up with a brilliant idea that I have to assume she helped encourage, that doctors would receive $44,000 each if they bought software, 38 billion dollars .. You may be thinking are doctors needy, but here’s the catch. This happened because of the mortgage meltdown. Doctors own multiple homes, so they have multiple mortgages, so they probably needed the assistance … ONC decided the threshold of features you would need for your software to comply with this mandate, and I’m assuming they kind of took Epic’s feature set and plowed it into this spreadsheet. They got the Department of Justice to enforce people that didn’t have the feature set that were getting the payments, and you had three record fines – $155 million, $57 million, $145 million — against the lesser competitors of Epic. Unreal. If you’ve studied “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” the way startups disrupt is they come in with lower feature products, but a feature that really matters to the customer in a simpler product. They move up they put a brick wall there so you couldn’t come up. It’s just amazing. Obama, in an interview with Ezra Klein, said this was the most disappointing part of Obamacare … You may ask, am I am I unhappy with Judith? I’m disgusted with it, but if I were a judge in the Olympic regulatory capture competition, I’m giving her a 10.

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago finds out from a press announcement that its CIO, John Sudduth, had been hired months before as CIO of the American Board of Medical Specialties. He held both jobs as a full-time, Monday through Friday employee without his bosses finding out for 2 1/2 months because of COVID work-from-home policies.

Not healthcare related except as an AI cautionary tale. OpenAI investor Microsoft apparently uses AI to produce crappy articles on MSN, whose content has suffered after it fired many of its human editors and started relying on wildly inconsistent syndicated articles. A now-removed article’s headline about the death of NBA player Brandon Hunter called him “useless,” strung together bizarre and incorrect details in its “story” about his career, and changed words here and there to hide its poorly executed plagiarism from other sites (it listed Hunter’s position as “ahead” instead of “forward” as originally stated in the TMZ piece it stole). The site earned unwanted attention last month after running an AI-generated travel guide to Ottawa, Canada that recommend that tourists visit the local food bank.

Sponsor Updates

Care.ai launches a podcast series titled “Smart from the Start,” hosted by former HIMSS CEO Steve Lieber.
Seashore MD streamlines patient booking and patient acquisition with EClinicalWorks EHR and Healow solutions.
The “HIT Like a Girl” podcast features Nuance EVP and GM of Healthcare Diana Nole.
Nordic releases a new “Making Rounds” podcast, “Emerging opportunities with cloud-based EHRs.”
Ronin will present at the virtual NLP Summit October 4.
Simnova in Italy will integrate Sectra’s medical education platform, the Sectra Education Portal, into their simulation training program.
SmartSense by Digi names Ed Marx to its healthcare advisory board.
Sphere publishes a new whitepaper, “Patient Payments: How Providers Can Improve the Last Mile of the Care Journey.”
Symplr announces that its Symplr Spend Management solution has been named number one according to Black Book’s 2023 top client-rated supply chain solutions rankings.
Verato will present at the Innovations in Value-based Care Conference September 27 in New York City.
Wolters Kluwer Health publishes “The State of Drug Diversion 2023 Report.”

Blog Posts

Leveraging data analytics to achieve positive outcomes (Meditech)
Diagnosing, optimizing, and funding your next EHR implementation to combat provider burnout (Nordic)
Avoid These Two Common EHR Implementation Pitfalls (Optimum Healthcare IT)
The data healthtech needs to deliver to clinicians – Dr. Rob Bart (Redox)
How Better Health Data Sharing Can Optimize Care for 4 Million Sjögren’s Patients – and My Family (Surescripts)
Best Practices in Conflict of Interest Disclosure for Hospitals (Symplr)
Eight Steps for Successfully Moving to Meditech Expanse (Tegria)
Research on denial management in healthcare: 3 key takeaways from Waystar + HFMA (Waystar)

Contacts

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

News 9/15/23

September 14, 2023 News 3 Comments

Top News

The VA tells the House Appropriations Committee that it hopes to resume its Oracle Health implementations in the summer of 2024.

Go-live at the joint VA-DoD facility Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center remains on track for March 2024.

The VA says that restarting the rollout will require VA success metrics to improve at its live sites and for go-live at the Lovell facility be completed successfully.

In the committee hearing, Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia blamed previous VA problems on Cerner technical issues. He added that the VA’s lack of repeatable process has hampered the implementation as compared to the DoD, although he believes the VA is on track.

In a related item, Rep. Greg Murphy, MD (R-NC) said in a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing that it is “inexcusable” to be rebuilding the VA’s Oracle Cerner system five years into the project, adding, “There are other systems out there that are much better.” Murphy is a practicing urologic and renal transplant surgeon at ECU Health (formerly Vidant Health), which uses Epic.

Reader Comments

From HisTalk2Fan: “Re: Larry Ellison’s comments about the Cerner Millennium rewrite made in the earnings call this week. What is your thought?” My reaction to the call in general:

Blaming the former Cerner’s revenue recognition practices for Oracle’s quarterly financial disappointment seems to throwing the acquired company under the bus, which Oracle has also done in attributing the VA’s implementation problems to Oracle-discovered Cerner technology deficiencies.
The oft-repeated goal to “drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards” sounds good to stock analysts, but perhaps less so to customers or prospects who aren’t looking forward to higher bills or reduced service due to cost-cutting layoffs.
Oracle talks about rewriting Millennium using code generators, but has said nothing about product roadmaps or the layoff-caused lack of clinical resources that would be needed to design, test, implement, and support a rewritten Cerner product. They have stopped talking about Millennium’s weak areas – like not offering a competitive RCM system — and instead talk only about moving the product to the cloud.
Oracle talked up the development of a hands-free voice interface and increased availability of AI/ML in the December 2021 acquisition announcement, where it also pledged that Oracle would “maintain and grow Cerner’s community presence” in Kansas City.
The company says it will announce two new contracts worth a combined $1 billion this quarter. My bet is that these are outside the US, where Oracle has said it will expand Cerner sales to create “a huge additional revenue growth engine.”
I know little about code generators, but the idea that old code or new specs can be fed into a tool that will effortlessly spit out perfect code has never worked. And while customers might (or might not) benefit from a move to Oracle’s cloud, technology changes alone don’t often excite the market. I doubt that the decision of UPMC and Intermountain to move to Epic was driven by Millennium’s infrastructure.
Oracle has failed to deliver (and now doesn’t mention) the promised rewrite of Millennium Pharmacy for the VA as the first step in Millennium’s transition, which it assured the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs would be finished by April 2023.
My big-picture takeaway is that the Cerner acquisition was Larry Ellison’s pet project, but now the bean counters are charged with making the healthcare cash register ring, which has been tried by big companies many times with a success rate of 0.0. Meanwhile, Oracle Cerner headlines mostly involve flagship customer attrition and Mike Sicilia slathering corporate concealer to cover its VA black eye.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: Living Colour, whose 40-year history I had missed until a social media mention sent me to Spotify to learn more. The New York City funk metal band has remarkably kept the same lineup since 1984 other than swapping bass players in 1992. They were boxed out of entire genres that should have made them famous due to ever-changing musical tastes, record label pigeonholing, and lack of support for most black artists, but they just keep doing what they do.

A Reader’s Notes from AHIP’s Consumer Experience and Digital Health Conference

Looks like about 300 attendees, with key themes of AI, member engagement, health equity, bringing digital solutions to the customer experience, and some discussion about analytics and interoperability.
It’s about as low-key as healthcare conferences get (HLTH will be a shock after this). Quality is good, speakers are specific with evidence and examples, and panelists who are pressed to predict the future seem to have anxiety that no one knows what the payer world will look like in a few years.
John Halamka says that Mayo is focused on low-risk use cases of generative AI, such as drafting appeals letters and replying to patient messages. They are thinking about use in prior authorization, but haven’t done anything. He says B2C AI tools are too risky because of hallucinations and the risk of giving patients incorrect information. He concludes that when working with AI startups, it is critical to separate fact from fiction.
A panel says that AI-powered ambient listening and documentation is a big opportunity, but adds that the onslaught of AI tools has been hard to triage.
California-based Manifest MedEx is using data on 36 million Californians – from EHRs, immunization registries, EMS EHRs, and claims – to promote health equity, although data normalization and consistency across data sources are challenges.
Oscar has a platform that creates patient interventions and messages based on knowledge about that person, such as recommending that a care manager arrange a specialist referral in response to a chatbot question, while Cambia has an initiative to lower the out-of-pocket medication cost of members. They say the message must be matched to the patient, such as tailoring to the local Spanish dialect used, and sent via the patient’s preferred communication method.
One presenter expressed concern about trends such as fewer providers accepting Medicaid, wondering if low-income patients will eventually be limited to virtual care only.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

RCM technology vendor Aspirion acquires AI-powered intelligent document processing platform vendor Infinia ML.

Digital therapeutics vendor Akili, which sells a videogame that is an FDA-approved treatment for ADHD, will lay off 40% of its headcount and abandon its business model that involves prescriptions and payers. The company will sell directly to consumers with no prescription required, saying that payers were standing in the way of patients receiving treatment. The company went public via SPAC merger in August 2022, with shares opening at $36 but falling to $4 within a week as another spectacular but highly profitable failure from SPAC king Chamath Palihapitiya. AKLI shares are now at 90 cents, valuing the former unicorn at $70 million.

Politico reports that private equity acquisition of hospitals and nursing homes, financed with low-interest loans, are at risk for layoffs and bankruptcies as higher interest rates eat into their profits. Federal agencies such as CMS and the SEC are alarmed over the undisclosed debt and the involvement of PE firms like The Blackstone Group – which holds $1 trillion in assets and controls businesses that employ 12 million Americans – that walk away from acquired companies after milking quick profits and management fees.

Sales

CommonWell Health Alliance names Ellkay as its technical service provider, where it will provide the interoperability infrastructure to support current requirements and CommonWell’s goal of becoming a QHIN under TEFCA.
Central California Alliance for Health will implement ZeOmega’s care management solution.

People

Rhapsody hires Sagnik Bhattacharya, MS (HealthEdge) as CEO.

Thirty Madison names Gil Shklarski, PhD (Flatiron Health) as CTO.

TeleTracking hires Nigel Ohrenstein, MA (Kaia Health) as president.

Julia Bernstein, MBA (Thirty Madison) joins behavioral telehealth provider Brightside Health as COO.

Bruce Gray, MBA (HIMSS) joins WPS Health Solutions as chief information and digital officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Blue Ridge Medical Center earns Rural Emergency Hospital designation with the assistance of Medhost and its REH package.

UT Health San Antonio and UTSA launch a five-year MD/Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence degree program.

Geisinger goes live on Exo Works, which integrates ultrasound documentation with its EHR and PACS.

The newly announced Apple Watch Series 9 adds the ability to use Siri to request on-device health and fitness information, such as data from connected monitors, and to log health data such as weight and meds.

Aridhia Informatics and Replica Analytics will collaborate to offer an end-to-end research data-sharing platform for research hospitals, pharma, and global consortia.

Other

The government of China cracks down on doctors who accept illegal commissions from drug companies for selling their products to patients, supplementing their “very small” salaries with “red envelope” money that can make up a significant part of their income. A previous study also found that one-third of patients had bribed their own doctor to get better treatment.

The Philadelphia newspaper notes that Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia paid its CEO $7.7 million in 2021, exceeding the amount of charity care the hospital provided in the three previous years combined.

Sponsor Updates

EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Unlock Healthcare Benefits with Healow.”
CereCore releases a new podcast, “Liverpool Women’s CIO on the EPR Implementation Journey.”
Arcadia announces that ACO using Arcadia Analytics outperformed the market in Medicare Shared Savings Program bonuses by nearly 20% on average in 2022.
Elsevier Health publishes its Clinician of the Future 2023 report, highlighting the new ways in which technology will provide relief for healthcare workers.
InterSystems will sponsor HackMIT September 16-17 at MIT in Cambridge, MA.

Blog Posts

How to Reach the CMDB Summit (Optimum Healthcare IT)
The Secret to Exceptional Customer Support: A Look into Dimensional Insight (Dimensional Insight)
Connecting Californians: Supporting Medicaid Members via CalAIM (Findhelp)
What’s the Difference Between a Call Center and a Contact Center? (Five9)
Stretching your cybersecurity budget: 6 ways to do more with less (Fortified Health Security)
Why am I going to attend HLTH next month? (Get-to-Market Health)
The Value of Using the Right Health Education Videos for Patients (Healthwise)
Three Keys to Unlocking Provider Productivity (Impact Advisors)
Unleashing the Cure: RPA 2.0’s Impact on Healthcare and Aerospace & Defense (Keysight Technologies)
Master Denial Management: 4 Essential Techniques for Healthcare Providers (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 9/13/23

September 12, 2023 News Comments Off

Top News

From the Oracle earnings call, following a Q1 revenue miss, slowed cloud sales, and lowered expectations that sent shares down 13% on Tuesday:

The company expects to sign two new Cerner contracts that are valued at over $1 billion in total in the current quarter. (Readers: who could this be? New customers, which would suggest an Epic displacement, or a new cloud contract for existing Cerner clients?)
Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison says that healthcare AI requires vast amounts of training data, including image information, and Oracle’s new vector database will contain anonymized EHR training data that will be good for its database business.
Ellison answered an analyst’s question about the one-year anniversary of Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner, saying that the move to “a new Millennium” involve rewriting the software one piece at a time using the Apex code generator, with the first step being hardening the system and moving customers to the cloud.
Ellison says that cloud-based revenue recognition has caused “a bit of a revenue headwind” since Cerner previously recognized a chunk of revenue at contract signing.
CEO Safra Catz added that Oracle is “always looking to save as much money as we can and spend as little” while modernizing the Cerner system and, as she has repeatedly said, working to “drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards.”

Reader Comments

From Digital Health CEO: “Re: our news on your site. We get a lot of positive social channel feedback on our mentions on HIStalk, which still has the best reach in healthcare.” Thanks. This is a actual comment from a non-anonymous CEO just in case anyone suspects made-up self promotion. It’s a good audience, skewed hard toward decision-maker careerists.

From Keep Me Anonymous Health System CIO: “Re: the Cerner input you requested. Here’s mine.” A summary:

Millennium is a decent inpatient EHR that works after expending the effort, while ambulatory has improved and our providers are receptive to using it.
Millennium Patient Accounting significantly lags Epic in functionality, ease of use, and analytics.
The Soarian-based RevElate system that is supposed to replace PA is a better product than Millennium PA, but there’s only one GA option to integrate it and that requires interfaces. Integrating workflows is difficult and requires dual maintenance, such as charge masters and providers. It is still being developed with implementation partners, so the expected benefits have yet to be proven.
I’ve seen no positive improvements since the Oracle acquisition. Oracle Health (or is it Oracle Cerner?) has had multiple rounds of layoffs, going beyond duplicative functions such as HR and marketing in getting rid of the core workforce, which is baffling. They lack the bench strength to executive anything timely and customers find it difficult to get knowledgeable people for supports and projects.
The last round of layoffs eliminated most, if not all, of their clinical experts, such as physicians and nurses.
Most of Oracle’s promises to improve the Cerner project involve infrastructure and moving to the cloud, but Cerner’s remote hosting was its most reliable service. Oracle is fixing something that is not broken and that holds little value to customers.
I’ve seen no roadmap for system development.
Oracle promises to rewrite the EHR, but I’m not sure who will redesign it given the lack of clinical bench strength.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Notable Health. The San Mateo, CA-based company is the leading automation platform for patient engagement and staff workflows. Deployed at over 3,000 sites of care, Notable automates over a million repetitive workflows every day across scheduling, registration, intake, referrals, and authorizations. The result: personalized, streamlined care for patients, the elimination of burdensome manual work for caregivers, and improved financial health for healthcare providers. Notable is backed by leading investors, including ICONIQ Growth, Greylock Partners, F-Prime, Oak HC/FT, Maverick Ventures, and 8VC. Find out why healthcare providers of all sizes, including Intermountain Health, Medical University of South Carolina, North Kansas City Hospital, and more have partnered with Notable to redefine what’s possible in healthcare. Thanks to Notable Health for supporting HIStalk.

Lorre is offering three companies a sweet deal – sign up as a Platinum sponsor and she will include the rest of 2023 for no extra charge. Contact her to see if three other folks beat you to it.

A mostly forgotten memory for DoD-Cerner watchers, which I recalled while fondly re-reading the DoD series written for HIStalk by the mystical Dim-Sum. Part of the ultimately successful Leidos proposal to DoD was the involvement of Intermountain Healthcare.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Online Medicare Advantage insurance sales firm Health IQ, which raised $200 million from big-name investors, files Chapter 7 bankruptcy with $1.3 million in assets and $257 million in debt. Co-founder Munjal Shah and some of Health IQ’s leadership are now involved with Hippocratic AI, which has raised $65 million from Andreessen Horowitz and which lost big on Health IQ.

Sales

Infirmary Health (AL) selects chronic care management and virtual care software and services from Wellbox.
Community Health Systems (TN) will use Mindoula’s virtual behavioral healthcare service as a part of its primary care offerings.
In England, Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust will implement Oracle Cerner in a $55 million project.

People

CereCore names James Lobban (Meditech) regional VP of business development.

Edifecs names practicing VA staff physician Summerpal Kahlon, MD, MS (Change Healthcare) chief medical officer.

Julia Goebel (Symplr) joins Komodo Health as head of marketing.

Surescripts hires Lynne Nowak, MD (Lark Health) as its first chief data and analytics officer.

Kristen Lalowski, RN (VillageMD) joins LetsGetChecked as EVP of product.

Fivos Health promotes Eric Nilsson to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Geisinger will expand its in-home chronic care management program, which includes equipment setup by Best Buy’s Geek Squad and data collection and monitoring by Best Buy-owned Current Health.

Broadmeadows Hospital and Northern Hospital in Melbourne, Australia go live on Oracle Health as part of Northern Health’s systemwide implementation, first announced in late 2020.

In Oregon, Blue Mountain Hospital and its Strawberry Wilderness Community Clinic implement Oracle Health’s CommunityWorks EHR.

A study of 200 provider executives by Bain & Company and KLAS Research finds that most health systems increased their spending on software and IT significantly in the past year, with revenue cycle management and clinical workflow optimization being the top investment areas while patient engagement has moved up the list. Two-thirds of the respondents say they will look first at their existing vendors, especially their EHR supplier, when looking for new functionality. Few organizations have an AI strategy, but 50% are either developing one or will do so soon.

Government and Politics

The Senate confirms Army veteran and VA Chief of Staff Tanya Bradsher as deputy secretary, where she will be responsible for the VA’s Oracle Cerner implementation.

Privacy and Security

Prospect Medical Holdings works to determine if patient information within its 16 hospitals was breached in a reportedly $1.3 million ransomware attack by the Rhysida group nearly six weeks ago. Prospect is also still working to bring all of its hospital systems back online.

Hospital Sisters Health System (IL) restores its Epic system after a cyberattack forced it to downtime procedures two weeks ago. Affiliate Prevea Health (WI), which was also a part of the attack, has yet to bring its systems fully back online.

Other

HealtheLink, an HIE serving Western New York, will use a $1 million grant from ONC to gather advance care planning documents and make them digitally available to providers within its network.

University of Utah Health research finds that poor EHR user experience strongly correlates with EHR-related patient safety concerns, particularly in the areas of medication alerts related to drug-drug interactions, patient allergies, duplicate orders, and excessive dosing.

Sponsor Updates

Artera names Nicole Ossey (Knock) VP of people.
DePaul Community Health Centers reduces days in accounts receivable by more than 50% with RCM solutions from EClinicalWorks.
The Agile Giants Podcast features Arcadia CEO Michael Meucci.
Nordic releases a new episode of its In Network podcast in partnership with Amazon Web Services, “Making Rounds: Emerging opportunities with cloud-based EHRs.”
Ascom Americas will sponsor the Hack the Building 2.0 Hospital Edition September 18-22 in Columbia, MD.
Bamboo Health will exhibit at NAACOS 2023 September 20-22 in Washington, DC.
CloudWave will exhibit at the Torch Fall Conference September 25-28 in Round Rock, TX.

Blog Posts

Five key features telehealth patients want: Insights for healthcare developers (Wolters Kluwer Health)
The Next Big Thing for Healthcare IT Service Desks – Support with Clinical Context (CereCore)
Leveraging Analytics in the Revenue Cycle Management Maturity Journey (AGS Health)
Optimum’s ServiceNow Store Opens (Optimum Healthcare IT)
How Arrive Health is Creating a Better Prescribing Experience, Including Eliminating 87% of RTPB Noise (Arrive Health)
Decreasing falls and cutting costs in the LTACH setting (AvaSure)
Driving Operational Efficiency + Patient Outcomes: Clearsense 20/20 (Clearsense)
7 Ways to Ensure Your Incident Response Plan is Incident-Ready (Clearwater)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/11/23

September 10, 2023 News 10 Comments

Top News

Walmart is reportedly considering acquiring a majority stake in ChenMed, which operates 100 Medicare Advantage primary care clinics in 15 states.

The family-owned ChenMed has made significant executive team changes this year, replacing five of six family members who held C-level roles. My quick eyeball of the leadership team web page changes since February show that only four of the 12 leaders remain.

If the deal goes through, it will likely be Walmart’s biggest healthcare investment, at several billion dollars.

Reader Comments

From Pure Envy: “Re: Epic. Why didn’t DoD and VA choose them in the first place? Will they switch from Cerner like everyone else seems to be doing?” Cerner paired up for the DoD bid with prime contractor Leidos, a skilled lapper at the federal trough, while Epic linked up with comparative federal lightweight IBM. Either that or the feds saw more promise in Cerner and the other companies that were part of the Leidos bid. The DoD has no reason to replace Cerner because its implementation is nearly finished and is free of the drama that has plagued the VA, which may be stuck with VistA forever given the embarrassment, cost, and likely similar outcomes of dumping Cerner for Epic under pressure from Congress. The one thing that is sure, given that the federal government is in charge, is that contractors will profit obscenely and indefinitely no matter which systems the DoD and VA are using, as the VA’s 40-year-old VistA is reportedly costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion per year to keep running. The VA rarely completes IT projects successfully and technology is seldom the problem – VA regions resist any form of central oversight and thus love their custom instances of VistA.

From Bemis Comfy: “Re: Cerner to Epic switches. Two big Cerner losses in one week. The trend will continue.” Probably, for these reasons: (1) Cerner sites that implemented its systems more than 7-8 years ago now have the money and fortitude to switch to the obvious market leader, while the Epic-to-Cerner migration history is minimal; (2) FOMO; (3) to the victor go the IT spoils, as acquisition-happy big health systems seem to have lost their temporary appetite for running multiple systems to avoid rip-and-replace in acquired hospitals and are now looking to reduce vendor complexity; and (4) the disastrous Brent Shafer Cerner years seeded frustration that is just now showing up as defections. Oracle’s interest in Cerner seemed to mostly be driven by the personal fascination of 79-year-old Larry Ellison, the opportunity to increase Cerner margins, and the chance to buy into a massive federal business, none of which necessarily boost the satisfaction of Cerner customers. However, Oracle executives are probably more worried about competing in cloud and AI than counting Cerner hospitals or strategizing how to compete more effectively with Epic. Maybe they will say more at next week’s Oracle Health Conference. If you’re a CIO with recent experience as a customer of both Epic and Cerner, what do you think?

From Pop Smoke: “Re: HIStalk. Have you considered changing the name to something that makes sense?” When I started HIStalk 20 years ago, hospital technology was referred to as “hospital information systems” and the department that operated those systems was “management information systems,” so HIS and MIS were universally understood industry terms that have since faded into obscurity. Readers can probably provide more examples (CPOE comes to mind). The name HIStalk does not refer to possessiveness, gender, religion, or anything else you’ve imagined. I’m too lazy and set in my ways to worry about anything except the content, so I’m not contemplating a rebrand, including canning the satirical smokin’ doc.

From Electric Eel: “Re: subscribing. How does one subscribe to HIStalk nowadays?” There’s a “Subscribe to Updates” menu drop-down under Contact, which takes you to this page. It ignores duplicates, so if you’ve stopped getting updates, just stick your email in there again. It is shocking how often emails aren’t delivered due to being rejected by an overzealous email system on the receiver’s end, and signing up again can’t hurt and might fix it.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Quite a few poll respondents have had a rocky employment year so far in 2023.

New poll to your right or here, as suggested by a reader: In your most recent change to a new medical practice for an ongoing relationship, how did they obtain your medical records? My guess is that a surprising number of practices don’t really care about the laboriously collected and maintained information from other providers, preferring to start over with patient-provided basics such as demographics, meds, allergies, family history, known conditions, and immunizations that their new customer is expected to scrawl onto poorly designed clipboard forms.

Thanks to the following companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo for more information.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Merative, the former IBM Watson Health, will lay off 100 of its 400 employees who work in Ireland, moving their jobs to India.

A study finds that when PCPs enter into vertical relationships with health systems – by selling out to them, affiliating, or entering joint contracting deals – specialist visits, total patient spending, ED visits, and hospitalizations within the health system all increase. In other words, health systems get exactly what they hope for when they use their large piles of cash to buy independent doctors who are then “encouraged” to steer business their way.

Calibrate, which sells weight loss drugs online to people who sign up for its $1,749-per-year coaching package (which doesn’t include drug cost), is paying out big chunks of its revenue as refunds to address BBB complaints from customers for whom the company can’t provide them with high-demand drugs such as Wegovy. Insiders say the company’s layoffs have left too few employees to manage insurance company authorizations and to respond to customer questions. Its newly released app has earned a 1.1 rating out of five stars on Apple’s App Store as a skeleton crew of engineers can’t keep up with bug fixes. The company says it will pivot to working with employers and health plans, although insiders question whether it has the people and the focus to launch a new business given its low staffing and the competitive environment.

Sales

Clalit Health Services, Israel’s largest healthcare provider, will implement Sectra’s digital pathology solution.

People

Industry long-timer Bill Carmichael, whose held IT roles at Franciscan Alliance, Information Resource Associates, and Eskenazi Health, died August 26. He was 71.

Georgia-based family practice doctor Jim Morrow, MD, MS, who held health IT executive and advisory roles in his career of nearly 40 years, died August 31 at 69.

Announcements and Implementations

The Healthtech Leader 3.0 conference – put on by CHIME, AEHIS, AEHADA, and AEHIT — will be held September 27-29 in Cleveland, OH, with CHIME members getting a discounted registration fee of $295 that includes breakfasts, lunches, and receptions. The Cleveland Clinic-connected InterContinental’s conference rate of $189 makes this a pretty inexpensive event, depending on your transportation cost.

Government and Politics

Nigeria’s federal government announces plans for a National Electronic Medical Record Platform that will unify the records of primary and federal medical centers. The newly appointed Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Tunji Alausa, MD – a nephrologist who founded and runs the Illinois-based Kidney Care Center and Dialysis Care Center – says:

We will embark on the digitalization of our healthcare system, because in this age,if you don’t have data, validated data, it’s just like still being in the dark. We need to make sure that the data we collect are accurate, they are validated,they can be trusted internally and locally. That will be used to deliver healthcare to our people. When we have validated data that we can trust,we can begin to see the indices where you are getting better,where you are doing well and where you are not doing well and then,you can direct your interventions to improving those outcomes.

HELP Committee ranking member Senator Bill Cassidy, MD (R-LA) solicits solutions to protecting patient privacy related to wearables, smart devices, and apps, none of which are covered by HIPAA. He seeks input on expanding HIPAA beyond covered entities and traditional health data; whether safeguards that address disclosure to law enforcement officials are sufficient; if organizations that aren’t covered entities should be required to delete consumer data at their request as GDPR mandates; and whether location data should be considered health data. He also asks questions about safeguarding genetic and biometric data, whether HIPAA should address claims data, and the extent to which consumers can opt out of having their data used for AI training. Responses are due September 28.

Other

Odd: the fired CEO of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton sues the hospital, claiming that he was fired because the hospital foundation’s “Under the Italian Sky” fundraising soiree included naked body painting.

An interesting VCU medical school poster notes that traditional physician clothes and accessories can spread bacteria. On the not-to-wear list: white coats (which are not laundered frequently), stethoscopes (unless they are disinfected between patients), watches, shirts that don’t allow “bare below the elbow,” ties (rarely cleaned), and cell phones. If white coats are required, providers should be given at least two of them with free on-site laundering and coat hooks should be available outside of areas where patients are seen so the coats can be removed. It recommends wearing sleeveless vests instead of white coats, although I wouldn’t want to be the person trying to rip traditional medical regalia from the cold, dead hands of doctors who aren’t about to hold court wearing an egalitarian vest.

Sponsor Updates

Lucem Health releases a new “This Week in Clinical AI” podcast.
Aga Khan Health Services in East Africa will implement Meditech Expanse.
Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with CT Lin, MD, Liz Salmi, and Bryan Steitz, PhD.”
Optimum Healthcare IT’s ServiceNow offering, Clinician Connect, is now available in the ServiceNow Store.
Verato will exhibit at the ISM + PHSA Conference September 10-13 in Kissimmee, FL.
West Monroe launches the third season of its This is Digital Podcast.
Wolters Kluwer Health will sponsor the 2023 Patient Experience Summit September 11-12 in Nashville.
Ellkay, Nuance, Healthwise, Fortified Health Security, Ronin, Ascom, Elsevier, First Databank, Impact Advisors, Linus Health, Loyal, Nordic, Optum, ReMedi Health Solutions, HCI Group, Wolters Kluwer Health, Net Health, Surescripts, and Waystar will exhibit at the Oracle Health Conference September 18-20 in Las Vegas.

Blog Posts

EMR Consultants: Breaking Down Short-Term, Long-Term, and Permanent Placements (HealthTech Resources)
The Benefits of Having Your Healthcare HCM, ERP, and SCM in One System (Healthcare IT Leaders)
Navigating Change Management: Fostering Organizational Engagement (Impact Advisors)
Living Fearlessly: Reflecting on Fear and Overcoming It (JTG Consulting Group)
AI Deployment Success: Improving Adaptability Over Time (Lucem Health)
Automated “risk stratification” is key to improving patient satisfaction and care team efficiency (Lumeon)
Revamp Your Revenue Cycle: Billing Flow (Medhost)
Attainable innovation: How trends shape the healthcare industry and its future success (Meditech)
5 Benefits of Offering Digital MSK at Your Outpatient Rehab Therapy Practice (Net Health)
New Reports Show Health Plans Must Innovate Behavioral Health Risk Management Strategy (NeuroFlow)
Preparing for the 2024 ICD-10-CM Code Updates (Nym Health)
It’s Time to End Multi-Trigger Targeting for EHR-based HCP Engagement (OptimizeRx)
Nurses of Note 2023: The Acute Neurovascular Advanced Practitioner (PerfectServe)
An Expert’s Take on HCC Coding (RCxRules)
Respite Care 101: From History to Modern Resources (Trualta)

Contacts

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

News 9/8/23

September 7, 2023 News 7 Comments

Top News

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo will acquire NextGen Healthcare in a $1.5 billion take-private transaction, paying a 46% premium to the unaffected share price.

NextGen offers solutions for EHR/PM and interoperability.

The private equity firm’s portfolio includes Imprivata, Hyland, Qlik, and Bluesight.

NXGN shares had lost 8% in the 12 months before the acquisition rumors surfaced. They were down 20% over the previous five years.

Reader Comments

From DJ: “Re: Intermountain. Rumor is that it told caregivers this week that it will move from Cerner / Oracle Health to Epic.” Verified by an Intermountain media contact in response to my inquiry. Oracle Health losing former Cerner poster children Intermountain and UPMC in the same week is significant. A Redditor posted the internal Intermountain email announcement to caregivers, with these snips:

We are excited to announce that we will align to a single Electronic Health Record (EHR) across Intermountain Health, and all regions will begin moving toward using Epic … Epic will be the single EHR for the organization due to strong functional offerings and significantly higher physician and APP EHR satisfaction scores. For example, Epic EHR satisfaction scores at Intermountain are .49 points above the national average on a 5-point scale and the Cerner score is .52 points below the national average … Epic is currently being used by Intermountain care sites in Colorado and Montana. The renewal deadline for our Cerner contract, which supports the iCentra EHR across the Canyons Region and parts of the Desert Region, is coming up in November. Given this timeline, it’s the right time to take action. We have an urgent need to find an EHR solution that can best support operations in Idaho and Nevada, where our legacy EHR solutions are antiquated and in need of replacement. Our finance team completed a detailed review of our annual EHR operating costs, and moving to a single platform will help us achieve significant cost savings over time. Today we are simply announcing this transition. We have a lot of planning work ahead of us to go-live with Epic across the system by the fourth quarter of 2025. As we plan for the transition, we will be sunsetting EHR contracts with other EHR vendors (e.g., Cerner, Allscripts, etc.).

Meanwhile, another Redditor says that while Neal Patterson built Cerner, losing customers such as Intermountain was more his fault than that of his often-blamed successors Brent Shafer and David Feinberg:

Patterson didn’t leave a succession plan when he died in 2017.
A primary driver of Cerner clients moving to Epic was that Cerner didn’t develop a competent RCM system and continued selling both its own system as well as Siemens Soarian
Cerner allowed clients to customize their system to the point that they couldn’t upgrade.
CCL was the go-to reporting system instead of a robust reporting solution.
Cerner didn’t develop a competitive offering to Epic’s MyChart.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Symplr. Symplr is building the bridge to enterprise healthcare operations and beyond. Together with its customers, it is creating the blueprint for how to not just survive, but thrive, by maximally using staff
and technology in tandem to bridge the gaps and increase efficiencies in healthcare operations. For more than 30 years and with deployments in nine of 10 US hospitals, Symplr has been committed to improving healthcare operations through its cloud-based solutions. Its provider data management; workforce management; compliance, quality, and safety; and contract, supplier, and spend management solutions improve the efficiency and efficacy of healthcare operations, enabling caregivers to quickly handle administrative tasks so they have more time to do what they do best: provide high-quality patient care. Thanks to Symplr for supporting HIStalk.

The HLTH conference is October 8-11, so I’ll post a list of participating HIStalk sponsors and their activities the week before. Watch for a data collection form link next weekend.

Webinars

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

Sales

South Dakota’s Department of Health chooses Findhelp to built its statewide social care referral system.
Aga Khan Health Services, East Africa will implement Meditech Expanse in Tanzania and Kenya.
Intermountain Healthcare will implement Epic throughout its system, replacing Cerner and other products.

People

Industry long-timer Mark Hefner died Saturday of cancer. He was 64.

Announcements and Implementations

AvaSure adds video AI support to its TeleSitter solution to reduce elopement and falls.

Withings earns FDA clearance for its Body Scan smart scale, a $400 device with a retractable grab bar that detects atrial fibrillation along with monitoring body composition, heart rate, and vascular age.

Government and Politics

The VA will review its online disability systems after discovering that technical issues delayed disability claims for veterans who tried to update their dependency status or to file appeals online. The VA found that some disability-related cases going back to 2011 have not been addressed.

Other

A woman says that her brother died alone in a Las Vegas hospital because of the way the hospital assigns names to unidentified patients. Clifford Allen collapsed in a retail area on a 115-degree Las Vegas day and was lying in the full sun for eight hours with no help from bystanders, during which time someone stole his wallet and oxygen tank. His sister repeatedly called every hospital in Las Vegas asking about patients admitted under his name or John Doe, with no success. He died 10 days later as an inpatient of MountainView Hospital, which says that while it admits unidentified patients under the last name Doe, it assigns different first names to avoid merging the medical records of multiple patients named John or Jane Doe.

Sponsor Updates

Direct Recruiters, Inc. hires Dave Emma (Teladoc Health) as practice leader of technology for digital health.
Concord Health Partners makes an unspecified investment in NeuroFlow.
Experity will accept nominations for its annual Industry Limelight Awards, to be presented at its 2024 Urgent Care Connect Conference, through October 27.
EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Unlocking Reporting Capabilities in EBO.”
Ascom launches its new Myco 4 smartphone for clinical institutions and enterprises.
Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Exploring aspects of leadership, management, innovation, and technology in healthcare organizations.”
Censinet partners with Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center to provide free third-party risk management services to Health-ISAC members through its Community Services Program.
CloudWave will co-sponsor the Meditech Live Welcome Reception on September 19 in Foxborough, MA.
Five9 will be at the CCW Patient Experience Exchange in Atlanta October 17-19.
Nordic releases another episode of its In Network podcast, “Designing for Health: Interview with CT Lin, MD, Liz Salmi, and Bryan Steitz, PhD.”
Divurgent releases a new episode of The Vurge Podcast, “Bridging the Gap Between Operations & Technology.”
Ellkay will exhibit at Oracle CloudWorld September 18-20 in Las Vegas.
Everbridge publishes a new case study, “Improving patient communications with Everbridge: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.”

Blog Posts

Liverpool Women’s CIO Perspective: Digital Maturity One EPR Milestone at a Time (CereCore)
Mitigating the Risks Involved with High-Risk Diagnosis Groups (AGS Health)
Bridging gaps: Data-driven approaches to patient outreach (Arcadia)
What Hospitals Can Do To Move From Digital Tools to Digital Transformation in Healthcare (Ascom)
An Expert’s Take on HCC Coding (RCxRules)
Availity Expert Q&A: Unleashing Efficiency to Revolutionize Prior Authorizations (Availity)
How a Security Controls Validation Assessment Optimizes Cybersecurity Investments (Clearwater)
How Continuous Safety Monitoring Can Reduce Hospital Stays for High-Risk Oncology Patients (Current Health)
Bridging the Gender Gap in Health Tech (Dimensional Insight)
Increased Prevalence of Alpha-Gal Syndrome Impacts More Clinical Decisions (First Databank)
Living Off the Land attacks: Unveiling the illusion (Fortified Health Security)

Contacts

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

News 9/6/23

September 5, 2023 News 8 Comments

Top News

UPMC will replace Oracle Health / Cerner and eight other EHRs with Epic. Implementation in the 40-hospital system will begin in Q4 and be completed by mid-2026.

UPMC was already using Epic in some areas, notably for ambulatory services.

Reader Comments

From SPAC Cadet: “Re: HIStalk. Have you thought about taking it public via a SPAC? Everybody is doing it!” Everybody was indeed doing it until the government cracked down on unproven companies that could not have passed the scrutiny involved in an actual IPO and instead “merged,” which left them free to pump shares via media promotion. Nothing says USA like celebrities, grifters, and the ever-present money people collaborating to pick the pockets of the little guy. SPAC king Chamath Palihapitiya used Twitter and CNBC shilling to earn himself a billion dollars in fees while shares in his average SPAC company were tanking 90%. His Clover Health, which he bragged was a surefire 10x win over 10 years, started trading at a $7 billion valuation that is now down to $650 million, so the 10x is looking accurate though directionally incorrect.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Health IT people may be professionally embarrassed by being the last holdout of fax machines, but most poll respondents wouldn’t walk out on a practice upon seeing one at the check-in desk (I purposely described it that way to indicate the presence of the lowest form of faxing, as opposed to the slightly sexier digital fax). One commenter astutely noted that not seeing a fax machine out front just means that they are using e-fax or have placed the machine out of sight. Another said it’s a lot more offensive shove a multi-page paper form at patients for whom the information is already in the clinic’s EHR. Bethany notes that even all-digital clinics needs a fax machine because they can’t receive referrals from other practices that insist on using them.

New poll to your right or here: Were you laid off, terminated, demoted, or forced to relocate so far in 2023?

Lorre always offers incentives for new sponsors to sign up in the last quarter when leftover marketing budgets need a home, so contact her to get on board.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo is reportedly in advanced stages of negotiation to acquire NextGen Healthcare.

The CEOs of Walgreens and Amazon-owned One Medical resign. The latter is less surprising since the CEOs of Amazon’s acquisitions rarely stick around beyond the kick-in of their golden parachutes, while the former looks like impatience that the ambitious plans to turn Walgreens into a a full-service healthcare provider via acquisitions involves too much risk and time.

Mercy Iowa City files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing the poor implementation of a new Allscripts EHR in 2022 that has since contributed to problems with coding, billing, and collecting for $189 million in patient services. The hospital has filed a lawsuit against Allscripts, now known as Altera Digital Health, to which it still owes $1.8 million. It is considering a “below-market” acquisition offer of $20 million from the University of Iowa, the value of which has left some bondholders seeking an official investigation into the hospital’s downfall.

Patient engagement technology vendor TeleVox acquires the Odeza patient engagement business of RCM company Ensemble Health Partners.

Sales

Tennessee’s TennCare Medicaid agency will use Findhelp’s social services assessment and Closed Loop Referral System as a part of its Health Starts initiative.
Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System will use Masimo’s remote patient monitoring hardware and software across its 10 hospitals in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Blackrock Health Group in Ireland will implement Meditech Expanse at an additional three clinics as part of a three-year, $27 million digital transformation program.

People

Prairie Lakes Healthcare System hires Tim Pugsley, MBA (Mankato Clinic) as CIO.

The National Library of Medicine announces the retirement of Director Patti Brennan, RN, MSN, PhD on September 30. She is an informatics nurse and earned a PhD in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Government and Politics

Air Force doctors say in a town hall meeting in Japan that DoD’s Oracle Health system — whose final go-lives are in the Indo-Pacific bases — is better than its predecessor, but has a quirk in which the records of children aged 13-17 won’t be available online and the children themselves can’t create a patient portal account until they reach 18.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory says that several military medic groups are interested in the EHR smartphone app that it created in 2019. The Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit (BATDOK) captures medical documentation at the point of injury and during transport

Privacy and Security

Carthage Area Hospital in New York gets phone systems up and running as it recovers from a cyberattack discovered last Thursday. The breach also impacted nearby Claxton Hepburn Medical Center, though its phone lines were not affected.

Other

A former physician employee of Babylon, who left the company six years ago after just 12 months, describes what it was like to work at “the most expensive failed experiment on digitizing primary care to date”:

He was shown the company’s “groundbreaking AI system” that was just some Excel worksheets containing decision trees that had been written by junior doctors. Attempts to improve the system failed.
Employed clinicians were told to assign the probabilities of various combinations of diseases and symptoms, leading to illogical questions such as the likelihood that someone with abdominal pain has allergies.
The company’s chatbot didn’t work and didn’t earn FDA approval.
Babylon claimed that its product’s performance was better than that of doctors, then backtracked on that claim when doctors cut ties with the company.
The company hired “slimy sales people” to push deals that almost always ended up failing, pushing whatever AI craze was making headlines, such as facial recognition and voice-to-text.
The GP at Hand telehealth service was convenient for patients, but the service was not cost effective and its expense damaged the NHS services it replaced.

Sponsor Updates

Wolters Kluwer Health announces that its drug diversion monitoring software received exceptional recognition from KLAS in its Drug Diversion Monitoring 2023 report.
A new KLAS white paper shows that Nordic has one of the industry’s most robust selections of services aimed at streamlining the EHR experience.
Ronin publishes a new white paper, “Clinician Experience: The Missing Link Between High-Efficiency and High-Tech Healthcare.”
KLAS recognizes Vyne Medical in its latest Advanced User Insights report on next-generation digital fax management.
The SaaS Fuel podcast features Zen Healthcare IT President Marilee Benson in “SaaS Founder Insights.”

Blog Posts

How Meditech’s Critical Care solution can elevate your organization (Meditech)
5 Benefits of Offering Digital MSK at Your Outpatient Rehab Therapy Practice (Net Health)
Speech recognition adoption made simple with Dragon Medical One (Nuance)
Extreme Usability II: Enhancing the Client Experience (Netsmart)
Automation in Revenue Cycle Management: Healthcare Providers Share Their Experiences with Autonomous Medical Coding (Nym Health)
How to Reach the CMDB Summit (Optimum Healthcare IT)
Real Results from RCxRules Users (RCxRules)
Message Queue Service Oils the Engine Driving E-Prescriptions (Surescripts)
How to Empower Family Caregivers During Hospital Discharge (Trualta)

Contacts

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

News 9/1/23

August 31, 2023 News Comments Off

Top News

Babylon Health sells its UK business, including the GP at Hand app, to US-based in-home test kit vendor EMed Healthcare.

The sale basically marks the end of the company, which has declared insolvency and sold the parts of its business that attracted buyers.

BBLN shares, which went public as one of many disastrous SPAC mergers, are at two-thousandth of one cent, valuing the former high-flyer whose market capitalization reached $4 billion at $5,000.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Wellstar Health System will acquire Augusta University Health System, pledging to complete AU Health’s implementation of Epic.

Biofourmis CEO Kuldeep Rajput resigns from the remote patient monitoring platform vendor one month after the company laid off 120 employees. Its July 2022 Series D funding round increased its total to $464 million, valuing the company at over $1 billion. Insiders say that key investors were unhappy with the company’s strategy and burn rate.

Non-profit RIP Medical Debt, which purchases discounted patient-owed medical debt and pays it off, will work with RCM software vendor FinThrive to use social determinants of health to identify patients whose debt meets the company’s criteria for payoff.

Sales

Bethany Children’s Health Center (OK) will implement Meditech Expanse using the Meditech as a Service platform.
Parkview Health will offer Epic-based virtual urgent care from KeyCare.

People

Jeff Cutler (Ada Health) joins Validic as chief commercial officer.

Adam Seyb (Janus Health) joins ProRank as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

GoodRx announces a real-time benefit check for Provider Mode, which gives prescribers access to a patient’s insurance coverage and drug cost.

NeuroFlow announces a tech-enabled approach to psychiatric collaborative care (CoCM) that combines the company’s AI-driven analytics, care collaboration enablement, and enterprise consumer-grade activation for its health system users.

Government and Politics

CMS asks states to review the results of their computer-assisted Medicaid eligibility determination after identifying a software error that incorrectly flags children to be dropped automatically if their family fails to respond or is found to be ineligible.

Privacy and Security

The FBI and its partners shut down the Qakbot bot that was used to perform several recent cyberattacks on US hospitals. The FBI penetrated the system, found that 700,000 systems were compromised globally, and then set up a redirect function to forward incoming traffic to an uninstaller program.

Systems at Singing River Health System (MS) remain down following an August 20 cyberattack.

In Europe, a privacy watchdog sues Google-owned Fitbit in multiple countries for exporting user data outside the EU in violation of GDPR. The suits say that Fitbit includes data-sharing consent in its user agreement, but doesn’t specify how the data will be used and doesn’t give paid users a way to opt out.

A law firm reminds Florida healthcare providers — hospitals, nursing homes, labs, pharmacies, and mental health providers — that a new state law requires them to verify that their EHR data is physically stored in the continental US, US territories, or Canada. The firm says that that the law does not limit the ability of people outside the country to access patient information, but it does specify where the information must be physically stored, whether by the provider itself or third-party vendors.

Other

UNC gastroenterologist, vice chair, and professor of medicine Spencer Dorn, MD, MPH, MHA – who humorously says on his LinkedIn that “I literally work in the belly of the healthcare beast,” lists how managing the physician EHR inbox violates productivity principles:

Messages arrive all day long and lead the physician reader down rabbit holes, conflicting with the day’s planned activities.
High-value task prioritization gives way to having to read each message to determine its importance.
Inbox noise creates distraction.
Efficiency is sapped by multitasking, as the average PCP switches their attention to the inbox 80 times per day.
Cognitive load is increased by context-switching among screens and windows.
Message burden forces managing the inbox evenings and weekends when the physician’s energy and attention are lower.
Solutions include redesigning the inbox itself, using AI to help manage messages, and provider organizations reducing the number of messages and delegating more of them to non-physicians.

One commenter on the inbox article above mentioned that EHR inboxes could be designing similarly to the Spark email client, which PC Magazine says is a lot cleaner and easier than Gmail, which keeps cramming in non-email features like to-do lists and meeting scheduling. Spark’s $60-per-year individual plan includes offers grouping and prioritization, “send later” and reminders, natural language email search, and an AI-powered email summarization and creation assistant. The team version adds collaboration functions. Twobird offers similar functionality for free.

Epic notes that all of the people who provide services to support its just-concluded UGM – including golf cart tour guides and A/V techs — are its own employees. The company ordered a record-breaking 9,000 doughnuts from a Madison doughnut shop for them.

Sponsor Updates

EClinicalWorks offers a new customer success story, “Boosting Patient Satisfaction with Healow Secure Text.”
First Databank releases a new Faces of Digital Health Podcast, “Bringing EPrescribing to the Next Level: To Patients.”
Fortified Health Security names Lee Tomlin security analyst.
Keysight enhances its Eggplant automated software test solution to enable multi-platform mobile app testing.
Lucem Health releases a new This Week in Clinical AI Podcast.

Blog Posts

Delivering the Right Information at the Right Time for Optimized Health Outcomes (Availity)
Pharmacists can increase patient trust through aligned content (Wolters Kluwer Health)
Lifting Up Patrons: How We Partner with Libraries (Findhelp)
Five9 Advances to Platform Tier in ServiceNow’s Build Partner Program (Five9)
Help Desk Updates: Your Super Weapon to Boost Clinician Productivity (HCTec)
Community Partnerships: Empowering People Through Health Education (Healthwise)
Building Community: Patient Engagement Solutions for Hometown Providers (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 8/30/23

August 29, 2023 News Comments Off

Top News

ONC renews The Sequoia Project’s TEFCA management contract for another five years.

The non-profit will also continue to oversee the development of Qualified Health Information Networks, with seven of them underway.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare market intelligence startup Bonfire Analytics raises $1 million in a pre-seed funding round.

Sales

Zyter|TruCare integrates Findhelp’s care and social services referral software with its Connected Health data-sharing technology.

People

Chris Betz (Brightside Health) joins Aptihealth as CTO.

Ascom Americas hires Chris LaFratta, MBA (VieCure) as VP and head of strategic service innovation.

Adam Farren, MBA (Osmind) joins Canvas Medical as president and COO.

Virtual care and remote patient monitoring solution provider TimeDoc Health hires Brian Esterly, MBA (Centria Healhcare) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

IBM trains a Watson large language model to convert legacy COBOL applications to Java, noting that enterprise systems around the world execute 800 billion lines of COBOL code every day.

Government and Politics

A federal judge orders COVID-19 testing firm Nomi Health to pay $7 million to Texas software developer OSGHD, who sued Nomi for licensing its product only long enough to copy its design to create its own system. The state of Utah has paid $84 million to Nomi for COVID testing and vaccination, which it originally attempted to run on a system from Qualtrics that it claims couldn’t handle the required volume.

Privacy and Security

The Rhysida ransomware group claims responsibility for the cyberattack on Prospect Medical Holdings. The group has put the stolen legal and financial documents of 500,000 Prospect employees up for sale on the dark web. Prospect has been struggling to get networks at its 16 hospitals back up and running since the attack occurred on August 3. Crozer Health, a Prospect hospital in Pennsylvania, announced last Friday that all of its computer systems were again operational.

Hospital Sisters Health System (IL) and affiliate Prevea Health (WI) revert to downtime procedures after an unidentified outage forces their systems offline. All systems are unavailable at 15-hospital HSHS. Pediatric hospitalist Maddie Mier, MD reports on X that she’s not the “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” kind of doctor and needs Epic for “my chart stalking routines & easy access to things like.. VITAL SIGNS.”

Other

Oracle Health Chairman David Feinberg, MD, MBA purchases The Weeknd’s furnished Los Angeles penthouse for a cool $19 million. Dubbed “The Mogul” by building management, the 8,000 square-foot pad includes four bedrooms, six bathrooms, a gym, wine vault, and views from four balconies.

Sponsor Updates

CloudWave sponsors the Firelands Health “Caddyshack” Open Golf Outing.
EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Empowering Communities, Analytics for Better Patient Care.”
Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Matt Sakumoto, MD.”
CereCore publishes a new case study, “Next Generation EHR Meets Surgery Partners.”
Healthcare IT Leaders refreshes its board.
Constellation Research names Artera to its Shortlist for top vendors in the healthcare clinical communication category.
A new KLAS report recognizes AvaSure as a complete virtual care platform that improves patient safety while reducing costs and staff workloads.
Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Exploring home and community-based services: Insights and considerations for healthcare organizations.”
CHIME releases a new Leader 2 Leader Podcast, “Workforce Issues in Healthcare Today: Top Challenges and How to Solve Them.”
Clearwater enhances its managed security services capabilities, establishing a new partnership, hiring new experts, and signing on new customers.
Clinical Architecture publishes a white paper, “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Enable Real-time Semantic Interoperability.”

Blog Posts

An Operation Leader’s Take on Partnering for Meditech Expanse Projects (CereCore)
Advancing Revenue Cycle Management Maturity Through Technology and Interoperability (AGS Health)
Success in transitional care management (TCM): The first 30 days (Arcadia)
How Arrive Health is Creating a Better Prescribing Experience, Including Eliminating 87% of RTPB Noise (Arrive Health)
Top 5 eligibility mistakes to avoid for a healthy revenue cycle (Availity)
Key strategies for healthcare providers implementing the No Surprises Act (Baker Tilly)
The True ROI (and Cost) of Legacy Data in Healthcare (Clearsense)
CMMC 2.0 Compliance is Around the Corner: Is Healthcare Ready? (Clearwater)
Role of Epic Consultants in Epic Upgrades (HealthTech Resources)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/28/23

August 27, 2023 News Comments Off

Top News

In Canada, Quebec chooses Epic for its $2.2 billion USD digital health record project.

The contract, which is in the final stages of negotiation, comes less than three years after Epic completed its first French language deployment in Belgium.

Six suppliers submitted bids, with Cerner Canada finishing second.

The government expects the first two sites to be live in 2024 and the rollout to be completed within five years.

Quebec has spent a reported $1.5 billion USD over the past 30 years unsuccessfully attempting to computerize its hospitals.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents, especially those responding in their role as a consumer, aren’t fans of hospital consolidation.

New poll to your right or here: Would you walk out of a medical practice without being seen if you saw a fax machine sitting at the check-in desk? I ask because I suspect that even philosophically passionate anti-faxxers don’t choose or exclude doctors based on their technologies.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Truepill, whose pharmacy fulfillment business led it to a multi-billion dollar valuation as it expanded into diagnostic testing and telehealth, will seek additional funding at up to a 90% reduction in valuation as it struggles with the departure of its co-founders and a DEA investigation into its Adderall dispensing related to its mental health partner Cerebral.

Per diem nurse staffing platform vendor Nursa raises $80 million in a Series B funding round.

People

Colusa Medical Center (CA) names Steve Stark, MS, MSHA as CEO. He previously worked his way up through it IT ranks at other hospitals, from IT director to CIO.

Niall Brennan (Clarify Health Solutions) joins the CDC as senior advisor for its data modernization plan.

Announcements and Implementations

A Baltimore TV station profiles Bowie State University’s new program in public health informatics and technology. The program, funded by a $10 million HHS grant, will offer boot camps, a bachelor’s degree, and a graduate certificate.

Trilliant Health offers developers free API access to its national directory of 2.7 million providers.

Government and Politics

VA CIO Kurt DelBene says that he is “cautiously optimistic” about its Oracle Cerner implementation, as the VA has learned from its first five go-lives and has tightened service level agreements in a recent contract renegotiation with Oracle.

Sponsor Updates

AGS Health adds AI-powered Intelligent Authorization to its AI Platform.
EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “How Healow Self-Scheduling Helped a New Practice Fill 400 Appointment Slots.”
OptimizeRx signs multi-year partnerships with two EHR vendors and one telehealth vendor.
NTT Data announces that Everest Group has named the company as a Leader in its 2023 Healthcare Data and Analytics Services Peak Matrix Assessment.
PMD unveils new branding to improve transparency and value for customers.
Nordic adds enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources from Workday to its portfolio of ERP Services.
PerfectServe is positioned highest in ability to execute in the first Gartner Magic Quadrant for clinical communication and collaboration.
Verato will exhibit at E-Solutions Exchange August 27-30 in in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.
Waystar will exhibit at the Texas Association for Home Care & Hospice Annual Meeting August 30-31 in San Antonio.
Wolters Kluwer Health will exhibit at Rise West August 28-30 in Dallas.

Blog Posts

Driving healthcare organizations to get the most out of their EHR (Meditech)
Psych Hub Provides Evidence-based Education to Empower the Entire Behavioral Health Ecosystem (NeuroFlow)
The dream of patient access and flow (Nordic)
Realizing Point-of-Care Opportunities: E-Book Insights from EHR Experts (OptimizeRx)
EHR Super Users: Making Life Easier for Medical Professionals (HealthTech Resources)
8 Essentials for Transfer Center Operations in Healthcare (PerfectServe)
Dr. Stephane Doyne – 12 plagues of AI in healthcare (Redox)
Sensing-as-a-Service Empowers Data Analysis in Healthcare and Commerce with Integrated Data Exchange (SmartSense by Digi)
Navigating vendor consolidation in healthcare: Key considerations (Spok)
My Not-so-Secret Diary on Electronic Prior Authorization in Austin (Surescripts)
The Benefits of Telemedicine for Older Adults: How Remote Medical Care is Making Aging in Place Easier (Trualta)
Everything You Need to Know About Evidence-Based Practice (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 8/25/23

August 24, 2023 News Comments Off

Top News

NextGen Healthcare is reportedly exploring options that could include selling the company.

NXGN shares lost 6% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 11% gain, valuing the company at $1.2 billion.

Reader Comments

From UGM Attendee: “Re: Epic. Moving into the documentation management systems area with the announcement of Gallery at UGM.” Unverified.

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 assets of AireHealth, which offers a platform-connected nebulizer for monitoring chronic respiratory conditions, will be liquidated in an online auction.

WellSky acquires Experience Care, which offers an EHR and other software for post-acute and long-term care providers.

Hospital shared services vendor Ovation Healthcare acquires 3D Technology, which offers professional and managed services.

Sales

Ireland’s Bon Secours Health System will implement Meditech Expanse.

People

Kurt Hammond, MBA (EMed Digital Healthcare) joins Exo as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Delta Air Lines is upgrading its onboard medical technologies to include app-powered direct access to doctors on the ground and enhanced diagnostic equipment, such as an automatic blood pressure cuff and pulse oximeter. Delta says it will be adding telemedicine and remote monitoring technologies.

Australia’s Queensland Health creates a clinical staff credentialing and training system using SAP, which will support the movement of clinicians among its 16 hospitals and health services.

A new KLAS report looks at Epic’s initiatives to improve EHR efficiency and satisfaction. Providers report increased satisfaction after participating in the company’s Physician Power User and Physician Builders programs. Features that are correlated with improved clinician efficiency are Rover (mobile documentation and notification), Brain (inpatient nurse planning), Secure Chat (staff collaboration), and Hey Epic! (voice assistant and reminders).

Privacy and Security

Hackers who breached a hospital in Israel are contacting its high-profile patients to demand that they pay a ransom to avoid having their medical records published. Among those messaged was Health Minister Moshe Arbel, who released his own medical information rather than be extorted.

Other

I seldom retweet (or re-X), but this is good. Will Manidis is founder and CEO of Science.io, which offers an AI-powered patient cohorting solution for patient screening and research.

Sponsor Updates

KeyCare caps a successful year of fundraising, health system collaborations, and high-quality telehealth delivery.
Fast Company names Linus Health’s DCTclock a winner in its 2023 Innovation by Design Awards.
Lucem Health releases a new episode of the This Week in Clinical AI Podcast.
Wolters Kluwer Health announces that 15 of its Lippincott healthcare titles received 28 wins in the 35th annual Awards for Publication Excellence competition.
Healthcare Growth Partners advises Experience Care in its acquisition by WellSky.
CereCore wins ClearlyRated’s 2023 Best of Staffing Client and Talent Awards for service excellence.

Blog Posts

A Healthy Healthcare Supply Chain Could Save Lives (Dimensional Insight)
Adapting Recruitment Strategies for Success in the Gig Economy and Contingent Workforce (Direct Recruiters)
Assessing Digital Capacity with Tools and Benchmarks (Divurgent)
The evolution and impact of NIST CSF 2.0 (Fortified Health Security)
Help Desk Updates: Your Super Weapon to Boost Clinician Productivity (HCTec)
5 Key Benefits of Hiring an Epic Consultant for Your EHR Implementation (HealthTech Resources)
How Application Managed Services (AMS) Can Elevate Your Entire Healthcare Organization (Healthcare IT Leaders)
Development & Implementation of Enterprise Imaging (Impact Advisors)
Leveraging a Platform Approach for AI: Driving Innovation in Healthcare (Lucem Health)
Enhancing Care Coordination: Bridging the Gap Between Metropolitan and Community Hospitals (Medhost)

Sponsor Spotlight

Dimensional Insight is a leading provider of analytics, data management, and performance management solutions, offering a complete portfolio of capabilities ranging from data integration and modeling to sophisticated reporting, analytics, and dashboards. Founded in 1989, Dimensional Insight has thousands of customer organizations worldwide and consistently ranks as a top-performing analytics organization. The company is an eight-time Best in KLAS winner in healthcare business intelligence and analytics between 2010 and 2021. (Sponsor Spotlight is free for HIStalk Platinum sponsors).

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 8/24/23

August 23, 2023 Headlines, News Comments Off

Healthcare software vendor NextGen explores sale

NextGen Healthcare shares rise on the news that the company is considering putting itself up for sale.

Fisher Auction Company will handle the Sale of the Assets of AireHealth, Inc., a Remote Patient Respiratory Care Platform

AireHealth will liquidate its respiratory remote patient monitoring assets including patents, software, hardware, and intellectual property in an online auction September 13.

WellSky Acquires Experience Care to Enhance Long-term Care Providers’ Ability to Operate Efficiently, Advance Resident Care

WellSky acquires Experience Care, which offers health IT for post-acute and long-term care.

U of U server outage brings down hospital, campus, UTA systems

A University of Utah heat-related server outage forces its affiliated health system to revert to downtime procedures and divert emergency patients.

Book Review: “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond”

August 23, 2023 News 3 Comments

Review by Tyler Smith, CEO, Health Data Movers.

Reading a paperback in the age of AI feels (and is) anachronistic. But until Neuralink pumps the information into our brains, such combinations of societal shattering technology breakthroughs and pre-AI workflows remain. In reading “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond,” it becomes evident that a combination of new technology and old processes will prevail in medicine over the next phase of technological advancement.

Given an early glimpse of GPT-4, authors Peter Lee, PhD, Carey Goldberg, and Isaac Kohane, MD penned distinctive chapters focused on their areas of expertise and the potential they have experienced or can imagine with the application of GPT-4 to medicine. They explain the basics of the incoming technology — including the fundamentals of LLM and machine learning, along with platforms like Nuance DAX — and contemplate the potential ethical pitfalls and opportunities of AI, including non-medical capabilities such as writing poetry.

Although presented as an academic text, the co-authors’ diverse backgrounds: computer scientist (Lee), physician (Kohane), and journalist / patient advocate (Goldberg) bring variety and thus life to case studies. Endowed with an introduction by the present king of AI, Sam Altman, and closed with a piece by Microsoft’s CTO, Kevin Scott, the work has all the makings of AI thought leadership star power.

Coming fresh off a viewing of “The Terminator,” the ethically positive potential of AI was a pleasant surprise, underscored by the authors’ assertion that GPT-4’s tone is more empathetic and caring than human doctors, a viewpoint reiterated recently in this post by Chris Longhurst, MD.

Quite a plot twist if the robot’s apparent empathy may force clinicians to improve their own written bedside manner. It has been awhile since I watched “Terminator 2,” but that might be a more appropriate cinematic pairing.

But as the authors take us through the modern reality of endless data capture and regulatory compliance processes (the dreaded prior auth!) that plague our healthcare providers, only a reader devoid of empathy would overlook that physicians are drowning in typing. If AI can lift the clerical burden, maybe a softer touch can find time on a physician’s daily calendar.

As an Epic implementation consultant who came of age during the Meaningful Use era, the hope presented in the book validated days and nights spent in Chronicles and Hyperspace. True the burden of typing was a byproduct of the installs performed across the country. But if the data that was gathered by such typing can now be mined and used to generate insights, and if the initial installs are seen as the first step in the shift to integrating technology into workflows (workflows that begin to substitute vocal cords for fingers), maybe it wasn’t all in vain.

A more radical prognostication of the future applications of AI in medicine would have made the book monumentally more thought-provoking. A scene similar to that contained in Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future,” wherein the reader is presented with an image of our lifestyles after physical activity disappears from the human experience (we simply live in pods) would have distinguished the work. Will AI alter our lives in such a way that medicine will change because our injuries and illnesses of the AI era will be symptoms of habits and a life we can’t even begin to imagine?

Since the authors don’t appear to aspire to thread the needle between Huxley and an academic piece, the book achieves stature as the perfect preface to an optimistic future for AI in medicine. As a fellow optimist, I’m hopeful as well, and will take such sentiment into today, where the real chapters of the story are being written.

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