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News 12/9/22

December 8, 2022 News 1 Comment

Top News

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The US Patient and Trademark Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board  rules that three AliveCor heart monitoring patents should not have been issued. The ruling follows a challenge by Apple, which had been found to have infringed on those patents following an AliveCor complaint.

PTAB ruled that the heart monitoring technologies for wearable devices are not patentable.

The International Trade Commission is set to decide by December 12 if importation of Apple Watches should be banned over the dispute.

AliveCor added ECG capabilities to its KardiaBand add-on watchband for the Apple Watch in 2017 and demonstrated the technology to executives of Apple, which rolled out similar built-in technologies the next year. AliveCor retired the band in mid-2019 and introduced new app-powered, non-continuous personal ECG products, including this year’s KardiaMobile Card.


Reader Comments

From Kendra: “Re: HLTH. Had a major data breach right before November’s conference in Las Vegas and registration information is being sold on the dark web.” Unverified. I’ve reached out to HLTH (which does not make it easy to contact them) for confirmation, but haven’t heard back. Personally, I wouldn’t be too worried about it anyway since conferences sell registrant information widely and hackers can’t be any more annoying than vendor spammers. UPDATE: HLTH says no breach occurred.

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From Sly Devil: “Re: publicly traded health insurer CEO compensation. Check out this list from S&P Global.” The top-earning health insurance CEOs for 2021 were those of buzzy newcomers Clover Health ($390 million), Bright Health ($181 million), and Oscar Health ($61 million). At least much of that comp was paid as since-tanked company shares — CLOV is down 74% in the past year, BHG is down 79%, and OSCR has slid 72%. Clover Health’s board members include Chelsea Clinton, a former CMS director, a Henry Ford Health System exec, and 7Wire Ventures partner Lee Shapiro, all of whom seem to have consumed Theranos-like Kool-Aid in overseeing this train wreck that went public in 2021 with the help of “SPAC King” Chamath Palihapitiya at a valuation of nearly $4 billion. Billionaire Clover co-founder and CEO Vivek Garipalli previously made a fortune buying three bankrupt New Jersey non-profit hospitals to form CarePoint Health, which took the hospitals out of all insurer networks to become the most expensive health system in the US, earning him an $11 million Hamptons house on Billionaires Lane when he was in his mid-30s. CarePoint then donated the hospitals to form a non-profit, which competing hospitals said was purely to give Garipalli and partners a way to escape huge liabilities and take a tax write-off after pocketing $160 million. I’ll remind myself to blame the game, not the player, but I also note that $300 billion annual revenue UnitedHealth Group compensated its CEO – who actually has a British knighthood for being rich — with “only” $18 million while the failing startups were making it rain for theirs.

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From Conflagration: “Re: Neil Pappalardo. I’m hearing that he officially retired from Meditech as of November 30. He’s still board chair and president of the trust, but even as a formality it’s still a noteworthy milestone that he is no longer an employee of the company he founded.” Unverified. I emailed a Meditech press contact but haven’t heard back. Pappalardo co-founded the company in 1968 after he created the MUMPS programming language, and arguably the health IT industry, while at Massachusetts General Hospital as a graduate student.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CompuGroup Medical acquires Medicus, adding a fourth laboratory information system to its roster that includes Labdaq, Schuylab, and AP Easy.

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Clinical trials intelligence platform vendor Lokavant raises $21 million in funding. Participating in the round was Roivant Health, which incubated the company as one of its biotech “vants” that includes data integration company Datavant.


Sales

  • WebMD Provider Services chooses Artera (formerly Well Health) for patient access and engagement related to patient education materials and medication affordability programs.
  • Ohio Gastroenterology expands its use of Orbita’s conversational AI platform to include interactive virtual assistants for pre- and post-procedure engagement.
  • Sutter Health will use Get Well’s GetWell Loop digital care platform to offer personalized, evidence-based educational content to teens and young adults.
  • LogicStream Health integrates First Databank’s MedKnowledge database into its drug supply system to provide evidence-based alternatives to unavailable drugs.
  • Tampa General Hospital will implement Palantir Foundry as its data platform.

People

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New York -Presbyterian Hospital adds CIO to the responsibilities of Peter Fleischut, MD, who continues as group SVP and chief transformation officer.

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Advocate Health, created by last week’s merger of Advocate Aurora Health and Atrium Health, names former Advocate Aurora Health CIO Bobbie Byrne, MD, MBA as EVP/CIO.

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Digestive health support vendor Vivante Health hires Hau Liu, MD, MBA, MPH, MS (Teladoc Health) as chief medical officer.

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Timothy Wilde (EXL Health) joins UpHealth as CTO.

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MSU Health Care promotes Nathan Fitton, DO to CMIO.

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Sonifi Health hires Brian Nido, MSEd (Galileo) as VP of customer success.

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Azalea Health names Brian Kenah (Sharecare) as its first CTO.

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Oncology digital health company OncoHealth hires Susan Hoang, PharmD (McKesson) as chief data and analytics officer.

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Jay Adams, MS, MBA (Harris Affinity) joins Altera Digital Health as EVP.


Announcements and Implementations

CereCore expands its health IT services to the United Kingdom.

Amazon ends support for third-party developed HIPAA skills for Alexa. The skill was released as a developer preview in April 2019 with announcement of new consumer voice apps from Express Scripts, Cigna, Boston Children’s Hospital, Providence Health, Atrium Health, and Livongo.

Dominican University New York launches an HHS-funded online public health informatics certificate program for those with a bachelor’s degree, offering a 20% discount of the program’s $11,400 cost for those who enroll by January 10.

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A new KLAS report finds that half of the small number of interviewed vendors have migrated their go-forward solutions to the cloud, most commonly choosing Amazon Web Services but with Microsoft Azure gaining traction. The most-reported benefit of cloud is agility (fast scalability, automated provisioning, and automated procurement). Most-mentioned obstacles are support gaps and cost management, with cost models being the top issue that vendors want cloud providers to address.


Government and Politics

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Former Theranos COO Sunny Balwani is sentenced to 13 years in prison after being found guilty of 12 fraud charges. He receives a similar sentence to his former boss and lover Elizabeth Holmes, who had asked to be tried separately claiming that Balwani had emotionally and sexually abused her during their long relationship. Key evidence in both trials was the rollout of Theranos lab stations in Walgreens, which spent $140 million in partnership costs only to find that the startup was using old technology instead of its own to perform tests.

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The Federal Trade Commission, HHS OCR, and ONC update FTC’s Mobile Health App Interactive Tool that allows health app developers to determine which federal laws and regulations apply to their app.

HHS defers enforcement of the No Surprises Act requirement that providers give uninsured and self-pay patients a Good Faith Estimate starting on January 1. HHS says that providers and facilities need to adopt standard API for exchange GFE data and that HL7 FHIR may be used for that purpose.

Beth Israel Lahey Health will pay $1.9 million to settle federal allegations that it failed to maintain accurate records of control substance use, following a 2018 incident in which a pharmacy technician stole 18,000 doses of controlled substances by removing them from automated dispensing machines indicating that they had expired without returning them to the central pharmacy. Meanwhile, Pikeville Medical Center (KY) will pay a $4.4 million civil penalty for diversion of 60,000 doses of narcotics from its Pyxis MedStations by a pharmacy technician.

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A House bill would create an independent federal patient safety agency that would be modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board and Commercial Aviation Safety Team in using a data-driven, scalable approach to preventing and reducing patient safety events.


Other

A Tennessee urgent care center that is owned by publicly traded Healthcare Solutions Management Group remains closed since November 16 following employee complaints that they haven’t been paid since October 1. They say they can’t access the EHR since the corporate office hasn’t paid that bill and that electricity and water have been shut off several times due to non-payment. HSMD shares are down 88% from their 12-month high, valuing the company at $221 million. The company was formed from a merger with a shell company that previously ran a South Dakota fertilizer company that went into receivership, stating as its goal to become “an advanced, national healthcare system.” It has has signed deals with a developer to open ambulatory surgery centers and urgent care centers that will cost at nearly $4 billion. Board chair and interim CEO/CFO Justin Smith is a former stockbroker.


Sponsor Updates

  • Clearsense India promotes Rashmi Bania to head of technology.
  • GHX begins accepting nominations for the 2022 GHXcellence Awards, which will be presented at GHX’s annual summit May 9-12 in Chicago.
  • Healthwise wins seven digital health awards from the Health Information Resource Center for its medical illustrations and health education videos.
  • Forrester recognizes the InterSystems Iris data platform as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Translytical Data Platforms, Q4 2022.
  • Meditech publishes a customer success story on how “Expanse Genomics supports Frederick Health’s precision medicine program.”

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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News 12/7/22

December 6, 2022 News 4 Comments

Top News

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Marshfield Clinic Health System (WI) lays off its 18-employee telehealth department and shuts down the service, citing system-wide financial challenges.

The health system launched the telehealth service in 2001.

Primary care staff will take over the team’s duties, with IT absorbing the technology functions that include several telehealth platforms.

The system has been transitioning from its 30 year-old homegrown Cattails EHR to Cerner over the last year. Marshfield Clinic said in its Q2 2022 report that the move to Cerner, in a project called One System EHR, has caused “greater disruption to reporting and revenue cycle billing and collections than anticipated and the realization of expected benefits from the system has been slower to materialize.”


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Remote cardiac patient monitoring consulting and management company Rhythm Management Group acquires competitor Equis Consulting Group.

Carle Health (IL) will transition its Clinical and Business Intelligence team to employment with Health Catalyst, which will continue to provide it with analytical support through 2028.

Business Insider looks at the spectacular unraveling of startup health insurer Bright Health, which went public in June 2021 at a $11 billion valuation but now is worth $600 million as it has downsized to selling policies in just one state. Experts say the company priced its Affordable Care Act plans low to attract members in several markets, but couldn’t manage its costs and processed claims manually even though it bragged on being a technology company.

UnitedHealth Group expects to generate $360 billion in revenue in 2023 with EBITDA of $36 billion. The company expects its Optum businesses (Health for patient-centered care, Insight for technology and analytics, and Rx for pharmacy services) to generate $214 billion of the total.


Sales

  • Digital health platform developer Better selects Lyniate’s Rhapsody health data integration software.
  • Virtual care company Let’s Talk Interactive selects EHR integration capabilities from Redox.
  • Aesthetics practice software vendor Docovia will leverage Clearwater’s ClearAdvantage managed service for cybersecurity and compliance.

People

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The Guthrie Clinic (NY) promotes Terri Couts, RN, MHA to SVP/chief digital officer.

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SolutionHealth (NH) promotes Debra Dulac, RN, MBA to SVP/CIO.

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Baker Tilly partner Travis Drouin will also lead its technology industry practice.

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Herman Kalra, MBA (Orion Innovation) joins CTG as VP/chief people officer.

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Juno Health, the commercial division of Document Storage Systems, hires Michael Bond, MBA (Allscripts) as VP of commercial sales.

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NTT Data promotes Douglas Kelly, MBA to VP/federal healthcare practice lead.


Announcements and Implementations

University of California San Francisco Health and UCSF Dentistry announce they have become the first academic health system in the West to merge medical and dental records into one EHR.

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Russell Medical Center AL) converts from Meditech Magic to Meditech as a Service with help from CareCloud’s MedSR division.

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Mater Private Network in Ireland begins its Meditech Expanse implementation.

QGenda launches a mobile-first solution for nurse and staff workforce management.


Privacy and Security

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CommonSpirit Health reports that some patient data, particularly of patients of Franciscan Health (WA), may have been compromised during a ransomware attack that forced its nationwide facilities to downtime procedures for nearly a month.

As AIIMS struggles to restore its IT systems after a November 23 cyberattack, reports begin to surface that the 2,200-bed health system in India hasn’t upgraded its computers and IT systems in 30 years. Government officials investigating the attack have reached out to E&Y to find out if its cybersecurity audit of AIIMS earlier this year found any vulnerabilities.


Sponsor Updates

  • Censinet adds former Mass General Brigham VP/CIO James Noga to its advisory board.
  • Net Health adds new predictive models to its PointRight Radar care management software to better identify patients at high risk for falls, pressure ulcers, mortality, and hospitalization.
  • Access publishes a new patient e-signature case study, “Northern Regional Hospital: Creating a Better Experience for Healthcare Workers and Patients.”
  • Nordic releases a new episode of its DocTalk series.
  • Agfa HealthCare receives the Cybersecurity Transparent Leader award from KLAS and Censinet.
  • Artera receives the 2022 CHIME Collaboration Award for its work with TrueCare to improve no-show rates, create greater access to care, and help patients gain control of when and how they like to communicate.
  • Azara Healthcare becomes an Accelerate Partner with Athenahealth through its Marketplace program.
  • Oracle Cerner customer Hamad Medical Corp. Qatar has built and equipped the dozens of clinics needed for the World Cup.
  • CereCore wins Best of Staffing Client and Best of Staffing Talent Awards from ClearlyRated.
  • ChartSpan names Saylor Zechman sales development representative.
  • CHIME offers support for the Healthcare Cybersecurity Act.
  • Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new report, “The Path to Open Medicine: Driving Global Health Equity through Medical Research.”
  • Healthcare IT Leaders adds ERP, EHR, and AMS consulting expertise with five new executive director hires and promotions.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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Monday Morning Update 12/5/22

December 4, 2022 News 4 Comments

Top News

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Healthcare consumer engagement company Carenet Health acquires Stericycle Communication Solutions, which offers online scheduling, automated messaging, and call center services.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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I could be convinced to change my “most important winter holiday” order of importance after reading a poll comment from Cyrus about Yalda. Yalda celebrants, most of them in Iran and nearby countries, observe the winter solstice (December 21 this year), the last day of autumn and the longest night of the year, after which hours of daylight start increasing again. People stay up all night, eat watermelon and pomegranates (their glowing colors symbolize dawn and life), read poetry, and dance and play drums when the sun rises in a triumph of light over dark. Yalda means “birth.” I like it even beyond my personal obsession with changing hours of daylight — nobody is excluded or favored since the same sun shines down on us all, although I suppose folks in the Southern Hemisphere would need to buy their Yalda pomegranates in June. 

New poll to your right or here: As a patient, would you be OK with your provider billing you personally for the time they spend answering clinical questions via patient portal or email? My immediate response to my own question was that of course professionals should charge me for their time that I consume voluntarily, regardless of the modality by which it is provided, but healthcare is different – will they tell me in advance that the clock is running, aren’t they already charging me ridiculously high prices without having to nickel-and-dime me over portal messages, will they bill only for new clinical work and not administrative questions or follow-up inquiries triggered by their lack of clear explanations, and should I be paying cash when I have insurance?


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Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Bardavon. The Overland Park, NS-based company partners with employers to optimize their employees’ musculoskeletal health with both preventative and post-injury solutions offered at work, in clinic and at home. Bardavon differentiates from digital-only players by combining a hybrid approach to MSK optimization that is bolstered by a nationwide network of 25,000 physical and occupational therapists who are focused on the holistic health of the American worker. Bardavon’s unique focus on an often-forgotten subset of the worker population, those who do the manual labor in America, positions them in a unique category as they launch into the commercial sector with a focus on a complete offering enabling both healthy and injured employees as they work to optimize their movement health resulting in positive, long-time health benefits for both the employees and the employer. Thanks to Bardavon for supporting HIStalk. Thanks also to the company and long-time HIStalk reader SVP/GM Alex Benson (who worked for Cerner for many years) for making a generous donation to my Donors Choose project this past April that fully funded 41 teacher grant requests.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Atrium Health and Advocate Aurora Health complete their merger to form Advocate Health, now the country’s fifth-largest health system with 67 hospitals, 1,000 sites of care, 150,000 employees, 21,000 physicians, and 42,000 nurses.

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Advanced primary care services and technology vendor UpStream Healthcare raises $140 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $185 million.

Investor-backed mental health startups – some of which were formed to exploit COVID-relaxed prescribing rules — failed to disrupt mental healthcare, Business Insider concludes, because they spent too much on advertising to attract patients and found that the direct-to-consumer model doesn’t work well because patients aren’t willing to pay. A former provider for Cerebral, which is best known for generating many prescriptions for Adderall and Ritalin, says she was allowed to spend just 15 minutes every three months with each patient.


Sales

  • Dayton Children’s Hospital will implement VisiQuate’s Denials Management Analytics and Revenue Management Analytics solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

I rarely mention open positions, but CHIME has an interesting one for director of innovation that does not require relocation.


Other

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A Washington newspaper describes the chaos at St. Michael Medical Center during a weeks-long ransomware downtime that affected parent organization CommonSpirit Health:

  • Staff could not access Epic, so switching to paper – by many employees who have never charted manually — caused ED and ambulance backups and caused an overwhelmed ED nurse to call 911 for help.
  • Employee timekeeping system caused payroll problems that still haven’t been fully resolved.
  • Staff had to take the word of patients about their meds, allergies, and recent procedures, even those who were probably not reliable.
  • Medications were dispensed without pharmacist oversight.
  • Patients were found in the ED waiting room who weren’t on their list to be seen.
  • Staff treated “scoop and run” patients who were brought in after incidents in assisted living without knowing their code status, intubation preferences, or if they wanted their families to be called.
  • Complaints that have been filed with the Department of Health claim that the hospital didn’t provide safety checks while Epic was down, allowed ED capacity to be exceeded by not allowing diversion, and required two hours or longer to provide lab and imaging results. One complaint says that routine labs for ICU patients took longer than 13 hours and stat labs weren’t reported for up to five hours.

A ProPublica investigation finds that publicly traded hospital operator Universal Health Services has pocketed $38 million in Washington state taxpayer funds over five years for running special education day schools in which underpaid, poorly trained employees taught students without a published curriculum and sometimes isolated and restrained them. The state paid annual tuition of $68,000 to $115,000 per enrolled student. Experts say that UHS, which earned $1 billion in profit last year, is one of several investor-funded companies that have targeted private special education and autism services because the revenue is steady and publicly funded.

Cardiologist Eric Topol, MD covers “medical selfies” in which he used a smartphone-based ultrasound device whose instructions came from YouTube. He says that US healthcare provides no incentive for using the devices because providers make money from traditional sonographer studies, but the technology is being used in other countries. He also notes the recent contribution of AI that allows anyone to perform a screening echocardiogram as guided by the app.

Police arrest a 72-year-old hospital inpatient in Germany who turned off the “noisy” oxygen machine of her room’s other occupant several times, requiring that patient to be resuscitated and moved to ICU.


Sponsor Updates

  • Premier’s Pinc AI Applied Sciences Division publishes a new study in Wolters Kluwer’s Journal of Wound, Ostomy, and Continence Nursing, “Characteristics, Hospital Length of Stay, and Readmissions Among Individuals Undergoing Abdominal Ostomy Surgery: Review of a Large Healthcare Database.”
  • Sectra publishes a new case study featuring St. Maria General Hospital, “How to save time on implementation while creating brilliant workflows.”
  • Volpara Health customer Virginia Mason Medical Center presents the results of the largest mammographic image quality evaluation to date, “Reduction in technical repeat and recall rate after implementation of [Volpara Health’s] artificial intelligence-driven quality improvement software.”
  • TigerConnect appoints former Cooper University Health Care CEO Adrienne Kirby to its board.
  • Wolters Kluwer Health adds a medication tray management solution to its Simplifi+ Compliance Suite.
  • Vyne Medical publishes a case study, “Refyne Connected Care Supports Virtual Collaboration among Montana Pediatricians.”

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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News 12/2/22

December 1, 2022 News 1 Comment

Top News

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NextGen Healthcare will acquire Chapel Hill, NC-based value-added reseller TSI Healthcare, which sells specialty-specific NextGen solutions, for $68 million.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Therapy Brands acquires behavioral health EHR vendor The Echo Group.


People

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David Graham, MD (Graham Healthcare Advisors) joins LifeBridge Health as VP/CMIO.

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AvaSure hires John Vaillancourt (RaySecure) as CFO; David Roth, MS (FDS) as chief marketing officer; Chris Kocsis, MPA (CoSource Consulting Group) as chief people officer; and Jacob Hansen, MBA (Calyx) as chief product officer.

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Bill Kloes (OnPointPX) joins Navenio as COO.


Announcements and Implementations

NHS England makes a last-minute change to its plan to automatically enable patient viewing of their primary care records via the NHS app, moving to phased rather than mass rollout in which individual practices will be notified in advance before records of their patients are made visible. Practices that asked EHR vendors EMIS and TPP to not enable the records access will have those requests honored as support plans are developed. The changes were announced on November 29, the day before the scheduled automatic activation.

Merative, the former IBM Watson Health, will stop making current and historic pricing information for specific drugs available to media outlets following complaints from drug companies.


Privacy and Security

An HHS OCR bulletin reminds covered entities and business associates that any website tracking tools they use cannot disclose protected health information. OCR specifically warns that sharing PHI with tracking technology vendors for marketing purposes, such as Meta Pixel, constitutes impermissible disclosure under HIPAA.

The Wyoming Supreme Court rules that a hospital must provide the parents of a newborn who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy the audit trail records of its Centricity EHR. Riverton Memorial Hospital provided records from its hospital management system, but refused to provide the Centricity audit trail, saying that the information was irrelevant, not part of the medical record, and had also been lost. The court ruled that the hospital hadn’t looked hard enough for the record, such as checking the backup server.


Sponsor Updates

  • First Databank names Tu Tran clinical pharmacist, Payton Corn operations technical analyst, and Alex Givens associate product manager.
  • Get Well will present at Next Generation Patient Experience 2022 December 5 in Indian Wells, CA.
  • Healthwise announces that it has been recognized by Avia Connect as a top company in patient education.
  • Sphere integrates its TrustCommerce platform with Veradigm Practice Management.
  • InterSystems releases a new Healthy Data Podcast featuring Divurgent CEO Ed Marx.
  • Meditech publishes a new case study, “Major Health Partners uses Meditech to improve home medication verification workflow in the ED.”

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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News 11/30/22

November 29, 2022 News 5 Comments

Top News

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A paywalled Boston Globe article says that Athenahealth CEO Bob Segert is preparing to take the company public for a second time.

Private equity firms Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital acquired the company in 2018 for $5.7 billion, bringing Segert on as CEO after his stint as chairman of Virence Health, which Veritas owned and combined with Athenahealth as part of the deal.

Athenahealth first went public in 2007. Veritas took the company private in 2019.


Reader Comments

From A Friend of Abry: “Re: Sensato acquired by Cloudwave. Sources say they paid a high multiple, hoping to create the first end-to-end healthcare operating platform that spans the public/private cloud and on-premise environments and will offer the first network and security solution that is specifically designed for healthcare.”


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Vicki’s donation, matched dollar for dollar in a Giving Tuesday program, fully funded these Donors Choose teacher grant requests:

  • Math resources for Ms. R’s elementary school class in Richmond, VA.
  • Math manipulatives for Ms. D’s elementary school class in Tallahassee, FL.
  • Science flashcard supplies for Ms. M’s elementary school class in Brownsville, TX.

Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Healthcare data security company CloudWave acquires managed cybersecurity services vendor Sensato for an undisclosed sum. Sensato founder John Gomez will become Cloudwave’s chief security and engineering officer.

Virtual mental therapy provider Talkspace is reportedly in talks to be acquired by Amwell for $200 million in shares, barely more than the value of its cash on hand and representing a loss of 90% of Talkspace’s value in less than two years. TALK went public in a SPAC merger in June 2021, with shares closing at $9.19 per share versus today’s $0.89 following a 36% jump on the rumor. AMWL shares that closed at $23.07 on their first day of trading in September 2020 are now worth $3.49, valuing the company at $960 million.


People

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Air Force veteran and former White House physician Benjamin Barlow, MD (American Family Care) joins Experity as chief medical officer.


Announcements and Implementations

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Adventist Health Mendocino Coast (CA) will go live on Oracle Cerner December 1.

Visage Imaging will offer an adapter to Amazon HealthLake Imaging from Amazon Web Services as part of its Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform.

Canon launches Canon Healthcare USA, hoping to strengthen its business in imaging diagnostics, health IT, and in vitro diagnostics.


Privacy and Security

Hackers reportedly demand $50 million in cryptocurrency to restore the servers of India’s 2,200-bed AIl India Institute of Medical Services.


Other

ProPublica looks at how half of Americans die while under hospice care, with a lack of regulation encouraging fraud and exploitation that has turned hospice care into a $22 billion industry that is mostly paid for by federal taxpayers via Medicare. Salespeople knock on doors in low-income areas offering free medications and housekeeping services in return for allowing their chronic conditions to be portrayed as fatal. The authors note that hospice companies get the highest rate of return for the least amount of work of any healthcare sector, with per-day payments requiring only twice-monthly visits, for which a hospice with only 20 patients can generate $1 million in annual revenue. A previous study found that 12% of hospice patients were not visited in their last two days of life and that for-profit hospices regularly discharge patients whose life has extended long enough to raise Medicare suspicion. An attorney says that expecting whistleblowers to keep for-profit hospices honest places “a ludicrous amount of optimism in a system with a capitalist payee and a socialist payer.”

A Washington Post opinion piece says that US healthcare inefficiency subsidizes the rest of the world, as profit-seeking providers and a lack of price controls allows drug, device, and IT companies to make most of their profits here and sell elsewhere for a fraction of our price. The US has 4% of the world’s population but 50% of its $8 trillion healthcare economy.

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The State Medical Board of Ohio suspends the license of plastic surgeon Katharine Roxanne Grawe, MD for violating rules pertaining to maintaining patient privacy when sharing photos or video via social media, and for inappropriately treating and/or failing to appropriately treat three patients who suffered severe post-surgical complications. The board specifically notes Grawe’s repeated failure to cease live-streaming surgical procedures, during which she responded to viewer questions and comments in real time.


Sponsor Updates

  • Nuance announces that Baptist Health (KY) and Einstein Healthcare (PA) have joined the Nuance Precision Imaging Network.
  • Agfa HealthCare has been named to the Leaders Category in the IDC MarketScape: US Enterprise Medical Imaging 2022-2023 Vendor Assessment.”
  • Bamboo Health names Christopher Conway (Brown & Toland Physicians) legal ops manager and Madeline Lally (Pathways Healthcare) business development representative.
  • Biofourmis wins a bronze Digital Health Award in the connected digital health category for telehealth/remote patient monitoring.
  • CHIME releases a new CHIMEcast Leader to Leader Podcast, “Unlocking the Digital Front Door to Improve Patient Care & Provider Efficiency.”
  • Nordic publishes a video titled “The Download – Harnessing Data and Analytics to Freeze the Squeeze.”
  • Clearsense will present at the Data Governance & Information Quality Conference December 5 in Washington, DC.
  • Clearwater will sponsor the H-ISAC Fall Americas Summit December 6-8 in Phoenix.
  • Vyne Medical’s FastAttach, Trace Web Application (Hosted), and Refyne Denials Management systems earn Certified status for information security from HITRUST.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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Morning Headlines 11/28/22

November 27, 2022 News No Comments

Apple and Epic Systems team up to launch macOS-friendly health records software

Epic will modify its system to run more easily on Apple devices, Axios reports, although Epic declined Apple’s request to develop an Apple-only native version.

DispatchHealth Raises More Than $330 Million to Expand Its Technology-Enabled Ecosystem of High Acuity Care in the Home

DispatchHealth, which offers tech-enabled, in-home urgent and primary care and hospital-at-home services, raises $330 million in a funding round led by Optum Ventures.

One Brooklyn Health System Offline After Unexplained IT Issue

The computer network of One Brooklyn Health System remains down following a November 19 incident.

Monday Morning Update 11/28/22

November 27, 2022 News No Comments

Top News

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Australia’s NSW Health chooses Epic to replace nine EHRs, six patient administration systems, and five pathology laboratory information systems to create a Single Digital Patient Record for the state’s public health system.

Epic will displace Oracle Cerner and Orion Health for the EHRs, Oracle Cerner and DXC for PAS, and Citadel and OmniLab for LIMS.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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A significant percentage of poll respondents think that other conferences will negatively impact that of HIMSS. Dr. Showoff opines that HIMSS is “outdated, entitled, and bloated;” created lingering resentment over its decisions around the 2020 cancellation; and erred in limiting its conference venues to Las Vegas and Orlando. Jack says that while the association conference model of HIMSS and other member organizations is dying quickly, “CHIME latched onto HLTH for cash flow” and questions whether provider executives really paid to show up at HLTH since the conference won’t share its attendee lists. Meanwhile, the Thanksgiving leftovers are about to be abandoned as RSNA kicks off in McCormick Place.

New poll to your right or here: Which winter holiday is most important to you? Regardless of your choice, I think we can agree that it’s coming soon.


You’ll probably see some bugs on the site over the next couple of weeks as I migrate to a new server, which always involves challenges with timing, PHP version incompatibilities, and problems I didn’t catch during testing. I dread this kind of project because it’s just me trying to get it done without making a technical mess.

Journalism peeve: writers who state that some major story fact is “unclear,” meaning the writer is interjecting their own unanswered questions instead of sticking to known facts. Also, statements such as “the community is in mourning tonight” that attempt to portray emotional color as a universal feeling without quantification or exception. I suppose that these are minor sins compared to crafting entire “news” articles whose only sources are TikTok videos or anonymous Reddit comments.

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HIStalk reader Mark made a generous donation to my Donors Choose project, which with matching funds applied fully funded these teacher grant requests:

  • Math manipulatives for Ms. H’s elementary school class in Houston, TX.
  • Math books and games for Ms. N’s special education high school class in Alexandria, VA.
  • Math games for Ms. S’s elementary school class in Camp Verde, AZ.
  • STEM kits for Ms. P’s kindergarten class in Lakeside, CA (her note is above).

Webinars

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


People

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Arcadia promotes Michael Meucci to CEO. He replaces Sean Carroll, who moves to executive chair.

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Jim Dowling (Philips) joins Infinitt Healthcare as SVP of sales for North America.

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Stephanie Lahr, MD (Monument Health) joins Artisight as president.


Announcements and Implementations

Epic will modify its system to run more easily on Apple devices, Axios reports, although Epic declined Apple’s request to develop an Apple-only native version.


Privacy and Security

Microsoft warns that hackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in the Boa web server for embedded applications, which was retired 17 years ago but is still being used in routers, security cameras, and software development kits.

In India, systems of 2,200-bed AIIMS go offline from a ransomware attack.


Other

The computer network of One Brooklyn Health System remains down following a November 19 incident.

News outlets in Canada warn that several of Ontario’s virtual care sites will shut down after reduced payments take effect on December 1. Most surveyed doctors say won’t accept the new $20 fee of Ontario Health Insurance Plan that affects patients who have not been previously seen in person. Some sites have already starting turning OHIP patients away or requiring them to pay cash. One hospital HIV and hepatitis C clinic that rarely sees patients in person says it will be paid $15 per appointment, less than 25% of what it billed using previous fee codes in the absence of virtual-only ones.

Police in Bhilwara,India shut down the Internet for two days as family members of a man who was shot by “four miscreants” vandalize the hospital in which he died, demanding government jobs and cash payments as compensation.

A patient who woke up during his 2017 back surgery at UCSD says in a lawsuit that a former anesthesiologist stole some of the fentanyl intended for his case, falsified his medical record to indicate that he was given the full dose, and was later found unconscious with drugs and syringes in a hospital bathroom. The anesthesiologist, whose medical license has since been revoked, admitted that he injected himself with unused patient drugs in hospital bathrooms up to eight times per day starting with his UCSD residency in 2003.


Sponsor Updates

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  • Pivot Point Consulting Engagement Manager Kathy Inkley works with Cerner Foundation to help pack and ship more than 200 care kits for underprivileged kids in local schools.
  • Optimum Healthcare IT names Melissa Gilman a Beacon Analyst on its Managed Services team.
  • ENT and Allergy Associates wins the NextGen 2022 Excellence in Healthcare Award for its implementation of the RCxRules Revenue Cycle Engine.
  • Sectra releases the first three episodes of its new podcast, “Let’s talk enterprise imaging.”
  • WebPT publishes “The Rehab Therapist’s Guide to Remote Therapeutic Monitoring.”
  • Zen Healthcare IT announces that its Zen SSL Extension is now available via ECommerce.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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News 11/23/22

November 22, 2022 News 5 Comments

Top News

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Care.ai, which offers AI-powered ambient monitoring technology for healthcare facilities, raises $27 million.

Its sensor-equipped Smart Care Facility Platform is designed to enhance an organization’s virtual nursing, virtual sitting, and other patient monitoring programs.

Founder Chakri Toleti sold his previous company, patient engagement vendor HealthGrid, to Allscripts for $60 million in 2018.


Reader Comments

From Oslo Dave: “Re: Texas AG Paxton’s inquiry into Epic’s children’s health information policies. Why would he be talking to them? Memorial Hermann has signed to implement Epic, but hasn’t even started.” The health system signed a deal to replace Oracle Cerner with Epic in September 2022, but the implementations won’t start until 2023. The patient portal is Cerner’s, so I’m not sure why the AG thinks Epic is involved.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ve seen a few Twitter-related mentions of Price’s Law, which that competence grows linearly in a growing company’s workforce while incompetence grows exponentially, with the result being that 50% of the work is accomplished by the square root of the total headcount. If your company has 100 employees, 10 of them get half the work done, while the remaining 90 employees do the other half. The conclusion is to hire and retain those people whose productivity is high enough to put them in that minority of workers, and also to look cynically at employee turnover numbers because losing stars will hurt even with small percentages


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient financing solutions vendor PayZen raises $20 million in equity financing.

Hospital for Special Surgery raises $21 million in a Series A funding round to launch virtual physical therapy clinic RightMove.


Sales

  • Telepsychiatry company MindCare Solutions selects Andor Health’s ThinkAndor virtual triage capabilities.
  • Parkview Health (IN) will use Veta Health’s remote patient monitoring and virtual care technology as a part of its telehealth monitoring program.
  • Aware Recovery Care selects Bamboo Health’s Pings real-time care notification software.
  • NSW Health in Australia will replace 20 health IT systems with Epic.

People

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24By7 Security promotes Ryan Sanders to VP of healthcare and advisory services.

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Laure Tessier-Delivuk (GE Healthcare) joins Inspirata as VP of operations, oncology informatics.

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Laolu Fayanju, MD joins RubiconMD as CMO. He was previously a regional medical director with Oak Street Health, which acquired RubiconMD last year.

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CPSI promotes Dawn Severance to chief sales officer and David Dye to COO.

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Divurgent promotes Adam Tallinger, RPh, MHA to EVP of client service.


Announcements and Implementations

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Evangelical Community Hospital (PA) will go live on Epic December 4.

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3M HIS announces GA of Ambulatory Potentially Preventable Complications analytics software for outpatient and ambulatory surgery centers.

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Sonoma Valley Hospital (CA) will replace Allscripts with Epic on December 3.

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AdventHealth (KY) celebrates the start of its Epic implementation journey with a “Follow the Yellow Brick Road to Epic” party. The system will go live in March 2023.


Privacy and Security

South County Hospital in Rhode Island resolves phone and network issues that forced it to revert to downtime procedures and cancel surgeries last week.

San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital (CA) recovers from a malware attack last week that caused it to shut down its EHR for six days.


Other

A Freedom of Information request finds that IT systems and telephones went down for 20 hours at Queensway Carleton Hospital in September, leading its doctors to question why the ED remained open. They also said that lack of connectivity required them to get imaging reports using their own cell phones, which violates health privacy rules. The hospital distributed backup pagers, assigned runners to deliver hand-written notes, and told nurses to listen for patient call bells since they could not receive alerts via wireless phones. The hospital said that it would normally post downtime signs in the ED, but couldn’t find them. 

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Heart transplant recipient Tom Johnson, a retired nurse, respiratory therapist, and healthcare IT manager, meets Amber Morgan, the mother of his organ donor, four years after the procedure. Johnson assured Morgan he is taking great care of her daughter’s heart, letting her listen to her daughter’s heartbeat through a stethoscope: “Today, I can play with my five grandkids, something I wasn’t able to do before. I feel so blessed because I’ve been praying for the family ever since my transplant.”


Sponsor Updates

  • Access publishes a new e-book, “Paper Informed Consents Sabotage Your Surgical Services Economies.”
  • AdvancedMD publishes a n e-guide, “Billing Options for the Modern Practice.”
  • Agfa Healthcare Global CMO Anjum Ahmed joins The British Institute of Radiology’s board.
  • Bamboo Health publishes a new intelligence brief, “In-Depth Analysis of Final Cohort Joining the ACO REACH Model in 2023.”
  • CHIME honors TrueCare Chief Innovation Officer Tracy Elmer and Artera with its 2022 Collaboration Award.
  • Clearwater will sponsor the H-ISAC Fall Americas Summit December 6-8 in Phoenix.
  • EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Brookhaven Heart &MD365: Streamlining Patient Engagement and Intervention with RPM.”
  • Get Well has been recognized as a Top Company in Patient Education by Avia Connect.
  • InterSystems invites developers to enter its Iris for Health Contest: FHIR for Women’s Health.
  • Lyniate announces that Rhapsody and EMPI have qualified for the UK Government’s G-Cloud Framework.
  • Meditech congratulates its customers named to CHIME’s 2022 Digital Health Most Wired list.
  • Denver Health Medical Plan CMO Christine Seals Messersmith joins Divurgent’s advisory board.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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Morning Headlines 11/21/22

November 20, 2022 News No Comments

Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for fraud

A federal judge sentences former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to 11 years in prison on four charges of investor fraud.

Mercy employees in payroll limbo after cyberattack against parent company

CHI Mercy Medical Center (OR) employees say that last month’s cyberattack on parent company CommonSpirit Health continues to impact its payroll system, resulting in missing hours and incorrect payments.

Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa. Employees describe a division in crisis and huge losses on a ‘wasted opportunity.’

Amazon’s Alexa business division loses $3 billion in the company’s most recent quarter, ranks third in usage behind Google Assistant and Apple Siri, and is being hit hard with layoffs.

More stolen Medibank data released, containing information about mental health and chronic conditions

Hackers continue to publish data stolen from Australian company Medibank, releasing on Sunday the medical records of 1,500 patients with chronic conditions, cancer, dementia, mental health conditions, infections, and injuries.

Monday Morning Update 11/21/22

November 19, 2022 News 12 Comments

Top News

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A federal judge sentences former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to 11 years in prison on four charges of investor fraud.

A law professor concludes, “Fraud cannot masquerade as innovation in Silicon Valley.”

Theranos had raised nearly $1 billion from investors in valuing the company at $9 billion.

Sunny Balwani, former COO and a romantic partner of Holmes, is scheduled for sentencing on December 7 on 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.


Reader Comments

From Les Diables Bleus: “Re: HLTH. I had a full three days of what I felt to be high-value networking — not sales, mind you, which don’t happen at conferences. It’s a good show to see what’s trending (remote point solutions and health equity) and to meet potential partners. Running into a provider was like a unicorn sighting, which is ironic since that is the HLTH mascot. It is like an all-inclusive resort in that food, drinks, and entertainment were easy to find and included. My exhibitor friends said it was easy to have a booth since HLTH manufactures it with your logo and minimal customization, puts it up, and tears it down so you don’t have to deal with shipping, Freeman, or late-night installations. I would definitely attend again purely for the networking.”

From Kitschy Kicks: “Re: HLTH. How appropriate that it was in Las Vegas, where the house always smites players who think their smarts will make them winners.” It’s a pretty good analogy that brash startups were probably emboldened by the heady atmosphere of both the conference and the Strip into thinking that they can beat the house. Companies that don’t provably solve a problem that prospects will pay for in a financially strained environment, that aren’t making money, and that took too much investor cash and have little to show for it probably don’t need to plan much for HLTH 2023.

From Been There: “Re: HLTH. Our company refuses to pay to play for sessions or articles. The challenge is when customers expect us there to support them, and when VC groups are uneducated but still influential (like former CMS execs). It’s worth a 24-hour trip to keep folks honest.” Plus your attendance entitled you to be a guest on an endless number of podcasts and video interviews that nobody will ever consume. And to hear the inspirational story, for his speaking fee of more than $100,000, of how Lance Armstrong overcame adversity (choosing to be the dirtiest doper, cheater, and bullying liar in the history of sports) to start a new and possibly related career in health and wellness investing.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Most poll respondents have a LinkedIn profile and 92% of them contain a headshot, more than half of which were taken professionally. Nearly 20% of the headshots are more than seven years old, so couple that with professional retouching and there’s a pretty good chance that you might need to squint to see the resemblance in person.

New poll to your right or here: Will HLTH, ViVE, and the CHIME Fall Forum have a major negative effect on the HIMSS conference? I differentiate my readership from that of other sites by the number of decision-makers who read HIStalk, an advantage that HIMSS has traditionally enjoyed in attracting exhibitors. New conferences may be poaching that desirable audience from HIMSS. The biggest threat to HIMSS is no longer the obvious one, that in-person conferences will be replaced by virtual ones (which were pretty much a complete bust during the pandemic’s darkest days), but rather that the newer conferences offer an alternative that is drawing a response.


I mentioned recently an announcement of two companies that consummated what was labeled as a “merger” even though it was obviously an outright acquisition that wasn’t called that to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the acquiree. Legally speaking, a merger occurs when two companies join together to form a new company, and if there’s no new company, then it is an acquisition (there’s very little “M” in “M&A.”) Even “AP Stylebook” warns reporters that true mergers of equals are nearly unknown and should be called that cautiously – PR BS aside, if it will be the same company name, CEO, and headquarters location, they bought the other company.

Mrs. H saw my mention of the Meta Quest 2 virtual reality system and got me one as a special occasion gift. It is crazy immersive and lots of fun even with the limited number of apps I have so far — mini-golf, Beat Saber, and table tennis (those last two are sweat-inducing exercise). I don’t like giving money to Facebook and they could kill off the product line as they run the company into the ground chasing a Metaverse pipe dream, but it’s fun in the mean time. I nearly face-planted when I leaned in for a table tennis shot and tried to catch myself on the realistic yet imaginary table.

I’m looking at the short list of conditions that just-launched Amazon Clinic will treat via text messaging, which includes problems such as dandruff, motion sickness, and birth control. I’m questioning how much value the messaging adds clinically over just making the drugs that are used to treat these conditions non-prescription. You could easily train a pharmacy technician to read the questionnaire results from kiosk or online entry, then hand over the meds if indicated with any appropriate instructions or warnings, which is about all online doctors would do. “Prescribing what patients ask for” is a common business model that adds little value. The new Amazon Clinic is really just Amazon advertising the services of other companies, as it does with its fraud playground of China-based sellers of electronic devices or clothing items whose disposable company names look like a cat wandered across a keyboard. 


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Business Insider reports that Amazon’s Alexa business division lost $3 billion in the company’s most recent quarter, ranks third in usage behind Google Assistant and Apple Siri, and is being hit hard with layoffs.


Sales

  • Redox will implement terminology solutions from Intelligent Medical Objects

People

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Kaiser Permanente promotes Mark Simon to VP/CIO of Washington and Colorado.

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Stephanie Rogers, RN, MBA (Cerner) joins Children’s Mercy Kansas City as CNIO and senior director of nursing, heath informatics, and technology.


Announcements and Implementations

Sanford Health and Fairview Health Services announce plans to merge into a 58-hospital system under the Sanford Health name and CEO.

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A report by Providence’s Digital Innovation Group says that health systems should take a retail-like “digital flywheel” approach in using technology to keep in touch with people who otherwise have only infrequent encounters. The authors say the EHR is a big barrier for outreach – it requires clinician involvement, it doesn’t support all lines of business, and it doesn’t address all types of consumer interaction. They recommend an Amazon-type system that applies algorithmic personalization to data to create a digital consumer identity. They say that unlike Amazon, health systems already offer a wide variety of services and have connections to partners that they can recommend to consumers. The report says that such efforts can be profitable to health systems given the $1.2 million lifetime value of a patient and that simply being able to assign a PCP is valued at $3,000. I’m a bit skeptical since Providence and other health systems have profited nicely from selling interventional care and well-intentioned attempts to offer wellness services nearly always fail for several reasons (lack of consumer motivation, ever-changing health plans, and a lack of clinically documented effectiveness). And perhaps the biggest challenge – whether consumers really want an ongoing relationship with their local health system as they might with Amazon or Starbucks. Personally as a “no news is good news” sort, I’m thrilled not to hear from my local medical center.  


Government and Politics

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sends a Civil Investigative Demand letter to Epic demanding that the company explain its policies on children’s health information. He says he is following up on complaints from parents that they lost access to the records of their children who were treated at Memorial Hermann Health System once the child reached 13 years of age. The health system, which is also targeted by Paxton’s investigation, says it is not aware of any parent complaints. Paxton said in a comment about his Epic inquiries, “Too many companies are taking marching orders from the radical left, especially when it comes to their all-out assault on family values and parental rights.”


Privacy and Security

First responders in Ontario go back to paper when its IMedic software is taken offline by a cyberattack.


Other

A JAMA Network opinion piece says that patient satisfaction surveys aren’t suitable for evaluating physician performance. The authors reference an interesting previous study in which the patients who rated doctors highest had higher costs and mortality rates. They observe that most patient survey instruments are old and weren’t designed to reward high scorers. They also note that physician panel size and workload means that one disgruntled patient can drag down a clinician’s score unfairly (see: sour Yelp whiners). They urge public and private payers to stop using patient satisfaction scores for quality assessment and payment.

A randomized clinical trial finds that patient portal messages reminding parents that their child is due for a well child visit and COVID-19 vaccinations increased the rates of scheduling both.


Sponsor Updates

  • Meditech Expanse customers in Canada can now integrate directly with digital care journey platform SeamlessMD.
  • Clearsense publishes a new infographic, “Shorten the Runway for Your Data Platform.”
  • PerfectServe announces the full integration of AnesthesiaGo with its Lightning Bold scheduling platform, and new automation capabilities for improved integration between Lightning Bolt and its clinical communication solutions.
  • EClinicalWorks releases a new series of podcasts on “Achieving Success Through Data Capture and Effective Communications.”
  • Wolters Kluwer Health will serve as the exclusive digital distributor of subscriptions to the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM Evidence, NEJM Catalyst, and NEJM Journal Watch
  • Premier’s PINC AI Applied Sciences team partners with Henry Ford Innovations to host the inaugural Advancing Health Equity Through Innovation and Collaboration event.
  • The Dutch Ministry of Defense expands its use of Sectra’s Tiger mobile encryption system to include secure file distribution.
  • Talkdesk adds Automation Designer and Workspace Designer to its Talkdesk Builder suite of low-code and no-code customization tools for contact center development.
  • West Monroe’s Alanna Discque receives the 2022 Dallas Ft. Worth Admin Award in the Spirit category.
  • Black Book Research names Zen Healthcare IT as the top-rated healthcare IT advisor for interoperability and integration.

Blog Posts

HIStalk sponsors exhibiting at RSNA November 27-30 in Chicago include:

  • Agfa HealthCare
  • Lyniate
  • Nuance
  • Nym Health
  • OneMedNet
  • Sectra
  • Visage Imaging
  • Volpara Health
  • Wolters Kluwer Health

Contacts

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

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News 11/18/22

November 17, 2022 News 1 Comment

Top News

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EHNAC (Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission) will merge with DirectTrust on January 4, 2023, giving DirectTrust access to EHNAC’s accreditation programs.


Reader Comments

From Dr. X: “Re: NEJM telemedicine article. It is classic that in the US, (a) we figure out that we need to do something — in this case, that further research is advocated — long after we actually implement something, and (b) because of our strange way of paying for healthcare (insurance and Medicare covers most costs), we feel that we need to research something that clearly has huge benefits (and some drawbacks), when in all other industries, market forces provide the answers.” The NEJM article, titled “Informing the Debate about Telemedicine Reimbursement – What Do We Need to Know?” says that we still don’t know whether telemedicine costs are additive to existing costs (some studies say yes) or whether its use improves outcomes. The authors conclude that permanent telehealth payment policies could include (a) higher co-payments for lower-value services to encourage clinicians to limit the use of telehealth; (b) implementation of bundled programs that put the usage controls on payers; and (c) paying for audio-only visits only if the clinician attests that they offer video visits that the patient declined.

From Informatics Daktari: “Re: HLTH. There was very little work being done there. I thought it was one of the most low-value conferences I’ve been to in a long time. Very much ‘see and be seen’ and felt like it was all startups looking for money.” I think the definition of “low value” is the key here. I’m not sure patients, taxpayers, or insurance-paying employers got anything except another set of expenses with HLTH’s promise of “solving the world’s biggest health challenges” (especially the unprofitable ones), but “value” to some is “catching up” (i.e., hanging out in Las Vegas bars) and pretending that the lyrics of featured performer Ludacris’s “Move Bitch” are profound rather than profane.

From Brought the Bug Home: “Re: HLTH. I should have known better than to attend a conference that has no vaccination or testing requirements. I tested positive upon arriving back home.” I’m curious about others, although I acknowledge that much of the exposure would have been in airports and on public transportation.

From CC Charges: “Re: Cleveland Clinic charging for some MyChart message responses. For or against?” I’m cautiously “for” since, like other professionals, clinicians should be paid for their time regardless of the form in which their customer requests it (your lawyer and accountant aren’t likely offering free advice just because they type it into email). On the other hand, I’m curious whether those providers get paid for the extra time spent. And for that matter, why providers who waste the time of patients through their own inefficiency don’t give them a discount for the inconvenience.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I excise verbal crutches from my interview transcripts, which I’m certain the interviewee doesn’t realize they are using. Most common are verbal tics that are intended to communicate emphasis or authenticity – a recent 20-minute conversation included 33 uses of “really” and 16 of “very” that I omitted from the final version.

HLTH recaps and photos I’ve seen look like quite the glad-handing party for health IT glitterati. I’ve seen nothing to challenge my assertion that conference attendance is driven mostly by mid-level provider executives – of which there are sufficient number to lure exhibitors – who demand that their employer prove their undying love by underwriting their ROI-free mini-vacation. If HIMSS is a boat show, HLTH a glamper-only, investor-focused Burning Man. Meanwhile, Axios opines that HLTH is “eating the conference world” with 9,000 attendees and the possibility of taking some folks away from JP Morgan and HIMSS, although it also notes that the conference’s wagon is hitched to bull market investor glory days that are rapidly becoming a faint memory. I’m pretty sure that quite a few companies blew the last of their investor-donated wads on a HLTH Hail Mary and won’t exist in a year.

Last chance – new HIStalk sponsors who start before December 31 get their 12 months at pre-increase 2022 rates, the same as existing sponsors pay. Lorre has welcomed several new sponsors in the past few weeks.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

FDA and Mitre publish an updated “Medical Device Cybersecurity Regional Incident Preparedness and Response Playbook.”

Genomic testing company Sema4 will exit the reproductive testing business and lay off 500 of its 1,600 employees following a $78 million Q3 loss.

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KHN covers private equity’s takeover of the profitable parts of healthcare, which has been sometimes accompanied by patient-endangering profit maximization. Most of the acquisitions – which often involve eye care clinics, dental management chains, physician practices, and hospices – are not subject to regulatory scrutiny since they fall under the $101 million threshold. Another new KHN piece observes that hospitals push vulnerable, confused patients into payment plans, run by big banks and private equity firms, that charge high interest rates. A patient whose hysterectomy forced her to borrow money at 11.5% interest concludes, “Hospitals have found yet another way to monetize our illnesses and our need for medical help,” as many have ended their traditional no-interest payment plans and refer patients to third-party lenders in return for an upfront commission.

My health IT employee advice as a Twitter implosion observer: (a) it’s time look for a new job when richly compensated executives can’t up with a better strategy to fix the problems their strategic misfires caused than to demand that the galley slaves row harder; and (b) no matter how deserving your boss is of correction or criticism, you don’t want to be the person delivering it (“free speech” is like “HIPAA” in that it doesn’t mean what 99% of people think it does, and criticizing the boss or airing company dirty laundry publicly will rightfully get you fired almost everywhere). Imagine asking Elon to pay your way to attend HLTH.


Sales

  • Community Bridges, Inc. chooses Netsmart CareFabric.

People

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JTG Consulting Group hires Philip Garrott (WellSky) as VP of sales.


Announcements and Implementations

Hackensack Meridian Health will run Epic on Google Cloud.

Healthcare Growth Partners publishes a white paper titled “Prepare and Prevent Common Due Diligence Issues in Health IT Transactions.”

Bamboo Health launches a care gap solution for its Smart Signals network

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A new KLAS report finds that provider burnout leveled in 2022 at 34%, with the main factors being time required to complete bureaucratic tasks, after-hours workload, and efficiency-sapping EHRs and other IT tools.


Government and Politics

A federal grand jury indicts five former employees of Methodist Hospital for selling the names and phone numbers of auto accident victims to a person who then resold them to personal injury attorneys and chiropractors.


Privacy and Security

A review of 12 healthcare websites that focus on substance abuse finds that 11 use tracking cookies, four use session recordings, six use Meta Pixel, and all 12 sent data to advertising companies.


Sponsor Updates

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  • GHX hosts its annual Turkey Trot 5K and food drive.
  • Clearsense publishes an infographic on how to shorten the time to building a data platform
  • Nuance publishes a white paper, “Nuance and NVIDIA: Bridging the gap from medical imaging AI development to clinical adoption quickly, safely, and effectively.”
  • AdvancedMD releases its fall update, adding 35 features.
  • Net Health expands its utilization of Kno2’s Communication API to help rehab therapists meet demands for care coordination.
  • Juniper Networks recognizes Sentara Healthcare with an Elevate Award in the early adoption category.
  • Meditech and Google Health advance their search and summarization collaboration to the next phase, with DCH Health System and Mile Bluff Medical Center signing on as early adopters of their integrated solution.
  • Oracle Cerner posts a podcast titled “Evolution of the pager: Creating more effective care team communication.”

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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News 11/16/22

November 15, 2022 News 5 Comments

Top News

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Amazon officially launches Amazon Clinic, a message-based service that connects customers with Amazon-approved, third-party virtual care services for more than 20 common health conditions.

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Amazon Clinic, which doesn’t yet accept insurance, is available in 32 states and offers the option to fulfill prescriptions through Amazon Pharmacy.

Meanwhile, the online retailer plans to lay off 10,000 employees in corporate and technology roles, including those working in its devices (Alexa), human resources, and retail divisions.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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HLTH is in full swing in Vegas. HIStalk readers who’ve opted for their (hopefully) cozy home offices rather than the bright lights of Sin City may not know what they’re missing. (Perhaps they’re reminiscing about dueling Elvises at HIStalkapaloozas gone by.) Email me with your photos and observations, and I’ll possibly share in an upcoming post.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Digital health integration and remote patient monitoring technology vendor Validic secures $12 million in a financing round led by Kaiser Permanente Ventures.

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AngelEye Health, which offers patient and family engagement software for hospital neonatal, pediatric intensive care, and nursery units, raises $20 million in a Series B funding round.

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Cleveland Clinic will begin billing patients for certain messages sent through its MyChart patient portal that take physicians longer than five minutes to answer and require a certain amount of clinical expertise. Messaging through the portal has doubled since 2019.


Sales

  • TriHealth (OH) selects Andor Health’s ThinkAndor Virtual Patient Monitoring technology.
  • Jasper Health will leverage Particle Health’s FHIR-based integration and API capabilities as part of its digital cancer care coaching and support software.
  • Williamson Medical Center (TN) will implement EvidenceCare’s AdmissionCare and CareGauge decision support products within its Meditech Expanse workflows.
  • Smile Digital Health will use data integration capabilities from Redox to enable customers to migrate data from legacy systems to its digital health platform using the FHIR R4 standard.
  • In Louisiana, Lane Regional Medical Center and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center will go live on a shared Epic system in 2024.
  • Labcorp will use Oracle Cerner’s laboratory information system to help manage the lab operations of a Catholic health system.

People

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Canvas Medical names JP Patil (Included Health) chief product officer.

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HCTec names Brent Prosser (ROI Healthcare Solutions) VP of sales and promotes Bernard Rush to VP of application support.


Announcements and Implementations

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Floyd County Medical Center (IA) goes live on Meditech Expanse with help from Healthcare Triangle.

Net Health develops Missed Visit Prediction Indicator, a predictive analytics tool for hospital-based outpatient rehab therapy clinics.

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Summa Health in Ohio transitions from Epic’s Community Care model, courtesy of nearby Bon Secours Mercy Health, to its own Epic system with help from Brightwork Health IT.

Wolters Kluwer Health announces GA of Digital Health Architect Consumer Education Suite, an educational content-as-a-service designed to help virtual care companies build and deliver custom digital health solutions.

Epic customers can now move their medical records to Google Cloud.

Commure introduces CommureOS, a new operating system designed to help providers create and customize organizational workflows.

Bamboo Health develops Rising Risk, new real-time risk stratification and patient engagement capabilities.


Other

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The Bermuda Hospitals Board celebrates the arrival of the first baby with an entirely digital health record. Frances Ivy Edwards was born shortly after the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital and the Mid-Atlantic Wellness Institute went live on the Oracle Cerner-based Patient Electronic & Administrative Records Log (PEARL).


Sponsor Updates

  • EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Achieving Success Through Data Capture and Effective Communications.”
  • NTT Data leverages Lumeon’s care orchestration engine in its virtual command center to coordinate delivery of key non-clinical services for hospital-at-home programs.
  • Everest Group recognizes AGS Health as a leader in its Medical Coding Operations PEAK Matrix Assessment 2023.
  • Clearwater publishes a new whitepaper, “Back to the Basics: HIPAA Compliance for B
  • After switching to the EClinicalWorks Cloud, Hyndman Area Health Center reduces its expected five-year costs by over 50% and improves overall practice performance.
  • Wolters Kluwer Health makes its Digital Health Architect Consumer Education Suite and EmmiGuide solutions available via the Microsoft Marketplace.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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Monday Morning Update 11/14/22

November 13, 2022 News 3 Comments

Top News

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Telehealth company Wheel acquires GoodRx Care’s back-end virtual care technology, which includes an EHR, clinical management tools, and patient experience software.

Wheel was already providing GoodRx with technology and clinicians. It will license the technology back to GoodRx for use on its GoodRx Care website and app.

GoodRx share price has dropped 87% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $2 billion versus $23 billion in February 2021.

The company’s share price took a hit in August when grocery chain Kroger stopped accepting GoodRx coupons in its pharmacies, which cost GoodRx 25% of its business.  


Reader Comments

From Not-Football SEC Fan: “Re: Datavant. Other tidbits: (a) Roivant still holds a minority stake; (b) Ciox’s main investor New Mountain Capital seems to be the majority owner; and (c) Datavant has acquired companies such as Mirador and Convenet to expand internationally.” Datavant acquired HIPAA expert determination firm Mirador Analytics in late 2021, then added UK-based Convenet in September 2022 to offer clinical trials tokenization in the UK. Datavant had previously acquired Health Data Link in 2019, which offered health systems linkage to researchers, and de-identification services vendor Universal Patient Key in 2018, both before Datavant merged in 2021 with Ciox Health, which New Mountain Capital formed in 2016 by rolling up four of its acquisitions. Datavant has raised $81 million in funding through a Series B round.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Poll respondents may not love the fact that conferences sell their registration lists to facilitate vendor spamming, but it’s apparently a pretty minor inconvenience since only a few folks would be willing to pay to eliminate the practice.

New poll to your right or here: What kind of headshot do you use on your LinkedIn profile? A reader told me that she has seen pictures that are more than 10 years old, which must be as awkward as creating an “optimized” online dating profile that leads to an awkward in-person moment. I trawl LinkedIn regularly for People updates and have seen awful headshots that are unusable – tiny or low-resolution ones and shots that include adjacent body parts from people who were amateurishly cropped out of a group photo. Most puzzling to me is why someone would bother to create a LinkedIn profile without adding a headshot unless they are technically challenged, struggling with appearance issues, or hiding from the mob. 


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Lorre has published a children’s book and will send a copy to anyone who donates $20 or more to the non-profit animal sanctuary where she volunteers. She is personally covering the printing and shipping costs, so the entire tax-deductible donation goes toward taking care of the animals.

Serving in the military involves sacrifices – career, family, and sometimes life and limb. Thanks to those who made them.

I’m pondering the takeaways from rich CEOs who are grandstanding their sorrow about laying off their employees. Many of these are wunderkinds who seem shocked by the concept of business cycles. My second reaction is more cynical — investors rewarded them for irrational growth, questionable strategies, and overpriced acquisitions and probably will do so again down the economic road, so their handwringing over dumping human ballast overboard reeks more of all-about-me embarrassment than personal remorse. It was inevitable that the “talent wars” power that was begrudgingly granted to galley-rowers was temporary and that the Great Resignation would eventually toggle to the second definition of that word  — unhappily accepting something that you can’t change, like taking a job because you need the money and realizing that “work from anywhere” and “take all the vacation you want” policies can disappear faster than crypto billions.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

An article by Andreessen Horowitz, a tech-heavy venture capital firm that manages $35 billion in assets, says that the biggest company in the world will be in consumer health technology. Snips:

  • Healthcare is a $4 trillion industry in the US alone that consumes 20% of GDP, five times the size of the entire world’s advertising industry.
  • The consumer health giant won’t be a big tech firm or an healthcare incumbent. It will be “a consumer-obsessed, healthcare-native tech company that reimagines what care can look like.”
  • The company’s core competency will be the ability to engage and retain patients, which healthcare companies have done poorly.
  • The vertical path to creating that largest company in the world would be to create a payvider firm that can demonstrate value, such as if “UnitedHealth Group and Apple had a baby.” The challenge is that consumers don’t pay directly for healthcare and the system is optimized for insurers and self-insured employers, so companies have little incentive to care about the consumer experience.
  • The horizontal path would be for a company to become the Amazon or Visa of healthcare, offering a marketplace of healthcare reviews, quality metrics, and price transparency or simplified bill-paying in return for a tiny percentage of the revenue, which given massive healthcare spending could still make that company one of the world’s largest.
  • Companies must plug into the health industry to succeed, using health systems and providers as channel partners who can help drive transactions.

Sales

  • William Osler Health System chooses Sectra’s enterprise imaging, including radiology imaging, breast imaging, and vendor-neutral archive.
  • Pivot Point Consulting deploys OCHIN’s Epic EHR at San Francisco Community Health Center.

People

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Tower Health names surgeon Eugene Reilly, MD, MHCI as VP/CMIO.

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Andrew Burchett, DO (Avera) joins Meditech as executive director of medical informatics.


Announcements and Implementations

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Finland announces Radical Health Festival, a pan-European digital health conference that will be held in Helsinki June 12-15, 2023. It will offer a speed-dating platform, a Solution Match service, a hosted buyer program, and conference app. CHIME will offer its Boot Camp there. Early bird registration opens on December 1 and starts at $200.

Two new KLAS reports look at home-based care technology. Facilities – which name as their top three challenges staffing, regulatory requirements, and COVID-19 – most commonly choose MatrixCare, PointClickCare, and Indeed. Home-based acute care organizations name staffing,regulatory requirements, and reimbursement changes as their top concerns and most commonly deploy MatrixCare, SHP, Netsmart, and WellSky to address them.


Government and Politics

South Africa’s deputy health director says that the country’s universal healthcare system will add a central patient information system within 4-5 years ,

England’s The Guardian reports that a $425 million contract for a national shared patient data system is likely to be issued soon to Palantir. Patients will not be required to provide consent for using their data, which will be used by integrated care boards and then de-identified for use by researchers. 


Privacy and Security

The ransomware hackers behind the breach of Australia-based insurer Medibank post a list of customers who have been treated for mental health and alcohol issues, following its earlier list of those who have had abortions. They are demanding payment of $1 AUD per customer, nearly $10 million USD.


Other

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The VA and DoD fund a 12-month surgical fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth School of Medicine that trains surgeons to perform pre-surgical preparation using a patient’s 3D-modeled organs or tumors.

A JAMA Health Form research letter notes that the EHRs of the six vendors that have settled HHS/DOJ charges are being used by 77,000 clinicians, recommending that (a) ONC’s certification process be changed so that vendors don’t know in advance which functions will be tested; and (b) post-market surveillance of EHRs be initiated.

A Gonzaga law professor who studies antitrust, health law, and inequity says that a federal judge should not have approved last month’s $13 billion merger of UnitedHealth Group and Change Healthcare because the insurer can use Change’s EDI clearinghouse data to cherry-pick the most profitable consumer groups to insure, reducing access and allowing the company to unfairly compete with insurers that don’t have access to that data. She says that insurers want to acquire companies that capture health data so they can create a unique digital ID for each person insured, which on the positive side would allow them to apply healthy nudges, but would also allow them to move sicker people to plans that require higher cost-sharing,. She notes a 2014 complaint that insurers in Florida placed all HIV drugs, even cheap generics, in their highest cost-sharing tier to discourage HIV patients from signing up and that UHG could remove specific providers from their network if their claims data shows that they see a lot of expensive patients, such as diabetics. 

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The Internet has resurfaced years-old survey data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that shows who people spend time with by age, as visualized by Our World in Data. It isn’t pandemic-adjusted current, but still interesting since I hadn’t seen it until folks starting sending it my way. Tidbits, from which your life-planning takeaways may vary:

  • People spend more time with co-workers than family members from ages 21 through 65.
  • Time spent alone hums along at fours hour per day until the mid-30s, when it steadily increases to nearly eight hours per day for those in their 70s.
  • Time spent with children peaks at 4.5 hours in the mid-30s, then tapers down hard to one hour per day by 60.
  • Time spent with friends peaks at more than two hours per day at 18, then trends down do a fairly steady half hour per day at around 40 through 80.
  • People spend more time with their partners as they age, increasing from three hours per day with a big jump starting in their late 50s, then tapering until 77 (I assume due to death or a change in living situations).

Sponsor Updates

  • Gozio Health and Artera expand their partnership, following their initial launch at UNC Health, to add smart links to Artera patient communications and to launch text messages to providers from the mobile app.
  • The Inspiring Women Podcast features Kim McKay, MD PeriGen CMO and clinical VP of OB/GYN at Avera Health (SD).
  • The Executive Leaders Radio Podcast features Quil Health CEO Carina Edwards.
  • Oracle Cerner releases a new podcast, “Increasing interoperability to connect care for Veterans and service members.”
  • Spok publishes a new report, “The state of healthcare communications.”
  • Upfront Healthcare CEO and co-founder Ben Albert joins the Day Zero Podcast to share his entrepreneurial journey.
  • Wolters Kluwer Health expands its Sentri7 suite of clinical surveillance tools to include Sentri7 Sepsis Monitor.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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News 11/11/22

November 10, 2022 News 3 Comments

Top News

A posted and then quickly unpublished video on Amazon’s YouTube page describes Amazon Clinic, an online care program for common conditions.

The video showed people completing a symptom questionnaire, paying a fee, and then being given a diagnosis and prescriptions by “third-party healthcare provider groups.”

Amazon Care, a similar service, will cease operations on December 31, 2022.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Attending HLTH next week? Some HIStalk sponsors will be there too, and provided a summary of what they will be doing in Las Vegas and how you can connect with them.

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Here’s a Datavant company refresher after I interviewed CMIO Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD about tokenization. Drug development technology vendor Roivant Sciences created the company in 2017, then merged it with healthcare data firm Ciox Health (which was itself a rollup of HealthPort, IOD, Care Communications, and ECS) in 2021 in a $7 billion deal to create a company with $700 million in annual revenue. Roivant has created a dozen drug therapy companies that it calls “vants” (all of them have names ending in “vant,” such as Datavant, Genevant, Psivant, etc.). Riovant Sciences went public in October 2021 in a $7 billion SPAC merger, with shares having since lost 46% of their value versus the Nasdaq’s 27% loss, valuing the company at $3.6 billion.

I ignored several press releases today in which I couldn’t figure out exactly what the company does, what its new product or service involves, or why I (and my readers) should care. Committee-generated writing is usually awful.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Northwell Holdings and Aegis Ventures launch Upliv, which will offer video consults and care for managing the symptoms of menopause. The company, which will get $8.4 million in seed funding through the end of 2023, will market to employers who will offer it as a free employee benefit.

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Medical coding automation vendor Fathom raises $46 million in a Series B funding round.

CitiusTech acquires healthcare-focused Salesforce services company Wilco Source.

Best Buy Health-owned care-at-home platform vendor Current Health joins Epic’s App Market.

Strategic advisor Seth Joseph says that “Glen Tullman’s best magic trick yet” would be for his Transcarent to buy Teladoc Health, which Glen foisted Livongo in August 2020 for $18.5 billion to create a $37 billion behemoth that quickly turned into a $5 billion mid-player. He says that Transcarent needs Teladoc’s relationships with health systems and its care management capabilities courtesy of Livongo, which would give the employer-focused Transcarent a better chance of selling to employers and taking on risk.

Amazon becomes the first publicly traded company to lose $1 trillion in market value, with Microsoft on its heels with a market capitalization that is down $889 billion.


Sales

  • Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital (NC) will implement Oracle Cerner’s EHR via the CommunityWorks model.
  • Boston Medical Center will implement Sectra enterprise imaging via the Sectra One subscription model.
  • Warren General Hospital (PA) will replace its legacy Meditech system and three ambulatory EHRs with Meditech Expanse.
  • The VA expands its work with Get Well to include 70 medical centers and its first rollout of GetWell Loop care plans.

People

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Derek Baird, MBA (Sensyne Health) is named CEO of newly launched virtual specialty care network Switchboard Health, which he co-founded.

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Chris Wild, MBA (Experian Health) joins Experian Data Quality as VP of sales.

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Sriram Devarakonda, MSEE (Nordic Consulting Partners) joins Cardamom Health as co-founder and CTO.


Announcements and Implementations

A large-scale study of the VA’s data warehouse determines that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 more than once carries increased risk of death, hospitalization, and long-term effects. Those people who get through an initial infection can’t let their guard down to reinfection, as each additional infection increases the risk.

HealthStream launches a developer portal of shared services, applications, and APIs.

Redox and product innovation firm TXI will partner to develop digital products.

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Pakistan’s Shifa International Hospital wins a Cheers Award from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices for its $900 project in which pharmacy services verify chemotherapy preparation using a camera and off-the-shelf software. ISMP notes that not all hospitals can afford sophisticated IV workflow and robotic software.

A KeyCare survey of people who have had at least one telehealth visit like or prefer it as an option, with 79% saying that it is important that both their regular doctor and their telehealth provider have access to their health records.

Salesforce announces Patient 360 for Health innovations for behavioral health, advanced therapy management, Salesforce Genie for healthcare, and care coordination. .


Government and Politics

The waitlist of England’s NHS reaches a record 7.1 million patients even before a planned nursing strike.


Privacy and Security

Russian ransomware hackers begin posting the exfiltrated data of Australia-based health insurer Medibank on the Dark Web after the company declines to pay their demanded $10 million ransom. The first data posted was a list of patients who have had abortions. The Australian Federal Police warns that people who looks at the data are themselves committing a crime under the country’s privacy laws. Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil called the hackers “scumbags,” adding that as a woman whose private health information was compromised by the hackers, the attack should not have happened and she expects Medibank to fully support its customers.

CommonSpirit Health says that access to its EHR and patient portal has been restored for most users following an October 4 ransomware attack.

Recently filed lawsuits claim that hospitals whose websites and patient portals used Meta Pixel may have violated federal and state wiretapping laws, as the hospitals and Meta intercepted doctor-patient communication without their consent. Legal experts wonder whether Meta’s terms of service will protect it from liability since hospitals accepted responsiblity for configuring the tool.


Other

London-based doctors write in the BMJ that a chronic lack of attention to NHS IT infrastructure and systems “brings to a halt the everyday business of healthcare.” The authors suggest learning from US approaches such as researching burnout and having ONC provide some federal oversight.

Ontario’s government and the Ontario Medical Association agree to decrease physician payments for virtual visits in which no existing patient-physician relationship exists, ending pandemic policies in which doctors were paid the same for virtual or in-person encounters. The most common face-to-face fee code is paid $27 US, while one-off virtual visits will now pay $11 to $15. A pediatrician and virtual care provider says the pay cut devalues services to the point that seeing patients virtually without a referral is no longer viable, ending the trend of expanding access. The Ontario government is targeting a 60-40 ratio of in-person and virtual care for family doctors.

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A chronic pain patient files a complaint against a Pennsylvania doctor who was assigned by a national medical marijuana card service to review her request. The woman says she could barely see the doctor during her video visit, their conversation was short, and she couldn’t figure out how to upload her medical records. The state agreed that he approved her card without reviewing her medical records. The doctor contracts for Veriheal, which gives patients their money back if they aren’t approved and reportedly pays doctors only for patients they approve.

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The ED charge nurse who called 911 seeking help with patients due to short staffing says that employees of St. Michael Medical Center (WA) were stressed by ongoing changes in ownership and leadership, a move to a different building, and CommonSpirit Health’s cyberattack that took the hospital’s Epic system down and sent clinicians back to paper charting. She says that the night she called for help, the ED was at less than 50% of minimum staffing and patients with serious issues were being left unattended in the waiting room. Joint Commission issued a preliminary denial of accreditation to hospital after the incident. She concludes:

We’re taught that we keep our issues with staffing, no breaks, long shifts, impacts on our own health, etc., to ourselves. We’re taught to suck it up and be martyrs for the cause and for the corporations that own our hospitals, to be grateful for the crumbs thrown to us by hospital “leaders” (that not once show up during a night like the one I described above) in the form of pizza parties and banners, all the while dealing with anxiety while driving to work and tears on the way home, UTIs from dehydration because there’s just no time to drink any water (or pee, after), time away from our families and fear that when we do see them, we might be bringing them some residual disease from work.


Sponsor Updates

  • Nordic publishes a new episode of its monthly DocTalk series titled “Healthcare’s labor pains.”
  • AGS Health is recognized as a leader in medical coding operations by Everest Group.
  • LexisNexis Risk Solutions publishes its “True Cost of Fraud for Healthcare Payers” study.
  • Renown Health (NV) expands its partnership with Loyal, implementing the company’s provider data management and physician search services.
  • Myndshft’s automated prior authorization platform is now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
  • NeuroFlow publishes a new case study, “Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Prevent Suicides.”
  • CHIME posts a 30th anniversary podcast featuring inaugural board chair John Glaser, PhD.
  • Nordic publishes a new infographic, “Consolidating an ERP: 9 steps for a smoother, more efficient transition.”

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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HIStalk’s Guide to HLTH 2022

November 10, 2022 News No Comments

Bamboo Health

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Booth #2030

Contact: Alison Matthiessen, senior communications manager
amatthiessen@bamboohealth.com
540.230.9021

Billions of dollars are wasted in healthcare services each year due to poorly coordinated care and lack of real-time patient insights. This is fueling the disconnect among physical health, behavioral health, and social care, which has led to an ever-widening gap in health disparity and the rapidly growing behavioral health epidemic. At HLTH, Bamboo Health will unveil several new solutions aimed at better supporting providers and payers to meet their goals for connecting the care continuum and value-based care initiatives. Through its suite of solutions, Bamboo Health delivers distilled and specific insights at the high-value care moments that matter, ushering in a new era of insights and analytics to bridge the gap in health equity, improve both clinical and financial outcomes, and make whole person care a reality. Bamboo Health will also lead discussions on how to reduce the fragmentation and friction that plague healthcare and prevent the desired results of improved outcomes, better experiences and lower costs.

Bamboo Health events at HLTH include an executive fireside chat titled, “988: Opportunity for Equitable Behavioral Health Access?” on Monday, Nov. 14, from 11:50 AM – 12:10 PM PST. Dr. Nishi Rawat, Bamboo’s Chief Clinical Officer will moderate the discussion featuring Madhuri Jha, LCSW, MPH, director at Kennedy-Satcher Center for Mental Health Equity and Morehouse School of Medicine, and Brandon J. Johnson, MHS, MCHES, public health advisor at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and Center for Mental Health Services. Together, they will discuss the challenges associated with the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in terms of an equitable response for all, including varied resources, awareness and stigma. The chat will also explore ways 988 has opened behavioral health access and what remains a challenge for the initiative regarding health equity. Those wishing to continue the conversation are invited to Bamboo Health’s Grove Theatre in booth #2030 from 12:15-12:45 p.m. PST. 

Bamboo Health is a finalist in the Mental and Behavioral Health Best in Class category for the UCSF Digital Health Awards, which recognize the achievements of innovative health technology companies dramatically improving healthcare. Bamboo Health’s executive team will be in attendance at the awards ceremony on the evening of Nov. 14 at 6:00 p.m. PST at the Zouk Nightclub in Resorts World in Las Vegas to see the winners crowned. Find out more at: https://bamboohealth.com/news-pr/bamboo-health-to-showcase-suite-of-solutions-designed-to-achieve-careflow-at-hlth-2022/.


Censinet

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Contact: Chris Logan, chief security officer
clogan@censinet.com
401.443.0287

Censinet’s SVP and Chief Security Officer Chris Logan will be in attendance, and in conjunction with KLAS Research representatives, will be giving out “Cybersecurity Transparent” awards to vendors at HLTH. The “Cybersecurity Transparent” designation represents vendors who have demonstrated meaningful cybersecurity program maturity, cyber preparedness, and an ongoing intention to communicate cyber risk posture to providers and payers looking for Best in KLAS solutions.


Get-to-Market Health

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

The continued pace of transformation in healthcare creates enormous pressure on technology companies to adapt and deliver clear value. Get-to-Market Health (GTMH) was formed to address this challenge. Whether a company has taken in a new round of investment and needs to accelerate its top line growth or is bringing new products to market, GTMH helps healthcare technology leaders’ market, sell and create sustainable, long-term relationships with their customers.


Healthwise

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Meeting Pod 43

Contact: Nate Smith, Partner Solutions, Digital Health & Emerging Markets
nsmith@healthwise.org
415.516.9848

Healthwise has set the standard for health education since 1975. Nonprofit and independent, Healthwise is a trusted resource for health information, technology, and services that help people make better decisions and improve health outcomes. Interactive tools, videos, and content integrate seamlessly into any workflow or application, adding value to your digital health solution while providing consumers the information they need to live healthier lives.


Lumeon

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Viosk/Booth #V-3359

Contact: Todd Fane
todd.fane@lumeon.com

Lumeon believes that care better coordinated is care better delivered. Lumeon is a digital health company that provides a cloud-based care orchestration platform that automates the tasks, workflow, activities, and events that occur during the process of coordinating care. With real-time, bi-directional data/system integration and the dynamic application of clinical intelligence and automation, Lumeon ensures that each patient receives the right care at the right time –every time. By automating care coordination, care teams deliver care faster, more efficiently, effectively, and consistently across the continuum of care, while also empowering clinicians and staff to work at the tops of their licenses and spend time with patients that need it most.


Lyniate

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Booth #2609

Contact: Drew Ivan, chief strategy officer
drew.ivan@lyniate.com

Lyniate delivers secure, proven, and flexible interoperability solutions. As your trusted partner, Lyniate powers the applications and workflows that improve clinical, operational, and financial outcomes today while helping you understand, prepare for, and influence changes on the horizon. Foundational offerings, Lyniate Rhapsody and Lyniate Corepoint, are in use by healthcare teams around the world.


NTT DATA

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Booth #1418; Meeting Rooms 364 and 366

Contact: Lisa Esch, SVP strategy and industry solutions
Lisa.Esch@nttdata.com
303.918.3069

NTT DATA is a title sponsor for HLTH 2022. Visit booth #1418 to learn how we’re humanizing the digital healthcare experience with a data-driven approach.

Join our sessions:

  • Health Equity Impact Session: Going Digital: Technology Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle 11:40 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15 on the Impact Stage Lisa Esch (NTT DATA) and Kelly Nye (HCA Healthcare)
  • Tech Talk Session: Business-Led Innovation: NTT DATA and Snowflake’s Health Plan Price Transparency Tool 10:35 a.m. Monday, Nov. 14 on the Tech Talk Stage Tamara Villalon (NTT DATA) and Patrick Kovalik (Snowflake)
  • Tech Talk Session: How to Beat Ransomware 10:50 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15 on the Tech Talk Stage Jack Buxbaum (NTT DATA)

Watch our demonstrations:

Each day of the event you’ll find informative demos in the NTT DATA booth, including: Hospital at Home, Sepsis Workflow Management, Advocate AI, Patient Experience, Medical Cost Manager (Payment Integrity), AI for Chronic Disease Prediction, Health Data Bank powered by Snowflake, Giving Back.

A healthy planet is fundamental to a healthy society, and we’re partnering with One Tree Planted to plant 2,000 trees on behalf of HLTH attendees! Stop by our booth (#1418) and choose where to plant your tree to support reforestation efforts around the globe.


OptimizeRx

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Booth #V-4845

Contact: Maria Cipicchio, SVP of marketing
mcipicchio@optimizerx.com
617.433.0406

OptimizeRx helps people start and stay on life-impacting therapies. Our end-to-end technology platform allows life science companies to support the full care journey – from increased brand awareness, to streamlined market access, to ongoing patient adherence – by connecting providers and patients to treatment information and support at the moments it’s needed most. Our network of 300+ EHR partners provides life science brands with access to 700K+ HCPs, representing 60% of US healthcare providers and 90% of hospital systems. Only OptimizeRx uses patent-pending artificial intelligence and real-word data to deliver more relevant, actionable information, while offering true omnichannel reach within the EHR, online and beyond hospital system firewalls, and across social networks. Visit OptimizeRx.com to learn more, or to connect with a member of our team.


Synapse Medicine

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Booth # 4651

Contact: Ingrid Graff-Cailleaud, US market contact
ingrid@synapse-medicine.com
+33 6 63 57 36 34

Synapse Medicine is a provider of data-driven clinical decision support that optimizes drug regimens along the entire patient care journey, from prescribing through adherence, for a safer, more effective and efficient path to medication success. At HLTH 2022, Synapse Medicine is hosting a special Boothside Chat—The Future of EHR Integration—with guest, Brendan Keeler, Head of Product, Flexpa. Champagne & Lite Bites will be served. Be sure to sign up to reserve your spot. https://synapse-medicine.com/en-us/hlth-2022 Tuesday, November 15 at 12:30 p.m.


Tegria

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Booth #452

Contact: Kevin Kutz, vice president of external relations
kevin.kutz@tegria.com
425.984.4777

Tegria provides consulting and technology services to help organizations of all sizes humanize each healthcare experience. We are more than 4,000 colleagues throughout the United States and internationally who help customers maximize technology, transform operations, improve financials and optimize care. We maintain partnerships with a wide range of technology leaders, including Microsoft, 3Cloud and ServiceNow. Learn more at www.tegria.com. Visit us at Booth 452 and we’ll donate $5 for every badge swipe to the National Diaper Bank Network, up to $5,000. Please help us spend it all and learn more about how meeting basic needs for young families contributes to health equity. Mark your schedules for Monday 11:25 – 11:45 at the Impact Pavilion for Theresa Demeter’s fireside chat with Leon Caldwell, PhD, senior director for health equity strategies and innovation for the American Hospital Association.


News 11/9/22

November 8, 2022 News 1 Comment

Top News

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Primary care company VillageMD will acquire provider Summit Health for $9 billion.

Walgreens owns a majority stake in VillageMD, having invested over $5.2 billion in the company to co-locate its clinics with Walgreens retail pharmacies. It said earlier this year that 200 of the co-branded practices would open in 2022.

VillageMD will operate nearly 700 primary, specialty, and urgent care facilities in 26 markets once the deal is done.

Summit Health was formed in 2019 by the merger of multispecialty medical group Summit Medical Group and CityMD, which operated urgent care centers in the New York City metro area.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Latest LinkedIn peeve — congratulating someone who announces their new job with the ungrammatical “You got this!” that seems to question competence in the manner of “I like you no matter what anyone says.” I can identify, however, since even though I crank out millions of words per year, I still get writer’s block when Mrs. H slides a greeting card my way and expects me to awkwardly dash off heartfelt thoughts, at least until I pester her to just dictate what I should say.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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ChristianaCare (DE) launches a Business Health Solutions unit to offer employers direct virtual primary and behavioral health services, destination surgery programs, and COVID-19 vaccination and symptom-monitoring capabilities.

Legacy data archiving company MediQuant acquires Knowledge Based Systems, which offers data access and retrieval solutions for several industries.

NantHealth announces Q3 results: revenue up 16%, adjusted EPS –$0.12 versus –$0.10. NH shares are down 81% over the past 12 months and have shed 98% of their value since their first-day close in June 2016, valuing Patrick Soon-Shiong’s company at $39 million.


Sales

  • Thirty-year Meditech customer HCA Healthcare will upgrade its hospitals to Meditech Expanse as its go-forward EHR.
  • MedStar Health in Washington, DC will implement and train Zephyr AI’s predictive analytics Insights software using its T2D de-identified data sets.
  • PainChek, an Australian pain assessment and monitoring app, will use TrakCare HIS and Iris for Health EHR integration software from InterSystems.

People

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Scott Van Houten (Philips) joins Lyniate as VP of sales.

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Matt D’Errico, MBA (Joslin Diabetes Center) joins Lawrence General Hospital as CIO.

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Extrico Health hires Kevin Dawson, MS (Howard University Hospital) as CIO.

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Hiteks Solutions names Judy Cassetty, RN (Iodine Software) as chief clinical officer.

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Direct Recruiters promotes Jordan Freireich and Jaimie Bailey to partner.

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Aetion hires Dorothee Bartels, PhD (UCB) as chief digital officer, Jade Cusick (Cerner Enviza) as chief commercial officer, and Jeremy Brody, MS (Cerner Enviza) as chief strategy officer.

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Polly Israni, MBA (Google) joins CoverMyMeds as chief marketing officer.

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Paul Roscoe (Trinda Health) joins CLEW as CEO.

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Definitive Healthcare hires Jon Maack, MBA (Athenahealth) as president.

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HCTec promotes Mike Linville to president.

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Kathy Ruggiero (Commure) joins Lumeon as VP of marketing.

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Lee Rivas, MBA will become CEO of R1 RCM on January 1, 2023, replacing Joe Flanagan. John Sparby will replace Rivas as president. Rivas is a West Point graduate and former US Army captain.

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Chris Baker (Experian Health) joins Doceree as VP of business development for health systems.


Announcements and Implementations

Censinet, the American Hospital Association, and KLAS Research launch a healthcare cybersecurity benchmarking study that will allow health systems to compare cybersecurity investments, resources, performance, and maturity versus peers.

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In Alberta, Canada, Foothills Medical Centre and its associated clinics go live on Epic as part of a province-wide Connect Care rollout set to conclude in 2024.

Healthcare AI and voice vendor Care Angel will partner with senior living company Upside to offer insurers a social determinants of health risk assessment and housing intervention solution.

CCS, which offers clinical solutions and home-delivered medical supplies for people with chronic conditions, adds a gestational diabetes management program that includes remote blood glucose monitoring and clinical coaching.

Epic announces that the country’s six largest health plans, along with 250 health systems, are participating in its Payer Platform.

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A new KLAS report on PACS finds that 30% of organizations could replace their vendor due to vendor acquisitions and replacement of legacy systems. Sectra continues to lead the market despite a customer-observed slippage in its high support quality, while Fujifilm and Merative are showing signs of overall improvement in bucking the industry trend. Intelerad customers note worsening support as the vendor makes acquisitions, while Change Healthcare’s are unsure of the product’s future following the company’s acquisition by UnitedHealth Group. GE Healthcare has the most vulnerable customer base because of disengaged relationships.


Government and Politics

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Clinical and IT staff at Fox Army Health Center (AL) are working through several issues that are associated with the facility’s September rollout of MHS Genesis, including intermittent access to the cloud-based messaging system and eventual online appointment booking and a backlog of medication requests that have put prescription fulfillment at 72-plus hours.

Attendees of ViVE 2023, March 26-29 in Nashville, can save 35% by registering before Friday at midnight. CHIME and HLTH are expecting the conference to draw 7,500 attendees and 450 exhibitors.

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In Canada, the Saskatchewan Health Authority takes its Administrative Information Management System offline after numerous complaints from users related to scheduling and leave requests. AIMS went live last week to replace 82 payroll, human resources, scheduling, and finance systems. Deloitte, Kronos, and Oracle have contributed to the decade-long, $138 million project.

A federal judge denies the three motions filed by former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes in which she requested a new trial, ruling that she was offering no new evidence for her fraud conviction and that a new trial was not likely to lead to her acquittal. She is scheduled for sentencing on November 18.


Other

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Ninety-eight percent of hospital management leaders say they have ramped up efforts to employ more outsourcing vendors, according to a Black Book survey of 775 provider organizations. Less than 5% of respondents reported extreme dissatisfaction with current third-party companies.

An AMA survey finds that more physicians are using telehealth and most think it provides patient care advantages, but they have four requirements:

  • The technology must work.
  • They have to be paid properly.
  • Liability insurance coverage and assurances of data privacy and security must be provided.
  • The process must work within existing practice workflows.

Sponsor Updates

  • Bamboo Health will exhibit at the National Association of Medicaid Directors conference November 14-17 in Washington, DC.
  • Oracle Cerner publishes a new client achievement, “Henry Community Health delivers a personalized patient experience with HealtheCRM.”
  • ChartSpan names Askia Sultan sales development representative.
  • Nordic posts a video titled “The Download: Optimizing Performance to Address Labor Shortages.”
  • CHIME awards 18 providers with its Digital Health Most Wired Survey level 10 certification.
  • Ellkay will exhibit at ModMed’s Momentum 2022 conference November 18-20 in Orlando.
  • Sphere company Health IPass joins Azalea Health’s API Marketplace.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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Monday Morning Update 11/7/22

November 6, 2022 News 4 Comments

Top News

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Roche, the world’s largest biotechnology company, unifies its 30-solution digital health portfolio under the brand Navify.

The company’s products include oncology decision support, tumor board, mutation profiler, digital pathology, results tracking, and infection management.

Roche acquired oncology software vendor Flatiron Health for $1.9 billion in April 2018.


Reader Comments

From Itsme: “Re: TeleTracking. At least 40 people lost their jobs last week. Most folks were on the client-facing side.” Unverified. I unsuccessfully searched the company’s website and press releases looking for a media contact so that I could inquire.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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A great number of providers are apparently insulting their patients-slash-customers by shoving a blank form at them that asks for information that they already have on file. I’m repeating myself in saying that I question how intentionally duplicated information is reconciled and by whom, whether the provider will review only the form’s contents instead of the better-vetted information from the EHR, and why providers think that blank forms are better than letting the patient review an EHR-generated document and the noting any corrections. You would order less frequently from Amazon if its website or app required you to manually enter your name, shipping address, and credit card information every single time.

New poll to your right or here: Would you pay a $250 add-on fee to your conference registration to opt out of having the organizer share or sell your contact information? A reader pointed out that the business model of conferences includes selling the contact information of prospects to vendors, so registrants would have to bear more of the cost if they throttle back on the “ladies drink free” model. I conclude that the amount that you are willing to pay to avoid any particular frustration (a toll road, VIP tickets, or a concierge MD) is a better indicator of the issue’s true importance than the number and passion of the complaints about it.

One of my favorite email tricks is sticking a period somewhere before the “@” in my address, which makes that email address look unique even though Gmail treats it like my real one. Example: email addressed to mr.histalk@gmail.com will actually be sent to mrhistalk@gmail.com, giving me an infinite number of seemingly unique addresses for free trials and such. A reader provides a similarly clever way to tell which companies are selling your email information, which takes advantage of the fact that Gmail ignores characters that follow a plus sign entered to the left of the @ sign. Example: sign up for the HIMSS conference using mrhistalk+himss23@gmail.com and any emails sent there will be delivered to mrhistalk@gmail.com, but with the full address listed so you know who shared your information. These tricks could be foiled by sites or bulk emailers that strip off the extra characters, but I doubt that’s common.

For folks who just can’t figure out the EDT versus EST thing, your confusion won’t be obvious again until March 12. Or never, if you instead just use ET.

If your company sponsors HIStalk and is participating in the HLTH conference, complete this form by Wednesday and I’ll list you in my conference guide.


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Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health (EDOC) exchange-traded fund has lost 27% of its value since its inception on July 30, 2020, while the Nasdaq is down 4% and the S&P 500 is up 15%. EDOC has also performed worse than both indices in the past 12 months. 


People

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Inflo Health hires Angela Adams, RN (Jvion) as CEO.


Government and Politics

In the UK, NHS nurses will likely strike nationally for the first time in the next few weeks over compensation, with patient waiting lists expected to grow even longer.


Other

Forbes profiles Humana’s use of a virtual assistant to reduce the documentation burden of its clinicians. The company says that 80% of clinician time was being spent documenting rather than interacting with patients, and using the tool that it named Allie has freed up 15% of their time. Allie was built using technology from Automation Anywhere.

A Madison, WI-based non-profit news site runs a well-written piece on Epic. Snips:

  • Epic walked away gracefully from its $624 million VA patient scheduling pilot programs when the VA chose Cerner in a $16 billion no-bid contract, which may benefit Epic in the long run since Epic has since enhanced its market position instead of bogging down in government work.
  • Epic has 12,500 employees and $3.8 billion in annual revenue versus Cerner’s 27,000 employees and $6 billion in revenue, but Cerner continues to lag product-wise, is losing premium customers to Epic while selling mostly to price-sensitive ones, and was laying off employees when Oracle pursued its acquisition.
  • Epic has built all of its products and they integrate well, while Oracle Cerner grew by acquiring unrelated products that were bolted together.
  • Epic says it’s too early to say if it will collaborate with Oracle Cerner on the national database of patient records that Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison has announced, with Epic saying that connecting to Cosmos can’t happen until Epic gains understanding about the reliability of Oracle Cerner’s data, its method of de-identifying patient data, and its willingness to legally agree not to sell patient data commercially.
  • Observers say that Oracle Cerner prospects may be spooked by Cerner’s history and the Oracle acquisition and may buy Epic instead.
  • Oracle has a history of making grand promises about developing new products when acquiring companies, but the end result is usually only that Oracle tries to sell more of its existing products to the acquired customers.

Contacts

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

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