News 5/5/23

Top News

The Drug Enforcement Administration, reacting to the record 38,000 comments it received about its intention to reinstate pre-COVID telehealth prescribing limitations for controlled drugs with the end of the public health emergency, will leave the flexibilities intact as it reexamines the issue.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A reader previously asked me for financial highlights from HIMSS. The organization hasn’t filed a federal Form 990 since May 2021, after which it changed its fiscal year-end to December 31, so records are current only through June 2020. That wasn’t a good year for HIMSS, when it had to cancel its cash cow annual conference. I’ve reported the numbers previously (they are two years old, after all), but here again are the highlights:

• Total revenue dropped 74% to $29 million.
• Profit slid from $21 million to a loss of $54 million, which swung net assets from $33 million to negative $24 million.
• Top-earning executives were President and CEO Hal Wolf ($1.4 million), former EVP Carla Smith ($1.3 million, of which $375,000 was severance), and 11 others who earned from $250,000 to $666,000.
• HIMSS reported a revenue breakout of $12 million from membership, $10 million from advertising, $1.9 million from conferences, $1.9 million from its maturity model business, and $1.6 million from corporate sponsors. Recall however that this is in a year when the conference was cancelled and revenue dropped by $83 million compared to the year before.

Happy Cinco de Cuatro to my fellow Cornballers (iykyk).

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Keysight Technologies. The Santa Rosa, CA-based company’s Keysight Eggplant is recognized by Forrester as a leader in software test automation. Healthcare providers and medical device manufacturers can experience enhanced healthcare software testing in three areas: (1) non-invasive EMR testing at DevOps speed; (2) streamlined medical device software testing; and (3) test automation and RPA in one toolset. Keysight’s Eggplant Test Automation Software helps healthcare providers design, schedule, and execute test cases that improve their user’s experience. Its solutions are tailored to simplify the complexities of continuous integration, deployment, and testing, enabling healthcare providers to analyze high-fidelity models of complex systems and ensure the best possible outcomes for patients. Thanks to Keysight Technologies for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Centene will sell healthcare analytics vendor Apixio, which it acquired in December 2020, to private equity firm New Mountain Capital. The private equity firm’s active holdings include Datavant, EMIDS, Cloudmed, and Signify Health.

Virtual youth and family mental health provider Brightline lays off 20% of its employees on top of the 20% that it let go in November 2022.

Home diagnostics vendor Cue Health will lay off 325 employees, or 26% of its workforce. The company, which was best known for its over-the-counter COVID-19 test that was used by the NBA, went public in 2021 at a $3 billion valuation. HLTH shares have since lost 97%, valuing the company at $105 million. CEO Ayub Khattak said in the March earnings call that the company sold $1 billion worth of tests in the last two years and has added a virtual care delivery solution. The company was awarded a $481 million Department of Defense contract in October 2020 for its rapid COVID-19 test, which uses swabs and a cartridge-based reader that delivers results to smartphones.

People

DataLink hires Eric Hedrick (Advantmed) as VP of clinical transformation.

Remote patient monitoring platform vendor Health Recovery Solutions hires Alan Bugos, MS (Medminder) as CTO.

Wi-fi sensing solution provider Origin AI hires Joseph Gwin, PhD (Best Buy Health) as chief innovation officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Apree Health, created in September 2022 by the merger of Vera Whole Health and Castlight Health, launches a cloud-based member analytics platform for health plans and large employers. Former Cerner President Don Trigg is CEO.

UCSD Health demonstrates scannable health insurance cards that use the SMART Health Code QR standard.

Government and Politics

The VA chooses four companies to submit task orders under an eight-year, $1 billion contract for home telehealth for remote patient monitoring: Cognosante, DrKumo, Medtronic Care Management Services, and Valor Healthcare.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warns consumers that high-interest medical credit cards and financing – often advertised in the waiting rooms of physicians, dentists, and hospitals that previously offered their patients no-interest payment plans – can inflate medical bills by up to 25%.

Privacy and Security

A lawsuit that was filed by a woman against Lehigh Valley Health Network, in an attempt to force the health system to pay ransomware hackers to remove her nude patient examination photos from the dark web, has been dropped. The federal judge questioned whether the court has the authority to force a party to comply with an illegal act, leading the plaintiff to drop her proposed class action lawsuit. 

NationBenefits says that the information of three million of its members was exposed in an April mass ransomware attack that exploited a flaw in cybersecurity vendor Fortra’s file transfer system. The attack involved other healthcare organizations such as hospital operator Community Health Systems, which said in February that the Fortra-vector attack exposed the information of at least one million of its patients. Fortra has determined that a zero-day flaw in its software allowed a ransomware group to steal data from at least 100 companies starting in January 2023.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Triangle will exhibit at the 2023 MUSE Inspire Conference June 7-10 in Denver.
• EClinicalWorks kicks off its summit for FQHCs, rural health clinics, Indian health centers, and community health centers.
• Volpara Health wil donate 5% of sales of its breast density assessment software to educational website DenseBreast-info.org.
• Health Data Movers will sponsor a breakfast at the UNOS Transplant Management Forum on May 18 in Denver.
• Meditech congratulates HCA Healthcare for its top ranking in Fortune’s list of 2023 Most Admired Companies in the medical facility category.
• Five9 publishes a new case study, “Healthcare Technology Provider Delivers Personalized Member Services.”
• NTT Data announces it has been named a Leader in all four quadrants of the ISG Provider Lens 2022 – Healthcare Digital Services report.

Blog Posts

• Creating the Triple-Win of Healthcare (Enlace Health)
• Cures Act Moves Certification Goal Posts for Health IT (First Databank)
• Take control of your healthcare security with threat hunting (Fortified Health Security)
• Is Your Healthcare Organization Ready to Make the Move to Epic Hyperdrive? (HealthTECH Resources)
• Helping Healthcare Supply Chain Adapt for a Modern World (GHX)
• 10 Healthcare IT Leaders You Should Know: Recap of HIMSS23 (Healthjump)
• Hospitals Suffer Financially Post-COVID: What That Could Mean for the Future (HealthTech Resources)
• HIMSS23 Reflections: It Comes Down to Patient Experience (Healthwise)
• Determining the Value-on-Investment of Provider-to-Provider Virtual Consultation for Cancer Care (Impact Advisors)
• How specialized terminologies improve clinical documentation (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Wrapping Up Medical Laboratory Professionals Week 2023 (JTG Consulting Group)
• Staying Ahead of Healthcare Tech Trends: Managed IT Services (Medhost)
• Connecting with My Physical Therapist Between Visits Helped Me Finish My Treatment Plan (Net Health)
• How Midtown Medical Imaging demonstrates the value of high-quality imaging (Nuance)

The following HIStalk Sponsors win 2023 MedTech Breakthrough Awards:

• Loyal – best patient registration and scheduling solution
• Kyruus – best online search and scheduling solution
• Elsevier Clinical Path – best computerized decision support solution
• Nym Health – best overall health administration software
• Availity – health administration innovation award
• Lumeon – best care orchestration platform
• Bamboo Health – best care management solution provider
• ConnectiveRx – best overall patient engagement service
• Experity – best EHR solution
• Arrive Health – best EHR service

Contacts

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

News 5/3/23

Top News

The trade secrets lawsuit that medical technology vendor Masimo brought against Apple ends in a mistrial.

Masimo claims that Apple had expressed interest in working with the company on pulse oximeter technology, then instead started poaching Masimo’s employees, including its chief medical officer, to develop competing technology.

Apple later sued Masimo, accusing the company of copying the design of the Apple Watch.

Masimo says that even though six of the seven jurors believe that Apple did not steal its trade secrets, it will file for a retrial.

The US International Trade Commission will rule later this month on Masimo’s demand that Apple Watch imports be banned because they infringe on its patents.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The JAMA Internal Medicine article that found that reviewers preferred the answers of ChatGPT over those of clinicians in response to patient questions has been widely reported, leading me to offer these points about the methodology:

• The 195 randomly chosen questions and the clinician answers were extracted from a Reddit forum rather than real-life examples, due to HIPAA concerns.
• The Subreddit moderators are responsible for verifying the credentials of participants who claim to be healthcare professionals.
• The longer answers generated by ChatGPT likely provided the illusion of empathy.
• The authors had no way to determine if the publicly posted messages are similar to real-life patient questions. Most of the example questions that they posted are of the “do I need to see a doctor” variety.
• The publicly responding physicians did not know the patients they responded to, did not have their medical history, and haven’t treated them. They were voluntarily responding on their own time as strangers, among responses by multiple users, and thus had no incentive to spend more time on message quality and empathy.
• The reviewers used measures of empathy and quality that had not been tested or validated. They did not assess ChatGPT’s responses for accuracy. The “which response is better” evaluation is subjective.
• Some of the lower-scoring physician answers from examples provided were more logistical than clinical and were thus less likely to exhibit or require empathy (you are considering an ED visit but that wouldn’t accomplish much, you’ll be fine without intervention, you should contact your PCP or urgent care).
• Actual patients did not review the responses, obviously including the person who actually asked the question.
• The five reviewers, all of whom were co-authors, included one nurse practitioner and four MDs who primarily work in research and/or informatics. Three of the five reviewed each response.
• The influence of perceived message quality or empathy on eventual patient outcomes or satisfaction is not known.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CVS Health closes its all-cash, $10.6 billion acquisition of Medicare primary care chain Oak Street Health.

Clubhouse, the live chat social media platform that was wildly popular for about 15 minutes during the pandemic’s early days when people first got bored sitting at home and were still fawning over every word spoken by technology executives in a soaring stock market, lays off half its employees as people tire of the novelty of listening to real-time audio conversations. I could never understand the appeal, so I was not on the waitlist of 10 million people. 

Sales

• Good Samaritan Hospital (CA) will implement Nest Collaborative’s virtual breastfeeding support services.
• Virginia Hospital Center will use Unite Us care coordination and social services referral capabilities via the Unite Virginia network.

People

Kyruus names Peter Boumenot (B.well) as chief product officer.

Das Health promotes Michelle Jaeger to president and CEO.

Retired US Navy commander William Walders, MHA (Health First) joins BayCare (FL) as CIO.

Brad Wensel, MBA (AWS) joins Iodine Software as chief customer officer.

Brian Parrish (Craneware) joins CVS Health’s ActiveHealth and Health Data & Management Solutions as chief marketing officer.

Tenet Healthcare promotes Christopher Waldren, RN, MHA to VP of information technology.

Jason Aranda, RN, MBA joins Providence as VP of clinical IT solution delivery, south division.

Blue Shield of California promotes Krishna Ramachandran, MS, MBA to SVP of health transformation and provider adoption. He spent several years in technical roles at Epic through 2010 and was chief information and transformation officer at Duly Health and Care for three years.

Announcements and Implementations

St. Joseph’s Health (NJ) rolls out clinical communications software from CareMesh, including Connect messaging and Search provider directory services.

Litchfield Hills Orthopedic Associates (CT) implements EClinicalWorks across its surgery center and offices.

Government and Politics

NPR’s “All Things Considered” runs a story on the VA’s struggles to implement Oracle Cerner, interviewing veterans who were negatively impacted by the rollout. It concludes that “many in Congress are suggesting the VA should walk away,” although it does not quantify the number, whose those members are, or what they propose as an alternative. It gives a good bit of airtime to Ed Meagher, a former VA IT executive (he left 17 years ago and has been a contractor consultant for most of the time since), who says that patients at the five VA sites that are live on Oracle Cerner are “guinea pigs” and advocates updating the VA’s 45-year-old VistA system.

Privacy and Security

Ottawa’s Queensway Carleton Hospital notifies 100,000 patients that their data was exposed when a test server of Aetonix Systems, the hospital’s cloud-based communication platform vendor, was breached.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas Senior Product Quality Technician Ronald Bullock rappels down 17 floors of the 21C Museum Hotel in Durham, NC as part of a fundraiser to support Duke Children’s Hospital.
• Agfa HealthCare earns Frost & Sullivan’s 2023 Customer Value Leadership Award for its customer-first approach and innovative leadership.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “The senior housing and care sector – challenges and opportunities.”
• WellSky adds new predictive analytics capabilities to its CarePort Connect solution to help providers reduce SNF readmissions and optimize end-of-life care transitions.
• Essentia Health launches a medical financial assistance enrollment program using CenterX’s EHR-integrated system.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions joins the AWS ISV Accelerate Program.
• Nordic releases a new episode of its In Network podcast, “Making Rounds: Leveraging analytics to create efficiencies.”
• Divurgent releases a new episode of it’s The Vurge Podcast, “Translating Business Needs Into Software Solutions, featuring Simple Interact founder and CEO Ravi Kalidindi.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast episode, “Enhanced Telehealth Experience with Healow Solutions.”
• Surescripts publishes a new data brief, “How Are Care Teams Evolving to Fill Primary Care Gaps?”

Blog Posts

• CEOs: Now is the Time for Bold Actions (AGS Health)
• Belong Health leans into complex populations with healthcare analytics (Arcadia)
• Patient No-Shows Are Costing Your Organization More Than You Think. Here’s How to Effectively Reduce Them. (Artera)
• How to Modernize Your EDI Platform (Availity)
• Care at home: How remote programs benefit patient outcomes, access, and reduce costs (Biofourmis)
• Clinical Surveillance – unlock actionable insights and amplify clinical experience to empower acute care teams (Philips Capsule)
• Public Health, Disease Surveillance, and the Opportunity for Master Data Management (CareMesh)
• A Clinical Service Desk for Epic Users: Emphasis on Clinical (CereCore)
• EHR Optimization vs. Replacement: Which Side Is Your Healthcare Facility On? (HealthTECH Resources)
• Why Do So Many Providers Fail to Capture Annual Wellness Visits? (ChartSpan)
• Role of Digital Transformation in Health Equity (CHIME)
• What Happens at Asembia 2023 Will Get Reported On Here (CoverMyMeds)
• Using Amazon Connect to Streamline Your Contact Center Operations (CTG)
• Study: US Military Sees Facility-Level Cost Savings in the First Year of Virtual Care Program (Current Health)
• Key Takeaways from HIMSS23 (Dimensional Insight)
• Methods for Improving Healthcare Quality (Vyne Medical)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 5/1/23

Top News

Researchers find that licensed healthcare professionals preferred ChatGPT 3.5’s responses to patient questions over those that were written by doctors 80% of the time, judging the computer responses to be more empathetic.

A study limitation is that the patient question and the physician response came from public Reddit postings rather than from actual patient interactions.

However, I would also note that the Reddit responses presumably came from doctors who had sufficient time and empathy to respond without personal benefit in the first place, which makes me think real-life responses would exhibit significantly less empathy and thoughtful thoroughness in giving ChatGPT an even wider lead.

Reader Comments

From Zingaro: “Re: collaborative software groups. Have you heard of examples where Meditech Magic standalone clients joined a regional Cerner collaborative?” I’ll invite readers to chime in, and if you are willing to share your experience, provide your contact information offline and I’ll forward to Zingaro.

From Joint Pain: “Re: HIMSS23. Thanks for giving a shout-out to our company as one of the small-boothed folks who nonetheless worked hard at the conference.” I know how it feels to stand in near isolation in a 10×10 booth that is off the beaten track in the exhibit hall’s nether regions, not inexpensively, I might add. I’ll also make this offer – if your company exhibited at HIMSS23 in a booth that was 10×20 or smaller, I’ll give you a first-year HIStalk sponsorship discount that will cover 365 days instead of your three on the show floor. Contact Lorre since I’m just blurting this out without thinking in assuming that she will figure out details.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents who attended HIMSS23 gave it decent scores. Some offered constructive criticism to beef up the health equity track, improve food and beverage options, and book more inspiring keynote speakers. I think that other than the carpet gaffe, they did a good job.

New poll to your right or here: Which HIMSS23-related recordings have you consumed for at least two hours? I’m asking as someone who has spent zero minutes and is questioning whether that makes me an outlier, given that it seemed like half the people at the conference were chasing the other half with cameras or microphones. I just don’t have the attention span to watch or hear self-indulgent interviewers and interviewees saying nothing useful when five seconds of skimming a transcription (had they made one) would have sent me fleeing. I will check out the official session recordings when they come out, although my attention span wanders there, too.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Teladoc Health reports Q1 results: revenue up 11%, EPS –$0.37 versus –$0.47, beating analyst expectations for both. TDOC shares have lost 21% of their value in the past 12 months versus the Dow’s 3% gain, valuing the company at $4.3 billion.

Sales

• Parkview Health chooses Sectra’s imaging cloud subscription service.
• North Carolina HHS contracts with Optum for provider enrollment, credentialing, and data management.
• Horizons Mental Health Center will implement Netsmart’s CareFabric platform, including the MyAvatar behavioral health EHR, as it transitions to a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic.

People

Kaiser Permanente promotes Nari Gopala, MBA to chief digital officer for its health plan and hospitals.

Genevieve Morris, MA, formerly of UnitedHealth-acquired Change Healthcare, joins UnitedHealth Group-owned Optum as VP of interoperability strategy, medical network.

Rahul Goyal, MD (Malaffi) joins Elsevier as chief medical officer.

Brian Parrish (Craneware) joins CVS-owned ActiveHealth and HDMS as chief marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Artera launches self-service analytics for creating patient engagement data dashboards.

Centre for Neuro Skills goes live on Meditech Expanse.

A Sphere study finds that two-thirds of providers believe that improving patient payment collections is a top priority, with interests in specific technologies such as text message payments, point-of-service kiosks, card on file processing, and incorporating check-in and payment into digital front doors.

Government and Politics

The Center for US Policy petitions FDA to declare Bamboo Health’s NarxCare software a misbranded medical device that should be recalled, claiming that its opioid risk score for patients – which is calculated from state prescription drug monitoring program data using what CUSP says is non-transparent methodology — is being used inappropriately to prevent pain patients from obtaining appropriate opioids.

Other

A New York Times opinion piece says that private equity is ruining the country by taking advantage of loose regulations to bankrupt acquired companies while making their own executives billionaires. A showcase example is Carlyle Group’s acquisition of nursing home chain ManorCare that was funded by piling debt onto to the chain – not to the private equity firm – then flipping its real estate to allow Carlyle to recover its investment while sticking the chain with paying high rents. Then came layoffs, cost-cutting, and poor resident care that ended up bankrupting the nursing home company, after which Carlyle avoided the resulting wrongful death lawsuits by claiming that it was an advisor, not an owner.

Sponsor Updates

• Nym Health names Hallie Heffington (Summit Medical Billing Solutions) and Chermanda Jackson medical coding and compliance auditors, Omer Bar-Sela (Mobileye) implementation squad lead, Scott Rulkowski (Olive) customer success manager, and Niv Shashoua (HP) junior software engineer.
• Nordic Consulting rebrands Bails & Associates, which it acquired in 2021, Nordic ERP Services.
• Eleanor Health reduces its month-end closing time from 15 days to one day using a customized AI workflow solution from RCxRules.
• Optimum Healthcare IT names Kevin Scahill Epic HIM analyst and Rachel Clemans ServiceNow engagement manager.
• Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (TN) uses PerfectServe to streamline transfer center communications.
• Specialty medication technology company RxLightning wins a Disruptor of the Year Mira Award.
• SunStone Consulting will offer VisiQuate’s advanced revenue cycle analytics to its clients.
• Pivot Point Consulting, a Vaco company, publishes its Q2 healthcare IT market report.
• South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority expands its enterprise imaging contract with Sectra to include its digital pathology module.
• Surescripts will apply to become a Qualified Health Information Network.
• Upfront Healthcare’s latest psychographics study shows the pandemic’s impact on consumer health behaviors.
• West Monroe celebrates its 21st anniversary.Wolters Kluwer Health will exhibit at AONL 2023 May 1-4 in Anaheim, CA.

Blog Posts

• Freezing the squeeze on the Canadian primary care system (Nordic)
• Physicians Speak: Make Pharma Digital Marketing Clinically Relevant (OptimizeRx)
• Reducing healthcare call volume: Generative AI helps manage and divert routine inquiries (Orbita)
• Digital Health Can Drive Health Equity (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Choosing a Revenue Cycle Services Partner (PMD)
• Five Key Guidelines for Successful Workforce Planning in Healthcare (Premier)
• Buyer mindsets: What you need to know before you pitch your digital solution to a healthcare CFO (Redox)
• Writing a New Ending to the Patient Access-to-Care Story (Surescripts)
• 4 innovative ways to leverage call monitoring for increased customer satisfaction (Talkdesk)
• Addressing President Biden’s Executive Order to Support Caregivers and Improve Care (Trualta)
• Volpara Analytics Providers University of Utah Radiologists Confidence in Mammography Quality Across Locations (Volpara Health)
• Double Your Reach: Marketing Hacks for Inside and Outside Your Practice (WebPT)
• 5 Key Interoperability Insights and News from HIMSS 2023 (Zen Healthcare IT)
• How to Survive a Joint Commission Survey (Zynx Health)
• Productive Health Care Systems Nationwide Need Interoperability (Vyne Medical)
• COVID and public health: Navigating the end of the US federal emergency (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 4/28/23

Top News

Virtual care platform vendor EVisit acquires Bluestream Health, which offers digital front doors and virtual workflow tools.

Click the image above to enlarge.

I interviewed EVisit CEO Sachin Agrawal a few weeks ago and Bluestream President Brian Yarnell last February.

Reader Comments

From Wormser: “Re: Google’s C4 data set training web sources. Is it good or bad that your site was used?” Probably good, but with an asterisk. I was initially happy to see that HIStalk contributed 3.4 million tokens to the model in being among the top 2,000 of 15 million sites that it scraped, at least triple that of the next-highest health IT site (HIMSS-owned Healthcare IT News). The model also prioritizes the most important and well-regarded sites, so that’s a plus. Negative: that means I’m involuntarily contributing a lot of decades-long work for free, which I rationalize that it’s free to read anyway. The top-used sites were patents.google.com, Wikipedia, Scribd (which is kind of a surprise), the New York Times, and the PLOS open access journals. The real story is that it’s good to question a model’s training sources and to consider the commercialization rights of the owners of that information, which will be especially important in healthcare.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I hate getting names wrong knowing that spellcheck can’t help me, so I was appalled to see that I mistyped the name of RxLightning CEO Julia Regan as “Julie” in our recent interview. I fixed the error, but my self-beratement continues, and I am reminded yet again that everybody needs an editor.

A friend asked for help polishing their resume and creating a cover letter, which of course I pasted into ChatGPT to create documents that left even a persnickety writer like myself with nothing to correct. I was thinking during the process that employers will have a tougher time selecting candidates based on their writing skill as a proxy for intelligence and attention to detail since ChatGPT makes everybody seem smart.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kaiser Permanente will acquire Geisinger Health in forming Risant Health, an independent, non-profit community hospital operator. Kaiser says it will invest $5 billion in Risant over the next five years, during which Risant will add up to six more health systems. The two organizations, both of which reported operating losses in 2022, say that Risant hospitals will benefit from Kaiser’s ability to invest in technology and preventive care.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions acquires Human API to create a seamless method of delivering health records for life insurance underwriting and care coordination.

People

Scott Sanner (Citra Health Solutions) joins Millennia as CEO.

Patient advocate, journalist, and “comedy health analyst” Casey Quinlan died this week of breast cancer.

Announcements and Implementations

Amazon shuts down its Halo Health wearables division and lays off its employees. The fitness tracker and subscription service was launched in August 2020 and Amazon announced its sleep tracking system Halo Rise in September 2022. The company started another round of layoffs Wednesday in its cloud computing and HR departments, pushing its total in the last few months to 27,000.

PMD – which offers solutions for secure communication, telehealth, charge capture, and RCM — launches a patient demographics management platform for medical practices

Eagle Ridge Hospital goes live on Meditech Expanse.

Rady Children’s Hospital and Sentara Healthcare implement Juniper’s AI-driven network technology to support reliable wi-fi and indoor location services.

AvaSure launches a virtual nursing application and care model, expanding its TeleSitter solution. I interviewed CEO Adam McMullin a few weeks ago.

Amazon Web Services increases its operational database workloads for Epic users by 61%, up to 42 million GRefs/s. 

The Columbus business paper profiles AndHealth, a chronic disease reversal telehealth company that was created by CoverMyMeds co-founder Matt Scantland. The company reports that its migraine patients had 70% fewer missed days of work. I interviewed him in February 2022.

A new KLAS report on health system capacity optimization management finds that LeanTaaS and Epic lead, while Qventus shows positive impact in the perioperative area. Users of Epic’s applications (Grand Central, Cadence, OpTime, MyChart, Cogito, Slicer Dicer, and Cognitive Computing) report strong out-of-the-box functionality that they home will be enhanced with AI/ML, actionable reporting and visualization, and a more consistent mobile experience, especially for Android devices.

Government and Politics

The VA, DoD, and Coast Guard experience another Oracle Cerner EHR downtime Tuesday, with the cause of the four-hour outage attributed to a failed database process.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) calls for the VA to terminate its contract with Oracle Cerner, calling it a “complete failure” that has harmed patients and employee morale. She says that “there is no coming back from the mess that the Department of Veterans Affairs has made with this deeply broken system.”

Privacy and Security

Six people, five of them former employees of Methodist Hospital in Memphis, plead guilty to HIPAA violations for selling the names of patients who were involved in car accidents to personal injury lawyers and chiropractors.

Other

Apple provides updates to its Hearing Study, which uses its Noise app for the Apple Watch to warn users of potentially harmful noise levels. It has found the one in three US adults are exposed to excessive noise levels, often involving traffic, machinery, and public transportation. I would imagine that many restaurants and bars would be embarrassed by their quantified noise levels, where one loud table can create a sonic escalation in which everyone is suddenly shouting. Surveys have show that while bad service tops the annoyance list of restaurant diners, noise levels are ahead of bad food, which is ironic given that some restaurants pride themselves on creating a noisy environment that conveys energy and hipness (65 dB is the maximum for comfortable conversation).

Sponsor Updates

• Flagstaff Surgical Associates (AZ) upgrades its EClinicalWorks software and implements Healow Pay and Healow Check-In.
• Elsevier launches an enhanced version of its ClinicalKey decision support tool, which includes an extensive drug compendium, mobile app, and deeper EHR integration.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions joins the AWS Independent Software Vendor Accelerate Program.
• GHX names 87 healthcare provider and supplier organizations to the 2022 GHX Millennium Club.
• HCTec will invest in expanding its operations in Hohenwald, TN, creating 100 jobs over the next five years.
• Clinical Architecture posts Episode 26, Discussing Data Quality, of “The Informonster Podcast.”
• Specialty medication technology company RxLightning wins a Disruptor of the Year Mira Award.
• Healthjump will exhibit at the NAACOS Spring Conference May 3-5 in Baltimore.
• Meditech congratulates 44 customers included among The Chartis Group’s Top 100 Critical Access Hospitals and Top 100 Rural Community Hospitals.
• Mobile Heartbeat’s MH-Cure clinical communication platform now integrates with Akkadian Provisioning Manager, enabling zero-touch provisioning for users.
• Google Cloud’s new Claims Acceleration Suite uses Myndshft prior authorization software to enable quick and seamless submission of PA requests.

Blog Posts

• Creating the Triple-Win of Healthcare (Enlace Health)
• Reduce Medication Alert Fatigue with Patient-Focused Clinical Decision Support (First Databank)
• Hospitals Suffer Financially Post-COVID: What That Could Mean For The Future (HealthTECH Resources)
• Healthcare Burnout: Impact, Consequences & Administrative Burden (GHX)
• Harnessing the Power of Healthcare Data Sharing to Improve Patient Care (Healthcare Triangle)
• HIMSS23 Recap: The HIMSSanity is Back! (HealthMark Group)
• What Does Nuvolo’s Sweden Release Mean for You? (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Saved by the Lab: Medical Laboratory Professionals Week 2023 (JTG Consulting Group)
• Investing in Centralized Provider Data Management to Power Digital Health Initiatives (Kyruus)
• Beyond RPA, AI, and Machine Learning: The Promise of Care Orchestration in Healthcare (Lumeon)
• Health Equity Hinges on Healthy Data (Rhapsody)
• Hospital Performance Monitoring: Navigating Revenue Margins and Improving Metrics (Medhost)
• Catch up on Meditech’s solutions at the 2023 Clinical Informatics Symposium (Meditech)
• Revolutionize Home Health Care with Wound Digital Imaging Benefits (Net Health)
• The future of ambulatory care documentation, part 2: How speech recognition helps ambulatory clinicians focus on what matters most (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 4/26/23

Top News

Tegria acquires Sisu Healthcare IT Solutions, which offers Meditech-certified hosting and services.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: Amanaz, which was part of the Zambia’s Zamrock movement of the early 1970s. When the country gained its independence in 1964, radio stations were required to play 95% Zambia-originated music, and bands met the sudden musical demand with Western-influenced blends of Afrobeat, garage rock, and psychedelic fuzz. Zamrock faded away with Zambia’s economic problems and massive AIDS devastation that continues today, but the 50-year-old music is enjoying a resurgence. Quality varies, but I like all forms of music that reflect the exuberant, non-commercial spirit of the times, whether it’s doo wop, early gospel, or punk.

I asked conference services vendor Freeman how it handles exhibit hall carpet. They referred me to their corporate sustainability practices page, which only says that they offer carpet that can be repurposed.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

USPTO grants cyber risk management company Clearwater a patent for the Predictive Risk Rating capability within its IRM|Analysis software.

GE HealthCare reports Q1 results: revenue up 8%, adjusted EPS $0.85 versus $0.96, beating expectations for both but sending shares down 9%.

Sales

• Allina Health (MN) will offer patients Epic-based virtual care through KeyCare.
• Lexington Medical Center (SC) will implement healthcare and social services referral software from Unite Us.
• Jefferson Health (PA) selects Ada Health’s symptom assessment and care navigation technology.
• The University of Miami Health System and the Miller School of Medicine will roll out Clear’s identity verification technology for patients and employees.
• OhioHealth will implement EVideon’s Vibe Health smart room technology at its Pickerington Methodist Hospital in December.

People

Tabula Rasa HealthCare promotes Brian Adams to president and CEO.

Adam Mariano (HighPoint Solutions) joins LexisNexis Risk Solutions as president / GM of healthcare.

Artera names Karri Alexion-Tiernan (TigerConnect) VP of product marketing; Joanne Chen, PhD, MS (Strive Health) VP of data; and Mark Thomson, MS (TigerConnect) VP of customer success.

Cancer remote patient monitoring technology vendor Veris Health hires Gary Manning (PhysIQ) as president.

Reperio Health hires Naomi Levinthal, MS, MA (Memora Health) as chief growth officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Children’s Mercy Kansas City opens a 6,000 square-foot Patient Progression Hub, which uses AI-powered technology from GE HealthCare to monitor patient flow, manage staffing, and coordinate care.

Fortified Health Security consolidates its managed security services into the new Fortified Central Command platform.

AvaSure develops a Virtual Nursing application and Care Model to support six current virtual nursing implementations.

WellSky expands the capabilities of its CarePort care transition solutions.

Government and Politics

The VA establishes an Artificial Intelligence Institution Review Board and an AI Oversight Committee for its clinical and research operations.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD employees in Utah volunteer at the St. Vincent De Paul Dining Hall, Utah Food Bank, Clementine Ranch, and Encircle during its day of service.
• Agfa HealthCare joins the AWS Partner Network.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Insights into the credit ratings of hospitals and health systems.”
• Care.ai’s virtual nursing solution is added to Google Cloud Marketplace.
• Surescripts posts a data brief titled “How Are Care Teams Evolving to Fill Primary Care Gaps?”
• Meditech is featured in an episode of HealthData Management’s video series titled “The Journey Beyond: Exploring uncharged territories.”
• Bamboo Health publishes a new case study, “Leveraging Real-Time Patient Data to Keep In-Home Care in Home.”
• KLAS honors CenterX with its 2023 Points of Light Award for improving prior authorization efficiency and easing administration burden for providers and payers.
• Nordic posts a podcast titled “Designing for Health: Interview with Chris McCarthy, Part 2.”
• Clearwater uses the Cyturus Third Party Risk Management module of the Compliance & Risk Tracker as its primary platform to support its Vendor Risk Management managed services program.
• Mubadala Health in Dubai will use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to run its Oracle Cerner EHR.

Blog Posts

• The Power of Personalization & How Smartphones Reflect the Individual in Healthcare (Access)
• Make Your Revenue Cycle Management Vendor a Key Strategic Partner (AGS Health)
• Healthcare dashboard examples: Exploring 5 impactful models (Arcadia)
• Are your Clinical Order Sets built correctly? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How to Improve Patient Outcomes and Boost Your Bottom Line ASAP (Yes, in a Matter of Months!) (Artera)
• Empowering FHIR (Availity)
• Struggling with maintaining your Virtual Safety Team? You’re not alone. (AvaSure)
• DRVS & Autism Acceptance Month – This April & Beyond! (Azara Healthcare)
• Moving to the Oracle Cloud readies University of Texas Health Center for future growth (Baker Tilly)
• Future of Telehealth: What’s Next for Patient Care? (ChartLogic)
• A Physician’s Perspective: Bridging the HER, Healthcare IT, and the PAC (Physician Advisory Committee) (CereCore)
• Managing a Deluge of Data: CIO Strategies to Make Information Accessible to Clinicians (CHIME)
• 3 Ways to Achieve ‘Backward Compatibility’ Without Draining Health IT Resources (Consensus Cloud Solutions)
• The Seasonality of Risk: Your Q2 Action Plan (Curation Health)
• 4 Key Strategies to Maximize Value-Based Care with Data and Analytics (Dimensional Insight)
• Recruiting Through Social Media: A Guide to Attracting Top Talent (Direct Recruiters)
• How to Address Operational Debt in Healthcare (Divurgent)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/24/23

Top News

The VA pauses its Oracle Cerner implementation indefinitely until issues at its live sites are resolved.

It also says “everything is on the table” as it negotiates the scheduled five-year extension of the original 2018 contract.

Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia indirectly placed blame for the delay on the VA, responding with a statement that Oracle supports the VA’s use of the time to “institute governance, change management, and standardization changes … similar to what DoD did a few years ago.”

Reader Comments

From Bonhomie: “Re: paying your way to HIMSS. Have you considered monetizing your presence by offering vendors the opportunity to purchase booth interviews or social media coverage from you, in order to offset your expenses?” That seems unbelievably slimy to me, although I’ve seen plenty of folks who were clearly taking money for interviewing company executives, hosting events, or shooting out suspiciously laudatory tweets. At least their sites and outlets are not known for covering actual news anyway, so reputational damage is minimal. Still, I would rather pay my own way, remain anonymous, and leave with my soul unsold.

From Phone Waver: “Re: HIMSS23. You didn’t mention booth people staring into their phones.” Two reasons: (a) I don’t think it happens as much as it used to, or maybe I’m so accustomed to it that I no longer notice; and (b) I’m more empathetic to exhibitor staff who have tasks they can accomplish online while waiting for someone to show interest. However, I still maintain that the free time that allows you look at your phone is created by your unapproachability in doing so, and your employer bought an exhibit booth rather than a telephone booth (OK, I admit that’s a dated reference).

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents aren’t using ChatGPT regularly. I’m not a power user, but I stay logged in in case I want it to check my wording, summarize what a company does given its web address (the fact that the website isn’t clear enough to easily tell is its own issue), or suggest interview questions that are not very good. I’ve also used it to plan events and to find obscure bands I might like, while Mrs. HIStalk jumped on it immediately to to help plan a complex vacation to Europe involving drives among several countries. I’ll add that the amazingly fast rise of ChatGPT means that the dabblers who evangelize their experiments are already yesterday’s news, with the new table stakes being actually accomplishing something with it that wasn’t previously possible.

New poll to your right or here: How would you grade your in-person attendance of HIMSS23? I would probably give it an A for the first time since 2019. HIMSS is surely happy that its relevance seemed little diminished, at least based on attendance, exhibitors, and general energy, when situations both within and outside its control had created an opening for competing events. My early read is that the HIMSS and ViVE conferences will co-exist with differing attendee demographics, but with enough business case for both to attract exhibitors.

HIMSS23 was the first opportunity see my Apple AirTag in action as it tracked my checked bag from the plane to the luggage carousel, a pretty slick and multi-use technology for $29. Mrs. H and I use the Find My app and our phones to tell if we’ve left work or the grocery store or whatever, so I’m sure many other AirTag use cases exist that I haven’t thought of.

I was annoyed that the #HIMSS23 Twitter hashtag was hijacked by some would-be “technology influencers” to constantly spout random conference updates and tourism recommendations without actually being at the conference. Blocking them doesn’t seem to hide them from Twitter search results.

I mentioned previously that HIStalk’s searchable history goes back to 2007, so it’s the one place you can find significant news events without the fluff, see what we’ve said about long-ago HIMSS conferences, or ponder the life cycle of companies, technologies, and even people that have gone from fame to forgotten. Suggestions: search for anything of interest or scroll through the very long article archive.

Webinars

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

People

Oracle hires former CMS Administrator Seema Verma, MPH as SVP/GM of life sciences, which includes leading the Oracle Cerner Enviza business.

In England, physician and digital health pioneer Elizabeth Murray, MSc, PhD dies of cancer at 63. She studied the impact of the internet on doctor-patient communication at UCSF in 2001 and set up an e-health unit at University College London in 2003.

Other

Bizarre, as forwarded by a reader. A data scientist at healthcare revenue integrity vendor Multiplan – improbably named Jack McQuestion — is charged with impersonating an FBI agent after trying to lure an OnlyFans adult performer from her house claiming to be an FBI agent with a warrant for her arrest. He left when she called police, but police used his doorbell camera image to find him and his Madison, WI apartment, a search of which turned up phony FBI credentials, pepper spray, and a garrote that he had ordered from Amazon. His job history before his data scientist job includes being an “artistic model” and a Pizza Hut delivery driver. Searching Amazon for “garrote” turns up sellers offering those products for supposed non-strangulation purposes that include cheese slicing and sculpting, but the seller’s choice of search keyword says a lot.

Contacts

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

From HIMSS 4/20/23

Tell me without telling me that today is the last exhibit hall day of HIMSS23.

Today is also when all of the previously defended booth swag is dumped out on the table for anyone to take (even other vendors) to avoid dragging it back home, which is how I ended up with socks from document management vendor Vasion, whose booth person urged me to take one small step to reduce his two suitcases full of them to a manageable number. I also had a nice conversation with folks from Amazon S3 data recovery vendor Clumio, who wanted to hand off one of their bags that I now realize is actually quite nice.

Of course I had to scan the QR code on the HIMSS bus window. It went to a website that described how to get out in an emergency. I think I would find a way out more quickly, approved or my own, than reading a website or watching a video.

It wouldn’t be a HIMSS conference without the always-entertaining Magic Boy in the booth of Hyland, although I don’t think he was involved with the company’s pre-conference magic trick of making 1,000 employees disappear.

I don’t know how many takers Jeron Electronic Systems got for its factory tours, but I thought the offer was smart. The family-run business makes nurse call and other healthcare communications systems right here in the Chicago area, with no supply chain product delays.

I went by the Ellkay booth many times and not only were employees paying heads-up attention, I was greeted every time. I didn’t eat anything but booth snacks all day until late afternoon all this week, so I got through Day 1 purely on their honey-caramel popcorn.

Hybrid infrastructure vendor Element Critical provided a great “Live Lucky” hat and fun conversation. 

Today was goodbye group photo day, or video in the case of Clearsense. They had a sharp-looking booth. The quick video, which popped up on LinkedIn, is a super idea.

This observation is supportive even though it might sound critical, but for folks in the startup area’s mini-booths, HIMSS23 could have been your best chance of the year to find prospects, partners, investors, and employees. I know it’s hard to remain alert, make eye contact, and initiate friendly conversation versus staring at your phone or conversing with your co-worker, but to be here otherwise doesn’t accomplish much. If your space holds two people, one of them should be someone who can confidently and energetically draw people in. I walked through the startup area several times and nobody seemed all that interested in initiating a conversation. If you’re going to be there anyway, take advantage of the foot traffic just to shoot the breeze with whoever walks by if nothing else.

These guys from Rocket.chat didn’t get a great booth location as a first-time exhibitor, but they were friendly and positive. The company’s HIPAA-ready messaging app supports communication with patients, colleagues, and vendors. They offer a free self-hosted team collaboration version.

The reps from digital transformation services vendor Cardinal Integrated earned our “Tiny Booth but Great People” award, as the person on the left admirably worked the perimeter to cheerfully engage passersby and her colleagues were quick to join in.

The rep at first-time exhibitor Solid, which offers public safety communications technology, was outgoing, informative, and energetic despite light foot traffic and reps in neighboring booths being lost in phoneland. The company offers a guide to improving poor cell service to support BYOD and bandwidth for IoT and 5G.

The friendly, sequined folks at Raleigh, NC-based Bandwidth were happy to describe the company’s messaging, voice, and emergency telecom platform.

Doximity provided today’s lunch. Their cupcake bites are like finger-scooping cake batter from the bowl, then repeating with the icing before shoving it home.

Avadin, which sells solutions for senior care agencies, uses AI – and now, apparently, ChatGPT – to listen for “help me” requests, monitor for falls, assess mood, and allow remote check-in.

I was initially a bit put off by HIMSS turning its tweeting over to someone who is actually good at it instead of old-school stuffy, but I’ve grown to like it.

Where have all the vendor puffer vests gone? Gone to Goodwill, all but one.

Conversations Overheard

According to one executive, the respective CEOs of CHIME and HIMSS never got along all that well after Hal Wolf took over at HIMSS, but it was the refusal of HIMSS to cancel the 2020 conference until the last minute that sent CHIME off to form the competing ViVE conference with HLTH.

I overhead high-level executives of two significant companies saying that HIMSS23 has been a good conference for them, but also expressing delighted surprise at how much business they expect to generate from the ViVE conference. Both reported that in both conferences, their booths were packed, their scheduled events were waitlisted, and even casual booth-lookers ended up being significant decision-influencers who will likely result in new business. Both said that the secret is in booking meetings long before the conference starts, guaranteeing that the booth will generate ROI no matter what.

Someone commented that unlike HIMSS, ViVE provided water bottles and food freely to all attendees. However, those water bottles reportedly cost ViVE $500,000.

I overheard from two different executives that unlike HIMSS, repping the company at ViVE didn’t seem like actually working.

Someone described how the HIMSS conference has changed in the last 20 years by citing similarly sized gaudy booths back in the day, but with provocatively clad booth staff, jugglers, and booths that were turned into near restaurants with endless trays of deli food. It was also recalled how once upon a time HIMSS closed the exhibit hall during education sessions. I overheard one person lamenting the demise of HIStalkapalooza, which reminded me that I’m staying near the best place that we ever had it at the House of Blues Chicago. That also reminds me that I have recaps of all HIMSS conferences and HIStalkapaloozas starting at 2008 on the site, and although the earlier ones disappeared with a platform change in 2007, it’s a pretty engrossing memory lane of trends, companies, and people that in some cases are no longer with us.

A rep eating lunch was telling someone how surprised he was that Microsoft has suddenly starting dominating healthcare with Azure, its Nuance acquisition, and now its work with generative AI.

A vendor executive said they personally pledged to remain visible in their booth any time the exhibit hall is open instead of retreating to conference rooms or off-campus lunches.

Folks were speculating whether HIMSS will admit that the “no-carpet HIMSS23” was an mistake that will be corrected next year. I heard more people speculating that HIMSS didn’t want to pay overtime for carpet installation and decided to skip it with an unrelated excuse. One vendor said they were happy to have had their booth setup finished before the weekend, when overtime rates became exorbitant.

News

HCA Healthcare is piloting Augmedix’s ambient medical documentation system and has invested in the company in a $12 million funding round. AUGX shares jumped 90% on the news, valuing the company at $128 million. It went public in a SPAC-like reverse merger in 2020, with shares down 15% since their first day of trading.

From HIMSS 4/19/23

This is how the main aisles look in the exhibit hall, which I’m mentioning again since I heard a lot of complaints today. This is apparently a live electrical line that ends up in a booth, but starts somewhere underground in a McCormick Place tunnel. I’m not saying that I don’t buy Hal Wolf’s “save the environment” excuse for ditching aisle carpet while still requiring exhibitors to rent it for their own areas, but a 10-year-old article I found says that conference supplier Freeman doesn’t automatically trash carpet after a single use even though it is cut to specifications – they “re-seam” it back into a single roll and rent it all over again, up to 4-5 times until it’s too far gone.

I’ll also say that the exhibit hall wasn’t 100% ready for its opening on Tuesday. Freeman people were dodging attendees during show hours as they delivered equipment throughout the hall, and I saw several booths with shipping boxes, electrical gear, and luggage piled up near the main aisle.

I don’t know what a Digital Health Technology Partner is, but I’m sure it involves writing a check.

The puppies were in their play area today, helping raise money for the Anti-Cruelty Society.

Pure Storage and Veritas are offering “HIMSS 2023 Bottoms Up!” each afternoon.

The coat check rooms were stacked high with suitcases on Wednesday, which suggests that quite a few folks are heading home today. Exhibitors are required to staff booths for the shortened exhibit hours Thursday, but it will probably be dead in the hall (and suitcases will be piled up there, too).

NFL player Damar Hamlin, the HIMSS23 Friday morning keynote speaker who nearly died on national TV after suffering cardiac arrest from an on-field collision with another player, is cleared to play and says he will return to the game.

I got bored and bailed early today, enjoying a late lunch / early dinner at Il Porcellino, mostly because it was a short walk from the hotel. It was actually pretty amazing – the grilled calamari in arrabbiata was excellent and the lasagna is the best I’ve had anywhere. It was way too much to finish, but the price was entirely reasonable, especially for the neighborhood. The server said they have seen a bump in business from the HIMSS conference.

News

JTG Consulting Group hires Susan Mize, MBA (Bridgeway Benefit Technologies) as chief services officer.

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles promotes interim CIO Conrad Band to SVP/CIO.

Healthcare AI News 4/19/23

News

OSF HealthCare (IL) selects AI-powered Cortex utilization management technology from Xsolis.

UPMC CTO Chris Carmody says the health system plans to use AI to connect patients with clinical trials based on EHR data analysis, develop digital twins for improved treatment planning, enhance telemedicine offerings, and create automated visit summaries using technology from UPMC Enterprises spinoff Abridge. I interviewed Abridge founder and CEO Shiv Rao, MD earlier this month.

Amazon announces new tools for building with generative AI on AWS. Amazon Bedrock offers foundation models from Amazon and other companies that address use cases such as text generation, chatbots, search, text summarization, image generation, and personalization.

EClinicalWorks will integrate its EHR/PM solutions with ChatGPT, cognitive services, and machine learning models from Azure OpenAI Service.

Microsoft and Epic announce that they will work together to bring generative AI into Epic’s applications via Azure OpenAI Service. UC San Diego Health, UW Health, and Stanford Health Care are already using an initial solution that automatically drafts message responses. Another solution will add natural language queries and interactive data analysis to Epic’s SlicerDicer self-service reporting tool.

A recent Stanford computer science graduate creates HealthGPT, a test case for connecting generative AI to Apple Health data to support answering user questions, such as, “How should I train for a half marathon?”

Research

University of Florida Health researchers are working with Nuance and its Precision Imaging Network to create and fine-tune AI solutions for radiologists, specifically in the areas of interpretation reporting and ensuring that algorithms perform effectively.

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop an Internet-connected OpenAI tool that correctly developed a plan to synthesize ibuprofen, aspirin, and aspartame and to control the lab technology required to manufacture them. They also had the system develop a new cancer drug that was not tested. The authors warn that such a system is promising, but could be used to create illegal drugs or bioweapons. Not surprisingly, they also credit ChatGPT for creating the first draft of the article.

A survey of 1,039 adults finds that 20% have experienced healthcare enhanced by AI, with younger patients making up the bulk of that group. Nearly half believe the use of AI in healthcare to be somewhat or very trustworthy.

Opinion

Headspace Health Chief Product and Design Officer Leslie Witt says AI won’t replace its mental health professionals any time soon, though the company is working to incorporate more AI-powered features into its meditation and mindfulness app. Headspace acquired Sayana, an AI-based competitor, last year.

Other

OpenAI launches a bug bounty program that will pay users between $200 and $20,000 to report vulnerabilities, bugs, or security flaws found in ChatGPT. Users have so far reported 31 vulnerabilities with an average pay out of $650.

Starting July 5, New York City will begin enforcing a law that requires employers to disclose the use of automated employment decision tools to job candidates during the hiring process. Companies that wish to use such AI-based tools must first have them audited for bias by the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

Elon Musk creates X.AI Corp., a company rumored to be an eventual competitor with OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015 and left three years later to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla.

Contacts

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

From HIMSS 4/18/23

Tell me anything interesting you’ve seen or heard since I need to plan my Wednesday and possibly Thursday if I don’t skip out.

I was standing outside in the cold barely after sunrise this morning, wondering where the HIMSS shuttle would be stopping since it wasn’t marked on the street. The HIMSS app wasn’t updating the bus status, and when it finally did, it showed a 15-minute wait on top of the 10-15 minutes I had already waited, so the planned 15-minute intervals didn’t actually happen even in light traffic.

I got my badge quickly, took a stroll around (my IPhone says I took 22,000 steps Tuesday by mid-afternoon), and then waited around for the exhibit hall to open at 10 a.m. I realized afterward the apparent extinction of the ball cap girls who used to forcefully thrust the show daily from Healthcare IT News at every passerby, almost defying you not to take a copy that you didn’t really want.

I also noted that the Starbucks line stretched endlessly and never died out completely, even in the late afternoon when I can’t imagine wanting coffee of any temperature.

My first action was to hike what seemed like miles to get a look at the lake and skyline. It was a beautiful, spring-like day that quickly erased memories of yesterday’s snowy gray.

Tell me without telling me that the HIMSS conference is in Chicago this year.

I saw this guy outside the exhibit hall. I saw a couple of other dogs in or near booths and HIMSS had a puppy play area that was being used to solicit donations for The Anti-Cruelty Society, although I disappointingly didn’t time it right to seem them playing in their fenced-in yard.

This is either (a) HIMSS23 attendees right before the exhibit hall doors opened, or (b) runners awaiting the starter’s pistol in the Fairly Well Dressed 5K. I have zero fashion sense or interest, but bright brown shoes and tight suits or blazers over jeans are current looks that look better than the baggy, three-piece charcoal gray suits and mirror-polished black shoes of yesteryear.

This is the first HIMSS conference that felt normal by 2019 standards. People were everywhere, almost nobody wore masks, booths were laid out with slightly wider aisles but normal spacing otherwise, and I didn’t see a single elbow bump in lieu of a handshake. Most of the hygiene theater of the dark ages of 2020 and 2021, which was of questionable scientific merit even then, has since been proven pointless and was quickly abandoned.

HIMSS says attendance is already up hugely over 2021 and nearing 2019 levels, but then again, why wouldn’t they say that when we “trust, but verify” types can’t investigate whatever number they throw out there? Regardless, the increase feels directionally correct. The exhibitor list shows 1,215, although some of those companies bought only meeting rooms rather than booths.

I started out with a packed ClosedLoop.ai session in the north hall. The anchor booths were in the south hall, but a few bigger vendors got the north hall, including Google Health.

Nice color coordination, Orion Health. I like it.

I attended a Sodexho presentation on having hospital staff initiate conversations with patients and then report back through the company’s Experiencia tool, which gives executives a real-time dashboard and alerts of patient issues while they can still be fixed. They said that nobody likes filling out a survey, especially if it’s likely nothing will happen anyway, so they use in-room conversations and text messaging to let staff either resolve or explain a problem, freeing up clinical staff who would otherwise be dealing with the hotel side of being hospitalized.

The exhibit hall was full of bare floors, weird dead ends, and unattractive HIMSS ghost town spaces. Tegria got a terrible location that was nearly impossible to find even when following the hastily erected directional sign, and Ellkay had a “this way” sign several aisles over like a highway exit. That reminded me of a HIMSS conference years ago in Las Vegas, where the downstairs Hall G was drawing so few people that HIMSS was shamed into adding extra signs and offering lunch discounts for enticing visitors to head downstairs into what resembled a poor student’s basement rumpus room.

The Microsoft-Nuance booth was busy.

I overheard several folks lamenting, as was I, the apparent end of an era, as Oracle has apparently expunged the Cerner and Oracle Cerner names in favor of Oracle Health.

I went to a session about the CoMET AI-based patient monitoring solution by Nihon Kohden by the doctor who developed it. He mentioned an interesting fact from a study – training a sepsis model on a hospital’s surgical ICU data had zero predictive value for the same hospital’s medical ICU, and vice versa. Models don’t work if they were trained on data from multiple hospitals or even multiple areas of the same hospital. I’m curious why that would be, so I’ll have to dig up the paper.

I think ChatGPT’s straight vertical growth and endless publicity have HIMSS23 vendors too little time to feature generative AI in their booth materials, other than EClinicalWorks anyway.

Giveaways were interesting this year. I forgot my battery-powered phone charger that I got at a HIMSS conference years ago, but nobody was handing them out. Chapstick and stress balls were in limited supply. I did score some Garrett’s popcorn, however.

Someone asked me, “Do you want a beer” from a booth at barely past noon, which I answered in wondering if the question was rhetorical given the hour. The person at the Silex booth assured me, “You wouldn’t be the first person to say yes,” so I took one from the ice chest to sip as I watched another vendor’s presentation. I’m sure the price they pay the concessionaire for each beer is astronomical, so I made sure to enjoy it.

You pay thousands of dollars to attend a conference, another $20 for a prison-grade lunch, and this as your seating choice if you want to eat, charge your phone, or allow your introversion to be soothed. I really don’t understand why we as attendees tolerate this. It isn’t like Las Vegas, where everything revolves around keeping you in the casinos, so putting out more tables and chairs surely wouldn’t upset the business model. I’m sure McCormick Place has buildings full of unused furniture.

The going-home Red shuttle line was pretty poorly marked in the convention center halls, so I finally found the bus after a few wrong turns and near-constant doubt that I was in the right place.

A Chicago reader agreed with my assessment that deep-dish pizza is awful (not my style, as El Presidente would say) and suggested tavern style instead, a Midwest-only specialty that I unfortunately haven’t found in River North that seems to favor Neapolitan style at steep prices. However, that person also urged me to go to Al’s or Portillo’s for Italian beef, so I left the convention center early, walked over to Al’s Italian Beef on N. Wells, and had a wet beef with sweet peppers and a large side of perfect hand-cut fries. I heard people talking all day about the sumptuous dinners their employers would be underwriting Tuesday evening, making me even happier with my self-paid $15 one that I consumed with gusto away from other badge-wearers. All that was missing was a working man’s ice-cold draft PBR or Heileman’s Old Style.

Conversations Overheard

A lady said she decided not to renew her membership in women’s group Chief because it was going to cost $9,000, which she was paying out of her own pocket, and she felt that the two women who started the organization made an unexpected fortune but didn’t deliver much afterward. She told someone that the organization had done nothing that benefited her in one year of membership.

Someone said that a few CIOs told they they were going to stop attending the HIMSS conference in favor of ViVE, saying that HIMSS didn’t recognize the threat of having its CIO track at HIMSS turned into CHIME’s own conference. The person said that the HIMSS conference would become an event for provider managers and directors who might then report what they learned about vendors and products to the decision-maker back home, to which I responded was often the HIMSS model anyway since CIOs often don’t roam the floor and instead dispatch underlings as scouts.

Most of the common hallways of the exhibit hall were uncarpeted, exposing spray-painted labels, hazard tape covering wires, and metal plates in the floor. Apparently Hal Wolf said in the opening session that it was an environmental decision based on the need to otherwise manufacture, install, and dispose of carpet. Sort of the same argument that hotels use in trying to convince you that re-using your room towels is for the environment’s benefit, not their own.

A top vendor executive emailed me today to say, “I hope you will be writing about the absolutely pathetic bare floors across the halls here at HIMSS. Vendors are required to pay for flooring in our booths (carpet, vinyl, wood, etc.) but HIMSS felt they didn’t have to do it? Ridiculous. We have never exhibited at an event where the exhibit hall felt incomplete until HIMSS23.“ I agree, and the environmental excuse seems iffy given the carbon footprint of endless flights for an in-person event compared to every other conference that somehow manages to lay down carpet. It’s beginning to seem like this was a “recover financially from HIMSS20” year for HIMSS in staying home in Chicago for making the exhibit hall look like a underfunded indoor flea market. I’m curious if anyone has seen other examples of apparent belt-tightening.

A long-time reader checks in: “Judy Faulkner recommended HIStalk to 30 of us in a conference room when she taught us about the ‘Epic culture’ in 2003. I have read every week, nearly 20 years! Thank you for writing.” Thank you for reading. My insistence on remaining anonymous and avoiding self-promotional activities means that HIStalk to me is an empty screen in an empty room, and writing it feels like scrawling in a diary that I don’t intend for anyone else to read. I like it that way, but I appreciate those few times each year when someone shares what their side of my screen looks like since I have no idea.

Someone asked if anyone was hearing anything about HIMSS Accelerate. Negative.

News

The VA’s Oracle Cerner system goes down for five hours on Monday, apparently joined by the same downtime for the DoD’s instance of Oracle Cerner.

Memora Health gets a $30 million investment from investors that include General Catalyst and two big health systems.

A recent Stanford computer science graduate creates HealthGPT, a test case for connecting generative AI to Apple Health data to support answering user questions, such as, “How should I train for a half marathon?”

From HIMSS 4/17/23

I arrived in Chicago in mid-afternoon Monday to lingering snow flurries, whipping wind, temperature in the high 30s, and near chaos in the O’Hare rideshare pickup area that made me glad to have a coat for the wait (unlike several guys wearing shorts and tee shirts featuring understandable but definitely undesirable nipplage). The warm-up starts Tuesday, however, with Thursday topping out in the low 70s, which is likely where weather comparisons to RSNA’s post-Thanksgiving weekend diverge. The view outside looked like six weeks ago in warmer Southern climes, with budding and flowering trees that are surely confused given that Chicago hit a record high of 82 just a couple of days ago.

Many folks on my flight were also headed to HIMSS23, and unlike me, were bubbly and loud in talking shop with their fellow conference travelers. They were all exhibitor people, so maybe they were getting warmed up for glad-handing. I’m staying in a quite nice, and nicely located, River North hotel at excellent HIMSS rates. Dinner was my first time having chicken Vesuvio, which was so fantastic despite its simplicity that I’ll try making it at home. I’m indifferent to Chicago hot dogs compared to Southern chili dogs, I’m not a fan of the underbaked dough lasagna called deep dish pizza, and I’ve yet to try Italian beef although I suspect I would like it a lot. I enjoy Garrett’s and Nuts on Clark popcorn, but not enough to pay the asking price. I also like the Walnut Room and Frango mints from the former Marshall Fields before Macy’s dragged them down a bit, at least from past visits, but I doubt I’ll head down to State Street this time around.

I haven’t even looked at the agenda, but my HIMSS23 plan for the week is simple: get my badge early Tuesday in hoping for shorter lines than last year, wander about the exhibit hall Tuesday and Wednesday, and try to overhear conversations that aren’t intended for me since those are more interesting. I’ll decide Wednesday evening whether it’s worth going again Thursday and then just walk around Chicago if not, heading home Friday.

I need eyes and ears out there because of my slothfulness while all the eager beavers are racing madly from one spot to another and stacking up social events with higher confidence levels than mine that something interesting awaits, so let me know if you hear or see anything important. I’ve been to enough HIMSS conferences to know that other than a few pre-timed announcements early in the week, nothing all that newsworthy happens there, and sites that try to cover it like real news usually end up trying to make lame press releases sound relevant.

I can’t decide: is the HIMSS23 slogan of “Health that Connects + Tech that Cares” calculatedly clever or does it try a bit too hard to deny being a boat show and fall short?

News

Microsoft and Epic announce that they will work together to bring generative AI into Epic’s applications via Azure OpenAI Service. UC San Diego Health, UW Health, and Stanford Health Care are already using an initial solution that automatically drafts message responses. Another solution will add natural language queries and interactive data analysis to Epic’s SlicerDicer self-service reporting tool.

In Japan, investigation of a hospital ransomware attack finds that NEC used the same username and password for thousands of user devices and EHR servers, assuming that front-ending the login process with a user’s smart card would secure the system by hiding the password in what it incorrectly thought was a system that wasn’t connected to the outside world. More than half of the 280 hospitals that are users of that EHR were found to have the same username and password.

Announcements

Medhost announces a Rural Emergency Hospital package.

Intelligent Medical Objects announces IMO Studio, a cloud-based platform for clinical terminologies, code sets, and data quality whose rollout will start with in July Epic customers.

EClinicalWorks will integrate its EHR/PM solutions with ChatGPT, cognitive services, and machine learning models from Azure OpenAI Service.

People

Ellkay promotes Ajay Kapare, MBA to president and chief strategy officer. He replaces co-founder Lior Hod, who will transition to chief culture officer.

Health Data Movers hires Darin Ryder (Continuum Health IT) as VP of client services.

Monday Morning Update 4/17/23

Top News

Arcadia raises $125 million in financing to accelerate its work in aggregating and analyzing healthcare data.  

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents, whether attending HIMSS23 or not, expect to be working harder this week.

I expect to be working harder this week because I will be unexpectedly lugging some kind of coat around airports thanks to HIMSS choosing to stay home in Chicago (Monday: gale warning, snow, high of 39) in abandoning the usual rotation of Las Vegas (sunny and 81) or Orlando (sunny and 82). The conference is in Orlando next year, then two consecutive years in Las Vegas afterward. Some conference folks put Las Vegas, Orlando, and Chicago as within the top five US conference locations, with former HIMSS cities San Diego (sunny and 64) and Atlanta (sunny and 70) rounding out the list.

New poll to your right or here: Are you using ChatGPT or other AI tools at least daily for work-related tasks?

Ramadan and its month of fasting will end Thursday evening as HIMSS23 is winding down. Muslims aren’t allowed to take anything by mouth – food, water, or medicine – from dawn to sunset, so they usually have a significant pre-dawn breakfast (with lots of water since none is allowed for the following 13 hours) and late-evening meal. It must be challenging to travel to a conference during Ramadan in accommodating prayer times and finding halal food, but at least attendees will be home for Eid al-Fitr.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Wisconsin’s Froedtert and ThedaCare will merge by the end of 2023 to create an 18-hospital system with $4 billion in revenue.

Tenet reports that EVP/CIO Paola Arbour’s total compensation in 2022 was $1.7 million, a big drop from the $2.9 million she was paid in 2021.

Sales

• Alaska’s Department of Health awards a new contract to HealthConnect Alaska, the state HIE, to expand its services.

People

Taylor Bockweg (MuleSoft) joins CarePayment as VP of national accounts.

Announcements and Implementations

Amazon announces new tools for building with generative AI on AWS. Amazon Bedrock offers foundation models from Amazon and other companies that address use cases such as text generation, chatbots, search, text summarization, image generation, and personalization.

Other

Industry long-timer Stuart Miller (Craneware) has had his HIMSS23 plans waylaid by an emergency double lung transplant two weeks ago. HIs daughter, Bethany Miller-Urroz (Rhapsody), invites everyone to visit Rhapsody’s Booth 7110 at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday to send their encouragement via a group photo.

Also missing a planned trip to HIMSS23 will be Chilmark Research founder and CEO John Moore, who wrote his moving “Bidding Adieu” from hospice care. 

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart will exhibit at NATCon23 May 1-3 in Los Angeles.
• Cone Health exceeds quality goals for its sepsis initiative using Premier’s Pinc AI quality enterprise.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “Navigating rapid cardiology practice acquisition with US Heart and Vascular’s Cheryl Rodenfels.”
• Sectra publishes a new case study, “Digital pathology transforms collaboration among pathologists in Greater Manchester.”

Blog Posts

• Doctor, do you mind the interruption? (Nordic)
• This Mission is Possible: Achieving Better Data in Healthcare (ReMedi Health Solutions)
• Unlock the Potential of Your Answering Service: Realizing Enterprise Value (PerfectServe)
• Breaking Down Silos: 4 Ways Premier is Working to Build a Unified Continuum of Care (Premier)
• Conversational AI: What is it and how is it transforming in 2023? (Talkdesk)
• PHE Expiration Implications for PTs, OTs, and SLPs (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 4/14/23

Top News

Carlyle Group abandons its interest in acquiring a 50% stake in payments integrity technology vendor Cotiviti from Veritas Capital.

Veritas reportedly rejected Carlyle’s offer that had been lowered due to market conditions.

Reuters reported in February that Carlyle was interested in acquiring part of Cotiviti at a $15 billion valuation.

Veritas took Cotiviti private in 2018 for around $5 billion and merged it into its Verscend Technologies payer analytics business.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIMSS23 weather goes from near-record high in the upper 70s through Saturday – which only early-arriving exhibitor personnel will get to see – with a big cool-off with 50-ish highs and the possibility of snow showers on Monday.

I’ve noticed that Oracle seems to be retiring the Oracle Cerner name that was used interchangeably with Oracle Health following the acquisition. Press releases after mid-February don’t include the Cerner name other than one reference to Cerner Millennium.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Interoperability platform vendor 1upHealth raises $40 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $76 million. The company says it will use the proceeds to develop products to support CMS regulations, enhance its data cloud infrastructure, and expand its customer and services teams.

Release of information vendor Verisma acquires competitor ScanStat.

Verato’s identity management solutions will be offered with the interoperability products of Redox to provide a 360-degree view of patients, members, providers, and communities.

Sales

• Saint Joseph’s Medical Center will extend its deployment of Oracle Health’s EHR and RevElate patient accounting solution to all locations.
• The Princess Alexandra NHS Trust will implement Oracle Health’s EHR.

People

Ashish Sant, MTech (Bracco) joins Merative as general manager of its Merge imaging solutions.

Aspirion hires Amy Amick, MBA (SPH Analytics) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Google will offer limited access to its Med-PaLM 2 medical large language model to a select group of Google Cloud customers for testing and use case development.

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop an Internet-connected OpenAI tool that correctly developed a plan to synthesize ibuprofen, aspirin, and aspartame and to control the lab technology required to manufacture them. They also had the system develop a new cancer drug that was not tested. The authors warn that such a system is promising, but could be used to create illegal drugs or bioweapons. Not surprisingly, they also credit ChatGPT for creating the first draft of the article. 

Google Cloud announces an AI-enabled Claims Acceleration Suite for prior authorization review and claims processing. One module is Claims Data Activator, which allows searching patient records to create FHIR-formatted structured data to speed decision-making. The company is also recommended solutions from Myndshft (real-time prior authorization and benefits) and Pega (expedited manual review of prior authorization requests) that run on Google Cloud.

Walgreens expands its year-old clinical trials business by recruiting participants for an Alzheimer’s drug trial. Walgreens launched the business in June 2022, saying that its nationwide footprint and enterprise-wide data capabilities allow it to make clinical trials more accessible, convenient, and equitable, particularly in the nearly half of its locations that are in socially vulnerable areas.

Remote diagnostics and telehealth vendor Medaica will provide free, FDA-cleared digital stethoscopes for in-home use by rural and underserved patients who are undergoing telehealth exams.

Glooko, which offers a home diabetes management system, will integrate Hedia’s bolus insulin dosing advice that can integrate with connected insulin pens.

Microsoft lists new Teams healthcare capabilities and other products that it will demonstrate at HIMSS23:

• Launch Teams virtual visits directly from Epic and Cerner via its EHR connector, which also supports joint and group visits.
• The ability to schedule, brand, and send patient reminders for virtual visits.
• Track virtual visit no-shows, appointment durations, wait times, and number of appointments.
• Integration of Teams with Teladoc Health Solo.
• A new pre-configured home experience for frontline care workers.
• A Walkie Talkie Teams app.
• Support for shared use of Android phones.
• A unified member view and care journey template for payers.
• Previews of new Azure AI Services for Health that include SDoH and ethnicity support from unstructured data, clinical trials matching, and Health Bot integration.

Roche announces Navify Algorithm Suite, which allows clinicians to order certified algorithms from Roche and other companies from within their EHR and laboratory systems.

A Deloitte survey of 30 US health system leaders looks at digital health tools:

• Three-fourths of respondents say their organizations are rethinking their business models from delivering treatments to maintaining health, with most of them supporting the change with digital technologies but conceding that much work remains.
• Health systems are successfully meeting consumer and care needs within their four walls, but fall short in preventive and continuing care. Adoption remains low for integrating wearables data, care plans, and clinician messaging.
• The executives say that integrating digital technologies also requires addressing revenue, fragmented ownership of digital projects, changing workflows. and lack of skilled workers.
• One interviewee noted that technology could help bridge the gap between what consumers do for their own health and wellness versus the entirely separate activities that they do for healthcare

Government and Politics

HHS OCR issues a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would extend HIPAA to prohibit the use of disclosure of PHI for identifying, investigating, suing, or prosecuting someone for seeking, obtaining, providing, or facilitating lawful reproductive healthcare. The unpublished document is here.

Other

Bay Area Hospital (OR) is threatened with closure after losing $61 million in its most recent fiscal year, which auditors blame on several problems that include a problematic implementation of Epic that resulted in $18 million of lost billings. Auditors also noted that the hospital spent $15 million more in contract labor in 2022 than in 2021, some of that due to Epic go-live support needs, and also spent $3.6 million to help local medical practices with their Epic installation.

The University of Virginia newspaper profiles 2016 graduate Aajash Shah, who with his ENT surgeon cousin started home allergy treatment company Wyndly in 2021. The company sells a $249 home finger-stick allergy test whose results are reviewed by a doctor to prescribe under-the-tongue tablets as an alternative to allergy shots. The service, which includes unlimited doctor time and treatments, costs $99 per month.

KFF Health News profiles Horizon Therapeutics, which is about to be acquired by Amgen for $27.8 billion even though it has never developed a drug that has reached the market. The Shkreli-like company buys old drugs, raises their prices, markets them aggressively to physicians who sometimes are paid honoraria, offers concierge-like services to patients to whom it markets directly, and makes sure that insurers rather than patients bear the financial burden via its patient assistance programs. It spent $120 million to acquire a last-resort gout drug that has many cheap alternatives, then marketed it aggressively to drive sales to $1 billion annually after increasing its price tenfold. The company, which saved a fortune in US taxes by moving its headquarters to Ireland, paid $93.4 million in 2015 to its CEO, who will reap a reported $135 million from the acquisition.

In India, authorities raid an unlicensed hospital that was being run by a high school dropout who was posing as a doctor, following reports that the illegal 16-bed Mediversal Hospital included a lab, ICU, emergency room, and surgery suite.

Sponsor Updates

• Women’s Health Associates realizes a 40% increase in revenue cycle payment processing with Healow Payment Services from EClinicalWorks.
• Surescripts launches the second season of its There’s a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology Podcast.
• BayCare Health System expands its use of Oracle Health technologies to include its RevElate patient accounting software.
• Vyne Medical will sponsor and present at NAHAM’s annual conference May 2-5 in Orlando.
• Fortified Health Security names Matthew Prater service desk technician.
• Health Data Movers publishes a new case study, “Data Conversion for a Growing Health System.)
• Net Health publishes a new e-book, “10 Practical Tips for Taking Your Physical Therapy Clinic Management to the Next Level.”

Blog Posts

• How Predictive Data Improves Outcomes, Cuts Costs (Enlace Health)
• Five9 Knows Healthcare: Improving Patient Care in Times of Calm and Crisis (Five9)
• Increase Margins and Eliminate Access Barriers with Meaningful Automation (Impact Advisors)
• How Well Do You Track Your Provider ‘Inventory?’ (InterSystems)
• Clearsense at HIMSS 2023 (Clearsense)
• How to buy back your clinical informaticists’ time (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Marble’s Data Connections – Kaiser Permanente (Marble)
• Everything You Need to Know About Rural Emergency Hospitals (REH) (Medhost)
• ViVE: The Trending Health Conference for Healthcare Tech Professionals (Healthjump)
• Seizing the moment at Meditech’s 2023 Home Care Symposium (Meditech)
• Quick Wins: 5 Service Lines that Make the Most Sense for Prior Authorization Software (Myndshft)
• How Brightside Health Supports At-Risk Populations Who Would Otherwise Fall Through the Cracks (NeuroFlow)
• The impact of technological advancements in healthcare (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 4/12/23

Top News

A federal jury convicts three former executives of waiting room advertising company Outcome Health, which was valued at one time at over $5 billion, of several fraud charges involving inflating the number of ad impressions to advertisers and investors from 2011 to 2017.

Convicted are former executives Rishi Shah (CEO), Shradha Agarwal (president), and Brad Purdy (CFO), none of whom testified.

SEC charges are pending against the executives, along with Ashik Desai, who testified against his former bosses in the criminal trial.

Shah and Agarwal stepped down following a Wall Street Journal investigative report in 2017. They were 31 and 32 at the time. Shah owned 80% of the company, giving him a net worth of nearly $4 billion. PatientPoint acquired Outcome Health  in March 2021.

Shah and Agarwal founded JumpStart Ventures in 2011, whose investments include MedCity News, CoverMyMeds, and Medpilot.

Reader Comments

From Nikki: “Re: Oracle. I bet whoever made this proclamation is regretting it.” Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia told the US Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on July 20, 2022 that the company would move the VA’s Oracle Cerner implementation to the cloud and rewrite its pharmacy module within 6-9 months. We’re at the nine-month mark and I’ve heard nothing. Maybe they’re saving the announcement for HIMSS23.

From Asclepi Us: “Re: health systems. I’ve heard that the term health system may be replaced as they get bigger and offer broader lines of business. One has said the future is ‘health platform.’” The trendy name progression has included hospital, medical center, regional medical center, health system (which patients generally dislike intensely), and health (particularly questionable given how hospitals make money). My prediction is that because the business of health is so broad and brand-obsessed that it will be like Northwell, Providence, Ascension, and others that simply choose a one-word name  — sometimes by making up an eye-rolling word or painfully conjoining two actual words into one — that they hope age well. The names with the shortest shelf lives will be those where two merging entities can’t bear to see either old name disappear and settle on squeezing both names into one. Assuming I am right that one-word names will prevail, ChatGPT suggests DynaCare, Vitalia, MediVista, Zenitha, Nuviva, or Aurelia.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ve added a couple of HIStalk sponsors to my HIMSS guide.

Someone on LinkedIn reference this 2017 article, in which two reporters coined the term “broetry” to describe those overly cutesy LinkedIn posts that — with one pithy sentence per paragraph — try to pass off trite personal or business observations as being inspiring or insightful. They say the broems “read like employee handbook haikus or an E.E.  Cummings motivational poster” that always finish with “some closing fortune cookie-esque takeaway.” One user speculates that the widely scorned format caters to an ADD mentality of get-to-the-point writing or perhaps is popular because it can be easily read on mobile devices. ChatGPT has since made the broet’s work easier and even more mindless.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor CenterX. The Madison, WI-based company delivers reliable, patient-specific pharmacy benefit data and a fully integrated prior authorization solution, allowing providers to start cost-effective therapy faster. It delivers full benefit transparency at the point of care, including up-to-date pricing information and offering alternatives to medications that require prior authorization. Its electronic prior authorization tools are integrated into the EHR and keep users in the same system, regardless of the payer or plan, without faxing, re-entering, or phone calls. More than 120,000 Epic providers have had the CenterX network added alongside their existing network or alone at no additional cost to the health system. Providers who use prescription benefit information from CenterX made changes 25% of the time to either save their patients money or avoid a PA. Also, prior authorizations dropped by 38% after CenterX ePA was implemented. Thanks to CenterX for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Confirming earlier rumors of a sale, healthcare automation vendor Olive AI sells its payer-facing prior authorization business to health information network Availity. The acquisition includes existing Utilization Management customer contracts and an agreement to hire around 100 key Olive personnel. Olive sold off its population health management and 340b solutions in 2021, and has laid off nearly 700 employees within the last year. According to its website, Olive now focuses solely on autonomous revenue cycle services.

Twitter legally ceases to exist under that name as Elon Musk merges it into another of this companies that is called X Corp. Musk has previously tweeted his intention to turn Twitter into the “everything” X app that includes social networking, messaging, and payments. Musk and his co-founders launched the company that eventually became PayPal by merging their security software company with online financial services company X.com in 2000.

Ellkay releases LKOrbit, an end-to-end, cloud-based connectivity platform that supports laboratory ordering, results, connectivity, and access to billing information.

Sales

• Contexture, an HIE serving organizations in Arizona and Colorado, will unify its technology platforms into a single system with assistance from Health Catalyst.
• McLaren Health Care’s Karmanos Cancer Institute (MI) selects Volpara Health’s Risk Pathways risk assessment and patient management software.
• Pria will implement Health Connect Cloud technology from InterSystems, which is also an investor in the chronic care management company.
• Dayton Children’s Hospital will implement Bio-key’s PortalGuard IDaaS biometric authentication in its migration from Epic’s Hyperspace to Hyperdrive.

People

Ben Hilmes, MHA (Adventist Health) joins Healthcare IT Leaders as president.

Nate Kelly, MBA (Hospital IQ) joins ChartSwap as president.

Greenway Health hires Don Kleoppel (Cerner) as CISO.

Announcements and Implementations

WellSky announces GA of WellSky Patient, giving patients the ability to communicate with providers between visits, access virtual care, and take part in condition management programs.

Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion remove medical debt of under $500 from US consumer credit reports, adding to previous actions that removed paid-in-full medical debt immediately and that gave people 12 months instead of six to pay a medical bill before it appears on their credit report.

Moffitt Cancer Center profiles CIO Joyce Oh, who joined the organization in September 2022.

Government and Politics

HHS and ONC issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking  with changes to the Cures Act and ONC’s certification program. Participation in the Electronic Health Record Reporting Program would become a new Condition of Certification for certified health IT developers and several certification criteria would be revised. The unpublished version is here.

HHS OCR issues a reminder that its HIPAA and HITECH enforcement discretion ends with the expiration of the public health emergency on May 11, 2023. A significant change is that providers will no longer be able to use non-compliant technologies to conduct telehealth sessions.

Cerner Enviza and John Snow Labs will work with the FDA as part of its Sentinel drug safety initiative to develop AI solutions that extract relevant data from clinical notes within EHRs so that the agency can better understand the effects of medications on large populations. Cerner launched the Enviza business in 2020, eventually combining its provider network data with that of health data vendor Kantar Health, which it acquired for $375 million in 2021.

The Defense Health Agency begins researching a support contract for MHS Genesis as its original 10-year, $5.5 billion agreement ends in July 2025. Leidos was the prime contractor for the July 2015 contract, joined by Cerner, Accenture, and Henry Schein.

Privacy and Security

The Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center within HHS alerts healthcare organizations to a growing number of distributed denial-of-service attacks. HC3 warns that the volume of invalid requests will not only slow servers down, but prevent valid requests from being processed.

Other

Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Center for Knowledge Management develops MyKnowledgeHub, an online database of curated clinical evidence, drug information, and patient education resources for VUMC providers.

Former Propeller Health executive Chris Hogg — who left the company and started virtual primary care company Marley Medical in 2021 — analyzes the apparent demise of digital therapeutics vendor Pear Therapeutics following its filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy:

• The early idea that software could impact clinical outcomes evolved into focusing individual market segments, with companies such as Omada, Ginger, and WellDoc.
• Implementation and delivery turned out to be the hard part. The underlying technology is only a small part of the solution.
• The grind of distribution and payment is hard and expensive.
• Companies were trying to identify their services business as technology businesses with their P&L showed otherwise.
• Commodity software was being offered a high prices – up to $500 per patient per month in Pear’s case — based on a limited number of studies, with spotty payment and questionable value of a limited service. Care delivery can’t be sold like a consumer product.
• Studies proving that tech can improve outcomes are necessary but not sufficient. Healthcare innovation usually fails to succeed due to patient acquisition, payment, and distribution.
• The path forward is to build a new care model around software to deliver end-to-end-care to produce the outcomes that create value.

Another insightful comment about Pear comes from Eric Gastfriend, founder and CEO of competitor DynamiCare Health, who calls out product cost, lack of payer coverage, and this great summary:

Unrealistic expectations. They went public last year via a SPAC at a >$1B valuation, with just $4M in revenue. Raising too much money at too high a valuation forces companies to take big risks, spending the money they’ve raised to try to quickly drive revenue / milestones in order to justify the valuation. In fact, the SPAC was largely driven by previous rounds that raised too much at too high valuations. In total, the company raised >$400M, 25% of which was in the form of debt. Once you’ve taken on debt, leases, regulatory compliance burdens (FDA for being a prescription product; SEC for being a public company), and other unavoidable costs, it makes it harder to turn the company profitable, and therefore a better strategy is to try to grow as quickly as possible to be able to raise more money. That can work until the macroeconomic / fundraising environment dries up, which is what happened for tech in late 2022.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD publishes a new e-guide, “Private Practice KPIs: 12 Data Points That Impact Revenue.”
• Agfa HealthCare publishes a new case study, “Region Midtjylland (Region Midt) celebrates their Agfa HealthCare Enterprise Imaging Go Live.”
• Nordic publishes a new episode of DocTalk, “Using data wisely: Telling the insight story.”
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at the ACMA National Conference April 21-24 in Washington, DC.
• Care.ai makes its AI-driven Smart Care Facility Platform available on Google Marketplace.
• CarePort Health publishes a new customer success snapshot featuring Legacy Health Services, “Successfully managing patient populations with help from real-time data.”
• CHIME congratulates members Cook Children’s Health Care System SVP and CIO Theresa Meadows, CHIME VP David Finn, and Intermountain Healthcare VP and CISO Erik Decker upon receiving their respective Leadership Excellence in Cybersecurity Awards from The Baldridge Foundation.
• Current Health publishes a new study, “Temporal trends in virtual care data may influence program staffing and design.”

Blog Posts

• How to manage ‘relentless’ payment denial codes (AdvancedMD)
• Part Two: Blizzards, Heat Waves, and Health Outcomes – Using Data in Response to Natural Disasters (Azara Healthcare)
• Can a Good Network Management Partnership Give Your Healthcare IT Organization New Focus? (CereCore)
• MEDHOST Invites Attendees to Learn More About Innovative Services and Solutions at HIMSS23 (Medhost)
• 10 Security Priorities for HIPAA Compliance Success (Clearwater)
• The Growing Use of ChatGPT by Hospital Staff Leads to the Inadvertent Disclosure of Patient and Technical Information (CloudWave)
• Our Top 4 ViVE 2023 Conference Takeaways (Divurgent)
• Consensus Cloud Solutions at HIMSS23 (Consensus Cloud Solutions)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/10/23

Top News

Pear Health, which offers prescription-based digital therapeutics, files Chapter 11 bankruptcy, lays off nearly all of its employees, and seeks buyers for the business or its assets.

The publicly traded company has halted the filling of new and refill prescriptions for its PDTs for treating substance use disorder, opioid use disorder, and chronic insomnia.

Pear was formed in 2013 and went public in December 2021 via a SPAC merger that valued it at more than $1 billion for several months before PEAR shares began their slide.

President and CEO Corey McCann, MD, PhD announced “a reduction in force, including me” on LinkedIn, blaming the company’s failure on insurers and unfavorable market conditions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Polarity is evident in the results of last week’s poll, where respondents are either (a) confident that most of their medical record would be accessible in a random ED visit, or (b) have no idea. Thanks for the insightful comments, which aren’t encouraging given that we all work around healthcare technology. Maybe we should all carry around a medical alert card that contains ID details and instructions for three scenarios: (a) the ED uses the same EHR as a provider you trust to have complete information, with your card identifying who that provider is and which EHR they use; (b) an ED that uses a different EHR; and (c) HIE details, including national networks, if relevant. Or, and I shudder to say it since it sounds so 2005-ish, maybe we should maintain our own personal health record on our phone, a website, or a thumb drive and carry instructions for accessing it.

New poll to your right or here, which I’ve run annually for many years: what will you be doing during HIMSS23?

Speaking as Mr. Obvious, HIMSS23 will unveil the new conference normal for HIMSS. On the plus side, COVID’s impact is much reduced since the skip year / failed virtual conference attempt of 2020 and the “mask-wearing summer in Las Vegas” unsuccessful recovery in 2021. On the negative, providers and vendors are dealing with iffy economic conditions; new conference competitors and the refocus of CHIME away from HMISS have probably poached some of the decision-makers whose attendance subsidized the cost for the rest of us; and the HIMSS brand hasn’t regained its pre-COVID luster. HIMSS22 went fairly well, so I’m thinking that HIMSS23 will be a modest hit from and attendance and exhibitor count perspective, although the most important metric is exhibitor perception of ROI in deciding whether to follow along to Orlando in 2024. Industry news is slow so far this holiday week, which might mean vendors are holding their announcements for next week in recognition that the HIMSS conference is still an important event.

The Chicago weather forecast shows plenty of warm spring days and no snow, but with a drastic cool-off just as HIMSS23 gets underway, with clouds and highs in the mid-50s. Chicago is the only city where it snowed during a HIMSS conference, so I’ll take this weather.

Also cool is the activity of HIStalk’s sponsors at HIMSS23, my summary of which might influence (or “inform,” as linguistic fad-followers might say) your exhibit hall navigation plan.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor SmartSense by Digi. The company, which is a business unit of Digi International (NASDAQ: DGII), is a leading global provider of temperature and environmental monitoring solutions that deliver dynamic and personalized asset monitoring, process digitization, and digital decisioning across healthcare. Its enterprise-wide critical asset monitoring and management solution for pharmacies, labs, clinics, blood banks, and more ensures compliance with centralized reporting, NIST-calibrated temperature monitoring, and logs that provide proof-of-temperature performance. The solutions deploy quickly and are wire-free, eliminating the need for IT support or HIPAA concerns. They help directors of lab, pharmacy, facilities, and biomed with governance over compliance, temperature, and humidity monitoring, and any other product safety concern, relieving pain points around product loss, regulatory compliance, automation, and temperature logging automation.Thanks to SmartSense by Digit for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual substance abuse disorder provider Workit Health will lay off 100 employees, anticipating that the DEA will reinstate a pandemic-relaxed rule that requires patients to undergo an in-person visit before having controlled substances prescribed via telehealth.

Erica Jain, MBA, co-founder and CEO of Virtual care tools vendor Healthie, lists lessons learned in its seven-year history:

1. The company over-invested in sales and marketing without a corresponding scale-up in technology and product teams.
2. It realized that success takes years regardless of how much money a company raises, and suggests that companies wait as long as possible between their seed and Series A rounds to focus on the business and make mistakes on a small scale before they jump on the VC treadmill.
3. The company wasted money on social media, ads, and team culture, which the founders rationalized as being first-timers trying to learn.
4. It hired sales reps without having training and management in place, which failed to deliver results and left customers feeling that the company was “sales-y.”
5. Lack of technical discipline and a rush to ship code quickly required a product rewrite that was painful to the company and customers.
6. The founders waited too long to bring in a head of product, causing bottlenecks and difficulty in prioritizing customer requests.
7. It learned the responsibility of being a healthcare infrastructure company, where customers could not get through a work day with anything less than full functionality.

Privacy and Security

A researcher questions why Phreesia’s clinic check-in app requires patients to check a box that authorizes the company to use their information to serve targeted ads. She starting choosing the subtle “no consent” option, then contacted Phreesia to confirm that they had no consent form on file for her. The company said it would revoke her authorization, seemingly confirming that it possessed one against her intentions, which Phreesia blames on a staff member who used its system to check the patient in manually. She notes that Phreesia’s SEC filing boasts that patients who are served its ads are 4.5 times more likely to end up with a prescription for the promoted drug, meaning it might not be in her best interest that her provider would not have prescribed the drug until asked.

Other

A randomized controlled trial finds that restricting EHR users to opening just one chart at a time doesn’t seem to reduce their efficiency, as measured by daily EHR usage time. On the other hand, the authors mentioned a previous study in which the single-patient limitation was not associated with a lower rate of wrong-patient errors compared to allowing up to four charts to be open simultaneously.

According to a study conducted by Cedars-Sinai, ChatGPT is effective at translating medical information about cirrhosis and liver cancer in a way that patients and caregivers can comprehend. However, the authors found that ChatGPT’s responses to frequently asked questions are often insufficient and may contain errors up to 50% of the time. They conclude that it’s a good adjunct for clinicians rather than a replacement for them.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Triangle announces a multi-year subscription agreement with customer CalvertHealth for its medical document automation solution Readabl.ai.
• Oracle Health helps University of Missouri Health Care clinicians incorporate external data for more comprehensive patient histories and informed treatment plans.
• Clark Health (FL) sees a 200% growth in services since investing in EClinicalWorks technology over a decade ago.
• Optimum Healthcare IT names Michele Haag (MaineHealth) business intelligence developer.
• Sectra publishes a new case study, “From crisis to solution: Sky Lake Medical Center’s rapid restoration of radiology after ransomware attack.”
• Trualta introduces virtual caregiver support groups, webinars, and care coaching programs to support more caregivers across the country.

Blog Posts

• Expanding Access to Care for Better Public Health (Netsmart)
• Key Takeaways from ViVE 2023: Digital Health Turns a Corner from Hype to Value (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Healthcare Call Center Trends: What Leaders Need to Know (PerfectServe)
• The End is Near: Are Providers Ready for the Unwinding of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency? (Premier)
• Use Cases for AI in Healthcare (RCxRules)
• What’s the problem with ChatGPT in the contact center? (Talkdesk)
• Hybridization is the Future: Can Your Practice Model Support It? (WebPT)

Contacts

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

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS23

These are the HIStalk sponsors that provided responses. Send me yours if you missed out. Click a logo for general company information.

Availity

Booth 8336

Contact: Matt Schlossberg, director, public relations
matt.schlossberg@availity.com
630.935.9136

Availity will highlight how its Upcycled Data addresses the critical issues affecting healthcare data interoperability at HIMSS23. Members of the Clinical Solutions team will be on hand to discuss Availity’s clinical data gateway capabilities and strategy, work to create an advanced data interoperability exchange platform and advocate for national standards, and efforts to establish a single connection point for payer-to-payer transactions. Availity’s team will also participate in the following sessions:

• Implementing Da Vinci Standards for Prior Authorization: A Story Untold
  Wednesday, April 19 | 11:45 AM – 12:05 PM CT | Da Vinci Project Kiosk at the Interoperability Showcase
  Susan Bellile, Availity, Amy Mattingly, Humana, and Michael Palantoni, Athenahealth
• How HL7 FHIR is Transforming Healthcare: AI, Analytics
  Tuesday, April 18 | 5:10 – 5:45 PM CT | HL7 Booth Theatre #138
  Sam Schiffman, Availity, and Vivian Neilley, Google
• Developing Scalable Infrastructure for Clinical Data Interoperability and Patient Access
  Wednesday, April 19 | 1:00 – 2:00 PM CT | South Building, Level 5, S504
  Ashley Basile, PhD, Availity, and Rob Low, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC)

To learn more about Availity and our participation at HIMSS23, please visit www.availity.com and schedule a meeting with our team!

Baker Tilly

Booth 452

Contact: Charlie Cook, principal, healthcare consulting
charlie.cook@bakertilly.com
772.919.1555

Baker Tilly is excited to exhibit at HIMSS23! Join us at our booth, #452 (near Epic), on Tuesday and Wednesday from 1 – 2 p.m. for a discussion on alleviating staffing shortages in hospitals with technology. Baker Tilly’s Ed Ricks, MHA, CHCIO will be joined by Artisight’s president, Stephanie Lahr, MC, CHCIO for a live discussion. Can’t make that time work? Connect with us anytime at the booth and stop by for some fun putt putt on our green!

Baker Tilly is a leading advisory CPA firm, providing healthcare clients with a genuine coast-to-coast and global advantage in major regions of the US and in many of the world’s leading financial centers – New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. We guide healthcare clients in the provider, payer, and life sciences sectors through complex financial and operational challenges, including system selection, implementation and optimization. Connect with us to discuss where you want to go.

Best Buy Health

Booth 7506

Contact: Patrick Muse, senior director of client engagement
patrick.muse@bestbuy.com
603.506.9982

Best Buy isn’t just the place where you buy big-screen TVs and computers. We also provide technology that might one day help take care of you or a loved one at home. Our Best Buy Health business enables care at home for everyone by focusing on three key areas: wellness at home, aging at home, and care at home. Building its strategy on the strengths of Best Buy, Best Buy Health utilizes its Lively brand to offer a suite of devices, health and safety services, and Caring Centers to help adults age independently. Best Buy Health also connects patients and providers through its Current Health platform to improve the care-at-home experience and ensure better outcomes. Stop by our big blue and yellow booth to learn more and get the chance to win an Apple Watch.

Censinet

Booth – Cybersecurity Command Center 4309-39

Contact: Ed Gaudet, founder and CEO
egaudet@censinet.com
855.866.6001

Censinet will be demonstrating Censinet RiskOps, healthcare’s choice for enterprise cyber and third-party risk management. Censinet and KLAS Research executives will also be recognizing leading digital health IT vendors with the KLAS Research / Censinet “Cybersecurity Transparent” award throughout HIMSS. Censinet CISO and Healthcare Industry Veteran Chris Logan will deliver “Insights from the Healthcare Cybersecurity Benchmarking Study” on Thursday, April 20 at 10:45 a.m. – 11:05 a.m. CT, in South Building, Level 2 | Hall A | Booth 4309-4333 | Cybersecurity Command Center – Theater B. Learn key insights from the industry’s first Healthcare Cybersecurity Benchmarking Study, co-led by Censinet, KLAS Research, and AHA, and sponsored by leading health systems.

Stop by the Censinet booth and pick up a Censinet VIVE2023-coveted solar wireless charger and experience the power of Censinet RiskOps and scan to win a VR Headset.

Clearsense

Booth 7527

Contact: Leann Williams, marketing manager
lwilliams@clearsense.com
904.334.7500

Clearsense is ready to show you our brand-new 1Clearsense data management and delivery platform, along with a full suite of applications. Our team will be available for live demos at booth #7527, and you can get an exclusive Lunch and Learn on Data Literacy with our resident data governance expert, Terri Mikol. Be sure to follow us on social for promos and giveaways and check out our website for a full agenda.

Clearwater

Booth 7320, Cybersecurity Command Center Booth 4309-40

Contact: John Howlett, SVP and chief marketing officer
john.howlett@clearwatercompliance.com
773.636.6449

Clearwater helps organizations across the healthcare ecosystem move to a more secure, compliant, and resilient state so they can successfully accomplish their missions. We do this by providing a deep pool of experts across a broad range of cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance domains, purpose-built software that enables efficient identification and management of cybersecurity and compliance risks, and a tech-enabled, 24x7x365 Security Operations Center with managed threat detection and response capabilities. Join us on Tuesday, April 18, at 12:15 p.m. in the Cybersecurity Command Center as Clearwater CEO Steve Cagle and Renown Health CISO Steven Ramirez discuss how Renown has gone about implementing a cyber risk management program and what the organization has learned along the way.

CloudWave

Booth 3417

Contact: Christine Mellyn
cmellyn@gocloudwave.com
781.636.8169

CloudWave, the expert in healthcare data security, provides cloud, cybersecurity, and managed services using a multi-cloud approach. CloudWave is 100% focused on healthcare and delivers enterprise cloud services to nearly 300 hospitals and healthcare organizations, supporting 140+ EHR, clinical, and enterprise applications.

Drop by the CloudWave booth for an interactive, informative experience. Visit us at Booth 3417 to hear CloudWave experts talk about important technology topics ranging from cybersecurity to cloud, and earn a chance to win a pair of Apple AirPod Pros at the end of each presentation! Managing the Edge – New Ways of Looking at Your Data Center Infrastructure – Tues. 4/18 @1pm, Wed. 4/19 @1pm    Hear How ArchCare Health Services Tested Their Cybersecurity Response Readiness – Tues. 4/18 @3pm, Wed. 4/19 @3pm    Take Healthcare IT Security to the Next Level – Go Beyond the Status Quo – Wed 4/19 @11am    What Scares Attackers the Most and How They Are Using ChatGPT – Thurs. 4/20 @11am    How to Build Your Secure Cloud Offering – A Guide for ISVs – Thurs. 4/20 @1pm.

For more information about CloudWave at HIMSS, or to add any of these presentations to your calendar, visit www.gocloudwave.com/himss23/.

Consensus Cloud Solutions

Booth 1876

Contact: Christine Duval, director of content and communications strategy
christine.duval@consensus.com
781.519.8539

Stop by our booth at HIMSS to learn how we’re building a more connected future in healthcare at the highest levels of privacy and security. Helping organizations access meaningful patient data to get the most comprehensive information and make the most informed decisions. We’re also giving away a Nintendo Switch every day! Without the proper interoperability solutions in healthcare, you may feel like you’re playing a game of Drawful! You’re limited in the ways you can communicate, there is a lack of time, a lack of continuity, and your message may not be received the way you intended. Stop by the booth to see if you can beat our communication-exchange experts at a game of Drawful. All Drawful players will be entered in our daily raffle to win the best-selling game console, Nintendo Switch.

Dimensional Insight

Booth 2809

Contact: Lindsay Goldfarb, Director of Healthcare Marketing
LGoldfarb@dimins.com
781.419.2190

Dimensional Insight, an award-winning enterprise analytics provider, is excited to showcase its new approach to self-service analytics at HIMSS23 in booth #2809. The new improvements to Diver Platform focus on empowering users to take ownership of their analytics, resulting in increased usage and faster time to insight. Stop by our booth to see how Dimensional Insight can help you optimize patient care, support staff productivity, and improve financial KPIs.

Schedule a meeting with Dimensional Insight on the HIMSS23 show floor and get a sneak preview of these latest advancements.

Ellkay

Booth 213

Learn how ELLKAY can declutter your data strategy while streamlining interoperability efficiencies and building a patient-centric digital ecosystem. Visit booth #213 to discuss how ELLKAY’s newest solution can do just that… delivering a speedier, scalable solution to improve your ROI. Everyone knows ELLKAY is the place to be, so join the ELLKAY booth buzz during HIMSS 2023:

Tuesday, April 18

• Coffee Hour at Booth #213 | 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
• Women in HIT Happy Hour at Booth #213 |  4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
• Champagne at Sunset | Level 33 at Marriott Marquis Chicago | 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. RSVP today.

Wednesday, April 19

• International Coffee/Tea Hour at Booth | 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
• Interoperability Happy Hour at Booth | 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Thursday, April 20

• Coffee Hour at Booth | 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Elsevier

Booth 1236

Contact: Mary Ann Abbruzzo-White, SVP of clinical solutions global marketing
m.abbruzzo-white@elsevier.com
215.275.9091

Elsevier is committed to supporting clinicians, health leaders, educators, and students to overcome the challenges they face every day. We support healthcare professionals throughout their career journey from education to clinical practice and believe providing current, credible, accessible, evidence–based information can help empower clinicians to provide the best healthcare possible. Stop by our booth to learn how to advance your EHR with knowledge and celebrate the launch of the reimagined ClinicalKey; our clinical decision support tool that delivers quick, credible answers at the point-of-care alongside trusted, comprehensive medical evidence to support practitioners’ clinical information needs.

Healthjump

Booth 7006

Contact: Mary Kay Bergan, senior sales manager
mbergan@healthjump.com

Healthjump allows you to get standardized EHR data across practices without the limitations and complex set-up of traditional interface engines. If we’re lucky, we’ll see you in Chicago this April for HIMSS23! You can find us at Booth #7006. We record in-person interviews with some of the most influential thought leaders in the industry! The series is called “Leaders in Leveraging Health Data.” If you are interested in joining the video series and becoming a leader, feel free to reach out.

KeyCare

Booth 3482

Contact: Sarah Inman, VP of health system partnerships
sarah@keycare.org
404.851.4678

KeyCare is an Epic-based virtual care platform designed to help forward-thinking health systems improve access and quality by expanding their virtual care options for patients. KeyCare offers health systems access to a network of independent virtual care providers working on KeyCare’s Epic-based platform. Health systems can start with nationwide virtual urgent care coverage, and then may add other virtual health services based on their virtual care initiatives. To learn more about KeyCare, visit www.keycare.org.

Kyruus

Booth 3663

Contact: Ashley Nyland, director of growth marketing
anyland@kyruus.com
617.419.2060

Join our team for the Kyruus Block Party at Booth #3663 on Wednesday, April 19! [during exhibit hall social] Kyruus is the leader in provider data management and provider search and scheduling for healthcare organizations, dedicated to a vision to make healthcare work better for everyone by connecting people to the care they need. Physician-founded and led, we saw that a systemic misalignment of supply and demand was causing people to wait too long for care and too often end up with the wrong providers. Inspired by baseball’s Moneyball concept, Kyruus delivers a better, data-driven approach to patient-provider matching and scheduling. Today, Kyruus powers the patient access initiatives of top healthcare organizations across the US, transforming how people find and book care through our multi-channel platform.

Looking to transform care navigation even more, Kyruus has acquired Healthsparq and Epion Health. With the addition of Healthsparq, a leader in healthcare guidance and transparency, the combined company is enabling unprecedented payer-provider connectivity to make it easier for people to navigate and schedule care across access channels. Epion Health is a leader in digital patient engagement solutions, and the collaboration offers healthcare organizations and providers a one-stop shop for patient access and engagement solutions.

MEDHOST

Contact inquiries@medhost.com or schedule a meeting with a representative at the conference to learn more.

MEDHOST, a leading EHR and healthcare IT solutions provider, will be at HIMSS23 in Chicago from April 17-21 for you to learn about their integrated EHR and their products and services that improve hospital operations and clinical care workflows. This includes a physician-focused mobile app, integrated anesthesia documentation, and a robust analytics solution. Additionally, MEDHOST offers a Rural Emergency Hospital solution packaging leading emergency department technology with IT, security, and application experts. Learn about MEDHOST’s MEDTEAM Services, outsourced services driven by a core mission to enhance how providers approach revenue cycle management, security, managed IT, and integration.

MEDITECH

Booth 2848

Contact: Anthony Filleti, marketing supervisor
afilleti@meditech.com
781.821.3000

MEDITECH empowers healthcare organizations everywhere to expand their vision of what’s possible with Expanse, the world’s most intuitive and interoperable EHR. Join MEDITECH in booth #2848 to see how MEDITECH Expanse can elevate the healthcare experience, and get a first-hand look at the platform’s cloud-based design – a solid foundation for safer, more sustainable care both today and in the future. MEDITECH executives, clinician experts, and team will be there to share customer successes, and demonstrate the company’s latest innovations, including mobile apps for physicians and nurses, the Traverse interoperability solution, Expanse Patient Connect secure texting, and more. Learn how Expanse helps drive better outcomes and provides mobile, personalized solutions to improve efficiency for an overburdened workforce.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, visitors can attend scheduled in-booth demonstrations on MEDITECH’s latest solutions, including Expanse Now, Genomics, Care Compass, Population Insight, and the embedding of Google Health’s search and summarization capabilities into clinician workflow. On Thursday at 10:00 a.m. visitors can learn more about MEDITECH’s Greenfield Workspace and MEDITECH Alliance programs. At the Interoperability Showcase MEDITECH will be featured in three use case scenarios; Record Locator Service: Powering Data Access in the Continuum of Care (CommonWell Health Alliance), 360X and Multimodality Technology to Support Care Transitions, and Leveraging Carequality and 360X transitions. MEDITECH customers will be presenting at several sessions throughout the conference, including HCA Healthcare, Avera Health, Frederick Health, and Lawrence General Hospital, covering topics such as data governance, usability, interoperability, precision medicine, and physician efficiency and optimization.

Nuance Communications

Booth 912

Contact: Caitlyn Keating, senior communications manager
Caitlyn.Keating@nuance.com
781.565.8926

Nuance, the global leader in conversational AI, will showcase the first-ever automated documentation workflow solution, DAX Express – powered by ChatGPT-4 — in an interactive, experiential demo at HIMSS23. Nuance will also preview an additional set of advanced generative AI-enabled capabilities that deliver more automation and intelligence-infused experiences across the patient journey. These future workflow-integrated capabilities – built on proven AI solutions that have consistently delivered value and outcomes for physicians, nurses, radiologists, and patients for decades – further automate complex workflows and mundane tasks, surface key details, and identify missing information to support patient care. Visit Nuance’s Booth #912 at HIMSS to learn more about how Nuance is ushering in the new era of intelligent healthcare experiences.

Philips Capsule

Booth 901, Cybersecurity Command Center 4309-03, Interoperability Showcase 7946-52

Philips is a health technology company focused on improving people’s lives through meaningful innovation across the health continuum – from healthy living and prevention to diagnosis, treatment, and home care. The company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as in consumer health and home care. Applying advanced technologies and deep clinical and consumer insights, Philips partners with customers to deliver integrated solutions that address the Quadruple Aim: improved patient experience, better health outcomes, improved staff experience, and lower cost of care.

Attend our HIMSS speaking sessions:

• Executive summit: “A Cry for Help – Relieving Patient Care Pressure Through Innovation.” Monday, April 17 at 1:15 p.m. – 1:50 p.m., Marriott Marquis Chicago, Level 4, Grand Horizon Ballroom. Moderator: Nick Patel, founder and chief executive officer, Stealth Consulting .Speakers: Becky Fox, chief clinical Information officer, Intermountain Healthcare; Roy Jakobs, chief executive officer, Royal Phillips; Stephanie Lahr, president, Artisight.
• Industry solution session: “How can automation and predictive insights help improve patient care at lower cost?” Speakers: Gretchen Brown, MSN, RN, chief nursing informatics officer, Stanford Health Care; Adam Alkhato, administrative director of biomedical engineering and technology, Stanford Health Care; Mike Seagraves, PhD, digital transformation partner, Philips. Wednesday April 19, 2023, 2:30 – 3:30 p.m., South Building S402, Room 2.
• Cybersecurity presentation: “Get secure, stay secure.” Speaker: Dirk de Wit, head of product security, Philips. Tuesday, April 18, 2023, 12:15 -12:35 p.m., South hall Theatre A.

ReMedi Health Solutions

We won’t have a booth, but many of our leadership team will be in attendance. Contact GP at g.hyare@remedihs.com to get in touch with ReMedi.

ReMedi Health Solutions is a nationally recognized, physician-led healthcare IT consulting firm specializing in peer-to-peer, physician-centric EHR implementation and training. Our core service lines include System Selection Advisory, System Optimization, Personalization & Physician Efficiency Sessions, Integration and Testing, Go-Live support, and Clinical Chart Abstraction. From the outside looking in, ReMedi Physician Informaticists inform clinicians how to better use the EHR. On the inside, however, we are passionate “Clinician Whisperers” that believe understanding the “why” behind each EHR decision is as important as the “what” or “how”. We listen to physicians, nurses, and healthcare leaders in order to understand their biggest challenges, and we leverage our decades of experience to develop efficient solutions that greatly impact the delivery of care. We will be at HIMSS connecting and sharing our learnings with health IT leaders, friends, and meeting new ones.

Rhapsody

Booth 7110

Contact: Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer
Michelle.blackmer@rhapsody.health
312.520.1873

Rhapsody is eager to meet and discuss your greatest challenges when it comes to data integration and data enrichment across your organization’s healthcare ecosystem. We’ll have a robust team of subject matter experts on-hand to speak to all things interoperability, including how Rhapsody health solutions can help your organization accelerate healthier outcomes with healthier data! Visit our booth #7110 or schedule a meeting with us.

Sphere, Powered by TrustCommerce

Booth 3757

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

Visit Sphere at Booth #3757! Sphere’s TrustCommerce platform provides a comprehensive payment platform that has earned the trust of the country’s largest healthcare organizations for their patient payments. Here are three reasons to make a visit:

• Integrate payments directly into your patient and staff workflows with TrustCommerce.
• Experience secure and compliant payment processing, anytime and anywhere, with pre-built integrations to leading EHRs like Epic, Veradigm, and athenaIDX and an extensible API platform that can be built into existing workflows,
• Bring transparency to the patient financial experience and boost payment yield with Sphere’s Health iPASS platform.

Meet our talented team, win exciting prizes, catch a demo, and join the fun at booth #3757.

Surescripts

Booth 1851

Contact: Kate Giaquinto, corporate communications manager
kate.giaquinto@surescripts.com
603.548.5273

Pop by Surescripts booth #1851 during the day or visit us between 4:30 and 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 18 for a bite to eat and a bit to drink. We’ll toast all that we’ve accomplished in the past year and make plans for the future.

Whenever you stop by, we look forward to talking with you about how we can help your organization fulfill its goals related to simplifying access to patient information across health systems, pharmacies, and payers, receiving critical clinical and medication intelligence in existing workflows—when and where it’s needed most and making decisions that improve outcomes while lowering costs.

Join Surescripts for two speaking sessions at the Interoperability Showcase Spotlight Theater: Tuesday, April 18 at 11:15 a.m.: Interoperability At Scale: Volume, Value Beyond Prescribing  Wednesday, April 19 at 9:45 a.m.: The “What’s Next” In Interoperability is Happening Now. Breakfast Briefing with Frank Harvey, CEO, Surescripts Network Alliance partners and industry leaders: Opportunities for Evolving Care Teams to Expand Access & Fill Gaps in Primary Care on Tuesday, April 18, 7-8 a.m. at the Marriott Marquis, Level 2, Shedd A & B.

Tegria

Booth 1481

Contact: Kevin Kutz, VP of external relations
kevin.kutz@tegria.com
608.621.5296

Tegria provides consulting and technology services to help healthcare organizations maximize technology, transform operations, improve financials, and optimize care. To learn more, visit www.tegria.com.

Visage Imaging

Booth 4308

Contact: Brad Levin, general manager, North America, and global head of marketing
blevin@visageimaging.com
540.454.9670

Visage is trailblazing Imaging’s SaaS move to the cloud with an Open Cloud philosophy based on industry standards and multi-cloud support, delivering ultrafast sub-second image display based on object-based cloud storage, while propelling cloud adoption at a fraction of the storage cost of on-premise solutions. Experience Visage 7 CloudPACS at both Visage Imaging Booth 4308 and AWS Booth 2056. While you meet with our experts and experience a demonstration, enjoy some delicious, futuristic, nitrogen (“Nitro Cream”) ice cream with all the fixins. Experience the Platform For The Future – Powered by Speed with Visage at HIMSS 2023, Chicago, IL More details.

News 4/7/23

Top News

The VA postpones its Oracle Cerner go-live at VA Saginaw Health Care that was planned for June, saying that the software isn’t ready for the next wave of deployments.

The VA had placed go-lives on hold in October 2022, saying it needed until June 2023 to resolve system challenges. Officials also expressed concern about the system’s ability to support the VA’s medical research.

VA officials said recently that they will seek changes in its Oracle Cerner contract, which is under review now at the five-year mark as specified in the VA’s contract. The VA declined to say whether the new delay is related to those negotiations.

Oracle Cerner is live at VA sites in Spokane, WA; Walla Walla, WA; Columbus, OH; Roseburg, OR; and White City, OR. Its most recent go-live was in June 2022.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Trualta. The St. Joseph, MO-based company supports families who are managing care for loved ones at home via an online learning platform. In partnership with innovative healthcare payers and providers, as well as social service organizations, Trualta supports better care at lower cost. Each partner organization is equipped with a  customized and co-branded learning portal through which healthcare professionals can deliver an innovative and skills-based training session to help caregivers better care for their aging loved ones. Trualta’s program includes an online learning management system that is accessible via desktop, tablet, or smartphone with companion print material, personalized for each family’s care situation. Topics include personal care, safety and injury prevention, cognitive decline and brain health, and caregiver wellness. Trualta is engaging in research partnerships and clinical validation trials with leading health organizations to demonstrate that capable and confident caregivers lead to improved patient outcomes. Thanks to Trualta for supporting HIStalk.

Googling #HIMMS23 turns up a bunch of companies who are spending big bucks on a conference whose acronym their social media kids can’t spell. Grammatical pedantry that might get you either a free drink or a punch to the nose, depending on your tone and audience: it’s an acronym if you say the letters as a word (HIMSS) and an initialism if you say the individual letters (FBI). I don’t know how to qualify terms like HIPAA or the previous JCAHO, which were illogically sounded out as “hippa” and “jayco,” although I could get behind calling MGMA “magma.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Physician staffing company Envision Physician Services will lay off 90 doctors and staff who work in its Clearwater, FL office. Parent company Envision Healthcare sold its ambulance business for $2.4 billion in 2017, was acquired by a private equity firm for $9.9 billion in 2018, and was near bankruptcy in September 2022 as it struggled with ongoing losses, $5.3 billion of debt, bad press over out-of-network billing practices, and a lawsuit from UnitedHealthcare that the company forced it to overpay for services by upcoding its out-of-network charges.

Sales

• Bergen New Bridge Medical Center extends its use of Altera Digital Health’s Paragon for another five years and will implement its ambulatory care EHR, physician app, claims management, DbMotion Connect, and Ventus Compliance Advisor. It will also move to remote hosting on Microsoft Azure.

People

Provation CEO Daniel Hamburger, MS, MBA retires and is replaced by Ankush Kaul, who has held executive roles in other companies that are owned by Fortive, which acquired Provation for $1.4 billion in late 2021

Announcements and Implementations

Nordic Consulting adds a managed services organization and announces new clients Roper St. Francis Healthcare and Bon Secours Mercy Health, the latter of which acquired Nordic from its fund manager owner in June 2022 via BSMH’s holding company Accrete Health Partners.

Cognizant expands its agreement with Microsoft to integrate its TriZetto products with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and to use Azure for its cloud offerings.

Government and Politics

The Wisconsin Supreme Court rules that Ciox inappropriately billed a UW Health patient $110 for giving her an electronic copy of her medical records. UW Health argued that while patients can get their own records at no charge from MyChart, it charges law firms and other third parties that have copies sent directly to them.

Other

MIcrosoft, the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, and software firm Fortra obtain a court order that allows Microsoft to seize the Internet infrastructure that Russia-based ransomware hackers use to launch healthcare attacks.

Sponsor Updates

• A study published by Elsevier finds that the initial phases of telemedicine implementation for children’s mental health services during COVID may have exacerbated existing racial and ethnic disparities in access to care.
• First Databank names Anitha Sankar senior quality assurance automation engineer, Sunil Boddapati lead software engineer, and Johnny Ma customer success consultant.
• Fortified Health Security hires Dave Phillips as regional director.
• Healthcare Triangle announces a $3 million cloud DevOps managed services agreement with a life sciences company.
• Meditech’s Greenfield Workspace better enables Phelps Memorial’s deployment of patient scheduling tools.
• Myndshft achieves HITRUST risk-based, two-year certification demonstrating the highest level of information protection assurance.
• Net Health’s PointRight analytics solution receives two endorsements from the National Quality Forum.

Blog Posts

• Focusing on Public Health: Staying Connected with the Community (EClinicalWorks)
• How Insights from Payer Data Improve Patient Care (Enlace Health)
• Occupational Medicine EMR Software (Experity)
• Break Down Data Silos and Drive Fluid Customer Experiences with Five9 Workflow Automation (Five9)
• Supply Chain Issues in Healthcare and How to Mitigate Them (GHX)
• Unlocking the Benefits of Cloud Migration for Healthcare and Life Sciences (Healthcare Triangle)
• How Get Well Uses Healthwise Content as a Service to Deliver Education in Their Digital Care Platform (Healthwise)
• The Rule of S’s: Evaluating new tech for clinical workflows (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Marble’s Data Connections – Access Hundreds of Millions of Records from Our Network (Marble)
• Advancing Interoperability in the Age of TEFCA: An Interview with CommonWell’s Executive Director, Paul Wilder: Part 3 (Medhost)
• How King’s Daughters Medical Center gave time back to nurses (Meditech)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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