News 9/7/22

Top News

CVS Health will acquire home-based care company Signify Health for $30.50 per share in a deal valued at $8 billion.

Amazon and UnitedHealth had also expressed interest in the company.

Signify Health CEO Kyle Armbrester, MBA, who came to the company in 2018 after seven years with Athenahealth, will continue to lead the business as a part of CVS Health.

The deal is CVS Health’s second largest in recent years, having acquired Aetna in 2018 for $70 billion.

Modern Healthcare notes that the three largest Medicare Advantage insurers will now control the three largest homecare providers.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents are mixed on why Amazon is closing Amazon Care, with the most common speculation being that its pending acquisition of One Medical is more important to the company or that the company is realizing that healthcare is too complicated to disrupt. IANAL says One Medical is a disruptor that has a better business model than Amazon Care’s selling telehealth and low-acuity home to employers, Fail fast ponders just how poorly things were going with Amazon Care if Amazon didn’t even attempt to combine its work with One Medical, and DD says anything short of creating a national, vertically comprehensive solution won’t appeal to big employers.

New poll to your right or here: In the most recent health IT purchase or sale with which you were involved, what initially triggered the buyer’s interest? It’s probably not easy to say with certainty and I couldn’t list every possible answer, but I’m curious what got the buyer’s initial attention.

Webinars

September 22 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2023 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, marketing director, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, marketing manager, IMO. The yearly update to ICD-10-CM is almost here. Prepare your organization for a smooth transition, and avoid any negative impacts to your bottom line, with an in-depth look at the upcoming changes. Listen to IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders discuss the 2023 ICD-10-CM coding changes. This webinar will review additions, deletions, and other revisions to the ICD-10-CM code set and how to make sure you get properly reimbursed.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

BJC HealthCare and Washington University School of Medicine will collaborate with CuriMeta, which will provide de-identified, real-world data for research. The organizations also led the company’s $6 million Series A funding round. Founder Davis Walp, MBA previously provided real-world data brokerage services to pharma.

Virtual primary care company 98point6 secures $20 million in new funding, which it will use to scale the licensing of its services to health systems. MultiCare Health System (WA) has implemented 98point6’s technology as part of its Indigo Health ambulatory division, which operates hybrid primary and urgent care clinics.

AESOP Technology, which offers AI-powered medication management and clinical decision support software, raises $3 million. The company, a spinoff of Taipei Medical University in Taiwan, opened an office in San Francisco in 2020.

Business Insider reports that Amazon is internally testing a direct-to-consumer telemedicine and online prescription drug service that will compete with the likes of Hims and Ro.

A New York Times opinion piece says that while Amazon is a Goliath in product sales, its money, technology, and logistics can’t fix the mess that is American healthcare:

Any company claiming its innovation will revolutionize American healthcare by itself is selling a fantasy. There is no technological miracle waiting around the corner that will solve problems caused by decades of neglectful policy decisions and rampant fraud. And a fix aimed at just the upper crust of employer-sponsored health coverage has no hope of making healthcare more accessible to those who are truly being left behind. Amazon Care and One Medical saw the same market opportunity within the crisis-ridden American healthcare system: a paid escape hatch for the better-off … But part of why Amazon Care had difficulties is that not all aspects of primary care are so simple that they can be performed in your home or through a video consultation (which is nevertheless a valuable service that is no doubt here to stay). For anything more complicated, patients would still have to visit a traditional clinic, meaning they would have to contend with all the things that are most tiresome about American healthcare: insurance, phone calls, and drug prices — if they can get the time off to visit the doctor at all.

People

Eric Brill (Hillrom) joins AirStrip as SVP of advanced clinical alarm communications and care coordination.

WellSky promotes Lauren Witlen to VP of marketing, connected networks.

UConn Health names Rick McCarthy, MS (White Plains Hospital) CIO.

George “Buddy” Hickman, MS (Harris Health System) joins First Health Advisory as chief strategy officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Bonita Community Health Center (FL) will transition to Epic as part of its acquisition by Lee Health.

Biotech company Freenome launches a study of cancer risk factors using Oracle Cerner’s Learning Health Network and study enrollment technology from Elligo Health Research, in which Oracle Cerner is an investor.

Government and Politics

The Federal Trade Commission launches an anti-trust investigation into Amazon’s plan to acquire One Medical as part of the deal’s regulatory approval process.

Moncrief Army Health Clinic at Fort Jackson (SC) will go live on MHS Genesis later this month.

Privacy and Security

The Ottawa Hospital in Canada recovers from an unspecified hardware issue that took its Epic, Cerner, PACs, Rhapsody, and Spok systems offline over the weekend.

Other

The Verona paper reports that 5,500 Epic customers attended UGM, double the number that came to last year’s COVID-compromised conference.

Regional Medical Center (SC) is working with its auditors to adjust its financial reporting model following its year-ago conversion to Cerner CommunityWorks, which it says “is still not functioning as originally expected” as gross accounts receivable increased by 70% and bill submission slowed.

A study of 175,000 Medicare beneficiaries with opioid use disorders finds that those who were offered expanded access to telehealth services remained in treatment longer and experienced reduced risk of overdose.

In Finland, 619 doctors file a complaint with the National Supervisory Authority for Health and Welfare about Epic’s patient record software that was installed at Helsinki University Hospital District last year. The doctors say the system has caused problems with patient data exchange and medication management, has lost information, and offers poor user experience.

Sponsor Updates

• PMD launches a new website reflecting its shift to end-to-end healthcare solutions.
• Microsoft publishes a case study featuring EClinicalWorks, “EClinicalWorks thrives in the cloud with Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Disk Storage.”
• Premier’s Pinc AI Applied Sciences division will use Datavant Switchboard and Privacy Hub to connect, certify, and license or provide research services on linked tokenized datasets for life sciences and health system partners.
• Nuance reports that customers like RWJBarnabas Health, University of Michigan Health-West, and others average 47% cost savings with 40% call containment and 30% patient self-service rates with its patient engagement solutions.
• Surescripts reports that providers used its Record Locator & Exchange service to access the health records of more than 62 million patients and exchange more than 622 million clinical documents in the first half of 2022.
• Clearwater completes its acquisition of CynergisTek, bringing together cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance leaders.
• Bamboo Health and CarePort will exhibit at the National Association of ACOs Fall 2022 Conference September 8-9 in Washington, DC.
• Biofourmis will present at the Mobile Tech in Clinical Trials Conference September 12 in Boston.
• Oracle Cerner publishes a new client achievement, “HHSC Kauai Region implements a clinically driven revenue cycle for a healthier bottom line.”
• CloudWave will exhibit at the TORCH Fall Conference September 12-15 in Round Rock, TX.

Blog Posts

• Nurse retention strategies: 3 practical ways to reduce nurse turnover (Ability Network)
• 3 ways AI-enabled RPM is improving care delivery (AdvancedMD)
• Understanding Hospital KPIs: The Role of Technology in Improving Performance (AGS Health)
• How to steer clear of healthcare data blind spots (Arcadia)
• Quitting Time Part 2: DRVS Tools to Support Tobacco Cessation Programs (Azara Healthcare)
• 5 ways to prioritize patients and profitability (Bravado Health)
• IT Service Desk Performance Resources for Continuous Improvement (CereCore)
• The Issue of Persisting Clinical Communication Gaps (ChartLogic)
• It’s Hard to Improve Cyber Resiliency When Reactive Security Prevails (Clearwater)
• Highlights from the 2022 Hub and Specialty Pharmacy Models East Conference (ConnectiveRx)
• The Complex Spiral of Oncology Medication Prior Authorization (CoverMyMeds)
• How Digital Twins Can Accelerate Healthcare Transformation (CTG)
• Why Usability is So Critical to Healthcare IT (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

News 9/2/22

Top News

Emergency medical services technology vendor ESO acquires Occam Technologies, which offers an EMPI platform.

Webinars

September 22 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2023 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, marketing director, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, marketing manager, IMO. The yearly update to ICD-10-CM is almost here. Prepare your organization for a smooth transition, and avoid any negative impacts to your bottom line, with an in-depth look at the upcoming changes. Listen to IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders discuss the 2023 ICD-10-CM coding changes. This webinar will review additions, deletions, and other revisions to the ICD-10-CM code set and how to make sure you get properly reimbursed.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Wheel, which offers virtual health infrastructure and clinical services, lays off 35 employees, representing 17% of its headcount. The company says the workforce reduction will allow it change focus from building a marketplace to developing an enterprise platform.

Sectra creates a genomics IT business unit and will work with University of Pennsylvania Health System to develop a precision medicine solution.

Insurer Oscar Health announces in an SEC filing that a Florida health plan is cancelling its contract to use Oscar’s technology platform. Health First Health Plans, which previously announced that it was pausing its implementation of the +Oscar system due to integration challenges, was generating $60 million in annual revenue for Oscar.

Walgreens Boots Alliance completes its acquisition of a majority stake in CareCentrix, which sells predictive analytics and homecare technology.

Innovaccer reportedly lays off 120 employees, about 8% of its workforce, nine months after it ran a $150 million Series E funding round that valued the company at $3 billion.

Specialty acute care telemedicine vendor SOC Telemed acquires Forefront Telecare, which offers virtual behavioral health services.

Sales

• Visage Imaging signs contracts with Montage Health, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Bay Imaging Consultants.

People

Katherine Virkstis, ND (Advisory Board) joins Get Well as VP of clinical advisory services.

Announcements and Implementations

The Sequoia Project publishes QHIN standard operating procedures and an application for designation, which it will begin accepting on October 3.

The CommonWell Health Alliance will apply to become a QHIN.

Ochsner Health incorporates oncology precision medicine information from Tempus in its Epic system.

Southern Ohio Medical Center reports a 30% reduction in hospital-acquired C. difficile infections following work with Meditech Professional Services and implementation of Expanse tools.

Wellstar Health System will close money-losing 460-bed Atlanta Medical Center on November 1, leaving Grady Memorial Hospital as the city’s only level 1 trauma center.

Masimo releases its $499 W1 consumer health watch, which offers continuous monitoring of oxygen saturation, pulse rate, respiration rate, and hydration levels. The medical version, which is available only outside the US, adds spot check ECG, atrial fibrillation detection, and a remote monitoring and telehealth application for clinicians and hospitals.

Privacy and Security

Credit rating agency Fitch Ratings says that the cost of cyber risk mitigation is increasing for non-profit hospitals even as their margins are decreasing, placing them at more risk for cyberattacks.

Other

A physician-authored opinion piece calls the EHR inbox an “after-hours second job for physicians” who are expected to respond to patient messages and manage low-value inbox notices without compensation or adjusted productivity targets. The authors recommend:

• Measure the volume of inbox messages and the time required to manage them.
• Turn off low-value messages, such as for tests ordered but not yet resulted and notifying primary care physicians of every test ordered during an inpatient stay.
• Assign a lower-license team to review new messages, resolve those they can, and then meet with the physician to manage the rest.
• Pay physicians for providing patient services via email and include that work in productivity measures.
• Research the non-visit inbox work across specialties, assess the risk and benefits to patient care of that work, and study the effectiveness of interventions that are intended to reduce inbox management demands.

A behavioral health researcher whose bipolar disorder has required numerous medication changes over the years recommends that clinicians use a simple, shareable form to document when a patient’s drugs are started, stopped, or adjusted along with the reason for the change. The document would help patients remember their medication history and avoid having a medication ordered that was previously unsuccessful.

An emergency medicine physician leaves the specialty, citing inappropriate ED use that is fueled by hospital administrators and contracted ED operators who boost profits by encouraging people to visit the ED for sports physicals and other non-emergent issues. Leonard Arnavi, MD also observes that hospitals push HIPAA responsibilities onto doctors even though ED layouts guarantee a lack of privacy, tie compensation to patient satisfaction surveys that force doctors to choose between practicing good medicine versus giving patients what they want, and train resident physicians poorly in their quest to capture GME funds and to create a supply of cheap labor.

Zus Health founder Jonathan Bush provides his always-interesting perspective to Fast Company. Snips:

• The hospital itself can only serve the people that can drive there. They’re in a local battle for a deep, vertical monopoly … [new market entrants are saying], “I’m going to take one narrow thing—anxiety, prediabetes—and crush it nationally.” These new companies don’t give a shit about vertical monopoly. They have no plans on even having an exam room, let alone a lab, a pharmacy, an operating room, an imaging center.
• A new class of company that on their most selfish day are happy to share data because that’s not how they make money; they can’t win by controlling your referral patterns beyond what they’re focused on.
• While Amazon has been able to keep its true North Star ever “closer to the customer,” One Medical has needed to seek payment from one hospital provider over another. This channel conflict with consumer interest will be very tough to iron out as the market heats up.
• [Health IT startups should] quickly get to the thing that no one else has and spend all your R&D, design, product time on that and rent everything else, at least until you get to break even or get to some sort of operational stability. That may be obvious advice, but during this last orgy of nearly free capital, people forgot it, and many young people started businesses not ever knowing that was a thing, and they’re about to get a massive bucket of water on their head explaining it to them.

Sponsor Updates

• Tegria supports the Snoqualmie Valley Schools Foundation in Snoqualmie, WA.
• PerfectServe celebrates its 25th anniversary.
• Surescripts releases a new episode of its There’s a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology Podcast, “Healthcare, Tech, and Capitol Hill.”
• Vocera releases a new Caring Greatly podcast, “Linking Leader and Team Member Well-Being.”
• Sixteen of Wolters Kluwer Health’s Lippincott healthcare publications earn 24 wins in the annual Awards for Publication Excellence competition.
• Surescripts announces that use of its Record Locator and Exchange increased by 76% in the first half of 2022 versus 2021, exchanging 622 million clinical documents for 62 million Americans.

Blog Posts

• How Better Clinical Communication Can Reduce Sentinel Events (PerfectServe)
• How optimizing your emergency department system improves the clinician and patient experience (Meditech)
• Data management in the age of telehealth (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Leveraging the Find Care Experience to Help Alleviate Workforce Shortages (Kyruus)
• Top 3 Strategies for Rural Healthcare Success (Medhost)
• TEFCA: A leap toward achieving nationwide interoperability (Oracle Cerner)
• Your Rehab Therapy EMR: The Key to Documentation Efficiency (Net Health)
• Behavioral Health CPT Codes for 2023 Encourage BHI & Technology Adoption (NeuroFlow)
• How Data Interoperability Can Be an Elixir for Expediting Clinical Trial Results (NTT Data)
• How to Alleviate Staffing Challenges with Automation (Nym)
• Can OpenNotes Be Too Open? (Nordic)
• Revamp the Patient Journey to Increase Revenue (PatientBond)
• Three Key Policies to Advance At-Home Care (Premier)
• Care for the Caregiver: It’s Not Selfish … It’s Practical (Quil)
• 2023 is Coming! Plan (and Budget) for These Risk Adjustment Challenges (RCxRules)
• 6 things to consider with inpatient virtual care (Sonifi Health)
• How digital transformation in healthcare improves patient experience (Talkdesk)
• 5G and the Coming Home Health Revolution (Tegria)
• 4 Things You’re Missing Out on by Not Leveraging Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (WebPT)
• ANCC’s Magnet Certification Journey: An Attractive Proposition (Part 1) (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 8/31/22

Top News

Politico points out that the HHS Office for Civil Rights can’t keep up with investigating healthcare cyberattacks, helping healthcare organizations better protect themselves against attacks, and enforcing HIPAA.

The office lacks funding, staff, and other resources. Fewer than 100 OCR investigators, some of whom are tasked with other duties, are expected to deal with 53,000 cases this year.

A 2023 budget increase, if passed, will allow the office to hire 37 more investigators.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I failed to add some of Dr. Jayne’s photos in her Monday recap of Epic UGM, so check out the updated version.

Webinars

September 22 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2023 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, marketing director, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, marketing manager, IMO. The yearly update to ICD-10-CM is almost here. Prepare your organization for a smooth transition, and avoid any negative impacts to your bottom line, with an in-depth look at the upcoming changes. Listen to IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders discuss the 2023 ICD-10-CM coding changes. This webinar will review additions, deletions, and other revisions to the ICD-10-CM code set and how to make sure you get properly reimbursed.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Post-acute care coordination software vendor Olio Health raises $13 million in a Series A funding round.

Critical event management technology company Everbridge reportedly considers putting itself up for sale, causing its share price to jump 17% in after-hours trading. The Vermont-based company went through a proxy fight earlier this year with an activist investor who called for Everbridge’s sale in the midst of falling share prices. David Wagner (Zix) joined the company as CEO in July.

Healee raises $2 million in a seed funding round led by Nina Capital. The company’s white-label technology helps providers set up telehealth, digital appointment scheduling, and patient check-in services.

Medical product RFID tracking vendor Biolog-ID announces plans to go public in a $300 million SPAC merger.

Sales

• ScionHealth (KY) will implement Cadence’s remote patient monitoring and virtual care technology across its 18 community hospitals.

People

Former National Coordinator and Health Evolution founder David Brailer, MD, PhD joins Cigna as EVP/chief health officer.

Nilesh Patil (Emids) joins WellStack as chief growth and strategy officer.

Medhost names CFO Matthew Higgins president of MedTeam Solutions, its newly consolidated and expanded line of business services.

Steve Gottfried (Curasev) joins Myndshft as VP of business development.

New York-Presbyterian Hospital promotes Rhonda Bartlett, DBA, RN to VP of digital services.

Announcements and Implementations

Blessing Health System (IL) implements Wolters Kluwer Health’s POC Advisor for sepsis detection and patient management at Blessing Hospital and Illini Community Hospital.

Conduit Health Partners announces GA of remote patient monitoring nursing services.

Children’s Hospital New Orleans will use Cleveland Clinic’s e-radiology service to ensure that its clinicians have around-the-clock access to pediatric radiology experts.

Lee Health (FL) expands its virtual care services with remote patient monitoring capabilities from Health Recovery Solutions.

Redox announces a major expansion of its interoperability operations in Canada.

Government and Politics

The VA names Lynette Sherrill deputy assistant secretary for information security and CISO.

Lyster Army Health Clinic at Fort Rucker Army Base (AL) and the 78th Medical Group at Robins Air Force Base (GA) will go live on MHS Genesis next month.

Other

Morris Hospital & Healthcare Centers (IL) recognizes Nikki Jackson as its Fire Starter of the Month for her work as an applications specialist within its IT department. CIO John Wilcox says Jackson’s value was especially evident during the Kronos timekeeping outage last year: “Nikki was able to build a temporary timekeeping system for us through iShare, something many organizations that were in the same situation weren’t able to replicate. It really displayed what Nikki is able to do for our organization every day.”

West Virginia University Medicine opens its first pediatric telemedicine and specialty clinic in an effort to help families in rural, southern parts of the state access care.

Sponsor Updates

• Surescripts joins Civitas Networks for Health as a strategic business and technology partner.
• Ascom receives FIPS 140-2 certification for the Myco3 smartphone.
• Baker Tilly publishes a new case study, “Real-world evidence help medical device company navigate CMS reimbursement rule.”
• Bamboo Health donates technology to Jefferson County Public Schools, the Louisville Tool Library, and UpLouisville.
• Nordic releases a new video highlighting its metadata-driven pipeline.
• Oracle Cerner releases a new podcast, “How data and tech advancements enabled innovation in the Middle East.”
• KLAS rates Clearwater as a top performer in its new research report reviewing the security and privacy consulting services market.
• Clinical Architecture celebrates its 15^th anniversary.
• Direct Recruiters hires Guru Brandes-Swamy (LetsGetChecked) as director of analytics for its healthcare IT and life sciences practice.
• Texas Children’s Hospital CIO Myra Davis joins Divurgent’s advisory board.
• Ellkay publishes a new customer success story, “WakeMed Health. Connectivity and Error Reduction Produce Big ROI.”
• KLAS recognizes Impact Advisors for exceeding client expectations in its new research report reviewing the security and privacy consulting services market.

Blog Posts

• Back to school: Top scholarly tools for 2022 (AdvancedMD)
• The Future of HIM Audits (AGS Health)
• What is value-based care? ACOs and the future of healthcare (Arcadia)
• Three Ways to Manage the Healthcare Supply Chain in An Era of Disruption (Ascom)
• Tips for managing patient-provider communications during a practice merger (Bravado Health)
• Optimize Orders in Meditech Now to Save Providers Time Later (CereCore)
• 4 Characteristics to Look for in a Change Management Partner (CTG)
• The Healthcare Economy’s New Conundrum (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• The Power of Data is Expanding: Reflections from the CMS HL7 FHIR Connectathon for 2022 (Diameter Health)
• Making the Case for Value-Based Care: BCBS Execs Speak Out (Enlace Health)
• Digital Care Management: The Evolution of Patient-First Solutions (Get Well)
• How data supports initiatives to automate implant orders (GHX)
• St. Luke’s University Health Network’s Cloud Transformation Journey (HCI Group)
• Tips for Hiring and Managing Remote Workers (Healthcare IT Leaders)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/29/22

Top News

An August 5 ransomware attack on software vendor Advanced that took down England’s 111 service along with mental health and community systems may not be resolved for several weeks, hospital employees are told.

Hospitals say that updating patient information after the systems are restored usually requires two weeks for each day of downtime, meaning that it could take up to a year before clinicians have access to full patient records online.

People who call 111 are waiting on hold for an average of 6.5 minutes versus the target of 20 seconds. Public health campaigns are urging people to call 111 instead of visiting hospital emergency departments in anticipation of backups this winter that are caused by “fuel poverty,” with gas and electricity bills expected to double in October.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Nearly two-thirds of poll respondents would not post a “looking for work” item on LinkedIn. Some say that strategy might work for a new grad or someone who needs a job, any job quickly, but basically LinkedIn is just another resume that will be ignored, especially with the “Facebook-ization” of the platform. I concur with DrShowoff’s advice: clean up your profile, add quantifiable numbers that illustrate your performance, use words that will help Linkedin searchers find you, and make sure your headshot is current and of high quality. To which I would add:

• Don’t refer to yourself in the third person as though an unseen, admiring biographer penned your profile.
• Write like you talk.
• Make your “About” summary the story you would want to tell a potential hirer first.
• Be concise in your “Experience” items and don’t waste space describing the business that each employer was in (anyone likely to hire you knows that Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is a hospital, for instance).
• The objective is brevity, so omit anything that won’t impact your being hired – your GPA, your one-month try at consulting between jobs, and the membership groups that anyone can join by writing a check.
• Consider writing posts that show what you know, including videos if that’s a strength.
• Use the platform for messaging specific contacts instead of passively hoping that someone finds your profile.
• I usually pay no attention to bottom part of the profile (Skills, Interests, Honors and Awards, Organizations, etc.) although I’ll sometimes glance at “Recommendations.”

Speaking of LinkedIn advice, I’m spending my morning removing connections or unfollowing folks who hopefully understand that their repeated likes and comments are pushed into my newsfeed. I can grit my teeth through “humbled” self-promotion, company pitches, topics unrelated to healthcare IT, and vapid “inspiration” posts written as one-sentence paragraphs, but I’m not here (or anywhere else) for individual insights about politics, sports, or just about any topic that starts with “I don’t usually share personal posts on LinkedIn” and ends with doing exactly that. Surely we all know that potential employers or customers look people up on LinkedIn and make decisions accordingly, and that social media platforms power their most annoying and evil activities via newsfeeds that intentionally push content that you didn’t ask for.

New poll to your right or here: What is the #1 reason you think Amazon is shutting down its Amazon Care primary care business? I couldn’t list every possible answer, so feel free to add a poll comment with yours.

I’m feeling the need to learn. Who outside of the vendor world would make a good interview? Should I review a book or other creative work? I’m most interested in the less-represented folks rather than those who are amply promoted by themselves or others, although it’s often a challenge for the rank-and-file people to get employer permission to be interviewed.

Webinars

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

Sales

• SAP-owned marketing technology vendor Emarsys contracts for cybersecurity and HIPAA compliance managed services from Clearwater.

People

Net Health hires Gabe Hesse (Arrive Health) as CTO and promotes Kevin Keenahan, MSE to chief product officer.

Kidney care company Somatus hires Joe Kimura, MD, MPH (Atrius Health) as chief medical officer.

Gene Sawyer (Optum) joins Evergreen Nephrology as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

A eight-customer KLAS review of Microsoft cloud technologies in healthcare is favorable, with clients reporting stable cloud solutions that aren’t oversold. However, they are less enthused about the company’s delivery of new technology and its track record of keeping promises, noting specifically that Teams needs work and the company’s licensing and cost issues are concerning. Amazon Web Services rates stronger in technology and keeping promises, while Microsoft performs better in executive involvement and partnership. Common uses of Azure are virtual desktops, virtual data centers, digital pathology image storage, AI/ML computing, and EHR hosting. More than half of customers say Microsoft’s cloud technologies reduced specific costs and shortened project timelines.

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• Can OpenNotes be too open? (Nordic)
• Medicare Mythbusters: 5 Medicare Advantage Insights to Know for Open Enrollment (PatientBond)
• How Better Clinical Communication Can Reduce Sentinel Events (PerfectServe)
• Three Key Policies to Advance At-Home Care (Premier)
• 6 things to consider with inpatient virtual care (Sonifi Health)
• How Medical Systems Solve Clinical Workflow Challenges with TigerConnect Roles and Teams (TigerConnect)
• To help retain nurses, fix communication: NASA TLX survey (Vocera)

Contacts

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

News 8/26/22

Top News

Amazon will close Amazon Care on December 31. It says that despite high patient satisfaction, the three-year-old virtual care offering did not provide a complete solution for its target audience of employers, concluding in an internal email that the business “wasn’t going to work long term.”

Amazon says it knew the business was not likely to be successful before it decided to acquire primary care chain One Medical, which was announced July 21. Some observers speculate that Amazon decided to focus on One Medical, which also sells to employers and offers telemedicine services. That acquisition has not yet received regulatory clearance.

Amazon had recently announced an expansion of Amazon Care locations and services for 2022.

A Washington Post article from last week quoted company nurses who questioned Amazon’s heavy-handed operation of the business despite its limited healthcare knowledge.

Shares in Medicare Advantage home care operator Signify Health, which is reported to be the target of acquisition interest by Amazon (along with UnitedHealth and others), jumped on the news.

Some of the online reactions:

• The company may have concluded that it makes more sense to work with providers instead of self-insured employers since the most expensive patients aren’t usually covered by employer insurance.
• Amazon Care may have hit a wall in hiring clinical employees.
• One Medical offers telehealth services, but also runs in-person clinics.
• Some speculate that Amazon is closing the business to ease any regulatory concerns that are related to its One Medical acquisition.
• The implications of Amazon not finding a go-forward path in telehealth may spill over into traditional providers.
• The failure of both Amazon Care and its Haven joint project may have caused Amazon to realize the challenges of building versus acquiring a healthcare business.

Webinars

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

Sales

• Baptist Health South Florida will implement Innovaccer Health Cloud for population health analytics, provider engagement, and care management.
• Northern Ireland’s Department of Health chooses Lyniate to connect health and social systems to Epic, which goes live nationally in 2023.
• MedAllies will implement Lyniate EMPI by NextGate.

Announcements and Implementations

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner says at the company’s UGM conference that the records of 162 million Americans are stored in its Cosmos research database, which was used to author an article with the CDC that progressed from first draft to publication in one month. The company also announced a Cosmos feature called “Look-alikes” that will allow physicians to submit symptoms of a puzzling diagnosis to identify patients who have similar issues and to share information with their doctors . An Epic developer took the stage to lay out the benefits that are accruing from moving to a web-based platform, including easier upgrades and the ability to improve usability.

Pacific Dental Services completes the implementation of Epic in its 900 practices, which it says will support the role of oral health in overall health. The company trained 14,000 employees in converted the records of 10 million patients in the transition from its previous practice management system.

In England, the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Foundation Trust goes live on GE Healthcare Edison True PACS on Amazon Web Services, which it says allows continuous cybersecurity patching and reduced carbon footprint.

Cardiology virtual care vendor MediCardia Health and aging-related genomics company Human Longevity launch a platform that uses extracted EHR data for patient risk assessment and remote patient monitoring. MediCardia founder and CEO Indrajit Choudhuri, MD completed fellowships in nuclear medicine, cardiovascular disease, and cardiac electrophysiology before starting the company in 2020.

First Databank launches FDB Navigo, which provides retail pharmacists with the patient’s most important risks, as derived from the pharmacy’s computer system, to help determine the “next best step.” 

Google announces the next generation of Fitbit wearables that includes the advanced, $300 Sense 2 smartwatch, which includes continuous heart rate monitoring and tracking of sleep and stress.

.

A new KLAS report on security and privacy consulting services finds high customer satisfaction with First Health Advisory and Impact Advisors, lowest overall scores for Intraprise Health and Meditology Services, and high satisfaction with managed services firms Fortified Health Security and CynergisTek (which will be acquired by Clearwater).

Government and Politics

The White House eliminates the optional 12-month journal article paywall embargo for federally-funded research projects, requiring journal publishers to make the articles and their associated data promptly available at no charge starting in 2026.

The Federal Trade Commission files a complaint about advertising technology vendor Kochava, saying that the company’s tools potentially violate the health privacy of consumers whose location and time are logged and then sold. The company denies the allegations, but says it will stop collecting mobile device user locations that involve health.

Other

A study of Epic Cosmos data finds that while 50% of suspected overdose patients are tested for opiates in the ED, only 5% of them are also tested for fentanyl, which was involved in 56,000 overdose deaths in 2020. The authors speculate that fentanyl testing is uncommon because it is usually not included in ED toxicology screening panels.

The New Yorker takes an on-the-ground look at what it’s like for residents of a nursing home that is acquired by a private equity firm. Spoiler: executives care only about cutting costs, always painfully and sometimes dangerously, and using complex corporate structures to protect the parent organization from the inevitable lawsuits over lower care quality.

Sponsor Updates

• NTT Data staff serve children and families staying at The Children’s Inn at the National Institutes of Health.
• Intelligent Medical Objects publishes a new case study featuring Piedmont Healthcare, “Optimizing OR scheduling and perioperative workflows.”
• Juniper Networks announces key milestones that highlight the company’s growth in the wired and wireless access space, including gaining the largest US healthcare provider as a customer.
• Nordic joins KLAS’s Arch Collaborative that looks at EHR best practices and clinician burnout.
• Surescripts joins interoperability organization Civitas Networks for Health.

Blog Posts

• Blessing Health targets smarter sepsis surveillance with Wolters Kluwer (Wolters Kluwer)
• How to Collect Patient Feedback in Urgent Care (Experity)
• The STAR Method: Four Steps to Make a Lasting Impression in Your Next Interview (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Leverage Your Hospital EHR to Reduce Medication Dispensing Errors (Medhost)
• The role of EHR extensions in enhancing patient care (Nordic)
• Keeping patients up to date on immunizations with patient registries (Meditech)
• Hold on Tight: Waves of Healthcare Regulations Ahead in Effort to Solve Prior Authorization Woes (Myndshft)
• Be Consistent, Focused In Your Rehab Therapy Marketing Strategy (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 8/24/22

Top News

Struggling Babylon Health cancels its last NHS contract eight years early, saying that the projects aren’t profitable enough to continue in a cost-cutting environment.

Babylon had offered an AI-based chatbot for triaging patients and a telehealth service.

The company will focus on the US market, where the for-profit healthcare system generates more potential funding.

BBLN shares are down more than 90% since the company went public in a SPAC merger in October 2021.

Reader Comments

From Long Island IT: “Re: Northwell. Word in metro New York is that it is talking to Epic now that its CIO, who was tied tightly to Allscripts, is gone and the product set has been sold to Harris.” Unverified. Northwell and Allscripts announced in October 2019 that they would co-develop a next-generation EHR (which never happened) and Northwell extended its Allscripts contracts through 2027.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares of Signify Health jump on the news that Amazon is reportedly interested in acquiring the home healthcare company, joining CVS Health and UnitedHealth. Final bids for Signify, which could achieve an $8 billion valuation, are due around Labor Day. UnitedHealth’s bid of $30 a share has made it the frontrunner thus far, followed by Amazon, which acquired membership-based primary care company One Medical last month for nearly $4 billion.

Virtual care company Recuro Health acquires Competitive Health, which offers digital health programs to employers. Recuro, which was founded last year by Teladoc founder Michael Gorton, acquired virtual primary care company WellVia in April.

Shares of Zoom took a beating on Tuesday as the company reported mixed quarterly results and lowered its forecast after enterprise sales failed to offset the loss of consumer users. A huge growth in Microsoft Teams users isn’t helping. ZM shares peaked in October 2020 at $559. They are now at $81, having lost 75% of their value in the past 12 months.

Sales

• Baptist Health chooses Censinet for vendor and product risk assessment.
• BronxCare Health System will implement virtual physical therapy, care paths, and remote education from Force Therapeutics for its orthopedic patients.

People

Suki names Belwadi Srikanth, MBA (Google) VP of product and design.

Brittany Carter, MBA (Cboe Global Markets) joins ChartSpan as CFO.

Todd Garlitz, MBA (LexisNexis Risk Solutions) joins virtual genomic services company Genome Medical as VP of growth marketing.

David Wardlaw, MBA (MobileSmith Health) joins Avant-garde Health as SVP of sales.

Tamara Elias, MD (Merck) joins Nuance / Microsoft as SVP of strategy and business incubation.

Announcements and Implementations

Cone Health’s payer subsidiary, HealthTeam Advantage, implements Bamboo Health’s Pings real-time care notification technology.

Brown & Toland Physicians makes e-consults with Stanford Health Care (CA) subspecialists available to its network of primary care physicians.

The Sequoia Project selects HITRUST as the certifying body for organizations looking to prove compliance with TEFCA security requirements for designation as Qualified Health Information Networks.

Payments technology vendor Anomaly announces an AI-powered claims prediction engine that it says can identify likely actionable denials with 97% accuracy.

The National Cancer Institute awards a grant to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to publish best practices for telehealth-enabled cancer care, which will include a study of its MSK@Home program for breast and prostate cancer.

Privacy and Security

Methodist McKinney Hospital (TX) refuses to pay hackers to retrieve 360 gigabytes of data that was stolen in a recent ransomware attack, which also affected two Methodist surgery centers. The attack occurred between May and July. The hackers have threatened to sell the data on the dark web.

In France, ransomware hackers demand $10 million to restore the systems of 1,000-bed CHSF Hospital Centre, which is sending patients to other hospitals.

The federal government warns hospitals about voice phishing attacks, in which hackers use telephone calls to convince computer users to install malware. The targeted user receives an email indicating that a subscription that they never signed up for is ending or from what is claimed to be a government entity or technology company, with instructions to call a provided telephone number for more information.

Other

The Verona paper profiles Epic’s artist-in-residence Manabu Ikeda, whose on-campus studio is open for visitors each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m.

A reader sent this shot of the famous opening campfire of Epic UGM. They offered kudos to the Verona fire department for managing the actual campfires. Meanwhile, I’ve read quite a few horror stories about would-be attendees who are sitting home because the airlines couldn’t figure out how to get them to Verona.

I had a photo of Judy’s keynote at Epic UGM inserted here that I should have noticed (as a couple of readers did who told me) that it was actually from last year’s conference, when the hall seemed emptier with distancing in place. That’s what I get for just searching Twitter for “EpicUGM” and forgetting that I would get old results since I almost never do a Twitter hashtag search. Anyway, Deep Space was apparently packed this week with 11,000 people in the audience. Thanks for the folks who let me know I goofed, and thanks in advance to whomever sends me a photo from this year’s session.

Sponsor Updates

• WebPT releases the Keet Remote Therapeutic Monitoring Dashboard and announces enhanced integrations with WebPT and Insight EHRs.
• Ellkay adds CRM data archiving to its LKArchive platform.
• CarePort will exhibit at the Chicago Care Coordination Summit August 30.
• An OptimizeRx study finds that its Evidence-Based Physician Engagement solution successfully identified doctors whose patients have treatment plans that may lapse due to a loss of insurance coverage.
• Biofourmis COO Jaydev Thakkar will present at the 2022 DPharm Idol Disrupt Event September 13 in Boston.
• Diameter Health exhibits at the Civitas Networks for Health Conference through August 24 in San Antonio.
• Bamboo Health makes its Crisis Management System available to support 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline regional call centers.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare leaders share four key insights on RCM innovation (Ability Network)
• How this simple cybersecurity practice could save you from a data breach (AdvancedMD)
• Healthcare analytics: build or buy? (Arcadia)
• Quitting Time Part 1: Integrating Programs to Drive Tobacco Cessation (Azara Healthcare)
• Leveraging Direct EHR Integration for Improved Clinical Efficiency and Patient Care (Bamboo Health)
• Making SDOH actionable at the point of care (Bravado Health)
• Patient Matching: It’s More Complicated Than You Think (CarePort)
• Meditech Expanse: Why Clinicians Love It (CereCore)
• Most Common IT Vulnerabilities for Practices (ChartLogic)
• Empowering Providers Through a Technology-Driven Physician Practice Management Platform (Clearwater)
• Defeating Copay Maximizer Programs: Supporting Clients in the Battle Against Payer Cost-Shifting (ConnectiveRx)
• Nursing Success within Hospital at Home (Current Health)
• Divurgent Turns 15 – A Look at Past, Present, and Future (Divurgent)
• Addressing the Acute Need for Chronic Care Services (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/22/22

Top News

VA data obtained by FedScoop under the Freedom of Information Act shows that the VA has had a least 45 days of Oracle Cerner downtime and 498 major incidents since its first rollout in September 2020.

The VA itself was responsible for one-third of the incidents.

The system issues caused 930 hours of incomplete functionality, 103 hours of degraded performance, and 40 hours of compete downtime.

The VA lists five medical centers as being live on the Oracle Cerner system — Spokane, WA; Walla Walla, WA; Columbus, OH; Roseburg, OR; and White City, OR. It has paused deployments that were scheduled for 2022 until next year.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said in response to the FedScoop report, “The bottom line is that my confidence in the EHR is badly shaken … the system is not meeting those goals and needs major improvement. We at VA could not be more frustrated on behalf of Veterans and providers, and we’re holding Cerner, Oracle, and ourselves accountable to get this right.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The employers of most poll respondents haven’t had big layoffs in the past year.

New poll to your right or here: Would you post a “looking for work” article on LinkedIn if you needed a job? I’ve seen a ton of those lately and I would do the same – there’s no shame in seeking the next gig and LinkedIn’s reach is broad, although of unknown effectiveness.

The weather looks good for this week’s Epic UGM, with daytime highs barely reaching 80 and nicely cool, campfire nights in the high 50s. A few HIStalk sponsors updated me on what they’ll be doing there, so check that out. Your photos and reports are welcome.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor KeyCare. The newly launched company offers health systems access to a network of independent virtual care providers via its Epic-based platform, avoiding the challenge of overwhelmed internal providers and third-party telehealth vendors that use poorly integrated technologies. Health systems can easily augment their care teams, optimize capacity, and enhance their digital front doors by partnering with a nationwide network of virtual care groups, while patients can schedule appointments with virtualists from the health system’s MyChart portal or call center. Encounters are then documented in KeyCare’s Epic system, ensuring a seamless experience. The company’s first customer is BHSH Spectrum Health West Michigan Division, which says the service provides patient convenience while ensuring robust data sharing and streamlined clinical workflows. KeyCare and Spectrum Health will present details of their work at Epic UGM this week. KeyCare’s founder and CEO is industry long-timer Lyle Berkowitz, MD, aka DrLyle. The company just announced a $24 million Series A funding round. Thanks to KeyCare for supporting HIStalk. 

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Idaho Health Data Exchange files Chapter 11 bankruptcy after federal and state funding dries up, leaving it $4 million in debt. IHDE, which was created in 2008, says it will reduce costs and move toward heavier use of subscription and user-based fees. 

Announcements and Implementations

NHS will pilot the use of smart glasses by home care nurses, hoping to reduce nurse administrative work by sending visit transcription to the EHR and offering them a way to obtain instant second opinions virtually. The software was developed by physician-launched Concept Health, which offers virtual and augmented reality based programs for remote consultation, chronic condition recovery, pulmonary rehab, relaxation, pain relief, and fall prevention.

Government and Politics

The Federal Trade Commission says that hospital mergers that are approved by states under Certificates of Public Advantage – state laws that shield hospital mergers from federal antitrust enforcement – usually don’t improve quality, increase employee compensation, improve access, or lower costs. FTC notes that most of the hospitals that sought COPAs to accomplish a merger ended up creating a single-hospital monopoly and that competition is the best way to improve cost and quality.

Privacy and Security

Novant Health sends 1.3 million letters to patients whose information it shared with Facebook via the Meta Pixel website visitor tracking tool. Novant says it implemented the technology in May 2020 to track the effectiveness of its marketing campaign for the use of Epic MyChart to boost virtual visits, adding that Facebook received more information than the health system intended because Novant configured the tracking tool incorrectly. Novant says it may have sent email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, emergency contact lists, appointment types and dates, and button clicks and freetext entries. Website The Markup told several hospitals in May 2022 that they were sending PHI to Facebook, after which Novant and some other named health systems removed it. Novant says it asked Meta Facebook about removing the information of its patients, but the company never responded.

Other

Amazon Care nurses say they were surprised by some of the company’s decisions in running a health business virtually. Examples:

• Home care nurses were asked to dispose of medical waste at home and to use blood centrifuge machines in their cars.
• The company didn’t collect patient emergency contact information until clinical staff told them it was necessary.
• Amazon chose a “bargain basement” off-the-shelf EHR instead of waiting for a vendor to develop a custom one and equipped nurses with wireless stethoscopes that didn’t always work.
• Nurses were sent to see patients in hotel rooms and at street protests without tracking their locations or giving them emergency button software.
• They struggled to keep up with state-specific telehealth regulations and worried about outcomes from the company’s use of untrained contract nurses.
• They worried about the cultural divide between nurses and Amazon employees, one of whom reportedly told a telehealth nurse that they were considered “the warehouse workers of Amazon Care.”

A Wall Street Journal report describes the drug overdose death of a pre-med student who obtained Adderal from online mental health provider Done. Points:

• Companies such as Done generate prescriptions for stimulants such as Adderal after video calls that list as little as 10 minutes and pressure their contracted clinicians to issue prescriptions if patients seek them.
• The patient, who lived in a sober-living house, didn’t disclose his drug addiction history to Done’s nurse practitioner. He relapsed shortly afterward and died of a drug overdose.
• The nurse practitioner was new to the company and had little experience with ADHD. She says she checked California’s prescription drug monitoring database as required by law, but didn’t notice the patient was  prescribed Suboxone by a rehab center.
• The company, which was started by a former Facebook executive who has no medical background, considered firing the nurse practitioner because she was supposed to name a supervising physician as state law requires and had failed to do so.
• Done’s clinicians are paid $10 per month for each monthly renewal, with one of them saying that she made $20,000 per month cranking out refill prescriptions at 30 seconds each.
• The company responded to complaints about its practices from the patient’s mother by saying that it offers only a technical platform that matches patients to medical professionals, with no responsibility for any prescriptions that result.

Sponsor Updates

• Optum publishes a new success snapshot, “Regional One amplifies utilization review effectiveness with Optum Case Advisor.”
• Surescripts releases a new episode of its There’s a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology Podcast, “The Giant Sequoia as a Metaphor for Advancing Interoperability.”
• Vocera publishes a new white paper, “Smart, connected hospital framework.”
• Ragan honors Well Health VP of People Marissa Morrison with a Platinum HR Award in the Future Leaders category.
• Verato will exhibit at the Civitas Networks for Health Annual Conference August 21-24 in San Antonio.

Blog Posts

• Telehealth Grants: The What, Where and Why (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Hospital Call Center Software: How to Solve the Top 3 Issues (PerfectServe)
• Physician Documentation Improvement Software Helps Bellin Health Improve RAF Score by 16 Percent (Premier)
• Five Ways to Ease Difficult Conversations About Transitions in Care (Quil)
• 6 Overwhelming Statistics That Illustrate the Staffing Challenge RCM Leaders Are Up Against (RCxRules)
• How health systems accelerate their RPM strategies with Redox (Redox)
• 10 ways digital signs can improve your hospital (Sonifi Health)
• Applying Blueprints to Revenue Cycle: How Christus Health Elevates Future-State Operations (Tegria)
• Understanding the financial impacts of clinical communication and collaboration (TigerConnect)
• 5 Ways to Retain Rehab Therapy Staff in 2022 and Beyond (WebPT)
• The Future of Healthcare: Acute-at-Home (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 8/19/22

Top News

KeyCare, which offers an virtual-first care platform that gives Epic-using health systems access to a network of independent virtual care providers, raises $24 million in a Series A funding round.

KeyCare’s founder and CEO is industry long-timer Lyle Berkowitz, MD.

The company’s website says that patients can use the service directly to connect with clinicians starting later this year

Reader Comments

From Quiet Cacaphony: “Re: Epic. Posted a job for a medical biller who will work on RCM activities for clients. Is this the start of a tentative or aggressive entry into rev cycle outsourcing, which Epic has eschewed? The job is based at headquarters with full benefits, so the strategy certainly doesn’t involve leveraging squeezed labor costs.” The job listing is nearly identical from one from mid-2017, when Epic was first launching billing services for Resolute Professional Billing customers, so this doesn’t seem like something new.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

UGM 2022 attendees: connect with HIStalk sponsors while you’re in Verona.

I dislike using “reimbursement” to refer to provider payments since the word means being repaid for expenses you incurred.  The correct but obsolete term is “imburse,” which simply means getting paid. It’s odd that hospitals and doctors try to hide the fact that they send bills, get paid, and make a profit from income that exceeds expense by calling it something else.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient engagement and access platform vendor Upfront acquires PatientBond, which offers patient relationship solutions. Upfront has raised $20 million through a Series B funding round.

Nurse job-matching website Incredible Health raises $80 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at $1.7 billion. Co-founder and CEO Iman Abuzeid, MBBS, MBA went directly from medical school into health consulting, worked in project management for AliveCor, and then started a healthcare customer retention software company with a colleague that they shut down to start their current venture.

ASG, which buys and runs vertical SaaS companies, acquires MediMatrix, which sells a solution for portable radiology imaging services.

HIPAA-compliant email vendor Paubox raises $10 million in funding.

Impact Advisors acquires business intelligence consulting firm C2 Healthcare.

Sales

• Warren General Hospital will implement Meditech Expanse in a $2.3 million project.
• British Columbia’s Fraser Health Authority chooses Picis Preop Manager, Anesthesia Manager, and PACU Manager for 11 acute care hospitals, integrated with Meditech as the health system replaces Client / Server with Expanse in an agreement signed in April 2022.
• Santa Cruz Health Information Organization chooses Verato’s master patient index and identity management platform.

People

Vyne promotes Steve Roberts to CEO. He replaces Lindy Benton, MS, who will serve as executive chair of the company’s board.

McLaren Health Care hires Derek Morkel, MHA (HealthTechS3) as SVP/CIO after serving as interim since late 2021.

Adam Tallinger, RPh, MHA takes a new position with Divurgent as VP of delivery.

Announcements and Implementations

Nuance and diagnostic intelligence company Covera Health launch the Quality Care Collaborative, which brings together payers, providers, and self-insured employers to support radiology quality improvement initiatives. Walmart has already joined the AHRQ-certified Patient Safety Organization as its first large-employer member.

Medical software vendor Parker Health will integrate First Databank’s FDB Vela, a cloud-native e-prescribing network, with its EHR.

Government and Politics

The Wall Street Journal reports that HHS is formulating how to shift the cost of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments to the commercial market instead of the federal government paying for everything.

Other

A study finds that higher-level EHR use is associated with a reduction in operating costs of urban hospitals – driven mostly by general / ancillary and outpatient costs – but rural hospitals don’t see any cost savings from their use. The authors note that rural hospitals more often choose vendors such as CPSI, Healthland, Evident, and Medhost than their urban counterparts, making the effect of vendor support uncertain when comparing urban versus rural hospitals.

Sponsor Updates

• CloudWave sponsors The Foundations for Firelands “Caddyshack” Open Golf Outing in support of cancer patients treated at Firelands Health.
• Get Well adds a new monkeypox digital care management plan to its library of over 250 digital care management plans.
• HIMSS Oregon appoints Pivot Point Consulting SVP Laura Kreofsky secretary and VP Joe Clemons sponsorship chair.
• Everbridge integrates its Travel Risk Management and Critical Event Management solutions into Everbridge Travel Protector for healthcare, businesses, and government organizations.
• Fivos Health will exhibit at AMP 2022 through August 20 in Chicago.
• Nordic posts a new episode in its “DocTalk” video series.
• Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at the Civitas Networks for Health 2022 Annual Conference August 21-24 in San Antonio.
• Lyniate releases the latest version of its Enterprise Master Patient Index by NextGate.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring MedAllies CEO John Blair, MD.
• Meditech releases a new podcast, “Sparking Passion and Resilience: True Stories from Nurse Leaders.”
• NTT Data Senior Director of Statewide Consulting Patti Garofalo receives a Medicaid Enterprise Systems Conference Collaboration Award at MESC 2022.

Blog Posts

• Stay Compliant: Coding Updates Effective 10/1/22 (Experity)
• Eye-opening Facts Increase Urgency to Automate Bill-only Implant Orders (GHX)
• Eliminating Barriers to Digital Transformation in Healthcare: Practical Tips (Healthcare Triangle)
• Understanding the Evaluation and Management (E/M) Level Coding Changes for 2023 (Impact Advisors)
• Coevolving with the Evolution of Healthcare Management (InterSystems)
• What’s next for the CMIO? Ten leaders weigh in. (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Diameter Health & Availity: Building the Premier Healthcare Data and Engagement Platform for Better Health and a More Efficient Healthcare System (Diameter Health)
• Know Your Cybercriminals: Using physical and digital identity attributes to identify bad actors (LexisNexis Risk Solutions)
• How Pre-Payment Billing Procedures Reduce Denials (Medhost)
• Prior Authorization and Benefits Verification Automation for Diagnostic Labs (Myndshft)
• Confessions of an EHR CEO (Net Health)
• What is “cognitive load” – and how can we help clinicians manage it? (Nuance)
• Location Matters: The Importance of Meeting Clients Where They Are (Netsmart)

Contacts

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

HIStalk Sponsors at Epic’s UGM 2022

Availity

Booth #214. People interested in reaching out to Availity can contact Stephanie Hastings at stephanie.hastings@availity.com or Kim Kirincic at kimberly.kirincic@availity.com.

Availity is the place where healthcare finds the answers needed to shift focus back to patient care. We work to solve communication challenges in healthcare by creating a richer, more transparent exchange of information among health plans, providers, and technology partners. As one of the nation’s largest health information networks, Availity facilitates billions of clinical, administrative, and financial transactions annually. Our suite of dynamic products, built on a powerful, intelligent platform, enables real-time collaboration for success in a competitive, value-based care environment. 

Baker Tilly

As Baker Tilly will not have a booth at UGM, we will be coordinating meetings with interested readers by emailing charlie.cook@bakertilly.com.

We have been providing Epic advisory services, end-to-end implementations, Refuels, upgrades, and staff augmentation resources since 2008. Our Epic Practice Director will also be at UGM and she is available for meetings from Monday – Thursday during UGM.

ELLKAY

Booth #206. ELLKAY Attendees: Ajay Kapare (Ajay.Kapare@ELLKAY.com) and Leah Gorman (Leah.Marshall@ELLKAY.com).

ELLKAY empowers hospitals, health systems, diagnostic laboratories, healthcare IT vendors, payers, and healthcare organizations with cutting-edge solutions. Since 2002, ELLKAY’s system capability has grown to over 58,000 practices connected and 700+ EMR/PM systems across 1,100+ versions.

Join us for “ELLKAY’s Taste of Wisconsin” on Monday, August 22 from 7-9 p.m. Enjoy locally-sourced favorites from Cedar Grove Cheese Curds to beers from the top six breweries in Wisconsin. Come get whisked away by the flavors from farmers and producers in the state of Wisconsin which will be paired with great conversation! RSVP today! https://lnkd.in/gk3Zjyxn.

Elsevier

Booth #201.

Since 2004, Elsevier has worked with Epic to deliver the highest quality content and solutions, ensuring you not only have the content necessary to support critical thinking and decision-making, but also seamless integration to optimize your IT investment. Elsevier can help you maintain consistent top performance, reduce variability in care, and ultimately improve patient outcomes. Come visit the Elsevier booth to learn more about all we are doing to support Epic customers for nursing and patient solutions (acute care plans, ambulatory care plans, patient education content and FHIR solutioning) reference (Skills, ClinicalKey Point of Care for Physician, Nurse, Pharmacy), provider pathways (ClinicalPath), and more.

FDB (First Databank)

Booth #211.

FDB (First Databank) creates and delivers the world’s most powerful drug knowledge that ignites, inspires, and illuminates critical medication decisions. We collaborate with our partners to help improve patient safety, operational efficiency, and health outcomes. Our drug databases drive healthcare information systems that serve the majority of hospitals, physician practices, pharmacies, payers, and all other areas of healthcare and are used by millions of clinicians, business associates, and patients every day.

Major solutions we will be sharing with our Epic user colleagues at the Epic UGM:

• CDS Analytics. An intuitive and powerful analytics tool to easily evaluate and improve the efficacy of clinical decision support for meds and beyond.
• Targeted Medication Warnings. Actionable medication guidance from a patient-first perspective. Including hyperkalemia, QT prolongation, opioid use risk assessment, nephrotoxicity, bleeding risk and pharmacogenomics.
• Pharmacogenomic CDS. Actionable drug-gene guidance within the workflow for appropriate drug therapy, to help prevent patient harm and ensure effective treatments.
• AlertSpace. Enabling clinicians to collaboratively improve and customize alerts to make them more meaningful, intuitive, and actionable.
• Meducation. Address patient medication adherence and understanding with personalized and simplified medication instructions, multilingual labeling support, and custom calendars in 30+ languages.
• FDB Vela. A new cloud-native electronic prescribing network that enables the seamless flow of critical prescription information, real-time benefits verification, and decision support between prescribers, payers, and pharmacies.

KeyCare

KeyCare and Spectrum Health will be presenting more details about their innovative use of the Epic platform and its Telehealth Anywhere technology.

Lyniate

Booth #207. People interested in reaching out to Lyniate can contact Mike Barbour at mike.barbour@lyniate.com.

Lyniate partners with healthcare organizations around the globe delivering a flexible interoperability suite that reliably connects people and the quality data they need. The Lyniate interoperability suite includes:

• Lyniate Corepoint Integration Engine
• Lyniate Rhapsody Integration Engine
• Lyniate Envoy Managed Service
• Lyniate Rapid API Gateway
• Lyniate EMPI
• Lyniate HealthTerm Clinical Terminology Management

Earlier this year, Epic selected Lyniate for integration within its Garden Plot offering, Epic’s new hosted and supported Software as a Service (SaaS) model for independent medical groups.

Sphere

Visit Sphere | TrustCommerce at Booth #200.

Sphere, powered by TrustCommerce, is trusted by the nation’s largest health systems to facilitate their integrated patient payments. Sphere helps clients process payments anytime, anywhere—securely, in compliance, and connected with core business software including EHRs. Stop by Booth #200 to learn about:

• Sphere’s TrustCommerce patient payment platform and its new digital wallet support within MyChart.
• How Sphere is now included in the Epic Garden Plot offering with integrated payments.

We’ll be giving away a set of Apple Airpod Pros. Visit us and enter to win.

News 8/17/22

Top News

CDC will regain control of hospital-reported COVID-19 data on December 31 when the government’s contract with TeleTracking ends.

HHS hired the patient flow technology company in July 2020 via a direct call to its co-CEO. HHS then instructed hospitals to stop sending their data to CDC and to instead use TeleTracking to populate the HHS Protect system.

TeleTracking has earned $50 million from the contract.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors who are attending Epic UGM, send me your participation information and I’ll include it in an online guide that I’ll run later this week. I’ve only heard from Availity, FDB, and Sphere so far, not counting the non-sponsors that submitted a form that will unfortunately remain unused. After-hours social events likely abound, so send me your info if you’re running short on invitees.

Mrs. HIStalk drafted me into doing some video recording and YouTube posting for a non-profit where she volunteers. My quickly assembled on-the-cheap technology arsenal involves an IPhone, a $32 wireless lavalier microphone, and Movavi Video Editor Plus 2022, for which I Googled to find an online coupon that dropped the no-subscription-required license down to $40. That software made it easy to edit and connect various video clips with one-click color and volume correction, insert some royalty-free opening music, and add a few text titles. I think I chose wisely (if somewhat randomly) since the Movavi software is easy to use while having a lot of powerful functions that are unobtrusive until needed. I’m not a video expert and have no interest in becoming one, so the small expenditure of cash and effort hit my sweet spot.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

UK-based digital healthcare company Babylon denies reports that it may be seeking a buyer as it wrestles with sinking share price. The business, which initially made a name for itself by offering virtual care services to the NHS, has gained a foothold in the US by acquiring 700-physician Meritage Medical Network; health kiosk vendor Higi; and DaytoDay Health, which offers patients pre- and post-visit care education, communication, and clinical support via personal care teams. BBLN went public via a SPAC merger in October 2021 at a valuation of $4.2 billion, with share price having dropped 93% in the ensuing 10 months for a company valuation of $335 million.

Sema4, which offers precision medicine and clinical trials tools, eliminates 250 jobs, 13% of its workforce. The founder and president has left the company and board. SMFR share price dropped 33% Tuesday on the news and have shed 86% of their value since the company went public via a SPAC merger in July 2021, valuing the company at $611 million.

Chronic disease management software and services company CareHarmony raises $15 million in a Series A funding round.

Hospital cost management system vendor SpendMend acquires Trulla, which sells pharmacy procurement software. That’s a pretty large misspelling of “visibility” on their webpage above.

Signify Health, the value-based home health provider that is reportedly being pursued by CVS Health, will lay off 489 people beginning October 1. The majority of affected workers work remotely, according to the company, which says the workforce reduction is the result of its decision to shutter its Episodes of Care Services segment.

Enterprise medical imaging vendor Intelerad acquires PenRad Technologies, which offers productivity tools for breast imaging and lung screening.

Activist investor Elliott Management buys a large stake in Cardinal Health and nominates five candidates for board positions. 

Sales

• Christus Health will implement the KyruusOne provider data management platform to create a digital directory.
• SSM Health will work with Optum to develop new inpatient care delivery models, billing processes, and patient engagement experiences using clinical technologies and analytics.
• University of Florida Health Shands chooses Syntellis Performance Solutions for financial planning, cost accounting, and decision support.

People

Ross Martin, MD, MHA (360 Degree Insights) joins consulting firm Agilian as CMIO.

Health Gorilla hires Steven Lane, MD, MPH (Sutter Health) as chief medical officer.

The SSI Group promotes Lori Brocato to SVP of product management.

University of Chicago Medicine names Maia Hightower, MD (University of Utah Health) chief digital and technology officer.

Philips will promote Roy Jakobs, head of its connected care business, to president and CEO when Frans van Houten steps down on October 15.

Nicole Dowsley, MBA (Genomind) joins Clearwater as chief transformation officer.

Verato hires Richard Jordan (Sutherland) as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

NextGen will apply to ONC to become a TEFCA-enabled, vendor-agnostic Qualified Health Information Network. According to the company, it is the first ambulatory-specific vendor to apply to become a QHIN.

The California Department of Public Health will implement lab result collection and reporting software developed by Manifest MedEx as part of its new Surveillance and Public Health Information Reporting and Exchange. Manifest MedEx, Diameter Health, and Lyniate developed the SaPHIRE system.

Duke Health (NC) implements Scanslated’s interactive radiology reporting service at its three hospitals and 14 outpatient imaging facilities.

Australia’s Northern Territory Government deploys the first phase of its $182 million patient health record system. Built on InterSystems TrakCare software, the technology will ultimately replace six legacy systems.

Government and Politics

The 6th Medical Group at Macdill Air Force Base (FL) and Fox Army Health Center (AL) will go live in the next wave of MHS Genesis deployments on September 24.

FDA will allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter to people who have mild to moderate hearing loss, starting in the next few weeks. FDA says that 80% of the 30 million Americans who have hearing loss don’t seek help, audiologist exams aren’t covered by insurance, and the market is dominated by a handful of companies that sell the devices for thousands of dollars. Experts say that FDA’s decision will spur innovation that could radically change the way that hearing devices work and look. My prediction is that the future’s hearing aids will be like listening to the Spotify phone app on Beats by Dre wireless buds, because why not? Get in there, Apple.

Privacy and Security

Conifer Health Solutions reports that an unauthorized user gained access earlier this year to a Microsoft Office business email account that was associated with Brookwood Baptist Medical Center (AL). The RCM vendor has been unable to determine if the personal information of BBMC patients has been accessed. 

An internal report determines that an IT systems failure in May at four hospitals in the UK cost $686,000 and led to the cancellation of 1,000 appointments. The report also revealed that the outage, which was caused by a VMware software defect, led to 330 incidents of patient harm.

Other

Researchers and stroke experts from Wake Forest University School of Medicine (NC) and Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist’s Comprehensive Stroke Center develop COMprehensive Post-Acute Stroke Services – Care Plan, a digital health tool that uses algorithms to create custom-made care plans for stroke patients. The COMPASS-CP tool can be embedded within a patient’s EHR and integrated with remote patient monitoring programs. Wake Forest’s Innovations arm has created Care Directions Inc. to commercialize the technology.

A study published in a data science journal finds that digital health companies are sending data to Facebook to target user advertising, sometimes violating their own policies that prohibit user tracking across websites. The authors found that participants in an online cancer community had their activity tracked by apps from Color Genomics, Myriad Genetics, Invitae, Health Union, and Ciitizen. The only company of the five companies to inquiries by Forbes was Health Union, which said it tracks information but gives users the option to accept or reject cookie-based tracking, also noting that the company isn’t bound by HIPAA because it isn’t a provider. Facebook parent Meta said the companies should not be sharing user information using its Business Tools.

Physician and author Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD describes in an article in The Atlantic why her experience took her from telemedicine skeptic to advocate, labeling it as “an indisputable complement to in-person care:”

• She saw how hard it was for patients to miss a day’s pay to take public transportation to office visits.
• Telemedicine dropped her no-show rate to nearly zero since patients weren’t canceling because of unexpected job demands or transportation difficulties.
• Eye contact has improved, as she can focus on the on-screen patient rather than the computer screen, and they can see each other face-to-face without masks.
• She can see the patient’s living situation and get to know them better by meeting their families and aides.
• Research has shown that routine physical exams are “largely ceremonial” and chronic illness mostly requires cognitive and conversational interaction.
• Providers, like patients, can work from home if they have sick children or are affected by COVID-19.

Sponsor Updates

• HCTec sponsors AltaMed Foundation’s East LA Meets Napa charity fundraiser to help women and families access necessary resources.
• Arcadia makes its research available in the Prognos Marketplace for life science customers.
• CHIME releases a new 30^th Anniversary Podcast featuring 2005 CHIME Board Chair Pat Skarulis.
• Dresner Advisory Services names Dimensional Insight an overall leader in business intelligence in its annual Industry Excellence Awards.
• Sectra will launch the next generation of its Education Portal for medical educators and students this fall.

Blog Posts

• How SDoH improves patient outcomes for community care organizations (Arcadia)
• Policy Perspectives: Why Choice Matters in Healthcare (Arrive Health)
• The Future of Health Information is Bright (Availity)
• Azara Team Completes Pan Mass Challenge 2022 Raising Over $35,000 for Cancer Research (Azara Healthcare)
• EHR Hosting and Backup: Budgeting and Planning Tips that Avoid Surprise Costs (CereCore)
• Pharmacogenomics: The Time is Now (First Databank)
• Top Reasons Fail to Fill Post-Discharge Prescriptions (and what you can do about it) (ConnectiveRx)
• Joining Forces to Drive Powerful Positive Changes in Our Nation’s Health System (Diameter Health)
• How Analytics Can Help Solve Your Patient Leakage Problem (Dimensional Insight)
• The Top 5 M&A IT Challenges and How to Overcome Them (Divurgent)
• National Health Center Week 2022 (EClinicalWorks)
• NG Healthcare Digital Summit Recap: Accelerating Consumer-Centric Care (EVisit)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/15/22

Top News

Truepill reportedly conducts its third round of layoffs in 2022, this time involving 175 employees that represent about one-third of its workforce.

The company, which offers white-labeled, API-connected virtual pharmacy and telehealth solutions as well as home diagnostic kits, claimed last year that it was bringing in $300 million in annual revenue. It was reported to have been valued at $1.6 billion after raising $255 million.

CEO Sid Viswanathan says the company will focus on increasing revenue and cutting expenses.

Truepill was the preferred pharmacy provider of virtual mental health provider Cerebral and had acquired competing virtual ADHD provider Ahead. It shut down Ahead in April 2022 as the Drug Enforcement Administration started investigating the prescribing practices of both of the online ADHD providers, leading Cerebral to stop issuing those prescriptions. 

Reader Comments

From Derek Smalls: “Re: new Oracle Cerner deals. Notice how small the new clients are?” The Cerner announcement lists six of the 11 new CommunityWorks hospital clients the company signed since April, ranging from 15 to 35 beds. I would say that it’s encouraging that these rural, community, and critical access hospitals can implement Cerner in a way that is affordable and technically feasible.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Life’s lessons from poll respondents who have lived them: plan your financial future early, take more risks, stay healthy, and don’t ignore your family.

New poll to your right or here: Has your employer conducted a layoff that you would consider significant in the past 12 months?

Epic’s UGM is coming up August 22-24. It never occurred to me that I could feature how HIStalk sponsors are participating in that and other events as I do with the HIMSS conference, but let’s give it a shot. Sponsors, complete an information form by Wednesday, August 17 and I’ll summarize the results later this week for those who are traveling to Verona. I’ll do this for other conferences if response is good.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF health IT index were up 11% in the past 30 days versus the Nasdaq’s 13.5% rise. However, they are down 27% in the past year and 17% since their July 2020 inception, meaning that your money would have been better invested in Nasdaq index funds.

A business filing indicates that BD’s price to acquire hospital pharmacy software vendor MedKeeper was $93 million.

Medicare Advantage primary care chain ChenMed is considering selling its majority stake in JenCare, a joint venture with Humana that runs 30 clinics in five states, at a company valuation of $4 billion. Family-owned parent company ChenMed also owns Dedicated Senior Medical Center and Chen Senior Medical Center. ChenMed CIO Hernando Celada runs two other ChenMed businesses, Curity (AI-powered care management) and IntuneHealth (primary care centers and telehealth).

Dental software vendor Planet DDS acquires the QSIDental cloud-based dental practice management software platform from NextGen Healthcare.

Sales

• Oracle Cerner executed 161 new, extended, or expanded contracts from April to June 2022, including 11 new clients.

People

Julie Schubert, RN, MS joins Well Health as VP of professional services.

Intermountain Healthcare President and CEO Marc Harrison, MD, MMM resigns to run an unnamed healthcare platform business for venture capital firm General Catalyst. He earned $6 million in 2020, according to Intermountain’s most recent tax filings, and like other former big-system CEOs, further blurs the already faint line between being a highly compensated non-profit executive and taking leadership roles in the most capitalistic organizations in American society.

Government and Politics

A security researcher tells a Defcon security conference audience that the decades-old encryption system that the VA’s VistA system uses could be easily defeated, allowing a hacker to perform clinician functions.

Privacy and Security

An Oregon hospital becomes the latest in a list of those that overpaid their employees during several weeks of ransomware-caused Kronos payroll system downtime that are trying to get employees to return the extra money. St. Charles Health System says the average employee amount owed is $780. The Oregon Nurses Association says it will issue a cease-and-desist letter to the hospital because its demand for repayment is illegal and the health system has provided no evidence that anyone was actually overpaid.

Other

A Commonwealth Fund blog post whose authors include former National Coordinator David Blumenthal, MD says that Amazon’s acquisition of primary care chain One Medical won’t resolve the “international embarrassment” of the US healthcare system. Snips:

• While Amazon shouldn’t be underestimated, its previous healthcare forays have largely failed, such as its Haven partnership and its minimally disruptive Amazon Pharmacy.
• One Medical has always lost money because third-party payers pay little for primary care, leading the authors to predict that Amazon will need to pursue value-based care contracts with commercial insurers instead of the usual Medicare and Medicaid market.
• The authors expect that Amazon will uncharacteristically need to restrict customer choice by negotiating preferred rates with local PCPs, which may not be acceptable in the employer-funded insurance model where the employees complain about being excluded from the big-brand medical centers.
• Amazon must complete with Optum and CVS Health / Aetna, which already have scaled up provider employment and bring unparalleled expertise in managing risk.
• The article concludes that the real question is whether profit-driven entrepreneurship and innovation can bring the US healthcare system up to the level of most other developed countries that do a better job of keeping people healthy at an affordable cost. 

Sponsor Updates

• Diameter Health CEO Eric Rosow and CTO Harvard Pan raise money for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute through their participation in the Pan-Mass Challenge.
• The Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation integrates Xealth’s digital therapeutic content distribution capabilities with its Oracle Cerner EHR, making it easier for patients to access educational content through their patient portals.
• PerfectServe adds more than 400 physician practices across 37 states in the first half of 2022.
• Sphere will exhibit at Epic UGM August 22-24 in Verona, WI.
• Spok announces that 18 of the 20 adult hospitals and all 10 children’s hospitals named to US News & World Report’s 2022-23 Best Hospitals Honor Roll use Spok secure healthcare communication solutions.
• Vocera will exhibit at the 2022 Defense Health Information Technology Symposium August 16-18 in Orlando.
• West Monroe publishes a new report, “2022 Be Digital Research.”

Blog Posts

• Checking-in on Check-Ups: 3 Tactics to Advance Patient Communication in Healthcare (PatientBond)
• 3 Steps to Powering Data Innovation with Analytics & AI (Pivot Point Consulting)
• PINC AI Data Analysis Update: Maternal and Infant Health Trends, 2008-2020 (Premier)
• In full view: Redox Recs on FHIR and digital health integrations (Redox)
• Patient experience tips for mother-baby units (Sonifi Health)
• Becoming great: 5 common characteristics of the best hospitals (Spok)
• How Healthcare Can Change the Odds with Value-Based Care (TigerConnect)
• 5 Practical Ways to Make Remote Therapeutic Monitoring Work in the Clinic (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 8/12/22

Top News

Cerner will pay $1.9 million in back pay and interest to 1,870 job applicants after the Department of Labor compliance evaluation found that the company had discriminated against Asian and black job seekers.

The affected applicants were seeking employment as medical billing specialists, system engineers, software interns, and technical solution analysts at the company’s Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS offices.

The review found that Cerner violated an executive order that prohibits federal contractors from discriminating in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and national origin.

Reader Comments

From Outsider Trading: “Re: Change Healthcare’s ClaimsXten. The rumored acquisition by Availity this spring didn’t end up happening – TPG signed a definitive agreement to acquire it if UnitedHealth Group’s acquisition of Change Healthcare is approved by the federal government.” The initial media reports named Availity as the buyer of the payment integrity business, but TPG Capital signed a deal in April to buy it or $2.2 billion in cash, contingent on the UHG-Change merger being cleared by regulators. I removed that mention from Tuesday’s news post about Availity acquiring Diameter Health.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Direct Recruiters, Inc. The Solon, OH-based company has been recognized since 1983 as the relationship-focused search firm specializing in building customized employment solutions. Our Healthcare IT and Digital Health teams partner with clients to help them strategically build high-performing teams from the C-Suite through the contributor level across each area of the organization. DRI offers contingency search, contract staffing and retained “Direct Retention” search to source, identify, acquire, and retain top-performing professionals to elevate the success of our client organizations. Recognized for over 17 national awards, DRI has a proven record of success in recruiting top talent for leading companies. Thanks to Direct Recruiters, Inc. for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual care and digital medicine vendor Biofourmis adds additional funding from Intel that increases its Series D round to $320 million.

Bloomberg reports that CVS offered $18 per share to acquire One Medical months before Amazon bought the primary care chain for the same price. The detailed timeline laid out in SEC filings is fascinating  — CVS is reportedly Party A in the document.

TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, buys women and children’s hospital chain Amcare Healthcare for a reported $1.5 billion.

People

Tower Health (PA) promotes CIO Michelle Trupp, RN, MSN to SVP and COO of Reading Hospital.

Motient hires Brian Miller, MBA (Signify Health) as VP of business development.

Digital Diagnostics hires Chris Meenan (Philips) as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

A study finds that patients who tested positive for COVID-19 and used Get Well’s remote patient monitoring technology to track their symptoms and vital signs had a 32% lower hospitalization rate, stays that were 2.7 days shorter, and fewer ICU days

Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX) Lumere launches a consulting service to help hospitals with their cost-saving and clinical variation programs. GHX acquired Lumere, which helped health systems align their drug and device purchasing decisions with evidence, in January 2020.

UNC Health and partners Gozio Health and Well Health enhance the health systems mobile platform to include a map of closest urgent care centers and EDs, a link to download the UNC Health app directly from text-based appointment reminders, and the option to save appointments to the mobile device’s calendar with a link to way-finding instructions. I noticed that the app also allows visitors to save their parking location so the app can route them back to their cars.

Government and Politics

The VA publishes a Digital Healthcare Playbook that describes how it works with contractors to develop software and lays out the kinds of solutions it needs.

VA OIG finds that the VA loaned IPads to 41,000 patients last year for use in virtual appointments, but only half of them completed an appointment. The VA also failed to collect 11,000 devices that had never been used for virtual appointments, which cost $6.3 million for devices and another $78,000 in cellular data fees.

Connecticut spent $20 million of mostly federal money to fund a University of Connecticut project to build HIE software that was ultimately discarded in favor of buying a system from Maryland’s CRISP HIE for $1 million per year. The group that developed the system, UConn Analytics and Information Management Solutions, has shut down and dismissed its 20 employees.

The Defense Health Agency’s Military Health System awards a subsidiary of government contractor Peraton a 10-year, $2 billion contract for digital transformation services.

Sponsor Updates

• CoverMyMeds staff raise funds for cancer research organization Pelotonia during its annual live and silent auction, and by participating in Pelotonia’s ride weekend.
• Biofourmis appoints former Trevor Fetter (The Hartford) and Sachin Jain, MD (Scan Group) to its board.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “How Payer Data in Healow Insights Can Help Improve Care.”
• CloudWave reports that over 50 of its customers have been with the company for five years or more, and that 92 have been customers for three years or longer.
• The Veterans Data Integration and Federation Enterprise Platform, which leverages technologies from InterSystems, receives the 2022 FedHealthIT Innovation Award.
• Lyniate launches version 11.2 of its Lyniate EMPI by NextGate.
• NTT Data announces the winners of the NTT Data AI Hackathon for innovations in healthcare.

Blog Posts

• Optimum CareerPath Spotlight – Meet Trevor MacGinitie (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Hazelden Betty Ford Taps Oracle Cerner and Xealth to Simplify Access to Addiction Treatment and Recovery Content (Cerner)
• A Different Point of View: EHRs Must Evolve into Platforms for Communities of Care (Medicomp Systems)
• The Healthcare Technology World is Becoming Flat (Get-to-Market Health)
• Pharmacists Will Rise to the Occasion with Paxlovid Prescribing (First Databank)
• Why Social Determinants are a Growing Priority (Get Well)
• Laying a foundation for the future: How will healthcare suppliers respond to an increasingly complex healthcare supply chain? (GHX)
• Why Digital Health Tools & Training are Key to Improving Community Health (The HCI Group)
• PROs & PROMs 101: An introduction to patient-reported outcome measures (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Building Connections Through the Lyniate Partner Program (Lyniate)
• How Clinician-Driven EHR Design Improves the Anesthesia Experience (Medhost)
• The Healthcare Technology World Is Fast Becoming Flat (Get-to-Market Health)
• How personalizing Expanse unlocked new opportunities for patient care at Ozarks Healthcare (Meditech)
• How Post-Acute Leaders Are Solving Prior Authorization & Benefits Verification Challenges (Myndshft)
• A Wound Care Provider’s Alaska Adventure Begins (Net Health)
• The Dire Need for Integrated Behavioral Health in Chronic Care Management (NeuroFlow)
• When every second counts, connections matter (Nuance)
• Leveraging AI to Overcome Revenue Cycle Staffing Shortages (Nym)
• Overcoming frozen thinking in healthcare (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 8/10/22

Top News

Health information network management company Availity will acquire Diameter Health, which specializes in data optimization and interoperability, marking its second acquisition of the year.

I interviewed Availity CEO Russ Thomas in January, and Diameter Health CEO Eric Rosow shortly thereafter.

Reader Comments

From Prime Mover: “Re: API fees. Here’s what I have seen in the industry.” Thanks for sending me this list in response to a previous reader’s comment:

• EHR vendors. API fees are common, pricing models vary, and per-transaction fees are often assessed. Some vendors take a cut of revenue for publishing apps on their marketplace and this is usually on top of an annual membership fee. Vendors are more likely to make USCDI-compliant APIs available at little or no charge so as to not invite scrutiny over information blocking, but these come with a limited support.
• Integration platforms, such as Redox, Ellkay, and self-service options like Jitterbit and MuleSoft. Their business model is exchanging data on behalf of a customer, so they charge for this, most often a fixed amount per connection (pulling demographics and appointment data from System A to System B is two connections). Per-user pricing is uncommon and volume-based pricing is quite rare. Some charge upfront platform fees.
• Health data exchanges, such as Datavant, Moxe Health, and 1upHealth. Companies use APIs to digitize and automate manual workflows, with much of the focus on provider-to-payer connections such as Medicare risk adjustment and release of information. Usually the interoperability piece is included in the overall service provided.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIMSS pulled out of Chicago years ago over customer-indifferent McCormick Place union members strong-arming exhibitors who dared plug in their own power strips or empty their own trash cans. I guess it got so bad that the convention center now provides a list of what exhibitors can do themselves, at least by full-time employees who have been on the job for six months (exhibiting company newbies and contractors apparently can’t be trusted). Exhibitor employees are allowed to set up and tear down booths, install signs and decorative items on the booth’s drapery and exhibitor table skirting, and to plug in and turn on AV equipment. HIMSS-specific exhibit hall rules include the usual prohibition on clowns, strolling through the hall wearing a sandwich board, and working a booth naked.

Webinars

None scheduled in the coming weeks. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Netsmart acquires Zimmet Healthcare’s Core claims data analytics offering for skilled nursing facilities. Netsmart will add Core to its CareFabric platform for post-acute care providers looking to improve their value-based care performance.

CPSI announces Q2 results: revenue up 21%, EPS $0.21 versus $0.42. Shares are down 15% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 16% drop, valuing the company at $447 million.

People

Erik Johnson (Verato) joins PatientIQ as VP of marketing.

Lehigh Valley Health Network (PA) names Maulik Purohit, MD (University Hospitals) chief health information officer.

Arcadia hires Chris D’Arcy (Liaison International) as chief human resources officer.

Advata promotes Corinne Stroum to SVP / head of product and Jamie Snell to chief customer success officer.

Health Catalyst names Melissa Welch, MD (InnovAge) chief medical officer and Edward Sheen, MD (Lumeris) SVP/ chief population health officer.

Randy Fusco (TEKsystems) joins Clearsense as CTO.

Sales

• Magnolia Regional Health Center (MS) selects AMC Health’s remote patient monitoring and virtual care technology and services for its RPM program focused on congestive heart failure patients.

Announcements and Implementations

Adventist HealthCare (MD) implements Innovaccer’s cloud-based population health management technology.

Atrium Health (NC) wraps up its system-wide conversion from Cerner to Epic.

MarinHealth (CA) goes live on Epic through a partnership with University of California, San Francisco Health.

Government and Politics

An audit of the Veterans Health Administration’s video connect program finds that 51% of the 41,000 patients who were loaned tablets for telehealth appointments in 2021 never used them for that purpose. VHA staff failed to collect 11,000 devices from patients who never scheduled a virtual appointment despite a requirement that devices be given back if appointments weren’t scheduled within 90 days of receipt. Auditors concluded that the program’s $14.5 million budget could have been used more effectively through better device monitoring, collection controls, and oversight.

Sponsor Updates

• Clinical Architecture supports the ALS Association Indiana at the 10^th Annual Bob Kravitz Golf Outing to Defeat ALS.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Transforming Care for Two Practices with Healow Insights.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health and the American Journal of Nursing welcome Carl Kirton, DNP, RN as incoming editor-in-chief.
• Sonifi Health will integrate Vitalchat’s telehealth software with its bedside patient engagement smart TV technology at a new pediatric hospital being built in Texas.
• Ascom Americas expands its channel partner network in Canada with Canem Systems – National Technology and Services Group.
• Azara Healthcare publishes a new customer success story, “MPCA Drives Clinical Quality Improvement Through DRVS Mapping & Data Validation Project.”
• CarePort partners with The Hospital and Health system Association of Pennsylvania’s HAPevolve subsidiary to offer members access to its care coordination technology.
• CHIME releases a new podcast, “CHIME 30^th Anniversary Podcast: Change with Bill Spooner, 2006 Board Chair.”
• Clearwater names Henry Gyambiby (KP Global IT Consulting) a consultant on its cybersecurity and risk consulting team.
• Experity names Amy Amick (SPH Analytics) to its Board of Directors.
• Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new handbook, “Navigating the ICU: A Guide for Patients and Families.”

Blog Posts

• 3 ways technology can optimize your billing services (Ability Network)
• Streamline the Prior-Authorization Process in 2022 (AdvancedMD)
• Reducing implicit bias in predictive healthcare analytics (Arcadia)
• Technology Can Help Marginalized Communities Gain Access to Behavioral Healthcare (Bamboo Health)
• The Chronic Care Model (ChartSpan)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 8/8/22

CVS Plans to Bid for Signify Health

CVS Health will reportedly make a bid to acquire value-based home care provider Signify Health, which has been exploring strategic alternatives.

Definitive Healthcare Reports Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2022

Healthcare commercial intelligence vendor Definitive Healthcare reports Q2 results: revenue up 37%, EPS –$0.05, beating expectations for both.

ScanSTAT Technologies expands health information management services with acquisition of Georgia-based ResolveROI

Health information management vendor ScanSTAT acquires release-of-information company Resolve ROI for an undisclosed amount.

VA Cerner EHR system goes down for over 4 hours due to patient database corruption issue

The VA’s Cerner system goes down for several hours due to database corruption.

Monday Morning Update 8/8/22

Top News

From the Allscripts earnings call:

• CEO Richard Poulton says the company’s potential acquisitions will be chosen to avoid past accusations of the company being “Frankenstein, because things didn’t really work together very well.”
• Acquisitions will focus more on payer and life sciences than providers, but Allscripts is interested in revenue cycle and getting providers paid faster.
• Asked by an analyst about a publicly traded competitor that is predicting a higher growth rate in the provider space, Poulton responded that “talk is cheap” and it’s laughable when someone predicts that their margins will double.
• Asked about existing clients whose contracts cover products that were sold to Constellation as well as some that stayed with Allscripts, Poulton says overlap exists FollowMyHealth and with practice management systems used by large physician practices. He says that the contracts stayed with whichever business owns the products, and where a contract covers multiple solutions that were split between the companies, they will be served by both companies until the contract expires. He added that FollowMyHealth “is not a big piece of the provider business at all.”

Reader Comments

From Jimbo: “Re: API fees. People used to talk a lot about how vendors who send or receive data on behalf of clients would charge for that service. I’m wondering from your readers which ones do?” That was a big deal early on, as some vendors were using a “how much can we make from it” approach to interoperability. Anyone care to weigh in on API-related charges?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Inconclusiveness is evident among poll respondents who weighed in on how Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner will impact the VA’s implementation.

New poll to your right or here, repeating a poll question I asked three years ago:  For those over 50, what is the #1 thing you wish you had done differently?

I’m interested in the dynamic of being laid off via a Zoom call from your home office. I think I would rather accept the corporate coup de grace remotely and in private versus being marched out of the office under the shocked but relieved gaze of co-workers. Those affected are surely stunned by the impersonal, scripted process regardless of its service location, but in my experience from being on both sides of layoffs, it’s best to get it done quickly and consistently and then send the person home so they can react in their own way elsewhere. I recall asking hospital security to be unobtrusively nearby when we were telling a bunch of our IT folks that their services were no longer needed, which seemed kind of slimy when it involves people you’ve known for years, but you never know how people will react. Then comes the classic Kubler-Ross stages of grief: (a) it surely was a mistake that will be fixed or customers and co-workers will rise in protest to override my dismissal; (b) management is clueless in failing to value my contribution to this train wreck of a company; (c) maybe I should have seen it coming, changed teams, or changed behavior less-valuable people got to keep their jobs; (d) realizing that the “please come back” call isn’t coming and the team and/or company is running fine; and finally (e) accepting what happened as unchangeable and figuring out how to move on. It’s dangerous deriving so much of your identity from a job that someone else can end with an Excel formula.

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Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Wall Street Journal reports that value-based home care provider Signify Health, which has been exploring strategic alternatives, will likely receive an acquisition bid from CVS Health. The company’s NYSE share price values it at $4.7 billion.

Healthcare commercial intelligence vendor Definitive Healthcare reports Q2 results: revenue up 37%, EPS –$0.05, beating expectations for both. The company says it will continue to make acquisitions, expecting to close one or two per year. DH shares dropped 16% Friday following the announcement. They jumped 40% on their first day of trading in September 2021, but have since lost 43% of their value versus the Nasdaq’s 16% loss, valuing the company at $2.4 billion.

People

Spok promotes Mike Wallace to president / COO and Calvin Rice, CPA to CFO.

Government and Politics

The federal government posts an earlier-than-expected RFP for implementation of an EHR for the Indian Health Service.

The VA’s Cerner system goes down for several hours due to database corruption. The outage reportedly also affected DoD and Coast Guard sites.

Privacy and Security

The UK’s NHS 111 non-emergency call line is affected by a cyberattack on its systems, causing delays in dispatching ambulances, booking appointments, obtaining referrals, and having emergency prescriptions filled. The affected patient management, electronic patient record, and care management are operated by vendor Advanced.

Other

Customers of NC-based eye care practice EHR/PM vendor Eye Care Leaders accuse the company of concealing its ransomware attacks in 2021 that included a week-long outage, claiming that the vendor ignored IT requests, threatened them legally, was unable to restore current practice data because it backed its systems up only weekly, and may have failed to file the required breach notice with OCR. They also claim that the company didn’t reduce their next month’s subscription fee despite failing to meet their uptime service level agreement. Several practices have signed on to a proposed class action lawsuit to break their contracts, get their data, and seek payment for damages. CEO Roni Amiel’s experience includes stints as CIO / CISO of NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Blythedale Children’s Hospital.

Sponsor Updates

• West Monroe staff volunteer with Boys Hope Girls Hope of Colorado to offer students career pathways insight, interview tips, and college internships.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Improving Patient Safety by Avoiding Medical Abbreviations.”
• Pivot Point Consulting promotes Kelly Robinson to senior operations specialist.
• Relatient releases a new Dash Talk Podcast, “Activating Patients Through Targeted Messaging and Segmentation: A One Pediatrics Case Study.”
• Surescripts releases a new podcast, “There’s a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology, “The Nightmare & Silver Lining: Walgreens’ Tasha Polster on the Impact of COVID-19.”
• Talkdesk CEO Tiago Paiva is recognized as the UC Leader of the Year during the UC Awards presented by UC Today.
• Zynx Health partners with clinical data and intelligence company LogicStream Health to deliver advanced performance improvement capabilities to health systems.

Blog Posts

• Hospital Marketing: How to Use Market Segmentation to Improve Patient Activation and Retention (PatientBond)
• Nurses of Note Awards 2022: The Senior Manager of Clinical Professional Development (PerfectServe)
• Medication decision support systems help build a resilient digital healthcare foundation (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• 7 ways contact center AI provides better customer experiences (Talkdesk)
• How to Leverage Communication and Data to Improve Patient Handoffs (TigerConnect)
• Allina’s Journey: Improving Outcomes for Total Joint Replacement (Upfront Healthcare)
• A Framework for Achieving Your Smart, Connected Hospital Vision (Vocera)
• The ROI of RTM: Maximizing Profitability with Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (WebPT)
• Improving Readmission Rates: Strategies for Skilled Nursing Teams (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 8/5/22

Top News

Davis Health System (WV) and WVU Health will end their partnership due to a planned change in EHR vendors.

DHS announced in February 2022 that it will implement Cerner under the CommunityWorks model, saying that while Epic and Cerner have similar functionality, Epic is unaffordable even when provided through WVU.

DHS says WVU notified it immediately after it announced its EHR decision that it was ending the clinical affiliation due to lack of an integrated system.

A DHS VP says, “It was a substantial difference of millions of dollars … we made the decision to go with Cerner, which will still speak to doctors at WVU or anywhere else in the state, it may just take an extra click … We went back to them and told them we would consider canceling our contract with Cerner if they could give us a new price that was more acceptable to our administration and the board. They said no.”

Reader Comments

From Allaboutlabs: “Re: Epic. Are they searching for a lab ordering partner? There has been some recent activity on genetic testing and EMR integration (Epic and Myriad, Meditech).”

From Bonhomme Richard: “Re: Senior Helpers. I ran across this wild podcast from the spring.” The CEO of home care franchise operator Senior Helpers, which was acquired last year by Advocate Aurora Enterprises, says that home care and personal care companies aren’t data driven because they aren’t paid by Medicare and therefore don’t have outcomes or claims information, placing them at a disadvantage now that Medicare Advantage insurers are starting to pay for such services. The company has developed an “autonomy score” that predicts readmissions and ED visits and is developing ways to prove the cost savings that they provide in preventing falls, encouraging medication adherence, and preventing hospital encounters.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Carequality Executive Director Alan Swenson clarified some points from my Monday news of updates to its Carequality Connected Agreement that will allow federal agencies to participate: (a) the updated language was in its general CCA, not anything specific to EHealth Exchange; (b) Carequality has “implementers” rather than “members”; and (c) Carequality is an independent non-profit organization that operates under a management services agreement with The Sequoia Project, which created the initiative but is no longer its parent.

My LinkedIn is awash in “I’ve been laid off and need a job” posts, but what’s interesting is how many of those users publicly thank their former employer for the opportunity they provided (until they didn’t). I understand the need to avoid communicating bitterness or despair while trying to land a new job, but that could be done equally graciously by not referencing the former employer at all, especially since it’s plain to see on the job history. I would find it hard to thank my corporate executioner unless they dispatched me with atypical grace or empathy, but I’ll side with the job-seekers who would gain little from publicly torching a company they didn’t leave until forced.

Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts announces Q2 results: revenue up 7%, adjusted EPS $0.18 versus $0.18, nearly all of those numbers attributed to its Veradigm business since it has sold everything else. Revenue beat Wall Street expectations, but earnings fell short.

CVS Health says in its earnings call that it will expand its services in primary, care, provider enablement, and home health, adding that it is already the country’s largest provider of retail health services with its MinuteClinics. CVS adds that “we can’t be in primary care without M&A” that will involve companies with a strong management team, strong technology, and the ability to scale, with a deal expected by the end of the year. It will emphasize value and consumer experience in offering virtual care and using its MinuteClinics and pharmacists as local access points. CVS passed on the chance to acquire primary care chain One Medical, which then accepted a $3.9 billion offer from Amazon. CVS has previously told investors that it hopes to own or manage up to 350 primary care clinics by the end of 2024, with a preference for practices that have experience in value-based care.

London-based Cera – which offers remote patient monitoring, homecare visits, and telehealth — raises a $320 million funding round.

Atropos Health, which offers a digital consultation service for providers, raises $14 million in a Series A funding round and names Brigham Hyde, PhD as CEO. The company says it solves the “evidence gap” via a publication-grade, just-in-time summary of real-world evidence that is extracted from millions of de-identified patient encounters.

Sales

• Stanford Medicine will study COVID-19 health outcomes using Komodo Health’s Sentinel application, AI analytics, and de-identified patient data.
• The Iowa Board of Pharmacy uses Bamboo Health’s PMP Gateway solution to integrated the state’s prescription monitoring program with provider EHRs.

People

The VA names David Massaro, MD, MBA, MS as the functional champion of its Oracle Cerner implementation, on detail from the VHA’s Office of Health Informatics.

Therapy Brands hires Jeff Shoreman (Magnitude Software) as CEO.

Bravado Health promotes Mallory Taylor to CEO.

Edifecs hires Raymond Bonnett, MBA (NextGen Healthcare) as VP of professional services, Mark Filiault (Diagnostic Robotics) as VP of payer sales, Chip Acton (Zipari) as VP of solution consulting, and Brian Hanley, MPAff (Nava) as VP of public sector sales.

Kyle Swarts (Curation Health) joins AiHealth as SVP of growth and marketing.

Megan Schmidt (Monarch Medical Technologies) joins Ellkay as VP of product management.

Announcements and Implementations

The Q3 trends report by Pivot Point Consulting, a Vaco Company finds that venture funding is down 40% so far this year versus last year; no digital health IPOs have occurred; and easing of virtual care red tape such as interstate provider credentialing is scheduled to end in February.

Sponsor Updates

• Bluestream Health announces that its technology powers New York State’s COVID-19 “Test to Treat” program.
• ChartSpan announces a partnership with group purchasing organization Health Resource Services.
• Experity publishes a new e-book, “Learn How Successful Urgent Cares Make Business Decisions.”
• Donations from FDB help fund National Council for Prescription Drug Programs Foundation grants of $295,000, which help to fund research dedicated to enhancing patient safety, expanding patient access to care, and expanding the role and value of the pharmacist.
• Wolters Kluwer Health donates clinical decision support tools including UpToDate, Lexicomp, and Lippincott Procedures to Mercy Ships, a humanitarian organization that operates two floating hospitals for underprivileged populations.
• HCTec supports Aspirus Health as a sponsor of its 2022 Golf Classic.
• Loyal earns SOC 2 Type II certification.
• Healthcare IT Leaders is ranked among the largest staffing firms in the US, according to Staffing Industry Analysts.
• Intrado names Tyler Remund (Sanford Health) senior product manager.

Blog Posts

• Rim to Rim: What is Data’s True Potential for Healthcare? (InterSystems)
• Interoperability in healthcare: The role of TEFCA (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• How Analytics Power Revenue Cycle Optimization (Medhost)
• Da Vinci Standards, Decoded: 3 Eye-Opening Ways Every Provider, Payer & HIT Vendor Will Reap Rewards (Myndshft)
• Predictive Analytics and Value-Based Care: Defining Value (Net Health)
• Creating the Standard of Digital Care: An Enterprise-Grade Approach to Population Behavioral Health (NeuroFlow)
• Why it’s essential to have an integrated strategy for AI in radiology (Nuance)

Resources: Consulting Engagement Request for Information, Sponsor Guide.

Contacts

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

News 8/3/22

Top News

Oracle lays off staff in its marketing and customer experience divisions. Some Oracle Cerner employees also appear to be affected, according to this Reddit thread sent over by a reader, which includes rumors of the departure of several former high-level Cerner executives.

Oracle is pursing $1 billion in annual compensation savings, which probably means the loss of 5,000 to 10,000 jobs of its 140,000.

Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Lyniate acquires Denmark-based clinical terminology management vendor CareCom. It’s the health data integration company’s second acquisition of the year, having purchased patient identity management company NextGate in March.

Business Insider describes how weight loss startup Calibrate uses technology not only to scale its business growth, but also to scale its business cutbacks, but without the empathy and support it claims to offer customers. The company laid off 150 employees, some of whom had just started their jobs the same week, via a two-minute webinar for which they were given 30 minutes notice. Calbrate’s subscribers pay $138 per month to get a prescription for GLP-1 weight loss drugs such as semaglutide along with virtual coaching, then they or their insurance pay hundreds of dollars each month for the drug itself.

Dandelion Health launches a platform by which health systems can sell de-identified patient data to life sciences companies to train their AI systems, with its first two members being Sharp HealthCare and Sanford Health.

Sales

• Gaylord Specialty Healthcare (CT) selects Meditech Expanse.
• Valley Health (VA) will implement Epic in its own instance instead of through Inova Health System in a 16-month, $50 million project.

People

Scott Raymond, MHA, RN (NetApp) is named chief information and innovation officer of Nebraska Medicine.

Northwell promotes Sophy Lu to SVP/CIO.

Brady Thomas (Specialized Bicycle Components) returns to Divurgent as chief of staff.

Iodine Software hires Priti Shah, MBA (Finvi) as chief product officer.

Cardinal Health promotes Michelle Greene, MS to CIO.

Steven Hendrick (Huron) rejoins Healthlink Advisors as VP.

Michael Ruffino, MBA (Hillrom) joins About as VP of health system partnerships.

Industry long-timer Simon Hawken, who led US and European sales for Merative (formerly IBM Watson Health), died July 25.

Announcements and Implementations

A study of 2,000 Ascension employees finds that adherence to organizational COVID-19 policies improved by 4.9% in the two-week study period when they were texted a reserved date for vaccination using the Relatient system, although no difference was observed from the control group once the vaccination deadline was reached.

Government and Politics

Carequality expands its interoperability framework to federal agencies via an update to its Carequality Connected Agreement that will allow those organizations to opt in to EHealth Exchange’s Carequality Bridge.

The 42nd Medical Group (AL) at Maxwell Air Force Base and 1st Special Operations Medical Group (FL) at Hurlburt Field will transition to Oracle Cerner-based MHS Genesis next month.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) asks the Federal Trade Commission to perform a high-priority review of Amazon’s planned acquisition of One Medical, which he says gives Amazon too much power to push non-prescription blood pressure medications at Whole Foods that are based on One Medical patient data (note to the Senator – I agree to some extent with your concerns, even though blood pressure medications are not sold without a prescription at Whole Foods or anywhere else in the US).

Other

The Washington Post obtains a confidential government review of a January 2021 report by the White House’s US Digital Service, which says the country’s organ transplant matching system — operated by the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS — is outdated, unreliable, dependent on manual data entry, and of unknown security status. The report concludes that the non-profit UNOS, which developed the system 36 years ago, is a monopoly that should be broken up in separating its role as a system vendor from that of a transplant policy organization. The federal government pays $6.5 million annually to UNOS under an agreement that requires it to buy the system for $55 million if it switches vendors.

Fox Chase Cancer Center (PA) nurses Maria Market, RN and Allison Ward, RN, MSN create the Oral Chemo Tracker, an EHR-compatible smart form that helps clinicians better monitor oral chemotherapy. The pair developed the digital form last year after a review found that just 33% of oral chemotherapy patients had a documented plan, only 7% were assessed for adherence, and none had record of steps taken to address non-adherence.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health makes Monkeypox content free to clinicians worldwide in response to the WHO-declared global health emergency.
• Ascom expands its channel partner network in Canada to better serve acute care customers in the areas surrounding Montreal.
• Bamboo Health names Amber Rogers proposal manager, Meredith Dougherty customer success manager, Whitney Minard implementation specialist, and Ibrahim Alabi associate product manager.
• Oracle Cerner publishes a new client achievement, “Allies in opioid stewardship: Fort HealthCare implements high-risk alerts to combat epidemic.”
• Loyal reaffirms its commitment to health data privacy and security with SOC 2 Type II certification.
• Divurgent publishes a new client success story, “On-Demand Staffing.”
• Ellkay earns Validated Data Stream Designation via the new NCQA Data Aggregator Validation program.
• Well Health promotes Tyler Ledbetter to manager of enterprise sales development.

Blog Posts

• Best Practices for Negotiating Health Insurance Contracts (AdvancedMD)
• Prioritizing CDI on the Ambulatory Side of healthcare facilities (AGS Health)
• Data analytics pave ACOs’ path to success (Arcadia)
• Interoperability: We have technology, data standards, and a compelling use case – so why isn’t everyone on board? (Availity)
• How digitizing at-home care can improve recovery for hysterectomy and c-section patients (Bravado Health)
• Interoperability Without a Directory is Like Blue Cheese Without Celery! (CareMesh)
• Is Outsourcing an Answer to Financial Pressures Post-Pandemic? (CereCore)
• How to Maximize Medicare Shared Savings (ChartLogic)
• Creating the Standard of Digital Care: An Enterprise-Grade Approach to Population Behavioral Health (NeuroFlow)
• Understanding Insider Threats and How to Protect Your Organization (Clearwater)
• Fighting for Medication Access and Adherence: Market Outlook Beyond 2022 (ConnectiveRx)
• Closing the Gap Between Patients and Their Records (EClinicalWorks)
• The Case for Health Data Interoperability (EVisit)

Contacts

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