News 1/20/23

Top News

Bayer acquires Scotland-based Blackford Analysis, which offers radiology and imaging AI tools.

The companies worked together previously in developing Bayer’s Calantic medical imaging AI platform.

Reader Comments

From Jobber: “Re: position seekers. Would you consider sharing a link to the LinkedIn profile of health IT people who are looking for jobs?” I might be willing to do that in a weekly roundup or something, but only for people who explicitly ask me to share their names, previous job, and sought-after position in the briefest of tables along with a link to their LinkedIn that contains all their other information. But first, a question – would this provide value to those who are listed and to readers, or would I just be creating another pointless task for myself?

From Oracular Degeneration: “Re: Oracle Cerner. Mike Sicilia assured the Senate in late July 2022 that the company would move the VA’s implementation to the cloud and rewrite its pharmacy module within six to nine months. We are at six months now, so is it just about done?” I haven’t heard anything about the self-imposed April 2023 deadline.

From Epic TS: “Re: HIMSS. All Verona-based Epic employees will have the opportunity to attend HIMSS this year, so it might have quite the large population of 22-24 year olds.” Interesting, if this report is accurate. It would seem hard to justify opening up conference attendance to 10,000+ vendor employees.

From RunFromThis: “Re: vendor exec pleads guilty. See attached court record.” [Name redacted], senior partner of [health IT consulting company name redacted], was arrested on March 4, 2022 (at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami at the start of ViVE-CHIME) and charged with being captured on surveillance video punching the company’s EVP of sales in the nose at 2:00 in the morning at the hotel bar. The information is public record, but I’m still not entirely comfortable running his name and that of his company over a misdemeanor battery charge. However, should you want to read more, enter citation # 202200018175 on this page. The executive-slash-puncher was 6’2” and 300 pounds, according to his arrest report, and the punchee reports on LinkedIn that the blow required emergency surgery that was followed by a quick exit from the company.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The biggest challenge in system implementations or upgrades, at least in some hospitals, is working up the nerve to actually pull the trigger to bring the change live knowing that while some things won’t work right, at some point you have to stop maintaining two systems. That feeling arose with my recent HIStalk server upgrade, where I fully expected issues after dozens of applications and endless custom coding so it would work with new server and database software (the term “deprecated function” comes up a lot). Most everything has been upgraded and/or fixed; web scripts and programming have been modified to work with new versions of PHP, MySQL, and server OS; the virtual firewall is finally working properly; and the new server is faster with more capacity.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Teladoc Health lays off 300 employees, 6% of its headcount, as part of a cost-saving restructuring. TDOC shares have lost two-thirds of their value in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 26% loss.

Real-time benefits tools vendor Arrive Health (formerly RxRevu) acquires medication adherence tools from UPMC Enterprises and has received an investment from UPMC.

Sales

• Highland Rivers Behavioral Health chooses Findhelp to help its clients to connect with local social care resources.
• Eudora Medical Center implements EClinicalWorks Cloud EHR.
• MultiCare Health system acquires Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital and will spend $100 million to replace its Cerner system with Epic.
• Cleveland Clinic will implement Palantir’s Virtual Command Center.

People

Hicuity Health hires Young Ahn, MD (Jiahui Health) as chief medical officer.

Clarus Care hires Rick Stevens (SoftServe) as vice chair and head of strategic accounts.

Announcements and Implementations

St. Bernards Healthcare (AR) upgrades to Meditech Expanse, assisted by the company’s professional services team. It replaces Meditech’s legacy system, three ambulatory systems, and a patient portal. (Questioning: since the health system is named after St. Bernard Tolomei, why does it incorrectly omit the apostrophe from its name?)

Fortified Health Security publishes its healthcare cybersecurity report for 2023.

Socially Determined partners with Datavant to offer patient-level social risk data to life sciences companies.

My favorite health IT market review is from Healthcare Growth Partners, which just released its annual report, whose masterfully concise and authoritative writing style always makes me a little bit jealous. Tidbits:

• Market sentiment is showing a glimmer of rebound as the Fed attempts to steer the economy to a soft landing with a resilient labor market. Health IT market activity has been falling, but remains at a healthy level historically.
• The rising cost of capital and concerns about a recession have reduced the risk tolerance and thus acquisitive interest in investors, but seller interest remains strong and an economic uptick could create significant deal flow.
• Investor pullback in health IT is not being driven by company or sector fundamentals, but rather hospital financial pressure (which is easing) that elongated sales cycles.
• High-quality growth companies continue to command premium valuations, while buyers will find relative bargains in acquiring sound companies and those with strong bookings and recurring profits.
• Health IT sectors with the strongest valuations, as reported publicly, are analytics, revenue cycle management technology, and telemedicine. 
• Companies have three valuation inflection points – proof of concept, growth scalability, and mature scalability.
• Notable take-private transactions as public market valuations plummeted include Cerner, Change Healthcare, Vocera, Tivity Health, Convey Health Solutions, Castlight, and SOC Telemed.

ECRI lists its “Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2023”:

1. Communication challenges when medical device manufacturers notify users of recalls.
2. A concerning number of defective single-use medical devices.
3. Inappropriate use of automated dispensing cabinet overrides.
4. Undetected dislodging of hemodialysis venous connections.
5. Failing to manage the cybersecurity risks of cloud-based clinical systems.
6. Inflatable pressure infusers for IV bags delivering air emboli.
7. Cross-contamination in cleaning ventilators.
8. Improper use of electrosurgical units.
9. Overuse of cardiac telemetry on non-cardiac patients, which causes alarm fatigue, clinician cognitive overload, and unrecognized critical events.
10. Underreporting of device-related issues.

Government and Politics

The State of Georgia’s proposed budget calls for $105 million for Medical College of Georgia to implement Epic. The college is part of Augusta University, which is negotiating the transfer of its assets to Epic customer Wellstar. I think the August University Health hospitals are using Cerner. The top reason given by the health systems for partnering was to expand digital health offerings to improve access to care and care personalization.

Privacy and Security

A ProPublica investigation finds that online pharmacies that sell abortion pills are sending potentially identifiable website user data to Google’s tracking tools, potentially exposing customers to prosecution in some states.

Other

A case study describes how Brigham and Women’s Hospital uses an electronic handoff tool when transferring patients from ED to inpatient, yielding high clinician utilization and a reduction in clarifying calls to ED clinicians from 51% of admissions to 10%.

Sponsor Updates

• PeriGen supports a Virtual Learning Day for perinatal and neonatal nurses titled “Partners in Practice: Uncovering Solutions and Strategies for Staffing and Reproductive Justice” on January 26.
• Netsmart achieves ONC Health IT Cures update certification for its human services EHR solutions.
• Ascom Americas expands its partnership with reseller Newtech Systems so that its clinical workflow solutions are available to hospitals in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Brookhaven Heart & MD365: Streamlining Patient Engagement and Intervention with RPM.”
• The Authentically Successful Podcast features Get Well CEO Michael O’Neil.
• Censinet publishes a research report titled “The Impact of Ransomware on Patient Safety and the Value of Cybersecurity Benchmarking.”
• GHX will present at the Contract Administration Conference February 6 in Cape Coral, FL.
• Healthjump earns NCQA’s Validated Data Stream Designation.

Blog Posts

• Tips for Payer Reviews: How to Handle Pre-payment, Post-payment, and Probe (Experity)
• 7 Clinical Guidance Innovations to Empower Retail Pharmacists (First Databank)
• Igniting a Positive Human Experience in Healthcare (Get Well)
• Real Risks Involved with Blockchain Technology (HealthTech Resources)
• Disrupting Healthcare Through Innovation (InterSystems)
• RxNORM 101: What you need to know for clinical documentation (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• How do you decide which Staffing Model is Right for You?  (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Helping Consumers Find a “Provider Like Me” and Why It Matters (Kyruus)
• Better Outcomes, Lower Costs: How Innovative Partnerships Are Overcoming Rural Staffing Shortages (Medhost)
• Engaging your patient population through care programs (Meditech)
• See a Mumpsimus? Stop a Mumpsimus! (Nordic)
• How Prior Authorization Software Takes Your Patients’ Intake Experiences to a New (Nicer) Place (Myndshft)
• Reporting All Medical Director Hours for SNFs: Why It Matters (Net Health)
• Key Benefits of Mental Health Treatment in Primary Care (NeuroFlow)
• Three trends that will define the future of healthcare (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 1/18/23

Top News

Definitive Healthcare will lay off 55 employees, about 6% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring plan that is intended to boost profits.

An email to employees from CEO Robert Musslewhite says the company must address its cost structure since the economy has slowed and companies are purchasing more cautiously.

Webinars

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Home care and staffing company Viemed invests $2 million in ModoHealth, which offers value-based care and patient management software. Viemed will join Modo’s provider network and use its technology.

Sales

• The San Francisco VA Health Care System will implement CareView’s Patient Safety System with help from Decisive Point Consulting Group.

People

Michael Hawkins (Patient Discovery) joins Axuall as CTO.

CalvertHealth (MD) promotes CTO Melissa Hall, RN to CNO and VP of clinical affairs.

Michele Norton, RN, MSN, MS (MobileSmith Health) joins Avalon Healthcare Solutions as SVP of product marketing.

CereCore promotes Craig McCollum to VP of Meditech International services.

EVisit promotes Sachin Agrawal, MSc to CEO. He replaces co-founder Bret Larsen, who will move to executive board chair.

InnovAge hires Cara Babachicos, MHA (South Shore Health) as CIO.

Lisa Castanzo (Oracle Cerner) joins Elsevier as VP of software engineering, clinical solutions.

Sean Lara (Akasa) joins Censinet as chief revenue officer.

CHOC Children’s promotes Steven Martel, MD to VP/chief health information officer.

Fred Sheffield (HealthPay24) joins TeleVox Healthcare as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Lightbeam Health Solutions announces GA of Radian, a clinical and social data analytics tool designed to help providers with health equity projects.

Persown uses analytics from SAS to develop a Sepsis Monitoring and Alerting System for Hospitals and Homes (SMASH-H).

Other

The Washington Post looks at the use of smartphone apps that collect patient clinical measures and send them to doctors, concluding that if the AI/ML they use requires doctors to interpret the results, the apps can’t really solve access and cost issues.

Safety officials in Bonner County, Idaho attribute a spike in unintentional 911 calls to skiers and snowboarders on local Schweitzer Mountain whose Apple Watches and Iphones automatically called emergency services when their fall-detection technology kicked in.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas Managing Director Kelly Feist receives a 2023 BIG Innovation Award from the Business Intelligence Group.
• Baker Tilly publishes a new case study, “Medical practice company implements cloud financial management platform to support evolving needs.”
• The Fixing Healthcare Podcast features Oracle Cerner Chairman David Feinberg, MD, “How leadership can fix healthcare.”
• Nordic releases another episode of its “In Network” podcast, “Designing for Health: Dr. Zafar Chaudry.”
• The American Medical Informatics Association elects Clinical Architecture CEO Charlie Harp the 2023-24 chair of its Informatics Partnership Council.

Blog Posts

• E-Signature 2.0 to 3.0 & the Progression of Patient-centric Solutions (Access)
• Data Reconnaissance: Understanding your practice’s data landscape (AdvancedMD)
• Industry Collaboration Day 2023 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Accounts Receivable: A Healthy Approach (AGS Health)
• How to Establish a Digital Patient Engagement Committee (Artera)
• Understanding the Impact and Importance of School-based Health Centers (Azara Healthcare)
• Taming the trouble from too much noise (Philips Capsule)
• How a Nurses-First Model Ensures Chronic Care Management Success (ChartSpan)
• The Intersectionality of Technology, Industry Growth, and Patient Outcomes: Clearsense 20/20 (Clearsense)
• Leveraging Agile in Testing – What You Need to Know (CTG)
• How Healthcare is Going Google (Divurgent)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 1/16/23

Top News

The Government Accountability Office rejects bid protests involving the VA’s selection of Booz Allen to continue managing its Oracle Cerner implementation for another five years.

Unsuccessful bidders Cognosante and Pro Sphere Tech said that Booz Allen has an organization conflict of interest because the $860 million contract will allow it to steer work under a different VA task order to its subsidiary Liberty IT Solutions, which it acquired in June 2021 for $725 million.

GAO dismissed a similar year-ago protest by a Liberty IT Solutions competitor, determining that Liberty and Booz Allen are performing different kinds of work that is managed by different VA offices.

Reader Comments

From Cron: “Re: disruptors. Does any company actually disrupt anything?” Rarely in healthcare, since those companies that would be disrupted are usually entrenched, well funded, and politically connected. Expectations are misplaced that scrappy startups will somehow fix our healthcare non-system for us since politicians won’t. The job of a startup is to survive, grow, and make money, and tangling with huge insurers, health systems, and vendors isn’t a great way to do that.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents are mixed on assigning responsibility to the VA’s struggling rollout of Oracle Cerner.

New poll to your right or here: Which social media service have you used in the past seven days?

Several folks have reached out about the death of industry long-timer Frank Pecaitis. His family has started a GoFundMe to establish a scholarship in his name.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor RxLightning. The New Albany, IN-based company enables physicians to accelerate patient access to their preferred specialty therapies. Its MedAccess platform was designed for physicians and their clinical team to re-imagine the entire specialty medication experience without paper forms or fax machines, supporting over 1,200 specialty medications across all therapeutic specialties. Ninety-four percent of patients get access in less than one hour and 99% in less than one day. Its proven approach simplifies the historically cumbersome process of specialty medication access by providing visibility into the entire patient journey through a digital platform, which acts as a single source of truth for all stakeholders. This MedAccess Ecosystem optimizes the patient journey from enrollment to fulfillment and makes the disconnected, connected. Thanks to RxLightning for supporting HIStalk.

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

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Not directly healthcare related, but interesting. JP Morgan Chase sues Charlie Javice, the 30-year-old founder of student loan signup platform vendor Frank, which it acquired for $175 million in September 2021 and has since shut down. Executives of Frank allegedly hired a data science professor to create 4.25 million phony user accounts versus its actual 300,000 users who used the service to apply for school loans. The company came under Congressional scrutiny in 2020 on suspicions that it was misleading students and  selling their personal information to advertisers. JP Morgan discovered discrepancies when it asked for a customer list so it could begin marketing its own offerings to students, then found that three-fourths of test emails were undeliverable and only 1% were opened.

Jingyun Fan, MS, founder and CEO of app-based insomnia coaching startup Shuni, lists the lessons she learned that resulted in shutting the company down after three years:

1. Founders must manage their egos in balancing the many naysayers while still listening to legitimate feedback.
2. First-time founders focus on “build it and they will come” instead of the real challenge of distribution. They should learn about marketing and sales and split their time equally between product and growth.
3. Operational excellence is easily copied and just doing something better isn’t enough to provide the returns that venture capital seeks.
4. Startups should not focus on building a services business, which is operational excellence that incumbents can copy given their capital and reputation.
5. Don’t try to sell platform technology into healthcare since better technology is a nice-to-have that may never result in a sale, and it’s hard to disrupt Epic or Oracle Cerner.
6. For behavioral health offerings, focus on direct-to-consumer growth rather than pursuing academia-grade outcomes data that would interest only employers and insurers.
7. Cost-of-acquisition is high in behavioral health and marketing strategies should focus on long-form content written by authentic personalities as brand representatives, making YouTube as the primary channel because you can speak directly to target clients, has good discoverability, and is good for search engine optimization.
8. Make sure as a founder that the problem you are addressing is worth dedicating a major part of your life to.
9. Venture capital isn’t right for every business. Capital comes with timeline expectations and what startups need is time.
10. Ignore these lessons. People do the impossible all the time, doing meaningful work and transforming their own lives.

Sales

• Two hospitals on the border between France and Belgium choose Sectra for digital pathology in a joint project.
• Owensboro Health (KY) outsources revenue cycle management and IT to Optum, which will take on 575 health system employees.

Government and Politics

ONC publishes Draft Version 4 of USCDI.

Sponsor Updates

• Current Health publishes a new case study, “UMass Memorial Health Builds Leading Hospital at Home Program.”
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Value-Based Care Achieved Through PCMH and HEDIS.”
• Relatient publishes a new case study featuring One Pediatrics, “Activating Patients Through Targeted Messaging and Segmentation.”
• West Monroe appoints TED Conferences CEO Jay Herratti to its board.

Blog Posts

• Are You Compliant? New CURES Act Rules in Effect (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How Bedside Manner Improves Patient Recovery (PerfectServe)
• How The Bellevue Hospital is Transforming their Supply Chain – and Maximizing Savings (Premier)
• Your guide to the average speed of answer in a call center (Talkdesk)
• 2023 Top Healthcare Cybersecurity Threats (TigerConnect)
• Upfront Healthcare 2022 Year in Review (Upfront Healthcare)
• 4 Tips to Boost Physical Therapy Documentation Training in Your Clinic (WebPT)
• The Cost of Doing Nothing (VisiQuate)
• Carequality & EHealth Exchange Annual Meeting Highlights (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 1/13/23

Top News

Alphabet’s Verily health sciences unit will lay off 240 employees, 15% of its workforce, as the company tries to bolster its financials to reduce reliance on its parent.

The company will end early-stage projects that involved remote patient monitoring and microneedles for drug delivery.

Reader Comments

From High Vibration Go On: “Re: J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. You should ask your readers for their assessment and any zingers, predictions, etc.” Readers who attended JPM, what thoughts do you have?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The migration to the new, more powerful server overnight went mostly OK, with a few errors due to permissions, security certificates, and the “contact us” online forms (still working on those). Let me know if you see anything that is irritatingly broken.

Webinars

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Censinet raises $9 million in new funding.

Talent Group acquires Queen Consulting Group.

Sales

• C By Precision Care chooses EClinicalWorks, Healow, and PRISMA.
• Meditech UK chooses CloudWave’s OpSus Cloud Services to deploy its cloud-based Meditech Expanse implementation at two NHS trusts.
• Eye Health America will implement NextGen Patient Experience Platform and NextGen Pay powered by InstaMed.
• Jefferson County Human Services (WI) chooses Eleos Health’s natural language understanding technology to interpret behavioral health conversations and reduce documentation time.
• Transcarent will offer expert second opinions from specialists at The Clinic by Cleveland Clinic, which is a joint venture between Cleveland Clinic and Amwell.
• Nicklaus Children’s Hospital will implement the ActX Genomic Decision Support platform.

People

Life sciences medical intelligence company Dr. Evidence hires Rose Higgins, RN, MPM (HealthMyne) as CEO.

DrFirst promotes G. Cameron Deemer to CEO. He replaces founder James Chen, MS, who moves to executive chairman of the board. The company also promotes Anthony Brooke to chief technology and innovation officer.

ModMed hires Jody Beaverson (Change Healthcare) as chief people officer.

Industry long-timer Frank Pecaitis — who held executive roles at QuadraMed, Medsphere, GE Healthcare, PatientSafe Solutions, Agfa HealthCare, and most recently at Philips in a 30-year career — died December 24 at 59.

Announcements and Implementations

A trigger method adverse event study of 11 hospitals in Massachusetts finds that nearly one-fourth of admissions included an adverse event, of which about 1% were both serious and preventable. The most common type of events involved drugs (39%), surgeries or procedures (30%), nursing care (15%), and healthcare-associated infections (12%).

Northwell Health releases a pregnancy chatbot for its patients that offers education and triage with escalation.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic posts a new episode of DocTalk titled “The two sides of digital health.”
• Healthjump earns Validated Data Stream designation in the new NCQA Data Aggregator Validation Program.
• EClinicalWorks customer Children First Pediatrics reports successful process automation, increased patient compliance, and general cost savings using the company’s Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS).
• Ellkay hosts a virtual blood drive through the Red Cross in support of National Blood Donor Month.
• Fortified Health Security names Ayinde Mitchell (Cognoa) regional sales director.
• HCTec sponsors five families as part of Operation Stand Down Tennessee’s holiday program.
• Impact Advisors announces that is has been recognized as one of the top leaders in Canada in the KLAS Canada EMR Consulting Services 2023 report.
• Kyruus reports a landmark year in 2022, serving over 100 health systems, 500 independent medical groups, and 100 health plan brands.

Blog Posts

• Customer-Centric Healthcare Tech Commercialization (Get-to-Market Health)
• Digital Innovations Behind the Future of Life Sciences Industry (Healthcare Triangle)
• How Technology is Affecting Hospitals From the Top Down: The Role of Today’s CIO (HealthTech Resources)
• How Patient Education Can Increase Compassion in Healthcare (Healthwise)
• Unlocking the power of digital healthcare solutions in three steps (InterSystems)
• A history of home healthcare payment models (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Meltdown: Why Resiliency Programs Alone Can’t Reverse Physician Burnout (Medhost)
• 4 essential factors to a successful, multi-year, phased implementation project (Meditech)
• How NeuroFlow Prioritizes User Experience to Improve Digital Mental Health (NeuroFlow)
• An In-Depth Q&A with Cathy Thomas Hess, Chief Clinical Officer of Wound Care (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 1/11/23

Top News

Capacity management and patient flow software vendor LeanTaaS acquires Hospital IQ, which offers hospital automation solutions.

Webinars

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kaufman Hall will acquire six-employee advisory firm and media publisher Gist Healthcare.

Behavioral health clinical database company Holmusk raises $45 million in a Series B funding round led by Veradigm, which will incorporate segments of its behavioral health and related de-identified patient data into Holmusk’s NeuroBlu Database.

CVS Health is reportedly interested in acquiring senior-focused primary care provider Oak Street Health in a deal that could be worth $10 billion. The retail pharmacy chain is in the midst of an $8 billion acquisition of home healthcare company Signify Health. Chicago-based Oak Street, which went public in 2020, operates 170 clinics across the country.

Tech-enabled kidney care company Monogram Health raises $375 million, bringing its total to $547 million.

Carbon Health announces a $100 million investment from CVS Health Ventures less than a week after announcing layoffs and the shuttering of several business lines. CVS will pilot the primary and urgent care company’s operating model and software within several of its CVS Health locations.

Wolters Kluwer Health acquires nursing education and training company NurseTim.

National telemedicine provider Avel ECare acquires after-hours remote pharmacy service NightWatch. Avel ECare got its start at South Dakota health system Avera Health before it was sold to private equity buyers and renamed in 2021.

Microsoft is in talks to invest $10 billion in ChatGPT owner OpenAI at a valuation of $29 billion

Sales

• Connecticut Children’s Care Network will offer nursing mothers Nest Collaborative’s virtual lactation consultation service.
• The VA will integrate Renalytix’s KidneyIntelX kidney disease assessment and management software with its EHR.
• Bon Secours Mercy Health (OH), Adventist Health (CA), Northside Hospital (GA), Duly Health and Care (IL), and Onsite Women’s Health (TN) select Volpara Health’s breast cancer screening and detection software.
• Meditech UK will use CloudWave’s OpSus Cloud Services to power its Expanse EPR at East Cheshire NHS Trust and Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

People

Retired Army Colonel Bobby Saxon, MS (CMS) joins Leidos as a VP focused on customer advocacy.

Curve Health names Matthew Michela, MBA (Life Image) CEO.

R1 RCM promotes Kyle Hicok, MBA to chief commercial officer.

Nordic Consulting promotes Terri LeFort, RN, MBA to president of Nordic International and hires Kieran Hughes (Tegria) as president of its markets in Europe and the Middle East and Thomas O’Shaughnessy, MSc (Deloitte) as president of its Canada-based subsidiary Healthtech.

Ventra Health hires Steven Huddleston (Pelitas) as CEO.

Consulting firm Brightwork Health IT hires Eliza Corrigan (Tasman Global) as chief sales officer.

Divurgent promotes Hannah Ellerbee, MBA to chief customer officer.

Colin Ashby (Talkdesk) joins Healthmap Solutions as VP of sales for healthcare systems.

Announcements and Implementations

Ardent Health Services (TN) will implement remote patient monitoring and virtual care services from Cadence as part of its remote care programs for patients with chronic conditions.

In Canada, 23 hospitals form a shared services IT organization as they implement a shared instance of Meditech Expanse.

Other

The Bermuda Hospitals Board provides a breakdown of costs and timelines associated with the rollout of its Oracle Cerner-based PEARL system, noting that its staff had to work through several COVID waves and a hurricane as its October 29 go-live approached. The board saved $1.3 million by hosting planning meetings remotely, though it spent $1.7 million to feed and house 160 extra support staff at the Hamilton Princess & Beach Club. The net cost of the project is expected to be $30 million paid over 10 years.

The Better Business Bureau alerts consumers to the shady business practices of North Texas-based telemedicine company Doctor Alexa. The bureau revoked the company’s accreditation last June after it failed to address 24 of the 46 consumer complaints filed on the BBB’s website. Complaints related to paying for services never rendered, chronic lack of communication, and failure to send prescriptions to pharmacies after virtual consults. The BBB received over 300 complaints related to telemedicine between 2019 and 2021.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD announces that it has been awarded 21^st Century Cures Act Certification from ONC.
• Baker Tilly releases a new BuzzHouse Podcast, “Fostering healthcare and housing through relationships as a community investment.”
• ChartSpan welcomes Lauren Wyatt (Change Healthcare) as client success director and Shelby Statom (Everly Health) as implementation project manager.
• Netsmart’s MyUnity earns ONC’s Cures Update certification, the first post-acute EHR to do so.
• CHIME releases a new Leader2Leader Podcast featuring Symplr Chief Product Officer Brian Fugere.
• Diameter Health again achieves the Certified Partner designation in NCQA’s Data Aggregator Validation program.

Blog Posts

• What does Experity do? (Experity)
• Improving Business Development at Your Medical Practice (AdvancedMD)
• The Role of RCM in Health Equity (AGS Health)
• CMS National Healthcare Directory RFI Blog Series: Provider Response (CareMesh)
• The Secret to One Hospital’s $115k Savings in EHR Build Costs (CereCore)
• Content Roundup: Top 5 Blog Posts of 2022  (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Talking Cyber Resilience and Business Risk to Your Board and Executives (Clearwater)
• 3 Tips for Optimizing Your Cloud Costs (CTG)
• The Right Analytics Solution Involves More Than Data Alone (Dimensional Insight)
• A Renewed Focus on Employee Engagement (Direct Recruiters)

Contacts

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

News 1/6/23

Top News

Allscripts changes its company name to Veradigm.

The company sold many of its health IT assets in the past two years. It says it has now consolidated its remaining portfolio of EHR, PM, and patient communication systems into the Veradigm Network.

Shares will continue to trade under the MDRX ticker symbol. They are down 8% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 34% drop.

Reader Comments

From Publius: “Re: non-competes. This would significantly impact Epic, which would have a mass exodus of employees. I assume they would fight it in court.” The Federal Trade Commission proposes banning the use of non-compete clauses that prevent employees from taking jobs with competitors or starting their own businesses. FTC says the clauses are exploitative, affect one in five American workers, and are sometimes imposed by companies on low-earning employees who don’t have significant company knowledge. Previous studies have shown that non-compete agreements protect established companies from startups, reduce competition, and limit the ability of companies to hire the best-suited workers. FTC says the change would provide new opportunities for 30 million Americans and raise wages by $300 billion per year. The proposed change would not affect non-disclosure agreements, but those could be subject to FTC review if they interfere with workers changing jobs. Among the companies named in FTC’s complaints are two Michigan-based security companies that prevented low-wage security guards from working within a 100-mile radius for two years after leaving.

From Pure Energy: “Re: M&A in a down market. Predictions?” Previously overvalued but cash-burning startups that have no obvious path to profitability will find themselves selling out to larger competitors – assuming any are interested in attaching new weights to their corporate ankles – at barely more than asset value as being ‘disruptive” and “innovative” without making money causes newly focused eyes to roll. Modestly or selectively successful companies will shed non-core business in hopes of generating quick cash from carve-outs. Companies that went public during the recent boom, especially those that took the sketchy SPAC route, will have to figure out how to continue operating (or not) based on trashed share price with zero chance of obtaining favorable funding. This is healthy and necessary, just like thinning and pruning deadwood, and survivors will emerge stronger. Also important is that the profitable aspects of the entire hospital and health system market may be consolidated into a couple of dozen big provider and provider-insurer players over the next 10 years, so it will be feast or famine for companies who sell into that market whose participants are focused on decreasing their vendor count.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ll be migrating HIStalk to a new server shortly, which includes a lot of changes to the underlying programming and databases, so expect the usual (hopefully minor and short-lived) glitches.

Webinars

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Salesforce will reduce its workforce by 10%, about 7,000 jobs, and will close offices in some markets, reductions the company blames on reduced customer spending and its own excessive hiring during the pandemic’s boom times. It not break out how many of the job cuts were related to healthcare. The company’s market value has dropped more than half to $134 billion from its late-2021 high.

Shares of GE spinoff GE HealthCare begin trading on the Nasdaq under the GEHC ticker. Shares closed their first day of trading Wednesday up 8%.

Epic-integrated virtual care platform vendor KeyCare completes its $27 million Series A funding round.

Onc.AI, which offers a medical oncologist clinical decision-making platform, raises $25 million in Series A funding.

Sales

• East Tennessee HIN chooses 4medica’s patient matching system.

People

Ardent Health Services hires Brad Hoyt, MD (Utica Park Clinic) as CMIO.

Acadia Healthcare Company hires Laura Groschen (Medtronic) as CIO.

Experity promotes Brian Berning, MS to CFO.

Curve Health hires Matt Michela, MBA (Life Image) as CEO.

Nicholas Anderson (G2o) joins Olah Healthcare Technology as VP of product management.

Announcements and Implementations

EHNAC publishes new versions of its program criteria for its accreditation programs.

The new quarterly market report of Pivot Point Consulting, A Vaco Company makes these points:

• Amazon’s acquisition of One Medical gives the company partnerships with big health systems and a business that has off-the-charts member satisfaction, 90% retention, and 300% member growth over five years, plus a growing Medicare and Medicare Advantage business via its Iora Health.
• Amazon’s relaunched virtual service of Amazon Clinic will be challenged to attract both consumers and providers to its platform, with modest synergies with its pharmacy business but little impact on expensive chronic condition spending.
• CVS Health gained 10,000 contracted clinicians with its September 2022 acquisition of Signify Health, which also gives it a Medicare presence with its Caravan marketplace.
• The acquisition of Summit Health by Walgreens-controlled VillageMD, which closed Thursday will double the company’s PCP count to 2,800 working in 680 locations.
• Walmart made no healthcare acquisitions in 2022, but expanded its telehealth and Medicare preventive care markets using its 4,000-stores footprint.
• Pivot Point recommends that providers start with the digital front door to enhance patient and staff experience, use data to innovate, and build partnerships with payers since the big retailers have shown little interest in hospital care.

An EpicShare article describes how University of Michigan Health – West uses Nuance’s DAX to reduce physician time spent writing notes, with some doctors reporting a total daily effort of 10 minutes to review the results. The organization says the cost can be high and DAX works better in primary care than with specialties, but notes got better and faster over time, more prior authorization requests were approved on the first try, and patients say they enjoy seeing their own words in the doctor’s notes in MyChart.

Withings announces U-Scan, a toilet bowl device that takes daily biomarker readings. The device, which is pending US FDA clearance, will debut in Europe with consumer health cartridges for women’s cycle tracking and hydration.

Government and Politics

A JAMA Network opinion piece warns that clinical algorithms may be found to violate antidiscrimination laws under the Affordable Care Act or may be regulated by FDA as medical devices, both of which the authors urge the federal government to avoid for lower-risk algorithms and until discrimination aspects are better defined. 

Other

Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD, who runs Verily’s life sciences clinical studies platforms, discusses the state of clinical trials in a brief Politico interview:

• Clinical trials will move to using existing data from EHRs and claims, along with sensor data, although data quality mismatches need to be resolved.
• Clinical trials need to involve a low burden for participants to generate representative participation.
• Clinical trials recruitment needs to include digital marketing, call centers, and extra service.
• Future clinical trials will involve long-term following of participants, which will require new ways of thinking about keeping people enrolled.

This is an interesting observation by Will Weider, although perhaps less relevant than it seems to healthcare since ordering is the focus at Amazon and most of us have done it many times. I don’t mind a chat bot as long as it doesn’t hog the screen, make sounds, or pop up on every new page after I’ve already dismissed it. I always renew my car registration online and DMV’s chat bot is like a nicer, field-prompting version of an online form. At least even the dumbest chat bot is smarter than the smartest telephone auto attendant.

Sponsor Updates

• Availity associates volunteer at the 24th annual Make-a-Wish Request-a-Thon.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where IT Hurts Podcast featuring National Coordinator Micky Tripathi.
• Wolters Kluwer Health marks the 30th anniversary of its UpToDate clinical decision support solution by announcing that it has donated over 100,000 subscriptions to UpToDate to caregivers and organizations in 159 countries.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story featuring Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio, “Prisma: How Better Data Improves Care and Reduces Costs.”
• Everbridge appoints RSA CEO Rohit Gai and Blackbaud EVP David Benjamin to its Board of Directors.
• Nordic launches a new podcast series titled “In Network.”
• The Empowered Patient Podcast features First Databank VP of Product Management Virginia Halsey, “Improving Access for Pharmacists to Appropriate Drug Interaction and Dosing Data.”
• Get Well offers a digital inclusivity toolkit to help healthcare teams address workplace violence.
• InterSystems announces it has been positioned in the Visionaries Quadrant of the recently published Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems.
• Juniper Networks announces it has been named a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure for the third consecutive year.
• Meditech publishes a new case study, “Frederick Health Aligns Workflows Across Care Settings with Meditech Professional Services.”

Blog Posts

• 5 Modern Must-Have Features in Urgent Care Technology (Experity)
• Top Trends Transforming the Future of Healthcare in 2023 and Beyond (Healthcare Triangle)
• Top 5 Challenges in Value-Based Care (and How to Solve Them) (Healthjump)
• More Than Two Years Into the Pandemic, Hospital Budgets Are Beginning to Crack (HealthTech Resources)
• Telehealth Finance Variables and Successful Business Models (Impact Advisors)
• 5 things to know about the 2023 CPT code updates (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• When it Comes to Wired & Wireless Access, Juniper Mist is in the Driver’s Seat (Juniper Networks)
• Voices from the Frontlines: Key 2022 Consumer and Provider Research Findings (Kyruus)
• Redefining Productivity to Assist with the Healthcare Staffing Crisis (Lumeon)
• Five Crucial Topics for Healthcare Leaders in 2023 (Medhost)
• How Volunteer Attorneys are Helping Patients Overcome the “Financial Toxicity” of a Cancer Diagnosis (Myndshft)
• Don’t Be Forgotten: Reduce Rehab Therapy No-Shows by Addressing the ‘Whys’ Behind Missed Visits (Net Health)
• Rebuilding Trust to Empower the Future of Healthcare (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 1/4/23

Top News

Congress approves an omnibus spending bill that includes $300 billion in 2023 funding for the VA, with $1.8 billion of that earmarked to continue to support the rollout of the department’s Oracle Cerner-based EHR across 25 facilities beginning in June.

Implementations were paused last summer after numerous reports of system outages, patient safety concerns, and cost increases.

Oracle’s progress dashboard shows that it has resolved eight high-priority software issues identified by the VA, and a dozen more in various stages of progress.

The VA purchased the Oracle Cerner system in 2018 for $10 billion. More recent estimates of total project cost exceed $50 billion over 28 years.

Webinars

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

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

Sales

• Outpatient radiology service provider Akumin will implement cloud-based enterprise imaging and informatics software from Mach7 Technologies.
• Virtual consultation software vendor SmileSnap subscribes to Clearwater’s managed cybersecurity and compliance services program.

People

Fuse Oncology promotes James Bauler, MA to CEO.

Jessica Hadley (CHIME) joins Divurgent as associate VP of client engagement.

Direct Recruiters promotes Trevor Yasinow to partner.

Carl Bertrams, MBA (Collateral Opportunities) joins Prevounce Health as VP of sales.

Atrium Health promotes Dawn Ross, RN, DNP, MS to chief clinical informatics officer.

Announcements and Implementations

San Juan Regional Medical Center (NM) acquires an Amwell telemedicine cart that it will use as part of its new telehealth partnership with Presbyterian Hospital’s NICU team.

Tampa General Hospital (FL) launches a remote monitoring pilot program for patients with chronic conditions using technology from Stel Life and remote care management services from Signalamp Health.

Government and Politics

Staff at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (MD) prepare for the spring transition to MHS Genesis.

Hawaii’s prison and jail medical records system has not been working since June, leaving staff unable to determine inmate COVID-19 vaccination status. The department apparently purchased EClinicalWorks in 2008 but failed to budget software maintenance and has not applied updates since. It  launched a replacement project in 2021 with a 2025 implementation deadline, but hasn’t signed a contract.

Privacy and Security

The LockBit ransomware group apologizes for a cyberattack on Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and gives the hospital a free decryptor to release their files, 13 days after the initial attack. The ransomware group, which sells its technical services to hackers as ransomware-as-a-service, says that its partner that was responsible for the attack violated its rules and has been kicked out of its affiliate program.

Other

Burnout among clinical support staff appears to be on the wane, according to an Artera survey that found a 20% year-over-year decline in staff reporting moderate to severe burnout. A similar decline was found among those reporting high or severe burnout. Of the 300 surveyed, 41% say a patient has noticed their burnout and 33% report that burnout has negatively impacted patient care.

A study of 2,000 consumers by prescription discount card vendor CharityRx finds that two-thirds of Americans Google before they contact their doctors; 37% get health advice from influencers (most commonly for anxiety, weight loss, and depression where clinicians may not have personal experience); and 20% claim they discovered they had a health condition after seeing a drug ad and 25% of those regularly take the advertised product.

Security guards at Beaumont Hospital (MI) threaten to arrest a patient in the ED waiting room for recording a confrontation between a doctor and another patient on her phone, claiming that she was violating HIPAA. The guards told her she could either delete the TikTok video or go to jail, after which they locked her in a room. Local police who were called determined that she had broken no laws, but the hospital refused to hand over her discharge paperwork and prescription. A lawyer who was contacted by the local TV station noted that the patient is not a covered entity and therefore has no obligation under HIPAA.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD employees deliver gifts to three local schools and help 14 families and 35 children this holiday season as part of the Sub for Santa program.
• The Champion Hospital in Kuwait selects Oracle Cerner’s Millenium EHR.
• Pivot Point Consulting publishes its first quarterly Healthcare IT Market Report for 2023.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Clinical Testing Hackathon for V12 Release.”
• Arrive Health employees put together holiday gift bags for residents at WellPower in Denver.
• Ascom Americas hires Alexandre Gauthier as regional sales director, and Christopher Fant as project manager, professional services group.
• Nordic publishes a technical paper titled “Healthcare Modernization Through Cloud-Enhanced Application Accessibility.”
• AvaSure, which specializes in acute virtual care and remote safety monitoring, experiences record-breaking growth in 2022 as its customer base tops 1,000 hospitals.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “The Inflation Reduction Act and its Effect on Healthcare Providers.”
• CarePort publishes a 2022 Year in Review infographic.
• Censinet announces new portfolio management capabilities to accelerate cyber risk management and incident response.

Blog Posts

• Three key updates to healthcare terminologies in 2022 (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Meet the MEAT Criteria to Avoid Overpayments (AGS Health)
• Improving patient engagement through shared decision making (Arcadia)
• Artera Finds Clinical Support Staff Burnout in Healthcare Remains High in 2nd Annual Study (Artera)
• How to ‘Be’ the CIO Your Organization Needs in 2023 (HealthTech Resources)
• The Azara Effect: Analyzing the Impact of the Patient Visit Planning Report on UDS Measure Improvement (Azara Healthcare)
• Delivering Equitable Healthcare Through Technology (Bamboo Health)
• RSNA 2022 | Visage’s Top Five (Visage Imaging)
• The Health Plan Response to the CMS RFI on a National Healthcare Directory (CareMesh)
• Epic Go-Live Planning: 4 Steps for Successful At-the-Elbow Support (CereCore)
• A Record-Setting Year (ChartSpan)
• A retrospective on Cerner’s transition to Oracle (Oracle Cerner)
• 2022 Wrapped Playlist (Clearsense)
• Disclosure of a Registrant’s Risk Management, Strategy, and Governance Regarding Cybersecurity Risks (Clearwater)
• 4 Ways to Support Patients Navigating Annual Benefits Changes (CoverMyMeds)
• Will new entrants slim healthcare by trimming the “waste”? (Nordic)
• The Ultimate Guide to Developing a Proprietary App (CTG)
• Availity Insights with Elaine Putman and John D’Ambrosio – Accelerating Enterprise Data Strategies (Availity)
• Urgent Care Software: Know What’s Right for Your Business (Experity)

Contacts

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

News 12/30/22

Top News

A study of 100,000 stroke patients in NHS hospitals finds that the rate of full recovery tripled to 48% when AI software from UK company Brainomax was used to make a quicker diagnosis.

The company was spun out of the University of Oxford.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Some healthcare IT websites find themselves with nothing to pontificate about in the slow holiday news weeks, so they pad space with the 2023 digital health predictions of whoever is willing to email a response. All those I’ve seen have been vague and obvious, usually covering overworked territory such as telehealth and wearables. The real problem is that a year is a short time window to snapshot a slow transition, so truly bold predictions would be ill-advised since the Internet doesn’t forget being publicly wrong. I don’t recall any of the 2021 pundits predicting that Oracle would acquire Cerner, that digital health company shares would implode with a special toasting of SPACs, and that widespread scammery in the online ADHD prescription mills would finally draw federal attention.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Healthjump. The King of Prussia, PA-based company is driving data liquidity and interoperability efforts within the world of healthcare. Healthjump provides a cloud-hosted platform for the collection, standardization, and delivery of EHR data into applications, analytics, clinical research, quality measures reporting, and more without the complex set-up of traditional interface engines. The platform connects to any EHR/PM system to extract over 300 standardized data elements, with delivery options including API, web hooks, flat file, and HL7. The company’s webpage lists, for each EHR vendor, how it access its data, what data is available, and how it is delivered. Thanks to Healthjump for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Seven care homes in Wales win awards for their use of RITA, a touchscreen app that helps patients, particularly those with memory impairments, recall and share events from their past by listening to music and speeches, watching old news reports and movies, and playing games. RITA, which is sold by Cheshire-based My Improvement Network, stands for Reminescence / Rehabilitation and Interactive Therapy activities.

Former Allscripts CEO Paul Black invests in and joins the board of Community CareLink, a Kansas City, MO company that offers software for case management, crisis calls, agency reporting, and social determinants of health referrals.

A group of Apple Watch users sues the company, claiming that pulse oximeters are racially biased because they are less accurate when testing dark skin. The plaintiffs say that the problem is that the Watch’s sensors and algorithms measure blood oxygen at the wrist, unlike medical grade units that measure at the fingertip.

Sales

• Downtown Pediatrics (WY) will implement EClinicalWorks Cloud.

People

Carteret Health Care (NC) names CIO / VP of General Services Kyle Marek, MS as interim CEO with the retirement of Harvey Case. He has been at the health system since 1998, when he took a network engineer job there right out of college.

Privacy and Security

Scripps Health will pay $3.5 million to settle class action lawsuits over the 1.2 million patients whose information was compromised in a March 2021 ransomware attack. Each plaintiff will receive $100 in cash and credit monitoring services, while those who had their identities stolen will receive up to $7,500 to cover out-of-pocket costs.

Lake Charles Memorial Health System (LA) begins notifiying 270,000 patients that their personal and medical information was compromised in a ransomware attack that occurred in late October, two months before the first letters were mailed.

Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children says it will take weeks to recover from a December 19 ransomware attack, during which time patients will continue to experience delays.

Other

In England, a surgery practice’s Christmas greeting broadcast text message for patients is mistakenly replaced with one advising the recipient that they had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. Panicked patients couldn’t get through on the practice’s telephone, so several lined up at its front door. Said one patient, “If it’s one of their admins that’s sent out a mass text, I wouldn’t be trusting them to empty the bins.”

Contacts

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

News 12/28/22

Top News

The Spokane VA is losing clinical staff over its Oracle Cerner implementation, the local paper finds. The hospital is projecting a budget deficit of $30 million in the fiscal year that ends in September 2023, with $10.5 million of the shortfall being caused by adding jobs to offset the loss of productivity with Oracle Cerner.

Employees complain that Oracle Cerner requires extra steps and irrelevant drop-down entries because it shares the DoD’s design, such as a lab prompt that requires selecting the patient’s species (since DoD documents the care of service animals).

The hospital’s decreased capacity has led more veterans to seek care in the private sector, which involves longer waits and higher cost to taxpayers.

Nearly three-fourths of the employees of Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center said in a September survey that their morale had decreased because of Oracle Cerner, with the vast majority complaining about less-efficient work processes, increased documentation time, and concerns about patient safety. More than 80% of respondents said they have seen little or no improvement in the system went live.

An OB-GYN  resigned “mainly because of the Cerner EMR,” saying that she is “mystified by and beyond disappointed in the Cerner product.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two-thirds of poll respondents say that the kind of healthcare that most of us want can’t be delivered in the US because of our free market health system. AT says that individuals prefer to be healthy, but that is a worst-case scenario for providers who are paid under a sick care model. Cosmos says healthcare should be regulated like a utility. Adam Smith (probably not the one who comes to mind since he’s been dead for a couple of centuries) notes that people don’t actually want healthcare, they want to feel and look better, so a true free-market system would focus on services that consumers will pay for, such as Lasik and cosmetic surgery, at the expense of public health and emergency services that support the common good.

New poll to your right or here: Is it acceptable for a non-profit health system to provide donors and VIPs with a higher level of non-clinical service than everybody else gets? I’ve mentioned before that I worked right out of school for a dump of a for-profit hospital, and when the mother of the eye surgeon who was our biggest revenue generator was scheduled to be admitted, it was like the President had collapsed on the sidewalk outside. I still maintain that we weren’t doing her any favors on the clinical side – nurses and other staff were forced to work outside their usual routines to cater to her in her room in a mostly isolated hallway (because our fawning administrators had her neighbors transferred further away) and the last thing you want as a patient is for clinicians to be winging it.

Webinars

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A private equity firm acquires clinical research technology vendor Calyx, which it will fold into its GLO Healthcare.

Oracle Cerner has offered 4.1 million square feet of Kansas City-area office space for sale in the past 22 months.

Sales

• Luminis Health will replace its legacy PACS with Visage 7 from Visage Imaging in a transactional licensing model for the cloud-engineered system.

People

Medecision hires Jana Barbuto (FluidEdge Consulting) as SVP of business development.

Hunter Bradley (Finvi) joins Atlas Health as VP of implementation.

Privacy and Security

An Associated Press report finds that governments are using COVID-19 contact tracing apps for mass surveillance, to stifle dissent, and to provide police with suspect tracking information. In the US, HHS signed contracts for collecting identifiable patient data and CDC bought the cellphone tracking data of 20 million people for COVID-related purposes.

Other

An op-ed piece in BMJ says that  NHS England needs to move ahead with giving patient access to their own records, both to empower them and to support the self-reliance that is necessary as access to care in the UK has slid to among the worst countries in Europe.

An advocacy group finds that employees at Washington, DC’s public psychiatric hospital didn’t notice one patient killing another earlier this year because they were staring at their phones, chatting, or away from their assigned posts.

An Ontario breast cancer survivor says that a speech recognition program’s omission of the leading word “if” in the second sentence above led her to believe that her cancer had returned.

Contacts

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

News 12/23/22

Top News

HHS publishes ownership data for all 7,000 Medicare-certified hospitals, which it says will help researchers and enforcement agencies identify owners with a history of poor performance, support research related to cost versus ownership, and allow consumers to make better decisions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Today’s post will be short and Monday’s may be entirely absent given the paucity of news. Enjoy whatever holiday that you celebrate, if any. 

Speaking of which, I’m distressed to see companies laying employees off right before Christmas. I can only assume that they are clueless, heartless, or so poorly managed that the best option was to upend the lives of members of their “company family” who now face a bleak holiday season. There’s no good time to be laid off, but a business must be sinking fast if they couldn’t wait until January to jettison their human ballast. Standing in front of holiday decorations to tell your family that your livelihood has been ended while simultaneously dealing with personal shame and a sense of betrayal can’t be fun.

I never look at Google Analytics stats for HIStalk, but I brought it up today to find something. I was surprised to see that while 89% of unique visitors since August 1 (when I installed the new version of GA) were from the US, China was the second-highest country at 3%, followed by Germany, India, Canada, and the UK. I’m curious about what a visitor from China would find interesting about HIStalk.

I think this is the first time that I’m so unenthused at attending a HIMSS conference that I haven’t registered or made travel arrangements by year’s end. The biggest single booths booked so far are Epic (7,200 square feet) and Oracle Cerner (6,400). Other large ones are Microsoft, EClinicalWorks, Athenahealth, InterSystems, and Philips.

Webinars

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

UK doctors warn that “privatization of the NHS by stealth” is occurring as a subsidiary of US health insurer Centene has quietly acquired 67 GP practices, making it the largest provider of such services. Centene also acquired a 50-hospital private health group. Advocates, some of whom are former NHS executives who took jobs with Centene-related businesses, tout innovation and cost reductions, but prior experience with Centene’s similar operations in Spain suggest that expectations didn’t match reality as cost savings didn’t materialize and the company has started divesting non-core assets to boost profits.

Zus Health founder and CEO Jonathan Bush says that the recession changes the game for digital health vendors:

In 2023, the pudding is that you create rock-solid cash savings for buyers of healthcare. I think that means that many worthwhile point solutions that have excellent offerings will need to work quickly to club up with aggregators or find other means of going to market with guaranteed easy savings math for unsophisticated benefits buyers. It will also mean efficiency will begin to trump effectiveness.

People

Mallika Edwards (Transaction Data Systems) joins Xsolis as chief product officer.

Bardavon Health Innovations promotes Alex Benson, MPA to COO.

Announcements and Implementations

US life expectancy dropped again in 2021, going back to 1996 levels even as other countries saw their average lifespan rebound. Experts say the US did so much worse because of low COVID-19 vaccination rates, drug overdoses, and the generally poor health of its citizens.

University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill describes how its venture studio launches digital health startups that are quickly ready for investment.

Government and Politics

Omnibus Appropriations legislation, if approved by the Senate and House, would extend Medicare telehealth flexibility and Acute Hospital Care at Home for another two years. Government funding expires at 11:59 p.m. Friday.

Other

The New York State Health Department launches an investigation of ECMC Hospital (NY) after a video goes viral in which its psychiatric nurses confront administrators over staffing levels. The nurses, who say they are caring for an average of 53 patients each, first ask an unidentified administrator about staffing plans for the week, during which the administrator doesn’t look up from her phone. They then knocked on HR’s door, where nobody answered, and then tried to see the director of nurses, who was on vacation. The hospital blamed the issues on its inability to discharge patients to state-supported programs and the low reimbursement rate for Medicaid patients. 

Doctors at NYU Langone’s ED say the hospital gives VIP treatment to wealthy donors, politicians, and celebrities who sometimes cut the triage line when employees see “friends and family” flags in the EHR that the patient should receive preferential treatment. Hospital trustees can use a dedicated phone line to alert staff that they are coming, after which administrators call and text doctors that a high-priority patient is on the way. Two interviewed members of NYU Langone’s board of trustee members told the New York Times that their ED care was fast and excellent, but they assume that all patients are treated similarly. Some doctors have quit or been fired over the hospital’s VIP policies and ACGME has placed the ED on probation. The hospital responded by hiring a defamation law firm that is best known for threatening news organizations with its expertise in “understanding the obstacles that the First Amendment poses for defamation plaintiffs.”

A hospital in France evacuates in a bomb scare that was triggered by the arrival in the ED of an 88-year-old man whose chief complaint was the World War I artillery shell that had mysteriously found its way into his rectum.

Contacts

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

News 12/21/22

Top News

Fujifilm acquires Tampa-based Inspirata, which offers the Dynamyx digital pathology system.

Reader Comments

From Climb Higher: “Re: airline-like reporting and oversight of patient safety issues. This is not a new idea, but I’m glad to see it maybe finally coming to life.” Me too. The first suggestion of an national EHR oversight program that I’m aware of was published in a 2011 article (above) that called for health system EHR safety committees to investigate EHR-related adverse events and then report them to a federal, multidisciplinary National Transportation Safety Board type organization that would review the issues to determine their potential prevalence and risk and then publish preventive strategies for a national audience where appropriate. The authors suggested two immediate steps to get the program started: (a) establish a reporting system for de-identified incident data; and (b) define trigger criteria, a dissemination methodology, the legal infrastructure required to create the new board, and integration of EHR vendor requirements into ONC’s certification process. I summarized the article and added my thoughts in November 2011, where I expressed a slight preference for a non-government approach such as that of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices:

I personally think you could start to turn the battleship with non-governmental non-profit of 5-20 employees. It  wouldn’t provide oversight, but leadership. Work on awareness and best practices. Take voluntary reports, and even if you don’t get many, blast them out there and let the reaction go somewhat viral. Develop constructive relationships with vendors and call out the obstructionists publicly. Make best friends with all those REC people out there. Align with the people who talk a lot about patient safety but don’t have technology expertise (Joint Commission, state licensing boards.) Steer clear of endless theoretical debates and react to real-life incidents. Stay well away from HIMSS and CHIME if you want to keep your objectivity, but think about working with AMIA. Self-fund through educational and consulting offerings. We have a highly collegial and collaborative industry, so use a network of experts as needed  to bolster staffing for specific projects. Even if the government eventually does something, this kind of work will still be needed – ISMP’s work isn’t diminished by the fact that there’s a plodding FDA out there.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Here’s wishing you a Happy Yalda for Wednesday night, the longest night of the year, the beginning of winter, and the start of longer daylight hours in the Northern Hemisphere. This is one of few holidays, like New Year’s Day, that is inclusive to all, except maybe those south of the equator who will celebrate Yalda when winter begins in June. ChatGPT perhaps says it better: “Happy Yalda! May this festive occasion bring joy and happiness to you and your loved ones. May the light of the longest night of the year brighten your path and guide you towards prosperity and success in the coming year. Wishing you a blessed and wonderful Yalda celebration.”

Random fact: Epic CEO Judy Faulkner will turn 80 next August 11, just 10 days before UGM starts.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A federal court grants the motion of Epic to invalidate the patents of non-practicing entity (patent troll) Decapolis Systems, which has been suing Epic customers claiming that Epic’s software violates its patents. Epic defended its customers and sued Decapolis in its own hometown. Two dozen companies, including EHR vendors, paid Decapolis to settle its litigation. Decapolis was formed in 2021 by a patent attorney who used generic healthcare information patents to target EHR vendors, along with filing lawsuits in several other industries based on similarly non-specific patents. Clearly USPTO is issuing a lot of patents that it shouldn’t.

Axios reports that primary care chain Carbon Health is talking with several companies about licensing its homegrown EHR. Co-founder and CEO Eren Bali has said that the company had to fix EHRs because everybody hates them and their software is “laughable,” insisting that the company design a new EHR for its own use without looking at existing ones or their feature lists. He will likely learn how hard it is to turn one organization’s custom-developed software package into a commercially viable, well-supported product. 

People

Aaron Wootton, MBA (Henry Ford Health System) joins Concord Hospital Health System as CIO.

Direct healthcare company Nomi Health hires Amy Wykoff (IBM Watson Health) as its first chief product officer.

Becky Fox, RN, MSN (Atrium Health) joins Intermountain Healthcare as chief clinical information officer.

Industry long-timer Dave Runt, COO of Contra Costa Regional Medical Center and Health Centers, tells me that he will retire this month.

Announcements and Implementations

A KLAS report on practice management systems for mid-sized and large practices finds Athenahealth and Epic topping the list for large practices — although Meditech Expanse was right on their heels but with an insufficient sample size – while Cerner and EClinicalWorks need improvement. Mid-sized practices are most satisfied with Athenahealth and NextGen Healthcare, while independent practices like NextGen Healthcare. Two-thirds of Oracle Cerner customers report dissatisfaction due to outdated technology, inadequate training, and functionality gaps that require adding third-party products, with many of those having low expectations for the company’s RevElate replacement product because of Cerner’s history of unfulfilled RCM promises.   

Government and Politics

HHS proposes a change to HIPAA that would support healthcare attachment transactions for claims and prior authorizations and the use of electronic signatures in those transactions, which the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare estimates could save $828 million per year. 

The General Accounting Office appoints seven members to the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee:

• Kikelomo Belizaire, MD, MPH, MBA, chief medical officer, Pegasystems.
• Shila Blend, PhD, MS, health information technology director, North Dakota Health Information Network.
• Hannah Galvin, MD, CMIO, Cambridge Health Alliance.
• Bryant Thomas Karras, MD, CMIO and senior epidemiologist, Washington State Department of Health.
• Anna McCollister, consultant and patient advocate.
• Deven McGraw, JD, MPH, lead for data stewardship and data sharing, Invitae.
• Naresh Sundar Rajan, PhD, MS, chief data officer, CyncHealth.

The Drug Enforcement Administration serves a Show Cause order to online pharmacy Truepill, which it alleges wrongfully filled thousands of prescriptions for ADHD stimulants such as Adderall in its relationship with telehealth companies such as Cerebral. DEA says that the company filled 72,000 controlled substance prescriptions in two years, 60% of them for stimulants, many of which were not medically appropriate and in some cases were written by prescribers who did not possess the required state license. Truepill’s fall 2021 funding round valued the company at $1.6 billion. The company acquired its own ADHD telehealth company (Ahead), shut it down as the DEA came knocking in its investigation of competitor Cerebral, and has conducted four rounds of layoffs this year. It has refocused on its core pharmacy business and cut back on its COVID-focused offerings of telehealth visits, home lab testing, and generating and filling antiviral prescriptions as allowed by Emergency Use Authorization.

Other

An MIT Technology Review article observes that the proliferation of AI-generated text and images will spoil future AI models, which will train on both real and fake Internet content without knowing the difference. The author worries that AI is good at generating confident, authoritative text that glosses over unreferenced assertions and outright misstatements that it repeats. She noted in a previous article that it’s nearly impossible to detect AI-generated text, but one way is to assume that if text is well written and free of typos, misspellings, and poorly constructed sentences, the author was probably not a human.

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/19/22

Top News

The event that was formerly known as the Cerner Health Conference will move to Las Vegas next year as part of the Oracle CloudWorld Conference.

The 15-year-old CHC drew 14,000 attendees to Kansas City, MO each fall, generating $18 million in local economic impact.

Reader Comments

From AI Ball: “Re: ChatGPT. I was playing with it when I read your mention of sponsorship, so I had it write a marketing pitch for you. What do you think?” The writing and level of expertise is better than that on most health IT websites. Its marketing pitch was about as good as I could have written, which should make some folks excited (unmotivated, Wikipedia-powered college students and phishing email authors with limited English proficiency) and others scared:

There are a number of potential reasons why a company might consider sponsoring a website like HIStalk:

• Increased visibility and brand awareness: Sponsoring a website can help a company increase its visibility and reach a wider audience. This can be particularly useful for companies that want to reach a specific demographic or target market.
• Lead generation: Sponsoring a website can help a company generate leads and attract new customers. This can be especially useful for companies that offer products or services that are relevant to the website’s audience.
• Content marketing: Sponsoring a website can be a useful way for a company to share its content and message with a targeted audience. This can help a company build its brand and establish itself as a thought leader in its industry.
• Networking and partnerships: Sponsoring a website can help a company connect with other organizations and individuals in its industry or field. This can lead to new partnerships and opportunities for growth and collaboration.

Overall, sponsoring a website like HIStalk can provide a number of benefits for a company, including increased visibility, lead generation, content marketing, and networking opportunities.

I asked Chat GPT who is responsible for high US healthcare costs and it gave a detailed write-up that included these factors: high prescription drug costs, high administrative costs, high costs for procedures, lack of price transparency, limited competition, and the high cost of care for the uninsured and underinsured. Maybe that seems obvious, but remember that it’s a machine talking, and in a quite readable way.

From Dilly Pickler: “Re: Ascension. The NYT article has generated nearly 2,000 comments that have little good to say about the US healthcare system.” Few of the depressingly insightful comments say anything positive about our US healthcare-industrial complex.

From Licit Liaison: “Re: Slack. Ever considered starting a Slack or Teams channel for industry discussions?” I have, albeit briefly given the unenthusiastic reception to my previous similar efforts (my conclusion: everybody likes to read, few like to contribute). Send me your ideas.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Just over half of poll respondents think that networking is harder for women, but two-thirds of female respondents believe that’s the case.

New poll to your right or here, which was inspired by a comment to the New York Times article about Ascension: Can comprehensive, compassionate, and accessible healthcare be offered in a free market, for-profit model? Click the poll’s Comments link to expound further.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Lumeon. Health systems use Lumeon’s Care Orchestration platform to transform their care delivery processes into seamlessly orchestrated, personalized, virtualized care centered on each patient’s needs. With Lumeon, care delivery becomes frictionless, efficient, and effective, ensuring the best standard of safe care is delivered every time. With headquarters in the US and Europe, the company is proud to be working with over 70 leading hospitals, health systems, and specialist health providers as its clients. Thanks to Lumeon for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Sales

• Luminis Health (MD) will deploy VisiQuate’s denials management, revenue management, and reserve analytics solutions.

Privacy and Security

An NPR report says that recent hospital ransomware attacks in India suggest that the country’s weak cybersecurity systems and data protection laws threaten the prime minister’s plan to digitize the health records of all residents in its National Digital Health Mission. Experts also question whether its plan to share records with informed consent is likely to succeed given India’s lack of history with that concept.

Other

Zocdoc founder and CEO Oliver Kharraz, MD, PhD offers an explanation of why big tech companies “enter the healthcare space like lions, only to retreat like lambs”:

• The companies aren’t solving healthcare’s problems, but rather are seeking profit for their core businesses (hardware for Apple, supply chain for Amazon).
• Changing healthcare requires bringing existing participants and their inconsistent technologies together, which is hard, slow connective work that tech companies aren’t equipped to perform.
• Well-funded startups have failed because they avoid the complexity of the healthcare system and focus on fixing “the fragments of a fragmented system,” such as developing telehealth solutions even though it represents a tiny fraction of healthcare interactions, developing cash pay solutions when most transactions are paid via insurance, and serving only the “worried well.”
• The author agrees with Andreessen Horowitz’s conclusion that the company that solves these problems will be a unifier that could end up being the biggest company in the world, but it probably won’t be one that is on today’s list.

Advisory Board’s Paul Trigonoplos excerpts some interesting quotes from interviewing health systems and tech vendors about partnering with each other:

• (Health system exec) There are thousands of tech companies, and they all do the same thing. Can’t we just wait a year and see what fails or gets bought? There is value in waiting.
• (Health system exec) A lot of vendors came to me and said, “We want to be your partner.” But I always said, “I want you to be a good vendor, and then maybe over time we can become partners.”
• (Vendor) Once a health system has signed a sales contract, they and their subsequent requests are no longer our number one priority. It’s on to the next sale.
• (Vendor) It takes hard work to find a good match. The problem is that vendors these days are like squirrels — we chase any sale we can get our hands on. So, it is really up to health systems to scope us out.
• (Vendor) If I had one ask of health systems, it’s that they stop relying on vendors to run circles around their middle management to accomplish something.

A KHN report notes that unlike the US, where 100 million citizens have unpaid medical bills, medical debt is almost unknown in Germany even in the absence of a government health care system. Germany’s healthcare systems is similar to ours in relying on private doctors and insurers with policies issued through employers, but different in that it limits out-of-pocket expenses for each patient, with free physician visits and a $10 co-pay for most prescriptions and a day’s stay in the hospital. US health insurance often comes with high deductibles, requiring even insured patients end up in medical debt after paying their medical bills via credit card, family borrowing, or installment plans.

Florida’s growing demand for RNs and LPNs is being hurt by the low licensure exam passing rates of its for-profit nursing schools. The state has the highest exam failure rate in the US at more than one-third of graduates.

I saw and liked this on LinkedIn.

Sponsor Updates

• Memora Health and PeriGen will partner to offer hospitals a labor and delivery inpatient solution along with a post-discharge monitoring tool.
• Wolters Kluwer Health integrates BioDigital XR’s extended reality-based medical education solutions with its Wolters Kluwer Medical Education & Medical Practice.
• Upfront Healthcare updates its proprietary psychographic segmentation model.
• West Monroe names Laurie Lovett to its Board of Directors.
• Vyne Medical gives away 10 trees through Speak for the Trees to 10 winners who attended MGMA.

Blog Posts

• Maximize your Learning Management System for EHR Success (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Delivering Equitable Healthcare Through Technology (Bamboo Health)
• Unduly noted: Why EHR documentation is creating an informational quagmire (Nordic)
• Extreme Usability: Enhancing the User Experience (Netsmart)
• Nurses of Note Awards 2022: The Manager of Ambulatory Nursing (PerfectServe)
• How University Hospitals Saved $7.5 Million Through Pharmacy Operations Improvement (Premier)
• How RCxRules Crowdsources Content to Help You Stay One Step Ahead (RCxRules)
• Three ways healthcare automation puts an end to patient-provider phone tag (Relatient)
• The Future is Information: Enabling a Smarter, Swifter Process for Specialty Medications (Surescripts)
• HLTH conference 2022 takeaways: How the future of healthcare is taking shape (Talkdesk)
• What’s New with MIPS for PTs, OTs, and SLPs in 2023? (WebPT)
• Care Plans and Order Sets – the Apples and Oranges of Patient Care? (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 12/16/22

Top News

Analytics vendor Komodo Health lays off 78 employees, 9% of its headcount, as part of a structuring and the planned departure of its CFO later this month.

An early 2021 funding round valued the company at $3.3 billion, since reduced following a down round. Plans for a summer IPO have been shelved. The company has raised $514 million.

Reader Comments

From Tally: “Re: Intrado outage. Did I miss your report, and do you have more information? Our patient reminder calls have been down since December 1. We get unclear updates from the vendor, who stated network issues. They took down the 988 Crisis Lifeline, at least for a time – hoping that is back up. SFTP files began dropping again a few days ago, but still no calls are going out.” I mentioned the downtime on December 5. I’ve emailed the company but haven’t heard back. Intrado’s status page says that most services have been restored, but individual integrations and SFTP may still be problematic. Intrado has had several outages over the years, one of which took 911 services down in 14 states for an hour in 2020 for which the company paid a $1.75 million settlement to the FCC. Intrado was involved in other 911 outages in 2014 (it paid $1.4 million to the FCC settle that incident) and 2018. Private equity-owned Intrado announced a month ago that it is changing its name to West Technology Group following the anticipated sale of its Safety business, along with the Intrado name, to an investment firm for $2.4 billion, which is expected to close in Q1 2023.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor AvaSure. The Belmont, MI-based company is the pioneer of video-based sitting and virtual nursing solutions, offering the most proven, scalable virtual care platform. It enables bedside nurses to work at the top of their license and empowers them with more time for direct patient care by extending care teams with new virtual roles, integrating virtual safety attendants and virtual nurses into existing clinical workflows. KLAS named it as a “Emerging Solutions Top 20” as #1 in reducing the cost of care. Provider bottom lines are enhanced by eliminating one-to-one sitters, reducing adverse events, and making work more efficient. Specific use cases include isolation precautions, workplace violence, suicide prevention, fall prevention, and adverse event prevention. The company offers a free on-site assessment and an online hospital cost calculator for falls and sitters. Thanks to AvaSure for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a recent AvaSure webinar I found on YouTube titled “Connecting the Bedside to the Webside: Virtual Nursing as a Service.”

Lorre reports strong end-of-year signups from companies that are anxious to spend their leftover money on HIStalk sponsorships and promoted webinars, so she is offering a sweetener or two to new supporters. I tactfully didn’t point out to her that companies traditionally offer deals when business is bad, not good, but you can sort that out with her.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual chronic pain solution vendor Override — which was founded by former VA Secretary David Shulkin, MD along with daughter and chronic pain sufferer Jennie Shulkin, JD, who will serve as CEO — raises $3.5 million in seed funding. The company used some of the proceeds to acquire pain management coaching business Take Courage Coaching.

Fortified Health Security announces an unspecified growth investment from two investment firms and Nordic Consulting.

A New York Times article in its “Profits Over Patients” series calls out Ascension, whose aggressive headcount reductions left it short of help during the pandemic to the point of endangering patients. The Times notes that Ascension characterizes itself as a ministry rather than a business, with its non-profit status allowing it to avoid paying $1 billion in taxes even though it generates nearly $30 billion in annual revenue, runs an investment company that manages $41 billion, and pays its CEO $13 million. The investment arm is run by Ascension’s former CEO, who was paid $11 million in his first year in that position. Former executives say that executives talked only about achieving financial targets, not how the money might be used to advance Ascension’s charitable mission, with one former division COO saying the company’s approach “was right out of the Wall Street playbook.”

Sales

• American Endovascular & Amputation Prevention goes live on EHR and health information search from EClinicalWorks.
• Washington Health Benefit Exchange chooses Leap Orbit’s provider data management system.
• Canada’s Niagara Health will implement Oracle Cerner.

People

Centene names Brian LeClaire, MBA, PhD (Arsenal Capital Partners) as CIO.

PatientPay hires Rick Bell (Bottomline Technologies) as SVP of business development.

Kaley Simon, MPH (Olive) joins MedAdvisor as SVP of product.

Summit BHC hires Jeanne Sands, DHA, MBA (SSM Health) as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Orion Donovan-Smith, a reporter Spokane newspaper The Spokesman-Review, wins a National Press Foundation award for his  investigative reporting of Cerner problems at the VA Mann-Grandstaff Medical Center. The competition judges said of Donovan-Smith, “It takes serious guts for a reporter and editor anywhere (let alone at a small newspaper) to devote dozens of stories to IT failures – and hope any meaningful journalism will come out of it.” I have made a donation to the paper on behalf of HIStalk readers in honor of Donovan-Smith, whose position is funded by a Report for America reporter grant. He did a pretty amazing job covering a complex and controversial story that had national implications.

The Milwaukee business paper describes how Epic brought all of its 11,000 employees back to the office a year ago, starting with three days per week in July 2021, four per week in August, all but two days per month in the office in September and October, and then a full in-office workweek starting in November. The article says that Epic’s headcount has grown since then from 11,300 to 12,500 and it has not laid anyone off.

A consumer study by Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX) finds that half of Americans are avoiding hospitals because of COVID-19 fears, lack of nurses, and shortcomings in physical security.

The Sequoia Project publishes the “Data Usability Implementation Guide.”

Other

Crook County Medical Services District (WY) will implement Cerner in replacing CPSI, which it says is a bottleneck to productivity, has created cash flow issues, and has tied up nurses by “wanting to know what someone’s shoe size is.”

A UCSD natural language processing study of Epic inbasket messages received by physicians finds no association between message contents and professional burnout, but notes that patient messages frequently include profanity and  violent words that indicate frustration with the physician or the health system that could induce stress and that could be used to drive quality improvement initiatives.

Healthcare IT Leaders will donate $10 to Atlanta’s Cristo Rey Atlanta high school for each response that describes, in a few words that take about 15 seconds to enter, what makes you hopeful for 2023. The school offers a college preparatory program for students in low-income families. The company hopes to raise $10,000 for the students.

Sponsor Updates

• Medicomp Systems features National Coordinator Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP in its “Tell Me Where IT Hurts” podcast.
• Konza National Network announces that its Qualified Health Information Network application has been accepted for review by The Sequoia Project.
• CloudWave shares news of its continued growth in Q3 of 2022.
• Findhelp publishes a new report, “Meeting the Moment: Community Organizations Nationwide See Challenging Times Ahead.”
• InterSystems congratulates EHealth Exchange on surpassing 1.35 billion monthly transactions.
• MUSE celebrates its 40th year and announces its 2023 events for Meditech users.

Blog Posts

• Holland Bloorview’s interoperability initiative connects MEDITECH EHR with Epic, uniting pediatric hospitals in Canada (Meditech)
• 4 Tips for Patient Education Governance (Healthwise)
• A Different Point of View: DOJ Suit Against Cigna – It’s Just the Beginning (Medicomp Systems)
• With VBC, Everyone Across the Value Chain Wins – Including Employers (Enlace Health)
• Smart Infusion Pump Drug Libraries: Addressing the Challenges of Optimizationv (First Databank)
• A Spotlight on Get Well Clinicians Who are Supporting Clinicians (Get Well)
• Unduly noted: Why EHR documentation is creating an informational quagmire (Nordic)
• 2022 Wrapped Playlist (Clearsense)
• Overcoming Obstacles to Adopt Blockchain Technology (HealthTech Resources)
• How normalization can support the data quality of meds and labs (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Top 10 patient safety concerns according to the ECRI Institute (Meditech)
• Overcoming Obstacles to Adopt Blockchain Technology (HealthTech Resources)
• Standardizing Risk Assessments Across Your EH Organization (Net Health)
• Health Plans, Boost Partners’ Value-based Care Strategy with Behavioral Health (NeuroFlow)
• Navigating outpatient best practices, part 1: Why clinical documentation integrity is more important than ever (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 12/14/22

Top News

Oracle reports Q2 2023 results: revenue up 18%, EPS $1.21 vs. $1.18, beating Wall Street expectations for both.

Oracle’s Cerner unit contributed $1.5 billion to the company’s quarterly sales of $12.3 billion.

Oracle shares have seen a 33% increase since October 1. It acquired Cerner in June for $28 billion.

From the earnings call:

• Total revenue grew 9% even without Cerner’s contribution.
• Cloud revenue was up 48% including Cerner and 25% without.
• CEO Safra Catz says that five months post-acquisition, Cerner is performing better than Oracle projected.
• CTO and chairman Larry Ellison said that while Cerner and Epic mostly automated hospitals, Oracle wants “to do national public health.” He added that several countries will be signing contracts with Oracle to build national healthcare early warning systems, concluding that “we, as humanity, have to do a better job of delivering healthcare to people than we have done historically.”

Webinars

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

Sales

• ACO Triad HealthCare Network (NC) selects DrFirst’s MedHx Population Risk Management software, which provides fast access to prescription fulfillment data.
• Mississippi’s Division of Medicaid and Department of Human Services will implement Verato’s Universal Identity data management technology.

People

Consumer goods manufacturer Newell Brands hires Mark Erceg (Oracle Cerner) as CFO.

Announcements and Implementations

US News & World Report is evaluating 3M Ambulatory Potentially Preventable Complications software for potential use in its “Best Hospitals” rankings.

Mount Sinai Health System (NY) begins offering on-site telemedicine services to patients who call 911 and meet certain low-acuity criteria. The new service is part of a five-year federal pilot program that aims to divert non-critical 911 patients from emergency rooms to more appropriate sites of care that will eventually include urgent care and behavioral health facilities.

OSF Healthcare’s OnCall Digital Health unit launches a remote patient monitoring service for pediatric RSV patients, giving at-home caregivers the ability to access educational materials and report symptoms over a 10-day period using a companion app. OSF offers similar RPM programs for patients with diabetes and heart failure.

Government and Politics

DHA Tidewater Market facilities in Virginia including Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, Air Force 633 Medical Group, and McDonald Army Health Center prepare to implement MHS Genesis, an Oracle Cerner system, next month.

Privacy and Security

Stat continues the efforts of The Markup to identify websites that use the Meta Pixel to collect visitor information and send it to Facebook. Analysis found that of 50 direct-to-consumer telehealth sites, 35 shared personal information and 13 sent answers to potentially sensitive user questionnaires. Thirty of the 50 sites used at least one social media tracking tool to collect the answers to medical intake questions. Amazon Clinic was the only one of the 50 sites that doesn’t send URLs and IP addresses to outside companies. The worst offender was Cerebral, which provided information to all seven major trackers (Google, Facebook, Bing, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn).

One Brooklyn Health continues to bring systems back online at its three hospitals after a November 19 cybersecurity incident. The downtime has forced staff to chart and carry paper records by hand to individual units, and has slowed lab results and the analysis of diagnostic imaging, which can no longer be done in-house.

Other

A Current Health survey of 100 hospital leaders finds that reducing readmissions, hospitalizations, and ER visits are top reasons for launching care-at-home programs. While 66% of respondents have launched some type of care-at-home program, staffing challenges and a lack of patient engagement and in-home technology support have sometimes hampered their effectiveness. Clinical monitoring support, logistics support, and in-home technical support are top considerations for organizations that are considering launching or enhancing such programs.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas hires Joe Mahloch as project manager, professional services group.
• CB Insights names Availity a top digital health company in its “Digital Health 150” report.
• Baker Tilly publishes a new case study, “Health system identifies more than $150 million of revenue opportunities through service line and managed care contracting assessment.”
• Nordic publishes a new video in its “The Download” series titled “Chronic disease management done differently.”
• ACHE Middle Tennessee names CereCore Client Services Manager Jessica Zayakosky treasurer-elect.
• Cerner co-sponsors the Bear Institute Pediatric Accelerator Challenge for Kids awards ceremony and closing event.
• CHIME submits comments to CMS in response to its RFI on its proposed National Directory of Healthcare Providers & Services, noting that such a directory “must truly reduce reporting burdens for healthcare providers.”
• Luxiere Magazine profiles Cordea Consulting founder and CEO Jen Jones.
• CloudWave will sponsor the MUSE Ohio – Community Peer Group Event December 14 in Wooster.
• Dimensional Insight expands its work with Puerto Rico-based health IT consulting firm Trinexus to include healthcare facilities in the Caribbean.
• Frost & Sullivan recognizes Meditech with the 2022 North America Enabling Technology Leadership Award.

Blog Posts

• 30 years of UpToDate: The evolution of clinical decision support and the future of evidence-based medicine (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• What You Need to Know About CMS’ New Proposal: Advancing Interoperability and Improving Prior Authorization Processes (Diameter Health)
• How to reduce emergency room visits this winter (Arcadia)
• Value-based Care & Intelligent Care Management (CarePort Health)
• Practice Management Optimization through EHR Software (ChartLogic)
• 10 Myths About Running a Medicare Chronic Care Management Program (ChartSpan)
• Data Governance is NOT a Dirty Word, It’s Asset Management (Part 2) (Clearsense)
• Talking Cyber Resilience and Business Risk to Your Board and Executives (Clearwater)
• Top 2 Challenges Providers Face When Implementing HCC (CTG)
• Healthcare Applications Dashboards: Patterns for Exposing Data (Dimensional Insight)
• CHIME 2022 Conference Recap and Takeaways (Divurgent)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/12/22

Top News

Epic will shut down its App Market until “later in 2023”and temporarily replace it with Vendor Services that will provide access to documentation, testing sandboxes, and technical support.

The company will also launch Connection Hub on January 9, where any software vendor that connects to Epic can list their app and self-report if they successfully exchange data.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents wouldn’t appreciate a provider charging them personally for answering their questions by email or portal message (I intentionally left insurance out of the question since that introduces all kinds of rabbit hole arguments). Interesting comments:

• Providers should first recommend booking an appointment instead of charging to answer an inquiry.
• Does the provider allow patients to ask real questions that generate a situation-specific, useful response?
• Health insurance premiums have already paid for their time, and charging is a disincentive to getting care.
• The question is moot since billing codes are already available and other professionals don’t offer free advice.
• Patients asking questions this way may be a sign of other problems, such as lack of appointment availability.

New poll to your right or here, following up on my interview with Patrice Wolfe: How does industry networking differ between men and women?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Findhelp. The public benefit corporation, which was previously known as Aunt Bertha, connects all people in need to programs that serve them with dignity and ease, offering the nation’s leading social care network and integrated software to modernize the social safety net. Over 400 health plans, health systems, governments, and cause organizations use its 600,000-program network, which is #1 in KLAS, to address social determinants of health. Customers can create their own branded platforms to connect their local communities with nearby social care resources. Its social care tools are integrated with Epic, Cerner, Athenahealth, EClinicalWorks, Innovaccer, and CarePort. Thanks to Findhelp for supporting HIStalk.

I’m fascinated that Findhelp has a film division that shares inspiring stories of people who are working to improve their communities, such as this one.

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

Webinars

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

Sales

• Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust will implement Sectra’s enterprise imaging solution and radiology module.

People

Weill Cornell Medicine promotes Curtis Cole, MD to the newly created position of VP/chief global information officer. Deputy CIO Vipin Kamath, MBA will succeed Cole as CIO.

Meditech confirms that founder and board chair A. Neil Pappalardo has retired from the company that he started 54 years ago.

Announcements and Implementations

Business Insider looks at Medly, a “digital pharmacy” that raised $110 million in funding through mid-2020. The company, which offered a user app and services from its own brick-and-mortar pharmacies, ran out of money in losing $10 million per month. It closed half of its 51 locations, laid off 1,000 of its 1,900 employees, saw its founder and CEO leave without notifying employees, and filed bankruptcy Friday. Employees say the company was so strapped after its most recent layoffs that it ordered its salespeople to fill prescriptions, even as it assured the remaining employees that no more layoffs would be conducted and that profitability was imminent.  

Government and Politics

The VA plans to hire 1,000 new employees to work on its Oracle Cerner implementation as it recruits from Silicon Valley.

Defacto Health summarizes the comments CMS has received to its RFI to create a National Healthcare Directory.

Privacy and Security

A security firm finds that 70,000 websites, including those of hospitals, are using Twitter’s advertising tracker that works like the Meta Pixel in capturing user information. The Twitter advertising pixel can be configured to limit its data collection for advertiser-specific purposes, but 99% of the websites aren’t using that feature.

Baylor College of Medicine reviews the patient privacy and HIPAA aspects of digital photography.

The India-based cybersecurity firm that notified a hospital that its data was being offered for sale on the dark web is itself breached. CloudSEK says that an employee laptop it sent to a computer repair shop was returned with a new copy of Windows installed that also contained stealer log malware. The hacker didn’t get much of anything useful from the data and screenshots that the malware sent, mostly training documents and database schema screenshots.

Other

Three-fourths of surveyed British Medical Association members say that lack of interoperability is a significant barrier to digital transformation, with 30% adding that the software they use is not adequate for their job. Eighty percent of respondents report delays in accessing data from secondary care, while two-thirds say they aren’t confident that instant data sharing will happen within 10 years. BMA recommends that the government upgrade IT hardware and software, improve broadband and wi-fi in healthcare facilities, and develop interoperability standards.

Sponsor Updates

• Relatient staff honor World Volunteer Day by volunteering at local Rescue Mission homes in Nashville, Cookeville, and Atlanta.
• Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new study, “Pharmacy Next: Health Consumer Medication Trends.”
• Premier announces that its Pinc AI solutions identified $1.5 billion in member-validated savings opportunities, generating an average return on investment of 16:1 between July 2021 and June 2022.
• TigerConnect publishes a new e-book, “When Every Second Matters: Guide to Speeding Critical Response Workflows.”

Blog Posts

• Best Software Integrations for Clinical Communication (PerfectServe)
• Thrive in the Face of Healthcare Labor Shortages with AP Automation (Premier)
• AAPC Case Study: Converting Risk into Revenue (RCxRules)
• 5 ways healthcare technology can help clinicians avoid burnout (Spok)
• 3 Studies Put Real-Time Prescription Benefit Under the Microscope of Peer Review (Surescripts)
• Ready for contact center AI? It’s easier than you think (Talkdesk)

Contacts

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

News 12/9/22

Top News

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

Timothy Wilde (EXL Health) joins UpHealth as CTO.

MSU Health Care promotes Nathan Fitton, DO to CMIO.

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

CereCore expands its health IT services to the United Kingdom.

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

• Healthcare Predictions: 5 Trends that Will Shape 2023 (Get Well)
• The GHX 5 Part Framework: Access & Badging Level Vendor Credentialing Compliance (GHX)
• Telehealth and RPM Interoperability with EHR Systems Improved Patient Care After COVID (HealthTech Resources)
• Implementing a Successful Digital Front Door (Loyal Health)
• An Ounce of Prevention: How EHRs Help Facilitate and Track Vaccinations (Medhost)
• Take Better Time Off During the Holidays (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Data Governance is NOT a Dirty Word, It’s Asset Management (Part 2) (Clearsense)
• Three stories of customer success with Meditech MaaS (Meditech)
• Why Prior Authorization Software is the Revenue Stream Multiplier You Want (Myndshft)
• How Employee Health and OccMed Can Manage Flu Vaccine Reporting During COVID (Net Health)
• Four EVV Challenges and How Addressing Them Can Improve Care and Operations (Netsmart)
• To Charge or Not to Charge (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 12/7/22

Top News

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

The health system launched the telehealth service in 2001.

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Mater Private Network in Ireland begins its Meditech Expanse implementation.

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

• Healthcare mega-mergers drive need for nursing policy and procedure standardization (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Using Care Orchestration to Improve Patient Safety and Health System Performance (About)
• Review Your Healthcare Business Credit Card This Holiday Season (AdvancedMD)
• Seven Tips for Working with Your Outsourced RCM Team (AGS Health)
• Key Themes Observed from Participating in 20 Conferences this Fall – and What They Mean for the Future of Healthcare (Azara Healthcare)
• 2023 Healthcare Technology Industry Trends: Top Challenges for CIOs (CereCore)
• 4 Reasons Your Cloud Costs Could be Going Through the Roof (CTG)
• Shaping the Future of Care: 2022 Customer Summit Recap (Current Health)
• How Data Can Measure the Impact of Hospital-at-Home Programs (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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