News 4/5/23

Top News

Content services platform vendor Hyland Software lays off 1,000 employees, 20% of its workforce.

The company blames the layoff on economic conditions and the unexpectedly high cost of moving to a cloud-based system.

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo acquired a majority stake in Hyland in 2007 for a reported $265 million and has led it through a long string of acquisitions, which in healthcare includes Valco Data Systems, EWebHealth, and Lexmark’s Perceptive business. 

Reader Comments

From Dr. Jacoby: “Re: Novant Health. It’s interesting to look at the jobs of the three top executives who were among its recent 50 layoffs.” Novant’s announcement suggests that it has scaled back some departments along with the executives who ran them, so it’s probably more than just these folks in their respective areas:

• Jesse Cureton, MBA, EVP/chief consumer officer. He had held the job for 10 years, which focused on strategic planning and marketing and public relations.
• Angela Yochem, MS, EVP/chief transformation and digital officer.She took the job in 2020 and served for nearly three years before that as CTO. She was Novant’s top technology executive, with the CIO, CTO, CMIO, and CISO reporting to her, and also served as GM of NH Enterprises.
• Paula Kranz, MA, MPA, VP of innovation development. She was executive director of Novant’s innovation lab for the past 15 months, which it closed last week with all employees laid off.

From Stiletto: “Re: podcasts. Trough of disillusionment.” Media forms that lower the participation bar — web pages, online communities, blogs, video channels – can become fading fads when audiences realize that the lowered barrier to entry encourages lesser talents. Newly launched podcasts dropped sharply in 2023, several were eliminated by NPR, Spotify is laying people off from the podcast platforms it acquired, and advertisers are questioning ROI due to low audience numbers and unfavorable demographics. Content that draws a loyal audience will do OK, maybe even better once Darwinism weeds out the AV club types (of which I would be one, which is why I haven’t dabbled). I like the idea of podcasts for commuters or travelers, but otherwise they don’t seem to align with the TL;DR skimmer attention span.

From Flapjacks: “Re: HIMSS Accelerate. Dr. Jayne said she hasn’t heard it mentioned. Have you?” No, other than I think I recall the HIMSS conference registration form trying to get me to opt in to Accelerate. It was Hal Wolf’s pet project and even he leaves no trace there. I clicked Events and HIMSS23 wasn’t among the three that were listed.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health data exchange vendor Lyniate changes its name back to Rhapsody, the original moniker of the company before it merged with Corepoint Health in 2019.

Wellth raises $20 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total raised to $40 million since launching in 2014. Its behavior-change app incentivizes users to build and maintain healthy habits. Investor Frank Williams, co-founder and former CEO of Evolent Health, joins the company as chairman of the board.

A Rock Health analysis finds that six Q1 digital health funding founds accounted for 40% of the quarter’s total, although its definition of “digital health” covers a lot of ground:

• Monograph Health, $375 million (in-home dialysis).
• ShiftKey, $300 million (shift bidding).
• Paradigm, $203 million (drug trials technology).
• ShiftMed, $200 million (on-demand workforce management).
• Gravie, $179 million (health benefits management).
• Vytalize Health, $100 million (Medicare ACO).

Billionaire investor Barry Sternlicht resigns from Cano Health’s board, citing poor governance and a questionable collaboration with MSP Recovery. He and two other board members who also resigned control 36% of the company and will push for asset sales and removal of the CEO. The company was valued at $4.4 billion when it went public on the NYSE via SPAC merger in June 2021, but shares have since lost 90% of their value.

Fujifilm sells its Japan-only EHR to Wemex, which is owned by PHC Group.

CHIME will convene its members-only Healthcare CISO Boot Camp April 12-15 in Salt Lake City.

Sales

• UC Davis Health (CA) will offer Propeller Health’s remote monitoring program to high-risk patients with asthma and COPD. 
• Transcarent will use CareJourney’s provider cost and quality insights data.
• Northwell Health (NY) selects patient monitoring technology and services from Philips.

People

Andrew Miller (Engooden Health) joins Elucid as CTO.

Caregility promotes Wendy Deibert, RN, MBA to CNO.

CitiusTech names Rajan Kohli (Wipro) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Morris Hospital & Healthcare Centers (IL) goes live on Meditech Expanse.

Kittitas Valley Healthcare (WA) goes live on AdaptX’s OR Advisor, ED Advisor, and Clinic Advisor.

The Coalition for Health AI releases its “Blueprint for Trustworthy AI Implementation Guidance and Assurance for Healthcare.” The PDF is here.  Among the founding members are Duke Health, Google, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, MITRE, Stanford Medicine, UCSF, and several CMS groups including ONC.  

Uber Health adds same-day prescription delivery to its patient transportation app for providers.

Government and Politics

The FDA publishes proposed guidance that will enable developers of AI-reliant medical devices to automatically update products that are already being used in clinical settings.

Privacy and Security

Northwest Texas Healthcare System and Doctors Hospital of Laredo (TX), both subsidiaries of Universal Health Services, notify patients that a November 2021 phishing incident at Adelanto Healthcare Ventures, a consulting firm with ties to one of their mutual business associates, may have exposed sensitive patient information. Interestingly, CommonSpirit Health affiliate St. Luke’s Health (TX) notified its patients about the same incident last November, making sure to stress that the breach was not related to CommonSpirit’s ransomware attack the month before.

Other

A small study finds that GPT-4 can accurately turn free-text radiology reports into structured templates, although that tool raises privacy concerns in sharing data with third parties. 

A gated University of Pennsylvania study in Health Affairs determines that 98.6% of hospital websites use computer code that enables data transfers to third-parties that include tech companies, social media platforms, advertising firms, and data brokers.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD releases 31 updates with enhancements to telehealth, medication cards, claims status, and mobile prescription drug monitoring program features.
• Ascom will provide UniHA, a cooperative purchasing network for French public hospitals, with its medical alarm management systems including software, mobility solutions, and services.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Mergers and acquisitions in the senior services sector.”
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at Rx Summit April 10-12 in Atlanta.
• Nordic releases another episode of its In Network podcast feature, Designing for Health: “Designing for Health: Interview with Dr. Archana Tedone.”
• Biofourmis and Current Health will participate in the Digital Medicine Society’s and Moffitt Cancer Center’s CancerX project to accelerate innovations for cancer prevention and treatment.
• CoverMyMeds issues a clarification regarding its recently announced layoffs, as well as the impact on its Columbus facility.
• CTG publishes a new case study, “CTG Helps Leading Medical Lab Improve Donor Insight and Client Service.”

Blog Posts

• Factors for Successful Offshoring of Revenue Cycle Management Services (AGS Health)
• How to improve your population health using SDoH data (Arcadia)
• Preventing Workplace Injuries is Best for Your Workers (and Your Budget) (Bardavon)
• Big and Small Ways Healthcare IT Can Address Technical Debt (CereCore)
• Putting Power in the Hands of Patients: The Human Side of Pharmaceutical Marketing (ConnectiveRx)
• What We’re Looking Forward to at HIMSS23 (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/3/23

Top News

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner reportedly tells attendees of AMGA that the company is testing the use of ChatGPT to create draft provider responses to patient emails.

She says ChatGPT is less terse than doctors.

This seems like a great idea since experiments have shown that ChatGPT excels at analyzing a transcript of what a doctor says to offer suggestions of how they can be more empathetic. In other words, the computer advises the doctor on being human.

Reader Comments

From Brisco County: “Re: online services such as WebMD. They must be sweating ChatGPT hard.” Any company whose livelihood is based on sending or receiving web traffic should be worried. Web commerce is driven by search engine discovery and the opportunity to create or steal content and surround it by ads. ChatGPT summarizes the web, so there’s less need for users to look elsewhere. Also worried are publishers, since much of their traffic relies on search engines. Add to the mix that Facebook and Twitter are dying and the web could look very different in a couple of years. I welcome the chance to see content that is personalized and useful rather than driven by an algorithm whose primary purpose is to enrich its owner. Which is another concern about OpenAI and other companies – what will the inevitable monetization of their platform look like?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents think their health system does a pretty good job using digital tools.

New poll to your right or here: After a weekend car accident out of state, how much of your important health information could ED doctors immediately obtain electronically? Also, let’s assume you are alone and unconscious with only a driver license and insurance card in your possession. Also, that all of your providers don’t use the same EHR. Poll comments are welcome about how you expect that the process would work or what precautions you might take to improve it.

I checked Epic’s site as soon as I woke up Saturday, but perhaps their previous April Fool’s phony news items set the bar too high because this one wasn’t memorable. ONC saved the day with a clever Rickroll tweet.

Webinars

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

People

The Health Care District of Palm County (FL) promotes Daniel Scott, MS (Good Samaritan) to VP/CIO.

Eric Rose, MD (TenSixteen Bio) joins Logos Informatics as CMIO.

Digital Health KC hires Dick Flanigan, MAS (RFJ Advisory) as CEO.

Ardent Health Services promotes Lonnie Garrison, MS to VP of IT.

Announcements and Implementations

Coryell Health begins its rollout of Oracle Cerner, which hopefully isn’t the system shown in the modified stock art stock that features illogically freeform input fields and a misspelling of “widowed.” Something tells me that the touchscreen-poking user wasn’t sitting in the health system’s 25-bed flagship hospital in Gatesville, TX, which is mostly known for its several jails and prisons. They used to hold a Prison Boss Cook-Off there, but it died from lack of participation.

Twitter open sources parts of its platform software, with the most interesting part being the code that chooses the “For You” tweets you see from users you don’t follow, with the most important factor being how likely it is that people will like, retweet, or reply. The blog post doesn’t say how the code artificially boosts Elon Musk’s tweets as he demanded in a recent Twitter tantrum, where he raged that the President’s Super Bowl tweet got more impressions than his own.

Amazon opens its low-power Sidewalk network – powered by connected Ring and Echo devices, courtesy of their owners — and to developers who need an cheap Internet of Things type connection. The coverage map shows that 90% of the US population is in range. Use cases include health trackers, smart pill bottles, smart door locks, dog trackers, soil moisture sensors, and weather stations.

Novant Health lays off 50 employees, including EVP/Chief Transformation and Digital Officer Angela Yochem, MS.

Other

In an unrelated but interesting conference development, the Entertainment Software Associated cancels its June expo that is known as “video game Christmas” in Los Angeles. The event, which drew 66,000 attendees to its final conference in 2019, was cancelled in 2020 due to COVID, changed to an online event in 2021, and then cancelled again in 2022. The organizers say interest wasn’t strong enough to support a big, impressive event and that interested companies couldn’t overcome resource challenges. Participants say that the big game publishers were already moving to running their own events online at a lower cost.

Madison magazine profiles Roots & Wings Foundation, created in 2019 by Epic CEO Judy Faulkner and her husband Gordon – and run by their daughter, Shana Dall’Osto – that offers unrestricted grants for non-profits purely based on trust. It awarded $40 million to Madison-area organizations in 2022. Dall’Osto says that neither she and her parents were raised rich, as Judy attended University of Wisconsin-Madison on scholarships and she and husband (and now pediatrician) Gordon lived in assisted housing and used food stamps before starting a family. She says she wasn’t unhappy that Judy signed The Giving Pledge in 2015, in which the many-billion dollar fortune of her parents will go to charitable causes instead of to their three children, saying that her mom was always clear about her intentions and her concerns about ruining kids by handing them big inheritances.

Sponsor Updates

• Surgical Care Specialists (PA) and Fairview Community Health Center (KY) transition to the EClinicalWorks Cloud.
• Nordic releases a new Making Rounds Podcast, “Modernizing business intelligence for stronger data analysis.”
• Talkdesk publishes a new report, “The promise (and pitfalls) of self-service automation in customer service.”
• Tegria staff partner with One Roof Foundation and take part in a community clean-up in the South Park neighborhood.

Blog Posts

• Continuing the Conversation: Our Commitment to IDD (Netsmart)
• Expanding women’s health: Addressing health disparities with innovations (Nordic)
• Our Culture of Giving: OptimizeRx Supports the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (OptimizeRx)
• Bolder and Brighter: Key Takeaways from the 2023 ACHE Congress (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Unlocking the Potential of Your Answering Service: More Than a Cost Center (PerfectServe)
• Battling Drug Shortages: Novel Ideas for an Unprecedented Challenge (Premier)
• FHIR 5 is here (Redox)
• A Day in the Life of a Contact Center Scheduler (Relatient)
• Keeping Pace with Best Practices is Key to Prescription Safety, Affordability (Surescripts)
• Decoding the fiction: The myths of artificial intelligence (Talkdesk)
• Reimagining Master Data Management for Healthcare Organizations (Verato)
• The Federal Breast Density Inform Rule: Huge Leap Forward, But More to Do (Volpara Health)
• Monday: Medicare Advantage rules change – How much will it really hurt? (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 3/31/23

Top News

Senators Patty Murray (D-WA), Jon Tester (D-MT), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) introduce legislation to overhaul the VA’s Oracle Cerner project, which would require the VA to:

• Develop metrics for deciding when and how new sites are brought live.
• Fix the patient safety issues that were listed in the VA’s March 2023 Sprint Report.
• Place further go-lives on hold until the five facilities that are live show an improvement in performance metrics compared to those they reported while using their previous VistA system.
• Bring in outside experts to renegotiate the Oracle Cerner contract.
• Develop a Plan B strategy in case Oracle Cerner rejects proposed contract terms or VA can’t get the technology to work.
• Reform its technology acquisition process.
• Add outside healthcare experts who have EHR rollout experience to its advisory committee.

Meanwhile, a group of Republican senators introduces legislation that would halt further VA go-lives on Oracle Cerner until significant improvements are made from a rigorous list of requirements.

Reader Comments

From Roky Erickson: “Re: Oracle Cerner. Our organization had a project pushed back because the company is having resource issues, and other CIOs tell me they are seeing the same. One even said that Oracle told them that VA issues are taking priority and commercial customer projects are being delayed.” Unverified. Let me know if you’ve experienced this – I won’t use names or specific details, of course.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ve added a calendar reminder to check Epic’s website Saturday for the usual April 1 shenanigans.

Last call for HIStalk sponsors to be included in my HIMSS23 guide that I’ll run shortly. Send me your details and you are in.

I’ve started tuning out anything that is written in the form of, “I asked ChatGPT to …” It was clever for about five minutes, but now it’s just tedious.

ViVE Observations From An Attendee

An HIStalk reader who is attending the ViVE conference sent these notes:

• Tuesday’s keynote by Micky Tripathi was the most substantive thing I’ve heard all week. He breaks out ONC’s work into three categories: (1) building a digital foundation via standards, IT strategy, and coordinating between federal agencies. He played up USCDI and UCSDI+; (2) making interoperability easier with FHIR APIs and TEFCA. He wants to make sure those required APIs are truly usable rather than vaporware and are extended to CDC connections; (3) encouraging information sharing, with information blocking enforcement provisions coming this year, which I am guessing means a draft rule in September.
• Other Tuesday headliners sounded like talking advertisements.
• Loving the multiple snacks through the day and the music of Chapel Hart.
• Wednesday was a light crowd, maybe 20% of peak attendance. I felt bad for exhibitors that so few buyers were around.
• I thoroughly enjoyed a presentation by Shiv Rao (Abridge) and Joon Lee (UPMC) on generative AI. They advise trusting the technology to assist a human, such as autopilot on a plane, but not to fly the plane unsupervised. UPMC’s evaluation of potential AI partners includes integration with existing workflows and systems, auditable output, a clinician-led organizational structure, a patient-centric solution, and 100% AI driven.
• While the event isn’t as grossly transactional as I feared, there is certainly an undercurrent of deal-making, which is probably intentional.
• Attendee mix will probably evolve. On the provider and payer side, you see more venture investors and innovation teams instead of CIOs and CISOs. EHR vendors are low key and on the periphery. Services-based vendors probably won’t get value from a booth since traditional IT execs aren’t going to be around much for meetings.
• Most presentations were on the ViVE floor and I liked that, with several presentation areas of varying sizes. It never felt noisy to have presentations going on, it was easy to move from one session to another, and you could follow applause to find good sessions. I wonder how the vendors whose booths were near the stages felt, however.
• The CHIME track was mostly separate with several member-only events, but participants participated in some general sessions as well.
• ViVE shoots for a vibe of youth, energy, innovation, and fun in its branding, themes, opening remarks, and evening entertainment. Sounds great until you remember that your ticket cost nearly $3,000.

If you attended or especially if you exhibited, send me your thoughts about the conference and content, which I will share anonymously. Notes from the CHIME track would be interesting to readers, as would comparisons of ViVE to HIMSS.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Amazon brings its Health business to the website’s main menu, I noticed when looking for the new book “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond” ($15.49 for the Kindle version, which caused a collision between my curiosity and parsimony).

McKesson-owned CoverMyMeds will lay off 815 employees; close its Scottsdale, AZ patient support center; and rent out space in the $240 million Columbus, OH headquarters building that it moved into in May 2021.

Florence, which offers a patient engagement app, emerges from stealth with a $20 million seed funding round.

Sales

• Healthcare Triangle announces a $3 million cloud managed services sale to an unnamed life sciences company.

Announcements and Implementations

ViVE 2024 will be held in Los Angeles February 25-28 at the Los Angeles Convention Center downtown.

National Quality Form endorses nursing home hospitalization and re-hospitalization analytics solutions from Net Health, the first LTPAC EHR or analytics vendor to develop NQF-endorsed quality measures.

UnitedHealthcare will eliminate 20% of prior authorization items in the next few months. The insurer will also implement a Gold Card Program to eliminate most prior authorization requirements for provider groups that have been historically compliant.

Government and Politics

VA Secretary Denis McDonough warns that proposals to cap the agency’s budget at 2022 levels will harm its Oracle Cerner implementation. The VA’s 2024 budget request includes $6.4 billion for infrastructure modernization and $1.9 billion for the EHR project. Meanwhile, McDonough says the VA will review its contract with Oracle Cerner, which it signed in May 2018 with a five-year review built in, which he says will drive scheduling of the next go-live because “this contract may not be what we need.”

DoD will complete its Oracle Cerner deployment in March 2024, with 75% of its hospitals and clinics already live and most of the remaining sites being overseas facilities. A DoD official says the VA is where DoD was in the 2017-2018 timeframe, with challenges in infrastructure, governance, and standardizing workflows.

VA OIG says that a doctor at North Las Vegas VA Medical Center falsified patient blood pressure readings during virtual visits, always entering them as 120/80. The unnamed physician says they thought the virtual visit template required entry of a phony number and added that they had not been given virtual visit training, both of which OIG says are false. OIG also noted that the hospital didn’t report the physician to the state licensing board and falsely claimed that it had reviewed the 120/80 entries as OIG had requested.

New FDA guidance requires medical device manufacturers to submit a cybersecurity plan as part of their new product application, spelling out how they will monitor and fix newly discovered vulnerabilities. The guidance applies to any medical device that is connected to the internet.

A federal judge in Texas rules that an Affordable Care Act requirement that insurers cover some preventive services at no cost to the patient is not valid, a decision that applies nationwide.

Other  

IBM Watson Health doesn’t get mentioned much these days other than as a cautionary tale for overhyping and underdelivering, but I see that IBM is now pitching IBM Watson Assistant for developing virtual agents using its conversational AI.

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center names facility dog and Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Luke as an honorary super user for MHS Genesis, where he has attended training sessions and sign-on fairs.

Sponsor Updates

• King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre expands its use of Oracle Cerner solutions across the Saudi healthcare sector.
• Five9 announces GA of Agent Assist 2.0, which uses OpenAI to summarize customer call transcripts in seconds.
• Fortified Health Security names Brad Arnold (Wellpath) security analyst.
• Healthcare Triangle reports fourth quarter and full year 2022 results.
• Health Data Movers publishes a new case study, “Software Development Advisory for an Integrated Experience Layer (IEL) Solution Discovery.”
• InterSystems releases a new episode of its Healthy Data Podcast, “Standards, Access & Meaningful Use of Data (ft. Zafar Chaudry, Seattle Children’s).”
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring HSBlox COO Lynn Carroll.
• Moving to Meditech Expanse has enabled St. Luke’s Health System to implement Meditech’s Smart Pump Infusion Integration with its Baxter Spectrum IQ infusion system.

Blog Posts

• Reducing No-shows Through Simple Patient Engagement Strategies (EClinicalWorks)
• An Urgent Care Business Plan – How and Why for Startups (Experity)
• Blueprint for the Contact Center: A New Path for IT Professionals (Five9)
• Future of Healthcare Supply Chains: An In-Depth Analysis (GHX)
• 3 Ways to Optimize Your Experience at HIMSS Global Conference (Healthjump)
• Engaging Minority Populations with Health Education (Healthwise)
• The Importance of New Types of Strategic Partnerships to Drive Innovation (Impact Advisors)
• Making bank or bankrolling waste: Why surgical schedulers need healthy dictionaries (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Overcoming Staffing Shortages in the Lab: Finding the Right Fit Consulting Firm (JTG Consulting Group)
• The Many Digital Doors of Patient Access and Engagement (Kyruus)
• Marble Data Connections – Access Hundreds of Millions of Records from Our Network (Marble)
• The Importance of Interoperability in Addressing Healthcare Disparities (Medhost)
• Hate Being Off the Grid? Offline Functionality Provides Vital Wound Care Workflow Continuity for Home Care Providers (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 3/29/23

Top News

HL7 publishes FHIR Release 5.

I will break my journalistic fourth wall in noting once again the industry contributions of “Father of FHIR” Grahame Grieve, who from interviews I’ve done with him always strikes me as an almost painfully humble, accolades-deflecting expert who led the charge that made FHIR a thing and just keeps on quietly doing the work.

Reader Comments

From Peony: “Re: huge health system losses. It’s all about their investments, not necessarily operations.” True in many cases. Health systems made annual fortunes from investing their big profits (which they don’t call that, of course) into investments that ranged from prudent to wildly speculative. Every investor looks smart in a bull market, but health systems are moaning at their investment losses much more loudly they did when bragging about their previous gains. I’m not an accountant, but headlines about shocking losses require further investigation. Did they lose money selling, or are these just paper losses that could be reversed when the market rebounds? How much money did the health system have stashed away that allowed them to play Warren Buffet, and did they buy and sell wisely? If they made money from operations, then should anyone care that their investments generated losses? Sometimes losses are real and critical — such as those in which a health system runs out of cash or sees their bond rating collapse — but I always suspect that it’s like plutocrats who claim crippling losses to the IRS while summering in the Hamptons.  

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: REM, whose early 1980s concert videos started popping up in my YouTube feed. Lots of people know dramatic singer Michael Stipe and arpeggio guitar master Peter Buck, but the subtle contributions of Bill Berry on the drums and Mike Mills with clean bass lines and high harmonies are underappreciated. The onstage energy and “I can’t believe we get to do this” smiling glances at each other are inspiring. Mills looks like an awkwardly shy teen and Stipe had the charm and appearance of a young Elvis. You can forgive the band for “Shiny Happy People” by watching them work the small crowd from a tiny stage in their dues-paying early days, perhaps with extra points for walking away as friends in 2011 with no plans to milk the reunion tour cash cow.

HIMSS guide reminder for sponsors: I’ve received information from four companies, two of which aren’t HIStalk sponsors, so now’s the time to send your information.  And speaking of conferences, sponsor Consensus Cloud Solutions is at ViVE this week, so I’ve added them to my conference guide.

Were a lot of cattle raised on the open ranges of Tennessee, I pondered upon seeing ViVE attendees posing with cowboy hats like citybilly country music crooners whose need for them is equally questionable, especially indoors and/or at night? I’m pretty sure cowboy hats and boots are, like mouse ears in Orlando, a sure way to self-identify as a tourist.  

ViVE Observations From An Attendee

An HIStalk reader who is attending the ViVE conference sent these notes:

• Announced attendance is 7,500, represented by 650 startups, 425 investors, and 330 hosted buyers. (Mr. H note — I’m surprised that only 330 attendees had their registration comped for agreeing to sit through vendor pitches. That means that a ton of people paid the high registration fee, although I then wonder how many are provider decision-makers).
• The conference had an easy start. You could get into town, take in some scenery, network, and have fun. There was enough going on to feel worthwhile but not jam-packed.
• Sessions were heavy on panels instead of individual speakers. That gives more companies a chance at the front of the room, but in losing the ability for someone creative to kill it with a great presentation instead of answering run-of-the mill moderator questions.
• Content is mediocre rather than thought-provoking or bold. As someone said, “everyone is simply tossing out headlines.” I would like to see a contrarian track where people point out where the shiny objects and overhyped solutions have failed to deliver.
• Live music is everywhere, included a performer in the registration area.
• A brief moment of silence was observed for the Nashville school shooting victims.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Value-based care enablement startup Wellvana Health raises $84 million, bringing its total to $140 million.

Sales

• Cone Health (NC) will use Lirio’s Precision Nudging intervention software, initially focusing on patients with hypertension.
• Lee Health (FL) selects B.well’s Connected Health technology to power its forthcoming Lee HealthPass app, which will aggregate patient data into a single interface.
• Catholic Care Center chooses Medsphere’s EHR and PM solutions.
• Netherlands-based Maastricht UMC+ chooses Epic to replace its SAP/Cerner system.

People

Clearsense names Alan Scott (Red Hat) chief enterprise architect.

Scott Cullen, MD (Accenture) joins Avia as EVP of strategic innovation and chief clinical officer.

Louis Raya (Waystar) and Tyler Wells (Waystar) join ADVault as VPs of business development.

Ann Joyal , MS, RD (Wolters Kluwer) joins Symplr as VP of marketing communications.

Announcements and Implementations

Carle Health (IL) implements Scanslated’s AI-powered radiology reporting software, which offers patients easier-to-understand radiology reports accessible through their patient portals.

ConnectiveRx develops a new Enterprise Data Platform that integrates data from every patient and prescriber interaction across its lines of support for enhanced reporting.

Marshfield Clinic Health System implements automated patient registration technology from Notable at its facilities in Wisconsin and Michigan.

UR Medicine (NY) uses DexCare technology to offer on-demand video visits across care settings as part of its Get Care Now program.

Censinet announces GA of Censinet Connect, a service that enables healthcare vendors to digitally share completed security questionnaires and supporting documentation with prospects.

Labette Health (KS) implements chronic care management software and services from ChartSpan.

Philips launches its Virtual Care Management suite of technologies and services for providers, payers, and employers within the US.

Mercy will take over management of county-owned Perry County Memorial Hospital and will invest $6.5 million to transition the facility from Cerner to Epic this fall. Both providers are based in Missouri.

Masimo opens pre-orders for its Freedom smart watch that provides continuous readings of pulse oximetry, ECG, and respiration as well as fall detection. It also features a data privacy switch that can turn off sharing of all data, including location tracking and microphone. A $100 deposit buys a place in line for fall delivery at a $400 discount from a list price that wasn’t mentioned. Masimo, like AliveCor, is fighting Apple over health tracking patents.

Government and Politics

FDA seeks sources for large-scale, de-identified healthcare claims data along with full access to their EHR data for its biologic product surveillance programs. FDA says EHRs provide more granular patient clinical information that is useful for validating claims data, although they won’t serve as the primary data source since they cover smaller populations and aren’t always longitudinal.

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (MD) goes live on MHS Genesis.

The Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center within HHS publishes a mobile device security checklist.

Carin Alliance publishes a report that describes how patients could provide their identities once to create a credential that could be shared across other systems without using individual portals. It envisions a person-center approach that allows people to interact with various systems in a scalable, low-cost manner.

Other

Humbled and honored to be recognized by Nora, who is immensely pleasured (HE-llo!) to tell me I’ve potentially won a “seal of recognition” from an unnamed organization that will recognize me at its unnamed conference, with no contact information provided except for Nora’s Gmail address. I’ll speculate that graduation from “potential honoree” status involves a transfer of funds. I’ll also speculate that given the conference date, the amply pleasured Nora works for Health 2.0, which has somehow started using a once-respected, HIMSS-owned conference name that it operates from India by way of a Las Vegas mail drop and from the Birmingham Bargains store in an Alabama outlet mall. In case you need an ego-stroking, self-nominated award that requires and offers little, they are “now accepting applications from industry stalwarts!” I assume that the industry stalwarts who have proudly posted a photo of their award failed to realize that this isn’t the actual Health 2.0.

Sponsor Updates

• CarePort will exhibit at AMGA March 29-31 in Chicago.
• CHIME releases a new Leader2Leader Podcast featuring Oracle Health Chairman David Feinberg, MD “The Future of Health Equity with Oracle Health.”
• Clinical Architecture releases the results of its “2023 Healthcare Data Quality Survey.”
• Nordic publishes a new episode of its In Network podcast.
• CloudWave will sponsor the MUSE New England Area Community Peer Group event March 29 in Pittsfield, MA.
• Current Health publishes a new case study, “UMass Memorial Health Builds Leading Hospital at Home Program.”
• Censinet and KLAS Research recognize AGS Health, Clearwater, Divurgent, Ellkay, Fortified Health Security, JTG Consulting Group, Nordic, and Upfront Healthcare for achieving and sustaining their KLAS Cybersecurity Transparent designation.

Blog Posts

• Medication Adherence: A simple workflow for improvement (Arcadia)
• The Burning Platform: Healthcare is in Dire Need of Change (CareMesh)
• How L1 Support and Hosting Services Made Customers Happy and More (CereCore)
• 3 Ways Analytics Can Help Fight Burnout in Healthcare (Dimensional Insight)
• Solve Independent Diagnostic Testing Facility Billing Challenges with Practice Management Software (ChartLogic)
• RapidAWV – Now optimized for any device! (ChartSpan)
• How to Track and Measure Provider Support Activities in Real Time (RCx Rules)
• Improve Operational Efficiency and Reduce Costs and Complexity with 1Clearsense (Clearsense)
• Hybrid Resiliency: Managing Healthcare Cyber Risk with the Best of Reactive and Proactive Security (Clearwater)
• Real-time Messaging Options Blows the Door Off Traditional Channels (ConnectiveRx)
• Healthcare Organizations: Electronic Faxing is Better with eFax and Unite (Consensus Cloud Solutions)
• Training Practices to Help Physicians Succeed at Risk-Based Documentation (and Beyond) (Curation Health)
• 5 Soft Skills to Look for in Prospective Employees (Direct Recruiters)
• Top Priorities for Healthcare CIOs Entering New Organizations (Divurgent)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/27/23

Top News

ProPublica says that Cigna’s reviewing doctors use “auto-denial” software that allows them to declare a patient’s test as medically unnecessary in an average of 1.2 seconds, without ever looking at the patient’s medical records.

A former Cigna executive says that it’s easier for the company to just deny everything knowing that policyholders will appeal its decision only 5% of the time, not to mention that is saves hundreds of dollars of research time per test by simply rejecting claims using a procedure-to-diagnosis table.

Featured prominently in the article is health IT long-timer Nick van Terheyden, MBBS, who dug into Cigna’s process when they refused to pay for his own test that he knew as a doctor was medically necessary.

Reader Comments

From Ricochet Rabbit: “Re: ambient notes. My doctor asked if I was OK with her using an ambient automated note taker to help her with the progress note. She said it wasn’t as good as Robin, which she has used elsewhere. I can imagine systems identifying key clinical concepts from the discussion and then use ChatGPT to create a progress note.” Accurately summarizing transcribed encounter conversations seems well within even today’s AI capabilities. It would also encourage doctors to communicate their thoughts to the patient, maybe as an intentionally spoken end-of-visit summary. The result could be like a research article’s abstract that tells most readers all they need to know about the article that follows. Robin is a smart assistant for creating clinical documentation for orthopedics, capturing both audio and video from the exam room that are then used by virtual scribes to deliver SOAP notes. The information is collected by a dedicated hardware device and then can be changed or enhanced afterward via the Robin app. I first mentioned Robin when it was released in May 2018.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Results from last week’s poll aren’t surprising, neither for the top vote-getters (above) and the bottom-finisher ones (Internet of Things, blockchain, and virtual reality).

New poll to your right or here: From your most recent patient experience with a health system, how would you grade their use of digital tools? I personally don’t mind manual and/or outdated consumer-facing technology as long as the people themselves are empathetic and friendly. My problem is that the people who shove poorly-designed paperwork at you via a clipboard are often arrogantly uninterested in what you think as a customer. Sometimes I wonder if their candidate pool is made up of people whose customer service skills were insufficient to keep their jobs at DMV.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor JTG Consulting Group. The Miami Shores, FL-based boutique consulting company – which was founded in 2018 by President and CEO Jamel Giuma — specializes in laboratory IT, supporting EHR and laboratory strategies in health systems of all sizes. With  400 years of combined experience, the talented JTG advisory staff has established many longstanding relationships with health systems, providers, and vendors across the industry. It provides vendor-agnostic, patient-centric, and tailored IT services and solutions that help clients maximize interoperability, operational efficiencies, and revenue opportunities. JTG also offers advisory services to help organizations find the optimal path for achieving their strategic vision , helping affect sustainable success through short-term critical turnarounds and instituting long-run foundational changes. The rapidly growing company prides itself on on-time completions, cost effectiveness, and quality of product outcome. It scored 96.1 in an October 2022 report by KLAS Research, with 100% of clients saying they would buy again, and was #7 in Best in KLAS in the HIT Staffing category. Thanks to JTG Consulting Group for supporting HIStalk.

ReMedi Health Solutions will attend ViVE23, so I’ve added them to my sponsor guide for the conference. Ditto Nuance, which should be a fun booth visit given recent DAX and Microsoft ChatGPT-4 announcements.

Speaking of conference guides, sponsors can send me their HIMSS23 participation details for that upcoming guide. It’s easy, it’s free, and you will likely get some booth visitors you would have missed otherwise (especially if your booth features interesting presentations or perhaps site-baked scones).

Webinars

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

People

TriHealth promotes Donna Peters, MBA to SVP/CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS report finds that EHR personalization is the biggest driver of provider satisfaction, although those providers often feel they don’t get much support and that area and resort instead to personal initiative. Nurse aren’t given many options for EHR personalization, so the top success factor for them is being proactive about learning the EHR.

Government and Politics

The federal government will solicit bids to provide services that have been offered by non-profit United Network for Organ Sharing, which has run the country’s transplant program for 40 years. The government’s top priority is replacing the organ-matching computer system in hopes of shortening transplant wait lists and addressing racial inequity.

The National Labor Relations Board clarifies that a February ruling prohibits employers from including non-disparagement or confidentiality clauses in their severance agreement, also noting that the ruling is retroactive and such clauses that are contained in already-signed agreements are nullified by the ruling. The original case involved a Michigan hospital whose severance contracts contained clauses that violated the labor rights of employees.

Sponsor Updates

• Potomac Urology achieves growth with EClinicalWorks EHR and Healow patient engagement solutions.
• Optimum Healthcare IT names Natalie Tollefson HR service delivery director.
• Pivot Point Consulting will sponsor the OCHIN Learning Forum April 2-5 in Las Vegas.
• Volpara Health will exhibit at the National Consortium of Breast Centers conference in Las Vegas through March 27.
• West Monroe Managing Partner Tom Hulsebosch retires to launch the Hulsebosch Hope Foundation, a family foundation that funds public charities that seek to serve the needs of under-resourced communities in Chicago.

Blog Posts

• National Guidelines for Child and Youth Behavioral Health Crisis Care: SAMHSA’s Response (Netsmart)
• Leverage Generative AI to Liberate Information Critical to Patients, Providers (Orbita)
• Medical Answering Services: Urgent Versus Non-Urgent Calls (PerfectServe)
• Accounts Payable Automation in Healthcare: It’s Not Just for Hospitals (Premier)
• How to Track and Measure Provider Support Activities in Real Time (RCxRules)
• Place your bets on data (Redox)
• 3 hospital contact center metrics that indicate the health of your operations (Spok)
• Post-Public Health Emergency Changes to Patient Care (Surescripts)
• Speeding AI implementation in the contact center (Talkdesk)
• Simple Strategies to Boost Online Visibility: A Guide for Rehab Therapists (WebPT)
• From Theory to Reality: Realizing the Elusive Promise of Value-Based Care (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 3/24/23

Top News

ED patient experience software vendor Vital raises $24.7 million in a Series B funding round.

The Atlanta-based company has raised $46 million since its founding in 2019.

Co-founder and CEO Aaron Patzer, MSEE was founder and CEO of money management software vendor Mint, which he sold to Intuit in 2009.

Reader Comments

From Homey D. Clown: “Re: GPT-4. Microsoft’s announcement included a quote from Epic that says the company will be using it.” The Microsoft blog post that announced Azure OpenAI Service quotes Epic SVP of R&D Seth Hain as saying that “we’ll use [GPT-4] to help physicians and nurses spend less time at the keyboard and to help them investigate data in more conversational, easy-to-use ways.” Hain, who joined Epic straight out of college in 2005, has spent the last eight years working on embedding cognitive computing and machine learning into Epic’s software. Health IT software vendors will need to make similar decisions about their financial and technical capabilities to incorporate ChatGPT-like AI into their products as opportunities and user expectations expand.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ll run my usual online guide of what HIStalk sponsors will be doing at HIMSS23 the week before it kicks off, so send me your details. And since the question comes up every year, we can in fact get a new sponsor onboarded quickly enough to get into the guide, not to mention that they also get 51 more weeks of involvement once we all return home from Chicago. 

I awkwardly put together my first weekly healthcare AI update, not yet confident about content and writing style. Still, I have lined up some good interviews as a result and the more I write, the more I’ll learn.

I have early access to Google’s Bard AI chat tool and found it to be vastly inferior to ChatGPT, even the 3.5 version, as it either gave wildly incorrect responses or declined to answer at all. Its only advantage is that its information is kept current instead of being limited by a training cutoff date, as ChatGPT’s famous knowledge horizon of September 2021. AI will get a lot cooler when it stays current, which may come in the form of merging it with search engines as Microsoft has done with Bing.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Primary care operator Oak Street Health, whose $10.6 billion acquisition by CVS is in progress, launches OakWell in joint venture with kidney care management company Interwell Health. OakWell will offer primary care services to patients with end-stage kidney disease directly in the dialysis center, where ESKD patients spend an average of 12 hours per week.

People

Caregility hires Paul Oliver (Cisco) as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Epic integrates Invitae’s genetic testing into its Orders and Results Anywhere network specialty diagnostics suite.

An Intelligent Medical Objects survey of provider leaders finds that 94% plan to implement software to address clinician burnout and a potential recession, while 98% of respondents acknowledge that they need to use data better to confront challenges. Most respondents think that AI is overhyped, yet are adopting it and reporting improvements in clinical quality and administrative functions as a result.

A new KLAS report ranks Epic Community Connect as the top EHR for FQHCs, closely followed by Athenahealth. NextGen Healthcare is the leader in supporting an integrated care model and treating underserved populations. FQHCs express general dissatisfaction with dental management software integration, although NextGen Healthcare customers are content with its Electronic Dental Record integration.

Government and Politics

The Oklahoma Health Care Authority board unanimously votes to implement a statewide HIE and require providers to contribute data to it except for patients who opt out. Mental health providers had marched on the capitol last week over concerns that the personal information of their patients could be compromised, while other providers are unhappy about the $5,000 signup fee.

Other

Former Microsoft HealthVault GM Sean Nolan takes a nostalgic look back at its acquired Azyxxi, which it later renamed to Amalga. He provides some fun backstory – and potentially startup-relevant lessons learned — to the flashy analytics platform that was the hottest thing going for a short time in the early 2000s:

• Azyxxi thought that ETL pre-work is always wrong and not useful for asking new questions, so they loaded data from source systems and relied on heavy SQL processing to transform it as needed.
• The company’s early culture was that users should be able to ask questions themselves instead of dealing with the IT department.
• The product displayed information in an automatically refreshed kiosk-type display in patient care areas. The company’s experts would optimize performance-hogging queries once they saw them being used, which avoided optimizing low-use functions.
• The Amalga team ran into channel conflict at Microsoft, which had salespeople co-selling with third party developers that used Microsoft technologies, meaning that the salespeople “were best buddies with a whole bunch of healthcare data analytics companies that were in direct competition with Amalga.”
• The product was created at Washington Hospital Center by a dedicated team of 40 employees, but prospect hospitals focused on risk avoidance rather than innovation and weren’t motivated to replace an existing, inferior product with one they had to learn.
• Microsoft narrowed its business lines with the hiring of Satya Nadella as CEO in 2014. Amalga was sold to the Caradigm joint venture of GE HealthCare and Microsoft, Microsoft sold its stake, and the company was split into two parts that were sold to Inspirata and Imprivata. He didn’t mention that Microsoft also used the Amalga name on a Thailand-based EHR and RIS/PACS that it acquired from Global Care Solutions (Microsoft later sold that business to Orion Health).

Epic stages a cook-off of its in-house chefs, with Madison magazine offering interesting facts about the company’s massive food service program:

• Epic serves 9,000 made-from-scratch meals per day from three food service buildings and seven culinary venues (soon to be eight).
• The company’s working farm provides some of the produce it uses.
• Several of its recipes are posted online.
• Culinary employees get the same benefits as everyone else, including paid vacations, bonuses, health insurance, sabbaticals, and normal working hours instead of the usual evenings and weekends.
• Epic’s on-campus soda fountain (above) is named after CEO Judy Faulkner’s father Lou, who owned a pharmacy that had a soda fountain.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore releases a new podcast, “How L1 Support and Hosting Services Made Customers Happy and More.”
• Everbridge CEO David Wagner presides over the opening of the Nasdaq to celebrate the company’s new brand and 20th anniversary.
• The Association of Health Information Outsourcing Services elects HealthMark Group CEO Bart Howe as its new president.
• InterSystems releases a new Health Data Podcast, “Mitigating the Risk of Innovation (ft. Pothik Chatterjee, Lifebridge Health).”
• Meditech releases a new podcast, “Shaping home care and hospice practices at the national level.”

Blog Posts

• CMS Innovation Center: Specialist Incentives for Value-Based Care (Enlace Health)
• 5 Healthcare cybersecurity tips for apps and mobile devices (Fortified Health Security)
• Ensuring Security and Compliance for Life Sciences Data with HITRUST Certification (Healthcare Triangle)
• Medical chart audits: what you need to know (HealthMark Group)
• How EMR Optimization Empowers Your Healthcare Facility’s Top Talent (HealthTech Resources)
• Capitalizing on Tighter EHR-ERP Integration (Impact Advisors)
• The impending crisis in healthcare: Lessons from SVB’s collapse (Nordic)
• What makes clinical terminology so tough to maintain? (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Communication Breakdown: The Growing Need for Data Integration Services in Community Hospitals (Medhost)
• Preventing Pressure Injuries in Hospitals Takes Best Practices and Technology (Net Health)
• Plans Must Move Upstream to Improve Medicare Advantage Member Outcomes (NeuroFlow)

Contacts

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

News 3/22/23

Top News

Microsoft-owned Nuance will launch Dragon Ambient EXperience Express, which uses ChatGPT-4 to automatically generate clinical notes, this summer.

DAX Express will be included in DAX. It will also be offered as an addition to Dragon Medical One.

DAX Express creates clinical notes using exam room or telehealth conversations with patients.

Nuance will demonstrate the product at HIMSS23.

Reader Comments

From Lloyd Christmas: “Re: DoD’s DEERS personnel system. Hearing that it screws up addresses, pay, and assignments. I imagine it feeds into the Tricare system and probably Cerner.” The Army has also had problems with its IPPS-A human resources system, whose recent problems have resulted in incomplete data that is used for promotions and assignments. Problems in either system are likely to cause problems in Oracle Cerner, although at least the  $600 million IPPS-A system is also from Oracle, based on PeopleSoft.

From Midwest Nice: “Re: Epic. Judy reads HIStalk! Slide shared from March staff meeting.” My goal is that every reader feels as though I’m whispering directly into their ear alone as their guilty pleasure. But I will share one story. Several years ago, some health IT companies were blocking access to HIStalk because they didn’t want their employees to hear the truth (which of course led those employees to simply read after hours from home). I received what I think was my first-ever email from Carl at Epic, which started off with the ominous, “I have a problem with your site.” I nervously continued: “Some of our employees are telling me that they aren’t able to access HIStalk from work. We can’t determine if the problem is on our end or yours. Can you help me out so they can keep reading?”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Marble. Marble provides a holistic API platform representing the simplest way to get patient authorization and access to a vast data network from 120 million patients and 65,000 healthcare organizations. On the front end, Marble captures and verifies patient identity, obtaining explicit patient consent to access and share patient data and storing that data with FHIR-compliant companies using the Marble API. Developers gain network searchability and data retrieval at their fingertips while meeting HIPAA compliance and other privacy mandates. Thanks to Marble for supporting HIStalk.

Attention ViVE 2023 attendees: check out what HIStalk’s sponsors say they will be doing there next week.

I’m not often a fan of suddenly trendy words and phrases, but this one’s efficiency gets my green light: 3Xing (it works with any number). You 3Xed your revenue, which is the same as tripling it (which is the same as increasing it by 200%, which confounds a lot of people).

Webinars

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

Sales

• UR Medicine Highland Hospital (NY) will use software from Medaptus to manage inpatient physician assignments.
• Mental health system Brook Lane (MD) selects Commure’s Strongline staff safety alert system.
• Northwell Health will implement Epic, with the first go-lives scheduled for 2025.
• Vitas Healthcare will implement WellSky’s hospital and palliative care solution in its 50 hospices.

People

Julia Strandberg, MBA (Pear Therapeutics) joins Philips as chief business leader of its connected care businesses, including enterprise informatics.

KLAS Research promotes Steve Low, MS to president.

Caregility hires Kedar Ganta, MBA (Cisco) as chief product and engineering officer.

Health Data Movers promotes Karla Christopher and Brandon Camp, MBA to VPs of delivery.

Announcements and Implementations

Delaware-based ChristianaCare’s Center for Virtual Health launches a subscription-based, direct-to-consumer virtual primary care service in six states.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia develops a remote patient monitoring program for babies discharged from the NICU and an RPM program focused on malnutrition.

Maternity telehealth provider Ouma Health will partner with MedArrive’s field provider network to offer in-home services to pregnant women and newborns, especially high-risk Medicaid beneficiaries. The companies note that Medicaid mothers are often erroneously labeled as non-compliant when they miss appointments because of problems with transportation or taking time off from work.

Gozio Health enhances its mobile platform to support customized experiences by user type.

KLAS interviews a small number of Oracle Health customers about their perception of the company:

• The percentage of clients that see Oracle Health as a long-term partner has dropped significantly, particularly in large health systems.
• Customers say they are losing patience waiting for the company’s RevElate RCM solution, for which communication has been infrequent.
• They also question whether Oracle Health has enough staff left to implement RevElate after several rounds of layoffs.
• While customers think that Oracle Health will execute better than Cerner, they are uneasy about the lack of detail in the company’s plans.

Government and Politics

Politico reports that the FTC decided not to sue to block Amazon’s $4 billion acquisition of One Medical due to the case being considered too hard to win. Questionable negotiations with Lyft just before Amazon Care was shuttered and the One Medical deal announced had raised federal red flags, but the online retailer’s far-reaching tentacles have left lawmakers unable to effectively pinpoint exactly which markets may have been monopolized.

The VA will launch a pilot of its internally-developed Internal Scheduling System this summer, enabling medical support assistants to see available appointment slots for particular providers without navigating five or more windows. The VA is also looking for commercial software “like ZocDoc or Kyruus” to help its providers manage community referrals.

The FTC offers a deep dive into the enforcement actions it took against GoodRx and BetterHelp after they allegedly used pixel-tracking technology to share user health data with third parties for advertising.

Privacy and Security

UC San Diego Health notifies patients that vendor Solv Health used analytics tools that distributed information to third-parties without authorization on the scheduling websites of the health system’s Express Care and Urgent Care clinics.

Other

A survey involving four academic medical centers finds that nearly all patients appreciate having their test results posted immediately to the patient portal, even if their providers haven’t reviewed them. Some of those whose results were abnormal reported being worried and trying to understand what the results meant to their health, but 95% of them wanted immediate access to continue anyway. The authors suggest conducting further studies of pre-counseling — which was not associated with lower levels of worry in the study — and allowing portal users to designate their notification preferences for abnormal results or to hold results until after working hours, perhaps even on a per-test basis based on the patient’s level of concern.

Sponsor Updates

• Lakes Region Mental Health Center (NH) expands its use of Netsmart technology to include the CareFabric platform.
• Meditech, Algonquin College, and Queensway Carleton Hospital in Canada, partner to teach EHR configuration, workflows, collaboration, and security in lab sessions this semester.
• Artera will exhibit at The Beryl Institute’s Elevate PX event March 27-29 in Dallas.
• Azara Healthcare congratulates FQHC customers Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas and Valley Professionals Community Health Center (IN) on being recognized by HHS as 2022 Million Hearts Champions.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Direct-care workers in the post-acute care sector – challenges and opportunities.”
• CereCore publishes a new case study, “An Epic Implementation Story: Fast Tracking Epic Integration for a New Pediatric Facility.”
• Nordic releases a new episode of In Network’s Designing for Health podcast.
• ChartSpan becomes the exclusive chronic care management partner of Arkansas Hospital Association Services.
• Dimensional Insight will exhibit at AMGA 2023 March 28-31 in Chicago.
• CompTIA honors Divurgent SVP of Delivery Rebecca Woods with its 2023 North American Spotlight Award for advancing women in technology leadership.
• CereCore expands its specialized IT staffing services in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to better serve the area’s healthcare and life sciences industries.
• The latest Philips Capsule patient deterioration Surveillance solution receives market clearance from the FDA.

Blog Posts

• The AI Advantage: Complete, Accurate, and Compliant Medical Coding (AGS Health)
• What conditions are causing hospital readmissions? (Arcadia)
• How Virtual Monitoring Technology Improves Patient Safety (AvaSure)
• How encryption can take your data security to the next level (Philips Capsule)
• Managing Post-Acute Care to Improve Quality and Reduce Costs (CarePort)
• Bottom Line: Cost Savings is Why Meditech EHR and AP Automation Make Sense (CereCore)
• A time of growth at Oracle Health (Oracle Cerner)
• Digital Health Companies: Get Ahead of the Cybersecurity Implications of the SVB Collapse (Clearwater)
• How EMR Optimization Empowers Your Healthcare Facility’s Top Talent (HealthTech Resources)
• Improving Health Equity by Understanding the Social Drivers of Health (CTG)
• Top Questions About Hospital-at-Home (Current Health)

Contacts

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

HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2023

AGS Health

Booth 1619

Contact: Christina Cussimanio, SVP of marketing

christina.cussimanio@agshealth.com

802.777.4084

AGS Health is more than a revenue cycle management company – we’re a strategic partner for growth. With expert services complemented by AI-enabled technologies and high-touch support, AGS Health is the premier revenue cycle partner for leading health systems, physician groups, and academic medical centers in the US. AGS Health employs more than 11,000 team members globally and partners with more than 100 clients across a variety of care settings, specialties, and billing systems. Anyone who is seeking an end-to-end revenue cycle management partner should seek out AGS. We will be hosting a charity event for the Kids In Need Foundation where participants can stuff a pencil case for a child in need.

AvaSure

Booth 911

Contact: Laura Melendez, event manager

laura.melendez@avasure.com

If you are interested in setting up a meeting or talking with AvaSure experts like our Chief Product Officer, Jacob Hansen, you can request a time.

AvaSure provides the leading hospital virtual care platform to systems with nursing and staffing shortages that are challenged to significantly reduce labor costs without sacrificing patient health outcomes. Recently recognized by KLAS Research as the leader in reducing the cost of patient care, AvaSure is the pioneer in providing best-in-class, video-based AvaSure TeleSitter and TeleNurse solutions. As a trusted partner of more than 1,000 hospitals, AvaSure combines remote patient monitors, virtual nurses, and other providers on a single platform to enhance clinical care without placing any additional burdens on existing staff.

Baker Tilly

Booth 2407

Contact: Charlie Cook (charlie.cook@bakertilly.com), Ed Ricks (ed.ricks@bakertilly.com, 843.521.7191)

Baker Tilly is a top eight CPA Advisory firm worldwide. We’d love to have you chat with Ed Ricks, former health system CIO and COO, about how we are helping health systems solve the nursing shortage with an AI platform in conjunction with our change management and analytics services. Helping remove barriers to care delivery, improve patient and clinician satisfaction, and improve the bottom line. Go there. Start here.

Care.ai

Booth 1512

Contact: hello@care.ai

Visit booth #1512 to learn how leading health systems use care.ai’s Smart Care Facility Platform to optimize their processes. Discover how our platform empowers care teams to deliver personalized, quality care leading to better patient outcomes.

CereCore

Booth 2704

Contact: Jillian Whitefield, business development manager

jillian.whitefield@CereCore.net

248.891.5557

CereCore provides IT services that make it easier for hospitals and healthcare systems to focus on supporting hospital operations and transforming healthcare through technology. We partner with clients to extend their team through comprehensive IT staffing and application support; technical, professional, and managed services; IT advisory services; and EHR consulting because we know firsthand the power that integrated technology has on patient care and communities.

Clearwater

Kiosk 1 in the Cybersecurity Pavilion

Contact: John Howlett, SVP and chief marketing officer

john.howlett@clearwatercompliance.com

773.636.6449

Clearwater helps organizations across the healthcare ecosystem move to a more secure, compliant, and resilient state so they can successfully accomplish their missions. We do this by providing a deep pool of experts across a broad range of cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance domains; purpose-built software that enables efficient identification and management of cybersecurity and compliance risks; and a tech-enabled, 24x7x365 Security Operations Center with managed threat detection and response capabilities.

Join us on Tuesday, March 28, at 10:30am in the Cybersecurity Pavilion as Clearwater CEO Steve Cagle presents “The Top 3 Questions Health System CISOs Want to Know About the Security of Digital Health Technologies (and How to Satisfy Them).”

Clinical Architecture

Booth 2020

Contact: Jeff Nolan, VP of sales

jeff_nolan@clinicalarchitecture.com

843.521.7191

Schedule time to meet with us at our booth:

Clinical Architecture delivers healthcare enterprise data quality solutions focused on managing vast amounts of disparate data to help customers succeed with analytics, population health, and value-based care. Our solutions produce trusted, actionable data to enable smart decisions that mitigate risk, reduce cost, and improve outcomes. Schedule a meeting with us during #ViVE2023 so we can show you how we’ve helped some of the largest healthcare enterprises overcome their data quality struggles.

Consensus Cloud Solutions

Booth 1020

We will showcase our innovative solutions that streamline workflow processes and enable interoperability across the healthcare ecosystem. Our experts will also be demonstrating our Natural language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions at the InterOpNOW! kiosk 13, where attendees can learn how Consensus’ solutions address the industry’s growing need for technology that alleviates the burden of repetitive administrative processes, while helping to reduce staff frustration and enable actionable insights to improve care.

But that’s not all! We hope you’ll join our communication-exchange experts at our booth in a fun, interactive game of Drawful. All participants will be entered into our daily raffle for a chance to win a Nintendo Switch!

Divurgent

Meeting Cube 1258

Contact: Brittany Williams, VP of marketing and communications

brittany.williams@divurgent.com

804.712.1524

Divurgent is your partner in digital acceleration – we’re a solutions provider focused on what matters most to our client partners. We disrupt the typical value equation by using data-infused, flexible, and scalable solutions that demonstrate and quantify value for our partners. We are committed to IT evolution, deploying tailored solutions that help our client partners achieve improved operational effectiveness, financial performance, and quality of customer experience. Learn about our Business Resiliency Tooling and Epic Hyperdrive Solutions – book time with us here.

Ellkay

Booth 1826

Contact: Ajay Kapare, chief strategy and marketing officer

TeamELLKAY@ELLKAY.com

The Team ELLKAY booth 1826 is one stop you don’t want to miss at ViVE! Whether you need your coffee kick in the morning or want to unwind during Happy Hour at night, join us in booth1826 and learn how to declutter your data strategy and make interoperability happen. ELLKAY’s innovative cloud-based solutions address the challenges that hospitals and health systems, laboratories, healthcare IT vendors, health plans, and ambulatory practices face. Schedule a meeting during ViVE with our team of data experts today!

Five9

Booth 1212

Contact: Roni Jamesmeyer, senior healthcare manager

roni.jamesmeyer@five9.com

972.768.6554

We will host a Happy Hour on Monday afternoon in our booth 1212 and have a book signing event during that time giving away free, signed copies of the book, “Blueprint for the Contact Center of the Future.” Come have a drink, meet the author, and grab a book!

Fortified Health Security

Booth 2243, Meeting Room 102B

Contact: Matthew Thompson, community manager

mthompson@fortifiedhealthsecurity.com

615.600.4002 x119

Fortified is Healthcare’s Cybersecurity Partner and we’re coming to ViVE with a full schedule of strategy sessions and social events. Join us in the Fortified Central Command Room (meeting room 102B) for one of these events:

• Crash Central Command: Security professionals cocktail mixer.
• Strategy session: Cyber subsidy strategies and lunch.
• Strategy session: Building a medical device security program and breakfast.
• Ask a VISO: Have healthcare cybersecurity questions? Ask one of our on-site VISOs.
• Introducing a better way to manage your MSSP: Fortified Central Command Group.

Demo Seats are limited. RSVP for any of these events here.

Fortified Health Security is Healthcare’s Cybersecurity Partner – securing data and reducing risk to help ensure patient safety and continuity of care. A two-time Best in KLAS award winner, Fortified works with healthcare organizations to construct client-centric, customized programs leveraging both new and existing solutions. We are committed to building a stronger cybersecurity landscape for both our client ecosystem and the healthcare industry as a whole.

Healthwise

Booth 1028

Contact: Nate Smith, partner solutions, digital health

nsmith@healthwise.org

415.516.9848

Healthwise gets it right every day so you can focus on building your digital health offering. Headlines report changes in medicine every day, but not every headline tells the whole story. Trust our content to be accurate and up-to-date and to reflect the evidence and current standards in medical practice. We stay one step ahead with our comprehensive monitoring, research, writing, review, and update process. Developed to be inclusive, Healthwise content can help you better serve and relate to an increasingly diverse population. Enhanced API documentation makes it easier and quicker for developers to get started with Healthwise APIs.

JTG Consulting Group

We will not have a fixed location. Please feel free to email the team attending (CEO Jamel Giuma and VP of Sales Philip Garrott) at TeamJTG@jtg.group, or schedule an appointment.

JTG Consulting Group offers comprehensive custom consulting services from professionals who have experience in a wide cross-section of industries with deep proficiency in healthcare, healthcare IT, laboratory, and laboratory information sectors. Our scalable offerings are designed to fully compliment and support the plan we build for you, and we provide creative and time-tested solutions to fit the unique needs of your health system. JTG was founded in 2018 by Jamel Giuma. His vision was to create a boutique healthcare IT consulting firm to provide custom IT support and solutions to health systems of all sizes. Our core team of employees is supported by a vast network of consultants from various settings and with a wide range of healthcare IT specialties. Connect with us to experience the JTG Way! Check out our blog post about Overcoming Staffing Shortages in the Lab: Finding the Right Fit Consulting Firm. Read our KLAS Report and see why the JTG team ranked #5 out of 26 in HIT Staffing!

Medhost

Booth 1942

Contact: Samra Khan, senior marketing manager

samra.khan@medhost.com

As a leading provider of electronic health records (EHR) and healthcare IT services, MEDHOST will showcase its clinical and financial solutions and services to help enhance hospital operations and patient care while improving your bottom line. At the MEDHOST booth, visitors can also learn about our mobile apps, digital patient management, and our partnerships with innovative companies such as CommonWell Health Alliance and AWS. MEDHOST is all about increasing your bottom line and helping you save costs, and you can start doing that by stopping at our booth and entering our giveaway for a chance to win a $500 gift card. To learn more or schedule a demo, please email inquiries@medhost.com or speak with a MEDHOST representative at ViVE booth #1942.

Nuance

Booth 2312

Contact: Doug Kaufman, solutions consultant

Doug.Kaufman@nuance.com

781.565.5000

Get ready for Nuance at ViVE! Together, Microsoft and Nuance offer the AI solutions you need to drive better decision‑making, improve physician and patient experiences, create more meaningful connections, and produce tangible results.

Request a meeting or visit the Nuance pod in Microsoft booth #2312 to experience how we help providers engage with patients more effectively at every stage of the health and wellness journey. While you are here, learn more about the launch of DAX Express, a fully automated, workflow-integrated clinical documentation solution that is the first to combine proven conversational and ambient AI with GPT-4, the newest and most capable generative AI.

ReMedi Health Solutions

Contact: GP Hyare, managing director

g.hyare@remedihs.com

ReMedi Health Solutions is a nationally recognized, physician-led healthcare IT consulting firm specializing in peer-to-peer, clinician-centric EHR implementation and training. At ReMedi, we listen to physicians, nurses, and healthcare leaders in order to understand their biggest challenges, and we leverage our decades of experience to develop efficient solutions that greatly impact the delivery of care.

Tegria

Meeting Cube 1265

Contact: Kevin Kutz, VP of external relations

kevin.kutz@tegria.com

608.621.5296

Tegria provides consulting and technology services to healthcare organizations throughout the United States and internationally. Meet with us to learn how our customers are maximizing technology, transforming operations, improving financials, and optimizing care.

Monday Morning Update 3/20/23

Top News

Oracle Cerner has conducted another round of layoffs, according to the social media posts of some employees who were affected. Some say they’ve heard that 10% of the company was let go, but Oracle has not confirmed specifics.

Rumored severance was four weeks plus one week per year of service.

Oracle also told office-based employees who were allowed to work remotely during the pandemic that they will need to return to campus full time. Managers will notify workers within 30 days if their jobs will be in-office, flex office with unassigned space, or remote.

Reader Comments

From Yduj’s Hardest Worker: “Re: Northwell moving to Epic. Confirmed – they played the wedding bells at Epic today.” Northwell has 42 Epic jobs posted, so it’s goodbye to Sunrise and other systems there. The health system renewed its contract with Allscripts in 2020 to extend through 2026 and had announced the year before that it would build its own EHR with Allscripts and its Avenel product. That’s a pretty big customer loss for Harris-owned Altera Digital Health, which acquired Sunrise and other Allscripts products in May 2022.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Today (Monday) is the first day of astronomical spring in the US, although meteorological spring has already sprung as of March 1.

Poll respondents say that the weakest aspect of in-person conferences is the quality of educational sessions, i.e. the predecessor to social media in which companies sell advertising with unpaid, user-generated content as the hook. I don’t bother with conference education sessions because they are usually dull and stale, especially given the alternative of delivering them virtually so I can bail out or fast-forward, so maybe we’ll see conferences deconstruct themselves into just a big exhibit hall by day and parties by night.

New poll to your right or here: Which technology trend will have the biggest healthcare impact in the next five years? I couldn’t list every possible one, so you can always add a poll comment to support one that I missed.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The UK’s merger watchdog raises competitive concerns about the proposed acquisition of healthcare software vendor EMIS Group by a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary.

Pear Therapeutics, which offers prescription-based digital therapeutics, will explore strategic alternatives to avoid reorganizing or liquidating the company. Pear went public via a SPAC transaction in June 2021 at an initial valuation of $1.5 billion. PEAR shares have lost 96% since, valuing the company at $83 million after a 34% drop following Friday’s announcement.

Autism treatment software vendor Spectrum Ai raises $20 million in a Series A funding round.

Stanley Healthcare renames itself to Securitas Healthcare. The company was acquired in July 2022 by security services vendor Securitas.

It’s a sad day for Glassholes everywhere (both of them): Google ends sales of Glass Enterprise Edition, which the company created in 2017 as a pivot from the poor-selling consumer version of Google Glass.

People

Transcarent hires Randy Hawkins, MD (Carrum Health) as chief medical officer. He was formerly a US Navy squadron medical officer, with deployment in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Announcements and Implementations

The publisher of New England Journal of Medicine launches NEJM AI and names Harvard Medical School informaticist Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD as editor-in-chief.

Orbita’s Blaze care-finding solution for consumers will incorporate triage algorithms from Isabel Healthcare.

Ohio-based The Healthcare Collaborative exits the HIE business and will transfer its customers – 70 hospitals and 18,000 providers — to Ohio Health Information Partnership’s CliniSync service by the end of 2023.

A new KLAS report on ambulatory and enterprise EHR interoperability grades NextGen Healthcare and Athenahealth highest in ambulatory, while Epic tops the enterprise EHR list. The authors say that Altera Digital Health (the former Allscripts Sunrise), EClinicalWorks, and Greenway Health are falling behind in using external data for transitions of care and analytics.

Government and Politics

A GAO report on the VA’s Oracle Cerner rollout finds that the VA needs to improve its change management practices and to assess user satisfaction. Previous surveys found that around 95% of users disagreed that the system enabled quality care and made them efficient. GAO also found that while Oracle Cerner has reduced the number of old trouble tickets that are unresolved, the overall number of open issues has steadily increased since 2020.

Privacy and Security

Peaceful protesters, many of them mental health professionals, assemble at Oklahoma’s state capitol to object to SB 1369, which requires health plans to submit patient data – including mental health records — to a statewide HIE.

Healthcare security executives Scott Dresen (Corewell Health), Kate Piece (Fortified Health Security), Greg Garcia (Healthcare and Public Health Sector Coordinating Council), and Stirling Martin (Epic) testify at a meeting of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee titled “In Need of a Checkup: Examining the Cybersecurity Risks to the Healthcare Sector.”

Other

NHS England orders trusts to start submitting patient information to a system that is provided by Palantir, which the newspaper article calls an American spy-tech firm. A US technology fairness organization CEO says that while NHS needs to make better use of patient data, he questions the fairness of the procurement and whether NHS should be choosing a partner “mainly known for supporting CIA drone attacks, predictive policing, and deportation raids.” Oracle board chair and CTO Larry Ellison suggested in the company’s recent earnings call that it was, as had been rumored, also a bidder for the Federated Data Platform that would expand access to de-identified patient data.

Medical residency match day last week resulted in a 94% success rate for PGY-1 positions, but 554 emergency medicine went unfilled, a huge increase that was driven by fewer applicants. The most competitive specialties were plastic surgery, internal medicine-pediatrics, OB-GYN, and orthopedic surgery. Nearly all of the 2,685 unfilled positions will be placed in the supplemental offer (SOAP) program. Residency preferences fluctuate significantly every few years as medical students try to guess the future earnings potential and job satisfaction of a specialty in which most of them will spend their entire working lives.

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe is accepting nominations for its Nurses of Note awards through April 14.
• Surescripts publishes its “2022 National Progress Report.”
• Premier’s Pinc AI and Fortune name the nation’s top 50 cardiovascular hospitals
• .Relatient’s team in India opens a new Global Capability Centre.
• Talkdesk wins several 2023 Stevie Awards for sales and customer service, and congratulates customer Memorial Healthcare System for winning several as well.
• The HLTH Matters Podcast features Tegria Managing Director Theresa Demeter.
• Volpara Health announces that a new US federal regulation requires mammography facilities to inform patients whether their breasts are composed of dense tissue.
• Vyne Medical publishes a new customer success story, “A Productive Manager’s Choice for Increased Patient Satisfaction.”

Blog Posts

• Clearsense at ViVE 2023 (Clearsense)
• Driving Digital Transformation in Healthcare (Nordic)
• Doctors and Social Media: Unlocking New HCP Engagement Approaches (OptimizeRx)
• Can Healthcare Technology Beat Burnout? Not On Its Own. (PerfectServe)
• Medical librarians use their expertise in healthcare technology to improve clinician satisfaction (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Reimagining Master Data Management for Healthcare Organizations (Verato)
• 4 Reasons to Switch Online Scheduling (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 3/17/23

Top News

VA officials testify before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee that its Oracle Cerner system has been linked to six incidents of severe patient harm, including four deaths.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, threatened to withhold funding for the system’s implementation until problems have been addressed.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) raised questions about why Cerner was awarded a no-bid, $10 billion contract that lacks adequate accountability for patient harm or system downtime. Tester urged the VA to continue its implementation efforts but to renegotiate its contract, which is set to expire on May 17, for more favorable terms. The VA’s top contracting offer responded, “That’s absolutely the plan.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said of VA employees, “I have never in my life seen such resistance to modernizing a program. You’ve got a vendor sitting right next to you. They’re making a good faith effort to bring something forward. Why can you not tell employees, ‘This is your job. If you don’t want to do this, go work somewhere else?’”

Reader Comments

From Bread Zeppelin: “Re: AI in healthcare. Would readers other than me like to have that section added to the HIStalk news posts, similar to the COVID-19 news coverage?” Let’s ask them in this poll, which I’ll also post on LinkedIn to see if anyone notices.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ve decided that LinkedIn will serve my social media needs best, especially given its significant participation by my decision-making readers, so follow the HIStalk page for updates there. Or stick with Twitter since I’m not abandoning it. 

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Senior care software vendor PointClickCare acquires Patient Pattern, which offers a value-based care EHR and care management platform.

White-label telehealth services vendor OpenLoop raises $15 million in a Series A funding round. It offers provider staffing as well as services to assist with regulatory monitoring and credentialing. Co-founder and CEO Jon Lensing, MD graduated medical school in 2020 and started the company instead of pursuing a residency.

Maribel Health, which offers solutions to support hospital-at-home and community-based palliative care programs, raises $25 million in a Series A funding round.

Interoperability platform vendor Zus Health raises $40 million in funding and announces that EHR vendor Elation Health will integrate Zus Aggregated Profile to allow clinicians to view expanded records.

Microsoft and its Nuance business announce a Copilot AI-powered feature for Nuance Mix Builder that allows teams to build intelligent chatbots with minimal technical skills. In other AI news, both Microsoft and Google announced that they have added generative AI to their Office and Workspace apps, respectively, that will create draft documents from a user’s description of what they need.

Sales

• UR Medicine Highland Hospital will implement Medaptus Assign to manage inpatient physician assignment.
• FQHC Access Family Care (MO) chooses EClinicalWorks EHR and related modules.
• Lakes Region Mental Health Center will expand its 33-year relationship with Netsmart by adopting its CareFabric platform.
• Zuyderland signs a 10-year renewal with Sectra and will move to its cloud-based enterprise imaging solution.

People

Industry long-timer Peter Butler, president and CEO of MDaudit, retires. He will be replaced by COO Ritesh Ramesh, MS, MBA. 

Athenahealth hires Caleb Anderson (Netsmart) as chief sales officer.

Brian White, healthcare partner with LogicSource and long-time health system executive, died Sunday. He was 48.

Announcements and Implementations

Google introduces Open Health Stack to help Android developers create FHIR-based digital health solutions.  

An Urban Institute survey of adults ages 18 to 64 finds that 15% of their families have past-due medical debt, most of it involving hospital bills. About 80% of those with overdue medical bills had insurance when the expense was incurred, and while one-third of them were offered a payment plan by hospitals, few hospitals offered to discount the total owed or offered to help them apply for Medicaid. Overall, 100 million US adults have medical or dental bills that they are paying off over time or that are overdue.

TytoCare receives FDA clearance for its AI-powered wheeze detection for remote diagnosis.

Other

I ran across a testimonial from Laurence Beer, MD, chief clinical officer at Transitional Care Physicians of America, on the company’s use of free Chrome browser productivity extension Magical to boost documentation productivity. He set up variables so populate patient details into the EHR note, saving one hour per day per user. He says that clinicians needed six mouse clicks to use an EHR shortcut to start a physical exam note that says “well-nourished, elderly male in no acute distress” while Magical did it with one. The organization distributed the shortcuts as a team list to standardize documentation.

Denmark-based Be My Eyes – which links mobile-connected volunteers to people with vision problems to complete such as identifying a product or navigating an airport — develops a GPT-4 powered Virtual Volunteer version. The new assistant, which is in beta testing, helps users identify household items, avoid fall hazards, hear a summary of web page and search content, and navigate public transportation.

Sponsor Updates

• Metrigy recognizes Five9 as a Contact-Center-as-a-Software MetriStar Award Winner.
• Fortified Health Security names Melissa Schroeder (Oracle) security compliance advisor.
• GHX recognizes North America’s 2022 50 best healthcare providers for supply chain excellence.
• Healthcare Triangle confirms that it does not hold any cash or maintain any accounts at Silicon Valley Bank.
• InterSystems releases a new Healthy Data podcast, “Clinical Staffing – Patient Ratio & Documentation Burden.”
• Konza National Network will present at the AHIMA Advocacy Summit March 20 in Washington, DC.
• Kyruus will exhibit at AMGA March 28-30 in Chicago.
• Kingman Regional Medical Center (AZ) moves toward eradicating hepatitis C with support from Meditech Professional Services.

Blog Posts

• VBC Can’t Work Without Specialists on Board (Enlace Health)
• High Acuity Patients in Urgent Care: Defining and Solving Acuity Degradation (Experity)
• ‘To Err is Human’ Update Finds Inpatient Adverse Events Still a Challenge (First Databank)
• Inefficiencies in EHR Systems Can Cause Healthcare Worker Burnout (HealthTech Resources)
• How to Improve Care for Spanish-Speaking Patients (Healthwise)
• Innovation, Partnerships Driving Nationwide Interoperability to Address Healthcare’s Top Challenges (Surescripts)
• Oracle Cerner RevElate Common Questions and Implementation Tips (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Rapidly Evolving and Increasing Cyberthreats: Why You Need an IT Assurance Service Program (Impact Advisors)
• 9 HIT conferences to attend in 2023 (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• MEDITECH continues moving health IT forward (Meditech)
• Advancing Interoperability in the Age of TEFCA: An Interview with CommonWell’s Executive Director, Paul L Wilder: Part 2 (Medhost)
• Myndshft Advocates for Da Vinci Standards in Public Comments to CMS Proposed Prior Authorization Rule (Myndshft)
• The Power of Pairing EHR and MDS Data Together for SNFs (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 3/15/23

Top News

Stat reports that Medicare Advantage plans are using “unregulated predictive algorithms under the guise of scientific rigor” to cut off payment for the treatment of seniors.

A palliative care facility official says that “the appeal outlasts the beneficiary” as people who will die within three months are forced into an appeals process that takes up to 2.5 years. A Medicare beneficiary lawyer says that her MA patients start getting payment denials 14 days into their SNF stay even though they are entitled by traditional Medicare to stay up to 100 days.

Former CMS Administrator Tom Scully founded NaviHealth after seeing how nursing homes nearly always keep discharged Medicare Advantage patients for the full number of days of their coverage, sold the company for $410 million to Cardinal Health, who then sold it to a private equity firm that paid $1.3 billion, who then sold it to UnitedHealth for $2.5 billion. The company manages post-acute care for insurers who contract with the company for a share of the savings, with providers saying that the number of denials increased greatly when the company changed hands.

A hospital case manager reports, “NaviHealth will not approve [skilled nursing] if you ambulate at least 50 feet. Never mind that you may live alone or have poor balance. MA plans are a disgrace to the Medicare program, and I encourage anyone signing up to avoid these plans because they do NOT have the patients best interest in mind. They are here to make a profit. Period.”

Reader Comments

From Zoey: “Re: ChatGPT. It’s going to get wild when Open-AI releases the new, much more powerful GPT-4 next week.” I’m paying for access to ChatGPT just for my own education, so the GPT-4 model came live for me midday Tuesday (and is also live in Bing’s AI search preview). “Wild” is probably a good word to describe what will happen when AI goes broader and deeper into even more questionably sourced information. Bigger computing power or broader sources aren’t necessarily better for AI training. Would you want your doctor diagnosing you from a system that was trained on Internet junk content, or would it be better to train a system only on medical literature to accomplish that? We saw that in the early days of Internet search, when the novelty of being able to find anything wore off and the quest for higher-value, higher-relevance information that is tailored to individual searchers became obvious. For example, AI could analyze a patient’s EHR to provide clinicians with critical information that is hidden among the chart bloat, although daily batch training would be necessary to avoid limitations as in ChatGPT’s knowledge cut-off of September 2021. Oracle is in an ideal position to do this with its Cerner EHR.

Speaking of AI, the new version of Google’s Med-PaLM medical domain AI tool – which was the first to “pass” the US medical board test last year with a score of 60%, scores 85% at “expert” doctor level. Apparently that model is trained on valid medical information, which Eric Topol, MD says will soon allow AI to create office notes, manage prescriptions, schedule appointments and labs, obtain pre-authorization, and aggregate and summarize medical records.

From Moneylender: “Re: SVB. VCs created their problem and will benefit from the government’s solution.” Agreed. Some VCs and pundits stirred up Internet mob mentality by urging people to withdraw their deposits from SVB and the banking system isn’t set up to deal with a bunch of me-me-me Internet-fueled toilet paper hoarders. Banks and stock markets require people to believe that they are stable, well regulated, and fair to all participants (the equivalent of the Monty Python sketch about buildings that start to fall once you stop believing that they won’t). Note to CEOs willing to learn from SVB’s former one: never publicly use the phrase “don’t panic” since that acknowledges the fear that people are indeed panicking, which like the aforementioned toilet paper hoarders, doesn’t matter whether it’s justified or not.

From Desert Frosé: “Re: Larry Ellison. Is he trying to train ChatGPT with misinformation or something by bragging on the ‘one patient, one record’ accomplishments of four Epic clients?” I honestly don’t know why he brought that up in the earnings call, where he seems to take credit for Epic’s interoperability in four of its big customers.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor HealthMark Group. The Dallas-based company is a leading provider of digital health information management solutions for healthcare providers across the country. Guided by over 15 years of experience in healthcare IT, HealthMark helps organizations transform administrative processes into seamless, digital encounters. It provides medical, billing and imaging record release as well as FMLA and audit support. Its technology-driven approach to managing medical record requests improves patient satisfaction and keeps patient data secure and compliant. Thanks to HealthMark Group for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a HealthMark Group explainer that I found on YouTube.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The FDIC transfers all deposits of Silicon Valley Bank to a new bridge bank headed by Tim Mayopoulos, formerly president of mortgage startup Blend and a former Fannie Mae CEO. The government will protect depositors of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, using a funding program that offers banks loans against securities to avoid emergency asset sales. The FDIC fund, financed by banks rather than taxpayers, will protect depositors but not investors or creditors. However, the majority of SVB’s clients are venture capital firms and their portfolio companies, not small depositors who will benefit from government support. SVB remains open and assures investors that they will have full access to all of their deposits beyond the FDIC’s $250,000 of insurance.

Bardavon Health Innovations acquires injury prevention company Preventure to expand its worker and health mobility solutions into a complete, end-to-end musculoskeletal solution. Its Safety Intelligence Suite includes customized injury prevention solutions, an AI movement coach, digital and human interventions, and use of engagement data to determine rehabilitation protocols for improved return-to-work times.

Tegria rebrands its RCM business as Acclara, naming Tegria RCM managing director Lincoln Popp as CEO.

Sales

• Providence will offer remote physical therapy services from Luna.
• Prime Healthcare (CA) selects Ceiba Healthcare’s Integrated Virtual Care technology for tele-neurology, tele-stroke, and virtual critical care services.

People

Ray Gensinger, Jr. MD (Hospital Sisters Health System) joins Tegria as SVP/chief medical officer.

Broward Health (FL) names Steven Travers (USA Health) CIO.

Philips hires Julia Strandberg, MBA (Pear Therapeutics) as chief business leader of its Connected Care business.

Pivot Point Consulting promotes Max Hanner to SVP of business development, Laura Kreofsky to SVP of advisory, Zack Tisch to SVP of innovation and life sciences, and Jillian Wood to SVP of strategy and transformation.

Carium hires David McCormick, MBA (Innovista Health Solutions) as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Ellkay releases LKOpera, an interoperability platform that allows partners to executive a connected digital ecosystem that accelerates go-lives and gives teams full control and transparency.

Children’s Wisconsin integrates Xealth’s patient education software with its EHR.

Avaneer Health launches a blockchain-based data-sharing network for payers and providers that aims to improve administration workflows. I remain just as skeptical of blockchain-based healthcare solutions as I did back in 2021, when the company launched: “Blockchain is a hammer looking for nails that never seem to get pounded, and while healthcare has a ton of inefficiency and lack of interoperability (weren’t government-subsidized EHRs and HIEs supposed to fix those problems?), the historic safe bet is to be skeptical of companies that pre-profess their technology’s ability make it better.”

UCHealth’s “no-touch estimate” function is serving 36,000 patients per month with no manual work, generating 99% of patient estimates from Epic in which 72% of them estimate the patient’s portion within 5% or $50 of the final billed amount.

PeriGen launches automated quality reports for L&D that review hypertension recognition and response, perinatal core measure 06 (PC-06) unintended harm in the newborn, and persistence of concerning FHR conditions over time.

A new KLAS report on clinical documentation strategies finds that Nuance’s DAX ambient speech recognition shows initial promise, but front-end speech recognition is becoming the go-forward platform, led by Nuance Dragon Medical One. Computer-assisted physician documentation offers benefits but low physician buy-in, with Nuance CAPD leading the category. Users of Clinical Documentation Integrity solutions, where Iodine Software and Nuance are the top category scorers, believe that development has stagnated with some vendors. Transcription services are on the wane, and while 94% of users of virtual scribes report positive impact, quality is inconsistent, especially when the assigned scribe is replaced.

Government and Politics

The VA publishes an EHRM Sprint Report acknowledges that the Oracle Cerner implementation “has not met Veteran or VA expectations,” but places the blame on the VA itself for failing to standardize processes and fix issues that arose in its initial deployments. The VA will:

• Analyze the EHR’s safety performance using Leapfrog’s tool.
• Improve over-the-shoulder support based on best practices from other health systems.
• Modify PowerPlans to support research.
• Prioritize new service requests using a patient safety framework.
• Create a site readiness dashboard for go-lives.
• Get live sites back to baseline productivity before bringing new sites live.
• Simulate patient safety risks at the VA National Simulation Center or other locations.

Other

Scripps Health lays several dozen employees, most of them in IT, according to LinkedIn commenters.

Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta sues two apparel companies over their allegedly unauthorized use of the phrase “Grady Baby.”

This could be a public service announcement for choosing both friends and alcohol consumption wisely. Doctors in Nepal remove a vodka bottle that had been inserted in the lowest part of the lower GI tract of a drunk man by his “friends”. A similar incident occurred nearby a few days before, when a group of party-goers decided to see what would happen if they inserted a 3×5 inch steel drinking glass into the nether regions of their drunken bro.

Sponsor Updates

• WEDI features Arrive Health CEO Kyle Kiser on its latest podcast, “Lucy Up! Improving Patient Access, Affordability, and Outcomes.”
• Lumeon names Jennifer Bowman (Molina Health), Karen Cox, RN (Chamberlain University), Christy Dempsey, RN (Press Ganey/Missouri University School of Nursing), Jessie Israel, RN (Denver Wellness Associates), and Timothy Zoph (McKinsey) to its new Thought Leadership Council.
• Baker Tilly publishes a new case study, “Health system realizes cost savings by outsourcing system integration and ad-hoc IT projects.”
• Sentara Healthcare (VA) and Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center (CA) use Wolters Kluwer Health’s Ovid Synthesis Clinical Evidence Manager to enhance their clinical research programs.
• Agfa Healthcare will introduce its Imaging Health Network at HIMSS23.
• The HLTH Matters Podcast features Biofourmis co-founder and CMO Maulik Majmudar, “Harnessing the Power of Tech and Data to Bring the Right Care to Patients, No Matter Where They Are.”
• E-prescribing software vendor DAW Systems implements Arrive Health’s real-time prescription benefit technology.
• Medhost joins the CommonWell Health Alliance.

Blog Posts

• Technology adoption making patient safety the primary goal at Primary Health Care Corporation (Oracle Cerner)
• The Power of Mobile Care & How It’s Changing the Way Patients Choose Hospitals (Access)
• 4 Ways AI-enabled RPM Helps Close Gaps in Patient Care (AdvancedMD)
• Fixing the Front-End of the Revenue Cycle: Integrated Financial Clearance (AGS Health)
• Using risk adjustment for better patient outcomes (Arcadia)
• MEDITECH showcases patient-centered interoperability strategies at HIMSS23 (Meditech)
• US Nursing Cliff a Catalyst for Change (Ascom)
• AvaSure Virtual Classroom Series: Virtual Nursing 101 (AvaSure)
• 9 Benefits of ServiceNow’s Enterprise Service Management Platform (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Reducing Injuries for High-Risk Employees Calls for Fully Integrated Musculoskeletal Solutions (Bardavon)
• We Must Dramatically Streamline Clinical Workflows: Here’s Why. (CareMesh)
• 5 Indicators Your HIT Staffing Partner is a Good One (CereCore)
• Inefficiencies in EHR Systems Can Cause Healthcare Worker Burnout (HealthTech Resources)
• Protect Your Practice: Mitigating the Risks of Medicare Fraud and Abuse with an In-House CCM Program (ChartSpan)
• 7 Ways to Minimize Privacy Risk Created by Online Tracking Technologies (Clearwater)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/13/23

Top News

Silicon Valley Bank, a major player in tech company financing, collapses and is taken over by federal regulators in the biggest US bank failure since 2008.

SVB has business relationships with half of all venture-backed technology and healthcare companies.

SVB failed as higher interest rates devalued its long-term, low-interest bond portfolio even as venture capital deposits dwindled in a down market, with the unrealized losses raising fear in depositors who created a bank run in trying to withdraw their money.

Notes:

• Deposits are FDIC insured up to $250,000, meaning that 95% of the money held by SVB is uninsured.
• Tech companies that can’t get their deposits out of SVB are expressing doubt that they can meet payroll and pay bills in the short term.
• Venture capital firms used their now-frozen SVB lines of credit to make investments quickly. However, they also triggered the SVB bank run by advising their portfolio companies to pull their money out, which created a liquidity event that forced SVB to convert unrealized losses to actual losses in an attempt to cover withdrawals.
• Some of the VCs issued their SVB warnings on Twitter, which created a panic that one investor summarized as, “If you are in a movie theater and it’s not on fire and you yell fire, and then you congratulate yourself for being out first while other people are laying on the floor, do you sleep well tonight?”
• SVB supporters note that the bank has been an ally of innovation, didn’t mishandle deposited funds, and instead chose a conservative investment approach involving government-backed funds that was derailed by interest rate hikes. The company held so much startup money deposited from fundraising proceeds that it couldn’t originate enough profitable loans to invest it, so it turned to low-interest but safe investments.
• FDIC is expected to pressure another bank to buy SVB, which holds enough assets – albeit long-term and discounted — to cover deposits if it can continue operation.
• Long-term observers question the involvement of the Federal Reserve in first holding interest rates artificially low, then raising them repeatedly. They also worry that fear will drive companies to move their money from banks to other investments, which will cause other banks to fail as depositors withdraw their funds.
• Private equity investor Bijan Salehizadeh, MD, MPH, MBA worries that portfolio companies whose funds are tied up in SVB can’t count on their VCs to provide an emergency bridge loan since many or most VC funds also bank at SVB and can’t get their money either, and opening new accounts at overwhelmed banking competitors is not a quick process. He also notes that some companies are funded under terms that require banking with SVB, which means other banks may be wary of taking them on. He says that the federal government needs to force a big bank to buy SVB over the weekend or else “we have not just an academic catastrophe, but an actual catastrophe.” He also urges affected companies to stop all accounts payable activity immediately to preserve cash for payroll.

I would welcome opinions from readers who are involved in venture capital or whose company is being affected by SVB’s collapse.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

One in five poll respondents have used telehealth to get a prescription they wanted knowing that the evaluation process would likely be superficial.

New poll to your right or here, following up on Dr. Jayne’ s impressions of ATA: what disappointed you most at the most recent in-person conference you attended? Someone told me once that the single most important item for attendees is food and the opportunities to socialize while consuming it, which brings back painful memories of waiting in endless food and coffee lines at HIMSS conferences only to end up sitting alone on the floor with my wildly overpriced purchase because of lack of seats.

Attention clock spring-forwarders, which is everybody in the continental US except those in Arizona. Avoid embarrassing yourself and mothball EST, CST, MST, and PST until November 5 since it’s all EDT, CDT, MDT, and PDT until then. You don’t get to pick which one you like better, but in a rare confluence of decreased effort accompanying increased accuracy, just write ET, CT, MT, and PT year round to always be correct (those of us in those time zones already know what time it is here). Perhaps unfairly, I assume that anyone who has lived their entire life under Daylight Saving Time but still writes it wrong can’t be all that bright or attentive to detail. TL;DR version – always abbreviate Eastern time as ET.

I keep seeing these clickbait articles in the form of “XXX hospital executives to know” whose selection methodology is whatever the fresh grad writer’s Google searches turn up. Does the “to know” encourage people to cold-call those who are named get acquainted? Otherwise, if they are so important that we should know them, wouldn’t we already?

I don’t often do book reviews, but I found the new, physician-written novel “The Algorithm Will See You Now” to be worth reading and describing.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

From the Oracle earnings call:

• CEO Safra Catz says that “cloud is no longer about just renting commodity white boxes” and instead offers velocity and value that supports business transformation.
• She says that Oracle has improved Cerner’s operating margin by more than five percentage points in its three quarters of ownership.
• Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison says that Cerner’s healthcare contract base has increased by $5 billion since the acquisition. He called out wins at Ascension Health, Auxilio Mutio, Vandalia Health, Banner Health, VA, DoD, and NHS.
• Ellison said that MD Anderson has reduced readmissions by 30% by using Project Ronin’s AI model running on Oracle Cloud.
• Responding to an analyst’s question about “when does it become clear that Oracle is helping improve the quality of care and saving lives,” Ellison cited implementations at DoD, VA, and Nova Scotia, along with an NHS bid in progress.
• Ellison stated that Oracle has built “one patient, one record in the database” at Stanford, UCLA, Mayo Clinic, and Cleveland Clinic, failing to note that all of those organizations user Oracle Cerner competitor Epic.

OptimizeRx reports Q4 results: revenue down 3%, adjusted EPS $0.25 versus $0.22.

Sales

• An unnamed drug manufacturer hub services company will use OptimizeRx’s technology to determine patient drug eligibility and affordability.

People

Laura Wilt, MBA (Ochsner Health) joins Sutter Health as SVP/CDO.

Washington University in St. Louis hires Greg Hart, PhD (FTI) as its first CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

An AHA-commissioned report by Kaufman Hall finds that 53% of US hospitals expect to lose money this year, driven by high labor and supply costs.

Government and Politics

Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT), who was recently appointed chair of the VA’s subcommittee on technology modernization, says that he would like to cancel the VA’s Oracle Cerner contract, claw back some of the money that the company has been paid, and focus instead on improving the VA’s legacy VistA system. He says VistA is a better system for supporting safe, high-quality care, citing high dissatisfaction rates among the VA’s users of Oracle Cerner.

The former CEO of now-bankrupt medical device company Stimwave is indicted for selling a non-functional piece of plastic as a $16,000 implantable medical device for chronic pain patients. Stimwave settled for $10 million in October 2022. Doctors complained that the implantable part of the original nerve stimulator device was too big, and since the company knew that the technology could not be made smaller, created a plastic dummy component that could be cut to fit, enabling the doctor to bill for implanting the fake device.

Privacy and Security

Virtual mental health startup Cerebral notifies HHS that it use of pixel tracking has inadvertently exposed the information of 3.2 million users to third parties. The shared information includes website visitor responses to a mental health questionnaire that includes responses about panic attacks, alcohol abuse, and personality disorder.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer launches the Outpatient Prospective Payment System Batch Grouper and Calculator Service within its MediRegs coding, reimbursement, and compliance solution.
• Nordic releases a new In Network Podcast, “Designing for Health: Interview with Dr. Srinath Adusumalli.”
• OptimizeRx announces a multi-million-dollar, three-year agreement with a leading Hub services company that will leverage its technology to accelerate patient access for its life sciences brands.
• Pivot Point Consulting announces new appointments to its Managed Services, Data & Analytics, Clinical Systems/EHR, Business Systems, and Advisory Services segments.
• Premier publishes a new success story, “Premier’s Pinc AI Clinical Intelligence: A Key to Reducing Clinical Variation and Improving Quality at St. Luke’s University Health Network.”
• Redox releases a new podcast, “Automation’s Impact on the Patient/Provider Relationship with Mytonomy’s Vinay Bhargava.”
• Spok earns top honors for the sixth consecutive year in a Black Book Market Research survey of healthcare industry clients on top-rated secure communications platforms.
• Volpara Health highlights studies presented at the 2023 European Congress of Radiology that demonstrate the important role AI plays in objective breast density assessment, cancer risk assessment, and mammography quality evaluation.

Blog Posts

• Financial Challenges Facing Hospitals & How to Solve Them (Vyne Medical)
• Breaking down the barriers to health equity (Nordic)
• Can Healthcare Technology Beat Burnout? Not On Its Own. (PerfectServe)
• Four Trends Guiding Healthcare Supply Chain Workforce Management (Premier)
• AI in the contact center just expanded (Talkdesk)
• Advancements in PT Technology and Emerging Digital Trends (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 3/10/23

Top News

Oracle reports Q3 results: revenue up 18%, adjusted EPS $0.68 versus $0.84, beating earnings expectations but falling just short on revenue.

The company’s much-watched cloud revenue jumped 45%.

ORCL shares dropped 5% in after-hours trading following the announcement as investors reacted to revenue of $12.4 billion versus the average analyst expectation of $12.41 billion.

Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison highlighted the contributions of its June 2022 Cerner acquisition, saying that its healthcare contract base has increased by $5 billion. He says Oracle is pleased with those results, but expects new healthcare contract signings to accelerate further over the next few quarters.

The Cerner business contributed $1.5 billion in revenue for the quarter, 12% of Oracle’s total revenue.

Reader Comments

From Marmaduke: “Re: WW. Didn’t they have problems with data privacy issues in the past?” The former Weight Watchers — which changed its name to WW in 2018 to emphasize holistic wellness instead of counting calories – acquired children’s diet app vendor Kurbo Health in 2018 for $3 million. FTC accused the companies of violating COPPA by encouraging users under 13 to falsely state their age to avoid seeking parental consent, then illegally collecting their personal information. WW settled with FTC in 2022 by paying $1.5 million and shutting down Kurbo. WW cautions in its latest SEC filing that it has limited experience in telehealth and drug marketing laws, so success in its planned acquisition of weight loss telehealth vendor Sequence will likely require retaining that company’s management team.

From Dingo with Ears: “Re: wax. While I love your regular news updates and have to come to depend on them, your highlighting the smart visual ear cleaner as an alternative to the trusty ear pickers I’ve been using for years is life changing. Wax on/ wax off!” I have seen roving ear cleaners in Chengdu, China whose patients sit among gaping onlookers in public parks to have their ears probed for many minutes by professionals who are armed with a variety of disturbing-looking tools that supposedly elicit pleasurable sensations (but the faces they make suggest that it isn’t always comfortable). I’ll take the app-powered self-cleaner any time.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The increasing trend of prescribing pricey and fashionable weight loss medications via telehealth prompts me once again question the value of making a drug prescription-only. The widespread availability of telehealth services that will sell patients what they want with minimal medical scrutiny – superficially reviewing their checkbox form entries –suggests that neither doctors nor patients see value in traditional exams and responsible prescribing. The telehealth companies make money like a club bouncer who waves a patron around the velvet rope after pocketing a $50 bill. I expect the pendulum to eventually swing back, either because prescribing requirements will tighten or some kid’s telehealth startup will find itself on the wrong end of a huge-dollar medical malpractice lawsuit when it turns out that the checkbox wasn’t a good replacement for actual medical care.

The single top-of-page banner on HIStalk is almost always booked long term and thus is rarely available, but it is now. Contact Lorre.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Business Insider reports that Elemy, which raised over $300 million to open clinics to treat children with autism, has pulled out of 11 of the 14 states it covered and conducted five rounds of layoffs as it hopes to transition from delivering care to selling software to clinicians to command a higher investor valuation. A former employee likened its strategy to “darts being thrown at a dart board.” A leaked recording of a company meeting suggests that it hopes to a scheduling app and an EHR to behavioral analysts, but its 31-year-old founder admits that its early efforts at developing technology were not successful.

Investor Jacob Effron posts a fascinating interview with Naomi Allen, whose worked at Castlight Health and Livongo before starting investor-backed mental health startup Brightline. Snips:

• Service layer vendors that can connect the digital health ecosystem to get solutions online faster are driving innovation.
• Most US counties have no pediatrics-trained mental health providers, leaving virtual and hybrid care as the only option.
• Castlight struggled because nobody had sold digital health solutions to employers and it was tough to prove value to companies and their users.
• She believes consumers can be incented to shop responsibly for healthcare services via specialty tiers, value-based networks, and incentives for seeing high-quality providers and getting second opinions.
• She wonders if the down market, with its reduced competition for employees, will require companies that sell solutions that are perceived as an employee benefit will need to find new sales approaches.
• Livongo figured out member delight early on, identifying pain points such as the cost and effort required to get blood glucose strip refills. It also identified data signals that would allow it to take action immediately instead of having insurer case managers calling randomly.
• It’s hard to convince patients to cut cords with their child’s behavioral therapist, which creates clinician shortages. Few therapists use measurement to determine when the child can exit care or be well served by other modalities, insurers don’t pay for mental health screening, and evidence doesn’t exist to connect level of care to acuity. 
• She thinks the Teladoc acquisition of Livongo made sense because Livongo’s impact was limited by two of its acquisitions that used only coaches rather than clinicians. However, Teladoc didn’t invest in keeping Livongo’s executives and its culture clashed with that of Livongo.

Revenue cycle management solutions vendor AGS Health opens an office in Manila, Philippines. The company has 11,000 employees.

Sales

• The new “smart” hospital of Valley Health System (NJ) will use Meditech Expanse, along with in-room monitors, RTLS patient locating for energy efficiency, and AI-powered video surveillance systems to prevent falls.
• Shaare Zedek Medical Center implements Juniper Networks Astra software to automate data center network operations.

People

Alistair Erskine, MD, MBA (Mass General Brigham) joins Emory Healthcare as chief information and digital officer.

Medhost hires Michael Yzermanm, MS (Avelead) as SVP of customer success and support.

David Wellons (Windy Hill Group) joins Penon Partners as VP and practice leader of sales operations and CRM process optimization.

Tegria promotes Brian Cahill, MBA to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthcare interoperability vendor Health Gorilla and CLEAR, which offers a secure identity verification platform, launch a service that allows consumers to access their health information securely. The program will start in Puerto Rico via the PRHIE.

An NTT Data survey finds that only half of the consumer respondents are aware of at-home care options, while three-fourths would prefer a telehealth visit or house call over making a trip to a provider.

Nuance adds GPT-powered chatbot capability to its Nuance Mix self-service contact center solutions.

Other

An investigative report finds that mental health non-profit Koko searched the social media posts of people 18 to 25 to find crisis-related mental health language so it could direct them to chatbot questionnaires on its website. Experts question why the organization didn’t set up the experiments as human subject research that would have protected the safety and privacy of users. The company previously raised flags by experimenting with AI to allow users to advise each other on mental health issues. A bioethicist concludes, “If this is the way entrepreneurs think they can establish AI for mental diseases and conditions, they had best plan for a launch filled with backlash, lawsuits, condemnation, and criticism, all of which are entirely earned and deserved. I have not in recent years seen a study so callously asleep at the ethical wheel. Dealing with suicidal persons in this way is inexcusable.” The company’s co-founders came from Airbnb.

An NHS scientist wins a racism lawsuit after her complaints about co-workers resulted one of them changing her name in a shared worksheet to “paininarse.”

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Keeping Patients Safe and Compliant.”
• Intelligent Medical Objects publishes a new case study, “Improving patient cohorts with comprehensive code mapping.”
• Nordic releases a new episode of DocTalk.
• Meditech’s Expanse Patient Care helps Major Health Partners realize a 30% time-savings for home medication verification in the emergency department.
• Nuance publishes a case study, “University of Rochester Medical Center enables effortless image sharing.”

Blog Posts

• Improving Patient Safety in Hospitals (Vyne Medical)
• VBC Doesn’t Happen Overnight. But It’s Happening Now. (Enlace Health)
• Front Desk Checklist PDF for Better Urgent Care Billing (Experity)
• Drug Overdose Deaths Continue to Surge (First Databank)
• How Transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 Revolutionizes the Life Sciences Industry (Healthcare Triangle)
• 2023’s Top 4 AI Use Cases in Healthcare Communications (Five9)
• 5 Factors in a Successful Medical Record Abstraction (HCI Group)
• Is Poor Tech Support Losing You Patients, Revenue, and Reputation? (HCTec)
• Boost Financial Performance by Improving Patient Outcomes (Healthjump)
• Muscle Building for Transformative Change (InterSystems)
• The cost of building a clinical informaticists team (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Getting Started with Online Scheduling: 5 Key Steps for a Successful Launch (Kyruus)
• From Ribs to Regimens: Your Complete Guide to Medication Reconciliation (Medhost)
• A can’t miss opportunity awaits you at our 2023 Home Care Symposium (Meditech)
• Full Steam Ahead: Regulations Create Momentum for Streamlined Healthcare Data Exchange & Prior Authorization Automation (Myndshft)
• Claims-Based vs. MDS-Based Insights: What’s the Difference? (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 3/8/23

Top News

Transcarent will acquire virtual primary care company 98point6’s care delivery division — which includes an AI-powered chatbot, physician group, and self-insured employer business — for $100 million.

Transcarent, which has relied on contracted clinicians, will gain 98point6’s 150 directly-employed doctors and support staff.

98point6 has raised $270 million in funding.

After the acquisition, 98point6 will stop providing patient care and will develop and sell technology to health systems. MultiCare Health System has signed on as its first software customer.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Hear ye, HIStalk sponsors participating in ViVE 2023 — send me your details for inclusion in my conference guide. It’s easy, free, and fun (well, maybe “fun” is a stretch) but why not tell reader attendees why they should drop by your expensive booth?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

WW, known as WeightWatchers until a 2018 name change, will acquire telehealth-based weight management company Sequence for $132 million. Sequence’s $99 per month membership plan provides prescriptions for high-demand weight loss drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic, a price that does not include the $1,000+ monthly cost of the drugs themselves. Sequence touts its prior authorization technology as a differentiator. WW shares, which have slimmed down 57% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 12% loss,  jumped 79% on the news, valuing the company at $489 million.

Best Buy will set up in-home virtual care systems for Atrium Health in a three-year deal. Atrium expects to monitor 100 patients remotely, buying devices from Best Buy and having them installed by its Geek Squad. Best Buy Health’s president is Deborah DiSanzo, MBA, who was formerly GM of IBM Watson Health and CEO of Philips Healthcare.

Newly launched Opkit announces GA of a health insurance verification platform for telehealth companies and virtual clinics.

Sales

• De Baca Family Clinic (NM) selects EHR and patient engagement software from EClinicalWorks.
• CareView Communications adds Sonifi Health’s interactive communications technology to its patient video monitoring software, giving patients the ability to communicate with care teams from bedside smart TVs.

People

Healthcare identity management vendor Verato hires Avi Mukherjee, MBA (Verily Life Sciences) as chief product officer.

Waystar promotes Missy Miller to chief marketing officer.

Direct Recruiters promotes Shayla Jastrzebski to partner.

Cookeville Regional Medical Center (TN) promotes Tim McDermott, MBA to CIO.

Kyruus promotes Heather Berndt, MA to VP of mid-market and client sales.

Announcements and Implementations

The Medical University of South Carolina takes over management of Regional Medical Center and will convert it from Cerner to Epic.

Vitalchat announces GA of AI-Enabled E-Sitter, virtual nursing technology that enables clinicians to remotely monitor up to 100 patients from a central hub.

Weill Cornell Medicine (NY) uses AI-powered ProviderIQ technology from Hatchleaf to more effectively match patients with best-fit providers across specialties.

A study of procedure documentation modalities for hand surgery – AI-based virtual scribe, medical scribe, transcription service, and EHR voice recognition –  finds that all four generate acceptable results. The AI scribe required the least amount of surgeon time and was able to identify most of the elements needed, but the plans it generated required clinician review.

An NYU School of Medicine study finds that prescribing rates for mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists doubled when cardiologists were presented with an EHR banner alert reminding them of the appropriateness of the treatment for their heart failure patients. MRAs can greatly improve survival rates but are ordered for only one-third of eligible patients, resulting in an estimated 20,000 preventable deaths in the US each year.

A new KLAS review of small-hospital patient accounting finds that Meditech Expanse tops the list, with Epic coming in second because service quality varies under the CommunityConnect model in which the host hospital provides services instead of Epic.

Government and Politics

The Defense Health Agency launches a six-month pilot of a tool that offers validated health information to patients and providers.

The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Subcommittee on Technology Modernization held the first of a series of oversight hearings on the VA EHR program Tuesday afternoon. Notes:

• Chair Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) said that VA IT systems exist to improve care, not to “turn out cushy contracts to technology companies.” He says that all EHR projects or options will be evaluated on patient safety, reliability, user satisfaction, and cost.
• Rosendale says that some elements of VistA will be used for at least 10 years, and some parts that aren’t addressed by Oracle Cerner may never go away, so VistA must be maintained.
• Rosendale said Mann Grandstaff VA Medical Center has become “the most dangerous VA hospital in the country” based on its post-Oracle Cerner patient safety reports of 500 per year versus an average of 55 per year from VistA-using facilities.
• Former VA CIO Roger Baker says concrete evidence exists that veterans have better outcomes from facilities that use the VA’s legacy VistA system instead of Oracle Cerner.
• Baker says that lobbyists are falsely claiming that VistA can’t be improved because of age, complexity, and technology. He says that big modernization improvements were made under his tenure even though VA had cut off VistA improvements for 16 of the last 24 years.
• Baker says that replacement of VistA Laboratory with the cloud version of Cerner’s laboratory system in 2007 was a failure that never expanded beyond the first hospital because of the cost and timelines required to customize it using available parameters.
• Baker says Oracle Cerner is the VA’s third attempt to replace VistA, following HealtheVet and IEHR, and all have failed because the VA’s culture values local control rather than software standardization.
• Baker says that studies have shown that only 16% of large US government IT projects succeed, and as the largest federal IT project, “VA has no chance of actually succeeding on this program.”
• Former VA executive Peter Levin testified that the billions of dollars that have already been spent on Oracle Cerner cannot scale to enterprise-wide clinical services. He said that DoD fared better because they had already transitioned to a centrally administered workflow, they planned better, and predecessor system AHLTA was a mess that made Cerner look like an improvement to users.
• Asked about Cerner being awarded a no-bid contract, Levin says he doesn’t think the selection was unfair, but there were “political exigencies.”
• VA IT executive Daniel McCune says that the annual cost of maintaining VistA has ranged from $418 million in 2018 to $891 million in 2022, and the cost will continue to increase until Oracle Cerner is fully implemented.

Privacy and Security

The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency release a Cybersecurity Advisory to help healthcare providers protect their networks from the Royal ransomware variant.

Other

A Black Book survey of 2,500 health IT leaders finds that 30% plan on investing in health data integration solutions this year. Reducing duplicate and unnecessary procedures, increasing volume of consumer health data, patient demands for nearly immediate health results, and gaps in clinical device connectivity were cited as top reasons for investment. Innovaccer took top marks for its data integration solutions.

CNBC profiles Denmark-born Ida Tin, whose company launched popular menstrual health app Clue. She coined the term “femtech” to describe the trillion-dollar market to attract investors who would not have been comfortable with “a company that helps women not pee their pants.” She stepped down as CEO of birth control app vendor Clue in 2021, explaining that, “I could see that the things that I would have had to learn to really serve the company were things I’m not that good at, and I was not so interested in a lot of very serious operational stuff and that didn’t excite me as much.” She became interested in business when she got lost at the college where she was studying art and ended wandering by mistake into a business course interview.

Sponsor Updates

• Sam Larson, head of marketing for Philips Capsule, and his family will take a team to Jamaica’s Mustard Seed Communities this summer to complete several work projects.
• AdvancedMD publishes a new e-book, “2023 MIPS Attestation Guide.”
• Bardavon Health Innovations acquires injury prevention company Preventure and launches a Safety Intelligence Suite for employers and insurers.
• CarePort publishes an e-book, “5 levers for hospital success under value-based care.”
• ChartLogic will exhibit at the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons Annual Meeting March 8-10 in Las Vegas.
• ConnectiveRx will sponsor the Point-of-Care Marketing Summit March 22 in New York City.
• AdvancedMD publishes a new e-guide, “2023 CPT/HCPCS Codebook.”
• Netsmart will integrate the CAMS-care Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality Framework and Suicide Status Form with its CareFabric platform.
• Nordic releases a new podcast, “Making Rounds: The Big Squeeze in Healthcare.”
• Optum will exhibit at the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy Conference March 21-24 in San Antonio.
• Sectra publishes a new case study, “AI frees up valuable time for radiologists in a Swedish healthcare region.”
• Spok earns top honors for the sixth consecutive year in a recent Black Book survey for its secure communications platform.
• Verato publishes a new case study, “Large Texas non-profit health system avoids costs, enhances productivity, and improves scalability.”
• West Monroe promotes 16 new managing directors.

Blog Posts

• Is Hospital Pre-Registration Possible Without Portal Adoption? (Access)
• Understanding the HHS-HCC Risk Adjustment Model (AGS Health)
• Healthcare disrupted: How to keep pace in a rapidly changing world (Arcadia)
• Ascom Workflow Technology Designed for Interoperability to Make 1+1=3 (Ascom)
• 7 Step Roadmap to Developing a Virtual Nursing Program (AvaSure)
• Using Real-Time Insights to Improve Value-Based Care Outcomes (Bamboo Health)
• Why Double Down on Injury Prevention? CEO Matt Condon Talks About Our New Safety Intelligence Suite (Bardavon Health Innovations)
• Epic Go-Live Planning: Keys to Successful HOD Implementation (CereCore)
• What is a Care Manager? (ChartSpan)
• Enabling Value with Interoperability & Analytics Using the 1Clearsense Platform (Clearsense)
• Harnessing Big Data for Suicide Prevention (Dimensional Insight)
• The 21st Century Cures Act and its Impact on Interoperability and Healthcare (HealthTech Resources)
• Long-Term Cost-Saving Opportunities in Healthcare (Divurgent)
• Key Tips for Successfully Managing and Optimizing Your Revenue Cycle (Vyne Medical)
• Beyond the call: How to differentiate your telehealth experience post-visit (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Using EHRs to Increase Employee Satisfaction and Retention (Netsmart)
• Be the Poison Control (or help desk) operator your colleagues need you to be (Nordic)
• Combatting Burnout and Fatigue in Healthcare (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• So, Food is Medicine, What Does That Mean for Pharmacy? (OmniSys)
• Break the Backlog: 6 Strategies to Reduce Report Queue Backlogs (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How Clinical Communication Helps Critical Access Hospitals Improve Patient Outcomes (PerfectServe)
• Three Ways Premier is Supporting Continuum of Care Providers (Premier)
• How to Succeed in Value-Based Care Without In-House HCC Coders (RCxRules)
• FAQ: How do healthcare organizations define optimal provider-patient communication? (Relatient)
• Why your hospital should be using patient discharge checklists (Sonifi Health)
• 5 hospital contact center trends to watch (Spok)
• Tegria on Techquity (Tegria)
• The Value of One Integrated Clinical Communication Platform (TigerConnect)
• Advancements in PT Technology and Emerging Digital Trends (WebPT)
• How Evidence-Based Care Leads to Value-Based Care (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/6/23

Top News

Epic will add 1,700 employees to its current headcount of 11,600 in the next 12 months, housing them in two new office buildings that it will build within its Harry Potter-themed Wizards Academy complex.

Two-thirds of poll respondents think that restrictions banning physicians from opening or operating hospitals should be lifted.

New poll to your right or here: Have you used telehealth to obtain a prescription for a drug that you wanted knowing that few questions would be asked?

I’ve done nothing to prepare for HIMSS23 except book a hotel, so I fired up the Meta Quest 2 and Wander, which has become my most-used VR app. I searched for my hotel by name and then could take a virtual stroll through Chicago to check out nearby restaurants, points of interest, and the Riverwalk. It brought back memories of previous HIStalkapalooza events that were in Trump Tower and the House of Blues, the latter of which is still my favorite venue of those I’ve used.

I am amused annually by the American Telemedicine Association, which advocates virtual care to those who attend its in-person conference.

A doctor friend received a PET scan report with good numbers last week, but the dictated summary said that he had heart damage and could expect a significantly shortened lifespan. He spent 12 hours researching the test and its interpretation, then messaged the doctor that the report didn’t make sense. He got a quick response saying that the doctor had pressed the wrong keys in Epic, then received a corrected report indicating that he’s fine after all. He raises these points:

• What if he was a layperson?
• Had he been referred, would a specialist had paid attention to the numbers, or would they use the erroneous summary to make medical decisions?
• Will his medical record reflect that the initial report was incorrect or that the doctor didn’t check the report carefully?
• Does this happen often?

I’m always losing subscribers to my email updates because of spam filters and company policies. If you’re not getting my updates, sign up again and be confident that you won’t get duplicate emails no matter what. While you’re at it, connect with me on LinkedIn so I can see your posts and job changes. If you send me news or a job update and I’m not immediately familiar with you or your company, I check if we are connected, how many connections we share, and if you’re in Dann’s HIStalk Fan Club to help decide whether readers will be interested.

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

Webinars

March 7 (Tuesday) noon ET.  “Prescribe RPA 2.0 to Treat Healthcare Worker Burnout.” Sponsor: Keysight Technologies. Presenters: Anne Foster, MS, technical consultant manager, Eggplant; Emily Yan, MPA, product marketing manager, Keysight Technologies. Half of US health systems plan to invest in robotic process automation by the end of this year, per Gartner. The concept is evolving to help with staff burnout and physician productivity. The presenters will introduce RPA 2.0, explain how to maximize its value, demonstrate how to quickly start on RPA 2.0 and test automation in one platform, and answer questions about healthcare automation.

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

People

Stuart Miller (Infor) joins Craneware as VP of sales.

Jamie Coffin, PhD (Sema4) joins Nature’s Toolbox as CEO.

Evernorth Health Services hires Sean Tuley, MBA (Global Medical Response) as Evernorth utilization management CIO.

Integra Connect promotes Marie Finnegan, RN to VP of product management.

Government and Politics

Teladoc Health-owned virtual mental health company BetterHelp pays $7.8 million to settle FTC charges that it shared the information of website and app users with Facebook and other social media platforms. Teladoc, which acquired the company in 2015 for around $5 million, says it’s a billion-dollar business.

Other

Telehealth-based weight loss startup NextMed is using fake reviews and before-and-after photos to promote its services to prescribe trendy diabetes drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, often omitting government-mandated warnings. The company, whose founder just graduated college, outsources clinical work to telehealth companies and customer service to offshore firms. It touts as a competitive differentiator its software that quickly process prior authorizations for the expensive drugs. Customers complain that the company is slow to respond to cancellation requests and offers Amazon gift cards for taking down negative reviews.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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News 3/3/23

Top News

VA Deputy Secretary Donald Remy, JD, who oversees the VA’s Oracle Cerner implementation and other initiatives as its equivalent to COO, resigns as of April 1.

Remy’s departure follows that of VA EHR Executive Director Terry Admirim, MD, MPH, MBA, who left the agency last week.

The VA will nominate a replacement for Remy for Senate confirmation.

Meanwhile, Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA), ranking member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, warns that the VA’s Oracle Cerner project “is on its fourth director in five years, and continues to burn money and disrupt care.” The head of the GAO told the committee that while the VA has addressed some challenges, its bureaucratic, decentralized structure makes positive change difficult and EHR project requires a more disciplined approach. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I invited HIStalk sponsors who are participating in the ViVE conference to send me details for my online guide (I should call it a “curated” guide since that’s a crutch word for ViVE). I feel the need to repeat that invitation because I received only one response, and that was from a company that isn’t a sponsor, so I’ve curated them out. I’m amused at the intersection of ViVE’s commercial ambitions versus its attempt to come off as breezy and unorthodox, such as its lengthy “brand guide” that includes a section on making “key messaging” resemble casually created graffiti, murals, or doodles. That is some excellent curating.

I get a lot of feedback from teachers whose classes have benefitted from the Donors Choose donations of HIStalk readers, including Ms. S in California, who provided this update after receiving hands-on STEM tools:

My amazing scholars not only use, but enthusiastically ask for, “Fun Friday” every single week in order to explore the STEM materials YOU helped provide for them! They are building worlds using their imagination, and solving problems as they arise while using the engineering design process. They utilize critical thinking skills, and collaborative skills to learn science through creative fun spaces. Never were so many rowdy 5th graders ready to get their hands moving and brains working so late on a Friday afternoon. They always see these items on TikTok and never have gotten the chance to explore it for themselves. Thank you for giving them that that joyful opportunity!

Today I learned about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which describes the “unconscious incompetence” in which people who lack knowledge or skill also lack the intelligence to realize just how incompetent they are.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Five9. The San Ramon, CA-based company is an industry-leading provider of cloud contact center solutions, bringing the power of cloud innovation to more than 2,500 customers worldwide and facilitating billions of customer engagements annually. Five9 provides end-to-end solutions with digital engagement, analytics, workforce optimization, and AI to increase agent productivity and deliver tangible business results. The Five9 platform is reliable, secure, compliant, and scalable. Designed to help customers reimagine their customer experience, the Five9 platform connects the contact center to the business while delivering exceptional customer experiences that build loyalty and trust. Thanks to Five9 for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s an intro video on Five9’s The Intelligent Cloud Contact Center and Workflow Automation.

Webinars

March 7 (Tuesday) noon ET.  “Prescribe RPA 2.0 to Treat Healthcare Worker Burnout.” Sponsor: Keysight Technologies. Presenters: Anne Foster, MS, technical consultant manager, Eggplant; Emily Yan, MPA, product marketing manager, Keysight Technologies. Half of US health systems plan to invest in robotic process automation by the end of this year, per Gartner. The concept is evolving to help with staff burnout and physician productivity. The presenters will introduce RPA 2.0, explain how to maximize its value, demonstrate how to quickly start on RPA 2.0 and test automation in one platform, and answer questions about healthcare automation.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Veradigm, formerly Allscripts, delays its Q4 and annual results reports because a software problem caused it to overstate earnings going back to Q3 2021. Veradigm has also lowered its annual  revenue expectations by 2% and adjusted earnings per share by 10%. MDRX shares dropped nearly 13% on the news. They have lost 27% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 15% loss, valuing the company at $1.6 billion.

Health Catalyst reports Q4 results: revenue up 7%, adjusted EPS –$0.05 versus –$0.19, beating estimates for both. HCAT shares have lost 46% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 16% loss, valuing the company at $780 million.

Walmart will open 28 new Walmart Health locations in 2024, increasing its count to 75 as it expands into Missouri and Arizona. The 5,750-square foot centers, housed in Walmart Supercenters, offer primary care, dental care, behavioral health, labs, X-ray, audiology, and telehealth.

Health insurer Bright Health – fresh off layoffs, the exiting of most lines of business, an impending delisting of shares on the NYSE, and a $1.4 billion loss in 2022 – warns that it has overdrawn its credit and expresses doubt that the company can continue as a going concern. Its valuation is down 97% since its IPO peak of $11 billion in June 2021. Bright Health paid its CEO $181 million in 2022.

UnityPoint Health and Presbyterian Healthcare Services announce their intention to create a parent company for their health systems, which will operate as a 40-hospital, 40,000-employee organization while retaining their existing brands.

Sales

• Genomics England deploys enterprise imaging from Sectra.
• University of Kansas Health System will implement AI-powered medical documentation from Abridge, which was created at the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance that includes Abridge investor UPMC. 
• Compass Health Network chooses NextGen Behavioral Health Suite.
• Deaconess Health System will implement Health Catalyst’s enterprise analytics and outcomes improvement.
• Bryan Health selects Health Catalyst for population health analytics and value-based care performance improvement.

People

Holly Urban, MD, MBA (Oracle Cerner) joins CliniComp as VP of clinical product design.

Adam Terzich (Redox) joins MediQuant as RVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Wolters Kluwer Health launches Coder Workbench, a high-productivity risk adjustment solution based on the Health Language Data Platform.

A small consumer survey commissioned by KeyCare finds that two-thirds of respondents who needed minor but urgent medical services during out-of-state travels chose telehealth visits with their regular clinicians over urgent care and telehealth visits with non-affiliated providers.

Epic will incorporate patient experience functionality from Press Ganey, initially into MyChart and Cheers, and eventually into other modules. Former Cedars-Sinai SVP/CIO Darren Dworkin joined Press Ganey as president and COO in August 2022 .

HealthBook+ launches to offer a care and guidance platform for healthcare workers that aggregates patient data to offer next best health steps.

Louisiana Children’s Medical Center goes live with Sapphire Health’s AWS-based Epic Cloud Read-Only ransomware recovery tool. Sapphire Health’s founder and CEO is Austin Park, who served two stints as interim CTO at LCMC.

Virtual care technology company Biofourmis and Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. will develop digital solutions for objective assessment and management of endometriosis pain, pairing the Biofourmis Biovitals platform with data that has been collected in studies involving Chugai’s investigational drug product for endometriosis pain.

The Australian Digital Health Agency launches My Health, which provides mobile access to My Health Record’s medical history, lab results, vaccination management, allergy tracking, hospital discharge summaries, and prescription information.

Privacy and Security

The government of Ireland fines provider Centric Health $490,000 for GDPR violations following a 2019 ransomware attack. The personal health information of 2,500 patients was permanently deleted from Centric’s Primacare systems, which is was in the process of replacing. Centric paid an unspecified ransom, but was too late to prevent the data loss.

The Federal Trade Commission warns Amazon that it will be monitoring its use of patient data following its acquisition of primary care provider One Medical, noting that it will judge pre-acquisition privacy promises by the standard of a “reasonable consumer” rather than that of a HIPAA expert.

Other

Osama Alswailem, MBBS, MA, an informaticist who is CIO at King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre in Saudi Arabia, lists technologies that are driving healthcare in the Middle East: virtual health, AI, wearables, blockchain, 3D printing, and personalized medicine. He says the CIOs have been redefined to chief digital officer as healthcare organizations rely more on data-driven decision-making. His hospital is using AI to improve resource management via a unified command center, working with 3D-printed prosthetics, and using virtual reality for staff training and patient education.

A New York Times opinion piece asks the question, “Why are ketamine ads following me around the internet?” as telehealth startups are taking advantage of pandemic-relaxed rules to aggressively tout the drug for questionable uses, underplaying the abuse potential and potentially dangerous side effects (permanent bladder damage, anyone?) The author brings up an interesting point: the US is one of two countries that allow drug companies to pitch their wares directly to consumers – increasingly, via social media – but even those companies, unlike telehealth companies, are required to stick to FDA-approved uses. Unmentioned in the article is a review of why telehealth-paid doctors are willing and able to ignore science to give customers whatever they want.

An orthopedic surgeon whose planned surgery was denied by the patient’s insurer finds that the company’s peer reviewer is a surgeon who was permanently banned from the OR by the state medical board. The surgeon dug up what he believes is an X-ray from the case that triggered the board’s action against the peer reviewer, in which an artificial hip was implanted backward. Stunned Twitter doctor commenters question whether the surgeon was impaired or incompetent, noting that (a) he also performed two follow-up corrective surgeries without fixing the problem, which was finally caught when the patient was seen by a new surgeon; and (b) horrifically botched surgery or not, the doctor kept his medical license and can practice however he likes outside the OR.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks achieves Google’s Chrome Enterprise Recommended designation.
• Experity recognizes three urgent care leaders with Limelight Awards at its Urgent Care Connect Conference in Miami.
• Vyne Medical publishes a new case study, “How to Save Time and Increase Profitability with Auto-Indexing.”
• CloudWave’s OpSus Live cloud hosting for healthcare infrastructure as a service achieves a ‘Best Practice’ rating after completing the Meditech Infrastructure and Supporting IT Process audit.
• The Health Plan Innovation Roundtable honors Enlace Health with the Fall 2022 Innovator Traction Award.
• Nordic publishes a podcast titled “Making Rounds: The Big Squeeze in Healthcare.”
• Fortified Health Security names Dylan Storm (Optiv) renewals specialist, Benjie Graham (Corpay) client success manager, and Jason McKellips (Allied Universal) regional director.
• Get Well honors Product Manager Andrew Todtenkopf with its Heart Award for his extraordinary contribution to company performance and culture.
• Kyruus publishes a new guide, “Successful Online Scheduling in 5 Steps.”

Blot Posts

• Where Does the Fax Machine Fit in 2023? (Vyne Medical)
• Enabling Value with Interoperability & Analytics Using the !Clearsense Platform (Clearsense)
• Equity, Environment, Resiliency, and Risk: Future Considerations for Healthcare Value Analysis (GHX)
• 5 Reasons You Could Benefit from Out-of-Pocket’s Healthcare 101 Course (Healthjump)
• NeuroFlow Helps Organizations Address the Youth Mental Health Crisis with Innovative Solutions for Adolescent and Pediatric Populations (NeuroFlow)
• EHR Advancements for 2023 and Beyond (HealthTech Resources)
• Combatting Burnout and Fatigue in Healthcare (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• The push for patient-friendly terminology (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Advancing Interoperability in the Age of TEFCA: An Interview with CommonWell’s Executive Director, Paul Wilder: Part 1 (Medhost)
• Confronting maternal mortality with Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital (Meditech)
• The future of ambulatory care documentation, part 1: It’s time to challenge the status quo (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 3/1/23

Top News

Cerebral announces its third round of layoffs in the past few months as the beleaguered direct-to-consumer telemedicine company attempts to reorganize and streamline its services.

Cerebral has struggled since the federal government launched an investigation of its prescribing practices for mental health issues, especially its heavily promoted prescribing of Adderall.

Cerebral’s valuation reached nearly $5 billion just over a year ago.

Reader Comments

From Pete Drucker; “Re: Quil Health. To exit the market, with the last day for employees being February 10 and for executives February 24.” This was sent to me on February 7, but I didn’t mention the company’s name pending verification. Quil’s web page has been taken down and CEO Carina Edwards has updated her LinkedIn with a February 2023 end date and references to the company changed to past tense. Philadelphia-based Quil was formed in 2019 as a joint venture between Independence Health Group and Comcast, offering medical alert and monitoring tools to support care-at-home for seniors. I interviewed Carina Edwards 10 months ago.

From Plural Effusion: “Re: plural words. I see examples daily where someone sticks in an unneeded apostrophe.” Plurals shouldn’t have apostrophes except for one-letter items, such as the Oakland A’s or minding your p’s and q’s.

From You Interviewed Me: “Re: my HIStalk interview. It received lots of attention. You have certainly built an engaged group of readers.” Thanks to this CEO for giving me a rare post-interview report. I’m always up for talking to CIOs, clinician executives, frontline people, or anyone who would be interesting to readers who comes from the non-vendor side of the table. If that’s you and you can spare 30 minutes for a call, let me know.

From Pshaw: “Re: attrition goals. Epic in a nutshell.” Former Amazon managers say that the company meets its attrition goals by rating decent performers as not meeting its expectations. The company refers its “unregretted attrition rate,” where it expects managers to rank 5% of employees in the lowest tier that the company wouldn’t mine losing, voluntarily or otherwise. Amazon replaces a set percentage of less-performing employees annually. UPDATE: I’m changing this since while I was thinking that Epic stack ranks employees and I thought I read long ago that the company’s philosophy was to intentionally replace the bottom tier, I’m not sure that employees in that tier are fired. Perhaps some who works at Epic can elaborate further.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors benefit from being listed in our guide to major conferences, which provides on-site details for those that are exhibiting or attending so attendees can seek them out. Send me your ViVE 2023 information  by Wednesday, March 15 to be included. The ViVE 2023 exhibit hall floor plan shows 169 exhibiting companies, with separate musical stages for pop, hip hop, bluegrass, classics, and country (the latter being the largest by far, which wouldn’t be a plus for me). Glancing down the exhibitor list, I see a few dozen HIStalk sponsors, so those remaining dozens are welcome to contact Lorre to extend their reach beyond occupying a small patch of carpet for a half week.

Speaking of ViVE, I just got an email saying that the Clearsense-sponsored industry night entertainment is the Black Crowes. Two perpetually feuding brothers are all that’s left of the original lineup that formed 40 years ago, also the only two who played on their monster 1990 album “Shake Your Money Maker” or on their last new album in 2009.

Webinars

March 7 (Tuesday) noon ET.  “Prescribe RPA 2.0 to Treat Healthcare Worker Burnout.” Sponsor: Keysight Technologies. Presenters: Anne Foster, MS, technical consultant manager, Eggplant; Emily Yan, MPA, product marketing manager, Keysight Technologies. Half of US health systems plan to invest in robotic process automation by the end of this year, per Gartner. The concept is evolving to help with staff burnout and physician productivity. The presenters will introduce RPA 2.0, explain how to maximize its value, demonstrate how to quickly start on RPA 2.0 and test automation in one platform, and answer questions about healthcare automation.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Automated coding technology vendor CodaMetrix raises $55 million in a Series A funding round. The company was spun out of Mass General Brigham in 2019 and is led by former LifeImage CEO Hamid Tabatabaie.

Sales

• Baptist Memorial Health Care (TN) selects LookDeep Health’s Clinical Action Platform to enhance its inpatient video monitoring capabilities.
• Augusta University Health (GA) will expand its Virtual Care at Home program using technology from Biofourmis.
• Southwestern Health Resources (TX) selects referral management software from LeadingReach.
• Yale New Haven Health (CT) will implement RxLightning’s automated pharmacy workflow software.
• Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in England will replace its Dedalus EHR with Oracle Cerner’s Millenium software next year.

People

Engooden Health, the former Cohort Intelligence, names Tom Frosheiser, MBA (Nvolve)  as CEO.

Dan Michelson, MBA joins 7wire Ventures as entrepreneur-in-residence, rejoining his former Allscripts executive colleagues Glen Tullman and Lee Shapiro. He was CEO of Strata Decision Technology through May 2022.

Leah Ray (Jvion) joins Linus Health as chief customer officer.

Chris Belmont, MBA (Memorial Hospital at Gulfport) joins Ochsner Health as SVP/CIO, a position he held from 2009 to 2013.

Announcements and Implementations

Southern Illinois Healthcare implements PocketHealth’s diagnostic image-sharing software for patients and providers.

NIH-funded researchers from Cleveland Clinic and MetroHealth will use digital twins, created from de-identified EHR data, to understand healthcare disparities based on living location.

A pre-print journal article finds that ChatGPT performs well in suggesting improvements to the logic of clinical decision support alerts.

Practice management software end users give EClinicalWorks, ModMed, NextGen, and Veradigm top customer satisfaction marks in Black Book’s latest annual survey.

Government and Politics

HHS OCR renames its Health Information Privacy Division to the Health Information Privacy, Data, and Cybersecurity Division as part of a reorganization that will better enable the office to more effectively respond to complaints. An OCR report published earlier this month pointed out that the office lacks the financial resources it needs to investigate HIPAA complaints and enforce penalties, both of which increased considerably between 2017 and 2021.

Privacy and Security

Researchers at Duke University’s public policy school find that since technology companies, app  vendors, wearables manufacturers, and social media platforms aren’t covered by HIPAA, they are legally selling the health data of their users to data brokers without their knowledge or consent. The authors looked specifically at at mental health data:

• Some data brokers are offering user health data on the open market, with minimal vetting of customers and few stated limits on its use.
• Brokers don’t always make it clear whether their health data is de-identified, and some seem to imply that they are willing to provide identifiable data.
• The most active brokers offered data of people with depression, ADHD, insomnia, ADHD, and bipolar disorder that also included ethnicity, age, gender, ZIP code, religion, number of children living in the home, marital status, net worth, credit score, and data of birth.

Other

It’s not just doctors who are burned out, a Times article says, citing evidence that patients are being burned out by poor healthcare customer service that includes long appointment lead times, short visits, high prices, surprise bills, insurance aggravation, and too much focus on the EHR. Experts say to watch how patients vote with their feet as they flock to non-traditional settings that offer same-day appointments, walk-in visits, flat-rate memberships, and telehealth.

A Stat review of the boards of 15 top-ranked academic medical centers finds that 44% of board members come from the financial sector, while 13% are physicians and 1% are nurses. The authors conclude that board composition may explain why non-profit health systems focus on revenue instead of community need and employee satisfaction. They cite previous surveys showing that a big percentage of hospital board members are white males.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas gives Fairchild Communication Systems the ability to re-sell Ascom clinical workflow solutions in the additional market of Toledo, OH.
• Azara Healthcare and Bamboo Health will exhibit at Rise National March 6-8 in Colorado Springs.
• Availity will present and exhibit at State HIT Connect March 6-8 in Baltimore.
• Baker Tilly names Kat Mako (IMethods) and Cindy Kmiecik (Uniper) business development directors of healthcare IT.
• Bardavon Health Innovations partners with the Gray Institute to offer discounted CEUs to its BNotes customers.
• Biofourmis, Care.ai, Clearwater, EVisit, and Optum will exhibit at ATA 2023 March 4-6 in San Antonio.
• CTG publishes a new case study, “CTG Improves Gundersen’s Patient Portal Support with Amazon Connect.”

Blog Posts

• Survey: Your Practice is Losing Almost a Month to Financial Busy Work (AdvancedMD)
• Robotic Process Automation & Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Two Distinct Technologies with Distinct Benefits (AGS Health)
• Population health trends across the United States (Arcadia)
• Part 4: Supporting the Patient Experience with Pharmacy Technology (Arrive Health)
• We Must Dramatically Streamline Clinical Workflows: Here’s Why. (CareMesh)
• Voice of the Assessor (Censinet)
• Building a Unified EHR with Meditech Expanse: A Look Back at Key Decisions (CereCore)
• 7 Ways to Minimize Privacy Risk Created by Online Tracking Technologies (Clearwater)

Contacts

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