News 12/30/22

Top News

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

The company was spun out of the University of Oxford.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

• Downtown Pediatrics (WY) will implement EClinicalWorks Cloud.

People

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

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

Other

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

Contacts

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

News 12/28/22

Top News

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

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

Other

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

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

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

Contacts

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

News 12/23/22

Top News

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

People

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

Bardavon Health Innovations promotes Alex Benson, MPA to COO.

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Other

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

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

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

Contacts

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

News 12/21/22

Top News

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

Reader Comments

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

People

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Government and Politics

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

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

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

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

Other

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/19/22

Top News

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

Webinars

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

Sales

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

Privacy and Security

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

I saw and liked this on LinkedIn.

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 12/16/22

Top News

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Other

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 12/14/22

Top News

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

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

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

From the earnings call:

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

Webinars

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

Sales

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

People

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/12/22

Top News

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Government and Politics

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 12/9/22

Top News

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

Timothy Wilde (EXL Health) joins UpHealth as CTO.

MSU Health Care promotes Nathan Fitton, DO to CMIO.

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

CereCore expands its health IT services to the United Kingdom.

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 12/7/22

Top News

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

The health system launched the telehealth service in 2001.

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Mater Private Network in Ireland begins its Meditech Expanse implementation.

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/5/22

Top News

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

• How to Identify Super Users? (It’s Not So Obvious) (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• M&A: The Right Time for Process Improvement (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Rethink How you Deploy Infection Preventionists: Reduce Risk with PINC AI Remote Surveillance (Premier)
• 7 Proven Health Campaign Strategies to Close Gaps in Care (Relatient)
• Improve patient health literacy with these 5 tips (Sonifi Health)
• The Verdict is Unanimous: Health Systems Value Reliable Medication History (Surescripts)
• 14 tips for amazing call center customer service (Talkdesk)
• CIO Guide to EHR Integration (TigerConnect)
• Four Observations on the State of Patient Engagement (Upfront Healthcare)
• A Trilogy of Billing Blunders: Overbilling, Misbilling, and Underbilling (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 12/2/22

Top News

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Therapy Brands acquires behavioral health EHR vendor The Echo Group.

People

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

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

Bill Kloes (OnPointPX) joins Navenio as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

• How to Identify Super Users? (It’s Not So Obvious) (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How New Epic EHR Partnerships Will Improve Molecular Testing Processes (HealthTech Resources)
• HLTH 2022 recap: Clinician burnout, empowering patients, and FemTech (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Demonstrating the Value of Patient Access in Challenging Times (Kyruus)
• Making a List, Checking it Twice: Tips for Preparing Your Emergency Room for the Holiday Rush (Medhost)
• Talking Turkey: How Prior Authorization Software Satisfies Everyone at the Table (Myndshft)
• Take Faxing Back to the Future: New Tool Enables Rehab Therapists to More Efficiently, Securely Share Information (Net Health)
• A Holistic Approach to Digital Mental Health Providers Access for All (NeuroFlow)
• 5 keys to a healthy Community Connect host-affiliate partnership (Nordic)
• Data Governance is NOT a Dirty Word, It’s Asset Management (Part 1) (Clearsense)

Contacts

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

News 11/30/22

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

People

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

Other

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

• Shortening the long road to reimbursement (AdvancedMD)
• 5 Reasons Why Coding and Documentation Audits are More Important Than Ever (AGS Health)
• HLTH 2022 Recap: 3 Key Takeaways (Arrive Health)
• From prenatal to postnatal and beyond: How patient communication can close gaps in maternal health care (Artera)
• Win with CarePort: Improving the Current State of Care Coordination for Physician Practices (CarePort Health)
• Which is best for your practice: Medical Billing Software vs RCM (ChartLogic)
• Is It Possible to Message HCPs While They’re Prescribing? Yup, Your Search is Over. (ConnectiveRx)
• How ServiceNow Can Ease the Process of Digital Transformation (CTG)
• How Analytics Can Help Hospitals Better Manage Their ICUs (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 11/28/22

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

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

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

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

One Brooklyn Health System Offline After Unexplained IT Issue

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

Monday Morning Update 11/28/22

Top News

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

People

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Other

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

• Strengthening Communication with EHR Embedded Messaging (PerfectServe)
• Anatomy of a Shortage: A Lack of Contrast Media Supplies Compromised Care for Up to 10 Percent of Patients in Key Clinical Categories (Premier)
• 20 Things You Can Do to Honor and Celebrate the Caregivers in Your Life (Quil)
• HLTH Highlights Need for Greater Efficiency and Simplicity (Surescripts)
• The ultimate guide to choosing the right customer support software for your company (Talkdesk)
• Getting Stakeholders on the Same Clinical Page: A Costly Proposition (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 11/23/22

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

• 4 Challenges Healthcare Organizations Face Today and How to Solve Them (Arcadia)
• Why Managed Services Helps Organizations Move Forward, Fast – From the CEO’s Perspective (CereCore)
• Resiliency and resourcefulness: the power of rural health providers (Oracle Cerner)
• What Data Can Tell Us About Mental Health (Dimensional Insight)
• Data quality in healthcare and the elusive digital twin (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Modernizing the Digital Experience for Parents & Caregivers: Insights from Boston Children’s Hospital (Kyruus)
• Stabilizing Medicare Access to Rehabilitation and Therapy (SMART) Act (H.R. 5536) (Net Health)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 11/21/22

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

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

Mercy employees in payroll limbo after cyberattack against parent company

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

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

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

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

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