Monday Morning Update 10/31/22

Top News

Teladoc Health reports Q3 results: revenue up 17%, EPS –$0.45 versus –$0.53, beating Wall Street expectations for both.

TDOC share price moved up on the news, although it remains down by 81% in the past 12 months. The company’s market cap is under $5 billion versus its all-time high of $45 billion in early 2021.

The company reports strong performance of its direct-to-consumer BetterHelp mental health business. It says it lost a former client of Livongo, which Teladoc acquired for $18.5 billion in October 2020.

Teladoc says that it is getting increased interest from organizations who want to use virtual health to manage chronic conditions at a lower cost.

Reader Comments

From Lomond: “Re: Cerner. Which of its missteps led to its sale to Oracle?” Cerner struggled with product issues (such as revenue cycle), dated architecture, and a client base that was being constantly poached by Epic. Multi-billion dollar federal contracts stretching over decades weren’t enough to keep investors excited. However, Cerner’s biggest mistakes were made by its board, who took forever to choose a successor when Neal Patterson died in 2017 despite the claimed existence of a CEO succession plan, which surely didn’t tell board members to, “Hire a low-profile CEO of a division of a foreign medical device manufacturer for his first real CEO job.” But to be fair, a lot of Cerner executives who should have been likely candidates, especially those who Neal didn’t like much, had already successfully moved on. Brent Shafer’s four years were forgettable except for the board’s capitulation to an activist investor, then the board hired as Shafer’s replacement yet another executive who had never run a publicly traded company, although maybe David Feinberg made Cerner look hipper to eventual acquirer Oracle in his fantastically lucrative few weeks as CEO. Looking ahead, I can’t think of many examples where acquired health IT companies got better running as divisions of unrelated companies whose own growth prospects were questionable, but Oracle is saying and doing all the right things so far. Boards have a fiduciary responsibility to investors and I think they chose the best available option in this case. It’s all great news for Epic, which at some point will have its own CEO succession plan tested in the same way.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two-thirds of poll respondents had paid their co-pay by the time they left their ambulatory visit. My personal experience is that medical practices and clinics are much worse at upfront collection than dental practices, which always seem to know exactly how much you need to pay after insurance and nicely ask for that payment while you’re taking possession of your free toothbrush kit.

New poll to your right or here: In the past year, has a provider given you a blank paper or electronic form that asks for information they should already have on file? It is aggravating when the front desk people of a provider that you’ve been seeing all along ask for the same information that they have already collected – medical history, allergies, meds list, emergency contact, etc. – instead of populating the form and allowing you to provide any corrections or updates. Will someone actually update your EHR information correctly if your new list of allergies or meds doesn’t match what is on file? If not, are you completing the form just so the provider doesn’t have to look at the EHR?

I watched Netflix’s movie “The Good Nurse” and it was a so-so yarn about nurse Charles Cullen, who killed dozens or hundreds of hospital patients using drugs like digoxin and insulin that he obtained by taking advantage of a quirk in the Pyxis drug dispensing machine. The hospital’s stonewalling of the police investigation was a big part of the movie, but what should have been mentioned was that many hospitals were irresponsibly using Pyxis like candy machines in the early 2000s, allowing nurses to make withdrawals of unordered meds, storing drugs in shared drawers (Cullen punched in Tylenol, then took digoxin from the same shared drawer), and failing to audit what was taken versus what was charted as given. i wrote a daily report ago for my academic medical center employer years ago that identified Pyxis withdrawals of unordered meds (including logic to account for delayed order entry), and it was so lengthy that nobody would review it. Anyway, the movie recalls the 2017 case of VUMC nurse Rhonda Vaught, who overrode a drug dispensing machine safeguard to give a patient the paralyzing drug vecuronium instead of the ordered sedative Versed, after which the patient died. San Diego-based Pyxis went public in 1992, sold to Cardinal Health for $867 million in 1996, was spun off with other products into Carefusion in 2009, and then was acquired by Becton Dickinson in 2014 for $12 billion.

This is the final boarding call for companies that want to sign up as HIStalk sponsors before the spring conference season begins and you realize that your HIMSS booth doesn’t help you for the 362 other days of the year.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Censinet. The Boston-based company’s cloud-based RiskOps platform and collaborative risk network transforms cybersecurity and enterprise risk in healthcare with the fastest assessment results, most coverage, and best overall experience at a fraction of the cost. Its digital catalog includes 9,500 assessed vendors and 34,000 products and services, offering automated risk ratings and corrective action plan generation to streamline identification and remediation of risks with pre-built workflows. An example is generating a list of vendors and products that have access to PHI but aren’t covered with a business associate agreement. The company offers healthcare organizations no-cost access to its RiskOps for HICP, which simplifies the implementation and assessment Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices. Censinet RiskOps enables health systems to create long-term vendor partnerships, resulting in fewer vulnerabilities, reliable patching, and better performance and compliance overall. Thanks to Censinet for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a video featuring Censinet founder and CEO Ed Gaudet, who describes the company’s philosophy and product.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Investor-backed HLTH says it has 9,400 registrants so far for its conference, which will be held November 13-16 in Las Vegas. I was surprised to see HIStalk list as a media attendee since none of us are going.

Sales

• Three university hospitals in France choose Sectra’s digital pathology solution.

People

Hearst hires Atti Riazi (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

SNOMED and LOINC will collaborate to standardize health data terminology, distribute their content together, and reduce duplication.

Fresh Tri, whose app promotes healthy habit formation, updates its system with improved onboarding, new algorithms to match users to behaviors, and new behaviors to support condition and disease management. Walmart licenses the app for free use by its 1.6 million employees.

Spok’s annual healthcare communications survey finds that the top obstacle in hospitals is budget and resources. Smartphone use for clinical communications dropped slightly for the first time, possibly because hospitals are issuing wi-fi phones instead of asking employees to use their own devices.

MUSC Health and MetroHealth launch Ovatient, a non-profit company and care model that will provide virtual and in-home care. The health systems say they hope that Ovatient can match the convenience and experience that non-traditional providers are delivering using digital tools.

Government and Politics

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirms that it plans to go live on Oracle Cerner next year, although under the Department of Defense’s MHS Genesis project rather than the VA’s as initially reported. NOAA has 24 clinicians.

Privacy and Security

A review finds that Canada’s Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information was warned that its 40-year-old Meditech Magic system was vulnerable to hackers a year before a fall 2021 ransomware attack exposed patient information and caused treatment delays. NLCHI has been recommending for years that the province issue a tender to replace Magic, with one study projecting that a move to Meditech Expanse would cost $85 million over 10 years, but would more than pay for itself.

Other

Congratulations to New Jersey health IT consultant Eric Finkelstein, who has broken a Guinness world record for eating at the most Michelin-starred restaurants in 24 hours. He was able to obtain reservations at 18 of New York City’s best restaurants, traveling between them by Citi Bike bicycle and using a body cam to prove his accomplishment in wolfing down each place’s fastest-prep menu items, sometimes in less than two minutes. He spent $500 on his latest Guinness accomplishment, which also includes visiting all Citi Bike docks, making the longest table tennis serve, and building a flag out of 20,000 ping-pong balls.

Sponsor Updates

• First Databank helps extend adoption of NCPDP’s National Facilitator Model, which will allow pharmacies, prescribers, and government agencies to access real-time information on prescriptions, testing, and immunization.
• PeriGen CEO Matthew Sappern appears on Alldus International’s AI in Action Podcast.

Blog Posts

• Partners in Success: What to Expect from the RCxRules Implementation Process (RCxRules)
• Optimum CareerPath Celebrates Global Health Equity Week (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 4 Steps to Vulnerability Remediation in Healthcare (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Don’t Get Spooked by Cloud Call Center Solutions (PerfectServe)
• Montefiore Medical Center Maximizes Savings and Drives Efficient Medication Use with Analytics (Premier)
• What’s the Promise of Healthcare Technology for Aging in Place? (Quil)
• Partners in Success: What to Expect from the RCxRules Implementation Process (RCxRules)
• Digital health is ready for its second act. Will it deliver on its promise to empower patients and providers? (Redox)
• New Research: Scheduling and communication technology integral to patient experience (Relatient)
• ‘Standard Bearers’ in E-Prescribing: CancelRx and RxTransfer (Surescripts)
• 8 steps for effectively coaching call center agents (Talkdesk)
• CIO Guide to Security and Patient Privacy (TigerConnect)
• The Rehab Therapist’s Guide to Co-Treatment Under Medicare (WebPT)
• A Change of Heart: Well Health Rebrands to Artera (Artera)
• Achieving Best Outcomes for Surgery in Older Adults (Zynx Health)

The following HIStalk Sponsors will exhibit at and/or sponsor AMIA 2022 November 5-9 in Washington, DC:

• Clinical Architecture
• First Databank
• Intelligent Medical Objects
• InterSystems
• Meditech
• Oracle Cerner
• Wolters Kluwer Health

Contacts

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

News 10/28/22

Top News

In England, the British Medical Association’s general practice group warns members of possible unintended consequences of NHS England’s “Data Saves Lives” program that takes effect on November 1. Patients over 16 will be automatically granted access to all of their digital medical records as stored in TPP and EMIS. The same functionality is being developed for practices that use Cegedim.

BMA GPC suggests that practices use a specifically assigned SNOMED code that allows them to protect the information of patients whose relationships put them at risk.

They also note the “poor functionality of current software” that allows redacted records to be automatically activated when the patient changes doctors.

The group says a media campaign is needed to warn the public that their family members can access their records if they know (or can find or guess) their password.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The FOMO in me is calling for experimentation with the Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headset, although the cheapskate in me is countering with (a) the strong possibility I wouldn’t achieve ROI because I’ll lose interest; (b) waiting for the follow-up product’s release next year at about the same price; and (c) my reluctance to support Facebook with eyeballs or dollars.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Google acquires five-employee Sound Life Sciences, which offers an FDA-cleared respiration app for smartphones and smart speakers.

Walmart Health will open 16 new health centers in its Florida Supercenters next year.

Sales

• PerfectServe chooses Lyniate Rhapsody as a Service for integration.
• AtlantiCare chooses Orbita’s healthcare virtual assistant and conversational AI platform for digital front door and outbound communications such as post-discharge follow-up and care reminders..

People

Everbridge hires Sheila Carpenter (Zix) as CIO.

Karen Luk (AbleTo) joins Vivante Health as SVP of product.

InteliChart hires Anthony Carter, MSEE, MBA (CloudFran) as COO.

Victor Bagwell, MPH, MAS, MBA, MSc (Optimal Analytics) joins FDA as division director, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Office of Regulatory Operations.

Avicena hires Tesia Folse (Gainwell) as VP of marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

UCLA Center for SMART Health and Hearst Health announce the finalists for their $100,000 prize for using data science to manage or improve health:

• Constant Therapy Health (at-home speech, language, and cognitive therapy).
• Geisinger (linking people with chronic diseases to clinical services).
• Prenosis (assessing hospital inpatients for sepsis risk).

A Black Book poll of hospitals and physician practices names AQuity Solutions as highest ranked in virtual scribes, medical transcription, and document capture.

The Massachusetts Medical Society opens submissions for its IT in Medicine awards program for MA-based medical students and residents.

Healthcare Triangle launches a service to help healthcare and life sciences organizations implement Metaverse environments.

GetWell will enhance its inpatient offering as a consumer-forward solution, including a new user experience, mobile-first solutions, automated caregiver workflow and communications, and further EHR integration.

Net Health integrates its wound EHR with PointClickCare to support clinical documentation exchange with post-acute healthcare facilities.

A new KLAS report on home health technology finds that Homecare Homebase is vendor of choice for large, independent organizations even though its user satisfaction is average and innovation lags, largely because it offers broad, well-integrated functionality. Independent agencies rate MatrixCare tops, while health system-owned agencies rank Epic and Meditech highest.

Government and Politics

A VA official says that the 12,000-employee National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may join the VA’s Oracle Cerner project.

Politico notes that many state Medicaid programs are declining to pay for remote patient monitoring, either because they question its effectiveness in managing chronic conditions or because they are unwilling to spend the money.

Privacy and Security

Australia’s MediBank says that its October 12 breach was worse than the insurer originally reported, now acknowledging that the hacker had access to all of the personal data of its 4 million customers and significant amounts of their health claims data.

A Meta spokesperson says that use of its pixel user tracking tool to send sensitive information to advertisers, as several leading health systems appear to have done, violates its policies.

Other

Vanderbilt University Medical Center informatics professor Allison McCoy, PhD questions why practices ask long-term patients to input the information that is already documented in their EHR. I’ll join that bandwagon in observing that providers have always shoved the same literal or virtual clipboard full of poorly designed forms at every patient, long-term or otherwise. Beyond making the patient enter information that’s already on file, that raises the question – how are the two sets of information being reconciled, and by whom? Electronic questionnaires, or more specifically their improper use by practices who fail to tailor their messages, may have made the practice even more annoying. Healthcare interactions are among the most important and most expensive for many of us, so to greet loyal customers with blank faces and blank forms is inexcusable, especially when pharmacies, dental offices, accounting and law practices, banks, and even veterinary offices always make customers feel known and valued.

An entertainment publication profiles retired ICU nurse Amy Loughren, who helped convict friend and colleague Charles Cullen for killing hospitalized patients by adding lethal drugs that he obtained from Pyxis drug dispensing cabinets to their IVs. The story is dramatized in the new Netflix true crime film “The Good Nurse.” Loughren became suspicious in 2002 about several mysterious patient deaths at Somerset Medical Center (NJ). She looked at Cullen’s activity log in Cerner, which showed that Cullen was monitoring patients who weren’t under his care and some of those patients died unexpectedly. Cullen eventually confessed to murdering dozens of patients, having moved from one job to another at hospitals that declined to notify authorities about their suspicions or to give him a bad employment reference because they were afraid of being sued. In another health IT angle, investigators were initially told that the hospital’s Pyxis system retained records for only two months, but a detective found that information was actually stored indefinitely, which convinced Cullen to confess to the 40 murders that he could remember (the actual number of patient deaths was speculated to be as high as 400).

Sponsor Updates

• Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at NextGen UGM November 6-9 in Nashville.
• Loyal Health will exhibit at the Healthcare Internet Conference November 7-9 in Miami.

Blog Posts

• Managing Outside Influences on Your Urgent Care Billing (Experity)
• Dancing to Health Literacy (First Databank)
• Take This Step to Level Up Your Cybersecurity Program (Fortified Health Security)
• Let’s Get Well, Together (Get Well)
• Optimum CareerPath Celebrates HIMSS Global Health Equity Week (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Choosing the Right Healthcare IT Staffing Agency (HealthTech Resources)
• UKG Workforce Central (WFC) End of Life: What Customers Should Know (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Get to Know Clearsense CMO: Larry Kaiser (Clearsense)
• Changing the Outcome of the Zero-Sum Healthcare Staffing Game with Digital First Solutions (InterSystems)
• Not just a small adult: Medical problem list organization for pediatric needs (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• 3 Ways an EHR Supports Hospital Disaster Planning (Medhost)
• Healthcare Triangle Helps Lane Regional Deliver Value-based Care with MEDITECH Chronic Care Management (CCM) (Healthcare Triangle)
• Caring for What’s Been Coded (Medicomp Systems)
• How leading healthcare organizations are filling the gaps in health literacy (Meditech)
• Rev Cycle 911: What is Prior Authorization Triage and Why is it an Antidote for Preventable Denials? (Myndshft)
• Find the Entrepreneur Inside to Effect Positive Change in Rehab Therapy (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 10/26/22

Top News

Philips reports lower revenue and a loss of $1.28 billion in Q3 due to supply chain issues and the recall of several million of its CPAP devices.

Newly appointed CEO Roy Jakobs says the company will immediately lay off 4,000 employees.

Philips hopes that remediation of 4 million CPAP and ventilator devices – which were found to contain foam whose degradation can cause serious injury or death — will be completed for 90% of users by the end of the year.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Lorre and Jenn are looking for fun ways to celebrate HIStalk’s 20th birthday in June 2023, should you have ideas.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HealthStream announces Q3 results: revenue up 5%, EPS $0.12 versus $0.05. HSTM shares are down 23% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 27% loss, valuing the company at $666 million.

Point-of-care digital patient education company CheckedUp acquires competitor Health Media Network.

Virtual mental health provider Cerebral lays off 20% of its staff, reportedly affecting 400 employees in primarily clinical and care counselor roles. A round of layoffs earlier this year impacted support and operations teams. The news comes less than a month after fairly new CEO David Mou, MD renewed the online mental healthcare company’s commitments to clinical safeguards and patient identification verification protocols and software, areas in which it has come under federal and consumer scrutiny. He also vowed to conduct a comprehensive review of internal operations and performance.

Sales

• Arizona HIE Contexture selects technology from Unite Us to power its CommunityCares social determinants of health referral system.
• OSF Healthcare (IL) will use CareSignal’s deviceless remote patient monitoring technology as part of its OnCall Connect digital care management service.
• Sinai Medical Group (IL) will implement physician RCM services from Conifer Health Solutions.

People

Walmart Health hires Claude Pirtle, MD, MS, MBA (West Tennessee Healthcare) as CMIO.

Brian Graves (RelayOne) joins Resolv Healthcare as VP of sales and marketing.

CVS Health hires Amar Desai, MD, MPH (Optum) as president of its newly formed healthcare delivery organization.

Commure hires Chris Kuhns, MBA (Iris Telehealth) as CFO.

Jamie Hall (Transcarent) joins virtual primary care vendor CirrusMD as president and CEO.

Health Recovery Solutions names Jaydeo Kinikar, MBA (Best Buy Health) chief product officer.

Laizer Kornwasser, MBA (CareCentrix) joins Teladoc Health as president of enterprise growth and global markets.

RevenueWell promotes Julie Coviello to chief customer officer.

Medical device data platform vendor Canary Medical hires Lisa Suennen (Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP) as president of digital and data solutions.

Mark Burgess (NextGen Healthcare) joins Agfa HealthCare as president, North America.

Health Care District of Palm Beach County hires Daniel Scott (Good Samaritan) as AVP/CIO.

Denis Tanguay, MSHA (Huntzinger) joins Sturdy Memorial Hospital as VP/CIO.

Tim Johnson (247/ai) joins Nuance Communications as head of UK sales, healthcare.

Talon hires Elif Eracar, MS (Redox) as COO.

Atlas Health hires David Franklin (Ontario Systems) as president; Christopher Parks (Avaneer Health) as chief client officer; Nicole Nye, MBA (Finvi) as VP of product management; Nicole Hess, MBA (Olive) as SVP of marketing; and Todd Helmink (PatientBond) as head of strategic partnerships.

Announcements and Implementations

Penn State Health’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center goes live on Oracle Cerner.

ACO MultiCare Connected Care implements prior authorization automation technology developed with MCG Health using the HL7 Da Vinci Project FHIR standard.

Lake Region Healthcare (MN) will go live on Epic November 1 through a Community Connect partnership with Sanford Health.

Healthcare concierge program Renee adds a flat-fee prescription drug program that covers 500 commonly prescribed generic medications for $25 per month. The company was founded by the husband-and-wife team of Nick Desai, MS and Renee Dua, MD, who founded doctor house call company Heal in 2014.

Hospital for Special Surgery announces plans to launch for-profit virtual musculoskeletal physical therapy provider RightMove, which is backed by a $21 million Series A funding round.

A Harvard study of an academic medical center’s orthopedic surgery patients finds that patient-reported outcomes are completed less often by patients who are black, covered by Medicare, aren’t married, don’t speak English, or who haven’t activated their patient portal account, which could create bias in clinical outcomes research. The authors speculate that patients who activate a portal account are self-selected for technology fluency, access to technology, and willingness to engage and manage their health.

CHIME’s Fall Forum will be held November 7-10 in San Antonio. The opening keynote speaker is humanoid celebrity Sophia, while the closing keynote will be offered by the US Navy’s first F-14 Tomcat fighter pilot Carey Lohrenz.

Government and Politics

The VA awards Oracle Cerner $956 million worth of task orders to continue its rollout.

North Carolina’s state treasurer says that the non-profit “hospital cartel” always puts profits ahead of patients in providing vague and sometimes conflicting data about the benefit they provide taxpayers in return for billions of dollars worth of tax exemptions. The report cites Atrium Health, which claimed that it lost $640 million in Medicare patients, but whose financial reports show a $120 million profit on those patients. National analysis shows that nearly all health systems spend less on charity care than they receive in tax breaks.

Privacy and Security

The US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency advises the healthcare and public health sector of ransomware attacks and data extortion schemes conducted by the Daixin Team. The group has been especially active over the last five months, with Oakbend Medical Center being one of its more high-profile victims. It stole 3.5 GB of data from the center in September, after which it published a sample of 2,000 OMC patient records on its data leak site.

Other

A fascinating article describes how, in the late 1960s, two pathology residents at Englewood Hospital (NJ) used their hands-on experience with newly developed lab test processing machines to later form what became Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp. The companies used that automation to scale, reducing per-test cost and weeks-long  turnaround times to the point that smaller labs either went out of business or sold out to the companies. One expert says that they are no longer lab companies, but rather “M&A companies in the lab space.” Competitors can’t crack the exclusive contracts that insurers sign with Quest and LabCorp and can’t compete with their armies of salespeople, so their only options are to focus on a low-profit niche like allergy testing, locate in low-density population areas that are unattractive to the big players, or agree to be purchased. The article goes off track a few paragraphs in, ranting off topic on electronic medical records except pointing out that EHRs don’t make it easy for doctors to choose competing labs.

Sponsor Updates

• Clearsense sponsors Banner Health’s Pulse of the City Soiree.
• Kyruus publishes its sixth annual patient access journey report, “The Many Digital Doors of Patient Access and Engagement.”
• The Who Would Have Thought: Digital Health Innovation Podcast features Arrive Health CEO Kyle Kiser.
• Azara Healthcare achieves HITRUST risk-based, two-year certification.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Implementing an effective hospital-at-home care delivery model.”
• Bamboo Health affixes new signage to the top of its office building.
• Clearwater announces that the National Association of Corporate Directors has recognized founder and Executive Chairman Bob Chaput as NACD Directorship Certified.
• Diameter Health will exhibit at the NCQA Health Innovation Summit October 31-November 3 in Washington, DC.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story showcasing how its AI-based Scribe dictation technology has helped Open Door Family Medical Center combat pandemic challenges and reduce physician burnout.

Blog Posts

• Drive Demand While Combatting Workforce Challenges and Improving Care Team Interactions (About Healthcare)
• Building a Tool Together to Comply with the “No Surprises Act” (AGS Health)
• Measuring Care Management (Arcadia)
• Readers Write: The Clinical Dilemma at the Tipping Point – How We All Can Drive Transformation in Healthcare (Ascom)
• Care across the continuum: Finding the right post-acute and community-based services for patients (CarePort)
• A Ransomware Readiness Checklist: Ways to Amp Up Detection and Response Plans (CereCore)
• Where FHIR Currently Stands and the Future Outlook for Interoperability (HealthTECH Resources)
• OCHC highlight: Seamless Exchange, a game changer in interoperability (Oracle Cerner)
• Why Invest in a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program? (ChartLogic)
• Cash or Bust: Why Discount Cards Could Be Key to Medication Adherence (CoverMyMeds)
• 5 Key Points for Optimizing Your IoT Testing Strategy (CTG)
• High Time to Get to the Cloud (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/24/22

Top News

Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison tells CloudWorld 2022 attendees that the company will partner with other companies to build next-generation healthcare applications, saying that “there’s no way we can do this by ourselves.”

Ellison again touted creation of a national health records database, warning that healthcare costs will bankrupt Western civilization unless efficiency is improved,

He added that acquiring Cerner was “maybe the single most important thing we did in terms of expanding our own capacity.”  

Reader Comments

From Jostler: “Re: tokenization. Any experts out there you could interview, or any summaries of how it is actually being used? I can’t tell if it’s hype or if it will be useful to get more data.” Tokenization is a way to link several data sets together so that a patient can be viewed as an individual via an encrypted token. The underlying data remains de-identified. A researcher would be able to tell that a given oncology clinic patient also picked up prescriptions at Walgreens and visited two health system EDs, for example, but would not be privy to that patient’s private information. I would be interested in hearing from people who have tokenization expertise or who have used it for research.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents who could move anywhere would most often consider the new area’s proximity to family, weather, and social and political environment. Interesting, few respondents care much about access to high quality health services, perhaps not yet having attained the age in which quality and quantity of life might depend on the services available in your location’s medical golden hour. Some respondents say that proximity to an airport that is an airline’s major hub would have ranked high on their list.

New poll to your right or here, extending Dr. Jayne’s experience where the front desk person insisted she didn’t owe the co-pay that was clearly listed on her insurance card. In your most recent ambulatory medical encounter in which you owed a co-pay, was it collected before you left?

Webinars

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

People

Jamey Pennington (Coker Group) joins Southwell as VP and chief information and HIPAA security officer.

CoverMyMeds promotes Lindsay Miller to VP of account operations.

Announcements and Implementations

Henry Ford Health commercializes its internally developed DromosPTM patient therapy management solution for specialty pharmacies.

Government and Politics

A Florida man pleads guilty to conspiracy and kickback charges for running an Internet-based platform on which physician orders for back and knee braces were bought and sold, yielding him a cut of the transactions. Nagainda Srivastav also ran call centers to find beneficiaries who could be billed for DME, then bought physician orders from offshore telemedicine companies that he sold online. His scheme generated at least $25 million in federal healthcare payments. His B2B Apps Solutions sells cloud-based pharmacy and EHR apps. Basic Googling turns up his $2.4 million, 8,900-square-foot  waterfront home in Tampa.

Apple sues medical technology company Masimo, claiming that it cloned the Apple Watch for its W1 Advanced Health Tracking Watch. Masimo previously accused Apple of contacting it in 2013 about potential collaboration, then using the meeting to identify Masimo employees it could poach, including its chief medical officer and those knowledgeable about pulse oximetry sensors, which Masimo says it invented.

Privacy and Security

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) sends a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to explain how its Meta Pixel tracker collects, stores, and uses the information of website visitors. He also wants to know what steps have been taken since The Markup publicized Meta Pixel’s use by health systems and how the system filters sensitive health information.

Other

A New York Times article on preparing for surgery suggests using Abridge, an app that records doctor-patient conversations and shares the recording and transcription with both. Co-founder and CEO Shiv Rao is a UMPC cardiologist and spent time as EVP of UPMC Enterprises.

The San Diego sheriff’s department will monitor its most medically vulnerable incarcerees using tamper-proof biosensor trackers, hoping to reduce in-custody deaths. The $1,000 ankle-attached trackers will be provided by 4Sight Labs, which a Colorado police department credits with saving the lives of three people who were in custody.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx and Melinta Therapeutics will present Innovate4Outcomes, a virtual event that will focus on antimicrobial resistance,  on December 1.
• Sphere will exhibit at Athenahealth’s Thrive conference October 24-26 in Austin, TX.
• Volpara Health achieves B Corp. Certification.
• Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new e-book, “Transforming the Nursing Workforce: Keys to Delivering Health Equity and Fostering Resilience.”
• Verato will exhibit at APHSA ISM 2022 October 23-26 in National Harbor, MD.

Blog Posts

• How Riverside Health System is Redefining Their HCC Coding Initiatives (Premier)
• How Center for Primary Care Improved their HCC Coding Without Hiring Additional Staff (RCxRules)
• 7 Tips to Address Medical Practice Burnout (Relatient)
• 11 tools for employing at-home call center agents (Talkdesk)
• Ready for HR Modernization? Score Big with these Five Early Wins (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Improving Critical Care Workflows at CommonSpirit (TigerConnect)
• A broad definition of healthcare workplace violence leads to better caregiver safety (Vocera)
• Are You Going to PPS 2022? Come See Us! (WebPT)
• Crisis response leads to promising new care delivery models (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 10/21/22

Top News

Advocate Aurora Health joins other large health systems in notifying millions of patients that their information was potentially exposed via the Meta Pixel website user tracker.

AAH says it is notifying all of its 3 million patients that it had installed the tracker on its MyChart and LiveWell patient portals, which gave Facebook advertisers access to their IP address, appointment details, providers, type of appointment, MyChart messages, and insurance information.

AAH says it installed the pixel to evaluate how consumers use its websites, but was not aware of the extent of information that was being collected and sent to third parties. It has removed the tracking tool.

Reader Comments

From Garbanzo: “Re: Unite Us. They may be the SDOH platform giant in terms of business, but not in KLAS reports.” Click to enlarge the graphic above that was sent by this reader, which compares competitors Findhelp and Unite Us in the categories of culture, loyalty, operations, product, relationship, and value.

From Isthmus: “Re: NH SB 423. The privacy bill was actually supported by Unite Us, voting was unanimous, and the Unite Us contract was placed in moratorium and then ended because it didn’t meet state privacy rules. Testimony is here.”

Webinars

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

Here’s the recording of this week’s webinar, sponsored by Mend, titled “Patient Payment Trends 2022 Learn All The Secrets.”

Announcements and Implementations

Trilliant Health’s excellent annual health economy report makes these points (I interviewed SVP / Chief Research Officer Sanjula Jain, PhD a few months ago):

• The number of commercially insured Americans, who drive most of healthcare’s profits, is declining, and the Medicare-eligible population is growing faster than other cohorts.
• Cancer screening volume is down, making it likely that initial diagnoses will be made in more advanced stages.
• Behavioral health and related medication prescribing are up significantly, but vary by market.
• Hospital inpatient and outpatient volumes have been flat for years even as obesity and chronic disease increases. Digestive surgeries will have the highest growth in almost all markets.
• Telehealth utilization remains high, but is being used significantly less that at its peak by seniors and children and is broadly shifting back to mostly in-person care. Most patients who have used telehealth have done so only once, and the biggest use is for behavioral health. Oversupply will cause telehealth visit prices to keep dropping, possibly to $0 if commercial insurers offer them at no cost.
• Medicare and Medicaid spending and projected increases are unsustainable and Americans have accumulated $140 billion in medical debt.
• Services are rapidly shifting to ambulatory settings. 
• The report observes that “only in healthcare can a monopoly lose money” as even market-controlling hospitals generate negative margins. It also notes that “the paradox of declining demand and rising price defies the laws of economics” as US healthcare prices keep rising as outcomes such as life expectancy keep falling. 

A study finds that use of AI-powered wound imaging and analysis software from Net Health allowed a virtual wound care program to provide quicker access and improved management to remote patients who took photos of their own wounds for specialist review.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions launches MarketView Patient Journey Intelligence, which uses tokenization technology to link de-identified datasets to analyze a patient’s movement through the care continuum.

An AHIMA white paper urges health information professionals to take on roles related to analytics, managing social determinants of health, helping clinicians use EHR information to engage patients, working with the design and management of online tools for value-based care, supporting efforts to roll out digital front doors, and developing AI processes. Interviewees differed on whether health information professionals will work more directly with patients.

Meditech launches Expanse Population Insight, which uses claims and EHR data from the Innovaccer Data Platform to provide information about risk, care gaps, and utilization at the point of care.

The joint venture health plan owned by Banner Health and Aetna/CVS Health rolls out “frictionless billing,” which shows patients what the provider billed, what insurance covered, and what they personally owe so they can pay their balance.

Government and Politics

FDA warns that amphetamine-based ADHD drug Adderall is in short supply. Experts question whether the shortage may have been exacerbated by online startups that marketed their prescribing of the drug via virtual virtual encounters that were convenient, inexpensive, and sometimes short on sound medical practice.

Privacy and Security

Analysis by data privacy firm Lokker finds that of 5,000 websites of hospitals and healthcare services providers, 40% use trackers from Facebook, 13% from Microsoft, 8% from Twitter, 6% from Pinterest, and 5% of TikTok. The company says that the web browser is the new endpoint to defend, containing privacy risks such as malware, PHI data skimming, and data broker fingerprinting scripts that repeatedly enrich user profiles to the point they can identify a specific website visitor.

A hacker breaches Australia’s insurer, Medibank, and steals 200 gigabytes of data that includes customer medical procedures, diagnoses, addresses, and credit card details.  A hacker group told the company it was interested in negotiating the disposition of the information it took.

Other

The Atlantic says that COVID-19 datasets are no longer reliable for predictive purposes due to (a) uncounted home test results; (b) CDC and stage agencies moving to weekly instead of daily reporting; and (c) and some states ending their reporting entirely. It says that hospital-reported data is sound, but it lags cases and doesn’t necessarily reflect transmission rates. Wastewater surveillance is consistent and free of biases for trend analysis. The authors also recommend conducting local population surveys to understand how many people are testing positive and what demographic groups they are in.

A medical building’s janitor is charged with felony aggravated assault with a deadly weapon when a co-worker’s hidden camera captures him urinating into the water bottle she had left on her desk. The woman, who was trying to figure out why her water always tasted and looked funny, says that she caught herpes from the contact. Eleven of her co-workers have come forward with similar complaints. The janitor admitted to police that he had repeatedly peed into employee water bottles and the building’s five-gallon dispenser and admits to doing the same thing at other buildings where he was assigned by his janitorial services employer.

A woman who visited the ED of John Muir Medical Center fearing fentanyl poisoning sues the health system for for billing her $6,100 for a drug screening test for which it accepts a $62 payment from Medicare. The woman says the ED wouldn’t see her until she signed a contract that required her to pay “regular rates and terms” and didn’t run the urine screen until after her three-hour visit, for which the health system wants her to pay $7,100 on top of the $6,000 that insurance has already paid.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart sponsors MHMR Tarrant’s 15th Annual Opening Doors Dinner to raise money for specialized therapies, transitional living, and peer support programs in the Fort Worth, TX area.
• Healthcare Triangle publishes a new whitepaper, “Moving Your Healthcare Digital Strategy from Theory to Execution: CHIME’22 Survey Reveals 3 Insights.”
• Nordic Consulting is recognized with best employer awards from Comparably and Madison Magazine.
• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Council Capital and Health Enterprise Partners in their platform investment in Alivia Analytics.
• Clearsense posts a new infographic titled “The ROI of Legacy Data.”
• Impact Advisors will sponsor and present at the 2022 Analytics + CIO: Real-World AI Transforming Healthcare Now Summit November 17-18 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at NextGen UGM November 6-9 in Nashville.
• Intrado and Loyal will exhibit at Athenahealth’s Thrive Summit October 24-26 in Austin, TX.
• Konza National Network names Claude Brunson, MD to its Board of Directors.
• Lyniate will host its Connect conference October 24-28 in Frisco, TX.
• Meditech releases a new podcast, “Reimagining the future of healthcare.”

Blog Posts

• How to Educate Multiple Generations on Security Risks and Protocols (Fortified Health Security)
• Where FHIR Currently Stands and the Future Outlook for Interoperability (HealthTech Resources)
• If you build it, they will come (Nordic)
• Free text clinical narratives in healthcare: A multi-language challenge (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Legacy SCL Health (Now Intermountain Healthcare) Reimagines Digital Patient Access (Kyruus)
• Real-World Data: Connecting datasets with unparalleled precision (LexisNexis)
• A Digital Front Door: The Consumer Impact of Patient Access Solutions (Medhost)
• 7 Tips to Make EHR Consolidations Less Stressful (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 10/19/22

Top News

Minnesota-based Allina Health and Flare Capital Partners launch Inbound Health, which will help other health systems develop tech-enabled, home-based care programs.

The new company is backed by an initial funding round of $20 million.

Former Mount Sinai Chief Product Officer and Head of Consumer Digital Innovations Dave Kerwar, MBA joins Inbound as CEO.

Reader Comments

From Digital Triplet: “Re: SDOH platforms. Findhelp, the NC low bidder you mentioned, has been working to publicize apples-oranges comparisons to Unite Us and to influence procurement activities in several states (OH and NH come to mind). They even got NH policymakers to make the kind of information sharing that Unite Us enables illegal, the David in your David and Goliath metaphor throwing stones at the big guy.” Unverified. New Hampshire’s SB 423 addressed privacy issues with the state HHS’s choice of Unite Us. It limits its storage of information to residents who are receiving HHS-funded services who consent to each instance of a referral and also prohibits provider users from viewing the information of people who haven’t been referred to them. 

From Morpheus: “Re: SDOH platforms. Unite Us is already the market leader after its acquisition of NowPow. Potential competitors would need to offer these advantages.” The provided list includes:

• A better user interface, especially the use of smartphones as point-of-service data capture tools.
• Lower cost.
• Better interoperability for social care referrals and loop closure of documentation of services. This would need to come from the federal government and ONC, where any program that gets federal money should have software that complies with interoperability standards. It would not be necessary to have a single statewide or regional system if smaller systems could communicate.

Meanwhile, Forbes updates its article on North Carolina’s selection of Unite Us with a statement from the company, which insists that it won the state’s business competitively and refers to a 2020 press release from UNC Health that describes its reasons for joining NCCARE360 and its Unite Us platform.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient communication platform vendor Well Health changes its name to Artera, as celebrated by the privately held company’s Chief Revenue Officer John Knotwell and CEO Guillaume de Zwirek.

Infusion pump data management vendor Bainbridge Health, a spinoff of Children’s Healthcare of Philadelphia, raises $3.4 million.

Remote patient monitoring technology vendor BioIntelliSense acquires Alert Watch, which offers data aggregation for clinical monitoring. Alert Watch founder and CEO Kevin Trempher, MD, PhD, who is also a professor at University of Michigan Health, earned a Cal Berkeley PhD in chemical engineering, an MD from University of California Irvine, and residency in anesthesiology from UCLA Medical Center before changing his emphasis to perioperative care systems in the 1990s.

Calm, which offers sleep and meditation apps, will launch Calm Health, a mental health and provider-caregiver communication app. Calm acquired care coordination platform vendor Ripple Health early this year.

Ari Gottlieb of A2 Strategy notes that health tech companies have lost $215 billion in market value, 81% of their total, as investors continue separating real business prospects from hype. He identifies some of the worst-performing companies — Babylon (down 98%), Teladoc Health (which has shed $46 billion in value down to $4 billion), and GoodRx and Amwell (down 92% from previous highs). He says that the only digital and telehealth company that is up in the past nine months his Hims & Hers, which shows that “selling ED pills to college kids” may be a recession-resistant strategy.

Sales

• University of Rochester Medical Center (NY) will implement Sectra’s enterprise imaging technology via cloud-based subscription service.
• Redox selects IMO Precision Normalize from Intelligent Medical Objects to standardize health data for its customers.
• A new hospital in Germany will deploy Ascom’s Telligence patient call system.

People

Gerald Greeley, MHA (Lawrence General Hospital) joins Shields Health as CIO.

Thanh Tran (South Shore Health) joins MaineHealth as VP/CTO.

Hugh Cassidy, PhD, MBA (True Blue Partners) returns to LeanTaaS as chief data scientist.

Caryn Bremer (In Compass Health) joins Eagle Telemedicine as VP of licensing and credentialing.

Annexus Health promotes David Meier to CTO and names Katy Wile (Huron) VP of product delivery.

Cognizant-owned  TriZetto Healthcare Products promotes Michael Pierce to COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Fort HealthCare (WI) implements Fresenius Kabi’s interoperable Ivenix Infusion System. The drug producer acquired Ivenix in March for $240 million.

Kirby Medical Center (IL) goes live on automated medical documentation software and real-time clinical support from Augmedix.

Amazon Web Services launches Landing Zone Accelerator for Healthcare for customers to maintain security and compliance in the cloud.

Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia tells Oracle Cerner Health Conference attendees that healthcare is Oracle’s highest priority and primary mission. Oracle Cerner also previewed its Advance dashboard, says that its Seamless Exchange integration product is nearing release, and highlighted its RevElate patient accounting solution that will be released in the next few weeks.

GE Healthcare will integrate Tribun Health’s digital pathology solution into its vendor-neutral archive.

Digital patient prescription tools vendor Custom Health acquires Health in Motion Network, which offers pharmacy patient health recordkeeping app. Health in Motion’s CEO is Ray Shealy, who has held executive roles at McKesson and T-Systems.

A new KLAS report on credentialing solutions finds that users of ASM’s MD-Staff report a paperless process that has decreased FTEs and turnaround time, with customers also giving good marks to Modio Health’s OneView and RLDatix’s Verge Health solutions.

Government and Politics

A KHN article says that federal law requires that government resources be accessible to patients with disabilities, but the VA’s Oracle Cerner system doesn’t support blind or low-vision users with text enlargement or text-to-speech options. The VA has received over 1,000 Section 508 complaints about Oracle Cerner, of which 469 have been accepted by the company to fix. A VA anesthesiologist complains of small icons and the need for multiple high-resolution monitors to display a patient’s entire record, while  a team at one VA facility found that it doesn’t support text-to-speech. Unrelated to Oracle Cerner, a survey by the American Federal for the Blind found that more than half of respondents have struggled with using proprietary telehealth systems, especially hard-to-read chat sidebars, and some resorted to using FaceTime.

The Department of Justice sues Cigna, claiming that the insurer inflated the diagnosis codes of Medicare Advantage patients to boost payments. DOJ says Cigna’s contracted nurse practitioners did not order testing or imaging to support the complex diagnoses they submitted from home visits whose entire purpose was to increase billing for the most potentially lucrative patients rather than to deliver care

Consumers with mild to moderate hearing loss can buy hearing aids without a prescription in an FDA rule change that took effect Monday. Best Buy has already launched an online hearing test and sale of 26 hearing aid models at prices ranging from $199 to $2,950. The Bose-powered models above offer self-tuning via a mobile app, preset templates for specific environments such as TV watching or restaurants, and video or voice call support directly from the app.

Privacy and Security

Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (WA) works to restore IT systems impacted by the ransomware attack on parent organization CommonSpirit Health earlier this month. VMFH officials say providers are now able to access patient medical records, and that the patient portal should be back up and running in a few days.

Other

Yale New Haven Health System will spend $400 million to buy three for-profit hospitals with 700 total beds, citing the value of having all hospitals running Epic. Connecticut’s healthcare advocate says he hopes that YNHHS’s interoperability zeal will extend to having all of its hospitals participate in the new Connie statewide HIE.

A technology analysis firm predicts that Apple will partner with a US insurer in 2024 to offer health insurance that incorporates sensor data from its Watch. I see little connection with health insurance and Watch’s short list of minimally relevant physiologic measurements, but perhaps some insurer will offer Watches (especially to the Medicare Advantage audience that loves perceived freebies) as an inducement to sign up.

Sponsor Updates

• Surescripts awards its White Coat Award to 10 healthcare industry leaders in e-prescription accuracy.
• Clearsense rebrands its healthcare data management and analytics platform to 1Clearsense.
• Netsmart exhibits at the 2022 LeadingAge Annual Meeting and Expo through October 19 in Denver.
• Azara Healthcare releases a new case study, “Alaska Health Centers Improve Diabetes Care Through Data-Driven Healthcare Model.”
• The North Carolina Dept. of IT wins a State Government IT Award from the National Association of State CIOs in the Business Process Innovations Category for the healthcare outcomes it achieved with Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds platform.
• Biofourmis will present at the American Academy of Home Care Medicine October 28 in Orlando.
• Oracle Cerner debuts new patient accounting solution RevElate at its annual conference.
• Clearsense publishes a new case study, “Using Clearsense 20/20 to Predict Renal Failure.”
• CloudWave will exhibit at the HIMSS New England HIE Conference October 20 in Worcester, MA.
• Meditech expands its population health management offering with Expanse Population Insight, powered by Innovaccer’s data platform.
• Diameter Health will exhibit at the NCQA Health Innovation Summit October 31-November 3 in Washington, DC.
• EClinicalWorks announces that Advocare has achieved $1 billion in collections using EClinicalWorks RCM.
• Ellkay will exhibit at Athenahealth’s Thrive conference October 24-26 in Austin.

Blog Posts

• All-payer connectivity: 3 ways to close the gaps between providers and payers (Ability Network)
• Practice Management Software Market Insights: Boosting Healthcare Service Efficiency (AdvancedMD)
• Introducing ‘That’s life in flow’ at RSNA 2022 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Leveraging Your Revenue Cycle to Influence Health Equity (AGS Health)
• 3 reasons your organization needs an electronic attachments solution (Availity)
• 76% of Health Workers are Burned Out – How Tech Can Help Now. (CareMesh)
• Meditech Expanse Implementation: Use Automation to Win the Battle Against Time (CereCore)
• Lessons from Heathrow: A New Approach to Tech Preparedness in Healthcare (Commure)
• Optimizing EHRs from Implementation Through Post Go-Live (CTG)
• Using Analytics to Get a Pulse on the Health of Your Emergency Department (Dimensional Insight)
• How Leaders and Team Members Can Prioritize Mental Health (Divurgent)
• How a Remote Solution Keeps Patients Close (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/17/22

Top News

The VA pushes back its next Oracle Cerner go-live from January 2023 to June 2023.

VA Deputy Secretary Donald Remy says that the “assess and address” period is necessary because “the Oracle Cerner electronic health record system is not delivering for veterans or VA healthcare providers.”

VA Secretary Denis McDonough announced in July that further deployments would be delayed until January 2023 while technical and system problems were resolved. The VA was set to roll the system out to 25 VA medical centers in 2023.

The VA is sending letters to every veteran who may have been impacted by system problems at its five live sites, asking them to call the VA if they experienced delays in prescription filling, appointments, referrals, or test results.

Reader Comments

From State of Confusion: “Re: NC and Unite Us. The $14 million state SDOH referral platform procurement was funded via solicited donations from Medicaid MCOs that were paid to Foundation for Health Leadership and Innovation, which took a 10% cut off the top. State HHS appears to have chosen its vendor and terms, then asked MCOs to foot the bill instead of going through state IT procurement. Also, a competitor that bid $500K for the project was shut out via service contracts that prohibited the use of competing systems.” Unverified. Unite Us is the Goliath among mostly David-sized SDOH competitors, having raised nearly $200 million from big names such as Salesforce, Andy Slavitt’s Town Hall Ventures, and Optum, with a Series C round last year valuing the company at $1.7 billion. I know little (but suspect much) about state IT procurement, but more knowledgeable readers are welcome to chime in. Federal taxpayers gave North Carolina HHS $650 million to test and evaluate non-medical Medicaid interventions, such as those related to food and housing, in its Healthy Opportunities Pilots.

From D. L. Roth: “Re: Epic. Are they trying to dodge the FDA by changing their sepsis algorithm and definition of sepsis, or is it normal for a software company to define a clinical outcome?” I can’t see the paywalled article, but the lead paragraphs say that Epic now recommends that hospitals train the sepsis model on their own data and has changed its definition of a sepsis to a more commonly accepted standard that relies less on the existence of antibiotic orders. A just-published article in Journal of Critical Care compares nine hospitals that implemented Epic’s sepsis prediction tool to six that did not, concluding that the Epic tool didn’t improve outcomes. A JAMA-published study from 2021 concluded that “the Epic Sepsis Model poorly predicts sepsis” and generates many false alarms, questioning why so many hospitals were using it in the absence of peer-reviewed clinical validation. That’s probably the real story – not that an EHR vendor developed a clinical tool that didn’t work as planned, but that hospitals blindly started using it to support patient care without digging deeper. Still, the tool is advisory rather than prescriptive, at least when used as intended, and thus should elicit little FDA regulatory interest. The sepsis advisor may not have helped patients as much as Epic and its client hospitals had hoped, but it also didn’t hurt them. It’s a good lesson for vendors who think AI/ML is the universal hammer for all healthcare nails — Epic has 40-plus years of experience working with the best health systems in the country, so if it can mess up a clinical algorithm, imagine the clinical damage your cool startup and its team of former beer-ponging Facebook engineers could do.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The most valuable mid-career credential to earn is a master’s degree or vendor-specific certification, poll respondents say, although I’ll asterisk those results because they are driven by the number of respondents who actually earned one of the listed credentials.

New poll to your right or here: If your job allowed you to live anywhere, what top three factors would be most important in your choice?

Mike generously donated to Donors Choose in offering “Continued thanks to you, Mrs. H, Dr. Jayne, and all the other content contributors.” I applied matching funds to fully fund these classroom projects:

• Headphones and clocks for Ms. M’s second grade class in Phoenix, AZ.
• Force and motion exercises for Ms. D’s elementary school class on Apollo Beach, FL.
• Headphones for the third grade class of Ms. Z in Orlando, FL.
• Activities and resources for Ms. N’s first grade class in Arlington, TX.
• Math books and games for Mr. C’s middle school class in Phoenix, AZ.
• STEM robotics and Lego kits for Ms. W’s middle school class in Margate, FL.
• STEM activity kits for Mrs. S’s elementary school class in San Bernardino, CA.

I’ve heard from most of the teachers already, including Ms. N, who said, “I am so grateful; but more importantly, our students will be. Your generosity, support, and investment is so appreciated. Our students will be able to enjoy this resources for many, many years to come!”

My recovery from “The COVID” remains uneventful nearly a week in, with my only symptoms over that time being a couple of early days’ worth of mild stuffiness and a scratchy throat. I’m remaining sequestered until midweek, although CDC guidelines say I can rejoin society now as long as I wear a mask.

Great news: the cringey “reaction GIF” – painfully unoriginal video clips posted on social media by people who are unwilling or unable to use actual words — is dead, retired to the Internet boneyard by Facebook-using boomers who still believe them to be clever.

Webinars

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The CEO of CVS Health says that the company will be involved in the “entire spectrum of someone’s health journey,” which includes health insurance via its Aetna business, MinuteClinic care delivery, pharmacy, and with its recent acquisition of Signify Health, the provision of in-home care. Karen Lynch also says the company will make a primary care acquisition later this year and will expand its digital offerings since otherwise “we’re never going to get that connected care and that personalized care.” She says that Amazon is a transactional company, while CVS has earned the right to be in healthcare, particularly via its COVID-19 vaccination program.

People

Lee Westerfield, MBA (Dstillery) joins Clearsense as CFO.

Announcements and Implementations

Vanderbilt and Brigham and Women’s will study the use of Synapse’s clinical decision support and medication reconciliation software to analyze drug-related risks and optimize medication appropriateness, as integrated with their Epic workflows.

Redox expands into Canada and offers API Actions, which describes specific data models as concepts that developers can more readily understand.

The National Association of ACOs asks CMS to conduct pilots of ACO submission of EHR-extracted quality of care data before mandating electronic submission. It also wants CMS to eliminate the requirement that ACOs report data on all patients from all payers, saying that ACOs that serve vulnerable patients will look work in CMS comparisons because of their sicker populations. A NAACOS survey finds that 39% of ACOs use more than 10 EHRs and only 17% use just one, forcing them to rely on third-party aggregators.

Government and Politics

An MGMA report finds that the most burdensome regulatory issue of medical practices is prior authorization, while the second is the No Surprises Act requirement that practices give good-faith estimates of out-of-network costs in advance.

Privacy and Security

In England, NHS software provider Advanced confirms that an August 4 cyberattack involved LockBit ransomware and that data was exfiltrated from Staffplan and Caresys customers. The hacker penetrated the Advanced network by using third-party credentials to establish a remote desktop session to its Staffplan Citrix server, from which it navigated the network to deploy malware. In a fascinating back story, the LockBit development team released Version 3.0 of the “ransomware as a service” that it promised would “Make Ransomware Great Again,” after which a disgruntled developer breached its systems and released the builder program on Twitter so that rival ransomware groups could use it without paying a percentage of the ransom.

Other

A Canada-based engineering society demands that “software engineers” stop using that title because they are not licensed or regulated like all other engineers.

A Minnesota health system halts plans to build a new clinic due to costs of switching its Epic host from Allina Health to OCHIN.

Bizarre: 200 decomposing bodies are found on the roof of a hospital in Pakistan, apparently placed there by its mortuary, which initially refused to allow inspectors to enter. Meanwhile, a health minister in India continues his surprise inspection of hospitals and firing those in charge for problems that include requiring families to buy patient medicines elsewhere, night nurses who don’t answer patient calls, clinicians who are absent but clocked in, and dogs running loose on the wards.

I’m honoring the memory of HIS-torian Vince Ciotti and the sunny slopes of yesterday by surfacing a LinkedIn post by Tom Sullivan on an upcoming reunion of former employees of Ray Forgit’s Medical Systems Management, which merged with Picis in 2002. Let me know of similar reunions or online groups since I’m a sucker for former health IT employer nostalgia.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx reports strong results from a recent program that used its patent-pending AI technique and real-world data to improve time to diagnosis and therapy for a complex disease.
• The Shasta County Health & Human Services Agency expands its implementation of Netsmart’s CareFabric platform to better support the California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal program.
• Sectra will install the radiology module of its enterprise imaging solution throughout German ANregiomed’s healthcare system.
• BCBS of Massachusetts uses Olive’s AI and automation to speed review time, automate authorizations, and eliminate administrative costs in a pilot project with New England Baptist Hospital.
• Optum releases its first Pharmacy Insights Podcast, “What’s happening in specialty pharmacy?”
• Aurora Mental Health Center reduces time to remission by 56% and increases access by 30% with Owl’s measurement-based care platform.
• Premier’s Contigo Health subsidiary completes its asset transaction for national provider contracts and licenses to cost-containment technology from TRPN Direct Pay and Devon Health.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “Patient Experience & Healthcare’s Move to the Cloud with ConvergeOne’s Matt Vestal.”
• Sectra launches its Let’s Talk Enterprise Imaging Podcast with three new episodes.
• Sphere will exhibit at Athenahealth Thrive 2022 October 24-26 in Austin.
• Surescripts releases a new There’s a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology Podcast, “An Antidote to Clinician Burnout: Fusing Old-Fashioned Medicine with High Technology.”
• Talkdesk awards 2022 CX Innovator Awards to Alignment Health and Carbon Health.

Blog Posts

• Culture & Focus on Clients Fuel Growth (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Technology: A Lifeline for Burned-Out Nurses (PerfectServe)
• 8 Ways to Reduce Alarm Fatigue in Hospitals (Spok)
• Why Does Clinical Experience Matter in Healthcare IT Leadership? (Optimum Healthcare (IT)
• Call center service level and customer satisfaction (Talkdesk)
• How Healthcare Technology Can Bridge the Gap in Patient Communication (TigerConnect)
• What is a TPE Audit, and How Should You Handle It? (WebPT)

Black Book’s latest ranking of coding, transcription, CDI, and clinical information management software and services vendors include the following HIStalk sponsors:

• Comprehensive mid-RCM coding, CDI and compliance solutions – inpatient hospitals and health systems: Nuance.
• Comprehensive mid-RCM coding, CDI and compliance solutions – physician practices and ambulatory providers: Nuance.
• Clinical data interoperability solutions: Redox.
• Medical speech recognition and AI solutions: Nuance.
• EMPI and clean-up: Verato.
• Computer-assisted coding applications: Optum360.
• Vendor-neutral archive: Agfa HealthCare.

Contacts

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

News 10/14/22

Top News

Walgreens will buy the remaining shares of care coordination and benefit management platform vendor CareCentrix for $392 million.

The total acquisition cost, including the previous investment by Walgreens, is $722 million.

CareCentrix CEO John Driscoll, MBA, MPhil will take a Walgreens role as EVP and president of US healthcare. He has previously served as a top leader of Surescripts, Castlight Health, and Waystar.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Synapse Medicine. The France-based company believes in medication success and is dedicated to making it possible for everyone. To achieve this goal, it has built an extensive, global medication knowledge base using algorithms to ensure the most reliable, up-to-date data. On the front end, Synapse Medicine provides a SaaS platform and UI components that are used to prescribe, dispense, and manage medications across the entire patient journey. The company is working with world-leading hospitals and digital health companies in the United States, Europe, and Japan to transform today’s medication regimens into tomorrow’s medication success. The company offers a webinar titled “Optimizing Prescription Safety for Your Health Tech Product.” Thanks to Synapse Medicine for supporting HIStalk.

Mrs. H insisted that I take a COVID-19 test before we went out to dinner with higher-risk friends Wednesday since I had mild nasal congestion, a bit of fatigue, and a scratchy throat after our recent travels. I did a swab test just to humor her and to make sure I wasn’t a risk to our friends and it turns out that her concerns were well founded – I tested positive (it felt odd to tell them, “We can’t come because I have COVID.”) The mild initial symptoms have eased and no new ones have emerged, so I’m hoping my vaxxed-to-the-max immune system is repelling the viral siege and protecting me from long COVID. I can only imagine how I would have felt – literally and figuratively – had I been infected in the pre-vaccine dark ages of 2020. Mrs. H, who tested negative and whom I see only from a masked distance as I isolate, masked up and went to Walgreens to buy a couple of $20 boxes of rapid tests for follow-up, where she learned from the helpful clerk that people with insurance can get four boxes of rapid antigen tests (two tests per box) per family member every 30 days at no charge. I don’t want to know who is ultimately picking up that tab.

Webinars

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Well Health will acquire CloudMD’s Cloud Practice Canada-focused business — which includes the Juno EMR, billing software, and three primary care clinic – for just under $6 million.

Specialty EHR/PM vendor Nextech acquires TouchMD, which sells patient visualization and marketing systems to plastic surgery and dermatology practices.

Property and casualty EDI vendor Data Dimensions acquires Providerflow, whose platform manages electronic claims attachments and requests from patients and third parties.

Prescription discount platform GoodRx launches Provider Mode, which allows providers to compare costs, send coupons to patients, and repeat searches via their own dashboard.

Weight loss coaching app vendor Noom lays off another 10% of its employees, mostly from its coaching team, as it attempts to transition into enterprise sales and a broader, more personalized mind-body platform. The company has raised $650 million and was planning a 2022 IPO at a $10 billion valuation. An Insider review found that the company doesn’t offer the personalized support it claims, and instead cranks out canned calorie-counting plans for a high subscription price with little evidence of long-term weight loss success. The company has generated thousands of Better Business Bureau and FTC complaints for billing users without their consent and making it hard for them to cancel subscriptions.

Behavioral health assessment and triaging platform vendor NeuroFlow secures a $25 million growth investment. I interviewed CEO Chris Molaro in March 2022.

The Private Equity Stakeholder Project calls out the former ownership of safety net hospital system Prospect Medical Holdings by private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners. They say that the PE firm reaped $658 million in fees and dividends over its 10-year ownership by burying the hospital chain in debt and slashing costs to the detriment of patient care. The PE firm sold the chain last year, releasing it from responsibility for the chain’s $3.1 billion of debt. LGP’s investment portfolio also includes health IT-related business MultiPlan (cost management), Press Ganey (hospital patient and employee analytics), WCG (clinical trials), and WellSky (post-acute care software).

Investment firm Francisco Partners the BSwift benefits technology business from CVS Health.

KHN reports that private equity firms are creating and running hospital obstetrics emergency departments – often consisting of a single small room — which allows patients who have pregnancy or post-partum medical concerns to be seen quickly and then billed at high ED rates. Few interviewed patients were told that they were about to incur ED services as they entered the unmarked rooms, often the same triage rooms as before. A physician researcher concludes, “To have people get an emergency room charge when they don’t even know they’re in an emergency room — I mean, that doesn’t meet the laugh test,” while UCSF professor Bob Wachter, MD says that hospitals “will always have a rationale for why income maximization is a reasonable and moral strategy.”

Sales

• CDC awards Accenture Federal Services a three-year, $189 million contract to for cloud migration services.
• ConvergeOne chooses Redox for EHR integration.

People

John Hallock (Transarent) joins Quantum Health as chief communications officer.

Diligent Robotics hires Gregg Springan, RN, MSN (Epic) as head of clinical informatics and Nicholas Bloom, MPH (Cedars-Sinai Accelerator) as head of client success.

Christopher Kunney, MSMOT (DSS) joins Divurgent as SVP of digital acceleration.

Announcements and Implementations

Walmart launches the Walmart Healthcare Research Institute and a related app to increase community access to clinical trials. The My Health Journey app helps patients find studies and send their medical and insurance records to investigators. FDA data suggests that studies are not representative of the entire US population because they recruit participants from their own urban locations who have the time and money to participate.

A Relatient poll of provider group executives finds that while most of them believe that online patient scheduling is critical for patient satisfaction, they are still using phone calls or automated phone messages to communicate with patients before their appointment, partly because that’s what patients prefer. The authors conclude that provider groups understand the importance of automation and digital tools and their associated reduction in staffing requirements, but need to choose the services that patients will actually use.

Campbell County Health (WY) kicks off its year-long, $8 million project to replace Meditech with Epic in an affiliation with UCHealth. An HIStalk search finds several references to the health system – it sent employee W-2s to a hacker who impersonated a hospital executive in 2017, lost $200,000 in Medicaid payments due to billing system failures in its acquisition of a private surgery center in 2018, and went on diversion due to a ransomware attack in 2019.

A Dubai health system goes live with a Metaverse-based hospital, which it says will eventually replace traditional telemedicine services and support its medical tourism program.  

Florida-based AdventHealth University and Full Sail University launch a virtual reality research center that will focus on healthcare employee training and patient safety technologies.

Providence spinoff DexCare, which offers system capacity and appointment booking software, acquires Womp Inc., which offers digital front door systems and mobile optimization technology.

CHIME appoints three CIO members to its board of trustees – Daniel Barchi, MS (New York Presyterian), Terri Couts, RN, MHA (Guthrie Clinic), and Tressa Springmann, MAS (LifeBridge Health). Named as director of the CHIME Foundation Board is Sean Kelly, MD of Well Health.

Government and Politics

Forbes updates its article on North Carolina’s sole-source choice of Unite Us’s social services integration platform. A recap:

• The state chose Unite Us for a federal Medicaid social services pilot without having its product reviewed by IT teams. Reports suggest that it will require modification to meet federal privacy requirements.
• Former state HHS Secretary Mandy Cohen, MD, MPH, who is now CEO of Aledade Care Solutions, intervened to get Unite Us the business even though state health systems preferred that of competitor Findhelp.
• Unite Us President and Co-Founder Taylor Justice complained to Cohen that UNC Health was about to choose a different vendor. She promised to call UNC Health CEO Wesley Burks, MD to get him to reconsider. Emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that Justice told Cohen, “I shouldn’t have let this happen and it will never happen again.”
• State lawmakers met Wednesday to ask the governor’s administration to explain why it used an non-competitive technology selection process and why, after three years and $27 million of federal Healthy Opportunities Pilot money spent, the only tangible result is that 10 families are receiving food deliveries.

Nebraska’s corrections department OIG says that a female inmate who was incarcerated for life died of cervical cancer because its Excel-based chronic care tracking system allowed her to go 10 years without having a Pap smear performed. OIG notes:

• A seven-year-old state statute requires keeping inmate medical records in an EHR, but NDCS still uses only paper charts like the ones above.
• The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services department spent a $150,000 EHR study grant in 2017 to buy an electronic medication administration record system instead.
• NDCS was appropriated $1.4 million to implement a commercial EHR in 2019, but never opened an RFP.
• In 2021, NDCS received another $745,000 to implement a commercial EHR, but then decided to develop a system internally. Nothing has gone live except for a behavioral health module and an intake form.
• Employees say they waste a lot of time phoning and faxing information that could be easily shared via a commercial EHR and that the lack of an EHR hinders the hiring of medical personnel.
• Among OIG’s recommendations is that if the homegrown system isn’t fully live by 2025, NDCS should abandon the effort and again seek the money to buy a commercial EHR.

Privacy and Security

CommonSpirit Health, which operates 142 hospitals in 21 states, confirms that its continued downtime that started October 3 was caused by a ransomware attack.

Other

An interesting post by Cyrus Bahrassa, founder and CEO of healthcare integration consulting firm Ashavan, opines that OAuth rather than FHIR is the most important interoperability standard. He provides a straightforward definition of OAuth, which is how “log in with Google” or “login in with Facebook” works without exposing App 1’s user account information to App 2.

Two NHS trusts move to downtime paper recordkeeping after an apparent database error in Oracle Cerner required most of a day to resolve. During the downtime, Royal Free London, which was ironically in the middle of a “go paperless” campaign, nearly ran out of paper.

In the UK, the doctor of a 12-year-old girl who died by suicide after being bullied online says she was not able to see the girl’s history of self-harm because her practice’s EHR could not access that of the girl’s previous doctor.

Sponsor Updates

• An InterSystems charity walk event on Thursday included music from an all-company band that features industry long-timer and VP Don Woodlock on drums.
• Nordic posts a new episode of its DocTalk video series called “The Impact of Long COVID.”
• Healthcare Growth Partners advises blood and biologics supply chain automation company BloodHub during its sale to InVita Healthcare Technologies.
• Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at the OR Manager Conference October 17-19 in Denver.
• Meditech Greenfield expands to include new collaborative environments – Greenfield Alliance and Greenfield Workspace.
• Baker Tilly US and Artisight launch a strategic implementation collaboration for AI-enhanced workflow automation.
• Netsmart will exhibit at LeadingAge October 16-19 in Denver.
• Nordic joins the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program.

Blog Posts

• The Future is Unsure for the COVID-19 PHE (Experity)
• Retail Pharmacists are Called to Embrace an Expanded Role (First Databank)
• Can expertise on-demand Solutions help your cybersecurity staffing challenges? (Fortified Health Security)
• Health Literacy: Patients Who Understand Content, Use Content (Get Well)
• How to Enhance EHR Use Measures to Mitigate Clinician Burnout (HealthTech Resources)
• OptimizeRx Announces Strong Results from its use of Previously Announced AI/RWE Solution (OptimizeRx)
• Five things to know about the 2023 ICD-10-CM updates (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Don’t be Fooled by Fake Login Pages: How Multi-Factor Authentication Protects Internet-Facing Servers (Medhost)
• 3 Clear Warning Signs That You Need Prior Authorization Software (Myndshft)
• How Occupational Health Executives Can Plan for the Future of Work (Net Health)
• How the US Naval Academy is Making Mental Health a Top Priority (NeuroFlow)
• Harnessing outcomes-focused AI in radiology reporting: It all starts with the data (Nuance)
• EHR consolidation: How to lead with empathy (Nordic)

Black Book Market Research’s latest ranking of health IT and management advisory firms includes the following HIStalk sponsors:

• Allscripts/Altera Implementation – ReMedi Health Solutions
• Blockchain – Healthcare Triangle
• Compliance, HIPAA, Risk Management, Regulatory – Clearwater
• Epic Implementation – Tegria, Bluetree Network
• HIT Staffing – Tegria
• Interoperability & Integration – Zen Healthcare IT
• Value-Based Care Hospitals – Premier

Contacts

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

News 10/12/22

Top News

Medicaid virtual mental health provider Brave Health raises $40 million in a Series C funding round.

The round was led by Town Hall Ventures, of which former acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt is a general partner.

The company serves patients in 10 states.

Brave Health’s two co-founders came from General Assembly, which offers technology courses to executives. It was acquired by a workforce development company for $413 million in cash in 2018.

Reader Comments

From Salient Point: “Re: Medicare. The Urban Institute says that the Medicare Part A trust fund will be exhausted by 2028. That’s especially interesting because it’s a presidential election year, meaning we will see a lot of political posturing and paralysis.” US debt is at $31 trillion, which was a big enough time bomb even before interest rates started to rise, so Medicare is another problem that will defy resolution with the near-certain lack political compromise and the voting power of seniors who don’t want to pay more or receive less.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

If your company isn’t an HIStalk sponsor, you have a few weeks to get on board for 2023 at 2022 rates (the same benefit existing sponsors enjoy, in other words). Beat the price increase and maybe use some leftover 2022 marketing money by contacting Lorre ASAP.

Companies or their PR firms have asked / demanded a few times that I remove my summary of a legitimate news source’s unflattering investigative report. They always say they are seeking to have the original article corrected, although I don’t recall that ever actually happening given that journalists and their editors are pretty careful to fact-check before publishing. My policy is this — if the source updates their article, I’ll update my reference to it, but otherwise I won’t bury or sugarcoat a story just because the company doesn’t like it. They are welcome to state their rebuttal in a comment and let the reader decide.

Thanks to Jenn for covering my recent several days off. It’s a testament to her abilities that you probably didn’t even notice my absence. I traveled only with my $99 Chromebook and it worked flawlessly — it was the lack of decent connectivity (and maybe a lack of personal motivation) that kept me mostly offline.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor KONZA. The Topeka, KS-based company’s next-generation KONZA National Network supports the delivery of unequaled actionable intelligence, including clinical information at the point of care, while supporting value-based payment models, care management, and analytics. As a member of the EHealth Exchange, it allows health systems to share data internally and with their external partners such as the VA, MHS, CVS, and DaVita. The Azure-powered system, which is available to any organization and does not require participation in a local or state HIE, allows health systems to query aggregated data to monitor care gaps, ED use, opioid use, and readmissions. It can also be queried to match patients with rare conditions with clinical trials and to identify health disparities and provides ADT alerts, submission of quality metrics to CMS, payer analytics, and updating the personal health records of patients when new data arrives. Thanks to KONZA for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

October 12 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “In Praise of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record (POMR).” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, KeyCare; Amber Sieja, MD, senior medical director of informatics, UCHealth and Ambulatory Services; Jim Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO. The problem-oriented medical record – initially developed in the 1960s by Lawrence Weed, MD – brought important structure to paper charting, and in particular, the problem list. Yet, today, the tool that was once the gold standard for organizing and making sense of patient history is often cluttered and unmanageable. Fortunately, tools and strategies exist to help make the problem list more meaningful, helping to synthesize patient data, highlight insights, and support patient care. The expert panel will share their experiences with POMR, including documentation practices and tools to improve workflows and efficiency, the impact of POMR and charting on the overall health of a patient, and the challenges and obstacles clinicians face when practicing POMR and charting and how they can be overcome.

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Insurer risk assessment technology vendor Milliman IntelliScript acquires API-based EHR records retrieval system vendor OneRecord.

The merged Beaumont Health and Spectrum Health system, which is Michigan’s largest employer, names itself Corewell Health.

People

Former Allscripts CEO Paul Black joins Thomas H. Lee Partners as a consultant for its healthcare investment group.

St. Clair Health hires Jim Kohler (Allscripts) as VP/CIO.

Hutchinson Clinic hires its recently retired CMIO Verlin Janzen, MD as interim CEO.

Mark Burgess (NextGen Healthcare) joins Agfa HealthCare as chief revenue officer for North America. 

Announcements and Implementations

Aspen Valley Hospital (CO) goes live on Epic.

Ascom works with Oracle Cerner to give nurses access to a patient’s EHR on Ascom’s Myco 3 VoWiFi smartphone.

In England, County Durham & Darlington NHS Foundation Trust goes live on Cerner.

UCHealth (CO) implements Eon’s patient management software.

The Sequoia Project seeks feedback on its “Draft TEFCA Facilitated FHIR Implementation Guide.”

Government and Politics

A Forbes report says that North Carolina chose Unite Us as its technology contractor for the federal Healthy Opportunities Pilot for Medicaid beneficiaries in a sole-source contract that did not undergo state IT review. Emails suggest that former state HHS Secretary Mandy Cohen, MD, MPH — now CEO of Aledade Care Solutions — intervened to win Unite Us the business over an unnamed competitor (reportedly Findhelp, formerly called Aunt Bertha), which was the preferred choice of the state’s health systems.

Privacy and Security

In New Zealand, hackers notify Pinnacle Midlands Health Network that they’ve uploaded the stolen data of 450,000 patients to the dark web. The cyberattack on one of the primary care network’s IT systems took place September 28 and Pinnacle issued a statement within a week.

Other

Health IT consulting contracts are on the upswing, according to Black Book Market Research’s latest market analysis. Seventy percent of surveyed providers say they’ll seek out consulting help for RCM optimization projects within the next 15 months. Low-priority projects, according to providers, include those related to EHR optimization, support, and training; and physician burnout. The Chartis Group was noted as the top enterprise health IT consulting firm.

Pediatric cardiologist and CMIO C. Becket Mahnke, MD compares paper charts to EHRs based on his annual cardiology volunteer work in Palau:

• Information retrieval isn’t too bad with paper charts, but is incomplete compared to accessing patient information via HIEs and Epic’s Care Everywhere.
• Lack of filters and search means flipping through paper pages.
• Documentation is faster using pen and paper instead of an EHR, allowing visits of 12 minutes per patient, including ECG time. However, legibility issues are a problem.
• Ordering is faster on paper, but again legibility issues cause problems with the receiving department and there’s no way to track ordering patterns over time.
• Lack of in-basket capability saves time with paper charts, but there’s no easy way to send information to colleagues or to receive result notifications.
• Paper charts aren’t readily analyzable for monitoring, quality improvement, and hypothesis generation.

The New York Times profiles Myron Rolle, MD, MSc, a former Florida State University football star, Rhodes Scholar in medical anthropology, and NFL player whose fizzled pro football career led him to a Mass General medical residency as a neurosurgeon, where he is in his sixth year of the seven-year program. Asked for advice for people who feel stuck, he said, “One: It’s never too late. Two: You’re needed. You’re still needed in this life. Your lane can be yours and it’s for you. What God has for you is going to be for you. Perfect it. Hone it. Be a master of it. Love it. Do it well. Impact people when you do it and help bring somebody up with you.”

Sponsor Updates

• Clearsense supports the George Landess Memorial/NEFL Scottish Games Golf Tournament, benefitting Challenges Enterprises.
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces that 10 of its healthcare publications from its Lippincott portfolio have been honored with 13 awards in the 2022 Folio: Eddie and Ozzie Awards.
• Agfa HealthCare supports The Royal College of Radiologists’ first Global Congress in Dubai.
• Tegria and Microsoft Azure services firm 3Cloud partner to offer EHR clients advance their AI/ML capabilities.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “New markets tax credits for healthcare providers.”
• Relatient publishes an e-book titled “2022 Patient Engagement Report: Provider Perspectives on Optimizing Patient Scheduling and Communication.”
• Cordea Consulting will exhibit at the Delaware Valley / New Jersey HIMSS Fall Conference October 12-14 in Atlantic City, NJ.
• Tegria will offer its customers a healthcare-optimized ServiceNow solution to deliver ITSM and CSM solutions.

Blog Posts

• Cybersecurity Tips for Healthcare IT Consultants (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Five Ways to Optimize Practice Resources While Driving Higher Quality Care (AdvancedMD)
• In-House Medical Coding Post-Pandemic: Is It Worth the Effort? (AGS Health)
• Insights from the RCxRules 2022 National User Conference: Staffing Shortages and Remote Work are Still Top of Mind (RCx Rules)
• Five phrases to grow and nourish a care management program (Arcadia)
• Best Practices for Referral Management (CarePort)
• HFMA Poll: CFO and CIO Synergy is Crucial to Successful Initiatives (CereCore)
• Increase Patient Trust and Retention Using EHR Policies and HIPAA Compliance Safeguards (ChartLogic)
• The Exponential Savings Potential for ACO Participants (ChartSpan)
• A Look at Emerging Healthcare Technology & Associated Security Risks (Clearwater)
• How Leaders and Team Members Can Prioritize Mental Health (Divurgent)
• ‘Value Over Volume, Patients Like Family’ (EClinicalWorks)

Oracle Cerner will host its Health Conference October 17-19 in Kansas City, MO. Exhibiting HIStalk Sponsors include:

• Arrive Health
• Ascom
• Ellkay
• First Databank
• Fortified Health Security
• Get Well
• Healthwise
• Intelligent Medical Objects
• Impact Advisors
• Kyruus
• Loyal
• Medicomp Systems
• Net Health
• Nuance
• Relatient
• Surescripts
• Wolters Kluwer Health

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/10/22

Top News

Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (WA), part of the CommonSpirit Health system, updates patients on the ongoing, unspecified IT incident that last week forced many CommonSpirit facilities to revert to downtime procedures, divert ambulances, and reschedule appointments.

CommonSpirit has yet to issue a statement.

Patients, meanwhile, are growing frustrated by the lack of digital access, which has turned online appointment scheduling and record retrieval into processes more laborious than usual. Prescription refills have also been impacted.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The majority of poll respondents are in favor of the HHS decision to hold firm on the October 6 deadline for information sharing.

New poll to your right or here: Which of the following items did you earn after age 35 that has been most valuable in your career? If you’ve done something on the list that turned out to be a great career booster in your 30s or after, others would no doubt be interested. I’m sure I didn’t think of every possible item, so add a poll comment if you earned some other credential that paid off big time.

An Olive rep clarified some points from Thursday’s news post regarding the company’s decision to divest its population health and 340b products: Those offerings make up less than 3% of the company’s revenue and no longer align with Olive’s product strategy. Two of its customers gave notice in August and September, in contrast to the number in the original article.

Webinars

October 12 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “In Praise of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record (POMR).” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, KeyCare; Amber Sieja, MD, senior medical director of informatics, UCHealth and Ambulatory Services; Jim Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO. The problem-oriented medical record – initially developed in the 1960s by Lawrence Weed, MD – brought important structure to paper charting, and in particular, the problem list. Yet, today, the tool that was once the gold standard for organizing and making sense of patient history is often cluttered and unmanageable. Fortunately, tools and strategies exist to help make the problem list more meaningful, helping to synthesize patient data, highlight insights, and support patient care. The expert panel will share their experiences with POMR, including documentation practices and tools to improve workflows and efficiency, the impact of POMR and charting on the overall health of a patient, and the challenges and obstacles clinicians face when practicing POMR and charting and how they can be overcome.

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Sales

• The VA selects Coforma to assist it in developing clinical decision support apps and EHR integrations.
• A Northeastern health system selects VisiQuate’s denials management, revenue management, and reserve analytics.

Announcements and Implementations

Image-sharing vendor Send Mammogram implements ClearData’s CyberHealth cybersecurity technology.

Box Butte General Hospital (NE) postpones its roll out of Meditech Expanse as it takes into account lessons learned from a mock live event held in late September.

EClinicalWorks announces the addition of sign, patient survey, and chatbot capabilities to its family Healow patient engagement apps at its annual user conference, where it also launched the latest version of its EHR. CFO Mark Speyer noted that the company has increased its staff count by 10% in 2022, and will continue to hire in the next year.

Government and Politics

Oracle Cerner engineers resolve an application package coding issue that caused the VA’s EHR pharmacy module to go down for 11 hours last week. In a separate incident, certain patients were unable to access the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System, a database of US military members, family members, veterans, and others eligible for military benefits. That issue resolved without technical intervention.

Other

The Nebraska Hospital Association and the University of Nebraska Medical Center prepare to launch an initiative that will give researchers access to the hospital’s de-identified claims data. The association hopes to partner with additional hospitals willing to give researchers access to similar data sets.

Intermountain Healthcare (UT) begins offering delivery of specialty pharmaceuticals and certain over-the-counter medications by drone to eligible patients in the Salt Lake Valley area. The health system, which first announced its drone delivery plans in 2018, has partnered with San Francisco-based company Zipline to offer the service.

Sponsor Updates

• Clearwater sponsors the Nashville Health Care Council Golf Tournament.
• Meditech and Forward Advantage develop the PxMobile healthcare system-branded app.
• Methodist Health System extends its 25-year relationship with Oracle Cerner with a 10-year contract extension.
• Optimum Healthcare IT names Shane Kuppler (Health Care District of Palm Beach County) Epic revenue cycle analyst.
• Relatient releases a new episode of Dash Talk Podcast, “How Better Access Gives OrthoSC a ‘Leg Up’ on Care Delivery.”
• Talkdesk receives two Frost & Sullivan 2022 Customer Value Leadership Awards for vertical market excellence.
• Tegria will present at the HFMA Region 2 Annual Fall Institute October 13 in Verona, NY.
• Volpara Health receives a 2022 Good Design Award for Volpara Analytics in the digital design category.

Blog Posts

• Key Takeaways: Evolution of Healthcare Systems (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Nurses of Note Awards 2022: The Clinical Practice Specialist (PerfectServe)
• Top 3 Takeaways from the AHIP Consumer Experience & Digital Health Forum (Redox)
• In-house vs. Outsourcing: The Benefits of a Chart Abstraction Service (ReMedi Health Solutions)
• What is call center routing and how does it improve customer experience? (Talkdesk)

Contacts

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

News 10/7/22

Top News

Federal rules take effect today that – in theory – will enable patients to obtain all of their medical records in digital format upon request.

A number of provider organizations attempted to get the October 6 deadline extended so that they could have more time to prepare for patient requests, and to better understand the penalties of failing to comply.

CMS has not yet made clear the ways in which providers and health IT vendors will be held accountable for failing to adapt to this new era of liberated patient data.

Webinars

October 12 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “In Praise of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record (POMR).” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, KeyCare; Amber Sieja, MD, senior medical director of informatics, UCHealth and Ambulatory Services; Jim Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO. The problem-oriented medical record – initially developed in the 1960s by Lawrence Weed, MD – brought important structure to paper charting, and in particular, the problem list. Yet, today, the tool that was once the gold standard for organizing and making sense of patient history is often cluttered and unmanageable. Fortunately, tools and strategies exist to help make the problem list more meaningful, helping to synthesize patient data, highlight insights, and support patient care. The expert panel will share their experiences with POMR, including documentation practices and tools to improve workflows and efficiency, the impact of POMR and charting on the overall health of a patient, and the challenges and obstacles clinicians face when practicing POMR and charting and how they can be overcome.

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient acquisition, engagement, and remote patient monitoring company PatientPoint acquires eye care-focused competitor Rendia for an undisclosed sum. Rendia CEO Smitha Gopal will also take on the new role of PatientPoint EVP of subscription and procedure-based specialties.

Private equity firm TPG acquires Change Healthcare’s ClaimsXten claims-editing business for $2.2 billion as part of the terms of UnitedHealth’s acquisition of Change.

Health information management vendor ScanSTAT Technologies reportedly puts itself up for sale. It acquired competitor Resolve ROI in August.

Nordic Consulting acquires Hygeian, a healthcare consulting and staffing firm that serves customers in the UK and Middle East.

Healthcare automation company Olive will sell its population health management and 340b program assets to Rotera. The move is in keeping with its decision earlier this year to streamline its offerings. Olive launched Rotera, which also offers healthcare automation software, out of its venture studio in 2021.

Sales

• Acute Behavioral Health (TN) will use Owl’s measurement-based care software to help its staff track patient progress and quantify treatment effectiveness.
• Virtual primary care vendor CirrusMD selects NeuroFlow’s behavioral health-focused clinical decision support, intervention services, and patient engagement capabilities.

People

Chesapeake Regional Information System for Our Patients promotes Craig Behm to president and CEO of CRISP and CRISP Shared Services.

Announcements and Implementations

The SSI Group leverages Myndshft’s automated prior authorization software to power its new PA technology.

CommuniCare implements EClinicalWorks across its 22 sites in Texas.

Google Cloud announces GA of its new AI-enabled Medical Imaging Suite.

Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care System, Coventry and Warwickshire ICS, and Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICS implement InterSystems HealthShare.

Littleton Regional Healthcare (NH) goes live on Oracle Cerner’s Community Works EHR.

WVU Medicine adds Findhelp’s social and human services search tool to its Epic patient portal.

Nym makes its medical coding engine available to radiology departments.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions launches the Gravitas Network, a clinical research data hub incorporating de-identified data sets from PointClickCare, Ovation, Solis Mammography, health systems collective Truveta, and the Institute for Health Metrics.

Software development company Academy Medtech Ventures implements Clearwater’s ClearAdvantage managed cybersecurity and compliance services.

Government and Politics

CMS solicits feedback on the idea of developing a national directory of healthcare providers and services.

Privacy and Security

CommonSpirit Health facilities in Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington continue to deal with the effects of Monday’s unspecified IT incident, which impacted several enterprise systems, including its EHR. Local news reports say that many CommonSpirit sites in those states have reverted to paper-based procedures, diverted ambulances, and postponed appointments.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore staff volunteer with the Utah Food Bank and Nashville-based Pencil.
• CHIME releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast featuring Clearsense President Kevin Field.
• EVisit ranks among the top three telemedicine vendors for customer satisfaction, according to a JD Power study.
• Net Health integrates Alinea’s workflow automation and patient and family engagement capabilities with its Therapy for Senior Living software.
• Experity encourages urgent care leaders to submit nominations for its annual Industry Limelight Awards through November 14.
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions publishes a new customer success story, “VGM & Associates and Its Members Increase Market Share and Improve Sales Targeting.”
• Lyniate publishes a new case study, “Greater Bristol Connecting Care underpins Exemplar status with Lyniate EMPI by NextGate for identity data management.”
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring CHIME VP of Public Policy Mari Savickis.
• Meditech adds sepsis detection tools to its Sepsis Management Toolkit.

Blog Posts

• Four Easy Ways to Protect Yourself Online (Fortified Health Security)
• Bring Your Own Device: The Evolution of Patient Engagement (Get Well)
• How Can Supply Chain Do More with Less in the Face of Unprecedented Turnover? (GHX)
• Hire a Consultant for IT Changes and Keep Your Hospital Running Smoothly (HealthTech Resources)
• Souped-Up Search Results: How They Save Clinicians Time (Healthwise)
• Path to Patient Empowerment: Why Healthcare Must Break Data Silos (InterSystems)
• A Q&A with IMO: NextGen and EHR workflows (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Digital Self-Service: A Must Have for Consumers (Kyruus)
• Healthcare Cybersecurity Awareness Resources (LexisNexis Risk Solutions)
• 3 Major Healthcare IT Security Topics for 2023 (Medhost)
• A new era of health IT transformation revealed at Meditech Live (Meditech)
• Productivity: Why This KPI Matters for Skilled Nursing Rehab Therapy Teams (Net Health)
• Ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) – what it is and why you need it (Nuance)
• Telehealth and LTPAC Part 1: Making Virtual Care a Reality Beyond COVID-19 (Netsmart)
• De-implementation: “Just say no” isn’t enough (Nordic)
• Three potential patient safety risks that can be addressed through technology (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 10/5/22

Top News

UnitedHealth finalizes its $7.8 billion acquisition of Change Healthcare, which it has merged with its Optum business. Change Healthcare has requested that Nasdaq de-list its stock from the exchange.

Reader Comments

From Apoagathos: “Re: CHI Catholic Health Initiatives. Looks like they were the victim of a ransomware attack yesterday.” CommonSpirit Health, CHI’s parent company, experienced an IT security incident Monday that impacted some of CHI’s facilities. CHI took some of its systems offline, including Epic.

Webinars

October 12 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “In Praise of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record (POMR).” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, KeyCare; Amber Sieja, MD, senior medical director of informatics, UCHealth and Ambulatory Services; Jim Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO. The problem-oriented medical record – initially developed in the 1960s by Lawrence Weed, MD – brought important structure to paper charting, and in particular, the problem list. Yet, today, the tool that was once the gold standard for organizing and making sense of patient history is often cluttered and unmanageable. Fortunately, tools and strategies exist to help make the problem list more meaningful, helping to synthesize patient data, highlight insights, and support patient care. The expert panel will share their experiences with POMR, including documentation practices and tools to improve workflows and efficiency, the impact of POMR and charting on the overall health of a patient, and the challenges and obstacles clinicians face when practicing POMR and charting and how they can be overcome.

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CTG acquires Eleviant Tech, a digital transformation company specializing in mobile, cloud, robotic process automation, and AI across multiple verticals including healthcare.

People

ChartSpan names Nic Erickson (Anthem) VP of patient enrollment and clinical operations.

Appalachian Regional Healthcare (KY) promotes VP of IT and CTO Mike Roberts to the additional role of CISO.

Jeff Silverman (Qualifacts) joins AccessOne as its first chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Harnett Health (NC) switches from Meditech to Epic as part of its affiliation with Cape Fear Valley Health.

Government and Politics

ONC launches a dedicated information blocking webpage ahead of the October 6 information-sharing compliance deadline. It will host virtual office hours on October 6 and 27 to help healthcare stakeholders better understand information sharing under ONC’s information-blocking regulations. 

Other

Five months into the role, Cerebral CEO David Mou, MD shares several things the online mental healthcare company is doing in light of federal and media scrutiny around its prescribing, marketing, and patient identity verification practices:

• Expanding internal infrastructure and safeguards to prioritize the most vulnerable patients, especially those at risk for suicide.
• Improving patient ID verification protocols and software to ensure information is accurate and that treatment isn’t offered to minors.
• Reallocating resources from marketing to clinical quality efforts.
• Establishing a Quality Commission of outside experts to conduct performance reviews.

STAT reports that Epic now recommends that its sepsis prediction model be trained on a hospital’s own data before clinical use, and that the company has changed its definition of sepsis onset to a more commonly accepted standard. Epic’s model came under scrutiny earlier this year when a study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that it did not retroactively identify two-thirds of sepsis patients.

Sponsor Updates

• The Ascom US team participates in the Great Cycle Challenge to help beat kids’ cancer.
• Azara Healthcare integrates FindHelp’s social services referral and reporting tool with its Azara DRVS and Care Connect solutions.
• CHIME releases a new Leader2Leader Podcast featuring Oracle Cerner Chief Health Officer Nasim Afsar, MD “Advancing Health Equity.”
• Clinical Architecture EVP Carol Macumber receives the HL7’s 2022 W. Edward Hammond, PhD, Volunteer of the Year Award.
• Wolters Kluwer Health updates its Ovid medical research platform with two new, curated research collections – the Public Health Advantage collection and the Evidence-Based Health collection.
• Baker Tilly publishes its “Healthcare M&A Update H1 2022.”
• Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center upgrades its adoption of Netsmart’s CareFabric platform in support of it becoming a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic.

Blog Posts

• AHUG 2022: Impressions of User Group Meetings (Agfa HealthCare)
• Determining the MS-DRG – Clinical Documentation Improvement (AGS Health)
• Build vs. buy and the capabilities that matter in healthcare IT (Arcadia)
• Hospital-at-home as a care delivery model (Baker Tilly)
• A 988 IT Infrastructure Conversation with Bamboo Health’s Carol Tsang (Bamboo Health)
• Physician opinion: Preparing for the changing role of the practicing physician (Bravado Health)
• By Initiating Pas, Providers Can Give Pharmacists Time with Patients (CoverMyMeds)
• Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt: The Promise of Cloud Computing in Healthcare (CTG)
• Data Standardization and APIs Can Help Pave the Way Toward Data-Driven Healthcare (Diameter Health)
• The Importance of Data Integration is Front-Page News (Dimensional Insight)
• 6 Tips for Becoming a Great Mentor (Divurgent)
• Back to School – for Your Practice, Too! (EClinicalWorks)
• Leader to Leader: A Data Revolution in a Consumer-First World (Clearsense)
• The Exponential Savings Potential for ACO Participants (ChartSpan)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/3/22

Top News

Federal prosecutors indict US Army Major Jamie Lee Henry and his wife, Anna Gabrielian, for conspiracy and disclosing the health information of military personnel to assist Russia with its war against Ukraine.

Henry was a staff internist stationed at Fort Bragg, and Gabrielian an anesthesiologist working at Johns Hopkins during the time of the alleged conspiracy. They met several times with an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian Embassy employee to stress their level of dedication to aiding Russia, eventually handing over the health information of a number of patients at Fort Bragg and Johns Hopkins to demonstrate their ability to access data they believed Russia could then exploit.

They both face up to 15 years in prison.

Reader Comments

From Jaffer Traish: “Re: The White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, & Health. Many announcements listed on the White House fact sheet of commitments. There is an important interop commitment outlined here.” The White House introduced a national strategy on hunger, nutrition, and health at a conference last week, incorporating five pillars that include ensuring public and private healthcare systems address the nutritional needs of all people. To do this, the government recommends screening for food insecurity, incentivizing providers and payers to conduct screenings for food insecurity and other social determinants of health, and supporting the data infrastructure necessary to do so. Traish refers to HL7’s Sync for Social Initiative, which aims to help healthcare stakeholders “better integrate nutrition information within a patient’s electronic health record by accelerating a standards-based approach to implementing universal social needs screening.” Committed participants include Oracle-Cerner, Meditech, Epic, and a number of health systems, payers, and other vendors.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents are in favor of creating a SWIFT-like network for healthcare similar to that of banking, although a significant number aren’t sure what all that involves.

New poll to your right or here: What should HHS do with the October 6 deadline for information sharing?

Webinars

October 12 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “In Praise of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record (POMR).” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, KeyCare; Amber Sieja, MD, senior medical director of informatics, UCHealth and Ambulatory Services; Jim Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO. The problem-oriented medical record – initially developed in the 1960s by Lawrence Weed, MD – brought important structure to paper charting, and in particular, the problem list. Yet, today, the tool that was once the gold standard for organizing and making sense of patient history is often cluttered and unmanageable. Fortunately, tools and strategies exist to help make the problem list more meaningful, helping to synthesize patient data, highlight insights, and support patient care. The expert panel will share their experiences with POMR, including documentation practices and tools to improve workflows and efficiency, the impact of POMR and charting on the overall health of a patient, and the challenges and obstacles clinicians face when practicing POMR and charting and how they can be overcome.

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Frustrated with Talkspace’s declining share price, lack of frontline leadership, and opaque business plans, investor Firstime Ventures calls for the therapy app vendor to appoint a permanent CEO, share its long-term plan, and address rumors of a potential sale. The company has reportedly received acquisition offers from Amwell and MindPath. It went public via a $1.4 billion SPAC in June 2021, but quickly lost stock market momentum. Its co-founder and CEO and head of clinical services both stepped down towards the end of 2021 due to lackluster Q3 results. Talkspace is likely still in the midst of a class-action lawsuit, filed earlier this year, that alleges it misled investors about its financials ahead of its IPO.

Sales

• Memorial Hermann Health System (TX) will switch from Oracle Cerner to Epic beginning early next year.
• EMedical Practice selects Sphere’s TrustCommerce payment processing software.
• Campbell County Health (WY) will go live on Epic next year.

People

Andrea Facini (Active Network) joins WebPT as chief product, marketing, and growth officer.

Verisma names GE Healthcare veteran Michael Fritts (Forced Physics DCT) COO, and promotes Julia Applegate to chief client officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Advata announces GA of Advata Smart AR, automated accounts receivable technology. The company was formed in June through the merging of six of Providence-owned Tegria legacy companies.

Verato develops Universal Identity technology, comprising patient data from EHRs, consumer data from CRMs and other demographic data sources, and provider data from national databases.

Allen County Regional Hospital (KS) goes live on Epic.

Meditech adds patient transport workflows, including an app for transport staff, to its Expanse EHR.

Government and Politics

Madigan Army Medical Center (WA) hosts a decommissioning ceremony for its Composite Health Care System. Science Applications International, now Leidos, was contracted to develop, design, and implement the system for the DoD in 1988. It rolled out across all military treatment facilities between 1992 and 1996, eventually running at 104 host sites with more than 100 interfaces with internal and external systems across the DoD and VA. It went live at Madigan in 1996, and experienced downtime only once, according to Col. (Dr.) David Owshalimpur, chief of nephrology at Madigan: “I always had it open during clinic days. If you knew the correct ‘cheat codes,’ you could fly through CHCS. It was also a much faster way to order labs, medications, and rads [radiological imaging] than AHLTA. So, CHCS was a nice backbone for both Essentris and AHTLA.” The medical center went live on MHS Genesis in 2017.

Other

Researchers at Houston Methodist develop analytics that predict hospitalization outcomes for geriatric patients with dementia on the first or second day of hospital admission with 95.6% accuracy. They hope to develop a corresponding mobile app for ICU and other hospital staff that will alert them to a patient’s likelihood of hospitalization and suggest interventions.

A survey of 115 healthcare executives finds that 55% believe integrating their disparate patient engagement capabilities will be a high priority in the coming year, though 84% believe it will be tough to accomplish with existing technology.

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe customer Bon Secours Mercy Health leverages the company’s Clinical Collaboration solution as part of its new Care Mobility project for nurse communication.
• Premier’s PINC AI Applied Sciences and partners AstraZeneca and Clinithink win a BWB Award for their use of technology-enabled healthcare solutions in the Digital Medicine category.
• RCxRules hosts a successful 2022 National User Conference.
• Surescripts releases a new There’s a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology Podcast, “More is Not Always Better: Making Interoperability Work for Patients & Clinicians.”
• Upfront Healthcare achieves HITRUST risk-based, two-year certification to manage risk, improve security posture, and meet compliance requirements.
• Volpara Health wins a Gold Good Design Award for its Volpara Analytics mammography reporting and quality software.
• WebPT names Marcus Osborne (Walmart Health) to its Board of Directors.
• Wolters Kluwer Health acquires UK-based IJS Publishing Group, which offers peer-reviewed medical journals supporting scientists and authors.
• Vyne Medical will present at the MGMA Medical Practice Excellence: Leaders Conference October 9-12 in Boston.

Blog Posts

• Freezing the squeeze: The three A’s of efficiency (Nordic)
• Address Physician Burnout with Real-Time Prescription Benefit Tools (Arrive Health)
• How to Improve Patient Experiences and Reduce Healthcare Costs (PerfectServe)
• How Caregiving Has Changed Over the Years (Quil)
• Why you should attend Redox Connect Conference 2022 (Redox)
• Empower agents with AI call center capabilities (Talkdesk)
• Delivering on Denials: Novant’s Culture Creates Wins for Physicians, Patients, and Staff (Tegria)
• How to Create Better Physician Schedules: Integrating Technology and Data (TigerConnect)
• The Coming of Age of Cash-Based Practices (WebPT)
• How to enhance your experience when migrating to Epic (Verato)
• Zen Healthcare IT’s Guide to Understanding the Trusted Exchange Frameworks (Zen Healthcare IT)
• The Importance of Providing Meaningful Educational Resources to Your Patients (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 9/30/22

Top News

The Wall Street Journal exposes lax patient identification verification at Cerebral, an online prescription drug company that has come under fire in recent months for potentially violating the Controlled Substances Act. An internal memo obtained by the paper says the company eschewed using its patient ID verification software because it slowed down the registration process, enabling some minors to receive treatment without parental consent. 

The company, which has raised $462 million, is facing an FTC investigation into its advertising and marketing, a federal inquiry into its prescribing practices, and the refusal of retail pharmacies like CVS and Walmart to fill its prescriptions.

Cerebral fired its founder and CEO in May and began laying off 350 employees in July.

Webinars

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kidney care company InterWell Health acquires Acumen Physician Solutions, the nephrology-focused EHR and practice management software division of Fresenius Medical Care. Acumen’s offerings include technology co-developed with Epic. Fresenius’ value-based care division, Fresenius Health Partners, merged with Cricket Health and InterWell last month.

Tech-enabled, senior-focused mental healthcare startup Rippl launches with $32 million in seed funding. The company will initially offer its virtual and home-based care programs through payers in the Seattle area.

People

Avel ECare promotes Kelly Rhone, MD to chief medical officer.

Dave Cassel (Safe Health Systems) joins Health Gorilla as SVP of customer success and operations.

Keltie Jamieson (Horizon Health Network) joins the Bermuda Hospitals Board as CIO ahead of its Cerner go-live next month.

Announcements and Implementations

Particle Health develops an API enabling EHR vendors to connect their customers to Carequality, CommonWell, and EHealth Exchange.

Christus Southeast Texas Health System launches a stroke-detection program using telestroke services from TeleSpecialists and care coordination software from Viz.ai.

Government and Politics

The FDA issues new guidance for clinical decision support software that should be regulated as medical devices, including AI-powered technologies that predict the likelihood of sepsis, heart-failure hospitalizations, and/or patient deterioration; as well as software that flags patients who may be addicted to opioids.

A GAO analysis of telehealth services used by Medicare beneficiaries between April 2019 and December 2020 finds that use of services increased from 5 million to 53 million visits – an increase in keeping with the temporary waiver of certain Medicare restrictions on telehealth during the pandemic, and that 5% of providers delivered 40% of services. Analysts recommend that CMS offer providers more concrete guidance on billing for audio-only visits, require providers to identify when virtual visits are conducted in patient homes, and assess the quality of virtual care delivered during the pandemic. It also recommends that OCR offer providers guidance on how to explain privacy and security risks to telemedicine patients.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough says it’s too soon to tell if an August EHR update by Oracle Cerner has finally fixed an “unknown queue” problem that caused thousands of clinical orders to disappear in an unmonitored inbox, causing patients to miss follow-up appointments. “We continue to have concerns about queues, unknown queues, unknown kind of areas where … veterans may end up,” he said. “I think that concern is significant enough that we’re not talking about a single, discrete issue that would suggest … a single discrete fix. But rather, they’re a pretty fundamental set of improvements. We’re continuing to make assessments about how big the challenge is.”

Other

Hurricane Ian leaves catastrophic damage caused by severe flooding, high winds, and power outages after hitting Florida’s West Coast Wednesday. Staff at HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital in Port Charlotte saw the ICU flood after its roof was blown off, and storm surge flood the lower level emergency room.

Sponsor Updates

• NTT Data sponsors The Children’s Inn Golf INNvitational.
• First Databank names Brittany Pritsch and Jasmine Stuckey research associates, and Nikki Sleeper regional manager.
• Get Well publishes a new case study, “Putting the patient first in digital care management.”
• Intelligent Medical Objects publishes a new case study featuring the University of Manchester, “Enhancing NLP with clinical terminology.”
• Netsmart announces its intent to become a Qualified Health Information Network.
• Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Humanitarian City in Dubai extends its contract with InterSystems for another five years.
• Clearsense publishes a new infographic, “6 Questions for Healthcare Data Transparency.”
• Zynx Health introduces a complimentary Monkeypox order set and care plan bundle.

Blog Posts

• The medical problem list toolkit (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Execution Over Perfection: Use the ‘Gift of Constraints’ to Help Your Rehab Therapy Clinic Succeed (Net Health)
• AI in Radiology, part 5: How to amplify the impact of radiology reporting (Nuance)
• What’s a vCISO and Why Do You Need One? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Physician EHR as a Detriment to Patient Experience? (ChartLogic)

Contacts

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

News 9/28/22

Top News

A JAMA study of 104 million clinical notes made over six years within the Penn Medicine Health System finds that the total text of 50.1% had been copied from prior text written about the same patient. Duplication increased yearly, from 33% for notes written in 2015 to 54.2% for notes written in 2020.

The study’s authors say duplication “casts doubt on the veracity of all information in the medical record,” makes certain information hard to find, and causes information scatter.

The implications of copy-and-paste-induced “note bloat” were also mentioned in a recent JAMIA article, “Do electronic health record systems ‘dumb down’ clinicians?” The authors pointed out that the use of copy-and-paste is potentially misleading and dangerous. (Dr. Jayne offers a summary of and her thoughts on the members-only content here.)

Webinars

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Surgical care coordination software vendor DocSpera raises $10 million in a Series B funding round.

The local paper looks at NeuroFlow’s new 16,000-square-foot office space in Philadelphia, its fifth location since launching at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. The software company, which focuses on helping physical healthcare providers integrate behavioral healthcare services, has raised $32 million. I interviewed CEO Christopher Molaro in March.

Sales

• Baptist Health South Florida selects remote patient monitoring technology from Raziel Health.
• Mater Private Network will implement Meditech Expanse across its nine facilities in Ireland by 2024.

People

Excela Health (PA) names Vasanth Balu (Optum) SVP and CIO.

Everbridge names David Alexander (F5) chief marketing officer.

David Peterson (AccuReg) joins Edifecs as SVP of marketing.

CereHealth promotes Shane Quint to president and CTO.

Bamboo Health hires Russell Olsen (WebPT) as chief product officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Watertown Regional Medical Center (MA) launches a remote monitoring program for patients with chronic conditions using technology from Cadence.

Clearsense adds Alexandria Charts, unstructured clinical data analysis technology developed by UPMC Enterprises, to its data management software.

AGS Health announces GA of AI-powered, automated revenue cycle management services.

Allegheny Health Network (PA) adds appointment scheduling capabilities from DocASAP, part of Optum, to its Epic patient portal.

Government and Politics

The 20th Medical Group at Shaw Air Force Base (SC), Naval Hospital Jacksonville and Naval Branch Health Clinics Jacksonville, Key West, and Mayport (FL), and the 14th Medical Group at Columbus Air Force Base (MS) go live on MHS Genesis. CAFB has warned patients that hackers have created fake MHS Genesis website links to take advantage of the system transition, and to only use the official MHS Genesis website address to access information.

VA officials consider proposing new patient care eligibility standards in the coming months, including pushing veterans to telemedicine appointments before giving them the option of care outside of the VA system.

CyncHealth warns the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services that it will no longer be able to operate the state’s HIE and PDMP if the department doesn’t make good on the $11 million owed on its contract. State officials have blamed the payment shortage on changes in federal funding. CyncHealth, meanwhile, has had to borrow money to pay its 75 employees, and has been unable to pay some of its technology vendors.

Other

An analysis of NHS England prescription and patient safety data reveals that 98 hospital trusts saw an increase in prescription errors in 2021, while 105 saw a decrease. Records indicate that 6,000 patients suffered some level of harm from those errors, with 49 experiencing severe harm and 29 leading to death. Nearly one in six NHS England facilities have yet to implement electronic prescribing.

A digital artist discovers that her medical photos are now part of a data set used to train AI image generators, despite signing a consent form indicating they were not to be shared.

Sponsor Updates

• Arcadia will host its annual Aggregate Conference October 12-14 in Chicago.
• Bamboo Health will sponsor Tufts University’s Women in Tech even October 1 in Boston.
• Biofourmis will present at DTxEast September 28 in Boston.
• ChartSpan partners with the South Carolina Medical Association.
• CHIME releases a new 30^th Anniversary Podcast, “Unity with Rick Skinner, 1999 Board Chair.”
• Clearwater will present at the Virginia HIMSS Fall Conference September 26-28 in Williamsburg, VA.
• Cloudwave will exhibit at the New England HIMSS Regional NH/VT Fall Conference September 28.
• CoverMyMeds employees have spent 1,508 hours volunteering with 100-plus organizations as part of the company’s CoverMyCommunity initiative.
• Diameter Health will present at the virtual NLP Summit October 4.

Blog Posts

• Virtual waiting rooms: How to create a five-star telehealth experience (AdvancedMD)
• Value-based care and fully delegated risk: Which model is right for your healthcare organization? (Arcadia)
• Leverage internal audit to minimize risk in medical leadership contracting and compensation processes (Baker Tilly)
• Simplifying administrative tasks for improved health outcomes and enhanced provider experience (Bravado Health)
• Digital Certificates Help Protect Healthcare Data from Cyberattack (Philips Capsule)
• Takeaways from the Chicago Care Coordination Summit (CarePort Health)
• Healthcare IT Service Desk: How to Improve Work Life Balance and Satisfaction (CereCore)
• True marriage of health and tech is needed to improve lives globally (Oracle Cerner)
• Physician EHR as a Detriment to Patient Experience? (ChartLogic)
• That Hospital EHR System Costs Too Much (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/26/22

Top News

Tony Blair Institute for Global Change recommends that the UK government recruit 30% of adults to participate in wearables-powered public health interventions by 2027.

It also recommends that the government restart pilots that motivate people to improve nutrition and exercise and to give people over 50 years of age free devices if they meet activity targets.

The executive summary says that the Department of Health & Social Care focuses on managing patient demand, but only one paragraph mentions prevention, which it says is essential to NHS’s survival.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Questionable terminology aside, the “quiet quitting” thing might be real — 45% of poll respondents say they aren’t willing to work as hard now as they did two years ago.

New poll to your right or here, following up on my conversation with Lyniate’s Erkan Akyuz: Should healthcare create a member-owned network, like banking’s SWIFT, so participants can exchange information reliably and cost-effectively?

I got my COVID booster and flu shot Thursday in the same arm at Walgreens, with no problems except a little bit of dull soreness if I rub it just right. Mrs. H had moderate fatigue and whole-body muscle aches after her injections, which leads me to hope that my minimal reaction was due to luck rather than failure to mount a robust immune response. I’m still embarrassed that the primary output is a paper card with scrawled entries, but at least Walgreens keeps an electronic record and I keep photos of my two-card set on my phone for whomever is the first person to ask to see them.

For prospective HIStalk sponsors (everybody else cover your ears): sign up now and beat 2023’s price increase, the first in many years. Tell Lorre you’re in. I appreciate the support, and my influential readers are usually interested in hearing about companies that provide it. A 2021 survey found that 94% of readers gain interest in a company that they read about on HIStalk, while 82% say they have a higher interest in my sponsors (who don’t gain any influence over what I write, in case you didn’t know that already).

Webinars

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kaufman Hall will acquire clinical documentation consulting firm Claro Healthcare.

Covenant Health outsources some IT functions, most notably cybersecurity, to Long80, which will offer employment to the 104 affected health system employees. Long80 is a collaboration between global IT services provider GAVS Technologies and Premier, Inc.

Announcements and Implementations

UnitedHealth Group’s Optum increases licensing fees for academic institutions to use its de-identified insurance claims data, forcing researchers to scramble for alternatives to spending tens of of thousands of dollars per study.

South Korea-based Hanwha Techwin integrates its intelligent IP pan-tilt-zoom cameras with Epic, which will allow hospital staff to monitor patients remotely by video and to conduct two-way communication with a remote sitter.

Government and Politics

Former HHS officials challenge an HHS OIG report’s findings that its HHS Protect system of hospital COVID-19 data collection using technology from TeleTracking, which was implemented in nine days, did not meet basic cybersecurity standards. OIG rescinded the report, citing inaccuracies, and says it will reissue a revised version.

Other

Sansum Clinic CIO Sean Johnson, RN, MHA (aka Professor Sean – he’s also a MHA adjunct at USC) posts the first in a series of nicely done consumer-focused YouTube courses called “Healthcare 101.”

Lumeris VP Rick Goddard, MS posted this graphic (click to enlarge) on LinkedIn that shows the relative strength of healthcare’s vertical integrators (Optum, CVS, Amazon, and local health systems) in each part of the care continuum. I might suggest adding Walmart and Walgreens to the chart. (You can check out his original blog on the topic here.)

Two of Saturday’s top stories in the New York Times involve the profits that are being generated by tax-exempt health systems:

• Providence’s “Rev-Up” program – designed by consulting firm McKinsey at a cost of $45 million — strong-armed patients to pay bills even if they were legally entitled to free care. The article notes that Providence avoids paying $1 billion per year in taxes while offering a low percentage of charity care, pays its CEO $10 million per year, and runs a Wall Street-style venture capital fund as part of its $10 billion reserves.
• Bon Secours Mercy Health, which generated $100 million per year in profit from inner city Richmond Community Hospital by taking advantage of 340B drug discounts and then investing the mark-up profits in wealthy neighborhoods. The Times says Bon Secours made $1 billion in profit last year, avoided $440 million in taxes as a non-profit, and paid its CEO $6 million. It says that the city gave Bon Secours a below-market lease on land to expand Richmond Community’s facilities and to open a nursing school, but the chain instead built luxury apartments and turned the hospital into a “glorified emergency room” in stripping services and shutting down its ICU. The 340B discount allows Richmond Community to buy a $25,000 per dose cancer drug for $3,400, giving the hospital an overall 44% profit margin, the highest in the state. A former Richmond Community ED doctor summarizes, “Bon Secours was basically laundering money through this poor hospital to its wealthy outposts.”

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom publishes a new report, “Nursing Satisfaction: What Matters Most at Work.”
• Oracle Cerner expands its partnership with customer King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre in Saudi Arabia to include developing shared ideas and research around data and AI.
• Optimum Healthcare IT advances to Elite Partner status in the ServiceNow Partner Program.
• Quil publishes a “Caregiver Discussion Guide.”
• Volpara Health launches a professional services program to help customers maximize the value of their high-risk cancer assessment programs.
• PodSass features SyTrue CEO Kyle Silvestro on its latest podcast.
• TigerConnect releases a new episode of The Connected Care Team Podcast, “Coordinating Clinical Workflows at CommonSpirit.”
• Volpara Health will sell RevealDx’s RevealAI-Lung, AI-powered software that helps accelerate lung cancer diagnosis and reduce unnecessary procedures, in Australia and New Zealand.
• WebPT publishes “The Complete Guide to Physical Therapy Billing.”
• West Monroe publishes a new client story, “MyEyeDr: A new digital scheduling experience increases online bookings by 2.5 times.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new case study, “Conway Regional achieves sepsis program quality and financial goals.”

Blog Posts

• 5 metrics for a more effective utilization management program (Olive)
• Digital-first for Better Patient Outreach and Improved Response (Orbita)
• Why Providers and Patients Benefit from Value-Based Care (PatientBond)
• ONC Cures Act Final Rule: 4 Tips for Compliance by October 6 (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Research Needs Robust Data: The CDC Utilizes the PINC AI Healthcare Database (Premier)
• How Smart Speakers Can Enhance Aging at Home (Quil)
• Insights from the RCxRules 2022 National User Conference: Staffing Shortages and Remote Work are Still Top of Mind (RCxRules)
• Ophthalmology: this is enterprise imaging (Sectra)
• Soothing the Economic Sting with the Inflation Reduction Act – and Health Technology (Surescripts)
• How to leverage AI in the contact center to improve health plan member experience (Talkdesk)
• Social Determinants of Health: Where Do We Start? (Zynx Health)

HIStalk sponsors exhibiting at AHIMA October 9-12 in Columbus, OH include:

• AGS Health
• Clinical Architecture
• Intelligent Medical Objects
• Nuance
• Nym Health
• Optum
• Wolters Kluwer

Contacts

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

News 9/23/22

Top News

VA Deputy Secretary Donald Remy tells Congress that its Oracle Cerner system is “not even close” to meeting patient needs and that “major improvements” are needed to resolve patient safety issues, which may force planned go-lives to be pushed back.

The VA’s top contracting officer added in the Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing that the VA “shouldn’t blindly follow” DoD even though that’s why VA originally chose Cerner in a $10 billion no-bid contract. He added that the VA may renegotiate its Oracle Cerner deal when the base contract expires in May.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), chairman of the Senate Committee on VA Affairs, said that the implementation has been a “train wreck.”

The VA’s Cerner project will cost $58 billion over 28 years, according to the testimony of Brian Rieksts, PhD of the Institute for Defense Analysis, which the VA asked to perform an independent life cycle cost estimate.

Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia told the subcommittee that Oracle Cerner will “deliver a system that will leapfrog commercial EHRs” at no extra cost to the VA. “We intend to rewrite the Millennium EHR as a stateless cloud application which will deliver a modern user interface, ease of use, mobility, voice recognition, and self service. It will have machine learning-based clinical decision support and analytics that are built in from the ground up. We intend to deliver a beta of this new system in 2023 and we commit to deliver it across VA as a cost-free upgrade under the current contract.” Sicilia says that new modules will run in parallel with existing Millennium software, allowing VA to decide when to switch to the new ones without requiring data conversion.

Asked by Sen. Tester where the VA’s project fits within Oracle’s priorities, Sicilia said, “This is the most important effort we have going on in the company. We have recast over 2,000 people, existing Oracle employees, to now work specifically on the VA EHRM program, in addition to the existing Cerner team.” He says the original 10-year timeline is still achievable.

Oracle has contracted with Accenture for training, which Sicilia admits was managed better with the DoD’s project.

Meanwhile, several members of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee want to increase congressional oversight of the VA’s technology acquisitions, citing as examples its supply chain management system (adopted from DoD at a $2 billion cost, with OIG saying it meets less than half of VA’s needs) and Oracle Cerner, which Chairman Mark Takano (D-CA) calls “the poster child for major acquisition issues at the VA.”

Reader Comments

From Buoyancy: “Re: Touchstone Imaging security incident. I received this letter from the company, which has $200 million in annual revenue, nine months after the incident with no explanation of what happened. They didn’t even offer free credit monitoring.” The company’s imaging centers basically shut down temporarily after the December 24, 2021 incident, with employees telling reporters that a hacker had taken down their phones, computers, and imaging systems. In older related news, Touchstone paid $3 million in 2019 to settle HHS OCR charges that a misconfigured FTP server allowed patient information to be Googled by anyone, claiming at first that no PHI was exposed until OCR’s investigation found otherwise. Touchstone was apparently acquired in late 2018 by US Radiology Services, a private equity-backed diagnostic imaging provider, although the companies refer to their connection as a “partnership.”

From Hatton Hand: “Re: Emerge. The data archive solution has been down for more than two weeks and I can’t access critical patient health information. The company is unresponsive.” I contacted Emerge, which provided this response:

Emerge is in discussions with a number of potential equity partners to restart operations and help the company grow to its potential. Emerge understands the concerns of its customers and the importance of getting back online as quickly as possible and is doing everything that it can to make that happen by the end of September.

From Patient Identity: “Re: SOP for Individual Access. Wondering if anyone has reviewed this recent SOP from ONC? I’m interested in what industry folks think. Check out twitter feed for @HITpolicywonk on this topic.” The Standard Operating Procedure document describes how the identities of patients who are seeking access to their information are verified by a credential service provider. Genevieve Morris worries that subtle wording of the requirements make participation optional and may lead EHR vendors to charge CSPs to access their systems.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A New York Times piece led me to check out the YouTube series of King Crimson’s 76-year-old leader Robert Fripp, who is mostly known as a scowling, audience-indifferent, hard-to-work-with musical perfectionist. Fripp, wearing his usual vest and tie, plays guitar and rolls his eyes as his wife of 36 years – singer and actress Toyah Willcox — sings and gyrates remarkably in the couple’s kitchen to music ranging from Radiohead to Britney Spears in their video series titled “Sunday Lunch with Toyah & Robert.”  

Webinars

October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Financial analysts warn that outpatient surgery center and physician staffing operator Envision Healthcare will likely run out of cash and file bankruptcy by the end of the year.

NTT Data will acquire MuleSoft consulting firm Apisero.

Sales

• England’s University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust chooses BridgeHead Software for application decommissioning.
• Life sciences research company Nference will use de-identified EHR data from Mayo Clinic and will create a Mayo-branded version of its NSights platform..

People

Amwell promotes Brian Donahue, MHSA to VP of sales of Amwell Behavioral Health.

Wolters Kluwer, Health promotes Chris Sullivan, MBA to VP/GM of the commercial segment for clinical effectiveness.

Matt Lenz (Teladoc Health) joins Posterity Health as SVP of sales and partnerships.

MPulse Mobile hires Lara Stell, CPA (GlobalTranz) as CFO and Sanjeev Sawai, MS (HealthEdge) as chief product and technology officer.

Announcements and Implementations

A CMS-funded study by National Quality Forum looks at using EHR-generated measures to improve care communication and coordination. A few of its ideas:

• Update data bi-directionally in real time between EHRs and HIEs with patient permission, sharing the information with non-traditional healthcare settings and community-based organizations.
• Collect patient-reported intake and outcome data electronically.
• Add patient and caregiver preferred languages as an EHR data element.
• Support patient and care team communication via secure email and telemedicine.
• Allow patients to upload their own information, such as records from other providers, via the patient portal.
• Configure EHRs to notify clinicians when a patient misses an appointment or fails to fill a prescription.
• Allow clinicians to “Google the chart” to find relevant data.
• Use EHR data to calculate risk for the clinician and patient to review together.
• Identify all care team members, their roles, and the contribution to outcomes.
• Add standardized data elements for care planning, goals of care with clinician assessment, reasons for transitions in care, perceived accuracy of clinical notes with edit capability, perceived care quality and trust, and patient preferences such as advance directives.

Maryland’s state legislature grants CRISP, the state-designated HIE, authority to operate as a health data utility, where it will be required to provide patient data to support public health goals. The state’s department of health, nursing homes, electronic health networks, and pharmacies will be required to send data to CRISP.

The Sequoia Project’s Information Blocking Compliance Workgroup publishes resources to help entities comply with the information blocking requirements of the 21st Century Cures Rule that go into effect on October 6.

USPTO issues a patent to Medicomp Systems for intelligent prompting of clinical protocols.

Emory Healthcare will go live on Epic on October 1, replacing Cerner.

Privacy and Security

A Washington Post review finds that several popular Android health apps send information to advertisers. It notes that the identifiers that are sent don’t directly identify the user, though privacy experts warn that being targeted by an advertiser using specific health concerns or conditions is jarring.

HHS waives HIPAA sanctions and penalties in Puerto Rico, where a public health emergency has been declared following Hurricane Fiona.

Other

IT services firm Wipro fires 300 employees who took advantage of work-from-home policies to moonlight for competing firms.

An NHS trust apologizes to 1,800 patients who were removed from its six-month appointment waiting list by robotic process automation technology that wasn’t being monitored. RPA software vendor Blue Prism found a caching issue, but a significant problem was that the RPA rules hadn’t been updated with new procedures for managing various NHS wait lists because the hospital’s only RPA expert had changed jobs.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart announces its intention to become a Qualified Health Information Network.
• Oracle Cerner publishes a new e-book, “Improving Clinical, Financial, and Operational Workflows as a Real-Time Health System.”
• GHX VP of Healthcare Value Karen Conway receives a Women in Supply Chain Award from Supply & Demand Chain Executive.
• Kyruus publishes a new case study, “Reinventing Digital Patient Access at SCL Health (now Intermountain Healthcare).”
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions awards Virginia Commonwealth University student Taylor Johnson its inaugural Life Lessons Scholarship.
• Lyniate publishes a new white paper, “Avoiding the pitfalls of poor patient identification.”
• Netsmart Technologies and NeuroFlow will include CAM-care’s Suicide Status Form in their platforms and client records to better assess and treat suicidal thoughts.
• KLAS ranks Nuance’s Dragon Ambient EXperience number one for improving clinician experiences in its “2022 Emerging Solutions Top 20” report.

Blog Posts

• True marriage of health and tech is needed to improve lives globally (Oracle Cerner)
• For physicians, less is often more (Nordic)
• Let HDM Manage Your Epic Go-Lives (Health Data Movers)
• Don’t Boil the Content Ocean: Tips for a Focused Content Strategy (Healthwise)
• Improved Revenue Cycle Management with Data Interoperability (InterSystems)
• The ‘new black:’ Why specificity matters in clinical terminology (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• How Medhost EHR Leverages AWS Analytics (Medhost)
• How Can Value-Based Care Models, Like MIPS, Help Improve Quality of Care in Rehab Therapy? (Net Health)
• Question, Persuade, and Refer: The Importance of Suicide Prevention Training (Netsmart)
• Curing the post-implementation blues (Nordic)

HIStalk sponsors exhibiting at the MGMA Medical Practice Excellence: Leaders Conference October 9-12 in Boston include:

• Availity
• Bamboo Health
• CoverMyMeds
• Dimensional Insight
• EClinicalWorks
• HCTec
• Kyruus
• Meditech
• Nuance
• TigerConnect
• Upfront Healthcare
• Vyne Medical
• Well Health

Contacts

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