Monday Morning Update 11/21/22

Top News

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

A law professor concludes, “Fraud cannot masquerade as innovation in Silicon Valley.”

Theranos had raised nearly $1 billion from investors in valuing the company at $9 billion.

Sunny Balwani, former COO and a romantic partner of Holmes, is scheduled for sentencing on December 7 on 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Reader Comments

From Les Diables Bleus: “Re: HLTH. I had a full three days of what I felt to be high-value networking — not sales, mind you, which don’t happen at conferences. It’s a good show to see what’s trending (remote point solutions and health equity) and to meet potential partners. Running into a provider was like a unicorn sighting, which is ironic since that is the HLTH mascot. It is like an all-inclusive resort in that food, drinks, and entertainment were easy to find and included. My exhibitor friends said it was easy to have a booth since HLTH manufactures it with your logo and minimal customization, puts it up, and tears it down so you don’t have to deal with shipping, Freeman, or late-night installations. I would definitely attend again purely for the networking.”

From Kitschy Kicks: “Re: HLTH. How appropriate that it was in Las Vegas, where the house always smites players who think their smarts will make them winners.” It’s a pretty good analogy that brash startups were probably emboldened by the heady atmosphere of both the conference and the Strip into thinking that they can beat the house. Companies that don’t provably solve a problem that prospects will pay for in a financially strained environment, that aren’t making money, and that took too much investor cash and have little to show for it probably don’t need to plan much for HLTH 2023.

From Been There: “Re: HLTH. Our company refuses to pay to play for sessions or articles. The challenge is when customers expect us there to support them, and when VC groups are uneducated but still influential (like former CMS execs). It’s worth a 24-hour trip to keep folks honest.” Plus your attendance entitled you to be a guest on an endless number of podcasts and video interviews that nobody will ever consume. And to hear the inspirational story, for his speaking fee of more than $100,000, of how Lance Armstrong overcame adversity (choosing to be the dirtiest doper, cheater, and bullying liar in the history of sports) to start a new and possibly related career in health and wellness investing.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents have a LinkedIn profile and 92% of them contain a headshot, more than half of which were taken professionally. Nearly 20% of the headshots are more than seven years old, so couple that with professional retouching and there’s a pretty good chance that you might need to squint to see the resemblance in person.

New poll to your right or here: Will HLTH, ViVE, and the CHIME Fall Forum have a major negative effect on the HIMSS conference? I differentiate my readership from that of other sites by the number of decision-makers who read HIStalk, an advantage that HIMSS has traditionally enjoyed in attracting exhibitors. New conferences may be poaching that desirable audience from HIMSS. The biggest threat to HIMSS is no longer the obvious one, that in-person conferences will be replaced by virtual ones (which were pretty much a complete bust during the pandemic’s darkest days), but rather that the newer conferences offer an alternative that is drawing a response.

I mentioned recently an announcement of two companies that consummated what was labeled as a “merger” even though it was obviously an outright acquisition that wasn’t called that to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the acquiree. Legally speaking, a merger occurs when two companies join together to form a new company, and if there’s no new company, then it is an acquisition (there’s very little “M” in “M&A.”) Even “AP Stylebook” warns reporters that true mergers of equals are nearly unknown and should be called that cautiously – PR BS aside, if it will be the same company name, CEO, and headquarters location, they bought the other company.

Mrs. H saw my mention of the Meta Quest 2 virtual reality system and got me one as a special occasion gift. It is crazy immersive and lots of fun even with the limited number of apps I have so far — mini-golf, Beat Saber, and table tennis (those last two are sweat-inducing exercise). I don’t like giving money to Facebook and they could kill off the product line as they run the company into the ground chasing a Metaverse pipe dream, but it’s fun in the mean time. I nearly face-planted when I leaned in for a table tennis shot and tried to catch myself on the realistic yet imaginary table.

I’m looking at the short list of conditions that just-launched Amazon Clinic will treat via text messaging, which includes problems such as dandruff, motion sickness, and birth control. I’m questioning how much value the messaging adds clinically over just making the drugs that are used to treat these conditions non-prescription. You could easily train a pharmacy technician to read the questionnaire results from kiosk or online entry, then hand over the meds if indicated with any appropriate instructions or warnings, which is about all online doctors would do. “Prescribing what patients ask for” is a common business model that adds little value. The new Amazon Clinic is really just Amazon advertising the services of other companies, as it does with its fraud playground of China-based sellers of electronic devices or clothing items whose disposable company names look like a cat wandered across a keyboard. 

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

Sales

• Redox will implement terminology solutions from Intelligent Medical Objects

People

Kaiser Permanente promotes Mark Simon to VP/CIO of Washington and Colorado.

Stephanie Rogers, RN, MBA (Cerner) joins Children’s Mercy Kansas City as CNIO and senior director of nursing, heath informatics, and technology.

Announcements and Implementations

Sanford Health and Fairview Health Services announce plans to merge into a 58-hospital system under the Sanford Health name and CEO.

A report by Providence’s Digital Innovation Group says that health systems should take a retail-like “digital flywheel” approach in using technology to keep in touch with people who otherwise have only infrequent encounters. The authors say the EHR is a big barrier for outreach – it requires clinician involvement, it doesn’t support all lines of business, and it doesn’t address all types of consumer interaction. They recommend an Amazon-type system that applies algorithmic personalization to data to create a digital consumer identity. They say that unlike Amazon, health systems already offer a wide variety of services and have connections to partners that they can recommend to consumers. The report says that such efforts can be profitable to health systems given the $1.2 million lifetime value of a patient and that simply being able to assign a PCP is valued at $3,000. I’m a bit skeptical since Providence and other health systems have profited nicely from selling interventional care and well-intentioned attempts to offer wellness services nearly always fail for several reasons (lack of consumer motivation, ever-changing health plans, and a lack of clinically documented effectiveness). And perhaps the biggest challenge – whether consumers really want an ongoing relationship with their local health system as they might with Amazon or Starbucks. Personally as a “no news is good news” sort, I’m thrilled not to hear from my local medical center.  

Government and Politics

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sends a Civil Investigative Demand letter to Epic demanding that the company explain its policies on children’s health information. He says he is following up on complaints from parents that they lost access to the records of their children who were treated at Memorial Hermann Health System once the child reached 13 years of age. The health system, which is also targeted by Paxton’s investigation, says it is not aware of any parent complaints. Paxton said in a comment about his Epic inquiries, “Too many companies are taking marching orders from the radical left, especially when it comes to their all-out assault on family values and parental rights.”

Privacy and Security

First responders in Ontario go back to paper when its IMedic software is taken offline by a cyberattack.

Other

A JAMA Network opinion piece says that patient satisfaction surveys aren’t suitable for evaluating physician performance. The authors reference an interesting previous study in which the patients who rated doctors highest had higher costs and mortality rates. They observe that most patient survey instruments are old and weren’t designed to reward high scorers. They also note that physician panel size and workload means that one disgruntled patient can drag down a clinician’s score unfairly (see: sour Yelp whiners). They urge public and private payers to stop using patient satisfaction scores for quality assessment and payment.

A randomized clinical trial finds that patient portal messages reminding parents that their child is due for a well child visit and COVID-19 vaccinations increased the rates of scheduling both.

Sponsor Updates

• Meditech Expanse customers in Canada can now integrate directly with digital care journey platform SeamlessMD.
• Clearsense publishes a new infographic, “Shorten the Runway for Your Data Platform.”
• PerfectServe announces the full integration of AnesthesiaGo with its Lightning Bold scheduling platform, and new automation capabilities for improved integration between Lightning Bolt and its clinical communication solutions.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new series of podcasts on “Achieving Success Through Data Capture and Effective Communications.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health will serve as the exclusive digital distributor of subscriptions to the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM Evidence, NEJM Catalyst, and NEJM Journal Watch
• Premier’s PINC AI Applied Sciences team partners with Henry Ford Innovations to host the inaugural Advancing Health Equity Through Innovation and Collaboration event.
• The Dutch Ministry of Defense expands its use of Sectra’s Tiger mobile encryption system to include secure file distribution.
• Talkdesk adds Automation Designer and Workspace Designer to its Talkdesk Builder suite of low-code and no-code customization tools for contact center development.
• West Monroe’s Alanna Discque receives the 2022 Dallas Ft. Worth Admin Award in the Spirit category.
• Black Book Research names Zen Healthcare IT as the top-rated healthcare IT advisor for interoperability and integration.

Blog Posts

• Preparing for Healthcare’s Post-COVID Biggest Challenges: Join us for Innovate 4Outcomes (OptimizeRx)
• Handling Revenue Integrity During M&A (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Using Healthcare-Related Data to Drive Decisions in the 21st Century (Premier)
• Employers Benefit from Smart Home Technology Designed to Give Their Caregiver Employees Peace of Mind (Quil)
• How to Get Leadership Buy-in for HCC Coding Solutions (RCxRules)
• Checklist: 6 Features to Look for in a Patient Scheduling Solution (Relatient)
• What are virtual agents? Benefits, and how to get started (Talkdesk)
• The Growing Threat of Cyberattacks in Healthcare (TigerConnect)
• When is the Best Time to Switch Physical Therapy Software? (WebPT)
• Getting Stakeholders on the Same Clinical Page: A Costly Proposition (Zynx Health)

HIStalk sponsors exhibiting at RSNA November 27-30 in Chicago include:

• Agfa HealthCare
• Lyniate
• Nuance
• Nym Health
• OneMedNet
• Sectra
• Visage Imaging
• Volpara Health
• Wolters Kluwer Health

Contacts

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

News 11/18/22

Top News

EHNAC (Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission) will merge with DirectTrust on January 4, 2023, giving DirectTrust access to EHNAC’s accreditation programs.

Reader Comments

From Dr. X: “Re: NEJM telemedicine article. It is classic that in the US, (a) we figure out that we need to do something — in this case, that further research is advocated — long after we actually implement something, and (b) because of our strange way of paying for healthcare (insurance and Medicare covers most costs), we feel that we need to research something that clearly has huge benefits (and some drawbacks), when in all other industries, market forces provide the answers.” The NEJM article, titled “Informing the Debate about Telemedicine Reimbursement – What Do We Need to Know?” says that we still don’t know whether telemedicine costs are additive to existing costs (some studies say yes) or whether its use improves outcomes. The authors conclude that permanent telehealth payment policies could include (a) higher co-payments for lower-value services to encourage clinicians to limit the use of telehealth; (b) implementation of bundled programs that put the usage controls on payers; and (c) paying for audio-only visits only if the clinician attests that they offer video visits that the patient declined.

From Informatics Daktari: “Re: HLTH. There was very little work being done there. I thought it was one of the most low-value conferences I’ve been to in a long time. Very much ‘see and be seen’ and felt like it was all startups looking for money.” I think the definition of “low value” is the key here. I’m not sure patients, taxpayers, or insurance-paying employers got anything except another set of expenses with HLTH’s promise of “solving the world’s biggest health challenges” (especially the unprofitable ones), but “value” to some is “catching up” (i.e., hanging out in Las Vegas bars) and pretending that the lyrics of featured performer Ludacris’s “Move Bitch” are profound rather than profane.

From Brought the Bug Home: “Re: HLTH. I should have known better than to attend a conference that has no vaccination or testing requirements. I tested positive upon arriving back home.” I’m curious about others, although I acknowledge that much of the exposure would have been in airports and on public transportation.

From CC Charges: “Re: Cleveland Clinic charging for some MyChart message responses. For or against?” I’m cautiously “for” since, like other professionals, clinicians should be paid for their time regardless of the form in which their customer requests it (your lawyer and accountant aren’t likely offering free advice just because they type it into email). On the other hand, I’m curious whether those providers get paid for the extra time spent. And for that matter, why providers who waste the time of patients through their own inefficiency don’t give them a discount for the inconvenience.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I excise verbal crutches from my interview transcripts, which I’m certain the interviewee doesn’t realize they are using. Most common are verbal tics that are intended to communicate emphasis or authenticity – a recent 20-minute conversation included 33 uses of “really” and 16 of “very” that I omitted from the final version.

HLTH recaps and photos I’ve seen look like quite the glad-handing party for health IT glitterati. I’ve seen nothing to challenge my assertion that conference attendance is driven mostly by mid-level provider executives – of which there are sufficient number to lure exhibitors – who demand that their employer prove their undying love by underwriting their ROI-free mini-vacation. If HIMSS is a boat show, HLTH a glamper-only, investor-focused Burning Man. Meanwhile, Axios opines that HLTH is “eating the conference world” with 9,000 attendees and the possibility of taking some folks away from JP Morgan and HIMSS, although it also notes that the conference’s wagon is hitched to bull market investor glory days that are rapidly becoming a faint memory. I’m pretty sure that quite a few companies blew the last of their investor-donated wads on a HLTH Hail Mary and won’t exist in a year.

Last chance – new HIStalk sponsors who start before December 31 get their 12 months at pre-increase 2022 rates, the same as existing sponsors pay. Lorre has welcomed several new sponsors in the past few weeks.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

FDA and Mitre publish an updated “Medical Device Cybersecurity Regional Incident Preparedness and Response Playbook.”

Genomic testing company Sema4 will exit the reproductive testing business and lay off 500 of its 1,600 employees following a $78 million Q3 loss.

KHN covers private equity’s takeover of the profitable parts of healthcare, which has been sometimes accompanied by patient-endangering profit maximization. Most of the acquisitions – which often involve eye care clinics, dental management chains, physician practices, and hospices – are not subject to regulatory scrutiny since they fall under the $101 million threshold. Another new KHN piece observes that hospitals push vulnerable, confused patients into payment plans, run by big banks and private equity firms, that charge high interest rates. A patient whose hysterectomy forced her to borrow money at 11.5% interest concludes, “Hospitals have found yet another way to monetize our illnesses and our need for medical help,” as many have ended their traditional no-interest payment plans and refer patients to third-party lenders in return for an upfront commission.

My health IT employee advice as a Twitter implosion observer: (a) it’s time look for a new job when richly compensated executives can’t up with a better strategy to fix the problems their strategic misfires caused than to demand that the galley slaves row harder; and (b) no matter how deserving your boss is of correction or criticism, you don’t want to be the person delivering it (“free speech” is like “HIPAA” in that it doesn’t mean what 99% of people think it does, and criticizing the boss or airing company dirty laundry publicly will rightfully get you fired almost everywhere). Imagine asking Elon to pay your way to attend HLTH.

Sales

• Community Bridges, Inc. chooses Netsmart CareFabric.

People

JTG Consulting Group hires Philip Garrott (WellSky) as VP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Hackensack Meridian Health will run Epic on Google Cloud.

Healthcare Growth Partners publishes a white paper titled “Prepare and Prevent Common Due Diligence Issues in Health IT Transactions.”

Bamboo Health launches a care gap solution for its Smart Signals network

A new KLAS report finds that provider burnout leveled in 2022 at 34%, with the main factors being time required to complete bureaucratic tasks, after-hours workload, and efficiency-sapping EHRs and other IT tools.

Government and Politics

A federal grand jury indicts five former employees of Methodist Hospital for selling the names and phone numbers of auto accident victims to a person who then resold them to personal injury attorneys and chiropractors.

Privacy and Security

A review of 12 healthcare websites that focus on substance abuse finds that 11 use tracking cookies, four use session recordings, six use Meta Pixel, and all 12 sent data to advertising companies.

Sponsor Updates

• GHX hosts its annual Turkey Trot 5K and food drive.
• Clearsense publishes an infographic on how to shorten the time to building a data platform
• Nuance publishes a white paper, “Nuance and NVIDIA: Bridging the gap from medical imaging AI development to clinical adoption quickly, safely, and effectively.”
• AdvancedMD releases its fall update, adding 35 features.
• Net Health expands its utilization of Kno2’s Communication API to help rehab therapists meet demands for care coordination.
• Juniper Networks recognizes Sentara Healthcare with an Elevate Award in the early adoption category.
• Meditech and Google Health advance their search and summarization collaboration to the next phase, with DCH Health System and Mile Bluff Medical Center signing on as early adopters of their integrated solution.
• Oracle Cerner posts a podcast titled “Evolution of the pager: Creating more effective care team communication.”

Blog Posts

• Get the Latest Changes to E/M Coding Guidelines (Experity)
• 5 Things to Expect from Managed Services Training Support (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Veterans Supporting Veterans: Get Well Salutes Our Military Heroes (Get Well)
• Anatomy of Effective Landing Pages (Healthwise)
• OASIS-E Implementation: An overview for home health providers (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Marking National Rural Health Day: The Recovery of Lakeland Community Hospital (Medhost)
• Innovation in action – 4 success stories from Meditech customers (Meditech)
• Prior Authorization Your Nemesis? Superhero Strategies for Vanquishing Delays & Denials (Myndshft)
• Pulling the RUGs Out: States Must Transition to PDPM Next October (Net Health)
• Uplifting our Veterans in the Workforce (Netsmart)

Contacts

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

News 11/16/22

Top News

Amazon officially launches Amazon Clinic, a message-based service that connects customers with Amazon-approved, third-party virtual care services for more than 20 common health conditions.

Amazon Clinic, which doesn’t yet accept insurance, is available in 32 states and offers the option to fulfill prescriptions through Amazon Pharmacy.

Meanwhile, the online retailer plans to lay off 10,000 employees in corporate and technology roles, including those working in its devices (Alexa), human resources, and retail divisions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HLTH is in full swing in Vegas. HIStalk readers who’ve opted for their (hopefully) cozy home offices rather than the bright lights of Sin City may not know what they’re missing. (Perhaps they’re reminiscing about dueling Elvises at HIStalkapaloozas gone by.) Email me with your photos and observations, and I’ll possibly share in an upcoming post.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Digital health integration and remote patient monitoring technology vendor Validic secures $12 million in a financing round led by Kaiser Permanente Ventures.

AngelEye Health, which offers patient and family engagement software for hospital neonatal, pediatric intensive care, and nursery units, raises $20 million in a Series B funding round.

Cleveland Clinic will begin billing patients for certain messages sent through its MyChart patient portal that take physicians longer than five minutes to answer and require a certain amount of clinical expertise. Messaging through the portal has doubled since 2019.

Sales

• TriHealth (OH) selects Andor Health’s ThinkAndor Virtual Patient Monitoring technology.
• Jasper Health will leverage Particle Health’s FHIR-based integration and API capabilities as part of its digital cancer care coaching and support software.
• Williamson Medical Center (TN) will implement EvidenceCare’s AdmissionCare and CareGauge decision support products within its Meditech Expanse workflows.
• Smile Digital Health will use data integration capabilities from Redox to enable customers to migrate data from legacy systems to its digital health platform using the FHIR R4 standard.
• In Louisiana, Lane Regional Medical Center and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center will go live on a shared Epic system in 2024.
• Labcorp will use Oracle Cerner’s laboratory information system to help manage the lab operations of a Catholic health system.

People

Canvas Medical names JP Patil (Included Health) chief product officer.

HCTec names Brent Prosser (ROI Healthcare Solutions) VP of sales and promotes Bernard Rush to VP of application support.

Announcements and Implementations

Floyd County Medical Center (IA) goes live on Meditech Expanse with help from Healthcare Triangle.

Net Health develops Missed Visit Prediction Indicator, a predictive analytics tool for hospital-based outpatient rehab therapy clinics.

Summa Health in Ohio transitions from Epic’s Community Care model, courtesy of nearby Bon Secours Mercy Health, to its own Epic system with help from Brightwork Health IT.

Wolters Kluwer Health announces GA of Digital Health Architect Consumer Education Suite, an educational content-as-a-service designed to help virtual care companies build and deliver custom digital health solutions.

Epic customers can now move their medical records to Google Cloud.

Commure introduces CommureOS, a new operating system designed to help providers create and customize organizational workflows.

Bamboo Health develops Rising Risk, new real-time risk stratification and patient engagement capabilities.

Other

The Bermuda Hospitals Board celebrates the arrival of the first baby with an entirely digital health record. Frances Ivy Edwards was born shortly after the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital and the Mid-Atlantic Wellness Institute went live on the Oracle Cerner-based Patient Electronic & Administrative Records Log (PEARL).

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Achieving Success Through Data Capture and Effective Communications.”
• NTT Data leverages Lumeon’s care orchestration engine in its virtual command center to coordinate delivery of key non-clinical services for hospital-at-home programs.
• Everest Group recognizes AGS Health as a leader in its Medical Coding Operations PEAK Matrix Assessment 2023.
• Clearwater publishes a new whitepaper, “Back to the Basics: HIPAA Compliance for B
• After switching to the EClinicalWorks Cloud, Hyndman Area Health Center reduces its expected five-year costs by over 50% and improves overall practice performance.
• Wolters Kluwer Health makes its Digital Health Architect Consumer Education Suite and EmmiGuide solutions available via the Microsoft Marketplace.

Blog Posts

• Upcycled Clinical Data Has the Potential to Transform HEDIS Quality Reporting and Close Care Gaps (Diameter Health)
• Take Control of Demand, Capacity, and Throughput with Better Care Orchestration (About Healthcare)
• How administrative staff burnout impacts the patient experience (AdvancedMD)
• Transforming the Revenue Cycle Through AI: Reducing Costs, Increasing Health System Cash Flow (AGS Health)
• Treating diabetes with data (Arcadia)
• Could the paper shortage finally put a stop to paper claims? (Availity)
• What could you do with more connected data? (Philips Capsule)
• IT Service Management and Work Life Balance: Why IT Teams Need Both Automation and Trust (CereCore)
• Meet 6 Hospitals and Health Systems Using Oracle Cerner to Enhance Patient and Caregiver Experiences (Oracle Cerner)
• Overview of the SEC “Cybersecurity Risk Management, Strategy, Governance, and Incident Disclosure” Proposed Rule Changes (Clearwater)
• Informa Connect Hub West 2022 Post-Conference Brief: Hub Strategy & Tactics Highlights (ConnectiveRx)
• 5 Metrics for Your “Tripledemic” Dashboard (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/14/22

Top News

Telehealth company Wheel acquires GoodRx Care’s back-end virtual care technology, which includes an EHR, clinical management tools, and patient experience software.

Wheel was already providing GoodRx with technology and clinicians. It will license the technology back to GoodRx for use on its GoodRx Care website and app.

GoodRx share price has dropped 87% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $2 billion versus $23 billion in February 2021.

The company’s share price took a hit in August when grocery chain Kroger stopped accepting GoodRx coupons in its pharmacies, which cost GoodRx 25% of its business.  

Reader Comments

From Not-Football SEC Fan: “Re: Datavant. Other tidbits: (a) Roivant still holds a minority stake; (b) Ciox’s main investor New Mountain Capital seems to be the majority owner; and (c) Datavant has acquired companies such as Mirador and Convenet to expand internationally.” Datavant acquired HIPAA expert determination firm Mirador Analytics in late 2021, then added UK-based Convenet in September 2022 to offer clinical trials tokenization in the UK. Datavant had previously acquired Health Data Link in 2019, which offered health systems linkage to researchers, and de-identification services vendor Universal Patient Key in 2018, both before Datavant merged in 2021 with Ciox Health, which New Mountain Capital formed in 2016 by rolling up four of its acquisitions. Datavant has raised $81 million in funding through a Series B round.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents may not love the fact that conferences sell their registration lists to facilitate vendor spamming, but it’s apparently a pretty minor inconvenience since only a few folks would be willing to pay to eliminate the practice.

New poll to your right or here: What kind of headshot do you use on your LinkedIn profile? A reader told me that she has seen pictures that are more than 10 years old, which must be as awkward as creating an “optimized” online dating profile that leads to an awkward in-person moment. I trawl LinkedIn regularly for People updates and have seen awful headshots that are unusable – tiny or low-resolution ones and shots that include adjacent body parts from people who were amateurishly cropped out of a group photo. Most puzzling to me is why someone would bother to create a LinkedIn profile without adding a headshot unless they are technically challenged, struggling with appearance issues, or hiding from the mob. 

Lorre has published a children’s book and will send a copy to anyone who donates $20 or more to the non-profit animal sanctuary where she volunteers. She is personally covering the printing and shipping costs, so the entire tax-deductible donation goes toward taking care of the animals.

Serving in the military involves sacrifices – career, family, and sometimes life and limb. Thanks to those who made them.

I’m pondering the takeaways from rich CEOs who are grandstanding their sorrow about laying off their employees. Many of these are wunderkinds who seem shocked by the concept of business cycles. My second reaction is more cynical — investors rewarded them for irrational growth, questionable strategies, and overpriced acquisitions and probably will do so again down the economic road, so their handwringing over dumping human ballast overboard reeks more of all-about-me embarrassment than personal remorse. It was inevitable that the “talent wars” power that was begrudgingly granted to galley-rowers was temporary and that the Great Resignation would eventually toggle to the second definition of that word  — unhappily accepting something that you can’t change, like taking a job because you need the money and realizing that “work from anywhere” and “take all the vacation you want” policies can disappear faster than crypto billions.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

An article by Andreessen Horowitz, a tech-heavy venture capital firm that manages $35 billion in assets, says that the biggest company in the world will be in consumer health technology. Snips:

• Healthcare is a $4 trillion industry in the US alone that consumes 20% of GDP, five times the size of the entire world’s advertising industry.
• The consumer health giant won’t be a big tech firm or an healthcare incumbent. It will be “a consumer-obsessed, healthcare-native tech company that reimagines what care can look like.”
• The company’s core competency will be the ability to engage and retain patients, which healthcare companies have done poorly.
• The vertical path to creating that largest company in the world would be to create a payvider firm that can demonstrate value, such as if “UnitedHealth Group and Apple had a baby.” The challenge is that consumers don’t pay directly for healthcare and the system is optimized for insurers and self-insured employers, so companies have little incentive to care about the consumer experience.
• The horizontal path would be for a company to become the Amazon or Visa of healthcare, offering a marketplace of healthcare reviews, quality metrics, and price transparency or simplified bill-paying in return for a tiny percentage of the revenue, which given massive healthcare spending could still make that company one of the world’s largest.
• Companies must plug into the health industry to succeed, using health systems and providers as channel partners who can help drive transactions.

Sales

• William Osler Health System chooses Sectra’s enterprise imaging, including radiology imaging, breast imaging, and vendor-neutral archive.
• Pivot Point Consulting deploys OCHIN’s Epic EHR at San Francisco Community Health Center.

People

Tower Health names surgeon Eugene Reilly, MD, MHCI as VP/CMIO.

Andrew Burchett, DO (Avera) joins Meditech as executive director of medical informatics.

Announcements and Implementations

Finland announces Radical Health Festival, a pan-European digital health conference that will be held in Helsinki June 12-15, 2023. It will offer a speed-dating platform, a Solution Match service, a hosted buyer program, and conference app. CHIME will offer its Boot Camp there. Early bird registration opens on December 1 and starts at $200.

Two new KLAS reports look at home-based care technology. Facilities – which name as their top three challenges staffing, regulatory requirements, and COVID-19 – most commonly choose MatrixCare, PointClickCare, and Indeed. Home-based acute care organizations name staffing,regulatory requirements, and reimbursement changes as their top concerns and most commonly deploy MatrixCare, SHP, Netsmart, and WellSky to address them.

Government and Politics

South Africa’s deputy health director says that the country’s universal healthcare system will add a central patient information system within 4-5 years ,

England’s The Guardian reports that a $425 million contract for a national shared patient data system is likely to be issued soon to Palantir. Patients will not be required to provide consent for using their data, which will be used by integrated care boards and then de-identified for use by researchers. 

Privacy and Security

The ransomware hackers behind the breach of Australia-based insurer Medibank post a list of customers who have been treated for mental health and alcohol issues, following its earlier list of those who have had abortions. They are demanding payment of $1 AUD per customer, nearly $10 million USD.

Other

The VA and DoD fund a 12-month surgical fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth School of Medicine that trains surgeons to perform pre-surgical preparation using a patient’s 3D-modeled organs or tumors.

A JAMA Health Form research letter notes that the EHRs of the six vendors that have settled HHS/DOJ charges are being used by 77,000 clinicians, recommending that (a) ONC’s certification process be changed so that vendors don’t know in advance which functions will be tested; and (b) post-market surveillance of EHRs be initiated.

A Gonzaga law professor who studies antitrust, health law, and inequity says that a federal judge should not have approved last month’s $13 billion merger of UnitedHealth Group and Change Healthcare because the insurer can use Change’s EDI clearinghouse data to cherry-pick the most profitable consumer groups to insure, reducing access and allowing the company to unfairly compete with insurers that don’t have access to that data. She says that insurers want to acquire companies that capture health data so they can create a unique digital ID for each person insured, which on the positive side would allow them to apply healthy nudges, but would also allow them to move sicker people to plans that require higher cost-sharing,. She notes a 2014 complaint that insurers in Florida placed all HIV drugs, even cheap generics, in their highest cost-sharing tier to discourage HIV patients from signing up and that UHG could remove specific providers from their network if their claims data shows that they see a lot of expensive patients, such as diabetics. 

The Internet has resurfaced years-old survey data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that shows who people spend time with by age, as visualized by Our World in Data. It isn’t pandemic-adjusted current, but still interesting since I hadn’t seen it until folks starting sending it my way. Tidbits, from which your life-planning takeaways may vary:

• People spend more time with co-workers than family members from ages 21 through 65.
• Time spent alone hums along at fours hour per day until the mid-30s, when it steadily increases to nearly eight hours per day for those in their 70s.
• Time spent with children peaks at 4.5 hours in the mid-30s, then tapers down hard to one hour per day by 60.
• Time spent with friends peaks at more than two hours per day at 18, then trends down do a fairly steady half hour per day at around 40 through 80.
• People spend more time with their partners as they age, increasing from three hours per day with a big jump starting in their late 50s, then tapering until 77 (I assume due to death or a change in living situations).

Sponsor Updates

• Gozio Health and Artera expand their partnership, following their initial launch at UNC Health, to add smart links to Artera patient communications and to launch text messages to providers from the mobile app.
• The Inspiring Women Podcast features Kim McKay, MD PeriGen CMO and clinical VP of OB/GYN at Avera Health (SD).
• The Executive Leaders Radio Podcast features Quil Health CEO Carina Edwards.
• Oracle Cerner releases a new podcast, “Increasing interoperability to connect care for Veterans and service members.”
• Spok publishes a new report, “The state of healthcare communications.”
• Upfront Healthcare CEO and co-founder Ben Albert joins the Day Zero Podcast to share his entrepreneurial journey.
• Wolters Kluwer Health expands its Sentri7 suite of clinical surveillance tools to include Sentri7 Sepsis Monitor.

Blog Posts

• The Burden of Choice Along the EHR Journey (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Outside the wire as a combat medic (Optum)
• Nurses of Note Awards: The Public Health Director (PerfectServe)
• Meet the Future of Value Analysis in Healthcare (Premier)
• What the Click of a Button Can Mean for Patient Access to Medication (Surescripts)
• Techquity Q&A Part 1: Health Equity by Design (Tegria)
• CIO Guide to Contextual Communication (TigerConnect)
• A broad definition of healthcare workplace violence leads to better caregiver safety (Vocera)
• How to Submit Medicare Claims Electronically (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 11/11/22

Top News

A posted and then quickly unpublished video on Amazon’s YouTube page describes Amazon Clinic, an online care program for common conditions.

The video showed people completing a symptom questionnaire, paying a fee, and then being given a diagnosis and prescriptions by “third-party healthcare provider groups.”

Amazon Care, a similar service, will cease operations on December 31, 2022.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Attending HLTH next week? Some HIStalk sponsors will be there too, and provided a summary of what they will be doing in Las Vegas and how you can connect with them.

Here’s a Datavant company refresher after I interviewed CMIO Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD about tokenization. Drug development technology vendor Roivant Sciences created the company in 2017, then merged it with healthcare data firm Ciox Health (which was itself a rollup of HealthPort, IOD, Care Communications, and ECS) in 2021 in a $7 billion deal to create a company with $700 million in annual revenue. Roivant has created a dozen drug therapy companies that it calls “vants” (all of them have names ending in “vant,” such as Datavant, Genevant, Psivant, etc.). Riovant Sciences went public in October 2021 in a $7 billion SPAC merger, with shares having since lost 46% of their value versus the Nasdaq’s 27% loss, valuing the company at $3.6 billion.

I ignored several press releases today in which I couldn’t figure out exactly what the company does, what its new product or service involves, or why I (and my readers) should care. Committee-generated writing is usually awful.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Northwell Holdings and Aegis Ventures launch Upliv, which will offer video consults and care for managing the symptoms of menopause. The company, which will get $8.4 million in seed funding through the end of 2023, will market to employers who will offer it as a free employee benefit.

Medical coding automation vendor Fathom raises $46 million in a Series B funding round.

CitiusTech acquires healthcare-focused Salesforce services company Wilco Source.

Best Buy Health-owned care-at-home platform vendor Current Health joins Epic’s App Market.

Strategic advisor Seth Joseph says that “Glen Tullman’s best magic trick yet” would be for his Transcarent to buy Teladoc Health, which Glen foisted Livongo in August 2020 for $18.5 billion to create a $37 billion behemoth that quickly turned into a $5 billion mid-player. He says that Transcarent needs Teladoc’s relationships with health systems and its care management capabilities courtesy of Livongo, which would give the employer-focused Transcarent a better chance of selling to employers and taking on risk.

Amazon becomes the first publicly traded company to lose $1 trillion in market value, with Microsoft on its heels with a market capitalization that is down $889 billion.

Sales

• Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital (NC) will implement Oracle Cerner’s EHR via the CommunityWorks model.
• Boston Medical Center will implement Sectra enterprise imaging via the Sectra One subscription model.
• Warren General Hospital (PA) will replace its legacy Meditech system and three ambulatory EHRs with Meditech Expanse.
• The VA expands its work with Get Well to include 70 medical centers and its first rollout of GetWell Loop care plans.

People

Derek Baird, MBA (Sensyne Health) is named CEO of newly launched virtual specialty care network Switchboard Health, which he co-founded.

Chris Wild, MBA (Experian Health) joins Experian Data Quality as VP of sales.

Sriram Devarakonda, MSEE (Nordic Consulting Partners) joins Cardamom Health as co-founder and CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

A large-scale study of the VA’s data warehouse determines that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 more than once carries increased risk of death, hospitalization, and long-term effects. Those people who get through an initial infection can’t let their guard down to reinfection, as each additional infection increases the risk.

HealthStream launches a developer portal of shared services, applications, and APIs.

Redox and product innovation firm TXI will partner to develop digital products.

Pakistan’s Shifa International Hospital wins a Cheers Award from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices for its $900 project in which pharmacy services verify chemotherapy preparation using a camera and off-the-shelf software. ISMP notes that not all hospitals can afford sophisticated IV workflow and robotic software.

A KeyCare survey of people who have had at least one telehealth visit like or prefer it as an option, with 79% saying that it is important that both their regular doctor and their telehealth provider have access to their health records.

Salesforce announces Patient 360 for Health innovations for behavioral health, advanced therapy management, Salesforce Genie for healthcare, and care coordination. .

Government and Politics

The waitlist of England’s NHS reaches a record 7.1 million patients even before a planned nursing strike.

Privacy and Security

Russian ransomware hackers begin posting the exfiltrated data of Australia-based health insurer Medibank on the Dark Web after the company declines to pay their demanded $10 million ransom. The first data posted was a list of patients who have had abortions. The Australian Federal Police warns that people who looks at the data are themselves committing a crime under the country’s privacy laws. Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil called the hackers “scumbags,” adding that as a woman whose private health information was compromised by the hackers, the attack should not have happened and she expects Medibank to fully support its customers.

CommonSpirit Health says that access to its EHR and patient portal has been restored for most users following an October 4 ransomware attack.

Recently filed lawsuits claim that hospitals whose websites and patient portals used Meta Pixel may have violated federal and state wiretapping laws, as the hospitals and Meta intercepted doctor-patient communication without their consent. Legal experts wonder whether Meta’s terms of service will protect it from liability since hospitals accepted responsiblity for configuring the tool.

Other

London-based doctors write in the BMJ that a chronic lack of attention to NHS IT infrastructure and systems “brings to a halt the everyday business of healthcare.” The authors suggest learning from US approaches such as researching burnout and having ONC provide some federal oversight.

Ontario’s government and the Ontario Medical Association agree to decrease physician payments for virtual visits in which no existing patient-physician relationship exists, ending pandemic policies in which doctors were paid the same for virtual or in-person encounters. The most common face-to-face fee code is paid $27 US, while one-off virtual visits will now pay $11 to $15. A pediatrician and virtual care provider says the pay cut devalues services to the point that seeing patients virtually without a referral is no longer viable, ending the trend of expanding access. The Ontario government is targeting a 60-40 ratio of in-person and virtual care for family doctors.

A chronic pain patient files a complaint against a Pennsylvania doctor who was assigned by a national medical marijuana card service to review her request. The woman says she could barely see the doctor during her video visit, their conversation was short, and she couldn’t figure out how to upload her medical records. The state agreed that he approved her card without reviewing her medical records. The doctor contracts for Veriheal, which gives patients their money back if they aren’t approved and reportedly pays doctors only for patients they approve.

The ED charge nurse who called 911 seeking help with patients due to short staffing says that employees of St. Michael Medical Center (WA) were stressed by ongoing changes in ownership and leadership, a move to a different building, and CommonSpirit Health’s cyberattack that took the hospital’s Epic system down and sent clinicians back to paper charting. She says that the night she called for help, the ED was at less than 50% of minimum staffing and patients with serious issues were being left unattended in the waiting room. Joint Commission issued a preliminary denial of accreditation to hospital after the incident. She concludes:

We’re taught that we keep our issues with staffing, no breaks, long shifts, impacts on our own health, etc., to ourselves. We’re taught to suck it up and be martyrs for the cause and for the corporations that own our hospitals, to be grateful for the crumbs thrown to us by hospital “leaders” (that not once show up during a night like the one I described above) in the form of pizza parties and banners, all the while dealing with anxiety while driving to work and tears on the way home, UTIs from dehydration because there’s just no time to drink any water (or pee, after), time away from our families and fear that when we do see them, we might be bringing them some residual disease from work.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic publishes a new episode of its monthly DocTalk series titled “Healthcare’s labor pains.”
• AGS Health is recognized as a leader in medical coding operations by Everest Group.
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions publishes its “True Cost of Fraud for Healthcare Payers” study.
• Renown Health (NV) expands its partnership with Loyal, implementing the company’s provider data management and physician search services.
• Myndshft’s automated prior authorization platform is now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
• NeuroFlow publishes a new case study, “Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Prevent Suicides.”
• CHIME posts a 30th anniversary podcast featuring inaugural board chair John Glaser, PhD.
• Nordic publishes a new infographic, “Consolidating an ERP: 9 steps for a smoother, more efficient transition.”

Blog Posts

• How a Blackhawk Pilot Became a Healthcare Security Expert (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• It’s Time to Modernize Prescribing & Fulfillment of Specialty Drugs (First Databank)
• 5 Steps to Improve Cybersecurity on Your Connected Medical Devices (Fortified Health Security)
• When Digital Engagement Technology is Part of the Care Team: A Recipe for Success with Katherine Virkstis (Get Well)
• The Secret to a Successful Sourcing Initiative? Physician Input (GHX)
• Healthcare IT’s Key Role in Patient Experience (HCTec)
• Seven Trends Driving the Future of Healthcare Technology (HealthTech Resources)
• Attributes of a Health-Literate Organization (Healthwise)
• How to Maintain Ongoing Change with Reinforcement (Impact Advisors)
• The Human Cost of Healthcare’s Fragmented Data (InterSystems)
• Demonstrating the value of terminology-based normalization for cohorting patients (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• 3 Top Strategies for Opening All the Digital Doors for Healthcare Consumers (Kyruus)
• Identity Verification vs. Ease of Access: The Balancing Act that Impacts Health Equity (LexisNexis Risk Solutions)
• Can Interoperability Address the Opioid Epidemic? (Medhost)
• How our independent healthcare system launched a state-of-the-art precision medicine program (Meditech)
• Quantifying Your Economic Impact as an OccMed Medical Assistant (Net Health)
• What is Trauma-Informed Care and Why Is It Important to NeuroFlow? (NeuroFlow)
• Buyer beware: Five tough questions to ask your imaging AI vendor (Nuance)
• Telehealth and LTPAC Part 2: Leading Geriatric Practice Uses Virtual Care to Overcome Delays in Treatment (Netsmart)

Contacts

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

HIStalk’s Guide to HLTH 2022

Bamboo Health

Booth #2030

Contact: Alison Matthiessen, senior communications manager
amatthiessen@bamboohealth.com
540.230.9021

Billions of dollars are wasted in healthcare services each year due to poorly coordinated care and lack of real-time patient insights. This is fueling the disconnect among physical health, behavioral health, and social care, which has led to an ever-widening gap in health disparity and the rapidly growing behavioral health epidemic. At HLTH, Bamboo Health will unveil several new solutions aimed at better supporting providers and payers to meet their goals for connecting the care continuum and value-based care initiatives. Through its suite of solutions, Bamboo Health delivers distilled and specific insights at the high-value care moments that matter, ushering in a new era of insights and analytics to bridge the gap in health equity, improve both clinical and financial outcomes, and make whole person care a reality. Bamboo Health will also lead discussions on how to reduce the fragmentation and friction that plague healthcare and prevent the desired results of improved outcomes, better experiences and lower costs.

Bamboo Health events at HLTH include an executive fireside chat titled, “988: Opportunity for Equitable Behavioral Health Access?” on Monday, Nov. 14, from 11:50 AM – 12:10 PM PST. Dr. Nishi Rawat, Bamboo’s Chief Clinical Officer will moderate the discussion featuring Madhuri Jha, LCSW, MPH, director at Kennedy-Satcher Center for Mental Health Equity and Morehouse School of Medicine, and Brandon J. Johnson, MHS, MCHES, public health advisor at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and Center for Mental Health Services. Together, they will discuss the challenges associated with the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in terms of an equitable response for all, including varied resources, awareness and stigma. The chat will also explore ways 988 has opened behavioral health access and what remains a challenge for the initiative regarding health equity. Those wishing to continue the conversation are invited to Bamboo Health’s Grove Theatre in booth #2030 from 12:15-12:45 p.m. PST. 

Bamboo Health is a finalist in the Mental and Behavioral Health Best in Class category for the UCSF Digital Health Awards, which recognize the achievements of innovative health technology companies dramatically improving healthcare. Bamboo Health’s executive team will be in attendance at the awards ceremony on the evening of Nov. 14 at 6:00 p.m. PST at the Zouk Nightclub in Resorts World in Las Vegas to see the winners crowned. Find out more at: https://bamboohealth.com/news-pr/bamboo-health-to-showcase-suite-of-solutions-designed-to-achieve-careflow-at-hlth-2022/.

Censinet

Contact: Chris Logan, chief security officer
clogan@censinet.com
401.443.0287

Censinet’s SVP and Chief Security Officer Chris Logan will be in attendance, and in conjunction with KLAS Research representatives, will be giving out “Cybersecurity Transparent” awards to vendors at HLTH. The “Cybersecurity Transparent” designation represents vendors who have demonstrated meaningful cybersecurity program maturity, cyber preparedness, and an ongoing intention to communicate cyber risk posture to providers and payers looking for Best in KLAS solutions.

Get-to-Market Health

Contact: Steve Shihadeh, CEO and Founder
steve@gettomarkethealth.net
610.613.4074

The continued pace of transformation in healthcare creates enormous pressure on technology companies to adapt and deliver clear value. Get-to-Market Health (GTMH) was formed to address this challenge. Whether a company has taken in a new round of investment and needs to accelerate its top line growth or is bringing new products to market, GTMH helps healthcare technology leaders’ market, sell and create sustainable, long-term relationships with their customers.

Healthwise

Meeting Pod 43

Contact: Nate Smith, Partner Solutions, Digital Health & Emerging Markets
nsmith@healthwise.org
415.516.9848

Healthwise has set the standard for health education since 1975. Nonprofit and independent, Healthwise is a trusted resource for health information, technology, and services that help people make better decisions and improve health outcomes. Interactive tools, videos, and content integrate seamlessly into any workflow or application, adding value to your digital health solution while providing consumers the information they need to live healthier lives.

Lumeon

Viosk/Booth #V-3359

Contact: Todd Fane
todd.fane@lumeon.com

Lumeon believes that care better coordinated is care better delivered. Lumeon is a digital health company that provides a cloud-based care orchestration platform that automates the tasks, workflow, activities, and events that occur during the process of coordinating care. With real-time, bi-directional data/system integration and the dynamic application of clinical intelligence and automation, Lumeon ensures that each patient receives the right care at the right time –every time. By automating care coordination, care teams deliver care faster, more efficiently, effectively, and consistently across the continuum of care, while also empowering clinicians and staff to work at the tops of their licenses and spend time with patients that need it most.

Lyniate

Booth #2609

Contact: Drew Ivan, chief strategy officer
drew.ivan@lyniate.com

Lyniate delivers secure, proven, and flexible interoperability solutions. As your trusted partner, Lyniate powers the applications and workflows that improve clinical, operational, and financial outcomes today while helping you understand, prepare for, and influence changes on the horizon. Foundational offerings, Lyniate Rhapsody and Lyniate Corepoint, are in use by healthcare teams around the world.

NTT DATA

Booth #1418; Meeting Rooms 364 and 366

Contact: Lisa Esch, SVP strategy and industry solutions
Lisa.Esch@nttdata.com
303.918.3069

NTT DATA is a title sponsor for HLTH 2022. Visit booth #1418 to learn how we’re humanizing the digital healthcare experience with a data-driven approach.

Join our sessions:

• Health Equity Impact Session: Going Digital: Technology Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle 11:40 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15 on the Impact Stage Lisa Esch (NTT DATA) and Kelly Nye (HCA Healthcare)
• Tech Talk Session: Business-Led Innovation: NTT DATA and Snowflake’s Health Plan Price Transparency Tool 10:35 a.m. Monday, Nov. 14 on the Tech Talk Stage Tamara Villalon (NTT DATA) and Patrick Kovalik (Snowflake)
• Tech Talk Session: How to Beat Ransomware 10:50 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15 on the Tech Talk Stage Jack Buxbaum (NTT DATA)

Watch our demonstrations:

Each day of the event you’ll find informative demos in the NTT DATA booth, including: Hospital at Home, Sepsis Workflow Management, Advocate AI, Patient Experience, Medical Cost Manager (Payment Integrity), AI for Chronic Disease Prediction, Health Data Bank powered by Snowflake, Giving Back.

A healthy planet is fundamental to a healthy society, and we’re partnering with One Tree Planted to plant 2,000 trees on behalf of HLTH attendees! Stop by our booth (#1418) and choose where to plant your tree to support reforestation efforts around the globe.

OptimizeRx

Booth #V-4845

Contact: Maria Cipicchio, SVP of marketing
mcipicchio@optimizerx.com
617.433.0406

OptimizeRx helps people start and stay on life-impacting therapies. Our end-to-end technology platform allows life science companies to support the full care journey – from increased brand awareness, to streamlined market access, to ongoing patient adherence – by connecting providers and patients to treatment information and support at the moments it’s needed most. Our network of 300+ EHR partners provides life science brands with access to 700K+ HCPs, representing 60% of US healthcare providers and 90% of hospital systems. Only OptimizeRx uses patent-pending artificial intelligence and real-word data to deliver more relevant, actionable information, while offering true omnichannel reach within the EHR, online and beyond hospital system firewalls, and across social networks. Visit OptimizeRx.com to learn more, or to connect with a member of our team.

Synapse Medicine

Booth # 4651

Contact: Ingrid Graff-Cailleaud, US market contact
ingrid@synapse-medicine.com
+33 6 63 57 36 34

Synapse Medicine is a provider of data-driven clinical decision support that optimizes drug regimens along the entire patient care journey, from prescribing through adherence, for a safer, more effective and efficient path to medication success. At HLTH 2022, Synapse Medicine is hosting a special Boothside Chat—The Future of EHR Integration—with guest, Brendan Keeler, Head of Product, Flexpa. Champagne & Lite Bites will be served. Be sure to sign up to reserve your spot. https://synapse-medicine.com/en-us/hlth-2022 Tuesday, November 15 at 12:30 p.m.

Tegria

Booth #452

Contact: Kevin Kutz, vice president of external relations
kevin.kutz@tegria.com
425.984.4777

Tegria provides consulting and technology services to help organizations of all sizes humanize each healthcare experience. We are more than 4,000 colleagues throughout the United States and internationally who help customers maximize technology, transform operations, improve financials and optimize care. We maintain partnerships with a wide range of technology leaders, including Microsoft, 3Cloud and ServiceNow. Learn more at www.tegria.com. Visit us at Booth 452 and we’ll donate $5 for every badge swipe to the National Diaper Bank Network, up to $5,000. Please help us spend it all and learn more about how meeting basic needs for young families contributes to health equity. Mark your schedules for Monday 11:25 – 11:45 at the Impact Pavilion for Theresa Demeter’s fireside chat with Leon Caldwell, PhD, senior director for health equity strategies and innovation for the American Hospital Association.

News 11/9/22

Top News

Primary care company VillageMD will acquire provider Summit Health for $9 billion.

Walgreens owns a majority stake in VillageMD, having invested over $5.2 billion in the company to co-locate its clinics with Walgreens retail pharmacies. It said earlier this year that 200 of the co-branded practices would open in 2022.

VillageMD will operate nearly 700 primary, specialty, and urgent care facilities in 26 markets once the deal is done.

Summit Health was formed in 2019 by the merger of multispecialty medical group Summit Medical Group and CityMD, which operated urgent care centers in the New York City metro area.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Latest LinkedIn peeve — congratulating someone who announces their new job with the ungrammatical “You got this!” that seems to question competence in the manner of “I like you no matter what anyone says.” I can identify, however, since even though I crank out millions of words per year, I still get writer’s block when Mrs. H slides a greeting card my way and expects me to awkwardly dash off heartfelt thoughts, at least until I pester her to just dictate what I should say.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

ChristianaCare (DE) launches a Business Health Solutions unit to offer employers direct virtual primary and behavioral health services, destination surgery programs, and COVID-19 vaccination and symptom-monitoring capabilities.

Legacy data archiving company MediQuant acquires Knowledge Based Systems, which offers data access and retrieval solutions for several industries.

NantHealth announces Q3 results: revenue up 16%, adjusted EPS –$0.12 versus –$0.10. NH shares are down 81% over the past 12 months and have shed 98% of their value since their first-day close in June 2016, valuing Patrick Soon-Shiong’s company at $39 million.

Sales

• Thirty-year Meditech customer HCA Healthcare will upgrade its hospitals to Meditech Expanse as its go-forward EHR.
• MedStar Health in Washington, DC will implement and train Zephyr AI’s predictive analytics Insights software using its T2D de-identified data sets.
• PainChek, an Australian pain assessment and monitoring app, will use TrakCare HIS and Iris for Health EHR integration software from InterSystems.

People

Scott Van Houten (Philips) joins Lyniate as VP of sales.

Matt D’Errico, MBA (Joslin Diabetes Center) joins Lawrence General Hospital as CIO.

Extrico Health hires Kevin Dawson, MS (Howard University Hospital) as CIO.

Hiteks Solutions names Judy Cassetty, RN (Iodine Software) as chief clinical officer.

Direct Recruiters promotes Jordan Freireich and Jaimie Bailey to partner.

Aetion hires Dorothee Bartels, PhD (UCB) as chief digital officer, Jade Cusick (Cerner Enviza) as chief commercial officer, and Jeremy Brody, MS (Cerner Enviza) as chief strategy officer.

Polly Israni, MBA (Google) joins CoverMyMeds as chief marketing officer.

Paul Roscoe (Trinda Health) joins CLEW as CEO.

Definitive Healthcare hires Jon Maack, MBA (Athenahealth) as president.

HCTec promotes Mike Linville to president.

Kathy Ruggiero (Commure) joins Lumeon as VP of marketing.

Lee Rivas, MBA will become CEO of R1 RCM on January 1, 2023, replacing Joe Flanagan. John Sparby will replace Rivas as president. Rivas is a West Point graduate and former US Army captain.

Chris Baker (Experian Health) joins Doceree as VP of business development for health systems.

Announcements and Implementations

Censinet, the American Hospital Association, and KLAS Research launch a healthcare cybersecurity benchmarking study that will allow health systems to compare cybersecurity investments, resources, performance, and maturity versus peers.

In Alberta, Canada, Foothills Medical Centre and its associated clinics go live on Epic as part of a province-wide Connect Care rollout set to conclude in 2024.

Healthcare AI and voice vendor Care Angel will partner with senior living company Upside to offer insurers a social determinants of health risk assessment and housing intervention solution.

CCS, which offers clinical solutions and home-delivered medical supplies for people with chronic conditions, adds a gestational diabetes management program that includes remote blood glucose monitoring and clinical coaching.

Epic announces that the country’s six largest health plans, along with 250 health systems, are participating in its Payer Platform.

A new KLAS report on PACS finds that 30% of organizations could replace their vendor due to vendor acquisitions and replacement of legacy systems. Sectra continues to lead the market despite a customer-observed slippage in its high support quality, while Fujifilm and Merative are showing signs of overall improvement in bucking the industry trend. Intelerad customers note worsening support as the vendor makes acquisitions, while Change Healthcare’s are unsure of the product’s future following the company’s acquisition by UnitedHealth Group. GE Healthcare has the most vulnerable customer base because of disengaged relationships.

Government and Politics

Clinical and IT staff at Fox Army Health Center (AL) are working through several issues that are associated with the facility’s September rollout of MHS Genesis, including intermittent access to the cloud-based messaging system and eventual online appointment booking and a backlog of medication requests that have put prescription fulfillment at 72-plus hours.

Attendees of ViVE 2023, March 26-29 in Nashville, can save 35% by registering before Friday at midnight. CHIME and HLTH are expecting the conference to draw 7,500 attendees and 450 exhibitors.

In Canada, the Saskatchewan Health Authority takes its Administrative Information Management System offline after numerous complaints from users related to scheduling and leave requests. AIMS went live last week to replace 82 payroll, human resources, scheduling, and finance systems. Deloitte, Kronos, and Oracle have contributed to the decade-long, $138 million project.

A federal judge denies the three motions filed by former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes in which she requested a new trial, ruling that she was offering no new evidence for her fraud conviction and that a new trial was not likely to lead to her acquittal. She is scheduled for sentencing on November 18.

Other

Ninety-eight percent of hospital management leaders say they have ramped up efforts to employ more outsourcing vendors, according to a Black Book survey of 775 provider organizations. Less than 5% of respondents reported extreme dissatisfaction with current third-party companies.

An AMA survey finds that more physicians are using telehealth and most think it provides patient care advantages, but they have four requirements:

• The technology must work.
• They have to be paid properly.
• Liability insurance coverage and assurances of data privacy and security must be provided.
• The process must work within existing practice workflows.

Sponsor Updates

• Bamboo Health will exhibit at the National Association of Medicaid Directors conference November 14-17 in Washington, DC.
• Oracle Cerner publishes a new client achievement, “Henry Community Health delivers a personalized patient experience with HealtheCRM.”
• ChartSpan names Askia Sultan sales development representative.
• Nordic posts a video titled “The Download: Optimizing Performance to Address Labor Shortages.”
• CHIME awards 18 providers with its Digital Health Most Wired Survey level 10 certification.
• Ellkay will exhibit at ModMed’s Momentum 2022 conference November 18-20 in Orlando.
• Sphere company Health IPass joins Azalea Health’s API Marketplace.

Blog Posts

• The Case for Data Minimalism (Curation Health)
• Healthcare’s Historic Kiosk Failure & How Smartphones Prevailed (Access)
• 3 tips to manage the front office staffing shortage (AdvancedMD)
• Healthcare in Crisis: Resource Constraints Add Mounting Pressure (AGS Health)
• How to measure care management’s impact (Arcadia)
• Inaccurate Provider Directories Create Barriers to Care (Availity)
• Think Pink – Using DRVS Tools to Improve Breast Cancer Screening Rates (Azara Healthcare)
• How to minimize risk in the charge capture process of telehealth services (Baker Tilly)
• Tired: Help desk. Wired: How desk! (Nordic)
• Achieving Epic Gold Star Levels: The Journey from an Analyst’s Perspective (CereCore)
• Data Literacy: A Transformational Outcome of Data Governance (Clearsense)
• Tech-Enabling Evidence Generation: Four Types of Insights Gleaned from Unstructured Narratives (Premier)
• From the Ground Up: The Most Useful Tool for Building a HIPAA Compliance Program (Clearwater)
• Throwing Banner Ads on Websites is so Basic; Instead, Get Your Client’s Savings Offer in Front of HCPs While They’re Prescribing in the EHR (ConnectiveRx)
• 5 Key Points for Optimizing Your IoT Testing Strategy (CTG)
• The Burden of Choice Along the EHR Journey  (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 3 Potential Life-Saving Uses of Data (Dimensional Insight)
• Quiet Quitting: Separating the Symptom from the Cause (Direct Recruiters)
• How to Strengthen Your Cybersecurity Posture in Healthcare (Divurgent)
• The Answer for Today’s Multidimensional Healthcare (EClinicalWorks)
• The HCI Group Supports Healthcare Organizations Moving EHR to AWS (The HCI Group)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/7/22

Top News

Roche, the world’s largest biotechnology company, unifies its 30-solution digital health portfolio under the brand Navify.

The company’s products include oncology decision support, tumor board, mutation profiler, digital pathology, results tracking, and infection management.

Roche acquired oncology software vendor Flatiron Health for $1.9 billion in April 2018.

Reader Comments

From Itsme: “Re: TeleTracking. At least 40 people lost their jobs last week. Most folks were on the client-facing side.” Unverified. I unsuccessfully searched the company’s website and press releases looking for a media contact so that I could inquire.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A great number of providers are apparently insulting their patients-slash-customers by shoving a blank form at them that asks for information that they already have on file. I’m repeating myself in saying that I question how intentionally duplicated information is reconciled and by whom, whether the provider will review only the form’s contents instead of the better-vetted information from the EHR, and why providers think that blank forms are better than letting the patient review an EHR-generated document and the noting any corrections. You would order less frequently from Amazon if its website or app required you to manually enter your name, shipping address, and credit card information every single time.

New poll to your right or here: Would you pay a $250 add-on fee to your conference registration to opt out of having the organizer share or sell your contact information? A reader pointed out that the business model of conferences includes selling the contact information of prospects to vendors, so registrants would have to bear more of the cost if they throttle back on the “ladies drink free” model. I conclude that the amount that you are willing to pay to avoid any particular frustration (a toll road, VIP tickets, or a concierge MD) is a better indicator of the issue’s true importance than the number and passion of the complaints about it.

One of my favorite email tricks is sticking a period somewhere before the “@” in my address, which makes that email address look unique even though Gmail treats it like my real one. Example: email addressed to mr.histalk@gmail.com will actually be sent to mrhistalk@gmail.com, giving me an infinite number of seemingly unique addresses for free trials and such. A reader provides a similarly clever way to tell which companies are selling your email information, which takes advantage of the fact that Gmail ignores characters that follow a plus sign entered to the left of the @ sign. Example: sign up for the HIMSS conference using mrhistalk+himss23@gmail.com and any emails sent there will be delivered to mrhistalk@gmail.com, but with the full address listed so you know who shared your information. These tricks could be foiled by sites or bulk emailers that strip off the extra characters, but I doubt that’s common.

For folks who just can’t figure out the EDT versus EST thing, your confusion won’t be obvious again until March 12. Or never, if you instead just use ET.

If your company sponsors HIStalk and is participating in the HLTH conference, complete this form by Wednesday and I’ll list you in my conference guide.

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health (EDOC) exchange-traded fund has lost 27% of its value since its inception on July 30, 2020, while the Nasdaq is down 4% and the S&P 500 is up 15%. EDOC has also performed worse than both indices in the past 12 months. 

People

Inflo Health hires Angela Adams, RN (Jvion) as CEO.

Government and Politics

In the UK, NHS nurses will likely strike nationally for the first time in the next few weeks over compensation, with patient waiting lists expected to grow even longer.

Other

Forbes profiles Humana’s use of a virtual assistant to reduce the documentation burden of its clinicians. The company says that 80% of clinician time was being spent documenting rather than interacting with patients, and using the tool that it named Allie has freed up 15% of their time. Allie was built using technology from Automation Anywhere.

A Madison, WI-based non-profit news site runs a well-written piece on Epic. Snips:

• Epic walked away gracefully from its $624 million VA patient scheduling pilot programs when the VA chose Cerner in a $16 billion no-bid contract, which may benefit Epic in the long run since Epic has since enhanced its market position instead of bogging down in government work.
• Epic has 12,500 employees and $3.8 billion in annual revenue versus Cerner’s 27,000 employees and $6 billion in revenue, but Cerner continues to lag product-wise, is losing premium customers to Epic while selling mostly to price-sensitive ones, and was laying off employees when Oracle pursued its acquisition.
• Epic has built all of its products and they integrate well, while Oracle Cerner grew by acquiring unrelated products that were bolted together.
• Epic says it’s too early to say if it will collaborate with Oracle Cerner on the national database of patient records that Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison has announced, with Epic saying that connecting to Cosmos can’t happen until Epic gains understanding about the reliability of Oracle Cerner’s data, its method of de-identifying patient data, and its willingness to legally agree not to sell patient data commercially.
• Observers say that Oracle Cerner prospects may be spooked by Cerner’s history and the Oracle acquisition and may buy Epic instead.
• Oracle has a history of making grand promises about developing new products when acquiring companies, but the end result is usually only that Oracle tries to sell more of its existing products to the acquired customers.

Contacts

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

News 11/4/22

Top News

Specialty EHR/PM/RCM vendor ModMed pays $45 million to settle a 2017 whistleblower lawsuit claiming that the company – which was formerly known as Modernizing Medicine — falsely attested that its EHR met Meaningful Use criteria, ignored patient-endangering software defects, illegally paid kickbacks, and sold systems to providers who were promised increased revenue through upcoding.

The Department of Justice joined the whistleblower lawsuit filed by former ModMedVP Amanda Long, who will receive $9 million of the settlement. 

Reader Comments

From Sloopy: ‘Re: a list of best jobs in health IT. Check out the source.” The kids who write for Becker’s often fail to filter out click bait stories as they desperately seek headlines to repurpose. Their source for this item is a poorly written, mostly offshore-staffed Internet of Things website whose article looks like a bored freelancer spent 10 minutes stringing together random Google search results, such as “CIOs can keep tabs on how their companies utilize IT to figure out where cyber security can be tightened up” and “you can be sure that your decision to stick to this sector is good because for a stable livelihood, you need a good stable job.” The methodology it used to determine the “best healthcare technology jobs” wasn’t mentioned because there wasn’t one. The bio of the author, who clearly values quantity over quality, says that she has written 40,000 articles. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Access. The Dallas-based company believes that hospitals and their patients deserve better than paper. The company eliminates paper troubles by providing EHR-integrated eForms and eConsent solutions that save hospitals money, make the lives of clinicians easier, and provide a better patient experience. Access has led the way with purpose built patient electronic solutions for hospitals for 20 years and now launches its next-generation Focus offering — which will be introduced in a November 9 webinar – that breaks the convention of forms in favor of adaptable digital experiences, positioning hospitals to effectively engage with their patients on their own devices, anywhere, any time. Thanks to Access for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts reports Q3 results: revenue up 5%, adjusted EPS $0.23 versus $0.21, beating analyst expectations on earnings but falling short on revenue.  

Clinical data abstraction platform vendor Carta Healthcare raises $20 million in a Series B funding round.

Hint Health, which sells EHR-integrated membership management and billing software, acquires AeroDPC, which offers an EHR/PM system for direct primary care physicians.

CPSI announces several leadership appointments under Chris Fowler, who was promoted to president and CEO in July 2022.

The president of virtual health provider Cerebral admits that the company tried to grow too fast when federal prescribing regulations were relaxed during the pandemic, drawing federal scrutiny over its controlled drug prescriptions and overspending on advertising to the point that it laid off 20% of its employees last week. Cerebral will abandon several of its existing and planned programs to focus on mental health, with the CEO adding that it needs to become self-sustaining instead of relying on uncertain additional investor funding.

Sales

• Palomar Health will implement Get Well’s GetWell Loop digital care management solution, followed by phases for inpatient experience, ED experience, care gap closure, and health equity.

People

KONZA National Network hires Karla Mills, MS, MBA (Health Gorilla) as COO.

Jared Klingeisen (Medable) joins specialty medication prescribing software vendor RxLightning as COO.

CommonSpirit Health hires Daniel Barchi, MEM (New York-Presbyterian) as senior executive VP and CIO.

ChenMed promotes Chase Titensor, MBA to VP of strategic payer partnerships.

Announcements and Implementations

Truveta announces GA of Truveta Studio, which allows researchers to analyze the de-identified, daily-updated data of its 25 health system members that represent 700 hospitals and 20,000 clinics. Truveta, which was launched in February 2021 by 14 large health systems, has raised $195 million.

Nine organizations licensed the cloud-based model of Meditech Expanse in the third quarter, raising the count of Meditech as a Service hospitals to 70. Five of the nine were new to Meditech.

Redesign Health will create pediatrics-focused healthcare technology products and companies in partnership with KidsX, whose 40 children’s hospital participants work with early stage digital health companies.

UK health IT vendor EMIS Group says that its $1.4 billion all-cash acquisition by Optum UK will be completed in early 2023.

Privacy and Security

The International Committee of the Red Cross will create a “digital red cross” that it hopes will work like its physical counterpart to prevent cyber harm to the systems of medical facilities and Red Cross offices during armed conflicts.

The office of Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) issues a report titled “Cybersecurity is Patient Safety” that provides issue background and describes policies that could be considered, such as:

• What should a healthcare cybersecurity framework look like? Is NIST’s guidance sufficient and being used?
• Should HIPAA be modernized beyond its focus of PHI protection by covered entities?
• How should Congress create minimum cyber hygiene practices? Should they be deployed under a facility’s Medicare Conditions of Participation?
• Should Congress offer a “cash for clunkers” program to incentivize life cycles for medical equipment? Should providers have a right to repair using third parties?
• Should Congress require healthcare software vendors to publish a “software bill of materials” to allow vulnerabilities to be assessed?
• Should providers be required to train all staff members to use alternate systems during downtime?
• Should providers receive FEMA disaster funds after experiencing a cyber event?
• Should Congress regulate cyber insurance or create its own reinsurance program?

A LexisNexis Risk Solutions study finds that half of participating healthcare payers had a data breach in the past five years, averaging 12,000 compromised records and an average incident cost of $5.4 million. Social engineering was the most common payer cyber fraud source, followed by ransomware. Most respondents say that online identity and credential verification is challenging, especially on mobile apps.

Other

Sixteen medical colleges and hospitals in India’s second-largest state have been using paper charts and radiology film since July 5, when a vendor shut down its hospital system over unpaid bills.

Researchers in Australia apply an electronic Frailty Index similar to that used by UK GPs, using a 36-item screening of PCP EHRs to detect patients with age-related decline who could be treated with vitamins, strength training, and chronic disease management.

Police file several charges against a UPMC ED physician who they say was driving his Tesla at 125 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone when he lost control, killing his passenger, a fellow ED doctor who was not wearing a seatbelt. The driver’s blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit.

Contacts

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

News 11/2/22

Top News

Oracle will close the former Cerner world headquarters and its Realization Campus in Kansas City, MO, consolidating employees from those locations to its Innovations campus as it reduces its footprint as the city’s largest private employer.

Reader Comments

From Doctor and Professor: “Re: Teladoc. We moved to its Solo virtual care platform from Teams. Clinicians are constantly frustrated and several have quit because they can’t deliver good care using the platform. It lacks features that Teams, Zoom, etc. have. You can’t set up backgrounds, share documents, or easily add people to the session. Only 10% of my recent sessions were free of major problems, such as dropped connections, erratic video, and being forced to use telephone audio due to drops and lags. The support people use a standard script that tells both clinician and patient download their app (its advantage was supposed to be that no app is needed), they tell you to plug your device into a charger, they recommend using a hardwired Ethernet connection and wired headsets, and they tell you to warn patients not to use the device for anything else and to turn off all messages while waiting for their session to start. Basically anything to avoid admitting that their system has problems.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Attention HIStalk sponsors that are participating in the upcoming HLTH conference: complete this form by next Wednesday (November 9) to be included in my online guide. The company says it has 800 sponsors, which is up there in HIMSS conference territory. It will be interesting to see how its “open show floor,” which apparently dumps education sessions and exhibits together in the same hall, works out for attendees and vendors. 

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health analytics vendor Advata, which Providence formed in June 2022 by merging six companies from its Tegria business, lays off 32 of its 150 employees. The merged companies were Kensci, Colburn Hill Group, Alphalytics, Lumedic, Quiviq, and MultiScale. Advata CEO Julie Rezek was hired from Facebook and has spent her career in advertising.

Walgreens-controlled primary care provider VillageMD is discussing a merger with private equity-backed Summit Health that would value the combined entity at up to $10 billion. VillageMD operates Village Medical offices at 200 Walgreens pharmacies, while Summit Health and its urgent care practice CityMD have 2,500 providers working from 340 locations.

Forbes profiles Forward Health, which offers primary and preventive care memberships in 10 states for $149 per month with no insurance accepted. The company, which was formed by two former Google employees and has attained a billion-dollar valuation, says that one-third of its members are uninsured, either because they don’t like the concept of health insurance or can’t afford the premiums. Forward’s technology-heavy approach uses full body biometric scans, wearables, DNA testing, and AI-powered algorithms that it says reduces its need for specialists and allows much of the in-office exam to be conducted by an administrative assistant. Trustpilot has some interesting reviews.  

HelpAround, whose platform connects drug companies with patients, renames itself to RxWare.

Sales

• Renown Health chooses provider data management and search from Loyal.
• Meditech will use Health Gorilla’s Health Interoperability Platform for the Traverse Exchange Canada network for sharing data among participating providers.
• Cherry Health chooses EHR/PM from NextGen Healthcare.

People

Anna Yakovenko (Advisory Board) joins the American Medical Association as VP of research and insights.

RevenueWell promotes Katherine Shuman, MHA, MBA to CEO, replacing co-founder Serge Longin.

Sean Postol (Joerns Healthcare) joins Nuance as SVP of sales.

Frank Carozzi, MBA (Streamline Health) joins Medlytix as VP of business development.

Announcements and Implementations

Meditech announces Traverse Exchange Canada, a cloud-based interoperability network that supports information flow among participating organizations.

A study by Elevance Health, formerly Anthem, finds that 94% of people who have used virtual primary care are satisfied with their experience. Non-users believe that doctors need to see them in person or aren’t sure if their visit will be covered by insurance.

The local paper covers the planned Epic go-live of Albany Med Health System (NY) in 2024. I think that Albany Medical Center and maybe others in the group are using Allscripts, while Glen Falls Hospital had big revenue drops and layoffs in 2018 following its “catastrophic” rollout of Cerner, which resulted in a lawsuit that was settled.

Drugmaker Pfizer raises annual sales forecasts for its COVID products – $34 billion for vaccine and $22 billion for Paxlovid – and will increase the price of its vaccine, which will end up priced at double its launch price in December 2020.

Redpoint Summit, whose products provide “EMR personalization at scale,” releases an AI-powered EHR add-on that speeds order entry by suggesting a given provider’s most commonly used medications, which it co-developed with Nebraska Medicine.

An orthopedic group achieved high response rates for EHR-tracked patient-reported outcomes measures following total knee and total hip surgery, but care teams actually looked at their data in fewer than 1% of encounters. The authors conclude that making PROMs available for care team review in the EHR isn’t enough to encourage their clinical use.

A new KLAS report on EHR/PM for ambulatory practices of 2-10 physicians finds that Elation Health, NextGen Healthcare, Athenahealth, CompuGroup Medical, and Azalea Health deliver best in providing the desired functionality and value. AdvancedMD users report steady improvements in technology, while those of EClinicalWorks express frustration with training and support.

Government and Politics

The VA awards Accenture Federal Services a spot on its five-year, $650 million contract to fast-track innovative healthcare technology solutions that can scale for clinical use.

Privacy and Security

A major hospital in Japan suspends non-emergency services after its EHR is taken offline in a ransomware attack. The hospital’s director admitted that “the quality of surgeries might be lowered.”

The legacy EHR of Ascension St. Vincent’s Coastal Cardiology (GA) is breached in a ransomware attack that did not affect its production systems.

Other

Psychiatrists express concern that startups are prescribing ketamine – best known as a powerful anesthetic and party drug – for off-label treatment of serious mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and OCD with minimal oversight.

Contacts

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

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.