News 8/17/22

Top News

CDC will regain control of hospital-reported COVID-19 data on December 31 when the government’s contract with TeleTracking ends.

HHS hired the patient flow technology company in July 2020 via a direct call to its co-CEO. HHS then instructed hospitals to stop sending their data to CDC and to instead use TeleTracking to populate the HHS Protect system.

TeleTracking has earned $50 million from the contract.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors who are attending Epic UGM, send me your participation information and I’ll include it in an online guide that I’ll run later this week. I’ve only heard from Availity, FDB, and Sphere so far, not counting the non-sponsors that submitted a form that will unfortunately remain unused. After-hours social events likely abound, so send me your info if you’re running short on invitees.

Mrs. HIStalk drafted me into doing some video recording and YouTube posting for a non-profit where she volunteers. My quickly assembled on-the-cheap technology arsenal involves an IPhone, a $32 wireless lavalier microphone, and Movavi Video Editor Plus 2022, for which I Googled to find an online coupon that dropped the no-subscription-required license down to $40. That software made it easy to edit and connect various video clips with one-click color and volume correction, insert some royalty-free opening music, and add a few text titles. I think I chose wisely (if somewhat randomly) since the Movavi software is easy to use while having a lot of powerful functions that are unobtrusive until needed. I’m not a video expert and have no interest in becoming one, so the small expenditure of cash and effort hit my sweet spot.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

UK-based digital healthcare company Babylon denies reports that it may be seeking a buyer as it wrestles with sinking share price. The business, which initially made a name for itself by offering virtual care services to the NHS, has gained a foothold in the US by acquiring 700-physician Meritage Medical Network; health kiosk vendor Higi; and DaytoDay Health, which offers patients pre- and post-visit care education, communication, and clinical support via personal care teams. BBLN went public via a SPAC merger in October 2021 at a valuation of $4.2 billion, with share price having dropped 93% in the ensuing 10 months for a company valuation of $335 million.

Sema4, which offers precision medicine and clinical trials tools, eliminates 250 jobs, 13% of its workforce. The founder and president has left the company and board. SMFR share price dropped 33% Tuesday on the news and have shed 86% of their value since the company went public via a SPAC merger in July 2021, valuing the company at $611 million.

Chronic disease management software and services company CareHarmony raises $15 million in a Series A funding round.

Hospital cost management system vendor SpendMend acquires Trulla, which sells pharmacy procurement software. That’s a pretty large misspelling of “visibility” on their webpage above.

Signify Health, the value-based home health provider that is reportedly being pursued by CVS Health, will lay off 489 people beginning October 1. The majority of affected workers work remotely, according to the company, which says the workforce reduction is the result of its decision to shutter its Episodes of Care Services segment.

Enterprise medical imaging vendor Intelerad acquires PenRad Technologies, which offers productivity tools for breast imaging and lung screening.

Activist investor Elliott Management buys a large stake in Cardinal Health and nominates five candidates for board positions. 

Sales

• Christus Health will implement the KyruusOne provider data management platform to create a digital directory.
• SSM Health will work with Optum to develop new inpatient care delivery models, billing processes, and patient engagement experiences using clinical technologies and analytics.
• University of Florida Health Shands chooses Syntellis Performance Solutions for financial planning, cost accounting, and decision support.

People

Ross Martin, MD, MHA (360 Degree Insights) joins consulting firm Agilian as CMIO.

Health Gorilla hires Steven Lane, MD, MPH (Sutter Health) as chief medical officer.

The SSI Group promotes Lori Brocato to SVP of product management.

University of Chicago Medicine names Maia Hightower, MD (University of Utah Health) chief digital and technology officer.

Philips will promote Roy Jakobs, head of its connected care business, to president and CEO when Frans van Houten steps down on October 15.

Nicole Dowsley, MBA (Genomind) joins Clearwater as chief transformation officer.

Verato hires Richard Jordan (Sutherland) as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

NextGen will apply to ONC to become a TEFCA-enabled, vendor-agnostic Qualified Health Information Network. According to the company, it is the first ambulatory-specific vendor to apply to become a QHIN.

The California Department of Public Health will implement lab result collection and reporting software developed by Manifest MedEx as part of its new Surveillance and Public Health Information Reporting and Exchange. Manifest MedEx, Diameter Health, and Lyniate developed the SaPHIRE system.

Duke Health (NC) implements Scanslated’s interactive radiology reporting service at its three hospitals and 14 outpatient imaging facilities.

Australia’s Northern Territory Government deploys the first phase of its $182 million patient health record system. Built on InterSystems TrakCare software, the technology will ultimately replace six legacy systems.

Government and Politics

The 6th Medical Group at Macdill Air Force Base (FL) and Fox Army Health Center (AL) will go live in the next wave of MHS Genesis deployments on September 24.

FDA will allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter to people who have mild to moderate hearing loss, starting in the next few weeks. FDA says that 80% of the 30 million Americans who have hearing loss don’t seek help, audiologist exams aren’t covered by insurance, and the market is dominated by a handful of companies that sell the devices for thousands of dollars. Experts say that FDA’s decision will spur innovation that could radically change the way that hearing devices work and look. My prediction is that the future’s hearing aids will be like listening to the Spotify phone app on Beats by Dre wireless buds, because why not? Get in there, Apple.

Privacy and Security

Conifer Health Solutions reports that an unauthorized user gained access earlier this year to a Microsoft Office business email account that was associated with Brookwood Baptist Medical Center (AL). The RCM vendor has been unable to determine if the personal information of BBMC patients has been accessed. 

An internal report determines that an IT systems failure in May at four hospitals in the UK cost $686,000 and led to the cancellation of 1,000 appointments. The report also revealed that the outage, which was caused by a VMware software defect, led to 330 incidents of patient harm.

Other

Researchers and stroke experts from Wake Forest University School of Medicine (NC) and Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist’s Comprehensive Stroke Center develop COMprehensive Post-Acute Stroke Services – Care Plan, a digital health tool that uses algorithms to create custom-made care plans for stroke patients. The COMPASS-CP tool can be embedded within a patient’s EHR and integrated with remote patient monitoring programs. Wake Forest’s Innovations arm has created Care Directions Inc. to commercialize the technology.

A study published in a data science journal finds that digital health companies are sending data to Facebook to target user advertising, sometimes violating their own policies that prohibit user tracking across websites. The authors found that participants in an online cancer community had their activity tracked by apps from Color Genomics, Myriad Genetics, Invitae, Health Union, and Ciitizen. The only company of the five companies to inquiries by Forbes was Health Union, which said it tracks information but gives users the option to accept or reject cookie-based tracking, also noting that the company isn’t bound by HIPAA because it isn’t a provider. Facebook parent Meta said the companies should not be sharing user information using its Business Tools.

Physician and author Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD describes in an article in The Atlantic why her experience took her from telemedicine skeptic to advocate, labeling it as “an indisputable complement to in-person care:”

• She saw how hard it was for patients to miss a day’s pay to take public transportation to office visits.
• Telemedicine dropped her no-show rate to nearly zero since patients weren’t canceling because of unexpected job demands or transportation difficulties.
• Eye contact has improved, as she can focus on the on-screen patient rather than the computer screen, and they can see each other face-to-face without masks.
• She can see the patient’s living situation and get to know them better by meeting their families and aides.
• Research has shown that routine physical exams are “largely ceremonial” and chronic illness mostly requires cognitive and conversational interaction.
• Providers, like patients, can work from home if they have sick children or are affected by COVID-19.

Sponsor Updates

• HCTec sponsors AltaMed Foundation’s East LA Meets Napa charity fundraiser to help women and families access necessary resources.
• Arcadia makes its research available in the Prognos Marketplace for life science customers.
• CHIME releases a new 30^th Anniversary Podcast featuring 2005 CHIME Board Chair Pat Skarulis.
• Dresner Advisory Services names Dimensional Insight an overall leader in business intelligence in its annual Industry Excellence Awards.
• Sectra will launch the next generation of its Education Portal for medical educators and students this fall.

Blog Posts

• How SDoH improves patient outcomes for community care organizations (Arcadia)
• Policy Perspectives: Why Choice Matters in Healthcare (Arrive Health)
• The Future of Health Information is Bright (Availity)
• Azara Team Completes Pan Mass Challenge 2022 Raising Over $35,000 for Cancer Research (Azara Healthcare)
• EHR Hosting and Backup: Budgeting and Planning Tips that Avoid Surprise Costs (CereCore)
• Pharmacogenomics: The Time is Now (First Databank)
• Top Reasons Fail to Fill Post-Discharge Prescriptions (and what you can do about it) (ConnectiveRx)
• Joining Forces to Drive Powerful Positive Changes in Our Nation’s Health System (Diameter Health)
• How Analytics Can Help Solve Your Patient Leakage Problem (Dimensional Insight)
• The Top 5 M&A IT Challenges and How to Overcome Them (Divurgent)
• National Health Center Week 2022 (EClinicalWorks)
• NG Healthcare Digital Summit Recap: Accelerating Consumer-Centric Care (EVisit)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/15/22

Top News

Truepill reportedly conducts its third round of layoffs in 2022, this time involving 175 employees that represent about one-third of its workforce.

The company, which offers white-labeled, API-connected virtual pharmacy and telehealth solutions as well as home diagnostic kits, claimed last year that it was bringing in $300 million in annual revenue. It was reported to have been valued at $1.6 billion after raising $255 million.

CEO Sid Viswanathan says the company will focus on increasing revenue and cutting expenses.

Truepill was the preferred pharmacy provider of virtual mental health provider Cerebral and had acquired competing virtual ADHD provider Ahead. It shut down Ahead in April 2022 as the Drug Enforcement Administration started investigating the prescribing practices of both of the online ADHD providers, leading Cerebral to stop issuing those prescriptions. 

Reader Comments

From Derek Smalls: “Re: new Oracle Cerner deals. Notice how small the new clients are?” The Cerner announcement lists six of the 11 new CommunityWorks hospital clients the company signed since April, ranging from 15 to 35 beds. I would say that it’s encouraging that these rural, community, and critical access hospitals can implement Cerner in a way that is affordable and technically feasible.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Life’s lessons from poll respondents who have lived them: plan your financial future early, take more risks, stay healthy, and don’t ignore your family.

New poll to your right or here: Has your employer conducted a layoff that you would consider significant in the past 12 months?

Epic’s UGM is coming up August 22-24. It never occurred to me that I could feature how HIStalk sponsors are participating in that and other events as I do with the HIMSS conference, but let’s give it a shot. Sponsors, complete an information form by Wednesday, August 17 and I’ll summarize the results later this week for those who are traveling to Verona. I’ll do this for other conferences if response is good.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF health IT index were up 11% in the past 30 days versus the Nasdaq’s 13.5% rise. However, they are down 27% in the past year and 17% since their July 2020 inception, meaning that your money would have been better invested in Nasdaq index funds.

A business filing indicates that BD’s price to acquire hospital pharmacy software vendor MedKeeper was $93 million.

Medicare Advantage primary care chain ChenMed is considering selling its majority stake in JenCare, a joint venture with Humana that runs 30 clinics in five states, at a company valuation of $4 billion. Family-owned parent company ChenMed also owns Dedicated Senior Medical Center and Chen Senior Medical Center. ChenMed CIO Hernando Celada runs two other ChenMed businesses, Curity (AI-powered care management) and IntuneHealth (primary care centers and telehealth).

Dental software vendor Planet DDS acquires the QSIDental cloud-based dental practice management software platform from NextGen Healthcare.

Sales

• Oracle Cerner executed 161 new, extended, or expanded contracts from April to June 2022, including 11 new clients.

People

Julie Schubert, RN, MS joins Well Health as VP of professional services.

Intermountain Healthcare President and CEO Marc Harrison, MD, MMM resigns to run an unnamed healthcare platform business for venture capital firm General Catalyst. He earned $6 million in 2020, according to Intermountain’s most recent tax filings, and like other former big-system CEOs, further blurs the already faint line between being a highly compensated non-profit executive and taking leadership roles in the most capitalistic organizations in American society.

Government and Politics

A security researcher tells a Defcon security conference audience that the decades-old encryption system that the VA’s VistA system uses could be easily defeated, allowing a hacker to perform clinician functions.

Privacy and Security

An Oregon hospital becomes the latest in a list of those that overpaid their employees during several weeks of ransomware-caused Kronos payroll system downtime that are trying to get employees to return the extra money. St. Charles Health System says the average employee amount owed is $780. The Oregon Nurses Association says it will issue a cease-and-desist letter to the hospital because its demand for repayment is illegal and the health system has provided no evidence that anyone was actually overpaid.

Other

A Commonwealth Fund blog post whose authors include former National Coordinator David Blumenthal, MD says that Amazon’s acquisition of primary care chain One Medical won’t resolve the “international embarrassment” of the US healthcare system. Snips:

• While Amazon shouldn’t be underestimated, its previous healthcare forays have largely failed, such as its Haven partnership and its minimally disruptive Amazon Pharmacy.
• One Medical has always lost money because third-party payers pay little for primary care, leading the authors to predict that Amazon will need to pursue value-based care contracts with commercial insurers instead of the usual Medicare and Medicaid market.
• The authors expect that Amazon will uncharacteristically need to restrict customer choice by negotiating preferred rates with local PCPs, which may not be acceptable in the employer-funded insurance model where the employees complain about being excluded from the big-brand medical centers.
• Amazon must complete with Optum and CVS Health / Aetna, which already have scaled up provider employment and bring unparalleled expertise in managing risk.
• The article concludes that the real question is whether profit-driven entrepreneurship and innovation can bring the US healthcare system up to the level of most other developed countries that do a better job of keeping people healthy at an affordable cost. 

Sponsor Updates

• Diameter Health CEO Eric Rosow and CTO Harvard Pan raise money for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute through their participation in the Pan-Mass Challenge.
• The Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation integrates Xealth’s digital therapeutic content distribution capabilities with its Oracle Cerner EHR, making it easier for patients to access educational content through their patient portals.
• PerfectServe adds more than 400 physician practices across 37 states in the first half of 2022.
• Sphere will exhibit at Epic UGM August 22-24 in Verona, WI.
• Spok announces that 18 of the 20 adult hospitals and all 10 children’s hospitals named to US News & World Report’s 2022-23 Best Hospitals Honor Roll use Spok secure healthcare communication solutions.
• Vocera will exhibit at the 2022 Defense Health Information Technology Symposium August 16-18 in Orlando.
• West Monroe publishes a new report, “2022 Be Digital Research.”

Blog Posts

• Checking-in on Check-Ups: 3 Tactics to Advance Patient Communication in Healthcare (PatientBond)
• 3 Steps to Powering Data Innovation with Analytics & AI (Pivot Point Consulting)
• PINC AI Data Analysis Update: Maternal and Infant Health Trends, 2008-2020 (Premier)
• In full view: Redox Recs on FHIR and digital health integrations (Redox)
• Patient experience tips for mother-baby units (Sonifi Health)
• Becoming great: 5 common characteristics of the best hospitals (Spok)
• How Healthcare Can Change the Odds with Value-Based Care (TigerConnect)
• 5 Practical Ways to Make Remote Therapeutic Monitoring Work in the Clinic (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 8/12/22

Top News

Cerner will pay $1.9 million in back pay and interest to 1,870 job applicants after the Department of Labor compliance evaluation found that the company had discriminated against Asian and black job seekers.

The affected applicants were seeking employment as medical billing specialists, system engineers, software interns, and technical solution analysts at the company’s Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS offices.

The review found that Cerner violated an executive order that prohibits federal contractors from discriminating in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and national origin.

Reader Comments

From Outsider Trading: “Re: Change Healthcare’s ClaimsXten. The rumored acquisition by Availity this spring didn’t end up happening – TPG signed a definitive agreement to acquire it if UnitedHealth Group’s acquisition of Change Healthcare is approved by the federal government.” The initial media reports named Availity as the buyer of the payment integrity business, but TPG Capital signed a deal in April to buy it or $2.2 billion in cash, contingent on the UHG-Change merger being cleared by regulators. I removed that mention from Tuesday’s news post about Availity acquiring Diameter Health.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Direct Recruiters, Inc. The Solon, OH-based company has been recognized since 1983 as the relationship-focused search firm specializing in building customized employment solutions. Our Healthcare IT and Digital Health teams partner with clients to help them strategically build high-performing teams from the C-Suite through the contributor level across each area of the organization. DRI offers contingency search, contract staffing and retained “Direct Retention” search to source, identify, acquire, and retain top-performing professionals to elevate the success of our client organizations. Recognized for over 17 national awards, DRI has a proven record of success in recruiting top talent for leading companies. Thanks to Direct Recruiters, Inc. 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

Virtual care and digital medicine vendor Biofourmis adds additional funding from Intel that increases its Series D round to $320 million.

Bloomberg reports that CVS offered $18 per share to acquire One Medical months before Amazon bought the primary care chain for the same price. The detailed timeline laid out in SEC filings is fascinating  — CVS is reportedly Party A in the document.

TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, buys women and children’s hospital chain Amcare Healthcare for a reported $1.5 billion.

People

Tower Health (PA) promotes CIO Michelle Trupp, RN, MSN to SVP and COO of Reading Hospital.

Motient hires Brian Miller, MBA (Signify Health) as VP of business development.

Digital Diagnostics hires Chris Meenan (Philips) as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

A study finds that patients who tested positive for COVID-19 and used Get Well’s remote patient monitoring technology to track their symptoms and vital signs had a 32% lower hospitalization rate, stays that were 2.7 days shorter, and fewer ICU days

Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX) Lumere launches a consulting service to help hospitals with their cost-saving and clinical variation programs. GHX acquired Lumere, which helped health systems align their drug and device purchasing decisions with evidence, in January 2020.

UNC Health and partners Gozio Health and Well Health enhance the health systems mobile platform to include a map of closest urgent care centers and EDs, a link to download the UNC Health app directly from text-based appointment reminders, and the option to save appointments to the mobile device’s calendar with a link to way-finding instructions. I noticed that the app also allows visitors to save their parking location so the app can route them back to their cars.

Government and Politics

The VA publishes a Digital Healthcare Playbook that describes how it works with contractors to develop software and lays out the kinds of solutions it needs.

VA OIG finds that the VA loaned IPads to 41,000 patients last year for use in virtual appointments, but only half of them completed an appointment. The VA also failed to collect 11,000 devices that had never been used for virtual appointments, which cost $6.3 million for devices and another $78,000 in cellular data fees.

Connecticut spent $20 million of mostly federal money to fund a University of Connecticut project to build HIE software that was ultimately discarded in favor of buying a system from Maryland’s CRISP HIE for $1 million per year. The group that developed the system, UConn Analytics and Information Management Solutions, has shut down and dismissed its 20 employees.

The Defense Health Agency’s Military Health System awards a subsidiary of government contractor Peraton a 10-year, $2 billion contract for digital transformation services.

Sponsor Updates

• CoverMyMeds staff raise funds for cancer research organization Pelotonia during its annual live and silent auction, and by participating in Pelotonia’s ride weekend.
• Biofourmis appoints former Trevor Fetter (The Hartford) and Sachin Jain, MD (Scan Group) to its board.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “How Payer Data in Healow Insights Can Help Improve Care.”
• CloudWave reports that over 50 of its customers have been with the company for five years or more, and that 92 have been customers for three years or longer.
• The Veterans Data Integration and Federation Enterprise Platform, which leverages technologies from InterSystems, receives the 2022 FedHealthIT Innovation Award.
• Lyniate launches version 11.2 of its Lyniate EMPI by NextGate.
• NTT Data announces the winners of the NTT Data AI Hackathon for innovations in healthcare.

Blog Posts

• Optimum CareerPath Spotlight – Meet Trevor MacGinitie (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Hazelden Betty Ford Taps Oracle Cerner and Xealth to Simplify Access to Addiction Treatment and Recovery Content (Cerner)
• A Different Point of View: EHRs Must Evolve into Platforms for Communities of Care (Medicomp Systems)
• The Healthcare Technology World is Becoming Flat (Get-to-Market Health)
• Pharmacists Will Rise to the Occasion with Paxlovid Prescribing (First Databank)
• Why Social Determinants are a Growing Priority (Get Well)
• Laying a foundation for the future: How will healthcare suppliers respond to an increasingly complex healthcare supply chain? (GHX)
• Why Digital Health Tools & Training are Key to Improving Community Health (The HCI Group)
• PROs & PROMs 101: An introduction to patient-reported outcome measures (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Building Connections Through the Lyniate Partner Program (Lyniate)
• How Clinician-Driven EHR Design Improves the Anesthesia Experience (Medhost)
• The Healthcare Technology World Is Fast Becoming Flat (Get-to-Market Health)
• How personalizing Expanse unlocked new opportunities for patient care at Ozarks Healthcare (Meditech)
• How Post-Acute Leaders Are Solving Prior Authorization & Benefits Verification Challenges (Myndshft)
• A Wound Care Provider’s Alaska Adventure Begins (Net Health)
• The Dire Need for Integrated Behavioral Health in Chronic Care Management (NeuroFlow)
• When every second counts, connections matter (Nuance)
• Leveraging AI to Overcome Revenue Cycle Staffing Shortages (Nym)
• Overcoming frozen thinking in healthcare (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 8/10/22

Top News

Health information network management company Availity will acquire Diameter Health, which specializes in data optimization and interoperability, marking its second acquisition of the year.

I interviewed Availity CEO Russ Thomas in January, and Diameter Health CEO Eric Rosow shortly thereafter.

Reader Comments

From Prime Mover: “Re: API fees. Here’s what I have seen in the industry.” Thanks for sending me this list in response to a previous reader’s comment:

• EHR vendors. API fees are common, pricing models vary, and per-transaction fees are often assessed. Some vendors take a cut of revenue for publishing apps on their marketplace and this is usually on top of an annual membership fee. Vendors are more likely to make USCDI-compliant APIs available at little or no charge so as to not invite scrutiny over information blocking, but these come with a limited support.
• Integration platforms, such as Redox, Ellkay, and self-service options like Jitterbit and MuleSoft. Their business model is exchanging data on behalf of a customer, so they charge for this, most often a fixed amount per connection (pulling demographics and appointment data from System A to System B is two connections). Per-user pricing is uncommon and volume-based pricing is quite rare. Some charge upfront platform fees.
• Health data exchanges, such as Datavant, Moxe Health, and 1upHealth. Companies use APIs to digitize and automate manual workflows, with much of the focus on provider-to-payer connections such as Medicare risk adjustment and release of information. Usually the interoperability piece is included in the overall service provided.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIMSS pulled out of Chicago years ago over customer-indifferent McCormick Place union members strong-arming exhibitors who dared plug in their own power strips or empty their own trash cans. I guess it got so bad that the convention center now provides a list of what exhibitors can do themselves, at least by full-time employees who have been on the job for six months (exhibiting company newbies and contractors apparently can’t be trusted). Exhibitor employees are allowed to set up and tear down booths, install signs and decorative items on the booth’s drapery and exhibitor table skirting, and to plug in and turn on AV equipment. HIMSS-specific exhibit hall rules include the usual prohibition on clowns, strolling through the hall wearing a sandwich board, and working a booth naked.

Webinars

None scheduled in the coming weeks. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Netsmart acquires Zimmet Healthcare’s Core claims data analytics offering for skilled nursing facilities. Netsmart will add Core to its CareFabric platform for post-acute care providers looking to improve their value-based care performance.

CPSI announces Q2 results: revenue up 21%, EPS $0.21 versus $0.42. Shares are down 15% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 16% drop, valuing the company at $447 million.

People

Erik Johnson (Verato) joins PatientIQ as VP of marketing.

Lehigh Valley Health Network (PA) names Maulik Purohit, MD (University Hospitals) chief health information officer.

Arcadia hires Chris D’Arcy (Liaison International) as chief human resources officer.

Advata promotes Corinne Stroum to SVP / head of product and Jamie Snell to chief customer success officer.

Health Catalyst names Melissa Welch, MD (InnovAge) chief medical officer and Edward Sheen, MD (Lumeris) SVP/ chief population health officer.

Randy Fusco (TEKsystems) joins Clearsense as CTO.

Sales

• Magnolia Regional Health Center (MS) selects AMC Health’s remote patient monitoring and virtual care technology and services for its RPM program focused on congestive heart failure patients.

Announcements and Implementations

Adventist HealthCare (MD) implements Innovaccer’s cloud-based population health management technology.

Atrium Health (NC) wraps up its system-wide conversion from Cerner to Epic.

MarinHealth (CA) goes live on Epic through a partnership with University of California, San Francisco Health.

Government and Politics

An audit of the Veterans Health Administration’s video connect program finds that 51% of the 41,000 patients who were loaned tablets for telehealth appointments in 2021 never used them for that purpose. VHA staff failed to collect 11,000 devices from patients who never scheduled a virtual appointment despite a requirement that devices be given back if appointments weren’t scheduled within 90 days of receipt. Auditors concluded that the program’s $14.5 million budget could have been used more effectively through better device monitoring, collection controls, and oversight.

Sponsor Updates

• Clinical Architecture supports the ALS Association Indiana at the 10^th Annual Bob Kravitz Golf Outing to Defeat ALS.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Transforming Care for Two Practices with Healow Insights.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health and the American Journal of Nursing welcome Carl Kirton, DNP, RN as incoming editor-in-chief.
• Sonifi Health will integrate Vitalchat’s telehealth software with its bedside patient engagement smart TV technology at a new pediatric hospital being built in Texas.
• Ascom Americas expands its channel partner network in Canada with Canem Systems – National Technology and Services Group.
• Azara Healthcare publishes a new customer success story, “MPCA Drives Clinical Quality Improvement Through DRVS Mapping & Data Validation Project.”
• CarePort partners with The Hospital and Health system Association of Pennsylvania’s HAPevolve subsidiary to offer members access to its care coordination technology.
• CHIME releases a new podcast, “CHIME 30^th Anniversary Podcast: Change with Bill Spooner, 2006 Board Chair.”
• Clearwater names Henry Gyambiby (KP Global IT Consulting) a consultant on its cybersecurity and risk consulting team.
• Experity names Amy Amick (SPH Analytics) to its Board of Directors.
• Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new handbook, “Navigating the ICU: A Guide for Patients and Families.”

Blog Posts

• 3 ways technology can optimize your billing services (Ability Network)
• Streamline the Prior-Authorization Process in 2022 (AdvancedMD)
• Reducing implicit bias in predictive healthcare analytics (Arcadia)
• Technology Can Help Marginalized Communities Gain Access to Behavioral Healthcare (Bamboo Health)
• The Chronic Care Model (ChartSpan)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 8/8/22

CVS Plans to Bid for Signify Health

CVS Health will reportedly make a bid to acquire value-based home care provider Signify Health, which has been exploring strategic alternatives.

Definitive Healthcare Reports Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2022

Healthcare commercial intelligence vendor Definitive Healthcare reports Q2 results: revenue up 37%, EPS –$0.05, beating expectations for both.

ScanSTAT Technologies expands health information management services with acquisition of Georgia-based ResolveROI

Health information management vendor ScanSTAT acquires release-of-information company Resolve ROI for an undisclosed amount.

VA Cerner EHR system goes down for over 4 hours due to patient database corruption issue

The VA’s Cerner system goes down for several hours due to database corruption.

Monday Morning Update 8/8/22

Top News

From the Allscripts earnings call:

• CEO Richard Poulton says the company’s potential acquisitions will be chosen to avoid past accusations of the company being “Frankenstein, because things didn’t really work together very well.”
• Acquisitions will focus more on payer and life sciences than providers, but Allscripts is interested in revenue cycle and getting providers paid faster.
• Asked by an analyst about a publicly traded competitor that is predicting a higher growth rate in the provider space, Poulton responded that “talk is cheap” and it’s laughable when someone predicts that their margins will double.
• Asked about existing clients whose contracts cover products that were sold to Constellation as well as some that stayed with Allscripts, Poulton says overlap exists FollowMyHealth and with practice management systems used by large physician practices. He says that the contracts stayed with whichever business owns the products, and where a contract covers multiple solutions that were split between the companies, they will be served by both companies until the contract expires. He added that FollowMyHealth “is not a big piece of the provider business at all.”

Reader Comments

From Jimbo: “Re: API fees. People used to talk a lot about how vendors who send or receive data on behalf of clients would charge for that service. I’m wondering from your readers which ones do?” That was a big deal early on, as some vendors were using a “how much can we make from it” approach to interoperability. Anyone care to weigh in on API-related charges?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Inconclusiveness is evident among poll respondents who weighed in on how Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner will impact the VA’s implementation.

New poll to your right or here, repeating a poll question I asked three years ago:  For those over 50, what is the #1 thing you wish you had done differently?

I’m interested in the dynamic of being laid off via a Zoom call from your home office. I think I would rather accept the corporate coup de grace remotely and in private versus being marched out of the office under the shocked but relieved gaze of co-workers. Those affected are surely stunned by the impersonal, scripted process regardless of its service location, but in my experience from being on both sides of layoffs, it’s best to get it done quickly and consistently and then send the person home so they can react in their own way elsewhere. I recall asking hospital security to be unobtrusively nearby when we were telling a bunch of our IT folks that their services were no longer needed, which seemed kind of slimy when it involves people you’ve known for years, but you never know how people will react. Then comes the classic Kubler-Ross stages of grief: (a) it surely was a mistake that will be fixed or customers and co-workers will rise in protest to override my dismissal; (b) management is clueless in failing to value my contribution to this train wreck of a company; (c) maybe I should have seen it coming, changed teams, or changed behavior less-valuable people got to keep their jobs; (d) realizing that the “please come back” call isn’t coming and the team and/or company is running fine; and finally (e) accepting what happened as unchangeable and figuring out how to move on. It’s dangerous deriving so much of your identity from a job that someone else can end with an Excel formula.

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

Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Wall Street Journal reports that value-based home care provider Signify Health, which has been exploring strategic alternatives, will likely receive an acquisition bid from CVS Health. The company’s NYSE share price values it at $4.7 billion.

Healthcare commercial intelligence vendor Definitive Healthcare reports Q2 results: revenue up 37%, EPS –$0.05, beating expectations for both. The company says it will continue to make acquisitions, expecting to close one or two per year. DH shares dropped 16% Friday following the announcement. They jumped 40% on their first day of trading in September 2021, but have since lost 43% of their value versus the Nasdaq’s 16% loss, valuing the company at $2.4 billion.

People

Spok promotes Mike Wallace to president / COO and Calvin Rice, CPA to CFO.

Government and Politics

The federal government posts an earlier-than-expected RFP for implementation of an EHR for the Indian Health Service.

The VA’s Cerner system goes down for several hours due to database corruption. The outage reportedly also affected DoD and Coast Guard sites.

Privacy and Security

The UK’s NHS 111 non-emergency call line is affected by a cyberattack on its systems, causing delays in dispatching ambulances, booking appointments, obtaining referrals, and having emergency prescriptions filled. The affected patient management, electronic patient record, and care management are operated by vendor Advanced.

Other

Customers of NC-based eye care practice EHR/PM vendor Eye Care Leaders accuse the company of concealing its ransomware attacks in 2021 that included a week-long outage, claiming that the vendor ignored IT requests, threatened them legally, was unable to restore current practice data because it backed its systems up only weekly, and may have failed to file the required breach notice with OCR. They also claim that the company didn’t reduce their next month’s subscription fee despite failing to meet their uptime service level agreement. Several practices have signed on to a proposed class action lawsuit to break their contracts, get their data, and seek payment for damages. CEO Roni Amiel’s experience includes stints as CIO / CISO of NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Blythedale Children’s Hospital.

Sponsor Updates

• West Monroe staff volunteer with Boys Hope Girls Hope of Colorado to offer students career pathways insight, interview tips, and college internships.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Improving Patient Safety by Avoiding Medical Abbreviations.”
• Pivot Point Consulting promotes Kelly Robinson to senior operations specialist.
• Relatient releases a new Dash Talk Podcast, “Activating Patients Through Targeted Messaging and Segmentation: A One Pediatrics Case Study.”
• Surescripts releases a new podcast, “There’s a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology, “The Nightmare & Silver Lining: Walgreens’ Tasha Polster on the Impact of COVID-19.”
• Talkdesk CEO Tiago Paiva is recognized as the UC Leader of the Year during the UC Awards presented by UC Today.
• Zynx Health partners with clinical data and intelligence company LogicStream Health to deliver advanced performance improvement capabilities to health systems.

Blog Posts

• Hospital Marketing: How to Use Market Segmentation to Improve Patient Activation and Retention (PatientBond)
• Nurses of Note Awards 2022: The Senior Manager of Clinical Professional Development (PerfectServe)
• Medication decision support systems help build a resilient digital healthcare foundation (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• 7 ways contact center AI provides better customer experiences (Talkdesk)
• How to Leverage Communication and Data to Improve Patient Handoffs (TigerConnect)
• Allina’s Journey: Improving Outcomes for Total Joint Replacement (Upfront Healthcare)
• A Framework for Achieving Your Smart, Connected Hospital Vision (Vocera)
• The ROI of RTM: Maximizing Profitability with Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (WebPT)
• Improving Readmission Rates: Strategies for Skilled Nursing Teams (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 8/5/22

Top News

Davis Health System (WV) and WVU Health will end their partnership due to a planned change in EHR vendors.

DHS announced in February 2022 that it will implement Cerner under the CommunityWorks model, saying that while Epic and Cerner have similar functionality, Epic is unaffordable even when provided through WVU.

DHS says WVU notified it immediately after it announced its EHR decision that it was ending the clinical affiliation due to lack of an integrated system.

A DHS VP says, “It was a substantial difference of millions of dollars … we made the decision to go with Cerner, which will still speak to doctors at WVU or anywhere else in the state, it may just take an extra click … We went back to them and told them we would consider canceling our contract with Cerner if they could give us a new price that was more acceptable to our administration and the board. They said no.”

Reader Comments

From Allaboutlabs: “Re: Epic. Are they searching for a lab ordering partner? There has been some recent activity on genetic testing and EMR integration (Epic and Myriad, Meditech).”

From Bonhomme Richard: “Re: Senior Helpers. I ran across this wild podcast from the spring.” The CEO of home care franchise operator Senior Helpers, which was acquired last year by Advocate Aurora Enterprises, says that home care and personal care companies aren’t data driven because they aren’t paid by Medicare and therefore don’t have outcomes or claims information, placing them at a disadvantage now that Medicare Advantage insurers are starting to pay for such services. The company has developed an “autonomy score” that predicts readmissions and ED visits and is developing ways to prove the cost savings that they provide in preventing falls, encouraging medication adherence, and preventing hospital encounters.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Carequality Executive Director Alan Swenson clarified some points from my Monday news of updates to its Carequality Connected Agreement that will allow federal agencies to participate: (a) the updated language was in its general CCA, not anything specific to EHealth Exchange; (b) Carequality has “implementers” rather than “members”; and (c) Carequality is an independent non-profit organization that operates under a management services agreement with The Sequoia Project, which created the initiative but is no longer its parent.

My LinkedIn is awash in “I’ve been laid off and need a job” posts, but what’s interesting is how many of those users publicly thank their former employer for the opportunity they provided (until they didn’t). I understand the need to avoid communicating bitterness or despair while trying to land a new job, but that could be done equally graciously by not referencing the former employer at all, especially since it’s plain to see on the job history. I would find it hard to thank my corporate executioner unless they dispatched me with atypical grace or empathy, but I’ll side with the job-seekers who would gain little from publicly torching a company they didn’t leave until forced.

Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts announces Q2 results: revenue up 7%, adjusted EPS $0.18 versus $0.18, nearly all of those numbers attributed to its Veradigm business since it has sold everything else. Revenue beat Wall Street expectations, but earnings fell short.

CVS Health says in its earnings call that it will expand its services in primary, care, provider enablement, and home health, adding that it is already the country’s largest provider of retail health services with its MinuteClinics. CVS adds that “we can’t be in primary care without M&A” that will involve companies with a strong management team, strong technology, and the ability to scale, with a deal expected by the end of the year. It will emphasize value and consumer experience in offering virtual care and using its MinuteClinics and pharmacists as local access points. CVS passed on the chance to acquire primary care chain One Medical, which then accepted a $3.9 billion offer from Amazon. CVS has previously told investors that it hopes to own or manage up to 350 primary care clinics by the end of 2024, with a preference for practices that have experience in value-based care.

London-based Cera – which offers remote patient monitoring, homecare visits, and telehealth — raises a $320 million funding round.

Atropos Health, which offers a digital consultation service for providers, raises $14 million in a Series A funding round and names Brigham Hyde, PhD as CEO. The company says it solves the “evidence gap” via a publication-grade, just-in-time summary of real-world evidence that is extracted from millions of de-identified patient encounters.

Sales

• Stanford Medicine will study COVID-19 health outcomes using Komodo Health’s Sentinel application, AI analytics, and de-identified patient data.
• The Iowa Board of Pharmacy uses Bamboo Health’s PMP Gateway solution to integrated the state’s prescription monitoring program with provider EHRs.

People

The VA names David Massaro, MD, MBA, MS as the functional champion of its Oracle Cerner implementation, on detail from the VHA’s Office of Health Informatics.

Therapy Brands hires Jeff Shoreman (Magnitude Software) as CEO.

Bravado Health promotes Mallory Taylor to CEO.

Edifecs hires Raymond Bonnett, MBA (NextGen Healthcare) as VP of professional services, Mark Filiault (Diagnostic Robotics) as VP of payer sales, Chip Acton (Zipari) as VP of solution consulting, and Brian Hanley, MPAff (Nava) as VP of public sector sales.

Kyle Swarts (Curation Health) joins AiHealth as SVP of growth and marketing.

Megan Schmidt (Monarch Medical Technologies) joins Ellkay as VP of product management.

Announcements and Implementations

The Q3 trends report by Pivot Point Consulting, a Vaco Company finds that venture funding is down 40% so far this year versus last year; no digital health IPOs have occurred; and easing of virtual care red tape such as interstate provider credentialing is scheduled to end in February.

Sponsor Updates

• Bluestream Health announces that its technology powers New York State’s COVID-19 “Test to Treat” program.
• ChartSpan announces a partnership with group purchasing organization Health Resource Services.
• Experity publishes a new e-book, “Learn How Successful Urgent Cares Make Business Decisions.”
• Donations from FDB help fund National Council for Prescription Drug Programs Foundation grants of $295,000, which help to fund research dedicated to enhancing patient safety, expanding patient access to care, and expanding the role and value of the pharmacist.
• Wolters Kluwer Health donates clinical decision support tools including UpToDate, Lexicomp, and Lippincott Procedures to Mercy Ships, a humanitarian organization that operates two floating hospitals for underprivileged populations.
• HCTec supports Aspirus Health as a sponsor of its 2022 Golf Classic.
• Loyal earns SOC 2 Type II certification.
• Healthcare IT Leaders is ranked among the largest staffing firms in the US, according to Staffing Industry Analysts.
• Intrado names Tyler Remund (Sanford Health) senior product manager.

Blog Posts

• Rim to Rim: What is Data’s True Potential for Healthcare? (InterSystems)
• Interoperability in healthcare: The role of TEFCA (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• How Analytics Power Revenue Cycle Optimization (Medhost)
• Da Vinci Standards, Decoded: 3 Eye-Opening Ways Every Provider, Payer & HIT Vendor Will Reap Rewards (Myndshft)
• Predictive Analytics and Value-Based Care: Defining Value (Net Health)
• Creating the Standard of Digital Care: An Enterprise-Grade Approach to Population Behavioral Health (NeuroFlow)
• Why it’s essential to have an integrated strategy for AI in radiology (Nuance)

Resources: Consulting Engagement Request for Information, Sponsor Guide.

Contacts

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

News 8/3/22

Top News

Oracle lays off staff in its marketing and customer experience divisions. Some Oracle Cerner employees also appear to be affected, according to this Reddit thread sent over by a reader, which includes rumors of the departure of several former high-level Cerner executives.

Oracle is pursing $1 billion in annual compensation savings, which probably means the loss of 5,000 to 10,000 jobs of its 140,000.

Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Lyniate acquires Denmark-based clinical terminology management vendor CareCom. It’s the health data integration company’s second acquisition of the year, having purchased patient identity management company NextGate in March.

Business Insider describes how weight loss startup Calibrate uses technology not only to scale its business growth, but also to scale its business cutbacks, but without the empathy and support it claims to offer customers. The company laid off 150 employees, some of whom had just started their jobs the same week, via a two-minute webinar for which they were given 30 minutes notice. Calbrate’s subscribers pay $138 per month to get a prescription for GLP-1 weight loss drugs such as semaglutide along with virtual coaching, then they or their insurance pay hundreds of dollars each month for the drug itself.

Dandelion Health launches a platform by which health systems can sell de-identified patient data to life sciences companies to train their AI systems, with its first two members being Sharp HealthCare and Sanford Health.

Sales

• Gaylord Specialty Healthcare (CT) selects Meditech Expanse.
• Valley Health (VA) will implement Epic in its own instance instead of through Inova Health System in a 16-month, $50 million project.

People

Scott Raymond, MHA, RN (NetApp) is named chief information and innovation officer of Nebraska Medicine.

Northwell promotes Sophy Lu to SVP/CIO.

Brady Thomas (Specialized Bicycle Components) returns to Divurgent as chief of staff.

Iodine Software hires Priti Shah, MBA (Finvi) as chief product officer.

Cardinal Health promotes Michelle Greene, MS to CIO.

Steven Hendrick (Huron) rejoins Healthlink Advisors as VP.

Michael Ruffino, MBA (Hillrom) joins About as VP of health system partnerships.

Industry long-timer Simon Hawken, who led US and European sales for Merative (formerly IBM Watson Health), died July 25.

Announcements and Implementations

A study of 2,000 Ascension employees finds that adherence to organizational COVID-19 policies improved by 4.9% in the two-week study period when they were texted a reserved date for vaccination using the Relatient system, although no difference was observed from the control group once the vaccination deadline was reached.

Government and Politics

Carequality expands its interoperability framework to federal agencies via an update to its Carequality Connected Agreement that will allow those organizations to opt in to EHealth Exchange’s Carequality Bridge.

The 42nd Medical Group (AL) at Maxwell Air Force Base and 1st Special Operations Medical Group (FL) at Hurlburt Field will transition to Oracle Cerner-based MHS Genesis next month.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) asks the Federal Trade Commission to perform a high-priority review of Amazon’s planned acquisition of One Medical, which he says gives Amazon too much power to push non-prescription blood pressure medications at Whole Foods that are based on One Medical patient data (note to the Senator – I agree to some extent with your concerns, even though blood pressure medications are not sold without a prescription at Whole Foods or anywhere else in the US).

Other

The Washington Post obtains a confidential government review of a January 2021 report by the White House’s US Digital Service, which says the country’s organ transplant matching system — operated by the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS — is outdated, unreliable, dependent on manual data entry, and of unknown security status. The report concludes that the non-profit UNOS, which developed the system 36 years ago, is a monopoly that should be broken up in separating its role as a system vendor from that of a transplant policy organization. The federal government pays $6.5 million annually to UNOS under an agreement that requires it to buy the system for $55 million if it switches vendors.

Fox Chase Cancer Center (PA) nurses Maria Market, RN and Allison Ward, RN, MSN create the Oral Chemo Tracker, an EHR-compatible smart form that helps clinicians better monitor oral chemotherapy. The pair developed the digital form last year after a review found that just 33% of oral chemotherapy patients had a documented plan, only 7% were assessed for adherence, and none had record of steps taken to address non-adherence.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health makes Monkeypox content free to clinicians worldwide in response to the WHO-declared global health emergency.
• Ascom expands its channel partner network in Canada to better serve acute care customers in the areas surrounding Montreal.
• Bamboo Health names Amber Rogers proposal manager, Meredith Dougherty customer success manager, Whitney Minard implementation specialist, and Ibrahim Alabi associate product manager.
• Oracle Cerner publishes a new client achievement, “Allies in opioid stewardship: Fort HealthCare implements high-risk alerts to combat epidemic.”
• Loyal reaffirms its commitment to health data privacy and security with SOC 2 Type II certification.
• Divurgent publishes a new client success story, “On-Demand Staffing.”
• Ellkay earns Validated Data Stream Designation via the new NCQA Data Aggregator Validation program.
• Well Health promotes Tyler Ledbetter to manager of enterprise sales development.

Blog Posts

• Best Practices for Negotiating Health Insurance Contracts (AdvancedMD)
• Prioritizing CDI on the Ambulatory Side of healthcare facilities (AGS Health)
• Data analytics pave ACOs’ path to success (Arcadia)
• Interoperability: We have technology, data standards, and a compelling use case – so why isn’t everyone on board? (Availity)
• How digitizing at-home care can improve recovery for hysterectomy and c-section patients (Bravado Health)
• Interoperability Without a Directory is Like Blue Cheese Without Celery! (CareMesh)
• Is Outsourcing an Answer to Financial Pressures Post-Pandemic? (CereCore)
• How to Maximize Medicare Shared Savings (ChartLogic)
• Creating the Standard of Digital Care: An Enterprise-Grade Approach to Population Behavioral Health (NeuroFlow)
• Understanding Insider Threats and How to Protect Your Organization (Clearwater)
• Fighting for Medication Access and Adherence: Market Outlook Beyond 2022 (ConnectiveRx)
• Closing the Gap Between Patients and Their Records (EClinicalWorks)
• The Case for Health Data Interoperability (EVisit)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/1/22

Top News

Scotland-based charge master software vendor Craneware reports that revenue for the year to the end of June was up 119%. Earnings increased 85% to $50 million.

Much of the jump was attributed to the company’s July 2021 acquisition of US-based pharmacy systems vendor Sentry Data Systems for $345 million at current exchange rates.

Craneware’s entire customer base is in the US, where 40% of all hospitals are its customers.

Reader Comments

From Premature Oraculation: “Re: Oracle rewriting Cerner Millennium. Six to nine months, even to reach a vague beta stage as the Oracle exec says, is not doable.” Agreed. Pharmacy systems are complex, deeply interconnected, and likely to create patient harm if designed or tested poorly. Oracle has the technical expertise to rewrite Cerner pharmacy in less than a year, but they are promising a complete functional redesign of the VA’s version of it. That doesn’t sound like enough time to even convene a VA working group to represent its 171 medical centers, develop basic specifications, and create an approval and signoff structure in both organizations. Even a technical replatforming to modern architecture would be a major undertaking given the testing that would be required, and some argue that expending all that effort just to improve the performance of existing functionality would be a missed opportunity. Still,  give Oracle credit for boldly placing a stake in the ground even though I suspect the company is naively underestimating the complexity of hospital IT systems, especially one that touches patient care directly and that has so many integration points to other modules. Also, whether it makes sense to develop a VA-only custom system and how that would work with customer-facing development tools such as MPages and CCL. I don’t understand why a pharmacy rewrite is important since I haven’t seen publicized VA problems that it would resolve, unless Oracle is talking the ambulatory pharmacy module, which has had some integration issues reported. It’s also true that throwing armies of technologists at a huge development project, especially one that requires endless stakeholder input, doesn’t guarantee a faster or better result.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents who plan to attend conferences in the next year are most likely to be found at HIMSS23, a vendor’s user group meeting, or ViVE.

New poll to your right or here: How will Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner impact the VA’s EHR implementation? I’m leaning toward “more likely to be successful” since the project’s challenges – excluding those of the VA itself — are mostly technical and Oracle brings a lot of engineering talent to the table.

Even so, it has been jarring to see how readily Oracle has thrown Cerner under the bus, blaming its lack of technical expertise and its dated architecture after spending $28 billion to buy the company. Maybe Oracle was caught off guard by catching so much congressional heat just weeks after the Cerner keys were handed over. Meanwhile, DoD’s Cerner project hasn’t had many publicized issues or hiccups, which could mean that (a) Leidos as the prime contractor is better than Cerner at keeping federal clients happy or at least quiet; (b) members of Congress aren’t as involved in DoD project oversight or using it to grandstand for their constituents; or (c) the VA’s needs are more complex and heavier on integration with 400,000 employees, care settings ranging from hospitals to private medical practices, and the need to convert data from VistA and other legacy systems going back decades. Project resets are a tough call, as the time spent trying to achieve perfection means losing momentum and enthusiasm. Health system implementations of Cerner, Epic, or anything else are hard enough without politicians dispatching VA OIG to find problems.

I’m pondering the lack of smart edits to date entry everywhere on the web, where the IT shame of Y2K elicited an overreaction of dumbing the computer down to accept only MMDDYYYY dates even when they will always be current or immediate future (like due date, ship date, appointment date, etc.) and it’s pretty obvious that entering “22” means “2022” and not “1922” or “2122.” It’s a contest of whether that wastes more time than clicking “accept cookies”

Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Spok announces Q2 results: revenue down 6%, EPS $0.10 versus –$0.04.

A KHN report notes that two-thirds of hospices are now run as for-profit companies, often by private equity firms. They are paid a fixed daily rate  with little government quality oversight, encouraging them to cut spending and to seek patients who will live longer, such as those with dementia.

Sales

• LifePoint Health will implement data and analytics solutions from Health Catalyst in its 93 hospitals.

People

Department of Veterans Affairs promotes Jonathan Nebeker, MD, MS to national CMIO and executive director of clinical informatics.

Announcements and Implementations

TriNetX announces members of its Pediatric Collaboratory Network – Children’s National Hospital, WVU Medicine Children’s, Children’s Health, and Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital.

Other

Bizarre: in Punjab, India, the health minister performs a surprise inspection of a medical college hospital, and finding a lack of cleanliness, orders the health sciences vice-chancellor to lie on a patient’s dirty bed. The 72-year-old hospital executive, who is a spinal surgeon and member of India’s medical regulatory body, resigned over the incident afterward, saying that obtaining a replacement mattress under the government’s laborious purchasing process takes nine months. Critics called the event “cheap theatrics” that will demoralize employees. I’m fascinated by the cultural dynamics that prevented the executive from refusing the demand of the health minister, a farmer who did not attend college and who has no healthcare experience.

Sponsor Updates

• Optimum Healthcare IT names Krista Bramlage (Cross Country Healthcare) managed services business development executive.
• Diameter Health releases a new infographic, “How Payers Can Get More ROI on Investments in Clinical Data.”
• Surescripts releases a new episode of There’s a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology Podcast, “How COVID-19 Has Upended Assumptions About Care.”
• G2 names Symplr a leader in clinical communications and collaboration, and HIPAA-compliant messaging.

Blog Posts

• 5 Benefits of Managed IT Services for Healthcare (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Advancing Maternal and Infant Health: One Database Can Illuminate the Entire Pregnancy Journey (Premier)
• A Risk-Free Approach to Risk Adjustment: A New Managed Service from RCxRules and AAPC (RCxRules)
• In full view: Healthcare sectors’ unique economics and regulatory drivers (Redox)
• Contact center cost savings: Doing more with less (Talkdesk)
• How to Create Fair (and Pain-Free) Physician Schedules (TigerConnect)
• How Managing Chronic Conditions is Streamlined with Digital Technology (Twistle)
• First Gradually, and Then All at Once: Amazon Puts a Premium on Patient Experience (Upfront Healthcare)
• SIIM22: Visage’s Top Five (Visage Imaging)
• Healthcare System Administrators – Celebrating Their Contributions to Optimizing Healthcare (Vocera)
• Keep in Touch: 4 Technologies That Connect Rehab Therapists and Patients from a Distance (WebPT)
• Digitizing the due diligence process in private equity will lead to value creation faster (West Monroe)
• Embracing Evidence-Based Care Plans to Support the IHI’s Patient Safety Initiative (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 7/29/22

Top News

Teladoc Health reports Q2 results: revenue up 18%, EPS –$19.22 versus –$0.86, missing Wall Street expectations for both.

The loss was driven by a Q2 impairment charge of $3 billion, which followed a $6.3 billion charge in Q1.

Share price dropped 18% Thursday after the announcement, valuing the company at $5.7 billion. Teladoc’s market capitalization was over $40 billion in early 2021. It paid $18.5 billion to acquire Livongo in the fall of 2020.

From the earnings call:

• The company is optimistic about its chronic care business that came from its acquisition of Livongo, but its pipeline is slower than expected due to competition and employer financial uncertainty.
• Its BetterHelp online therapy business grew revenue 40% year over year, which was still on the low end of company expectations as smaller private competitors have priced their services unsustainably low to earn market share.
• The $3 billion impairment charge was driven by an increased discount rate and the decreased market multiples for other digital health companies.
• The company will look at its cost structure to maintain near-term profitability and will market bundles of services to prospects.
• Teladoc is entering into more value-based arrangements, where payment is driven by clinical outcomes or cost savings.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The June 2020 expiration date of my 2016-vintage, seldom-used Asus Chromebook meant it could no longer receive Chrome OS or Chrome browser updates, so I decided to shell out $99 for a comparable Lenovo one from Best Buy. My only requirement was the same 11.6 inch screen, which I like because it’s barely bigger than my standard IPad in a package that weighs just 2.4 pounds. It feels elegant, the keyboard is nice, and when I logged into Chrome OS , everything was right where it was on its predecessor, although that means that the intoxicating new-computer smell was offset by the lack of satisfaction I would have earned from successful setup tinkering. It seems crazy that an entirely usable computer, as theoretically underpowered as it might be, costs less than $100.

Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Payment integrity platform vendor ClaimLogiq acquires SyTrue, which offers natural language processing technology for medical claims and coding. ClaimLogiq says NLP will give clinicians and coders the ability to make rapid payment integrity decisions.

NextGen Healthcare reports Q1 results: revenue up 5%, adjusted EPS $0.16 versus $0.25, beating investor expectations for both. NXGN shares are up 15% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 18% loss, valuing the company at $1.2 billion.

BD acquires MedKeeper, which offers cloud-based hospital pharmacy applications for IV verification and medication delivery tracking.

Sales

• Availity is named as the single-source technology partner for California’s provider directory utility.
• Vizient will offer its members digital patient engagement and behavior change programs from PatientBond.

People

Malissa Bennett (Optum) joins Curation Health as chief commercial officer.

Tegria promotes Brian Bircher to RVP of sales.

Austin Awes (Infor) joins Commure as VP of sales – platform.

Optimum Healthcare IT hires Chris Mader (TotalTek) as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

AmerisourceBergen launches DTx Connect, which allows patients to access physician-prescribed digital therapeutics and diagnostics via EHR-integrated ordering and patient fulfillment monitoring.

Behavioral health integration vendor NeuroFlow launches a referral network of behavioral health providers, tele-therapy companies, and tele-psychiatry organizations to expand access to care. The company’s technology performs digital, population-wide behavioral health screening, then provides AI-powered “best next step” clinical decision support for care teams. I interviewed co-founder and CEO Chris Molaro in March 2022, marveling at his pre-entrepreneur background as an assistant clerk to the US Supreme Court, graduating from West Point and then earning a Wharton MBA, and serving five years as as US Army platoon leader with deployment to Iraq.

Government and Politics

Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL) warns that the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee may consider “pulling the plug” on the VA’s Oracle Cerner implementation if its larger sites don’t go live successfully early next year as the VA has promised. Bost also told a committee that the VA’s Cerner project is “a bad investment at any price” and that the project’s cost could be as high as $63 billion over 25 years “if everything goes wrong, and I see a lot of things going wrong.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (M-UT) proposes creating the Center for Public Health Data as an independent data subagency of HHS. It would create a single system of community-acquired infectious disease health data, including aggregating de-identified hospital and laboratory that is already being collected for real-time access. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD supports the idea, saying that CDC’s analysis is too slow to assist local officials who are making decisions and it holds the data from outside review until it reaches its own conclusions.

Sponsor Updates

• Ellkay earns NCQA Data Aggregator Validation designation, which allows health plans to gather supplemental data for quality measures and to prove its validity. 
• The specialty medication solution of Surescripts is being used by 24% more prescribers year-over-year who generated 8.2 million prescriptions between January and May, saving patients an average of $535 per prescription.
• RCM solutions vendor Brundage Group will offer its clients integration from Redox to connect to hospital EHRs.
• InterSystems opens an office in Auckland, New Zealand, to better accommodate new TrakCare customers at Auckland City Hospital and Starship Children’s Hospital.
• Juniper Networks will exhibit at Black Hat 2022 August 10-11 in Las Vegas.
• Myndshft celebrates reaching the milestone of 1 million patients served by its prior authorization platform.

Blog Posts

• A Different Point of View: Treating EHR Avoidance Syndrome (Medicomp Systems)
• Understanding the Changing Consumer Experience in Healthcare (Healthwise)
• How Manual Patient Engagement Can Contribute to Staff Burnout (Intrado)
• Allies in opioid stewardship: Fort HealthCare implements high risk alerts to combat epidemic (Oracle Cerner)
• Building Providers’ Digital Presence: Here, There, and Everywhere (Kyruus)
• Look-Alike, Sound-Alike Medications Get an AI-Assist to Improve Patient Safety (MedAware)
• A Risk-Free Approach to Risk Adjustment: A New Managed Service from RCxRules and AAPC (RCx Rules)
• 3 Ways Medhost Supports 2022 National Patient Safety Goals Compliance (Medhost)
• How Meditech supports collaboration and innovation among clinicians (Meditech)
• Cost to Capital: Turn Your Rehab Therapy Department into an SNF Revenue Center (Net Health)
• Meet the patient where they are (At the barber shop!) (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 7/27/22

Top News

Governance, risk, and compliance vendor RLDatix acquires Galen Healthcare Solutions, which offers system support, implementation, optimization, data migration, and cloud-based legacy system retirement.

The CEO of RLDatix is industry long-timer Jeff Surges (Healthgrades, Allscripts, Merge Healthcare).

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The wildly uncertain intricacies of email delivery, spam filters, and company email server policies mean that HIStalk update subscribers are constantly falling off my list as undeliverable, often without realizing it. Sign up and you’ll know first when I post something new. You won’t get spam from me or anyone else and don’t worry about getting multiple emails – the list ignores duplicate email addresses.

Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare cybersecurity, compliance, and risk management vendor Clearwater acquires RevSpring subsidiary Tech Lock, which offers similar services for a variety of industries including healthcare. Tech Lock leadership will transition to senior roles within the new Clearwater subsidiary.

Former pharma bro and just-released federal convict Martin Shkreli launches Druglike, a drug discovery software platform. He says its use will benefit patients with rare disease, which a cynic might add would include those parasitic disease sufferers who saw the price of 60-year-old drug Daraprim jump from $14 to $750 per tablet after it was acquired by the former hedge manager’s company. Druglike will run computational chemistry problems on the computers of “miner” users who will be paid in tokens called MSI (Martin Shkreli Inu).

Theator, which uses AI to derive insights from surgery videos, announces a Series A funding round of $39.5 million. Mayo Clinic joined the round as an investor and commits to using the company’s video analytics.

Automated patient intake software company Health Note raises $17 million in a Series A funding round led by SignalFire.

3M will spin off its healthcare business into a stand-alone company focused on health IT, wound care, oral care, and biopharma filtration. 3M had attempted to sell off its health information systems revenue cycle and software business earlier this year.

AI-powered data quality company Cornerstone AI raises $5 million in seed funding.

Cloud, managed services, and analytics company Healthcare Triangle opens an office in Singapore, where it expects to create 500 jobs over the next five years.

Cleerly raises $192 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised since launching last year to $248 million. The company has developed predictive intelligence and clinical decision support software for patients with heart disease.

Columbus-based chronic condition management technology vendor AndHealth will triple its headcount in a new space downtown. The company was launched in 2021 by CEO Matt Scantland, who sold his previous company CoverMyMeds to McKesson for $1.1 billion in 2017. I interviewed him in February 2022.

7wireVentures portfolio company Caraway emerges from stealth mode with a $10.5 million seed funding round. It will offer mental health, reproductive, and physical healthcare services to college-aged women.

Primary care EHR vendor Elation Health raises $50 million in a Series D funding round, increasing its total to $109 million. Ascension Vendors and Jonathan Bush were among the round’s participants.

Sales

• Presbyterian Healthcare Services (NM) selects Commure’s Strongline staff safety alert system to better protect employees at its 70 facilities.
• Deep River & District Hospital, Kemptville District Hospital, and Winchester District Memorial Hospital in Ontario will go live on Epic in November.
• Akron Children’s Hospital will use analytics and population health management software from Health Catalyst.
• St. Dominic Hospital and and Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center will go live on Epic next year through their affiliation with Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System.
• UPMC (PA) signs a five-year contract with Microsoft for its cloud computing, AI, and machine-learning software.
• Cooper University Health Care (NJ) will implement Sectra’s enterprise imaging technology.

People

Harsha Panyadahundi (Wolters Kluwer) joins Sharecare as CTO.

CareJourney names Mah-Jabeen Soobader (Archway Health) chief analytics officer.

University of Florida Health promotes Jiang Bian to the new role of chief data scientist.

Brad Porter (Fisher & Paykel Healthcare) will become CEO of Orion Health when his father-in-law, Orion founder and CEO Ian McCrae, steps down in late August. McCrae will remain involved as an executive director focused on products.

Teladoc Health names Mike Waters (Providence) COO.

Jerald West, PhD (AdvanSix) joins Access as CISO.

Change Healthcare promotes Benjamin Gold to VP of product management.

Announcements and Implementations

Vital announces GA of CareAdvisor, whose tools track health progress and discharge readiness and and offer care plans and educational content.

Experity adds a business intelligence module to its EHR and practice management software for urgent care clinics.

Government and Politics

Sources report that the Roseburg VA Health Care System’s Cerner-based EHR went partially offline for several hours last week due to a system overload that affected patient registration.

Other

An AMA survey of consumers finds that 92% think their health data shouldn’t be sold, and while most respondents are comfortable with their doctors and hospitals using their data, they are least comfortable having it used by a prospective employer or technology companies. Nearly all want app developers to disclose how their data is used, 88% think hospitals and doctors should review apps before they are given access to health data, and 75% want the chance to approve use of their data in advance and to be able to opt out.

Studies find that despite federal and state requirements for health plans to keep their provider directories current, consumers are still wasting time trying to book appointments with listed providers who no longer take insurance or new patients, and in some cases, receive services only to be charged out-of-network prices because of insurer directory errors.

Sponsor Updates

• Experity will host the 2023 Urgent Care Connect conference February 22-23 in Aventura, FL.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story featuring Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio, “Prisma: How Better Data Improves Care and Reduces Costs.”
• AGS Health publishes a new e-book, “5 Reasons to Select AGS Health as Your Offshore Service Provider.”
• OptimizeRx partners with Cooler Screens to offer healthcare advertising agencies  a pharmacy advertising presence for their pharma clients via retail surfaces, such as the doors of in-store coolers.
• Bamboo Health sponsors the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors Annual 2022 Meeting.
• Cerner publishes a new client achievement, “The University of Tennessee Medical Center automates processes to optimize throughput and reprioritize valuable resources.”
• Nordic releases a new episode of its “DocTalk” video series.
• CloudWave announces the availability of its OpSus Recover disaster recovery service in the AWS Marketplace.
• The B2B Leadership Podcast features Dimensional Insight VP of Marketing Kathy Sucich, “How Putting Employees First Makes You a Better Leader.”
• Divurgent will present at the Arch Learning Collaborative Summit July 27.
• Optimum Healthcare IT joins TriZetto Consulting Partner Network. 

Blog Posts

• Housing insecurity and health – more than a social problem (Arcadia)
• Technology as a Safety Net for Critical Environments (Ascom)
• Getting Provider Billing Right: EHR Workflow and Optimization Tips (CereCore)
• A Growing Must Have for Healthcare: MDR (Clearwater)
• Go From Data to Decisions with Business Intelligence for Experity EMR/PM (Experity)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 7/25/22

Top News

Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia tells the US Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that Oracle will move the VA’s Cerner implementation to the cloud and rewrite Cerner’s pharmacy module, completing both tasks within 6-9 months. Notes:

• Sicilia told the committee to consider that Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner gives VA, DoD, and the Coast Guard “a new, vastly more resourced technology partner overnight to augment Cerner.”
• Oracle says it will shift its top talent to working on the federal government’s Cerner challenges and is running the project from a war room that is staffed by senior Oracle engineers and developers.
• Sicilia says that Cerner, like its EHR competitors, is running on dated architecture using technology that is up to two decades old, making it hard to manage, support, and scale. Oracle says it will quickly move the Cerner application to a “modern, hyperscale cloud data center,” the same infrastructure that Oracle uses for critical industries in financial services and utilities. That conversion will be performed at no cost to the federal government.
• Oracle quickly fixed a database bug that caused 13 of the most recent 15 outages once the acquisition was completed and Oracle gained access to Cerner’s source code.
• The “unknown queue” was designed to account for human error rather than to mitigate it, so it will be redesigned.
• Sicilia says Oracle will “start over” with the Cerner pharmacy module, rebuilding it as a showcase of a cloud-optimized web application.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents aren’t too worried about negative job changes.

New poll to your right or here: Which conferences you plan to attend in person in the next 12 months? A sponsor asked if I planned to create a sponsor guide for conferences other than my usual HIMSS one, so the poll results will help me decide.

It’s an interesting phenomenon that so much of my LinkedIn feed is filled with “I’ve been laid off and need a job” posts, many of them from Olive because it laid off so many employees (450) at once. I’ve laid people off and been laid off myself and the double whammy is that not only are you out of a job, you are competing for a new position along with a bunch of your comparably skilled co-workers, most of them vastly preferring to avoid relocation. Maybe LinkedIn, combined with remote work options, will be effective in reducing the lost time between being marched out of one door (often virtually these days) and waiting for a new one to open.

Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Ascom acquires Appliware, a France-based developer of long-term care solutions for patient monitoring and alarming.

Elevance Health, the former Anthem, says in its earnings call that it will develop solutions that go beyond selling health insurance, touting its Carelon health services offering in which the company’s own providers will coordinate and provide patient care. Carelon offers services for behavioral health and value-based care and operates IngenioRx, an pharmacy benefits management and home delivery pharmacy company. ELV shares are up 20% in the past 12 months versus the Dow’s 8% loss, valuing the company at $110 billion.

Sales

• New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene will implement CareMesh’s national provider directory, which is available via FHIR APIs, file uploads, and web app.
• Hawaii’s Med-QUEST Division awards NTT Data a health analytics contract.

People

Divurgent hires Collin Jones, MBA (RedZone Technologies) as VP of finance.

Announcements and Implementations

Clearwater launches ClearConfidence, a managed services program covering cyber risk management and compliance.

An Optum consumer survey finds that providers fall short in offering online scheduling for both in-person and telehealth visits, particularly for younger adults who are not satisfied. Half of the respondents missed a scheduled healthcare appointment in the past year, one-third of those because they forgot, suggesting that appointment reminders could help reduce that number.

Three studies show that use of Bayesian Health’s AI technology for sepsis early warning reduced inpatient mortality by 18%. Founder and CEO Suchi Saria, PhD is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where she also runs healthcare AI and engineering groups.

Other

WHO declares monkeypox as a global health emergency as world case counts rise to 16,000. US infections have risen from 200 to 3,000 in the past four weeks.

In the UK, IT and telephone system servers at one of NHS’s largest trusts go down as data center cooling systems fail to keep up with a record heat wave. The UK recorded its highest-ever temperature Tuesday of 104.5 degrees F. Clinicians are recording information by hand and asking patients to bring their own records to appointments. One doctor reports, “We are back to using paper and can’t see any existing electronic notes. We are needing to triage basic tests like blood tests and scans. There’s no access to results apart from over the phone, and of course the whole hospital is trying to use that line. Frankly, it’s a big patient safety issue and we haven’t been told how long it will take to fix. We are on divert for major specialist services such as cardiac, vascular, and ECMO.”

A widely cited 2006 research article on Alzheimer’s is found to contain what appears to be “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, leading to speculation that the authors may have altered data to support a hypothesis and thus sending researchers off on wild goose chases for years. In an interesting case of money driving the scientific process, the research was performed by scientists who were associated with the manufacturer of an Alzheimer’s drug, while the neuroscientist who reported the altered images was hired to do so by two other neuroscientists who were short sellers in shares of the same drug company. NIH spends $1.6 billion per year on research of amyloids for Alzheimer’s and scientists report that suggesting other causes of the condition to study pits them against the “amyloid mafia.” The only marketed drug in that category is Aduhelm, which earned the FDA widespread scientific scorn for approving a drug despite unimpressive research results.

Sponsor Updates

• Azara Healthcare staff train for the Pan-Mass Challenge, a bike race that will raise money for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Azara BKRS will ride in honor of colleague Heather Budd, who lost her battle with ovarian cancer last November.
• Northwest Clinics in the Netherlands adds Agfa HealthCare’s Rubee for AI platform to its Agfa enterprise imaging solution.
• GHX has grown its technology group by 12% in the last year, and plans to grown another 21% by the end of 2022.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “The rise of CCBHCs and the importance of quality of care measures in behavioral health.”
• Oracle Cerner releases a new podcast, “Improving health equality and equity through digital innovation.”
• Clinical Architecture Manager of Research & Strategy Jordan Rose becomes the co-vice chair of the HIMSS Chapter Advocacy Task Force.
• CloudWave appoints CompuGroup Medical CEO Derek Pickell to its board.
• ReMedi Health Solutions posts a white paper titled “How a Clinically-Driven Chart Preparation Process Improves the Continuum of Care.”
• RCx Rules publishes a case study titled “How US Dermatology Partners Achieved Their Highest Clean Claim Rates Despite Staffing Challenges.”
• Health Data Movers appoints former Bluetree CEO Jeremy Schwach to its Board of Directors.
• Lyniate announces a referral partnership with Solarity, which has developed an intelligent automation engine for easier use of clinical data.
• Nuance expands the availability of Dragon Medical One through the Microsoft Marketplace.
• Nordic Consulting achieves ISO 27001 certification.
• Pivot Point Consulting publishes a new case study, “A Multi-Pronged Success: AthenaOne EHR Support & Cures Act Education.”
• PeriGen earns the 2022 Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Product Leadership Award for its maternal and infant care solutions.
• PerfectServe publishes a case study, “Children’s Hospital & Medical Center Omaha: Centralizing Provider Scheduling Across an Enterprise.”
• MGMA’s podcast features Surescripts Senior Product Analyst Nicholas Chambers, “How Medical Practices Improve Medication Adherence and Patient Safety.”
• Vocera publishes a new white paper, “Smart, connected hospital framework.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health expands its Lippincott portfolio, using open science to support the higher velocity exchange of scientific findings.

Blog Posts

• Technology Best Practices for Stabilizing Healthcare Revenue and Operations (About)
• Key Steps for Successful Provider Credentialing (AdvancedMD)
• ECR2022: Thank you for joining us (Agfa HealthCare)
• Debunking 3 Myths About Offshoring Your Revenue Cycle Management (AGS Health)
• FHIR: Benefits and limitations for whole-person care (Arcadia)
• Staying the Course: 4 Ways to Reduce Patient Drop-Off in Rehab Therapy (Net Health)
• How is Your State Supporting 988 Crisis Response? (Bamboo Health)
• Getting Provider Billing Right: EHR Workflow and Optimization Tips (CereCore)
• Operational and Financial Tips for Starting a Private Practice – Part 1 (ChartLogic)
• CHIME – Always Dedicated to Serving Its Members (CHIME)
• Top 5 Spots to Check Out in Madison at the Epic UGM (Clearsense)
• 4 Steps to Increase Your Patient EHR Adoption (CTG)
• How Analytics Can Make a Difference in the Radiology Department (Dimensional Insight)
• Key Takeaway from the AHIP 2022 Conference (Divurgent)
• Cost & Utilization Explorer: Seeing, Understanding, Acting (EClinicalWorks)
• Strategies and Trends Impacting Your Urgent Care Billing (Experity)
• Telemedicine Policy Review: It’s Time for Non-Discriminatory Regulation and Reimbursement for Home Testing (EVisit)
• How FDB Leverages the CDC and FDA to Help Ensure Trusted Clinical Content (FDB)Working Toward High-Touch, Digital-First Access for All (Get Well)
• Incorporate Mentoring and See Your People Thrive (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Advice from Supply Chain Experts: Four Best Practices for Smooth Leadership Transitions (GHX)
• 3 Ways a Neutral Zone Could Propel Personalized Medicine: Real-Time Example of Data Collaboration from Roche (Healthcare Triangle)
• HCCs under CMS and HHS: Can you spot the difference? (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Memos from the Medhost CISO: Overcome Cyberattacks with Risk Assessments and Virtual CISO (vCISO) Services (Medhost)
• Supporting complex oncology care close to home (Meditech)
• 3 Reasons to Add Automated Prior Authorization to Your SaaS Solution (Myndshft)
• What is the Most Popular Behavioral Health Content in the NeuroFlow App? (NeuroFlow)
• Combining Cutting-Edge Technology and Deep Clinical Knowledge to Simplify Complexity in Healthcare Administration (Nym Health)
• Impact of patient activation across the ecosystem (Bravado Health)
• Unlocking Success in Palliative Care for Providers and Patients (Netsmart)
• Healthcare interoperability can put people first (Nordic)
• Expanding Access and Improving Outcomes with Measurement-Based Care (Owl)
• 3 Digital Health Trends Among Millenial and Gen Z Healthcare Consumers (PatientBond)
• Symplr Experts Guide on How to Engage Providers in Value Analysis (Symplr)
• What is Health Care Provider Credentialing? (PMD)
• How Healthcare Providers Can Tackle the Rising Costs of Services (Premier)
• How US Dermatology Partners Achieved Their Highest Clean Claim Rates Despite Staffing Challenges (RCxRules)
• In full view: Interoperability Best Practices for Specialty Labs Integrations (Redox)
• AHIP conference 2022: 3 top trends for health plans (Talkdesk)
• Transforming care delivery with modern healthcare technology (TigerConnect)
• 6 Fresh Ideas for Keeping Patients Engaged Between Appointments (WebPT)
• Homegrown, Out-of-the-Box, or Standardized Evidence-Based Clinical Decision Support: What’s Powering Your EHR? (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 7/22/22

Top News

The VA postpones this week’s planned Oracle Cerner go-live in Boise, ID due to system stability issues that the VA says make it unsuitable for larger-facility use. The VA has no other go-lives scheduled for 2022.

The Spokane paper obtained a document from Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center that lists 180 incidents of system degradation and downtime since September 2021, a far larger number than the VA has acknowledged.

Meanwhile, VA officials tell Congress that its implementation will cost $51 billion over the next 30 years, including maintenance and staffing, but it does not expect the $16 billion Cerner contract to run over budget unless the 10-year implementation timeline is extended.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Several COVID-careful relatives and friends have come down with the virus in the past week, some of whom have had it multiple times and all of whom were vaccinated. I think the term “pandemic” no longer applies (COVID-19 is now arguably endemic) and the coronavirus is no longer “novel” (most of us have been vaccinated, had COVID-19, or both, which has dramatically dropped hospitalization and death rates). A New York Times viewpoint predicts that by the end of 2022, 80% of the total infection count since 2020 will have happened in 2022 as new variants are popping up every few weeks. Experts predict 100,000 to 300,000 COVID-19 deaths in the US each year indefinitely as higher case counts overcome lower death rates. COVID has killed just over 1 million Americans.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Amazon will buy publicly traded primary care clinic chain One Medical for nearly $4 billion in cash, a 77% premium to ONEM’s closing share price Wednesday. The company has member-only clinics in 16 cities throughout the US. One Medical acquired Medicare-focused provider Iora Health in June 2021 for $2.1 billion. Before the acquisition announcement, One Medical shares were down 63% in the previous 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 18% loss. Bloomberg reported on July 5 that One Medical was considering its options after CVS Health reportedly expressed interest but ultimately passed.

A CB Insights Q2 report on digital health says that the COVID-era funding boom is receding to 2019 levels, dropping 32% quarter over quarter following a 36% drop in Q1. IPO activity is nearly non-existent and SPAC exits are rare. Funding in the health IT category remained at 2021 levels, however. Telehealth cooled dramatically and digital startups that focus on reproductive health face privacy and security challenges following the Roe v. Wade decision.

Remote patient monitoring system vendor Verustat acquires One Healthcare Solution, which sells software for chronic care management, annual wellness visits, and medication reconciliation.

A recapitalization of Internet Brands values the company at $12 billion. Its health brands include WebMD, Medscape, EDoctors, and Henry Schein One.

Tech-powered online pharmacy Capsule reportedly lays off 13% of its employees.

The twice-yearly health IT investment market review of Healthcare Growth Partners – the only company whose reports I study carefully — notes that an entire generation that was raised on cheap capital and climbing valuations is watching the market come to a screeching halt. It observes that while valuations are falling, they have climbed steadily since early 2018. Points:

• Valuations remain strong for high-quality companies, although investor criteria for “quality” have stiffened and emphasis has shifted from growth to profit.
• Fewer investors are buying, but available capital from premium buyers has kept valuations high.
• The cost of private debt is increasing, as lenders become cautious and raise their quality standards.
• The industry will consolidate as smaller companies that lose access to capital are acquired by incumbent competitors.
• HCP believes that multiples are nearing a bottom, but a return to post-COVID levels is unrealistic and sellers need to deal with a market that looks more like 2018-19.
• Winning sectors are likely to be supply chain management, spend analytics, contract and vendor management, lead generation, and revenue enhancement.

Sales

• MemorialCare Miller Children’s & Women’s Hospital Long Beach will implement Health Catalyst’s Twistle patient, family, and caregiver communication system in pediatric cardiology.
• Denver community mental health provider WellPower selects Augintel’s NLP solution to extract information from provider case notes.
• Prime Healthcare adds three hospitals to the surgical care team collaboration and coordination solution of RelayOne.

People

Matthew Lungren, MD, MPH (Amazon Web Services) joins Nuance/Microsoft as CMIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Apple publishes a report on its healthcare accomplishments and ambitions. Notes:

• The company’s health efforts are focused on the personal health journey of users (data storage, fitness and health features, support for third-party apps) and medical collaboration (research enrollment, making patient data available to providers, promoting health lifestyles via Apple Watch, and supporting public health and government).
• The release this fall of IOS 16 and WatchOS 9 will offer features covering 17 areas of health and fitness . These are activity, heart health, sleep, respiratory, mobility, hearing, mindfulness, education, COVID-19, handwashing, safety, women’s health, medications, research, health sharing, data visualization and insights, health records, and third-party apps.
• The Health IPhone app can store 150 types of health data and tens of thousands of App Store apps use the HealthKit API.
• The company’s work with Stanford to develop the Apple Heart Study helped it develop capabilities to allow researchers to develop medical studies at unprecedented scale.
• Healthcare systems are using Apple technology to strengthen the physician-patient relationship and to enable care from everywhere.
• Providers and insurers are integrating Apple Watch into their wellness programs.

Google Health develops a tool that can reduce the effort and cost of training machine learning systems on chest X-rays. The system, CXR Foundation, converts X-ray images to a numeric representation that allows models to be developed using smaller datasets and less computing power but with no loss of predictive quality. Another benefit is that it works with smaller datasets and allows building a solid model that accommodates underrepresented populations and rare medical conditions.

Oracle and Microsoft announce Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, which allows customers to run applications across the cloud offerings of both companies.

Frederick Health (MD) goes live on Meditech Expanse Genomics in that includes First Databank’s embedded pharmacogenomic decision support, sending orders, and receiving inbound patient-matched results in full PDF form.

Government and Politics

The Justice Department seizes $500,000 from the cryptocurrency accounts of North Korean hackers, which includes ransom paid by hospitals that DOJ returned. A Kansas hospital paid $100,000 to regain access to its systems following a ransomware attack, while a Colorado provider paid $120,000. The incidents drove the federal government’s July 6 cybersecurity threat warning about North Korea-based ransomware hackers who are targeting healthcare and public health organizations.

Privacy and Security

An Atlas VPN review finds that three-fourths of Q1 malware attacks exploited Microsoft Office vulnerabilities, often because users had not applied security updates. Browser exploits are becoming rare because they keep themselves updated automatically.

Other

I’ve read some insightful comments about Amazon’s acquisition of One Medical, which I’ll summarize:

• Health systems have bought up primary care practices as a loss leader, with their real interest being forcing their owned PCPs to refer their high-profit inpatient procedure work to the health system’s acute care hospitals.
• Telehealth companies can disrupt that process only so much in the absence of offering the in-office services that patients regularly need.
• Amazon is gaining a national physical presence with the acquisition. It also gains a respected healthcare name.
• Amazon’s PCPs can focus on meeting consumer needs rather than making in-organization referrals.
• The company could also charge for its procedure gatekeeper services or bid the procedure work selectively.
• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in November 2021 that the company will be a “significant disruptor” with its Amazon Care virtual primary care business. Its goal was to be a one-stop shop for health-related transactions via three health arms – Amazon Care (virtual medical advice), Amazon Diagnostics (at-home testing), and Amazon Pharmacy (the former PillPack). Amazon also offers the Alexa Together caregiver support / remote patient monitoring service that runs on Echo devices.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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News 7/20/22

Top News

Healthcare automation vendor Olive AI lays off 450 employees, one-third of its total headcount, saying that economic realities have forced it to “reconcile missteps” related to its aggressive expansion.

The company was valued at $4 billion a year ago.

The company says it will sharpen its focus on revenue cycle for providers and utilization management for payers, which generate 80% of its revenue.

Olive shares CEO Sean Lane with Olive spinoff and Medicaid care management technology vendor Circulo, which laid off 25% of its workforce one month ago.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

GE Healthcare, which is separating itself into three publicly traded companies that each focus on a high-growth sector, will name the healthcare business GE HealthCare when it spins off in early 2023.

An internal email that was shared on Reddit – and confirmed by Oracle as authentic by the Kansas City business paper — outlines significant changes in the former Cerner business that is now owned by Oracle:

• The business is now called Oracle Health, one of Oracle’s Global Industry Units (GIUs), with no mention of whether the Cerner name will continue to be used. 
• Former Cerner President and CEO David Feinberg, MD, MBA will become chairman of Oracle Health, with unstated responsibilities and reporting structure.
• Former Chief Client and Services Officer Travis Dalton, MPA, who led Cerner Government Services, will run Oracle Health as its general manager.
• Former CTO Jerome Labat and other Cerner technology executives will report to Oracle EVP Don Johnson, the company’s cloud executive who will now oversee Oracle Health engineering.
• Corporate functions such as IT, finance, legal, and HR will be moved to Oracle teams.

People

California health information network Manifest MedEx promotes Erica Galvez to CEO.

Tanner Health promotes Abe Manasrah, MS to VP/chief data officer.

Industry long-timer Ron Strachan, MSA, whose SVP/CIO roles have included WellStar Health System and McLaren Health Care, offers advisory and interim CIO services in his newly founded company Optimize Health IT.

OneMedNet hires Joe Walsh, MBA, MA (AllStripes) as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Loyal integrates Google Business Messages – the  asynchonrous chat function that is built into Google’s search and map tools — with its digital platform, allowing users to carry their conversations forward from Google searches to a hospital’s website or patient portal without losing the discussion.

Microsoft announces a digital contact center platform that is powered by tools from Nuance, Dynamics 365, Teams, and Power Platform.

Teladoc Health’s Livongo chronic condition management business will place its fees fully at risk for improvements in measures for hypertension, diabetes, and weight management.

Holzer Health System goes live on PeraHealth’s Rothman Index Trend and Mobile to monitor patient condition.

The non-profit Digital Medicine Society releases four toolkits for integrating data from wearables and digital sensing products.

A new KLAS report on remote patient monitoring concludes that interest and investment is growing in a fragmented market, but RPM’s future will be driven by insurer payments. The offerings of Health Recovery Solutions and Vivify Health have the highest usage, but the latter suffers from steadily declining customer satisfaction due to low support quality and poor EHR integration. Organizations say they need better EHR integration to streamline clinician workflows and capture billing data, also hoping that patient ease of use will improve. Most of the RPM activity is tentative exploration by large health systems who plan to support their RPM programs through insurance billing or by reducing costs under value-based care contracts.

Government and Politics

ONC publishes USCDI Version 3.

HHS OCR settles 11 cases in which providers failed to give patients copies of their medical records in a timely manner, assessing civil money penalties that range from $3,500 to $240,000. One medical practice refused to provide medical records to a patient who had an outstanding balance, another claimed that a patient’s durable power of attorney did not include access to medical records, and Memorial Hermann Health System paid the largest penalty of $240,000.

Privacy and Security

Fortified Health Security’s mid-year cybersecurity report finds that malicious attacks make up of 80% of breaches and organizations that use cybersecurity tools that use AI/ML can detect and contain breaches faster than those that don’t use automation.

Sponsor Updates

InterSystems UKI supports its employees during record-high temperatures and the resulting school closings by inviting the families of employees to spend the day in its air conditioned offices.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Monday Morning Update 7/18/22

Top News

A VA OIG report concludes that the VA’s use of an “unknown queue” in its Cerner system caused multiple events of patient harm in which orders failed to reach their intended care location. Notes from the report:

• The system failed to deliver 11,000 orders in which clinicians chose a service location that didn’t match the type of service that they were ordering.
• The system did not notify the clinicians that their order had not been delivered, and in fact assured them that their order had been accepted.
• The VA learned of the unknown queue’s existence when it opened its first Cerner trouble ticket about the problem four days after go-live, after which the VA instructed staff to monitor the queue and cancel and re-enter the problem orders.
• Cerner says that a a VA leader had approved the use of the unknown queue in January 2020, but that leader and their supervisor say they weren’t aware of it.
• Cerner created a provider alert for their undelivered orders in February 2022, but the VA said that the solution wasn’t adequate.
• The OIG did not accept the response to its report from VA Deputy Secretary Donald Remy because it failed to address the report’s key finding that patients were harmed.
• Remy says that Cerner and the VA were both aware of the queue’s existence before go-live, but OIG says it was provided with no evidence to support that statement and that users weren’t informed about the queue until a year after go-live.
• OIG says it it is “troubling” that Remy absolves Cerner for failing to educate VA about the unknown queue and instead blames VA users for the negative outcomes it caused.
• OIG also notes that both the Deputy Secretary and EHRM IO executive director were aware of the patient harm that resulted, but in their testimony to Congress, they insisted that no harm had occurred.

A second new VA OIG report looks at the VA’s Cerner training:

• VA project executives sent misleading information to OIG in to a “careless disregard for the accuracy and completeness of the information.”
• VA showed OIG a training evaluation plan without disclosing that the plan had not been reviewed, approved, or implemented.
• OIG was given a slide that showed the user proficiency pass rate at 89% instead of the actual 44%, then explained the error as being due to removing a small number of outliers who had taken and failed the test up to 29 times. VA had not calculated the numbers until it received OIG’s request.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s pretty much an even split between C-level executives working from home or from the office. I’m surprised – I thought more of the C-suite would have returned to the office.

New poll to your right or here: How worried are you that your employer will lay you off, demote you, or force you to relocate in the next 12 months?

Thanks to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor West Monroe, which is upgrading from Gold. The digital services firm was born in technology but built for business, partnering with companies in transformative industries to deliver quantifiable financial value. It believes that digital is a mindset—not a project, a team, or a destination—and is  something that companies become, not something they do. That’s why it works as diverse, multidisciplinary teams that blend management consulting, digital design, and product engineering to move companies from traditional ways of working to digital operating models and create experiences that transcend the digital and physical worlds. Thanks to West Monroe 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

Private equity firm Veritas Capital acquires Coronis Health, which offers physician billing and RCM. Axios speculates that Veritas will acquire one of several potentially available privately held RCM company and combine it with Coronis Health.

A fascinating Brookings report looks at Medicare Advantage insurance market, which is good timing since the eye-popping paper valuations of some tech-focused players are being shredded in a more scrutinizing stock market:

• MA represents 46% of all Medicare beneficiaries.
• Two-thirds of enrollment is concentrated among five big insurers – UnitedHealth Group, Humana, CVS/Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, and Anthem.
• These large companies have other businesses that provide services to their MA plans, such as Humana-owned Kindred’s home health and hospice services and three of the five that operate pharmacy benefit managers. Profits in those related businesses are shielded from medical loss ratio requirements, which places smaller insurance competitors at a disadvantage..
• Nearly all of the plans bid rates that are lower than Medicare fee-for-service, but plan payments are 104% of Medicare spending in generating net profit margins of 5%. However, big insurers have accounting flexibility when they operate multiple insurance product lines and related businesses that sell services to their MA plans, so their true profit and pricing competitiveness are hard to determine.

Sales

• Bedrock Management Services chooses CareCloud Remote solution for home healthcare practice groups, which it will implement at 33 locations in seven states.
• Starting Point Behavioral Healthcare will implement Owl’s measurement-based care platform,  which offers evidence-based measures and predefined measure bundles to give clinicians actionable insights.
• Sutter Health signs a 10-year contract to make R1 RCM its exclusive provider of enterprise revenue cycle management services, with 1,150 Sutter employees being assigned to R1 RCM.

People

Tanner Health (GA) promotes Bonnie Boles, MD, MBA to SVP/CMIO.

Joe Bajek (Centura Health) joins Lifespan as VP/CTO.

Other

So many lessons to be learned here. A company that runs a video game operator in which players can earn cryptocurrency by battling Pokemon-like characters loses $620 million in crypto when one of its engineers falls for a fake job offer on LinkedIn. North Korea-based hackers posed as job recruiters on LinkedIn, got a bite from an engineer at game developer Sky Mavis, took the engineer through several rounds of interviews, and then sent him a generous offer letter in the form of a PDF that was loaded with spyware that gave the hackers access to the company’s blockchain network.

Sponsor Updates

• Volunteers from Arrive Health (formerly RxRevu) help Denver-based mental health provider WellPower prepare its ADA-accessible garden space at its Dahlia Campus for Health and Well-Being Market Farm.
• Quil publishes a new white paper, “Bridging the Gap Between Patient Engagement Solutions, The Provider Experience.”
• Relatient will offer TriZetto Provider Solutions customers access to its Dash patient scheduling and engagement suite of solutions.
• Talkdesk publishes a new report, “The Future of AI 2022: Progressing AI Maturity in the Contact Center.”
• Clearsense posts “Top 5 Spots to Check Out in Madison at the Epic UGM.”
• TigerConnect releases a new episode of The Connected Care Team Podcast, “A Conversation on the Next 10 Years of Healthcare Transformation.”

Blog Posts

• 4 Signs an Urgent Care Needs to Improve Their Patient Experience (PatientBond)
• 3 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Healthcare ERP System (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Northwest Health Adopts Artificial Intelligence Technology to Enhance Maternal and Fetal Safety (PeriGen)
• Best Practices for Healthcare Software Deployment (PerfectServe)
• Celebrate the “Insiders” of Healthcare Value During Value Analysis Week (Symplr)
• Accelerating the APM Adoption with Rural Providers (Premier)
• Unpacking HIMSS Research Insights (Redox)
• Patient-Centered Marketing: 7 Strategies to Drive PT Self-Referrals (WebPT)
• Identity is More Than a Hospital Bracelet: How to Get Person Data Right Every Time (Verato)
• Not All Interventions Are Created Equally (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 7/15/22

Top News

A JAMA viewpoint article by informatics leaders Kevin Johnson, MD, MS and William Stead, MD calls for expanding use of the SAFER guides to align health systems and EHR vendors in improving safety and usability, but also to develop a similar set of SMARTER guides to protect the cognitive attention of clinicians.

Broad topics include the use of collaborative documentation, designing workflows to minimize interruption, and aligning decision support to role and task.

The authors summarize:

The term electronic health record is a misnomer. The EHR is a complex sociotechnical infrastructure for automating clinical and administrative workflows within a healthcare facility or system. It is not designed primarily to capture and present a patient’s record as efficiently and effectively as practical. It is not an additive technology, such as a new imaging modality, that works within established practice workflows. Connecting EHRs to other health system technology requires complicated interfaces; connections among health systems require even more work. Second, the EHR has many stakeholders … in the US, requirements for reimbursement, regulatory compliance, and administrative workflow automation often take precedence over clinical efficiency and effectiveness … clinical teams are challenged by repetitive documentation, alert fatigue, increased workarounds, and decreased data quality.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

My infrequent health system encounters give me little patient exposure Epic’s MyChart, but my recent “is this COVID or something else” visit to an academic medical center’s urgent care clinic showed me how far use of MyChart has progressed. The urgent care provider notes and billing information were posted quickly, my meds list is correct since she reconciled it during that visit, appointment scheduling looks easy even though I didn’t use it, messaging is handy, and record-sharing appears easy with downloading or sending records or enabling Share Everywhere. MyChart is one of few health-related apps I’ve used that not only provides immediate value, but is just as slick and functional as anything I’ve used outside of healthcare and depth of its capabilities, which probably varies by customer site, is impressive.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

EHR consulting firm Healthcare Performance Group acquires competitor Health Data Specialists.

EHR and developer tools vendor Canvas Medical raises $24 million in a Series B funding round.

Healthcare Triangle closes a $6.5 million private placement.

Sales

• Northwell Health chooses Google Cloud as its preferred cloud platform and says it will use the platform’s AI/ML capabilities to implement clinician decision-making support.
• Infectious disease laboratory testing vendor HealthTrackRx will implement Shadowbox to connect its lab systems to customer EHRs.

People

Xealth hires Joe Sedlak, RN, MBA (Health Recovery Solutions) as SVP of sales and Laurance Stuntz (Massachusetts EHealth Institute) as SVP of customer success.

Announcements and Implementations

A study involving GetWell’s remote patient monitoring technology finds that its use by COVID-19 patients resulted in lower hospitalization rates, ICU use, and length of stay.

Dubai’s Medcare Women & Children Hospital goes live on InterSystems TrakCare.

CHOP genomics researchers develop a phenotype algorithm that analyzes EHR information and biobanking data to identify patients who have ADHD alone versus ADHD with comorbid conditions.

Meditech announces Meditech Live, a customer leadership conference that will be held in Foxborough, MA September 20-22.

Government and Politics

FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, MD says that US medical product evidence generation is “mediocre” once medical product development progresses beyond the early phase. He says that “everyone in the United States has an electronic health record packed full of data that could be used to do studies very inexpensively.” He cites the astonishment expressed by some that FDA’s follow-up study on questionably approved Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm would take nine years, saying that the system should be able to quickly generate solid evidence to support post-market studies.

AMIA and the American College of Medical Informatics call for new privacy regulations following the Roe v. Wade decision that would protect digital health data from subpoena and areas that fall outside of HIPAA such as apps, websites, search behavior, and consumer location data.

Other

A report concludes that England will need to create 40,000 more hospital beds by 2030 to be able to deliver pre-pandemic standards of care to an aging population. Per-person hospital capacity has halved in the past 30 years, with high bed occupancy and overtaxed ambulance and ED services. Report publisher Health Foundation also calls for remote patient monitoring and boosting social and community care options to allow timely hospital discharges.

MIT researchers create a publicly available set of 2,000 clinical questions whose answers physicians are most commonly seeking when using their EHR, hoping to reduce the time doctors interact with the EHR user interface by extracting the answers automatically. Initial results were poor because the evaluation questions that were used were not good ones, so the team is training a model that will generate thousands or millions of good clinical questions that will then be used to train a new model to answer them. [insert your witty observation here]

A study finds that employees in their 20s are pushing hardest for a return to in-office work, worried about the lack of community, mentorship and networking opportunities, and the physical space needed to do their jobs. Some of them are turning down job offers that call for remote-only employment. Older workers are happier with WFH because they have bigger homes, a well-establish group of friends, the freedom to transport their children, and a strong desire to avoid time-wasting commutes from the suburbs. One author says that hybrid policies that don’t mandate specific in-office days of the week can morph into remote-first work because people who show up find that colleagues and office energy are not there. One CEO says that the Great Resignation was really just people changing jobs because of their work preferences. An unintended consequence may be that younger employees work from the office, while older workers are allowed to WFH in the suburbs since companies can’t satisfy both groups with a single policy.

Sponsor Updates

• Medicomp Systems releases a new “Tell Me Where It Hurts” podcast featuring Nick van Terheyden, MBBS of ECG Management.
• EClinicalWorks partners with HealthEfficient to support its 40-plus member health centers across the country.
• Everbridge adds Service Intelligence to its Digital Operations offering to help customers accelerate IT incident response, reduce time-consuming unplanned work, and maximize the value of digital service.
• Meditech will host Meditech Live September 20-22 in Foxborough, MA.
• Cerner describes how Fisher-Titus Medical Center replaced its hastily implemented early-pandemic virtual visit system of IPads and MIcrosoft Teams with an integrated platform from Amwell and Cerner, where a virtual rooming process mirrors in-process workflow as clinicians launch virtual visits as a video window within a patient’s Millennium chart.
• Net Health announces that its rehabilitation outcomes management system, Foto Patient Outcomes, has been used in the 127th clinical research study published in a peer-reviewed medical and rehabilitation journal.
• Netsmart releases a new CareThreads Podcast, “Unlocking Success in Palliative Care.”

Blog Posts

• A Different Point of View: The Key to EHR Usability – Clinically Responsive Workflows (Medicomp Systems)
• Integrated, Whole-Person Care – A Data-Driven Approach to Transform Payers into Care Orchestrators (Diameter Health)
• Avoid the Telehealth Cliff: Managing Enterprise Risk in Virtual Care (EVisit)
• Combining AIOps with Service Intelligence: Critical for Digital Service Uptime (Everbridge)
• 3 Ways a Neutral Zone Could Propel Personalized Medicine: Real-Time Example of Data Collaboration from Roche (Healthcare Triangle)
• EHR Optimization – 3 Crucial Steps to Ensure Success (HCI Group)
• 5 Tips to Build Value Through In-Application Health Education (Healthwise)
• What is Advanced Scheduling? Q&A with Dave Johnson (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• 4 Simple Steps to an Effective Analytics Strategy (Medhost)
• Turning Solution into Strategy with your CMDB (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Giving clinicians the tools for safer opioid prescribing (Meditech)
• Functional Outcome Measures in PT – Best Practices (MWTherapy)
• Powering AI in radiology: The role of structured data (Nuance)
• The alchemy of care variation (Nordic)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 7/14/22

Brightline Closes $10 Million Extended Series C Financing from Northwell Health as Demand for Family Behavioral Health Care Soars

Pediatric and family-oriented virtual behavioral healthcare company Brightline adds a $10 million investment from Northwell Health (NY) to its Series C funding round, bringing its total to $115 million.

Alaska DOH issues RFP for statewide health information exchange services

The Alaska Department of Health seeks proposals for a statewide health information exchange project budgeted at $6 million for the first two years.

Electronic Caregiver buys Las Cruces Tower for $8.9 million

Remote patient monitoring and virtual care company Electronic Caregiver acquires the building where it is headquartered for nearly $9 million to accommodate the addition of 770 employees over the next five years.