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.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

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.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

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.

News 7/13/22

Top News

UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Health and Red Ventures form RVO Health, which will include consumer-facing health and wellness websites — such as Healthline, Psych Central, and Healthgrades – along with Optum Store and virtual coaching platforms.

Red Ventures owns internet properties such as CNET, The Points Guy, TV Guide, ZDNet, and Bankrate. It acquired Healthline Media in July 2019 and Healthgrades.com in August 2021.

Optum Health operates a network of primary care, surgery, and urgent care centers.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Enterprise performance management software vendor Syntellis Performance Solutions acquires Stratasan, which specializes in healthcare market intelligence and analytics for hospitals and other healthcare organizations.

Clinical data exchange API company Particle Health raises $25 million in a Series B funding round.

Sales

• Northwell Health selects EVideon’s Vibe Health interactive bedside technology, including Engage TV and Insight digital whiteboards.
• TriZetto Provider Solutions will offer its customers Relatient’s Dash suite that includes contact center scheduling, patient self-scheduling, reminders, messaging, and chat and digital patient intake.

People

Sage Health hires Wayne Sass, PhD (Optum) as CTO.

Scott Gildea, MBA (Leidos) joins Nordic as VP of enterprise technology transformation.

TriHealth CIO Cathy French, MS will retire in September after nearly 44 years with the Cincinnati-based health system. She started out as a staff nurse and then became director of IT health system products in 1979.

Announcements and Implementations

Northwest Health (IN) rolls out PeriGen’s PeriWatch Vigilance maternal-fetal early warning system within its Birthing & Family Care Centers.

PrimaryOne Health implements Bluestream Health’s virtual care services across its 11 locations in central Ohio.

Hansen Family Hospital (IA) and affiliates implement mobile check-in technology from Epion Health.

Mass General Brigham will expand its hospital-at-home program and has hired a home-based care president who formerly worked for for-profit Kindred at Home. The program expects to serve 200 remote patients versus today’s 25 and will expand employee headcount from 800 to 1,000.

Wellness app vendor Happify Health renames itself Twill Health and describes its expanded offerings as, “By combining digital therapeutics, well-being products, community-based care, live coaching, and clinician-trained AI, Twill intelligently guides each person to the care they need, when they need it, in the way they want.”

The six-week CHIME Healthcare CIO Boot Camp – Digital will start on August 15, 2022. The program is open clinical informatics leaders or those who work for provider organizations, with CHIME membership not required.

Privacy and Security

Virginia Commonwealth University Health System notifies 4,441 organ donors and recipients of a data breach that enabled their PHI to be viewed by other patients through the health system’s patient portal.

A California newspaper’s opinion piece says that patient privacy will change on January 1, 2024, as a new state law — mostly addressing expanding Medicaid to undocumented immigrants — will give all practitioners access to all of a patient’s data, with no exception for behavior health and abortion visits.

Ransomware groups create a searchable database of all the data they have stolen from hacked companies who haven’t paid their demanded ransom. It gives other hackers access to passwords and confidential information and lets patients know that their information has been exposed, pressuring the hacked companies to pay up.

Other

Amazon’s moonshot project is developing cancer vaccines in partnership with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and is recruiting patients for an FDA-approved clinical trial of personalized vaccines for breast cancer and melanoma. Amazon says it is contributing scientific and machine learning expertise.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story featuring Ninth Street Internal Medicine, “Healow Pay: Improving Collections, Reducing Phone Calls.”
• Diameter Health publishes a new white paper, “The Strategic Role of Clinical Data in Risk Adjustment.”
• Estonia’s Pildipank expands its relationship with Agfa HealthCare by moving the shared PACS to the Enterprise Imaging Platform.
• Dutch care home provider Coloriet renews its service contract for Ascom’s TeleCare IP, smart sensoring, and mobility solutions.
• Bamboo Health joins the Florida Behavioral Health Association as a corporate member.
• Oracle Cerner has increased the total number of beds contracted outside of the US for the second consecutive year.
• CHIME releases a 30^th anniversary podcast, “Innovation with Tim Stettheimer, 2010 Board Chair.”
• Arcadia makes its research data available through AWS Data Exchange.

Blog Posts

• High Quality Clinical Data Increases Risk Score Accuracy for Health Plans (Diameter Health)
• Truth about Browser Extensions with Cloud Applications including AdvancedMD (AdvancedMD)
• Overdose prevention centers and the impact of mental health data (Arcadia)
• Leveraging internal audit to minimize risk of third-party vendors in healthcare (Baker Tilly)
• EHRs are Slowing Health Tech Innovation (Bravado Health)
• Oncology Integrations in Meditech Ambulatory: 7 Focus Areas for Team Collaboration (CereCore)
• The Triple Aim of Health Care (ChartSpan)
• 10 Common Challenges Facing Epic IT Teams (CTG)
• How Health First makes Hospital at Home available to everyone (Current Health)
• Florida is the Perfect Place for Early Birds (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 7/11/22

Top News

An Oracle EVP says in a letter to two members of of VA’s Subcommittee on Technology Modernization that the VA’s Cerner system was “not operating as intended” at Mann-Grandstaff Medical Center, in which an “unknown queue” problem caused patient orders to be delayed or lost.

The company says Oracle’s expertise and technology will be used to “rethink approaches not possible before the acquisition.”

Cerner and the VA had agreed on how the queue would be used to detect incorrectly entered orders going back to January 2020, but the VA didn’t train its clinicians to monitor it.

The letter was signed by Oracle EVP and company lobbyist Ken Glueck.

This is good reporting from Orion Donovan-Smith of the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

Meanwhile, Oracle is reportedly considering cost reductions of up to $1 billion that would result in the layoff of thousands of employees as early as next month. Its recent $28 billion acquisition of Cerner added 28,000 employees to Oracle’s headcount of 143,000.

Reader Comments

From Promo Copy: “Re: remote work. Trading tomorrow’s job opportunities for today’s convenience.” I agree that you want to be a familiar company presence when career-advancing plum assignments, promotions, and cross-training opportunities are handed out. Folks who want those things – exceptions being those who mostly travel to customer sites, who aren’t looking to move up, or who work for a company whose executives are also working remotely – might want to watch how those opportunities are doled out based on where the recipient sits. Companies are fans of remote work when they can spend less for office space, pay non-metro salaries in some cases, and get longer workdays for free, but I would be slightly concerned that — other than the atypical use case of superstar Silicon Valley software engineers — executives might then extend the successful proof of concept to workers who are much further away and much cheaper. I also think that companies that skip the hybrid model and allow some but not all employees to work offsite permanently will either reel it back in or inadvertently create two classes of employees who benefit in different ways, which is perfectly fine as long as employees understand their career path options.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents don’t see a lot of clinician time being wasted doing lower-level work, which is a better result than I expected.

New poll to your right or here, related to the above discussion: Where are the C-level executives of your employer routinely working, other than when traveling? It occurs to me that maybe most employees don’t even know where the suits sit.

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

Webinars

July 12 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Digital Data Stewardship for Trusted, High-Quality Data Exchange.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. Presenter: Carol Graham, MS, RN, product manager, Clinical Architecture. Organizations face challenges in ensuring that the patient data they received and send is consistent, accurate, and usable. Use cases include receiving multi-source data across health information networks with variation in formats and content; merging and de-duplicating provider, payer, and research data; uplifting legacy data for current use cases and formats; and normalizing and formatting data for public health surveillance, quality measure reporting, and providing directly to the patient. This webinar will cover Pivot, a comprehensive Digital Data Steward solution that orchestrates format harmonization, content (vocabulary) normalization, de-duplication, and data quality validation into a single solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cardinal Health acquires ScalaMed, whose app is used by patients to receive their electronic prescriptions on their phone, giving them the ability to price-shop and choose their pharmacy after the fact. I like this a lot since I’ve long maintained that e-prescribing forces patients to choose a pharmacy upfront without knowing cost or availability details, then wastes their time (and that of their prescriber) in trying to move the prescription to a different pharmacy.

Sales

• Canada’s Niagara Health chooses Sectra’s radiology, cardiology, and VNA systems.

People

Deana Rhoades, MBA (NTT Data) joins ZeOmega as VP of business development and channels.

Jill Jemison, MBA (University of Vermont) joins the University of North Carolina medical school as associate dean/CIO.

Ontario Clinical Imaging Network names Shafique Shamji (The Ottawa Hospital) as president and CEO.

Logan Health (MT) hires Steve Garske, PhD, MBA (Pipeline Health System) as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Astria Health and Cerner settle their legal dispute in which the health system blamed its 2019 bankruptcy on problems with Cerner’s billing system. Cerner disputed that claim, saying that Astria poorly managed its merger with two other hospitals.

A new KLAS report in PACS in Europe finds that Agfa, Philips, Sectra, and Visus have broad footprints and are growing, with Philips and Sectra having the largest number of high-volume customers.

Government and Politics

Public health experts say that the US is repeating its same COVID-19 mistakes with monkeypox, which should be easy to eliminate because it’s a known pathogen that spreads poorly and had tests and vaccines available before the outbreak began in May. Tests are hard to obtain, vaccines will be in short supply for months, surveillance and contact tracing are poor, and official case counts are are lower than actual. Doctors who see suspected cases must obtain approval from state epidemiologists to send patient samples to CDC, which then takes several days to run the tests and approve the diagnosis.

Other

State-run hospitals in Maharashtra, India report “chaos” as the state unexpectedly and permanently shuts down its Hospital Management and Information System in a dispute with the outsourced service provider. Officials say the contractor refused to pay penalties for poor system performance, so its contract was terminated, after which the vendor refused to provide copies of the hospital data. Those officials added that a new system is ready to install once upgrades are applied.

A Columbus TV station profiles an Epic ASAP analyst who is one of 637 employees OhioHealth is laying off as it outsources IT work to Accenture and RCM to AGS Health. Of the 637 eliminated jobs, 567 are in IT. OhioHealth says that eliminating jobs and hiring “technology and global talent pool external providers” will improve patient care.

A KHN report says that a shortage of mental health therapists is sending patients to online therapy companies, many of them backed by venture capital firms who advertise directly to consumers, whose questionable practices may include using texting with no guarantee of immediate response instead of real-time communication. One company pays therapists per word of text that they write or read. Those companies pay less and thus attract less-experienced providers who are not trained to deliver safe and effective care online. The founder of the Telebehavioral Health Institute questions whether parents should trust an online therapist to treat depression and anxiety in their children, concluding, “”What’s happening is a corporate takeover of behavioral healthcare by digital entrepreneurs.”

Consulting firm president Fred Goldstein tweeted the result of his hour-long wait for a virtual visit from Amwell. I’ve had similar experiences with ride-sharing services, where my assigned driver decided that my fare wasn’t worth their time and cancelled, but you would think telehealth providers would have a way to reassign the visit to another doctor. Interesting to me is that the doctor who cancelled is the chief product officer and medical director of Grapefruit Health, which offers telehealth services to schools. Still, I blame the company’s platform more than the doctor, who may have had a personal emergency that would have created the same result for an in-office visit. It happened to me once – I showed up for a scheduled doctor visit, appeased the clipboard gods with a solid 10 minutes of handwriting (this was my second visit to this single-doctor practice), waited for maybe 20 minutes past my scheduled time, then was called up by the customer-indifferent front desk person to be told that the doctor had the whole day off. I complained and was indignantly told that someone had mistyped my phone number and they couldn’t each me, which of course failed to explain why they checked me in and let me sit there. The doctor, who was much better at medicine than business, apologized afterward and suggested that I call after hours to avoid her incompetent employees

Sponsor Updates

• Symplr forms an executive customer council to drive its vision for strategic healthcare operations.
• Net Health adds Pressure Injury Deterioration Risk indicator into its Tissue Analytics AI-powered wound imaging and analysis solution, and a Missed Visit Prediction indicator to its Wound Care EHR.
• OneMedNet appoints Christoph Zindel, MD to its board.
• Arrive Health publishes a new customer success story featuring UCHealth, “Arrive Health Helps Doctors Cut Prescription Costs for Patients.”
• Spok announces that Asia Pacific value-added distributor InTechnology Distribution will offer Spok products and services.
• Talkdesk wins Cloud-Based CX Solution of the Year at the 2022 Customer Contact Week Excellence Awards.
• TigerConnect introduces draft mode for physician scheduling.
• West Monroe Innovation Fellow Doug Laney publishes a new book, “Data Juice,” about the 101 ways business leaders can monetize their data.
• Wolters Kluwer Health has expanded Ovid with SRI International’s BioCyc collection of organism-centric Pathway/Genome Databases and bioinformatics software tools.
• Zynx Health and the Hendrich Fall Program form a joint alliance that enables providers to access comprehensive and holistic fall prevention care guidance.

Blog Posts

• Post COVID-19: 4 Healthcare Consumer Behavior Changes from the Pandemic (PatientBond)
• Nurses of Note Awards 2022: The Nurse Navigator and Staff Educator (PerfectServe)
• What’s in a Title? How the Role of the Credentialing Professional is Changing (Symplr)
• Five Trends of Change in the Life Sciences Industry (Premier)
• How to select the most effective call center software (5 tips and best practices) (Talkdesk)
• Keeping Pace with Patient Expectations in 2022 (WebPT)
• Allowing Patients to Utilize Their Own Devices Encourages Patient Engagement (VitalTech)
• The Year of Healthcare Interoperability (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 7/8/22

Top News

The federal government warns healthcare organizations to defend themselves against potential North Korea-sponsored cyberattacks that are using Maui ransomware.

FBI, CISA, and Treasury urge healthcare and public health organizations to:

• Deploy PKI and digital certificates to authenticate network connections, including to the EHR.
• Inactivate generic administrator accounts.
• Turn off network device management interfaces.
• Secure PHI with encryption at rest and firewalls.
• Implement multi-layer network segmentation.
• Store backups offline.
• Use tools to monitor IoT devices for erratic use.

Webinars

July 12 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Digital Data Stewardship for Trusted, High-Quality Data Exchange.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. Presenter: Carol Graham, MS, RN, product manager, Clinical Architecture. Organizations face challenges in ensuring that the patient data they received and send is consistent, accurate, and usable. Use cases include receiving multi-source data across health information networks with variation in formats and content; merging and de-duplicating provider, payer, and research data; uplifting legacy data for current use cases and formats; and normalizing and formatting data for public health surveillance, quality measure reporting, and providing directly to the patient. This webinar will cover Pivot, a comprehensive Digital Data Steward solution that orchestrates format harmonization, content (vocabulary) normalization, de-duplication, and data quality validation into a single solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Axios reports that Premier Inc. is considering strategic alternatives that include being taken private. The company’s market cap is $4.4 billion, with PINC shares having gained 4% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 21% loss.

Patient payments startup Cedar, valued at $3 billion, lays off 24% of its workforce “in order to adapt to current market realities.”

In England, seven NHS trusts that traded de-identified patient data for shares in an AI startup lose millions of pounds, as shares in Sensyne Health are de-listed due to a company reorganization.

Sales

• In England, two Cheshire NHS trusts will collaborate to replace their paper-based systems with Meditech Expanse.
• In The Bahamas, Doctors Hospital Health System chooses CloudWave to host its new Meditech Expanse EHR on OpSus Healthcare Cloud.

People

Peter Bridges, MBA (Curai Health) joins Transcarent as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Caris Life Sciences will integrate its molecular testing products with Epic’s Orders and Results Anywhere network.

In England, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust becomes the UK’s first 5G-connected hospital, launching a trial of Virgin Media O2 Business connectivity. A key app is vital sign monitoring and documentation of physician observations.

Teladoc Health offers members of its Primary360 primary care program in-home lab specimen collection services from Scarlet Health. Those members also receive free same-day medication delivery from Capsule.

University of Colorado School of Medicine launches the Department of Biomedical Informatics.

A new KLAS status report on telehealth platforms finds that Caregility performs well (especially in inpatient settings), Amwell is often considered even though its legacy product has higher dissatisfaction, and Doximity works well as an easy-to-use and lightweight solution for simple outpatient settings. Customers of Caregility, Teladoc Health InTouch, and SOC Telemed report positive effects in clinical outcomes, while those of Doxy.me say it reduces missed appointments and providers patient benefits at a good price. Vidyo lost ground after Epic replaced it with Twilio. Microsoft Teams and Zoom are frequently used for multi-party calls even in organizations that use different products for regular telehealth visits.

Government and Politics

Former Theranos President and COO Sunny Balwani joins his former fellow executive / former romantic partner Elizabeth Holmes in being convicted of federal charges, in his case, that he defrauded patients and investors. Holmes was acquitted of those same charges, but was found guilty on investor charges. Both face up to 20 years for each count at their September sentencing, 12 in Balwani’s case and four for Holmes.

Privacy and Security

IT security and technology reseller SHI, which has 5,000 employees and $12 billion in annual revenue, remains down from a ransomware attack last weekend. That’s not the best look for a company that sells cybersecurity and disaster recovery solutions.

Other

An interesting article on telehealth in China, written by a Harvard public health researcher, makes these points:

• Telehealth grew hugely in the pandemic’s early days, but the government had already been trying to build a digital health ecosystem to alleviate public hospital overcrowding.
• Telehealth didn’t remove all geographic barriers, as some patients exhibit “home bias” in preferring to be seen by a doctor who practices in their own province.
• Online price transparency should increase competition and lower prices.
• Telehealth doctors are usually full-time employees of public hospitals, raising concerns that their work as private telehealth contractors interfere with their public hospital duties.
• Affordability is a concern since telehealth is primarily an out-of-pocket expense and access to public hospital appointments may worsen for lower-income patients if telehealth referrals fill appointment slots with private pay patients.

Vermont regulators consider revoking the state license of Walgreens after one of its stores closed for months after a fire but kept billing patients and insurers for prescription refills that couldn’t be picked up. The state says the company, which runs 23 stores in Vermont, also shut down stores without notice, closed the pharmacy department for 325 days in a 21-month period because of staffing shortages, and in some cases left the pharmacy open without having a pharmacist-manager present.

The Atlanta newspaper profiles rising local high school senior Asanshay Gupta, who in 2020 – at age 14 – developed a free app to help hospitals calculate the demand for oxygen due to COVID-19 patient requirements. Among its users was a 10-hospital chain in India who used it to ensure that ambulances were stocked with enough oxygen, which was in short supply, for patients being transported. He hopes to study biomedical engineering or medicine after his graduation next year.

My favorite recent article is “Truly Humbled to Be the Author of This Article,” where David Brooks describes those endless LinkedIn and Twitter humble-braggers who shamelessly tout their own accomplishments and all-around wonderfulness while claiming to be “humbled” or “honored.” He cleverly notes that the humble-braggers slather on a bonus layer of false humility by eliminating the personal pronoun, as in “Humbled to be …” instead of “I am humbled to be …” A snip:

You are showing the world that you haven’t let your immense achievements go to your head! You’ve remained completely egalitarian—you just happen to be a better egalitarian than most people (and you are humbled by that fact). It’s easy to be humble when you’re most people. But just think about how amazing it is to be humble when you’re as impressive as you!

Sponsor Updates

• First Databank names Sneha Jingar senior Salesforce administrator.
• Healthcare Triangle facilitates secure data-sharing for drug discovery through “Neutral Zone.”

Blog Posts

• Why Telemedicine Matters (EVisit)
• Automating Veteran Patient Education to Address Readmissions (Get Well)
• The evolving EHR: Workflow improvements for today’s clinician (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• What is Advanced Scheduling? Q & A with Dave Johnson (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Education, Resources, and Training to Improve Preeclampsia Awareness (Medhost)
• How to Hire a Physical Therapist: 7 Tips for Hiring the Best Fit (MWTherapy)
• Net Health Community Brings Healthcare Industry Peers Closer Together (Net Health)
• Autonomous Coding vs. Computer-Assisted Coding – Part 2: Key Differences (Nym Health)
• Patient referral leakage: Are health systems making it easy to do the right thing? (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 7/6/22

Top News

Francisco Partners completes its acquisition of the data and analytics assets of IBM Watson Health and renames the business Merative.

Chosen as CEO is industry long-timer Gerry McCarthy, who has served in executive roles with ESolutions, TransUnion, HealthMEDX, and McKesson. The company’s headquarters will be in in Ann Arbor, MI. Former Watson Health Paul Roma will transition to senior advisor to Francisco Partners. Much of the remaining IBM Watson Health executive team will remain in place.

The company, which FP acquired for a reported $1 billion versus the $4 billion IBM spent to create it from a series of acquisitions, will organize around six product lines – Health Insights; MarketScan; Clinical Development; Social Program Management and Phytel; Micromedex; and Merge Imaging solutions.

Reader Comments

From Spare Change: “Re: return to office. We are seeing the result of employees who have power like they have never had, the ability to work from anywhere.” I think that moment was fleeting. Economic and industry conditions have put bosses back in charge and they know that they need to manage costs while fretting less that their employees might flee to greener pastures. I never understood the “great resignation,” assuming (perhaps naively) that the same number of people still need to work and the total number of available jobs hasn’t changed much even though job mix has shifted. Some jobs can be performed remotely (and always could have been), but work-from-home was, like telemedicine, a temporary compromise whose adoption will settle at numbers higher than pre-pandemic but much lower than in 2020-21. I bet many executives agree with me that you can’t build and maintain a great company when employees are doing task work in their living rooms and communicating via Slack and Zoom while missing face-to-face meetings, chance encounters, personal relationships, and exposure to broader company work. I expect companies to compromise by offering a hybrid model of 1-2 offsite work days per week or maybe going with a permanent four-day workweek, which adds flexibility and reduces commute headaches but without conferring geographic freedom. Employee threats to sell their services elsewhere if they are required to show up at the office are ringing pretty hollow now versus a year ago. Have you seen a shift in the employee-employer dynamic in the last couple of months?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s about an even poll respondent split between telehealth being more important now versus in 2019.

New poll to your right or here: From your most recent encounter, how much of the clinician’s time seemed to be spent on tasks that lower-level people could have done? My perception is mixed – sometimes it seems that being the only person in the room with the patient makes the clinician feel that it’s easier to do low-value work than to bring someone in to help, or lures them into a comfort zone of happily performing comfortably mindless work.

HIStalk sponsors: prices will increase a bit starting January 1, 2023, although the cost will still be less — taking inflation into account — than in 2014, when it last changed. This is the cue for on-the-fence companies to sign up sooner rather than later.

Webinars

July 12 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Digital Data Stewardship for Trusted, High-Quality Data Exchange.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. Presenter: Carol Graham, MS, RN, product manager, Clinical Architecture. Organizations face challenges in ensuring that the patient data they received and send is consistent, accurate, and usable. Use cases include receiving multi-source data across health information networks with variation in formats and content; merging and de-duplicating provider, payer, and research data; uplifting legacy data for current use cases and formats; and normalizing and formatting data for public health surveillance, quality measure reporting, and providing directly to the patient. This webinar will cover Pivot, a comprehensive Digital Data Steward solution that orchestrates format harmonization, content (vocabulary) normalization, de-duplication, and data quality validation into a single solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Concierge primary care operator One Medical is reportedly considering its options after attracting and then rejecting preliminary acquisition interest from CVS Health. Shares in One Medical’s parent company have lost 75% of their value in the past year, giving the company a market cap of $2 billion.

Sales

• Midwest Orthopaedic Center (IL) selects cloud-based EHR and RCM software from EClinicalWorks.

People

Eric Newman, MD (Geisinger Health) joins Eon as chief innovation officer.

Well Health names J.P. Knapp, MHA (Vocera) VP of sales.

Brian Lancaster (Nebraska Medicine) joins Children’s Mercy Kansas City as SVP/CIO.

Cured promotes Josh Kalscheur to VP of business development.

Announcements and Implementations

CaringWays taps Clearwater to develop and implement a cloud-based cybersecurity and compliance program for its digital fundraising software for patients.

Cone Health (NC) implements ActX’s EHR-integrated, genomic decision-support software.

The American Nursing Informatics Association publishes the first in a series of toolkits that support the practice of nurse informatics.

FDA gives clearance for LiveMetric’s LiveOne, a wrist-worn monitor that takes blood pressure from the radial artery every 10 seconds and records the results over several days to help understand the connection between BP and lifestyle, behavior, and medications.

A new KLAS report on EHRs for practices of 11 or more clinicians finds that Epic and Meditech lead the the pack in finishing a close 1-2. Ease of use and workflow is by far the most pressing concern of practices of that size. Cerner users are frustrated with outpatient workflows and the company’s focus on resolving inpatient problems, while Greenway Health’s customers are an outlier in putting functionality improvements at the top of their list of needs. Allscripts has two of the three bottom-rated products, along with poor ratings for support, relationships, and overselling product capabilities.

Government and Politics

A California Medical Association bill would require health plans to exempt doctors from obtaining prior authorization for prescriptions if they have historically practiced within that plan’s rules 80% of the time. Other physicians would be given the right to have their PA appeals conducted by a physician in their specialty.

Privacy and Security

HHS posts a review document titled “HIPAA Privacy Rule and Disclosures of Information Relating to Reproductive Health Care.”

Other

Damages in Epic’s 2016 trade secrets lawsuit against Tata Consultancy are reduced by a federal court to $140 million. The original damages assessed to Tata were set at $940 million, but were reduced to $420 million and later to $280 million.

Norton Healthcare (KY) attributes ongoing computer connectivity issues at several facilities to an unspecified hardware problem that began July 1.

Munson Healthcare’s virtual urgent care program sees an uptick in usage that it says is mostly due to word of mouth. It triages patients to video visits after initial phone screenings and has seen 250 patients as of early June. It is staffed by 20 Munson physicians who pick up shifts on their days off. Next up for Munson is patient text messaging and enhancing the system’s doctor-finder tool with online scheduling.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “How Price Transparency Can Offer a Competitive Edge.”
• Azara Healthcare completes the NCQA HEDIS Health Plan Measure Certification Program for MY 2022 HEDIS measures.
• Bamboo Health hires Dana Koetz as growth director, Brian St.Amour as data integration engineer, Anvesh Muthyala as senior software engineer, Kamilla Ionesia as partnerships manager, Dean Cikins as strategic accounts director, and Milacy Travieso as project manager – data science.
• Biofourmis releases a new Out of Patients Podcast.
• CareMesh names Samantha Davis, RN (Medical Solutions) senior clinical project manager.
• CoverMyMeds will exhibit at McKesson IdeaShare July 7-10 in Washington, DC.
• Enlace Health achieves HITRUST certification to further mitigate risk in third-party privacy, security, and compliance.
• Nuance will offer its Dragon Medical One speech recognition software to Meditech users in Puerto Rico through a partnership with health IT firm Scientia Puerto Rico.

Blog Posts

• The importance of surveillance-level data monitoring in hospitals (Philips Capsule)
• How Allia Group Recovers Out of Network Revenue with its Proprietary Platform Paired with AdvancedMD Reporting (AdvancedMD)
• The Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals celebrate one year of clinical imaging collaboration between Radiology & Cardiology (Agfa HealthCare)
• SNFs vs. recovery at home: Acquiring the data to determine the appropriate care setting for recovery after surgery (Bravado Health)
• Healthcare Literacy and the Patient Portal: Explore Hands-on Video Resources to Increase User Confidence (Part 2) (CereCore)
• Changing Influence of the Healthcare CIO (CHIME)
• The Future of Health Data in the UK: What HCPs Need to Know (Clearsense)
• How to Overcome Community Connect Adoption Challenges (CTG)
• How to Create a Culture of Data Literacy in Urgent Care – and Why (Experity)

Contacts

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

News 7/1/22

Top News

A NEJM perspective piece says that today’s care delivery policies and technologies sacrifice the “solution shop” work of doctors (solving patient problems and building patient trust) for “production line” work (approving prescription refills, entering orders, completing preventive screenings).

It notes that most of the patient visit can be consumed by clinicians completing EHR checkboxes, entering orders, manually completing prior authorization requests, and managing inbox messages.

It also observes that since it’s easier to measure the production line work in the EHR, quality metrics represent those tasks disproportionately.

The article also says that healthcare financial resources have moved away from direct patient care to tech companies, data aggregators, drug and insurance companies, and performance measurement subcontractors, as insurers and pharmacies automated their practices to meet more complex billing requirements while leaving doctors with more production line work.

The authors conclude that the solution and production work streams be designed to match worker skills, supported by policies and workflow.

The physician who sent the article my way says that the “workflow versus thoughtflow” challenge requires a major reengineering of physician processes to allow either (a) lower-level staff to do them where appropriate; or (b) the physician to perform them while still addressing higher-level thinking tasks. 

Webinars

July 12 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Digital Data Stewardship for Trusted, High-Quality Data Exchange.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. Presenter: Carol Graham, MS, RN, product manager, Clinical Architecture. Organizations face challenges in ensuring that the patient data they received and send is consistent, accurate, and usable. Use cases include receiving multi-source data across health information networks with variation in formats and content; merging and de-duplicating provider, payer, and research data; uplifting legacy data for current use cases and formats; and normalizing and formatting data for public health surveillance, quality measure reporting, and providing directly to the patient. This webinar will cover Pivot, a comprehensive Digital Data Steward solution that orchestrates format harmonization, content (vocabulary) normalization, de-duplication, and data quality validation into a single solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient engagement and release-of-information technology vendor HealthMark Group acquires Acton Corporation, its third ROI acquisition in 15 months.

Sales

• In England, East Suffolk and North Essex and West Suffolk trusts choose Sectra for digital pathology.
• NHS Scotland names Citadel Health as supplier of its Laboratory Information Management System framework.

People

Kyruus hires Paul Merrild MBA (Sound Physicians) to the newly created position of president.

CloudWave promotes Mike Donahue to VP of client services.

Former Kareo CEO Dan Rodrigues takes the CEO role at Tebra, the company he co-founded when Kareo merged with PatientPop last year.

Privacy and Security

Baton Rouge General is forced to chart on paper due to a Tuesday cyberattack.

Other

Funniest news of the week: the federal government fines accounting firm Ernst & Young $100 million for failing to act on reports that many of its employees were cheating on their CPA exams. The best part – the section they were cheating on was ethics. Those involved say they were short on after-work study time or had already failed the exam multiple times.

Sponsor Updates

• California State University, Dominguez Hills becomes the seventh higher education institution to join Optimum Healthcare IT’s CareerPath program, which offers students who are interested in a healthcare IT career a two-phase training program that includes a digital health certification program that was co-developed with CHIME followed by application-specific technical tracks.
• Visage Imaging joins the Amazon Web Services Partner Network as an Advanced Technology Partner.
• Premier honors The Breakaway, an Indiana recovery home for women battling addiction, with its Monroe E. Trout Premier Cares Award and a $100,000 prize.
• West Monroe publishes a new report, “Understanding Major Trends in Healthcare M&A and Investment.”
• The HIT Like a Girl Podcast features EVisit Chief Strategy Officer Juli Stover.
• FDB hires Jaelyn Ibarra as a research associate.
• GHX congratulates customer Spectrum Health on earning the 2022 Top Supply Chain Projects Award from Supply & Demand Chain Executive.

Blog Posts

• Strengthening HCP Engagement with Omnichannel Strategies (OptimizeRx)
• Brand Loyalty: How to Reach New Patients and Keep Them Coming Back (Symplr)
• HL7 FHIR DevDays top 5 takeaways (Redox)
• Arrive Health Helps Doctors Cut Prescription Costs for Patients (Arrive Health)
• The Art of a Data Detective (Surescripts)
• What’s the Difference Between Omnichannel and Multichannel Customer Support? (Talkdesk)
• Embracing Modern Clinical Communication and Collaboration Methods (TigerConnect)
• How Managing Chronic Conditions is Streamlined with Digital Technology (Twistle)
• Breaking Down the 2021 MIPS Preliminary Feedback Fact Sheet (WebPT)
• A Different Point of View: Solving the ‘Inter (without) Operability’ Conundrum (Medicomp Systems)
• FHIR Dev Days – What a Difference Three Years Makes! (Diameter Health)
• Visuals in Health Education: The Positive Impact is Easy to See (Healthwise)
• SHIELD: Overcoming obstacles to lab information interoperability (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Providers are Onboard with Online Scheduling: What Healthcare Organizations Should Do Now. (Kyruus)
• H is for ‘Empathy’ (Lyniate)
• For Rural Hospitals, It Pays to Be Transparent (Medhost)
• How clinicians can use AI to improve patient care (Meditech)
• From Data to Actionable Insights: Create a Data-Driven SNF Rehab Therapy Team (Net Health)
• Bridging the Gap in Primary Care: Behavioral Health Integration Best Practices (Neuroflow)
• Bringing Equity to the Forefront with CalAIM (Netsmart)
• Revenue cycle transformation: 3.4% increase in net revenue and still growing (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 6/29/22

Top News

The National Academy of Medicine publishes a paper titled “The Promise of Digital Health: Then, Now, and the Future” whose authors are digital health household names that include Amy Abernethy, Patti Brennan, Atul Butte, Judy Faulkner, John Halamka, Kevin Johnson, Don Rucker, and Eric Topol. Points:

• US health policies and health system investments are misaligned with WHO’s definition of health as incorporating physical, mental, and social well-being, not just the absence of disease.
• Digital health has done little to improve care effectiveness, efficiency, equity, and continuity of care, as inpatient data is largely sequestered and difficult to integrate due to a lack of data standards.
• The promise of real-time generation of evidence to fuel a learning health system exists only in a few pilot projects.
• Potential uses of digital innovation include advancing diagnosis and treatment, ensuring care continuity, managing patients offsite via telemedicine, partnering with individuals for self-management, and reducing errors and waste.
• Digital health measured the impact of COVID-19 by race, economic states, and underserved populations and has the potential to identify, measure, and modify the root sources of illness.
• Social determinants of health, which cause up to 15% of premature deaths, need to be considered as in-scope by providers and health systems, as supported by the collection and integration of SDoH into EHRs and mobile apps. The risk of algorithmic bias should be considered, however, such as stigmatizing no-show patients who struggle with employment and childcare issues.
• Digital health can also contribute to the understanding of environmental factors, such as air pollution and climate change.
• Behavioral interventions, such as weight management programs, often don’t work, and digital programs that claim otherwise are usually not supported by evidence and weren’t produced by experts in health behavior change.
• AI/ML as applied to genetic, genomic, and medical history data could provide near real-time feedback to individuals using a voice assistant as a “digital health coach.”
• Architecture should focus on the individual, embed equity and transparency, and realign health system payments around outcomes and value.

Reader Comments

From Das Kapital: “Re: slow news days. I’m disappointed when there’s not much news to read in HIStalk.” That’s a feature, not a bug. Unlike most news sites, I have no incentive to pad out the good stuff with junk to draw clicks or increase time-on-page numbers. My gift to you on those slow news days is time that you can reallocate.

Meanwhile, that’s a reminder for me to offer the annual Summer Doldrums first-year, extra-months deal for new sponsors. If your company is failing to reach decision-makers; was surprised to learn that your since-departed junior marketing person ignored our renewal emails and got you cancelled; or is a small startup, Lorre can hook you up. You get a year’s worth of exposure for less than what some companies spend on Starbucks for conference booth staff.

From Oracle of Secrets: “Re: Oracle Cerner (still feels weird to write that). Larry’s reading of marketing mumbo jumbo about quality and cost improvements with the acquisition wasn’t convincing.” You should assume until proven otherwise that Oracle’s entire interest in buying Cerner is (a) to boost sales of Oracle’s existing products, especially cloud services, by getting (or making) Cerner users replace anything from Oracle’s big tech competitors Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.; (b) to sell more Oracle products such as ERP into the Cerner market; (c) to gain access to a supply of de-identified patient data that can be used from everything from AI training to selling on the open market; and (d) to get a bit closer to massive healthcare spending in both the US and elsewhere. Oracle may do great work in healthcare, but market precedents aren’t encouraging. It will be interesting to see how hard Oracle upsells into the Cerner client base and whether that drives clients to Epic, which by the way already offers a lot of what Larry was extolling. Readers, what is your experience with Oracle as a vendor?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: Turnstile, Baltimore-based, high-energy punkish rockers who I found accidentally who then made a big splash at Glastonbury this week. They kind of remind me of Rage Against the Machine, but they can take an enjoyable hard turn from scrapping with throngs of on-stage mosh pit divers to playing thoughtful melodies.

I talked to a HIMSS insider about recent changes there. Notes from our chat, with the usual disclaimer that this is one non-anonymous person’s opinions and observations that have not been confirmed:

• Some employees felt that HIMSS22 was an awkward conference, with low HIMSS employee morale and a lack of visibility of President and CEO Hal Wolf. Turnover increased immediately before and after the conference.
• Some regional events that should have been popular have been cancelled due to lack of sponsoring vendors. HIMSS laid off around 50 people, most of them in the events area, a few weeks ago.
• Hal’s vision was a Netflix or New York Times type subscription model for HIMSS, where people could buy a basic subscription and pay extra for add-ons.
• Hal runs HIMSS more like a for-profit business than his predecessor Steve Lieber, with a quick, confusing switch of tactics from a non-profit and the hiring on of quite a few of Hal’s former for-profit company colleagues.
• HIMSS wasn’t prepared for the buzz of the ViVE conference and “mouths dropped” internally upon seeing the energy it drew. HIMSS didn’t send anyone to scout ViVE, but saw recaps and photos from the brightly colored, fun conference with interesting people on stage in Miami. The industry’s aggravation level with HIMSS was high, making it the perfect time to start a competing conference. Still, HIMSS isn’t making major changes, just strategizing to increase HIMSS23 registration numbers and streamline the entry process for the “45 minute PowerPoints in windowless rooms” educational format.
• HIMSS had previously tried something similar to HLTH and ViVE by buying Health 2.0 to get a younger and hipper crowd and to tap into investors, but “wrung the life out of it” by making it into a mini-HIMSS that suffered from “death by committee.”
• The sale of HIMSS Analytics was “shocking” since that business had given HIMSS a way to understand health IT as an influencer rather than just a cheerleader.
• HIMSS Accelerate was the “jump the shark” moment as HIMSS tried to push members where they wanted them instead of where those members actually wanted to be. It was supposed to change the way that HIMSS does business, but people don’t need or want another social media platform. Accelerate use is negligible outside of HIMSS employees.

Webinars

July 12 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Digital Data Stewardship for Trusted, High-Quality Data Exchange.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. Presenter: Carol Graham, MS, RN, product manager, Clinical Architecture. Organizations face challenges in ensuring that the patient data they received and send is consistent, accurate, and usable. Use cases include receiving multi-source data across health information networks with variation in formats and content; merging and de-duplicating provider, payer, and research data; uplifting legacy data for current use cases and formats; and normalizing and formatting data for public health surveillance, quality measure reporting, and providing directly to the patient. This webinar will cover Pivot, a comprehensive Digital Data Steward solution that orchestrates format harmonization, content (vocabulary) normalization, de-duplication, and data quality validation into a single solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A trade court judge rules that Apple infringed on AliveCor’s atrial fibrillation detection technology, a decision that if affirmed by the International Trade Commission, could force Apple to stop selling Watch in the US or to remove the disputed technology.

PicnicHealth raises $60 million in a Series C investment round, bringing its total funding to over $100 million. The San Francisco-based startup uses de-identified patient data culled from its PHR offering to build datasets for research.

App-enabled at-home and point-of-care testing company Cue Health will reportedly lay off 170 employees, citing economic hardships and a shrinking market for COVID-19 testing. The company had signed testing contracts with the NBA, MLB, and HHS, among others, during the height of the pandemic.

Hartford HealthCare (CT) spins out H2O, a cloud-based predictive analytics company focused on offering providers insight into patient length of stay, and patient flow through the emergency department and during surgery. The software, developed in collaboration with MIT professor Dimitris Bertsimas, PhD, will be offered commercially by the end of the year.

People

R1 RCM names former Cloudmed CEO Lee Rivas, MBA president. R1 finalized its acquisition of the RCM software vendor last week.

Hackensack Meridian Health (NJ) names Sameer Sethi (Bon Secours Mercy Health) SVP and chief data and analytics officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Olive announces GA of its Autonomous Revenue Cycle, a group of solutions designed to help providers automate time-consuming, revenue-related administrative tasks.

Trinity Health of New England partners with virtual lactation platform vendor Nest Collaborative to offer virtual breastfeeding support for families who give birth at the health system’s three birthing hospitals, generally paid for by health insurance.

TriHealth says that integrating Tempus oncology genomic testing workflows with Epic helped identify available clinical trials, recommend an FDA-approved treatment, improved genetic counseling, alerted clinicians when appropriate new treatments became available for existing diagnoses, and made clinician ordering easier.

Yale researchers develop an EHR-embedded software tool to help ED doctors initiate buprenorphine treatment for opioid abuse.

Government and Politics

The Government Accountability Office recommends that HHS develop a way for covered entities to offer feedback on the breach reporting process. Hacking and IT incidents have increased by 843% since 2015, while unauthorized access and disclosures have increased by 43%.

Other

An Insider investigation of virtual mental health startup Cerebral finds that the company ran itself without regard to clinical standards until the federal government intervened. The report says that the company took on patients it should not have, assigned them to clinicians — mostly nurse practitioners — and other employees who lacked training and oversight, pushed those clinicians to issue prescriptions to 95% of patients, and placed the licenses of its clinicians at risk via its policies and its disregard for state regulations. Insiders say Cerebral’s clinicians sometimes ignored the company’s requirement that they check prescription drug monitoring databases before prescribing controlled substances. Cerebral is being investigated by the DEA, DOJ, and FTC, while health insurers and pharmacies have cut ties. The company at one time had 210,000 active patients and 4,500 employees, with plans to expand to 10,000 employees by the end of this year as it planned to expand into weight loss.

A study concludes that most digital health startups have low levels of clinical robustness, as evidenced by few regulatory filings, clinical trials, and data shared publicly.

Sponsor Updates

• Agfa HealthCare further develops enterprise imaging workflows for the Yorkshire Imaging Collaborative and South Yorkshire & Bassetlaw regions in England.
• Everest Group’s RCM Operations Peak Matric Report names AGS Health a Star Performer and Leader for growth, innovation, and positive impact on the healthcare market.
• Baker Tilly donates $10,000 to Camp Good Mourning as part of its Wishes grant program.
• BDO publishes a new insight, “Minimizing Revenue Loss Due to Inpatient Status Downgrades.”
• Clearwater hires Alka Kumar (HealthWorks) as a compliance and privacy consultant.
• Optimum Healthcare IT hires Kenneth Martin (Elliot Hospital) as application team manager within its managed services team.
• Divurgent names Kristal Wittman director of digital health.
• AGS Health is again named a Leader and Star Performer in Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) Operations by Everest Group.
• Enlace Health will present at the World Forum Bundled Payments Conference July 14 in Chicago.
• The American Society of Nephrology has entered into a publishing agreement with Wolters Kluwer Health to publish Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, and Kidney360.

Blog Posts

• How cumbersome RCM processes are hurting your employee morale (Ability Network)
• The Importance of Patient Engagement in a Medical Practice (AdvancedMD)
• Can data help eradicate long-COVID? (Arcadia)
• The Brand Lessons That Are Having an Impact This Year in B2B (Ascom)
• Six Key Statistics on the Behavioral Health Crisis in the US (Bamboo Health)
• 5 ways to better manage patient expectations for improved satisfaction scores (Bravado Health)
• The Dedication to Giving Back (CHIME)
• Competing against generic alternatives? Highlight Your Savings Offer While Prescribers are in the EHR. (ConnectiveRx)
• How to Overcome Community Connect Adoption Challenges (CTG)
• Dermatology Made Easier This Summer (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/27/22

Top News

The White House signs the VA Electronic Health Record Transparency Act of 2021, which requires the VA to report the costs of its EHR modernization project to congressional committees each quarter. The report will also include a breakout of project funding sources.

The VA must also submit quality, performance, safety, and value metrics, along with a list of patient safety reports, incidents, alerts, or disclosures.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents are skeptical that Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner will improve cost or quality.

New poll to your right or here: How important to you personally is telehealth today versus in 2019? I realized while posing the question is that it hasn’t changed for me – I’ve yet to have a telehealth visit, although I wouldn’t be opposed to it as an alternative to the physician office visits that I rarely require.

I’m surprised to see pundits who confidently state that Larry Ellison is CEO of Oracle, a position he hasn’t held since 2014.

The need is evident.

Webinars

July 12 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Digital Data Stewardship for Trusted, High-Quality Data Exchange.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. Presenter: Carol Graham, MS, RN, product manager, Clinical Architecture. Organizations face challenges in ensuring that the patient data they received and send is consistent, accurate, and usable. Use cases include receiving multi-source data across health information networks with variation in formats and content; merging and de-duplicating provider, payer, and research data; uplifting legacy data for current use cases and formats; and normalizing and formatting data for public health surveillance, quality measure reporting, and providing directly to the patient. This webinar will cover Pivot, a comprehensive Digital Data Steward solution that orchestrates format harmonization, content (vocabulary) normalization, de-duplication, and data quality validation into a single solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Myriad Genetics will integrate its provider genetic test ordering and resulting program with Epic.

Healthcare Triangle launches a digital front door app for users of Epic’s MyChart.

Sales

• Altus Neighbors Emergency Centers will use the billing system of Sphere-owned Health IPass.
• Lutheran Health Network, Flowers Hospital, and North Knoxville Medical Center implement the PeriWatch Vigilance maternal-fetal early warning system.
• Health Alliance launches a remote patient monitoring program powered by CareSignal.

People

Healthcare Growth Partners hires Brooks McElveen, MS (New Capital Partners) as VP.

Announcements and Implementations

Microsoft will collaborate with Volpara Health Technologies on AI-powered detection and quantification of breast arterial calcification.

PerfectServe will further develop its cloud-based call center solution.

Baker Tilly and MedeAnalytics develop Service Line Data Signs, an easy-to-use analytics solution for supply and pharmacy expenses.

Other

CHOP SVP/CIO Shakeeb Akhter recaps the health system’s recent conversion from Ascom phones to Epic communications, including secure messaging, Voalte voice calling, and Rover alerts and alarms.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx extends the reach of its omni-channel medication adherence platform through a partnership with pharma marketing technology company Equals 5.
• Pivot Point Consulting promotes Nicole Gerten to senior operations specialist.
• Protenus has received the highest overall performance score for its drug diversion surveillance solution in the recent KLAS Drug Diversion Monitoring report.
• Symplr announces the winners of its 2022 Lean Human Capital Elite Honor Roll program.
• Premier has named Henry Ford Health the winner of the 2022 Premier Alliance Excellence Award.
• TigerConnect and its Critical Alert business have announced that Mount Nittany Health nurse Jodie McClure, RN has won its Nurses at the Heart of Healthcare contest.
• VisiQuate expands its Payer Action Center to help providers reclaim millions in unpaid claims.
• The following HIStalk Sponsors will exhibit at HFMA through June 29 in Denver: AGS Health, Arrive Health, Availity, Change Healthcare, Experian Health, Iodine Software, Nym Health, Olive, Optum, Oracle Cerner, Premier, Tegria, VisiQuate.

Blog Posts

• What Will the Future of Healthcare Look Like? (Experity)
• Healthcare data standards 101: HL7, FHIR and more (Olive)
• Why is it Important to Reduce Hospital Admissions? (PatientBond)
• Breakthroughs Bulletin: Spotlight on Our Innovation Showcase Suppliers (Premier)
• Key Takeaways from the 2022 APG Annual Conference: ACO REACH and Health Equity (RCxRules)
• 6 best practices to know before implementing a cloud contact center solution (Talkdesk)
• The Unexpected Drivers of PT Patient Success (WebPT)
• 7 Patient Engagement Strategies to Improve Outcomes (Well Health)
• Top 3 Things to Look for in a Healthcare Integration Service Provider (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 6/24/22

Top News

MemorialCare’s innovation fund makes an unspecified investment in IoT security vendor Asimily.

Reader Comments

From Pointy Solution: “Re: Cures Act vendor requirements. NextGen, at least, is reaching out to customers about their responsibilities.” NextGen reminds its customers via email that the Cures Act prohibits EHR vendors from enforcing “gag clauses” and reiterates that its customers are free to communicate about system usability, interoperability, security, and user experience regardless of what their contracts do or don’t say (the company says it does not believe that any of its agreements contain gag clauses). I’m not sure if such customer communication is required, but regardless, nice job by NextGen.

Webinars

July 12 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Digital Data Stewardship for Trusted, High-Quality Data Exchange.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. Presenter: Carol Graham, MS, RN, product manager, Clinical Architecture. Organizations face challenges in ensuring that the patient data they received and send is consistent, accurate, and usable. Use cases include receiving multi-source data across health information networks with variation in formats and content; merging and de-duplicating provider, payer, and research data; uplifting legacy data for current use cases and formats; and normalizing and formatting data for public health surveillance, quality measure reporting, and providing directly to the patient. This webinar will cover Pivot, a comprehensive Digital Data Steward solution that orchestrates format harmonization, content (vocabulary) normalization, de-duplication, and data quality validation into a single solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Ro, which offers telehealth visits for ED, hair loss, skin care, and fertility, joins an ever-lengthening list of formerly high-valuation digital health startups that are laying off employees. Business Insider reports that the company laid off 18% of its headcount on Thursday, four months after reaching a paper valuation of $7 billion.

Sales

• Intermountain Healthcare goes live on Gyant’s asynchronous e-visit system Async, which provides AI-powered clinical assessment within the health system’s My Health+ app and routes patients to an asynchronous visit when appropriate.
• Urgent care provider Innovative Care goes live on Nym Health’s medical coding technology for revenue cycle management.

People

Signify Health hires Paymon Farazi, MBA (Tausight) as chief product officer.

InstaMed, a JP Morgan Company, promotes Jeff Lin to president.

Announcements and Implementations

Global Healthcare Exchange launches a digital solution to support health systems capture, review, and report vaccination information.

Change Healthcare releases a patient engagement solution that incorporates its revenue cycle management capabilities with Luma Health’s patient engagement software.

Wolters Kluwer, Health and Laerdal Medical launch a VSim for Nursing simulation training course area for advanced medical-surgical and critical care scenarios.

Optum develops a laboratory benefit solution to reduce unnecessary lab testing, which it saves could save health plans $3 billion per year.

WellSky-owned CarePort expands its care coordination data connections to 17 HIES and data sources.

KLAS says that Oracle Cerner’s go-forward RCM product RevElate won’t necessarily solve the company’s high-profile revenue cycle problems, as customer experience with implementation and training of its underlying Soarian Financials product has been mixed. Customers say that Soarian Financials is a solid system that drives good outcomes despite usability issues, but requires more add-on products than expected, has exposed customers to more nickel-and-diming since Cerner acquired the product in 2015, and won’t solve Oracle Cerner’s challenges of hiring and keeping employees who can facilitate successful outcomes.  

Other

North Carolina’s state treasurer says that pandemic-related federal hospital funding was a “huge wealth transfer to wealthy hospital systems,” noting that the state’s seven dominant health systems saw profits swell to $5.3 billion last year. Treasurer Dale Folwell – who notes that Atrium Health collected $719 million in provider relieve funds and then merged with a competitor, while Duke Health’s profit margin jumped from 11% in 2019 to 41% last year – says that big health systems “have turned into stock market, private equity, and real estate development firms” that “disguise themselves as non-profits.”

A KHN article ponders whether a small town is better off with a bad hospital than having none at all, describing two rural Missouri hospitals that were bought by a private equity-backed firm that collected federal relief money, hired directors with little hospital experience, stopped paying their bills, missed paychecks, ran out of supplies, and racked up a long list of CMS deficiencies before closing the hospitals 18 months after buying them. Noble Health Corporation, which operated Audrain Community Hospital and Callaway Community Hospitals, announced on March 18 that it would limit services and divert ambulances temporarily because of an unspecified IT issue with RCM and EHR systems that it said was causing cash flow problems, then locked the doors for good six days later.

Sponsor Updates

• The Health Information Resource Center recognizes Healthwise with seven Digital Health Awards for its medical illustrations and health education videos.
• FDB hires Christopher Marks (State Farm) as information security officer.
• Jinuper Networks publishes an information sheet titled “Revolutionize the Network for Modern Healthcare.”
• CarePort, a WellSky company, has expanded its data connections to 17 HIEs and data sources across the country to provide enhanced visibility into a growing number of providers and increased care coordination capabilities.
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions publishes a new interoperability report, “Assessing the Evolution of Health Data Exchange.”
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast, “On Innovation with Dr. Nick van Terheyden.”

Blog Posts

• HHS Updates Guidance for HIPAA-Compliant Audio-Only Telehealth (EVisit)
• Healthcare data: the value of historical patient data (Experian Health)
• Why Crisis Management Preparedness Matters (Everbridge)
• How to Prioritize the Patient in a Digital-First Experience (Get Well)
• 3 Ways to take your Healthcare IT Service Desk to the next level (The HCI Group)
• Embracing Health at Home – Key Strategies to Optimize Health Outcomes (HCTec)
• Strengthen your security posture with identity governance and privileged access management (Imprivata)
• 6 factors to consider when calculating real EHR downtime costs (Interbit Data)
• IMO asks: What’s next for the CMIO? (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• 3 Reasons Your Healthcare Facility Should Offer Online Bill Pay (Medhost)
• How to reduce prescription abandonment and improve medication adherence (Meditech)
• 5 Inspiring Physical Therapy Innovations (MWTherapy)
• Fantastic First Impressions Set the Foundation for Future Rehab Therapy Referrals (Net Health)
• What is ambient clinical intelligence – and how is it transforming healthcare? (Nuance)
• Autonomous Coding vs. Computer-assisted Coding – Part 1: The Evolution of Medical Coding (Nym)
• The big squeeze: Navigating the confluence of post-COVID challenges (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 6/22/22

Top News

An NBC News article notes the reduced availability of telehealth visits as state-level pandemic emergency health orders expire, reinstating more restrictive practice requirements.

Patients are being forced to change doctors, drive to in-person treatment locations, or answer questions about where they will be physically located during their appointment to comply with individual state laws that regulate cross-border provider practice.

Only 12 states still have telehealth waivers and some of those expire soon.

Additional challenges will be introduced when the federal pandemic order expires and Medicare’s telehealth and payment waivers will end.

Webinars

July 12 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Digital Data Stewardship for Trusted, High-Quality Data Exchange.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. Presenter: Carol Graham, MS, RN, product manager, Clinical Architecture. Organizations face challenges in ensuring that the patient data they received and send is consistent, accurate, and usable. Use cases include receiving multi-source data across health information networks with variation in formats and content; merging and de-duplicating provider, payer, and research data; uplifting legacy data for current use cases and formats; and normalizing and formatting data for public health surveillance, quality measure reporting, and providing directly to the patient. This webinar will cover Pivot, a comprehensive Digital Data Steward solution that orchestrates format harmonization, content (vocabulary) normalization, de-duplication, and data quality validation into a single solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Telehealth infrastructure provider SteadyMD acquires BlocHealth, which offers a clinician licensing, credentialing, and payer enrollment platform.

Sales

• Union General Health System (GA) selects digital patient intake technology from Qure4U.
• Mount Sinai Health System (NY) will implement MphrX’s Minerva clinical data-sharing software.
• Valley Health System will install EVideon’s Vibe Health smart room technology at its new hospital in New Jersey next year.
• Appalachian Regional Healthcare (KY) will use virtual care and AI-based predictive analytics technology from Biofourmis as part of its new Rural Home Hospital project.
• Pfizer will use real-world, de-identified pharma safety evidence from Truveta, which represents 20 health system members.

People

Former ConnectiveRx and Surescripts executive Rick Ratliff (CAQH) joins Australian medication management app company MedAdvisor as its US-based CEO and general manager.

Kris Bhambhani (Columbia University Irving Medical Center) joins Amazon Web Services as global head of healthcare compliance.

Pinkrose Hamilton (Hackensack Meridian Health) joins University of Iowa Health Care as chief data analytics officer.

Rich Steinle (Innovista Health Solutions) joins Carium as CEO, replacing co-founder Scott Pradels upon his transition to COO.

Orion Health names Craig White (Concerto HealthAI) chief data officer and Grant Anthony (Verisure) CISO.

Joe Cabralm MS (Press Ganey) joins Prolucent Health as chief growth officer.

Industry long-timer Pete Mounts, partner with Himformatics and former executive with McKesson and Eclipsys, has died.

Announcements and Implementations

CloudWave announces that seven healthcare facilities, including Doctors Hospital (the Bahamas), Franciscan Hospital for Children (MA), Blythedale Children’s Hospital (NY), and Wooster Community Hospital (OH), have implemented its OpSus Cloud Services.

RxRevu, whose platform delivers patient-specific cost and insurance coverage information within provider decision-making workflows, renames itself to Arrive Health.

Chicago-based WellBe Senior Medical implements Bluestream Health’s virtual care platform-as-a-service.

GE Healthcare announces GA of Portrait Mobile, wireless vitals monitoring technology for hospital patients.

Government and Politics

In Australia, the Queensland government will allocate an additional $200 million USD for the continued implementation of its enterprise Cerner EHR project over the next five years. Sixteen of a hoped-for 27 hospitals have gone live to some degree on the new system. Originally launched in 2011 with a budget of $288 million, the IEMR project ballooned to an estimated completion cost of $840 million. An audit in 2018 found the scheme to be 40% over budget. Further problems, including outages in 2019, physician complaints, and the departure of the director-general have hampered go-live timelines.

The VA seeks bids for its $650 million Accelerating VA Innovation and Learning contract, which will focus on five innovation task areas – personalized care, data transformation, digital care, immersive technology, and care and service delivery models. Offers are due June 30.

The 49th Medical Group at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico celebrates the launch of MHS Genesis.

Privacy and Security

Baptist Health System notifies over 1 million patients in Texas of a data breach after noticing that an unauthorized entity installed a line of malicious code on the back-end of its website in late March, gaining access to its computer network for several weeks.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD recognizes Product Developer Kylie Jensen with a FIT Award.
• CTG publishes a case study titled “VCU Health Partners with CTG for Successful Epic Go-Live.”
• Baker Tilly will sponsor and present at the Chief Patient Officer Summit July 19-20 in Boston.
• Nordic posts DoctTalk Ep. 106, “Redefining health for a new era of care.”
• CareMesh welcomes Elle Scott as a sales and account intern.
• Executives from Ascension, CVS, and Cognetivity Neurosciences will keynote the InterSystems Health Leadership Conference June 23 in Seattle.
• CloudWave sponsors the 2022 HIMSS Colorado Golf Classic in Littleton.
• Encompass Health implements Cerner at its 150^th post-acute inpatient rehab hospital.

Blog Posts

• How to save time and money with internal interoperability (Ability Network)
• Agfa HealthCare celebrates another User Conference! (Agfa HealthCare)
• Real-world data IRL: Accelerate your research with new FDA guidelines (Arcadia)
• Connecting DRVS to Your HIE: A High-Value Proposition (Azara Healthcare)
• Ask These Questions Before You Pursue an M&A Transaction (BDO)
• Going Beyond the Firewall: How to Prepare and Plan for a Cyberattack (Philips Capsule)
• Epic Hyperdrive: How You Can Prepare for the Transition (CereCore)
• How EHR Data and Survey Responses Mitigate Clinical Research Bias (ChartLogic)
• Creating Opportunities to Connect is CHIME’s Secret Sauce (CHIME)
• A Holistic Approach to Cyber Risk Management (Clearwater)
• ‘I Just Tried to Be Inventive:’ One Patient’s Plan for Medical Bills (CoverMyMeds)
• 4 Ways to Align Test Automation and Agile Development (CTG)
• Beside the Bed and Behind the Screen: Experienced Nurses are Finding New Energy in Hybrid Care (Current Health)
• Disease Explorer: Effectiveness Through Cohorts (EClinicalWorks)
• Payer COVID-19 Screening Policies and Boosting Your Online Security (Experity)

Sponsor Spotlight

RxRevu, the nation’s leading provider of integrated cost and coverage data, has renamed itself Arrive Health in an effort to better reflect the company’s mission to improve patient access to care, reduce friction in provider workflows, and increase awareness of affordable care options. In conjunction with the renaming, Arrive Health has launched a new corporate website and new product offerings to better serve providers, care teams, and patients. Arrive Health will be exhibiting at the upcoming HFMA Annual Conference in Denver, from June 26-29.

Contacts

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