Monday Morning Update 9/6/21

Top News

A BMJ-published review of using AI for breast cancer screening finds that 34 of 36 reviewed systems were less accurate than a single radiologist and all performed more poorly than two radiologists.

Excluded from the review were studies that used the same data for training and validation, which likely perform worse in analyzing new data.

The authors conclude that AI is “a long way from having the quality and quantity required” to use in clinical practice, especially without further radiologist review, such as in screening “normal” mammograms.

Reader Comments

From New Vince Fan: “Re: Vince Ciotti’s HIS-tory. Will be continue to be available on HIStalk?” Yes. Vince and I had agreed two years ago that his HIS-tory was in danger of being lost when stored as individual PowerPoints that he had created over several years, so I spent a day assembling them all into a single PDF that is permanently available from the top menu under Navigation / Information (or directly here). Vince cheerfully admitted that his memory of events from 40-50 years ago wasn’t perfect and someone who worked within one of the companies he wrote about would be more knowledgeable of specific details that he speculated about, but Vince had a rare broad view of the industry having worked in much of it, known most of its pioneers, and seen with clarity what went right or went wrong with corporate decisions. It was touching when he told me that he considered his HIS-tory series to be his legacy after a 50-year career.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I just couldn’t find a sensible way to word the question I asked last week about who companies might hire for a CEO position – triggered by Cerner’s two-for-two in hiring people in their first-time CEO job – so I’ll allow the answers to speak for themselves. My poorly worded question even confounded the issue at hand – David Feinberg had CEO experience before Cerner named him to that job, but it was for a non-profit health system.

New poll to your right or here: Which of these HR actions have happened to you?

Listening: the first new music from ABBA since 1982, accompanied by a sweetly reminiscent look back at their history via photos and video from when the then-married couples donned spacey costumes and eyeliner to sing with Swedish accents the best Europop of that era and perhaps any other. They don’t look quite like the members you remember since they’re in their mid-70s now, but they sound fine. The band had refused the richest contracts in history to reunite over fears that fans would be disappointed, but they have reconciled their personal differences to record a new album and an avatar-powered concert experience that will be backed by live musicians. I will say as a music fan that ABBA’s was fresh more than skilled (though written by Benny and Bjorn with an immensely strong commercial pop ear) and was mostly just a lot of youthful fun with the occasionally darker overtone later in their career, but I still like it (my favorite album: 1981’s “The Visitors,” which was their last, and my favorite song “Slipping Through My Fingers” from that same album). The BB boys have always called the shots, made fortunes in commercial music ventures, and are the active participants in this reunion, while the girls (Frida and Agnetha) provided the most memorable performing component but then chose a quiet, mostly non-musical life and seem to have a background role in the new content. I’ll say that the boys could just write their songs and then stay home and count their money and I would be equally happy watching AA bring them to life without them. BB are making fortunes from songwriting royalties and finding new ways to resell the group’s old music.

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

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF gained 1.7% in the past month versus the Nasdaq’s 3.7% rise. EDOC shares were launched nearly a year ago and have risen 19% since versus the Nasdaq’s 36% gain.

Achieve Partners acquires cybersecurity services vendor Metmox to develop a training and mentorship program, the same reason it acquired Optimum Healthcare IT in July.

Sales

• The VA renews its CliniComp contract for another five years.

People

Adirondac Health (NY) names Aaron Kramer, MS as president and CEO. Most of his career has been spent in IT, including work as an IBM systems administrator, an IT director, and CIO of Adirondac through June 2019.

Susan Salahshoor, RN, MMIS (PatientSafe Solutions) joins TransformativeMed as VP of clinical success.

Announcements and Implementations

McLaren Northern Michigan goes live on Vocera, deploying its Vina smartphone app and Smartbadge voice-controlled wearable.

COVID-19

HHS reports that most states have 25% or more of their ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients (dark red above), requiring 25,000 beds nationally of 85,000 available. Seven-day deaths per 100,000 population are highest in Louisiana, Nevada, Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Eric Topol wonders why we have to base US decisions on data from Israel (reason: they collect it, we don’t). Another challenge here is that vaccine records are not reliably centralized and tied to a national patient identifier, which is not surprising when the main proof of vaccination is an easily counterfeited paper card with scrawled handwriting that focused on product information rather than the recipient.

Texas has only 81 pediatric and 200 adult ICU beds available for its 29 million residents, as schools have reported 50,000 new student cases in two weeks and a dozen school districts have closed temporarily. Eight counties are using refrigerated trucks to store the bodies of COVID-19 patients.

Other

TechRepublic profiles Rush University Medical Center’s use of Amazon HealthLake to track COVID-19 cases. HealthLake, which became generally available in July, includes FHIR connectivity.

University of Connecticut profiles UConn Health interim CIO Adam Buckley, MD, MBA (University of Vermont Health Network) who joined the health system in July in replacing interim Chuck Podesta, who is now CIO at Renown Health (NV).

Four of six traveling ICU nurses that were contracted by Providence St. Joseph Hospital Eureka (CA) to care for COVID-19 patients quit the next day, which CEO Roberta Luskin-Hawk, MD says is due to their unfamiliarity with its EHR even though it is “used by many hospitals.” Still, she says, “We are excited to be transitioning to a more widely used electronic medical record system in the coming weeks.”

Atlanta-area telehealth nurses tell a local TV station that they lack clinical training and are telling patients “hold while I review your records” and then are frantically Googling their symptoms. Nurses report that hold times are up to one hour as high numbers of callers are turned away in EDs and urgent care centers. One nurse says, “We have no knowledge of childhood illnesses, diseases, or parameters of vital signs and I just felt that that’s a very dangerous situation” as better trained nurses haven left for higher-paying jobs.

Sponsor Updates

• Clearwater publishes a new case study, “Digital Health Company CaringWays Partners with Clearwater for Cybersecurity and HIPAA Compliance.”
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Using EClinicalWorks Tools to Measure Quality for Shared Savings at Innova Primary.”
• Change Healthcare offers a new Supporting Accurate Claims content hub.
• OptimizeRx CEO Will Febbo will present at the Lake Street Capital Markets’ The Best Ideas Growth Conference September 14-15, and at the Piper and Sandler 2021 Heartland Summit September 29-30.
• Symplr publishes a new case study, “Baystate Health’s New Digital Peer Referencing Integration is a Dream Come True.”
• Protenus publishes a new case study, “Seattle Children’s Hospital Uses AI to Protect Pediatric Patients’ Privacy.”
• Seniors at Douglas County Health Center stay connected using technology from Sonifi Health.
• Data-protection vendor Spirion announces its inclusion in seven 2021 Gartner Hype Cycle reports.
• WebPT becomes The Alliance for Physical Therapy Quality and Innovation’s first at-large member and strategic partner.

Blog Posts

• Effective Network Segmentation Strategies to Fend Off Cyberattacks (Clearwater)
• Embracing AI-enabled technologies as a strategic asset (Nuance)
• Overdose Awareness: Featuring Ashley Addiction Treatment (Netsmart)
• How Healthcare Providers Can Attract Medicare Consumers (PatientBond)
• Driving Domestic Gloves Production: Andy Brailo with Henry Ford Health System (Premier)
• The ROI of the Spok Go clinical communication and collaboration platform (Spok)
• 3 ways to make billing and payments part of a great patient journey (Talkdesk)
• Skip the Phone Calls. Engage Your Members in a New Way. (Twistle)
• Celebrate to Motivate: The Best Staff Appreciation Ideas for Rehab Therapy Clinics (WebPT)
• Burnout a ‘growing problem’ for physician assistants, reports JAAPA (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 9/3/21

Top News

Baxter International will acquire Hillrom for $10.5 billion in cash plus assumption of debt that values the transaction at $12.4 billion.

The announcement emphasizes Hillrom’s recent refocus from manufacturing hospital beds to remote patient monitoring and connected care solutions.

Hillrom previously acquired cardiac monitoring company Bardy Diagnostics for $375 million, patient monitoring vendor EarlySense for $30 million, and clinical communications vendor Voalte for $180 million.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I was saddened to learn from Bill Bogutski that Vince Ciotti has died. Vince retired in 2019 after a 50-year health IT career, much of it spent working with Bill and other principals of the HIS Professionals consulting firm. The photo of Vince above is from a reunion of former employees of Shared Medical Systems in 2019. Vince spent considerable time over several years, starting in 2011, documenting health IT’s first decades for HIStalk readers in his engrossing HIS-tory series. I interviewed him two years ago and it’s still an entertaining read that will give you a feel for Vince’s filter-less, cynical humor. I asked him then what he wanted his epitaph to say:

If I could be remembered for anything, it would probably be my HIS-tory files, which I thank you for posting over such a long time, two and a half years. I hope some of the future CIOs read them and learn from them. I hope that’s what they remember me by, the guy that warned them about not repeating these mistakes of the past.

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare Triangle files for an IPO that will raise up to $50 million.

Provation acquires Pentax Medical’s EndoPro endoscopy software. 

Accenture acquires Canada-based healthcare technology consulting firm Gevity. 

Sales

• Coalition of Asian-American IPA chooses CarePort Connect for care coordination.

People

SOC Telemed promotes Chris Gallagher, MD to CEO. He replaces John Kalix, who resigned his CEO and board positions.

Transcarent hires Snezana Mahon, PharmD (Evernorth) as COO.

Stephanie Solich (Zipari) joins VisiQuate as VP of client development.

Patient payment and engagement platform vendor Millennia names Dave Dyell as chief strategy officer and Doug Sundlof (Cloudmed) as SVP of sales.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions promotes Jeff Diamond, JD to president and GM of its healthcare business.

Announcements and Implementations

UC San Diego Health launches the Center for Health Innovation to develop, test, and commercialize technologies.

COVID-19

A University of California San Diego Health review of employee health records finds that COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection dropped from 90% in June to 66% in July, which the authors attribute to emergence of the delta variant, waning immunity suggesting the need for booster doses, and the ending of masking mandates. Adding to the argument for booster doses is that those healthcare workers who were vaccinated earlier were infected at a higher rate.

A New York attorney is suing hospitals that refuse to administer ivermectin to ventilated COVID-19 patients whose families insist.

Sponsor Updates

• Glytec will host “Time to Target: Uniting Around Patient Safety,” its inaugural conference on glycemic innovation and collaboration October 26-27.
• Everbridge wins two Silver 2021 Stevie Awards in the categories of customer service department of the year and customer service team of the year.
• The HCI Group releases a new DGTL Voices with Ed Marx podcast, “Soul-Stirring Kilimanjaro Clinic.”
• Healthcare IT Leaders publishes a new guide, “15 Tips for Patient Accounting System Project Success.”
• Ideawake releases a new video, “3 Health Systems Transforming Patient Care via Bottom-Up Innovation Programs.”
• Imprivata makes its digital identity solutions One Sign and Confirm ID available on Microsoft Azure.
• Infor publishes a new case study, “Bozeman Health raises quality of care and reduces waste with Infor.”
• InterSystems releases a new podcast, “How Can Healthy Data Save Healthcare?”
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring CPSI CMO William Hayes, MD.
• NextGate names Minakshi Tikoo, PhD (NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene) director of product management.

Blog Posts

• Balancing Healthcare Resilience with the Patient Experience (Everbridge)
• Five Actions to Help Prevent Opioid Overdose (First Databank)
• Digital Health Technology Deployed for Veteran Suicide Prevention (GetWellNetwork)
• Clinical Technology Disparities and Opportunities for Improvement (Halo Health)
• Six Tactics to Restore the Healthcare Revenue Cycle (Health Catalyst)
• The Value of ServiceNow IT Business Management (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Telehealth Needs Your Help (Healthwise)
• T-Mobile breach exposed data of 40 million: How safe is your customers’ personal information? (Imprivata)
• What’s in a variant? Clinical documentation, epidemiology, and genomic sequencing (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Healthcare Must Engage Patients and Clinicians as They Manage the Rest of Their Life (Medhost)
• How Meditech customers are supporting patients this Recovery Month (Meditech)
• 7 Tips for Leveling Up Your PT Practice Before 2022 (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 9/1/21

Top News

Sources report for the second time in as many months that Baxter will acquire medical equipment company Hillrom for nearly $10 billion. Last month’s initial offer put Hillrom shares at $144 apiece, while this more recent bid inches closer to $150. The deal may be announced before the holiday weekend.

Hillrom has in the last several years ventured beyond its hospital bed roots into health IT, acquiring cardiac monitoring company Bardy Diagnostics for $375 million, patient monitoring vendor EarlySense for $30 million, and clinical communications vendor Voalte for $180 million.

I interviewed Hillrom SVP Mary Kay Ladone, a nearly 30-year Baxter veteran, in March.

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Tele-genetics testing and counseling company Genome Medical raises $60 million and acquires GeneMatters, which offers genetic counseling via video visit, as well as care delivery and patient engagement software.

Summit Healthcare reports that revenue and sales have exceeded expectations for the first half of the year, with 18 health systems recently signing on for the company’s data integration and exchange, automation, and business continuity services.

The tit for tat between NextGen Healthcare’s board members continues, with the company publishing an email from the chair of its nominating committee to board member Lance Rosenzweig to further demonstrate that Rosenzweig and company founder and board member Sheldon “Shelly” Razin are in fact trying to obstruct board operations.

DirectTrust acquires the assets of Safe Identity, an industry consortium and certification body for digital healthcare credentials.

Ellipsis Health raises $26 million in a Series A funding round. The startup has developed AI-based voice recognition technology that detects signs of depression and anxiety.

Appriss Health rebrands to Bamboo Health following its acquisition of PatientPing.

Sales

• Vizient signs a two-year contract with Ascom, giving its members access to pre-negotiated pricing and terms for the Ascom nurse call and monitoring system.
• Lee Health (FL), LifeBridge Health (MD), MedStar Health (MD), MercyOne (IA), Moffitt Cancer Center (FL), and MultiCare (WA) sign on for Avia’s membership-based, digital healthcare transformation consulting services.

People

LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Healthcare CEO Josh Schoeller takes on the additional role of Elsevier Clinical Solutions president.

The VA promotes Neil Evans, MD to acting CIO.

Twistle President and COO Matt Revis also joins the Health Catalyst leadership team. Health Catalyst acquired Twistle in June.

Announcements and Implementations

Spok announces GA of its ReadyCall Text waiting room pager, alongside enhancements to its Spok Go clinical communications platform.

Government and Politics

The FBI issues an alert about Hive ransomware, which has attacked nearly 30 healthcare organizations since first detected in June. The alert may have been spurred by the mid-August attack on Memorial Health System (OH), which ended up paying the hackers to regain access to internal systems that include 800 servers and 3,000 personal devices used by physicians.

COVID-19

A pre-print analysis of 24 statewide COVID-19 vaccine incentive programs finds no significant change in vaccination rates within those states, and no significant difference in vaccination trends between states that did and did not offer incentives.

A church youth camp and concurrent (though separately located) men’s conference held by the same organization in June has been linked to 180 confirmed and probable COVID-19 cases, most of whom were unvaccinated. Those cases ultimately led to 1,000 people in four states being exposed through attendance or close contact. The host organization did not require testing or vaccination for either event.

Other

Southern Louisiana hospitals in the path of Hurricane Ida have reported extensive roof damage, inoperable phone systems, power failures, and the need to enact staffing emergency staffing protocols. Hospital operations teams were especially concerned about the storm’s impact coupled with a surge in COVID-19 patients. More than 2,400 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized across the state as of Sunday.

Jury selection has begun in the trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Set to start on September 8, the trial has been postponed several times since she was charged with multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud in 2018. This article offers a quick refresher on what led up to the legal proceedings.

A study published in Contraception looks at the growing trend in at-home IUD removal and the corresponding uptick in DIY videos on Youtube and TikTok. Top motivators for the at-home option include the expense of an in-office procedure, side effects, a desire to get pregnant, and even unwillingness on the part of some providers.

Sponsor Updates

• Ellkay has sponsored the Cerner Foundation’s Westport Bounce, which provides funding for equipment, medicine, surgeries, travel, and wellness screenings to students.
• Spok publishes a new e-book, “The ROI of the Spok Go clinical communication and collaboration platform.”
• CereCore wins ClearlyRated’s 2021 Best of Staffing client and talent awards for service excellence.
• Cerner CIO Bill Graff wins CIO of the Year in the Orbie Awards’ large enterprise category.
• CHIME’s Digital Health Leaders Podcast features Monument Health CIO and CMO Stephanie Lahr.
• Clearwater publishes a new case study, “A Clear Success: Strong Cybersecurity & HIPAA Compliance Program Positions CaringWays for Growth.”
• Clinical Architecture celebrates its 14^th anniversary.
• Dimensional Insight’s Smarter Healthcare Podcast features Mass General Brigham Chief Digital Health Officer Alistair Erskine, MD.
• Cooper University Health Care (NJ) expands its use to Nuance’s Dragon Ambient Experience to 475 physicians and APPs.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Improving Patient Safety by Reducing Uncoded Allergies.”

Blog Posts

• Is the Value-Based Purchasing program on its way out? What SNFs need to know. (Ability Network)
• Interpol’s Latest on COVID-19 Cyberthreats (AdvancedMD)
• Riding for a Cure: Diameter Health’s Pan-Mass Challenge Team (Diameter Health)
• The Infinity Gauntlet of Healthcare Interoperability (EClinicalWorks)
• How data standardization can improve patient outcomes (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/30/21

Top News

Google shuts down its DeepMind-developed Streams app that displays patient information to UK clinicians.

Streams was the only DeepMind app that didn’t use AI, and plans to incorporate the technology were never acted on. It uses algorithms that were developed by the UK’s NHS.

The UK’s data protection office objected to The Royal Free Hospital providing DeepMind with patient data without their consent or knowledge during its development of Streams. Royal Free is the only NHS Trust that is still using Streams.

Google acquired AI startup DeepMind in early 2014 for a reported $500 million. Most of the company’s work involves teaching computers to play games such as Go and Pong. Its DeepMind Health business was moved within Google Health in late 2018, raising privacy objections that DeepMind had promised repeatedly that its data “will never be linked or associated with Google accounts, products, or services.”

Google says it will focus instead on Care Studio, which is being piloted at Ascension and Beth Israel Deaconess.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Cerner’s new CEO hire draws about a two-to-one negative among those who care.

New poll to your right or here: What background would you favor if you were hiring a CEO for your current employer? It’s an awkwardly constructed question, but my interest was piqued by IANAL’s comment last week that growing software companies usually hire CEOs whose background is strong either in sales or technology, and Cerner’s incoming CEO David Feinberg doesn’t fit that mold. I didn’t do a great job of incorporating what probably should have been a separate poll – at what point should a company’s hiring favor comparable CEO experience?

I was thinking about the prediction years ago and digital stethoscopes would replace their low-tech acoustic counterparts for a myriad of logical reasons. I get the feeling that it’s still mostly old-school instruments being used, but maybe someone has stats.

I’m taking a semi-break this week while still doing most of my usual HIStalk work, just from elsewhere and hopefully spending less time.

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Olive launches an in-house venture studio for startups that are developing solutions for its automation platform.

Sales

• Wolters Kluwer, Health adds six UK customers of UpToDate and Lexicomp.
• Whatley Health Services chooses RCxRules for revenue cycle automation.

People

VitalTech hires Steven Scott (PointRight) as president and CEO.

Clearsense promotes Kimberly Dickason, RN, MBA to COO and hires Pamela Fowler, MBA (University of Washington) as chief marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Mayo Clinic and Verily will collaborate to develop an evidence-based decision support solution, starting with cardiovascular and cardiometabolic conditions. The tool will be driven by Mayo-developed content and de-identified health data and will use open standards to allow integration with commercial EHRs.

Government and Politics

Ascension pays $85,000 to settle Justice Department charges that it violated federal immigration laws because of a software programming error. The error caused Ascension’s custom employee eligibility verification software to send automated emails to all of its non-citizen employees whose documents were set to expire, requesting them to submit proof of continued work authorization. Some of the recipients had presented documents that did not require re-verification, such as permanent residents and refugees. The Justice Department concludes, “Employers are reminded that while software programs may seem efficient, there is still a responsibility to ensure that programming decisions do not result in discrimination.”

COVID-19

China delays its approval of the BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine because of concerns that availability of a more modern, more effective vaccine will undermine confidence in its old-school, made-in-China products that are key to its national vaccination program.

Texas reports that nearly 14,000 people are hospitalized with confirmed coronavirus infection, occupying 21% all all hospital beds, and 300 people died of COVID-19 on Friday. The entire state has 303 ICU beds available versus the nearly 2,500 that were free pre-pandemic. A 46-year-old Houston-area Army combat veteran died of gallstone pancreatitis last week because lack of ICU beds. An ED doctor who treated him says treatment is a 30-minute procedure that is nearly always successful. The doctor says, “We are playing musical chairs with 100 people and 10 chairs. When the music stops, what happens? People from all over the world come to Houston to get medical care and, right now, Houston can’t take care of patients from the next town over.”

CDC describes how an unvaccinated teacher who kept working while experiencing congestion and fatigue and later tested positive for COVID-19 infected 12 of her 22 students after removing her mask to read to the class. The attack rate of the students seated in the front rows of the classroom was 80% versus 28% in the back rows.

Other

A Wisconsin advocacy group for raising taxes on the wealthy says that the net worth of Epic CEO Judy Faulkner rose from $2.5 billion in March 2020 to $6.7 billion in August 2021. Its data source was a web page from Forbes, which has no way of knowing the net worth of anyone beyond their publicly reported stock holdings, but that earns click bait traffic by making its made-up numbers look authoritative.

It seems obvious that the Internet’s robust supply of mean people seek health information online like everybody else, but it turns out that the headline writer misspelled “men.”

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Saving Summer with Kiosk, the Patient Portal, and More at MedRite.”
• Symplr publishes a new whitepaper, “Workforce Management Strategies in Times of Uncertainty.”
• Pure Storage’s FlashArray helps to improve the performance of Korea’s COVID-19 vaccine reservation system operated by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency.
• Quil Chief Customer Officer Roelf Kuitse will speak at the American Cancer Society’s Changemakers virtual series, Achieving Equity in the Telehealth Age September 21.
• The MatrixCare podcast features Surescripts Manager of Product Innovation Rachel Petersen and Surescripts Key Account Executive Jill Lytwyn.
• Visage Imaging parent company ProMedicus names Alice Williams a director.
• Azara Healthcare and Luma Health form a technology partnership for their population health data reporting and patient journey platform, respectively.
• Vocera will present at the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference September 9, the Baird Healthcare Conference September 14, and the Morgan Stanley Healthcare Conference September 15.
• West Monroe publishes a new report, “What’s Driving the Current Wave of Healthcare M&A and Investment?”

Blog Posts

• Five reasons why chatbots fail. (And how to make yours a runaway success.) (Nuance)
• How Health Plans Can Reduce Readmissions (PatientBond)
• 3 Ways to Increase Medical Practice Revenue (PMD)
• Data Delivered: Collaborating with Pharma to Study Anticoagulant Use in COVID-19 Patients (Premier)
• Get the Support You Need: Privacy Professional Services Elevate Resource-Strapped Teams (Protenus)
• How to Realize Revenue Earlier by Offering Patients More Flexible Payment Options (Sphere)
• The guide to pagers for hospitals (Spok)
• Talkdesk integration with Zoom unifies contact center collaboration (Talkdesk)
• Why Providence is Making the Switch to Cloud-Based Data Management for EHR (Tegria)
• Unlocking the Value of Genotypic and Phenotypic Data for Translational Research (TriNetX)
• Can Postpartum Contraceptive Care be Enhanced with Technology? (Twistle)
• Revenue cycle 101: charity care screening (Waystar)
• FAQ: The 2022 Medicare Proposed Rule and Other Perplexing Payer Regulations (WebPT)
• Well Health HIMSS 2021 Recap (Well Health)

The following HIStalk sponsors have achieved top client satisfaction and user experience rankings in Black Book’s latest survey on coding, transcription, CDI, and clinical information management software and services vendors:

• Nuance – comprehensive mid-RCM coding, CDI, and compliance solutions; CDI software; medical speech recognition and AI solutions.
• Infor – clinical data interoperability solutions.
• Symplr – provider credentialing.
• Agfa Healthcare – vendor neutral archive.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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News 8/27/21

Top News

Allscripts sells its precision medicine software subsidiary 2bPrecise to laboratory diagnostics software company AccessDX. Terms were not disclosed.

The sale comes nearly a year after Allscripts sold CarePort Health to WellSky for $1.35 billion.

Readers pointed out at the time that 2bPrecise and Veradigm might be next in line to sell.

Reader Comments

From Legerdemain: “Re: job question. I get great reviews, but they say there’s no budget for a decent raise and promises of promotions never pan out. Is it time to look elsewhere?” Of course. In fact, it’s always time to be looking elsewhere, especially if your potential new job is one that can be performed remotely so you don’t have to uproot yourself and your family. Employers have no incentive to voluntarily offer higher pay to employees who otherwise seem content to stick around without it. Somehow the money magically appears only when you threaten to quit and they realize how hard or expensive it will be to replace you. But I’ll add this — don’t let your employer buy you back once you’ve received another job offer. Why would you want to keep working for a company that treats you fairly only when there’s a gun to their head and that will likely remember your perceived disloyalty unfavorably in future HR decisions?

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

ManpowerGroup will acquire IT staffing and services provider Ettain Group for $925 million in cash. Ettain Group acquired Leidos Health, the commercial EHR consulting business of Leidos, in October 2019. Leidos Health was formed when Leidos acquired Vitalize Consulting Solutions and MaxIT Healthcare.

Mental health app company Ginger will merge with meditation app startup Headspace. The newly combined company will be known as Headspace Health, a division originally created by Headspace in 2018 to develop FDA-approved, prescription-strength meditation apps. Ginger CEO Russell Glass will take on the same role with the new company, while Headspace CEO CeCe Morken will retain that title and become president of the new business. Ginger raised $100 million in a Series E round earlier this year. The combined companies have a reported valuation of $3 billion.

Antidote Health, a virtual primary and urgent care company serving patients in five states, will use $12 million in seed funding to establish a health maintenance organization for its customers.

Not directly health IT related, but they cover the industry: Robert Albritton, the 52-year-old founder and owner of Politico, will sell the 14-year-old digital publishing group for more than $1 billion to a Germany-based media conglomerate.

Dollar General says in its earnings call that its healthcare push will take several years and involve services that aren’t readily available to its rural customers, such as eye care, telemedicine, and prescription drug delivery. The company has already partnered with GeniusRx, Higi, and telehealth provider Babylon.

NextGen Healthcare’s board says in a surprisingly blunt public statement that two of its members – one of them company’s founder, Shelly Razin – are “obstructing the Board’s effort to drive Board refreshment” with their proxy campaign to add their own slate of board members. The board says that members Razin and Lance Rosenzweig don’t want their candidates interviewed. The other board members also accused Razin of previously presiding as board chair over “a deteriorating business” and pushed a capital allocation plan that would have prioritized paying $400 million in dividends that would have mostly benefited him personally, with the company turning itself around only after he stepped down as president and CEO in 2000 as board chair in 2015.

Sales

• Axis Community Health and Tiburcio Vasquez Health Center choose CareSignal’s Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring.

People

Holon Solutions promotes Scott Tatro to chief customer officer.

Albany Medical Center (NY) has hired Suryakant Kale as its first CTO and VP of information services, technology, and infrastructure.

Nikolas Green (Amazon) joins Mercury Healthcare (formerly Healthgrades) as chief data officer.

ResMed promotes CTO Bobby Ghoshal to president of its SaaS business.

Announcements and Implementations

The Rural OB Access & Maternal Services network deploys Twistle’s text-based patient engagement technology to its network of providers in New Mexico.

Upstate Medical University in New York will use $2 million in funding from the FCC to upgrade its telehealth services, including improved integration with its Epic system. Nearly 70% of Upstate’s clinics have offered telemedicine services since the pandemic began; the health system has sometimes averaged 6,000 virtual visits a week.

UT Health East Texas offers patients telemedicine services and remote physical therapy and rehabilitation treatment from TheraNow.

COVID-19

COVID-19 hospitalizations have hit 100,000 for the first time since January, when vaccines weren’t widely available, and ICU patient count has exceeded 25,000 for the first time in the pandemic. Pediatric hospitalizations topped 2,000 for the first time in a year. Florida has 17,000 COVID-19 hospital inpatients, while Texas has 14,000. CDC reports 154,000 new cases and 1,138 new COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday.

COVID-19 cases in Meade County, SD, home to the Sturgis motorcycle rally, have risen 1,500% in the past two weeks. South Dakota has the largest percentage case increase of all states. Neighboring states had a big jump in documented infections after last year’s scaled-back event.

A music and surf festival in England with 50,000 attendees has been linked to nearly 5,000 COVID-19 cases, most of them in people aged 16 to 21. The festival required attendees to prove their COVID-19 vaccination status using the NHS Covid app and for festival campers to take a second test during the event and log the result.

Montana’s schools struggle to comply with a recently passed state law that prohibits treating vaccinated and unvaccinated people differently, which means that schools can’t follow CDC guidelines to quarantine only unvaccinated employees and students after COVID-19 exposure. Some schools say they will ignore the law when they reopen this week or next, some say they will make quarantine optional, and others will force vaccinated students to quarantine unnecessarily. Montana is also the only state that prohibits public and private employers from requiring employees to be vaccinated, which it says is discrimination and a violation of human rights.

Four states with low vaccination rates and high COVID case counts – Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama – are using half of the shipped supplies of the Regeneron antibody treatment that is given early in COVID infection to reduce the chance of hospitalization. Federal taxpayers are paying $1,250 per dose, plus an administration fee of several hundred dollars for Medicare patients, versus the $20 that vaccine would have cost. The governors of Texas and Florida are touting the treatment and opening government-run centers to administer it. One Florida hospital has administered the antibody treatment to 2,000 patients, at least 90% of them unvaccinated. According to the hospital’s chief nursing officer, “What’s amazing to me is that a vaccine we’ve been working on for 10 years, they are deathly afraid of. But this highly experimental cocktail? They’re willing to run in there the minute that they’re sick to get this infused into their bodies.”

An important review finds that airborne transmission of aerosolized respiratory viruses over longer distances and for longer time, including coronavirus, may be the dominant method of infection instead of droplets that fall quickly to the ground. Some mitigation measures overlap for both types of particles, such as distancing and masks, but the findings place extra emphasis on ventilation, mask type and fit, air filtration, and UV disinfection. For healthcare workers, medical masks and eye protection were designed for droplets and not aerosols and N95 types are best. The authors recommend using carbon dioxide sensors to monitor and optimize ventilation and the use of HEPA and HVAC aerosol filtration.

Other

University of South Australia researchers design an AI-powered facial digital camera system that can remotely monitor the vital signs of a NICU baby with ECG-level accuracy.

Sponsor Updates

• Experity launches the next generation of its Experity EMR/PM software for urgent care.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success video, “Using Healow Check-In at Utah Orthopedic Spine & Injury Center.”
• Everbridge has won the 2021 Service to the Citizen: Champions of Change Award for the deployment of its Return to Work and vaccine distribution software solutions over the last year.
• First Databank publishes a new study, “Characterization of Pharmacogenetic Information in Food and Drug Administration Drug Labeling and the Table of Pharmocogenetic Associations.”
• Bluestream publishes a digital developer checklist titled “Key Features to Look For in Virtual Care APIs.”
• The Healthcare de Jure Podcast features Halo Health CEO Jose Barreau, MD.
• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Symplr in its acquisition of SpinFusion.
• The American Red Cross of Greater Atlanta names LexisNexis the 2021 Corporate Blood Sponsor of the Year.

Blog Posts

• Delivering on the Promise of Health Equity in Inequitable Times (GetWellNetwork)
• The Clinical Collaboration Investment – Can You Afford Not To? (Halo Health)
• Accelerate Charge Capture Improvement with Health Catalyst VitalIntegrity (Health Catalyst)
• Taming the data tsunami: 5 clinical terminology tactics for success (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• COVID-19 Testing Support (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• In the Age of Chronic Conditions, Patient Education is Crucial (Healthwise)
• This ESPN-Televised Basketball Tournament Used Vaccine Verification to Keep Players and Staff Safe (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• What’s in a variant? Clinical documentation, epidemiology, and genomic sequencing (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• New Study Shows How Clinical AI Can Improve End-of-Life Care for Cancer Patients (Jvion)
• Which apps are best for patients and providers to share medical data? Digital health formularies may help them decide (Lyniate)
• Improve Care by Improving Clinic and Hospital Communication While Preventing Revenue Leakage (Medhost)
• Through the pandemic and beyond, more hospitals are choosing MaaS (Meditech)
• 6 Tips on Implementing a Team Approach to Patient Care (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 8/25/21

Top News

NextGen Healthcare board members Sheldon “Shelly” Razin – who also founded the company — and Lance Rosenzweig nominate their own slate of four new director candidates, blaming “Chairman Jeffrey Margolis and his allies” for impeding shareholder value by “effectively assuming control of the Board.”

Razin stepped down from his president and CEO position in 2000 in a power struggle with activist former shareholder Ahmed Hussein and retired as board chair in 2015 after 41 years. Both Razin and Hussein have been involved in other company lawsuits and proxy fights. Razin owns nearly 10 million NXGN shares worth $150 million.

Margolis assumed the board chair role in November 2015. Share price has increased 8% in that time versus the Nasdaq’s 191% gain.

NextGen President and CEO Rusty Frantz left the company by mutual agreement in June 2021. A search for his replacement is underway.

Reader Comments

From Changemaker; “Re: HIMSS. Why didn’t they share financials at the business meeting? How did they fund Accelerate, from money kept from exhibitors in 2020? Where is the 990 form that was released in July? Members should question Hal Wolf about how is leading, from a lack of transparency to a lack of diverse leadership. All Friends of Hal at the top.” Your comment reminded me to ask HIMSS for its 990 form, which they graciously sent quickly for my summarization. It covers through June 2020, so a lot of interesting information won’t surface until the next filing, which might not be soon since HIMSS is changing its fiscal year to end December 31 instead of June 30. HIMSS pays its executives extraordinarily well (Hal: $1.4 million) and six of nine of its executives are white males.

From EpicCustomer: “Re: UGM. Judy as the tooth fairy. Her outfits get more bizarre every year.” I like that she lets her wacky flag fly instead of being an empty suit who can’t say “good morning” unless reading from a teleprompter for fear of spooking shareholders with spontaneity. Customers understand Epic’s culture and have bought into it (literally).

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Senior connected care vendor ConnectAmerica, whose brands include Lifeline following its acquisition from Philips last month, will acquire 100Plus, which offers remote monitoring technology for seniors. Terms were not disclosed, but 100Plus had raised $40 million in funding. ConnectAmerica’s CEO is former Siemens Healthcare and Nuance executive Janet Dillione, while the founder and CEO of 100Plus is Ryan Howard, formerly chairman and CEO of Practice Fusion.

Acute care telehealth and teleICU service provider Equum Medical raises $20 million in growth equity.

AllStripes, which offers real-world and patient data to support rare disease research, raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

People

Greg Ingino, MBA (Vertafore) joins WebPT as CTO.

Dina hires Maryann Lauletta, MD (Inspira Health Network) as chief medical officer, Bob Maluso, RPh, MBA (Woundtech) as chief growth officer, and Ross Lipenta (Health Catalyst) as VP of platform architecture.

Dina promotions include Brett Poirier, MBA as VP of operations, Jay Riggins as VP of engineering, and Travis Woyner, MBA as VP of product.

Todd Johnson (Avia)  joins SomaLogic as EVP of business development and strategy.

Fertility EHR vendor EIVF hires Nimesh Shah, MPA (Ingenious Med) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

WebMD adds Symplr’s provider search and scheduling to its online health information.

Adventist Health Bakersfield (CA) goes live on IPro Healthcare’s ambulatory order management system.

Government and Politics

Former VA CIO Roger Baker says in a FCW opinion piece that VA should not take risks in trying to hurry its Cerner replacement of the homegrown Vista. He notes:

• Cerner should replace Vista only when its use is associated with improved care quality metrics.
• The VA needs to consider that Vista investment has been frozen several times since 2000 as the VA attempted to replace it, but it will remain in use for at least seven more years, meaning that the last facility to go live on Cerner will have been running Vista without any enhancements for 10 years.
• Cerner is missing about one-third of Vista’s capabilities, including registries, support for government-specific reimbursement and billing requirements, and medical equipment supply and maintenance schedules. Those functions will need to be supported even beyond the 10-year Cerner timeframe.
• Vista is the only backup plan for veteran care if the Cerner project fails, which is concerning as schedules are slipping and given the government’s poor track record of big modernization projects.
• VA and its contractors are losing the expertise needed to maintain and upgrade Vista.

COVID-19

New COVID-19 cases as a seven-day average are trending down slightly, as are deaths. The growth in overall number of COVID-19 hospital inpatients is rising, but a bit less sharply. Unfortunately, all are flattening at high levels. Florida and Georgia hospitals report that more than 25% of their inpatient beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients

Brown University public health school dean Ashish Jha, MD, MPH says that four factors are important in bringing kids back to full-time school: (1) all eligible faculty, staff and students should be vaccinated; (2) testing should be offered weekly to anyone who asks and rapid antigen tests should be offered to those with possible symptoms in a “test and stay” program; (3) masks should be required universally indoors, and (4) ventilation upgrades should be considered. He says distancing isn’t as important and masks alone are only modestly helpful.

FDA issues full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for people 16 and older, triggering some companies to require their employees to be vaccinated now that the product is no longer approved for emergency use only.

A Kaiser Permanente study of its EHR records finds that while the Pfizer vaccine’s efficacy at preventing COVID-19 infection with the delta variant drops off to 53% after four months, its protection against hospitalization remains at around 93%. This suggests that while prevention wanes, the delta variant is not escaping vaccine protection.

A new CDC study finds that unvaccinated people are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and five times more likely to become infected.

Anthony Fauci, MD says that full approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine could increase vaccination rates, which would make it possible to “start to get some good control in the spring of 2022,” signaling his expectation of another bleak COVID-19 winter.

Israel, whose high vaccination rates nearly eliminated new COVID-19 cases and allowed all restrictions to be lifted, is back to near-record new cases, heavy deaths, and hospitals that can’t take new COVID-19 patients. Possible explanations include travelers returning from foreign vacations when restrictive measures were eased, rise in the delta variant, and vaccine efficacy drop-off. The country will aggressively roll out booster doses. Israel has 80% of those over 12 vaccinated versus 60% in the US.

The mayor of Lake Ozark, MO asks his Facebook followers to pray that he is successful in smuggling the livestock de-wormer ivermectin into a hospital for treating a friend who is admitted with COVID-19.

Other

A Tennessee woman and her son sue the University of Tennessee Medical Center and two of its contractors, claiming that leaky sewer pipes overhead in the ICU burst, showering her and her son – who was an ICU patient on a ventilator – with hundreds of gallons of wastewater in a “downpour of human waste.”

Sponsor Updates

• CoverMyMeds employees volunteer during the company’s month-long CoverMyCommunity effort.
• Ascom Director of Product Management Jeff McCormick shares his advice on facilitating relationships with health IT leaders.
• Azara Healthcare publishes a new case study, “Lower Lights Christian Health Center Streamlines Population Health and Care Management with Azara Healthcare.”
• Experian Health publishes a new white paper, “State of Patient Access 2.0: The Pandemic is changing everything from scheduling to collections.”
• CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast, “A Conversation with Craig Richardville, CHCIO, SVP, and Chief Information and Digital Officer, SCL Health.
• In a new report, KLAS rates Clearwater a top-performing security and privacy consulting firm.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of The Informonster Podcast, “Lab Data Interoperability.”
• Divurgent VP of Technology Emily Carlson appears on the first Women Making Innovation Happen in Technology! Podcast.
• Engage publishes a new case study, “From Chaos to Control: How Exeter Hospital Addressed Their Disaster Recovery Challenges.”

Blog Posts

• Yes, Virginia, the government does investigate telemedicine (AdvancedMD)
• Achieving success in skilled nursing after COVID-19 (CarePort)
• Uncovering breakthrough COVID-19 insights using real-world data (Cerner)
• Effective Network Segmentation Strategies to Fend Off Cyberattacks (Clearwater)
• Maternal Oxygen Supplementation: What is Best Practice? (OBIX Perinatal Data System, developed by Clinical Computer Systems)
• Riding for a Cure: Diameter Health’s Pan-Mass Challenge Team (Diameter Health)
• What the Data Shows About the COVID-19 Delta Variant (Dimensional Insight)
• In a World of Apps, Healow Delivers What Patients Most Want (EClinicalWorks)
• The State of Patient Access 2.0: 4 opportunities to strengthen the digital experience (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

HIMSS Financial Highlights

This information is from the 2019 Form 990 of HIMSS, which covers the tax year ending June 30, 2020, as compared to last year’s filing for 2018. HIMSS has changed its fiscal year-end to December 31, effective 12/31/20. My analysis of the 2018 form is here.

Income and Expense

Total revenue: $28.7 million (down 74%)
Total expenses: $82.6 million (down 9%)
Revenue less expenses: –$53.9 million (versus a $21.2 million surplus)
Net assets: -$24.4 million (versus $33.3 million)

Program Service Revenue

Conferences: $1.9 million (down 96%)
Corporate sponsorships: $1.6 million (down 88%)
Membership: $12.1 million (down 6%)
Advertising and media: $10.4 million (up 4%)
Analytics and maturity models: $1.9 million (down 37%)

Revenue from Related Organizations

HIMSS Media: $10.9 million
HIMSS Analytics: $1.9 million
Personal Connected Health Alliance: $1.2 million
HIMSS Europe: $1.3 million

HIMSS also reported taxable partnerships through its Healthbox consulting firm. 

Major Expenses

Conferences: $11.9 million
IT: $7.5 million
Occupancy: $2.4 million
Travel: $3.0 million

Highest Compensated Employees

Harold Wolf, III, President and CEO: $1,381,794
Carla Smith, EVP: $671,788 (through February 2019): $1,295,912
Bruce Steinberg, managing director, international: $667,400
Stephen Wretling, chief technology and innovation officer: $662,149
Mitch Icenhower, chief relationship officer: $542,307
Blain Newton, EVP, HIMSS Analytics (through October 2019): $503,663
Ilene Moore, SVP, general counsel, and government relations: $497,851
John Whelan, EVP, HIMSS Media (through October 2019): $453,275

Total salaries and wages: $35.7 million for 225 employees, plus $5.2 million in pension plans and other employee benefits. HIMSS had 133 employees who received more than $100,000 of reportable compensation.

Monday Morning Update 8/23/21

Top News

Business Insider reports that Google Health will shut down after three years and will reassign its 570 employees across Google.

The group’s most noteworthy remaining employee was Chief Health Officer Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc, who will be reassigned to report to Google’s chief legal officer. Google Health VP David Feinberg, MD, MBA was announced as Cerner’s new president and CEO on Thursday.

This is the second time Google has created and then quickly killed off a Google Health organization, the first being in 2011 when its personal health record failed to attract user interest.

Google says its health work will continue within individual teams.

Reader Comments

From Go Knowles: “Re: David Feinberg. How would you grade Cerner’s CEO choice?” C at best, but even that is a better grade than I would assign to Cerner’s board. He has no experience as a for-profit or publicly traded company CEO; his medical background in psychiatry is not all that relevant to the vast majority of physicians or technologists; he acknowledged upon his hiring by Google that the company’s healthcare efforts had fizzled but he nevertheless left them shortly afterward with even less healthcare accomplishment; and he stated then that his goal was to use now-dissolved Google Health’s scale to help billions of people but then left to run a company without anywhere near that kind of influence. I don’t understand why Cerner’s board keeps hiring people without big-company CEO experience, fails to groom internal candidates in its succession plan, and can’t decide whether it wants to be a software vendor or would rather chase a new dream of selling patient data to drug companies. A career spent mostly running non-profit health systems is not the usual background found in publicly traded companies with 28,000 employees and a $25 billion market value. He is already guaranteed making a fortune and will make even more if the company’s shares perform well or if the company is acquired. I don’t know if Google Health dissolved because he was leaving or if he was lucky to find a gold-plated life raft at the perfect time.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Few respondents said that HIMSS21 improved their perception of HIMSS, but at least “no change” outdrew “negatively.” One of the negatives was that people who paid registration fees for HIMSS20 but were concerned about attending HIMSS21 in person were not given the option to hold their credit until HIMSS22, forcing them into the digital version where they don’t gain access to the in-person session recordings.

New poll to your right or here: What was your reaction to Cerner’s hiring of Google Health’s David Feinberg as president and CEO? Tell us more by clicking the poll’s “Comments” link.

HIMSS21 Survey Results

I won’t over-analyze the responses since I received only around 50 of them, but here are some high points:

In-Person HIMSS21, Paid Attendees

• Respondents gave it a B-minus grade.
• All but one said their perceived COVID-19 risk was the same or lower than expected.
• They liked the increased seating space, the higher-quality conversations that were possible since people weren’t rushed, and catching up with friends.
• They didn’t like having the event spread over multiple venues, the quality of the CIO Summit compared to the previous CHIME event, and the empty spaces in the exhibit hall.
• Interesting topics or vendors were few, but one respondent liked the nursing innovation “Shark Tank” event.
• Twice as many attendees say they are more likely to attend HIMSS22 now than those who say they are less likely.
• Exhibitor staff graded the conference lower, but enjoyed more-engaged participants. Negatives include convening a conference in a venue that allows indoor smoking, the lack of exhibitor value, lack of mask-wearing enforcement, the lack of qualified prospects, and using the Caesars building when the Sands complex had ample space. One questioned the diversity of presenters, especially among the HIMSS staff – anyone care to comment since I didn’t attend any presenter events?

Virtual HIMSS21 Attendees

• Respondents gave it a D grade.
• Comments: the conference was bland, the Accelerate app was poor but HIMSS was pitching it endlessly, not all sessions were available virtually, the forced banter and enthusiasm of the TV-style anchors with zero healthcare knowledge was annoying (this was a common theme), and company officials including those of HIMSS engaged in pontification of platitudes.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner SEC filings outline the compensation package that its board is giving incoming President and CEO David Feinberg, MD, MBA, which adds up to nearly $35 million in his first 15 months:

• $900,000 base salary.
• Target cash bonus of $1.35 million.
• $13.5 million in restricted shares for 2022.
• $3.375 million in shares for Q4.
• A one-time cash bonus of $375K.
• A new hire award of $15 million in restricted shares to offset his equity loss with Google.
• Use of Cerner’s jet.
• Generous severance terms, such as change of control — two years salary, bonus, health insurance, and equity vesting.

In addition, outgoing CEO Brent Shafer gets his existing salary, bonus, and $2.5 million restricted shares for helping out during the one-year transition.

Sales

• University of Colorado Medicine implements the RCxRules Revenue Cycle Engine at its 100 locations with 3,000 providers.

Government and Politics

In India, an executive of Apollo Hospital Group says that it has logged 10 million subscribers to its online health service after the government’s implementation of a national patient ID and a digital voucher system for patient payments. The company expects online pharmacy and telemedicine sales to increase significantly because of the digital healthcare strategy that was developed by Apollo and the government 10 years ago.

COVID-19

FDA will likely issue full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Monday. Approval could help support company-required vaccination and possibly sway some unvaccinated people into getting the shot.

Orlando’s mayor urges residents to stop watering their lawns and washing their cars to preserve supplies of liquid oxygen, which is used by the city’s utility provider to purify drinking water water, because it is desperately needed for COVID-19 hospital inpatients. The city faces a boil water advisory within a week if residents don’t comply.

Alabama reports a negative supply of ICU beds, Louisiana says that 28% of new COVID-19 cases involve children, and six of the biggest hospitals in Kansas are at 100% ICU capacity as unvaccinated COVID-19 patients fill beds.

Alabama’s UAB Medicine says that a record 39 unvaccinated pregnant women have been admitted to its ICU this month, nearly all of them undergoing forced early delivery due to COVID-19 damage. Two pregnant women died and nine lost their babies as doctors were forced to perform C-sections in the ICU on women who were on a ventilator or ECMO. None of the pregnant ICU patients are vaccinated.

Mississippi’s poison control center is seeing an increase in calls and at least one hospitalization related to ivermectin exposure. The state is asking people to stop buying the veterinary worm medicine from feed stores to self-treat COVID-19.

Abbott Laboratory ordered workers in its Maine factory to destroy existing inventories of its BinaxNOW rapid COVID-19 test in June and July, then laid off employees, cancelled supplier contracts, and closed the only other plant that makes the tests and laid off its 2,000 employees, all because sales were down. Abbott, which didn’t foresee the increased demand that is driven by the delta variant, now says it can’t provide enough tests. Abbott issued a statement saying that it did not destroy any finished product and that demand dropped because CDC advised people to avoid testing unless they had symptoms.

Other

Weird News Andy (WNA) is proud to announce the winners of the inaugural AHA! (Acronyms in Healthcare Awards) competition. His impartiality allows him to unashamedly choose himself as the winner, for which he says he’ll take himself out for a post-work ice cream cone.

• Third place goes to Brian Too for HIM.
• Second pace goes to RobertLS for CCHIT.
• First place goes to WNA for HAPI.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx names Kristen Mignon (Orbita) VP of account management.
• DirectTrust names PatientPing VP Jitin Asnaani an Interoperability Hero as part of its inaugural awards program.
• Vocera CMO Bridget Duffy, MD will present at the Ending Physician Burnout Global Summit August 24.
• Well Health achieves four ISO certifications for ISMS and PIMS.

Blog Posts

• ICYMI: Diversify Your Service Lines or Bust (Netsmart)
• How to Use Technology to Increase Patients Payments and Revenue (PatientBond)
• Key Takeaways from HIMSS 2021 Global Conference (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Why the Patient Experience Matters to Your Revenue Cycle (PMD)
• Built for Longevity, Our Customer Success Tops What You’ll Find Anywhere Else (Protenus)
• The Art of the Small Pull Request (Redox)
• How Teleneurology Provides Expertise for Epilepsy, MS, Movement Disorders, and Dementia Patients (SOC Telemed)
• Realize Revenue Earlier by Offering Patients More Flexible Payment Options (Sphere)
• Do Your Data Security and Compliance Strategies Consider the Remote Worker? (Spirion)
• The real-world impact of clinical communication and collaboration (Spok)
• Virtual contact centers: How they operate and why they are the future (Talkdesk)
• 11 Ways to Rethink Your Patient Engagement Strategy (Twistle)
• How front-end automation supports a more efficient + precise revenue cycle (Waystar)
• Fight CMS’ Proposed 2022 Payment Cuts (WebPT)
• Modern Trends in Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management (Vyne Medical)

Contacts

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

News 8/20/21

Top News

Cerner hires David Feinberg, MD, MBA as president and CEO, effective October 1, 2021.

He has been VP of Google Health since January 2019. Before that, he was president and CEO of Geisinger from 2015 to 2019.

Cerner also announces that President Donald Trigg will leave the company.

Cerner’s board has separated the roles of chair and CEO with the hire. William Zollars will become independent board chair on October 1, while Feinberg will become a board member.

Reader Comments

From Inanimate Object: “Re: HIMSS. What does it mean that they said only three attendees tested positive? There was no contact tracing, random post-event testing, and no mass email asking people to let them know if they had symptoms or tested positive.” A HIMSS broadcast email says that three HIMSS21 participants have tested positive, one during the conference and two afterward. It was not a self-congratulatory email, so kudos for that, but perhaps naive in thinking that anyone would bother to notify HIMSS upon becoming symptomatic and/or testing positive. Some have observed that HIMSS, as a health technology cheerleader, should have encouraged use of a contact tracing app. I would add that some post-conference voluntary surveillance would be nice in considering upcoming in-person conferences, including HIMSS22, to determine how effective the HIMSS21 policies were in avoiding spread since it was one of the first big in-person healthcare gatherings since the spring of 2020. Of course for HIMSS, three is a good number that could only be spoiled by further review.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Clearwater. Clearwater is the leading provider of cybersecurity, risk management, and HIPAA compliance software, consulting, and managed services for the healthcare industry. Its solutions enable organizations to avoid preventable breaches, protect patients and their data, meet regulatory requirements, and optimize cybersecurity investments. More than 400 healthcare organizations, including 70 of the nation’s largest health systems and a large universe of physician groups and digital health companies, trust Clearwater to meet their cybersecurity and compliance needs. For health IT and digital health companies, the company offers the ClearAdvantage managed services program that transforms the burden of cybersecurity and HIPAA compliance from a liability into a competitive advantage. Led and executed by expert healthcare privacy and security professionals leveraging our award-winning SaaS-based software platform IRM Pro, the company provides organizations with the benefits of an integrated and efficiently executed, best-in-class cybersecurity and HIPAA compliance program at 25% to 50% of the cost of traditional approaches.ClearAdvantage was designed not only to protect your organization and its data and meet HIPAA compliance requirements, but also to do so in a way that meets three important business objectives – better, easier, and less expensive. Thanks to Clearwater for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a Clearwater explainer video I found on YouTube.

I’ll wrap up my “HIMSS21 Attendee Feedback” survey soon, so spend a couple of minutes answering 10 questions and you’ll be part of the summary that will appear here soon.

This is from the self-laudatory “About” section of the LinkedIn profile of a guy I ran across. I can’t decide if the misspelling is more attention-grabbing than the the no-subject, third-party writing that brags about his generic attributes (“motivates and influences others to achieve.”)

Listening: drummer Aric Improta, recommended by Alex Scarlat, MD as “the best drummer still alive.” I’m not a big fan of drum solos since they often involve a lot of frenzied but musically pointless thrashing, but this guy is amazing. He plays for the wildly energetic Fever 333 as well as Night Verses. This reminds me of the Who’s Pete Townshend complaining that his live playing was limited to being an efficient rhythm guitarist because Keith Moon was drumming all over the place instead of keeping time and John Entwistle played “every harmonic in the sky” by treating his bass guitar as a lead instrument, making the deceased former members “f***ing difficult to play with.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare analytics platform vendor Inovalon will be acquired by an equity consortium at a valuation of $7.3 billion, a premium of 24% over the average share price through July 26 when media speculation surfaced the rumor. Founder and CEO Keith Dunleavy, MD will remain a shareholder, board member, and CEO after the take-private transaction. The transaction is expected to close in late 2021 or early 2022.

Healthcare connectivity platform vendor Commure will acquire mobile provider technology developer PatientKeeper from HCA Healthcare, which will make an investment in Commure. Commure will migrate PatientKeeper’s platform to its cloud infrastructure and will license it to continued customer HCA, which will participate in its further development. Commure is a portfolio company of General Catalyst. Commure founder and executive chairman is billionaire investor Hemant Taneja, a managing partner of General Catalyst who was the lead investor in Livongo when it was sold to Teladoc for $18.5 billion last October.

Verily acquires Raleigh, NC-based SignalPath, which offers a clinical trials management system. Co-founder and CEO Brad Hirsch, MD, MBA is an oncologist who formerly worked as a Duke informatics director and senior medical director of Flatiron Health. Verily president of clinical studies platform Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD – who until recently was FDA’s principle deputy commissioner of food and drugs and acting CIO – also is an oncologist who held leadership roles at Duke and Flatiron.

Workforce management systems vendor QGenda acquires CredentialGenie, which offers a provider credentialing system.

Apple is reportedly scaling back its HealthHabit app that allows its employees to track fitness goals, talk to health coaches, and manage hypertension, with the 50 Apple Health employees who are assigned to the project facing reassignment or layoff. A Wall Street Journal review from a few weeks ago found that the app’s employee users weren’t engaged and didn’t trust the health data from Apple’s clinics that was used to develop the product.

Sales

• Sentara Healthcare will contribute de-identified patient data to England-based Sensyne Health for AI life sciences research. Sentara will become a partner and shareholder in Sensyne Health, joining 11 NHS trusts, St. Luke’s University Health Network, and University of Colorado Health.

People

Hospital operational management software vendor Hospital IQ hires Nate Kelly, MBA (Cerner) as chief commercial officer and promotes Jason Harber to COO and chief strategy officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Harvard Medical School and Israel’s Clalit Research Institute establish a joint precision medicine effort, with the US arm being led by Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, chair of HMS’s Department of Biomedical Informatics.

Medical scales vendor Seca will deploy user authentication from Imprivata.

Healthcare Triangle announces a ready-to-deploy healthcare block chain network called Blockedge, which can operate on any public cloud.

Ellkay releases LKAggregate, a data aggregation solution, to Epic App Orchard. It sends data to Epic Healthy Planet from disparate EHRs.

Government and Politics

WEDI asks HHS to issue expedited guidance on how providers can submit a good faith estimate of their charges to health plans under the No Surprises Act. WEDI also asks for clarification on the compliance date, which transactions will be used to exchange advanced determination requests and responses, and how HHS will handle cases where multiple providers are involved.

Indiana’s health department notifies 750,000 residents that their COVID-19 contact tracing information was exposed in a security company’s “unauthorized access,” which the company says actually means that the state was storing the data unsecured on the Internet and took it offline when the company gave it a heads up.

COVID-19

CDC announces creation of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which will analyze and communicate data for public health decision-making to mitigate threats such as social and economic disruption. Experts have recently said that CDC is not equipped to provide the type of real-time data analysis that is needed to to make quick decisions in a fast-changing pandemic, so this is a significant change for CDC.

Florida’s COVID-19 hospitalization continues to climb far above previous pandemic peaks, as deaths also surpass previous highs and rolling seven-day test positivity is at 37%.

Seventy-three Mississippi hospitals ask the state for 1,450 healthcare workers to offset staff shortages, saying they could open another 1,000 beds if they had enough people. Mississippi has issued an order that allows EMTs to perform some in-hospital services. The state has the highest number of hospitalizations since the pandemic began and Neshoba County has the highest per-capita case count in the country at 263 per 100,000, which officials says is because the recent county fair had thousands of mostly mask-free people packed into events, some of them political, while the county has just 22% of its residents fully vaccinated. Mississippi hospitals had six ICU beds available Wednesday morning with a 46-patient waitlist.

The Texas Education Agency tells school districts that they don’t need to perform contact tracing or broadly notify parents when a student comes down with COVID-19. TEA says data shows that students don’t spread COVID-19 to other students at a significant level, although the public health data that was used to make that assessment predated emergence of the delta variant.  Schools are allowed to conduct rapid tests of staff and can also test students if their parents have provided written permission.

A survey of US nurses finds that 75% trust COVID-19 vaccines as safe and effective, but many have questions about duration of protection, whether boosters are needed, and long-term effects. While 88% say they are or will be vaccinated, the biggest questions among those who won’t involve long-term vaccine effects, lack of safety information, and mistrust about their development and approval process. Not many unvaccinated nurses say that FDA approval would change their mind.

Samsung and the Commons Project Foundation add SMART Health Cards that display COVID-19 vaccination status to Samsung Pay.

Washington state hospitals are reaching near maximum capacity, partly because many patients have no family members to care for them at discharge and understaffed nursing homes won’t accept transfers.

Other

AI expert Alex Scarlat, MD ingeniously applies an AI model to a Medicare claims database that he ran across that shows outlier claims or beneficiaries that suggest fraud. This is pretty brilliant – our “pay and chase” model results in the occasional high-profile arrest for something that should have been caught and stopped almost immediately, like a general practitioner who is mass producing prescriptions for expensive compounded scar cream or upcoding all visits to the most complex.

I’ve seen no photos from HIMSS21 sessions, so here’s one from LinkedIn user Les Jordan, chief product and strategy officer for MobileSmith Health. I would enjoy this open space since my biggest reason for not attending HIMSS educational sessions is getting trapped between seemingly miles of knees in a presentation that screams “dud” five minutes in. I’m guessing this photo isn’t representative of education sessions in general, but since I didn’t attend any, feel free to describe your experience. It will be interesting to see attendance numbers from the HLTH conference in Boston in October, especially since CHIME has shifted its HIMSS conference participation to the new ViVE conference with HLTH March 6-9 in Miami Beach, a week before HIMSS22 in Orlando. It’s a terrible time to be in the conference business.

UPDATE: HLTH and CHIME just opened their call for ViVE presenters, saying that the March conference will gather 5,000 attendees, 450 sponsors, and 300 speakers in Miami Beach. Some of the sponsors and supporters listed so far include Allscripts, Athenahealth, CereCore, Cerner, Clearsense, Divurgent, Ellkay, Fortified Health Security, Healthcare Triangle, Impact Advisors, Imprivata, InterSystems, KLAS, Lumeon, Meditech, Nordic, Optimum Healthcare IT, Pivot Point Consulting, Quil, and The HCI Group.

Sponsor Updates

• Vizient will offer its hospital members the remote patient monitoring and virtual care platform of VitalTech.
• KLAS Research’s First Look Report reveals that Redox’s EHR integration drives fast outcomes for its digital health customers.
• Lumeon wins two Bronze Stevie Awards in the 2021 International Business Awards.

Blog Posts

• 5 Key Components of a Digital Front Door Healthcare Experience Strategy (Avtex)
• PatientBond Named to Inc. 5000 for Third Year in a Row (PatientBond)
• MedAware Partners with athenahealth’s Marketplace Program to Provide Clinicians with an Effective Medication Safety Monitoring System (MedAware)
• ReMedi Health Solutions Ranks No. 165 on the 2021 Inc. 5000 List (ReMedi Health Solutions)
• Lone Workers vs. Remote Workers: Knowing the Different and Keeping Both Safe (Everbridge)
• Data Breach Lawsuits on the Rise: Is Your Healthcare Organization Prepared? (Fortified Health Security)
• Recognizing a Compassionate Advocate for Patients (GetWellNetwork)
• New CMS Rules Put Hospitals on Notice: Vigilance on Hyperglycemia and Hypoglycemia are Critical to Patient Care (Glytec)
• Data, Interoperability, and the Impact of COVID-19 (Halo Health)
• Hospital Price Transparency: Healthcare Consumers Have a Right to Know, Don’t They? (InterSystems)
• HIMSS conference conversations: Why did you join IMO? (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• HIMSS Day 2 and Day 3 Recaps (Lyniate)
• Tackling the Training and Education Challenges in Rural Healthcare (Medhost)
• 5 reasons to listen to Meditech podcasts (Meditech)
• How to Attract and Retain Talent in Your PT Practice (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 8/18/21

Top News

Streamline Health Solutions, developer of pre-bill coding audit technology, acquires RCM software and consulting firm Avelead for $20 million.

Avelead President and CEO Jawad Shaikh will remain in those roles, reporting to his Streamline counterpart Tee Green, co-founder and former head of Greenway

Reader Comments

From Borlander: “Re: HIMSS21. A vendor rep I was supposed to meet with after HIMSS just tested positive for COVID. Who could have predicted that?” I was relieved that my antigen test was negative while simultaneously wondering if other attendees are getting less-cheery news.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIMSS tells me that total HIMSS21 in-person attendance was 19,000, a lot more than it seemed on the ground.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

ClosedLoop.ai raises $34 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total raised to $45 million. The startup, which has developed AI-powered predictive data modeling software, won the CMS AI Health Outcomes Challenge earlier this year.

Care coordination and social services referral company Unite Us acquires analytics vendor Carrot Health.

The Washington Post describes what can happen when non-profit hospitals “experiment as venture capitalists” via technology investment, describing the $12 million spent by Cone Health (NC) to successfully develop diabetes management app Wellsmith. The health system shut the startup company down because its product wasn’t competitive and its success at keeping people healthy would have jeopardized the health system’s predominantly fee-for-service revenue. Former Wellsmith CEO Jeanne Teshler lists problems with having a health system as its key investor:

• Cone was not willing to be a customer of Wellsmith because only a minority of its patients were covered by value-based care such as Medicare Advantage and ACOs and thus Cone could not bill insurers for the service.
• Patients had to purchase home devices that weren’t covered by insurance.
• Wellsmith released a software update that was a “dismal failure.”
• Cone was considering an ultimately failed merger and its financial commitment to Wellsmith was uncertain.
• Health systems that have venture funds won’t buy products that are funded by other health systems.

Sales

• UnityPoint Health (IA) will implement Premier’s PINC AI technology, supply chain services, and service line analytics, and will join its GPO.
• Ellis Medicine (NY) offers patients access to virtual mental healthcare using technology from AptiHealth.
• ChristianaCare (DE) joins Premier’s supply chain service network.
• In the UAE, Medcare Hospitals & Medical Centres will implement InterSystems TrakCare as a Service in its four hospitals and 16 medical centers. Its first hospital is already live in Sharjah.

People

Cerner hires Lisa Collins, MBA (Accenture) as SVP of global services and Nithya Narasimhan (ADP) as SVP of client relationships in the East region.

L. Hayley Burgess, PharmD, MBA (HCA Healthcare) joins clinical surveillance company VigiLanz as chief clinical officer.

Robert Millette, MBA (Lee Health) joins Integrated Care Solutions as VP of delivery innovation.

Cantata Health Solutions names Scott Anderson, MBA (Netsmart) SVP and GM of managed services and Adam Feldman (Qualifacts) SVP of sales.

Symplr hires Kristin Russel, MBA, MPA as chief marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Qardio launches QardioDirect, a remote patient monitoring and telemedicine service for patients with chronic conditions.

Ciitizen announces GA of its Cures Gateway, software designed to help HIEs comply with medical records requests initiated by patients.

Children’s National Hospital (DC) earns URAC’s first pediatric hospital telehealth accreditation.

UnitedHealth’s Optum subsidiary revamps its Optum Store to add direct-to-consumer services such as virtual care and prescriptions for people without insurance, including offerings that will compete with investor-funded storefronts such as Ro and Hims.

Government and Politics

CMS has sent warning letters to 165 hospitals that haven’t posted their negotiated prices, although it has not issued fines. A patient advocacy group’s study found that 94% of hospitals haven’t complied and are theoretically liable for a fine of $300 per day, although CMS has suggested that the penalty isn’t enough and wants to increase it to $10 per bed per day for larger hospitals.

COVID-19

CDC numbers suggest that the predicted plateau in new COVID-19 cases has likely occurred and cases are beginning to trend down, although hospitalizations and deaths lag by weeks.

Texas orders five refrigerated mortuary trailers that will be staged from San Antonio. The state has 12,000 COVID-19 patients in hospitals which also contain the most pediatric COVID-19 patients of any state at 239.

A public health study in Canada finds that while teens are more likely than babies and toddlers to carry coronavirus into their homes, it’s the younger children who are more likely to spread it to other household members, probably because those children require more hands-on attention and cannot be isolated when they exhibit symptoms.

Hillsborough County, FL reports that 5,600 students and 300 employees were in isolation or quarantine as of Monday morning after just four days of school.

Other

Memorial Health System works to recover from a ransomware attack early Sunday morning that caused it to shut down its IT systems, divert emergency patients, and cancel surgeries and radiology exams at its facilities in Ohio and West Virginia.

Johns Hopkins Medicine clinicians and IT staffers develop a Video Visit Technical Risk Score in Epic to determine which patients might be in need of technical support ahead of their virtual care appointments. The score, automatically calculated using EHR data, can be displayed as part of a user’s schedule view.

Weird News Andy challenges readers to come up with the most inappropriate healthcare acronyms and will judge submissions to select a winner. He kicks it off with HAPI (hospital-acquired pressure injury).

Sponsor Updates

• Elsevier adds new features to its ClinicalKey medical resource search engine, including a new user interface, improved search functionality, and significant point-of-care content.
• AdvancedMD publishes the 2021 edition of its “MACRAnyms” e-book.
• The Empowered Patient Podcast features Capsule’s head of clinical informatics, John Zaleski.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “Supporting digital innovation in children’s healthcare.”
• OptimizeRx partners with Demandbase to expand its direct-to-physician, account-based digital touchpoints for life sciences.
• CHIME’s latest podcast features CHIME board member, boot camp faculty member, and healthcare leader George “Buddy” Hickman.
• Dina will exhibit at the Rise West Medical Advantage Senior Leadership Conference August 30-September 2 in Colorado Springs.
• EClinicalWorks releases a series of podcasts focused on “How Health Centers Nationwide are Improving Access to Care.”
• Ellkay will exhibit at Epic UGM August 23-25 in Verona, WI.

Blog Posts

• A Day in the Future of Healthcare (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise)
• Top Three Takeaways from the 2022 Quality Payment Program Proposed Rule (Azara Healthcare)
• What the data tells us: the pandemic’s impact on acute and post-acute care (CarePort)
• CIOs: Is Now the Time to Implement Meditech Expanse? (CereCore)
• Healthcare’s Blind Spot in 2021 (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Value-based care strategies for financial resiliency (Cerner)
• HIMSS21: A snapshot of themes and ideas from the live event in Las Vegas (ConnectiveRx)
• Using hello2healow for Patient Outreach in Florida (EClinicalWorks)
• Crack the Code: Simplify Your CPT and E/M coding processes with Computed Assisted Professional Coding Software (EZDI)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/16/21

Top News

CMS will require hospitals to attest that they have completed an annual self-assessment of their compliance with the SAFER Guides for EHR safety. The requirement starts with the EHR reporting period in CY 2022.

The nine categories of the Guides are:

1. High-priority practices
2. Organizational responsibilities
3. Contingency planning
4. System configuration
5. System interfaces
6. Patient identification
7. Computerized provider order entry with decision support
8. Test results reporting and follow-up
9. Clinician communication

The SAFER Guides were developed by Dean Sittig, PhD; Joan Ash, PhD, MLS, MS, MBA; and Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH with the support of ONC. They first published the SAFER Guides in early 2014.

Reader Comments

From Recapper Rick: “Re: HIMSS21. Hot topics from the exhibit hall?” That’s always subjective, but I’ll try (and encourage others to chime in), remembering that low exhibitor count means underrepresentation of some topics:

• Hot: telehealth, remote patient monitoring, cybersecurity, AI, interoperability, health equity, population health management, patient payments, digital front door, cloud, hospital data for life sciences.
• Not: EHRs, big data, blockchain, wearables.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Take these results with a grain of salt since some non-providers missed the “healthcare providers” part of the poll and responded about their non-provider workplace. That’s perfectly fine – basically across the industry, it’s a fairly even split of requiring vaccination proof.

New poll to your right or here: How did HIMSS21 change your perception of HIMSS?

I checked out some of the HIMSS21 videos on the HIMSS Accelerate platform. They are posted as unlisted YouTube videos and stream embedded from there, although the Alex Rodriguez keynote doesn’t work since it has been blocked by Warner Music Group. I don’t know if A-Rod has anything to do with WMG, so maybe it has something to do with background music or something.

I still haven’t seen a HIMSS21 attendee count, although they said that 18,000 people had registered for both the in-person and online versions. Since HIMSS didn’t provide a count of onsite, paid attendees, I’ll throw out my guess of 8,000 given the expanse of empty space in the exhibit hall and hallways. Let me know if you have better information.

One final HIMSS21 to-do item – complete my quick 10-question survey about your experience with either the in-person or virtual version. I’ll summarize the responses shortly. Thanks.

My vaccinated, COVID-infected relative is feeling a good bit better although with brain fog, but she learned from emails from others in her camping trip group that at least 60 of them have been infected, which makes it a superspreader event. The other relative who was infected last week from an unknown source now has three of four family members testing positive and symptomatic, for which they initiated a telehealth visit (filled out an online form, paid $90, got a telephone call back two days later) with the controversial America’s Frontline Doctors, who prescribed a Z-Pack and hydroxychloroquine.

HIMSS21 returnees, consider following Dr. Jayne’s suggestion to isolate until the fourth day after you left the conference, then take a COVID-19 test on that day for the all-clear. Walmart sells the BinaxNow self-test at $20 for two, and given present circumstances, it’s unlikely that the second one will expire unused.

I set a reminder to see if anyone had analyzed HIMSS conference tweet counts as a proxy for general conference interest and participation. Ottawa-based medical writer Pat Rich did.

I’m disappointed that nobody Photoshopped the “Chris Christie on the closed beach” meme onto his HIMSS21 keynote stage photo.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Ideawake. The Milwaukee-based company enables employers to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of their workforce. Its industry-leading idea management software makes it easy to capture, evaluate, and implement targeted ideas from frontline employees. Support a culture of innovation by using its one-stop platform for facilitating innovation challenges, shark tanks, hackathons, and improvement symposiums from initial sourcing of ideas to measuring ROI. Customers such as Advocate Aurora, UnityPoint, OSF Healthcare, and Sanford Health use Ideawake to cost-effectively discover more solutions, prioritize the best ones faster, and transform more of them into impact. Engage hundreds to tens of thousands of employees to solve your biggest problems and break down entrenched silos and geographic barriers while fostering a global, company-wide culture of innovation. Thanks to Ideawake for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s an Ideawake intro video.

Reader Tom Foley, chief growth officer of GenieMD, emailed to say that the company was busy during HIMSS21, still going strong with demos and meetings at 4:00 Thursday as the exhibit hall closed. I was intrigued and asked why his company did so well when others didn’t seem as thrilled. I appreciate his ideas:

• GenieMD offers an integrated telehealth and remote patient monitoring solution, which is a growth area since providers are finding out that their EHRs aren’t robust in those areas and video-only platforms aren’t a long-term solution.
• The majority of booth visitors were senior decision makers.
• The company expected reduced conference attendance, so decided just four weeks out to upgrade from a Caesars Forum kiosk to a 10×10 space in the main hall.
• They bought a full-page ad in the conference magazine.
• They issued four press releases the week before and during the conference and posted those on LinkedIn and Twitter.
• GenieMD has chosen an 20×20 booth for HIMSS22, expecting to have more information to share then.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Acute care telemedicine vendor SOC Telemed reports Q2 results: revenue up 84%, EPS –$0.16 versus –$0.30. Shares dropped 34% on Friday following the announcement, valuing the company at $414 million. TLMD shares are down 69% since early November 2020, when the company went public via a SPAC merger.

Customer experience software vendor Talkdesk completes a Series D funding round that values the company at $10 billion.

Clinical workflow solutions provider Medstreaming and its acquired M2S clinical data registries company rename the combined entity to Fivos Health. Industry long-timer Jay Colfer is CEO.

Labcorp acquires Ovia Health, which offers health plans, employers, and individuals services that include women’s health coaching and apps for fertility, pregnancy, and baby development tracking. The company whose annual revenue is $20 million, previously received an investment from Labcorp’s venture fund.

Sales

• Oklahoma Heart Hospital chooses Health Catalyst’s Data Operating System and DOS Marts.
• Stratum Med will offer its practices CareSignal’s Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring.

People

Jeannell Thomas (UnitedHealth Group) joins Protenus as VP of implementations and customer solutions.

Industry long-timer Brian Gildea (Spok) joins NThrive as VP of new client acquisition.

Divurgent hires Scott Freeman, MHA (Leidos) as VP of client service.

Announcements and Implementations

Intelligent Medical Objects launches IMO Core CSmart app, which allows Cerner users to more easily capture ICD-10 specificity and secondary codes, improve capture of HCCs, and organize problem lists in clinical categories.

Imprivata rolls out a new digital identity maturity assessment tool.

Everbridge announces new versions of its CareConverge and HipaaBridge secure clinical collaboration solutions.

Adventist Health joins Cerner Learning Health Network.

Government and Politics

UnitedHealthcare will pay $15.7 million to settle federal and state charges that it overcharged or denied coverage for patients with mental health and substance abuse issues using a software algorithm to trigger extra reviews.

COVID-19

The federal government’s HHS Protect system shows that hospitals in Florida and Georgia are using more than 20% of their inpatient beds for COVID-19 patients.

State officials in Mississippi warn that its hospital system is facing imminent failure and ask for federal government help with more than 1,500 COVID-19 patients hospitalized, 400 in the ICU, and University of Mississippi Medical Center turning a floor of its parking garage into a field hospital. Oregon is sending National Guard members to hospitals that are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.

COVID-19 test positivity rate exceeded 50% in Oklahoma and Mississippi last week. Their percentage of fully vaccinated residents is 41.7% and 35.9%, respectively.

Even more concerning is the percentage of ICU beds that are housing COVID-19 patients.

NIH Director Francis Collins said on a Sunday news program that he expects the daily case count to exceed 200,000 within two weeks – it’s at 140,000 now — because 90 million people still aren’t vaccinated, concluding that “we’re in a world of hurt.”

Eric Topol, MD says in an op-ed piece that CDC is making a mistake by ending its monitoring of post-vaccination COVID-19 infections that don’t involve hospitalization or death. He says we are “flying blind” since we don’t know how many breakthrough infections are occurring, the threshold cycle of positive PCR tests would provide an understanding of viral load, and we can’t perform genetic sequencing to see if the virus is continuing to mutate. Data collection would also help public health officials identify who is at risk for breakthrough infections, analyze vaccine effectiveness, and figure out the types of patients who need booster shots.

In another call for increased CDC data analysis, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says it should gather data on children who are hospitalized with COVID-19 to determine whether the big ramp-up in the South is the “top of a huge iceberg of dire infection” or a sign that the virus has become more pathogenic in children.

Politico’s “Inside America’s COVID-Reporting Breakdown” says that state surveillance systems aren’t capable of giving public health officials real-time data to determine where outbreaks are occurring. Labs are short on staff to process tests quickly, many results are reported manually, and the systems that are used by state health departments are not interoperable with each other. Newly opened labs that weren’t prepared to report results electronically forced health department volunteers to pull results off fax machines and re-enter them into spreadsheets. Data de-duplication to make sure each result was entered only once was hampered by misspelled names.

CDC issues a recommendation that people whose immune systems are compromised get a booster dose of vaccine. Those conditions are listed in the slide above from CDC’s vaccine advisory committee. CDC is also now recommending that pregnant and breastfeeding women receive the vaccine.

The Atlantic science writer Ed Yong writes a new version of his influence March 2020 piece titled “How the Pandemic will End.” He makes these points in the newly published “How the Pandemic Now Ends”:

• The goal is once again to buy time to keep hospitals and schools open and to get more people vaccinated.
• Unvaccinated people are often clustered geographically and that allows the variant to spread. Vaccinated people can transmit the delta variant to an unknown degree.
• Societies cannot use vaccines as their only defense, and unvaccinated pockets can still shut down schools, overwhelm hospitals, and create more changes for worse variants to emerge. Available tools include better ventilation, rapid tests, and social support such as paid sick leave, eviction moratoriums, and free isolation sites.
• Universal vaccination mandates probably won’t fly, but vaccination should be required for employees of hospitals, long-term care facilities, and prisons, where vulnerable people don’t have a choice about being exposed. They may also be likely for university students, government employees, and the military.
• The delta variant has made it unlikely that COVID-19 can be eliminated. The pandemic will eventually turn into an endemic like the common cold.

Sponsor Updates

• Avtex publishes a Digital Front Door Toolkit.
• OptimizeRx SVP & Principal of Agency Channels Angelo Campano joins The Curtis & Coulter Podcast to discuss “The ‘Tele’ Movement & Evolution of Point-of-Care.”
• Nordic publishes a new whitepaper, “The new healthcare ecosystem: Preparing for decentralized care.”
• TCS Healthcare Technologies will use Healthwise Care Management Solution in its care management platform.
• Protenus co-founder and CEO Nick Culbertson joins the ReCon Labs Podcast.
• University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands signs a 10-year contract for digital pathology with Sectra.
• Spirion appoints Billy VanCannon head of product management.
• Well Health salutes five customers who made the US News Best Hospitals 2021-22 Honor Roll.
• Frost & Sullivan honors Lumeon with the 2021 North American Customer Value Leadership Award.
• Nordic Consulting partners with Fortified Health Security to offer its customers cybersecurity solutions.
• Surescripts publishes a new data brief, “COVID-19 Heightens the Need to Improve Interoperability, Provide Price Transparency & Relieve Provider Burnout.”
• Halo Health releases a new infographic, “Clinical Collaboration Platforms and EHRs – An Essential Partnership.”
• Healthcare Growth Partners has advised Radix Health in its sale to Relatient.
• Infor announces significant success and momentum for its cloud-based interoperability solutions.
• Meditech releases a new infographic, “How NMC Health leverages data with BCA dashboards.”

Blog Posts

• What is a Digital Front Door & Why Does Every Healthcare Organization Need One? (Avtex)
• Yoda and Luke: A shining example of mentorship (Nuance)
• ‘When’ not ‘if:’ Resilience is an essential component of healthcare cybersecurity (Nordic)
• 4 Tips to Help Specialty Pharmacies Focus on Patient-Centered Care (PatientBond)
• Can Healthcare Withstand Hacking? (Medsphere)
• 5 Key Questions to Ask So You Can Meet Your Patients’ Digital Health Expectations (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Trilateral API for Data Sharing Between Microservice Bounded Contexts (Redox)
• How Hospital IT Can Consolidate Vendors (Capsule)
• The Need for Evolved Patient Engagement Post COVID-19 (SymphonyRM)
• How human-in-the-loop technology empowers agents to operationalize AI (Talkdesk)
• EpicShare Connects Epic Clients (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Improving the healthcare experience via lessons learned in the pandemic (Tegria)
• COVID-19 Continues to Bring New and Unique Challenges for Healthcare Providers (Twistle)
• Revenue cycle 101: denial and appeal management (Waystar)
• Reboard to Reboot: How Rehab Therapy Clinic Leaders Can Drive Success in the New Normal (WebPT)
• Three Ways Technology-fueled Remote Workforce Can Help Build a More Sustainable Healthcare (Vyne Medical)
• 3 Focus Areas for Improving Business Resilience (Everbridge)
• Improved Clinical Collaboration Platforms Mean an End to the Hospital Pager (Halo Health)
• Effective Leadership in Today’s Rapidly Evolving Virtual World (HCTec)
• Is your organization protecting sensitive patient information? (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• 3 Steps to “Tidy Up” Your Health Content (Healthwise)
• Healthcare’s current state: What’s right? What’s wrong? (Infor)
• The Difference Between Online Scheduling and Online Scheduling That Works (Lumeon)
• HIMSS21 Day 1 Recap from Lyniate (Lyniate)
• Community Hospital Tips from the Medhost Team: Collecting from the Uninsured (Medhost)
• 8 Powerful Team Building and Motivational Strategies for Physical Therapists (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

From HIMSS 8/12/21

The conference was pretty dead today. Even Epic’s booth had basically nobody in it except a few employees. Some booths were already cleared out as practicality outweighed the HIMSS policy that requires booth tear-down only after the hall closes at 4:00. Everybody’s mind was on getting safely home.

Supplies of conference totes are ample if anyone needs one or 25.

Siemens Healthineers had a huge booth that was almost empty today, although I seem to recall that it had some decent traffic earlier in the week.

Thanks to Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG) for a hot doughnut that I accessorized with lava-hot pistachio sauce and tutti-frutti. NOTE: a reader found that the doughnuts were provided by InterSystems, which I should have suspected since I remember its Wall of Doughnuts at HIMSS19.

I liked this tee shirt from Vivify Health, which offers remote patient monitoring tools.

I stood in the hot, bright sun for a few minutes waiting for this rotating video display to hit the CoverMyMeds banner again after I saw it flash by. You can see the splashing of the fountain between the Wynn and Palazzo at the lower right.

I asked HIMSS for in-person attendance at HIMSS21, which they are supposed to be sending me, hopefully with an explanation of how the count was derived (registered or actually showed up to get a badge, exhibitors versus non-exhibitors, etc.) I only care about in-person, paid  attendance excluding exhibitor passes.

A-Rod has probably faced more DEA agents than the number of audience members he’ll see in his 1:15 p.m. Friday session called “Mindset of a Champion,” with that mindset apparently being that it’s OK to cheat by using performance-enhancing drugs and then lie about it as long as the personal payoff is significant. If anyone actually sticks around to hear what he has to say, please take a photo of the audience since anything other than a tiny turnout would be shocking given the time slot. I understand that he’s a celebrity entrepreneur and all, which seems easier when you start out with a few hundred million dollars, but I don’t see the healthcare connection. I’m sure HIMSS paid dearly to get Patrick Dempsey, Rainn Wilson, and A-Rod to add star power along with minimal relevance.

Someone who wasn’t at HIMSS21 tweeted that they had heard that a bunch of exhibitor staff were unmasked. I saw nothing of the sort — with maybe one or two exceptions that may well have been short term, everybody I saw was responsible. That wasn’t necessarily true outside the HIMSS velvet ropes, although even there compliance was pretty good. I got invaded a second time by someone unmasked crashing into the  hotel elevator as the door was closing (perhaps the disdain for others extends from not mask-wearing to refusing to politely wait for the next elevator), to the annoyance of the other passengers who were all masked up but trapped.

I pressed even harder against the back wall of the elevator since I had just heard from a relative who got COVID-19 during a group camping trip this week, one of at least 10 people there who have tested positive after spending time in a nearby bar. All of them had been vaccinated. The symptoms are apparently miserable, and while the odds of hospitalization or death are low for those who are vaccinated and thus have a “mild” case, the chance of experiencing long COVID symptoms is maybe 20%. Another set of relatives, a family of four who had decided that vaccination was unnecessary, just messaged that two of them have been diagnosed with COVID-19 (one of them is a child) and a third is now showing symptoms. At this point, you’re either going to get vaccinated or you’re going to get COVID, and regrets from the former are minimal while those of the latter are sometimes expressed in writing while dying on a ventilator.

A couple of folks asked about the after-hours party risk from attending HIMSS. I did not attend anything outside the conference areas and ate only at uncrowded restaurants whose tables were widely spaced, but I walked by the bar-restaurants in the Palazzo and Venetian (like Sugarcane and Chica) and they were wall-to-wall crammed with HIMSS attendees who were displaying the behavior that makes bars a hotbed of viral spread — leaned-in and loud conversations (lots of vocal cord spray), no masks, no spacing, and extended periods of close contact. That wouldn’t be too bad if it were just conference-goers of known vaccination status, but at least one of the packed venues was not closed to the public at the time. HIMSS can’t control conditions outside its boundaries, but I assume that some of those folks are going back to work at hospitals — many of them overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients — and I hope they will either get tested or isolate before going anywhere near patients or caregivers.

Something to consider for HIMSS22 or other conferences that limit attendance to vaccinated people. Require exhibitors sign a form that they won’t have after-hours events unless they are held in venues that are closed off to the general public (in Orlando, unlike Las Vegas, I believe that HIMSS controls the entire hotels). Arrange some kind of dining options that don’t require exiting the vaccination bubble — discounted room service, outside food delivery with conference rooms for group eating to scratch the socializing itch, or ballroom-type food service accessible only by badge — and include bar service. Leave the bubble if you want, but you aren’t required to given provided options. Feeding attendees in the exhibit hall like an extended happy hour would be a win-win with exhibitors. Basically to keep live conferences from becoming superspreader events and thus risking cancellation, you have to control more than just the meeting rooms and give your attendees easy ways to avoid people who are unmasked and possibly unvaccinated. And perhaps give them an easy way to take a COVID test before  they return to work. News item: RSNA just announced that it will require vaccination and masks.

A couple of companies ask Lorre to stop by to say hello and she wants me to give a shout-out specifically to Nordic, who welcomed her like a queen when she dropped by wearing her now-vintage HIStalk tee shirt. Nordic has been a longtime supporter and several of its executives rushed over to chat and make her feel welcome.

I got an overview of Telemedicine 911, which allow telemedicine providers whose patient experiences an emergency during their session (like a heart attack or stroke) to get in direct connection with the patient’s 911 emergency services dispatcher and send details or patient background. The nurse practitioner who was working in the booth said she once had a patient say they intended to harm themselves during a telehealth visit, she asked the patient if it was OK if she sent some help, and she got in direct contact with the 911 team in the patient’s local area so they could respond.

The folks at PORTL got in touch after I mentioned that their hologram technology was interesting, but nobody would explain it in the booth of its partner Avaya. They offered a private showing that I declined, but here’s a video of how University of Central Florida’s medical school is using it to allow students to diagnose 3D patients. The technology has been used for the Emmys red carpet and for musical performances.

I’ll be back to normal posting this weekend, where I’ll ask for feedback about both versions of HIMSS21. HIMSS22 is just seven months away.

From HIMSS 8/11/21

It’s Day 2 of HIMSS21. It was even quieter and less crowded than yesterday. I bet some vendor folks have already headed home and I’m sure luggage will be carefully hidden within booth confines tomorrow for afternoon dashes to the airport.

Meanwhile, here’s what is happening with COVID-19 in Florida, the home (maybe) of HIMSS22 seven months from now. UPDATE: a reader correctly noted that CDC initially posted inflated case count data for Monday in failing to adjust for Florida’s Monday through Friday only reporting, but this hospitalization data was correct since it was a snapshot. Florida’s hospitals have more than 15,000 COVID-19 patients in beds, representing 28% of their overall capacity, and 3,100 COVID-19 patients are in their ICUs. Florida also has the highest rate of children hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US, with 8.1 per 100,000 residents versus the national average of 2.2.

I heard several thought leaders claim today that their pet topic (virtual visits, cybersecurity, whatever) “has to change,” which always leads me to question why they think it “has” to change versus their desire that it change for reasons reasons self-serving or otherwise. These are the only healthcare change factors that I’m aware of, in order of least to most potency:

• It’s the right thing to do.
• Patients would like to see things done differently.
• Patients will seek competitive alternatives if the change isn’t made.
• Changing will increase profit.
• The change is required by law.

Change Healthcare has one of the busier booths in the hall.

Avaya’s hologram thing was cool, but the reps were too busy looking at each other and their phones to tell me its purpose even after I stood around expectantly for a couple of minutes with nobody else around.

Here’s a footwear combo that I think Dr. Jayne will like.

Smart marketing — you have probably seen and remember this guy in the “please scan me” suit adorned with QR codes. It’s for data company MDACA. It reminds me of the old days when provocatively clad pairs of ladies would roam the hall wearing “follow me” shirts hoping that eyes-bulging attendees (mostly male, presumably) would follow them like lemmings. Companies would justifiably be called out instantly if they tried that kind of stunt today. This is a more clever and subtle variation and the guy was very nice when I chatted with him.

I like this “tiny house within a booth” concept for meeting space, TeleTracking in this case. Leg room is apparently challenging, at least beyond the first leg.

This vendor got a huge booth, but then again, they are also putting on the conference. HIMSS has a lot of space to tout their own offerings in their exhibit hall.

All but one of the booth folks I talked to said that while traffic is way down, they are having good conversations. The other exhibitor — who is CEO of a smallish company — said the lack of people was awful, he felt ripped off by HIMSS, and anyone saying otherwise was just trying to put a positive spin on a bad situation. I’ll survey readers after it’s all over for their thoughts and to see what conclusions they take into HIMSS22.

The good news for smaller exhibitors is that they aren’t lost in the shuffle of massive booths, armies of big-company employees, and highly publicized announcements. This version of the HIMSS conference felt more like an even playing field where even small-booth vendors could earn some attention.

It occurred to me that the HIMSS Bookstore isn’t here, so maybe it’s no longer a thing. I can’t say I ever bought any books there and some of its tomes were self-stroking vanity works, but I sometimes stopped in.

I had a brief chat with Sandeep Jain, MD, founder and CEO of ListenMD. The company offers a distraction-free doctor messaging app that allows both message sender and recipient to set deliverability preferences. It also allows the medical practice to set recipients and times for receiving messages from patients.

I acted on a company tweet to check out Nationwide Medical Licensing, which offers a turnkey service to license physicians and other professionals in multiple states, which is keeping them busy due to telemedicine. They also work for companies that need to get their doctors licensed in additional states, taking care of the forms and documentation and returning a simple file containing everything that is required. They also do physician credentialing. I am fascinated that CEO Alexis McGuire worked for the Brevard Zoo (UPDATE: fixed, I originally wrote Broward) in Florida until late 2018 while also working her way up from receptionist at NML.

J.J. Richa, CEO of Quality Care Metrics, gave me a quick booth overview of its Deep Empathy patient questionnaire solution. Patients answer psychology-based questions (not so obvious as “do you have suicidal thoughts”) that assess pain levels and psychological issues and report back to the clinician, including telehealth providers.

I chatted briefly with the folks from Clearstep, which offers automated a healthcare screening and routing triaging type solution that is used by CVS Health, BayCare, and HCA Healthcare. It also delivers population health insights on the back end and has been used for COVID-19 screening.

I took a look at Hyro‘s conversational solutions Adaptive Communications Platform, which it says is more effective than intent-based chatbots and IVR systems. It has impressive nameplate customers such as Weill Cornell (where it was developed), SCL Health, and Novant Health.

From Cornwall: “Re: HIMSS coverage I have been in the industry for about 10 years and have read HIStalk, on the days it is published, all of that time. HIStalk is by far the best HIT source that I read. I appreciate the amount of effort that you put into this as well as how steadfast you are about your anonymity given the quality of the work. Have a great HIMSS.” Thank you. I went anonymous after almost getting fired from my hospital job for being too honest about our vendors even though I was scrupulous about not using any information I obtained from my IT leadership job. In addition, I have no interested in turning into a narcissistic talking head or trading tepid fame for for cash, so being anonymous means there’s no temptation for journalistic impropriety. I even attend HIMSS anonymously, changing up names, using a low-level job titles like “intern” and claiming made-up employers so that I get no special treatment, which sometimes means I get ignored completely.

Accenture, which sells cybersecurity services, is hit by a ransomware attack. The hackers say they will publish company data publicly if they don’t pay up.

1upHealth offers to test the patient access APIs of health plans at no charge to see if they meets CMS requirements to connect with third-party developers.

Verizon’s BlueJeans Telehealth virtual health app will allow users of IOS devices to share their IOS-only Apple Health record with telehealth providers after the upcoming IOS 15 upgrade is installed. I’ve never heard of BlueJeans Telehealth and I loathe IOS-only patient apps (talk about running roughshod over health equity), but good for them I guess. UPDATE: Verizon reached out to say the Apple Health integration is actually already available with IOS 14 and that they recognize the limitations of an IOS-only solution and are working on more integration. Verizon was scheduled to exhibit at HIMSS21 with more information but decided to opt out. I appreciate that update. BlueJeans, I learned by Googling, was a year-ago collaboration tool acquisition by Verizon for $500 million and the telehealth offering was announced four months ago.

From HIMSS 8/10/21

HIMSS21 looked quite a bit different than usual – far fewer exhibitors and attendees, big expanses of open space in the exhibit hall that featured widened hallways and the unused booth space of cancelled exhibitors, lack of blockbuster announcements and newly issued federal rules, and fewer C-level level provider and vendor executives who stayed home and let their underlings attend. I’m going to take the contrarian point of view and say that I might have enjoyed it more than usual, for these reasons:

• It was calm and quiet everywhere, but not necessarily in a “this place is dead” kind of way.
• Seating was ample, boosted by the no-show vendors whose spaces were turned into makeshift lounges with plenty of tables and chairs.
• Food lines were minimal and places to sit and eat overpriced convention center food were plentiful.
• It felt more like a scientific conference in the absence of jugglers, costumed and/or scantily clad booth reps, non-clinicians wearing white coats and scrubs, and over-the-top giveaways and food service in the hall.
• The many booth folks I asked said the conversations they had were of high quality and made it worth exhibiting since product and service demand was pent up from the long pandemic holding period.
• HIMSS did its usually great job organizing it all, even given the sting of the cancelled HIMSS20, the distraction of the digital track, and the always-present possibility that the in-person HIMSS21 could have been cancelled at the last minute.

I always gripe that the HIMSS conference has grown to be too big, too unfocused, and too much of a celebratory blowout that earns its high attendance only because of FOMO and vendor worries about being one-upped by competitors. For me, HIMSS21 was more to my liking. We’ll see how HIMSS22 lays out, although Florida’s world-leading COVID-19 case count and hospitalizations is raising questions about whether a spring conference is likely to happen. At least HIMSS won’t have to worry about rolled-over registrations from HIMSS21.

I felt perfectly COVID safe in the conference areas, but I worry about what attendees might be bringing home other than booth swag when I saw the hotel bars and restaurants packed 10-deep with unmasked people, mostly attendees, talking closely and loudly. We all know that bars are among the highest areas of COVID spread and some of those venues didn’t appear to be closed to the public. I steered clear and hope those attendees don’t work around patients or at least plan to isolate.

I had forgotten since HIMSS19 just how much young sales guys curse when conversing with each other in private conversations near others.

The cost of Palazzo room service coffee – $20 plus 18% plus $9 (around $33). The line at the hotel’s Starbucks at 6 a.m. – about 50 people, most likely Easterners who crashed early Monday night after gaining three hours and then woke up early seeking a caffeine jumpstart.

I almost welcomed once again seeing the conference phenomenon of people walking slowly down the middle of busy conference hallways while screwing around with their phones, unaware of how many rear-end crashes they are narrowly avoiding.

Is it overly ironic when people at an in-person conference demand that virtual medical visits be paid for because they are efficient and convenient, but watching educational sessions virtually instead of spending patient money to congregate in Las Vegas apparently is not acceptable? Especially when every part of the hall is already jammed with amateur and professional videographers, talking heads, and podcasters who are recording content that few will ever bother to consume?

I cringe every time someone call this city “Vegas.” Three syllables isn’t all that many.

One of few areas in which HIMSS planned poorly was having educational and exhibit sessions in the Caesars Forum (note: the missing apostrophe is correct), which is easily accessed through a 50-yard outdoor walkway bridge from the end of Aisle 22 of the exhibit hall (it is not anywhere near Caesars Palace, either). The problem is that HIMSS scheduled early morning sessions in that building, and that bridge was therefore not accessible until the exhibit hall opened at 9:30 a.m., leaving the shuttle bus or walking as the only alternatives. Otherwise, that brand new facility was super nice, and I enjoyed visiting the exhibit hall and specialty pavilions there even though I entered it every time temporarily blinded by the hot, bright sun.

Some exhibitors were understandably not quite ready when the hall opened at 9:30, as employee were still unpacking boxes and bringing monitors to life.

Seating was plentiful throughout the exhibit hall thanks to reduce vendor count, some from last-minute decisions. I like that those vendors, or perhaps HIMSS itself, paid Freeman a fortune to have their areas populated with benches or tables and chairs.

The much-reviled Hall G exhibit area downstairs, which was like a poorly planned basement rumpus room, has been closed, thankfully, although not before I paid $5,000 several years ago to have a tiny, seldom-visited booth down there. Exhibitors revolted one year against low traffic, forcing HIMSS to install new signage, announce overhead its pleas for people to go down there, and comped lunch for those folks who took in the subterranean spectacle. The area is blocked off from the main hall now and the only HIMSS attendee access was via the downstairs entrance, where you could see its only tenant, the COVID-19 testing center.

The big exhibit hall booth winner was Ellkay, for these reasons: (a) its booth was across the aisle from Epic’s; (b) it drew people like crazy from the moment the hall opened until it closed, outdrawing even its neighbor Epic; and (c) it was a big space that was well designed and staffed by helpful employees. Someone from the company told me Ellkay has grown from 60 employees to 650 over a short period. Their booth was packed every time I walked by, from hall opening at 9:30 on.

Some vendors suffered from poor location. I hope HIMSS offered a big discount for this space.

Canon Medical had a mini-museum of disruptive technology, including this display related to music. The rep told me that Canon invented autofocus.

The Zipnosis folks were sporting cool orange shoes, which they said were Allbirds.

Man & Machine was showing washable medical grade and sealed keyboards and mice. Founder, CEO, and self-proclaimed “The Big Cheese” Clifton Broumand, MSE is apparently quite a character.

I got a quick look at the patient engagement platform of Twistle by Health Catalyst, which had some nice folks working their booth.

I was surprised at the customer logo gallery of virtual care platform vendor EVisit, which includes Texas Health Resources, Trinity Health, and Banner Health. It declares that unlike telehealth technology competitors, “it does not and never will include a competing provider network.”

Bravada Health’s Ayva offers an interesting surgical journey system that offers videos, checklists, and reminders to give patients the best outcome, all without installing an app.

And the winner of Best Customer Name-Dropping is …

This isn’t a brilliant marketing idea but a true story, the rep said. Which makes it a brilliant marketing idea.

Epic’s booth was predictably decorated with big, weird pieces, but I didn’t see Judy or Carl there, probably because UGM is coming up shortly.

Cylera was printing custom tee shirts, of which Lorre got me this one.

NCQA had a great happy hour today, with food that exceeded typical convention center expectations (although by exhibit hall policy it certainly must have come from said convention center).

Raintree Systems founder and CEO Richard Welty died last month at 57, the company announced.

Adobe announces Adobe Experience Cloud for Healthcare. It’s hard to tell what it does from the company’s excessively lofty description, but it sounds like online marketing, audience insights, and digital enrollment.

Automation vendor Olive acquires revenue cycle management vendor Healthcare IP.

A SymphonyRM consumer survey finds that physicians dropped off their communications with patients during the pandemic and that infrequent communication was the top reason patients lost confidence in their doctor during that time. About 20% of respondents say they will look for a new doctor because of how they handled COVID-19. Fewer than half received COVID-19 information from their doctors and only one-third received communication about the vaccine.

Healthcare professional network operator Doximity announces Q1 results: revenue up 100%, adjusted EPS $0.11 versus $0.00, sending shares up in after-hours trading. The company’s market cap is $9.4 billion. Its IPO was in late June.

Salesforce announces new Health Cloud features that include remote patient exception monitoring, intelligent appointment management, and medication management. I wasn’t sure if they really pulled out of HIMSS21, but swinging by their listed booth to check out the new features yielded only a large expanse of bare carpet.

Philips adds Health Suite features – Patient Flow Capacity Suite and Acute Care Telehealth.

Zoom launches a beta release of a no-app mobile browser version of Zoom for Healthcare, available only for patients who use IOS.

I’m looking for interesting stuff to see Wednesday now that I’ve done a superficial surf of the HIMSS21 landscape, so send suggestions my way. Lorre will be in the hall Wednesday and Thursday if any current or prospective sponsors want to chat. She doesn’t really have anything to do since we aren’t exhibiting or doing HIStalkapalooza, thank goodness.

From HIMSS 8/9/21

My trip to Las Vegas was thankfully uneventful, with all plane passengers I saw masked up. Uber pricing was crazy at the Las Vegas airport, showing $45 to get to the Palazzo versus Lyft’s $21. I ended up taking a cab since the rate is fixed at $27, there was no waiting, and I could see the vehicle right in front of me before choosing. I pulled up Uber for other destinations from the hotel and it was always double Lyft’s rate, which reminded me why I always use Lyft in Las Vegas. It’s hot outside, but who goes outside  during a conference that is held in the desert at connected venues?

Pondering: why does HIMSS spend money to buy airport signs? Do Las Vegas visitors really register for the conference on a whim, or do registrants require reassurance that they are in the right city?

Masking within the Venetian area is maybe 75% at best, with lots of pulled-down masks and some folks who walked right by the “masking required” signs with no mask in evidence. Compliance was close to 100% in the HIMSS areas, which offers little comfort since you can’t avoid the casinos, hotel hallways, and restaurants full of the unmasked. Overall, I would say I have felt safe since leaving home, but I frequently wanted to commit mayhem on someone who clearly doesn’t care about being responsible around others or who defiantly ignores clearly posted policy.

HIMSS21 check-in was painless, although signage wasn’t perfect (maybe because of the hotel and convention center not being purely dedicated to the conference) and some of the “ask me” information people didn’t seem to be fully informed when I posed questions. I can’t quite figure out how to get to the Caesar’s building for educational sessions, although it seems to involve passing through the exhibit hall that was closed today to get to a bridge that was also closed today. I’m not sure why prior HIMSS conferences in Las Vegas were all contained within the Sands-Venetian complex and now the much-smaller HIMSS21 requires walks or shuttles to the Wynn and Caesar’s Forum Conference Center (not to be confused with the Caesar’s hotel since they are not adjacent), but that has dampened my already-minimal enthusiasm for attending educational sessions. I’ll probably just stick to the exhibit hall and surrounding areas this week.

No badge holders were provided this time, just a clip-on lanyard that fits onto the paper badge. I’m not too sure about the integrity of these. Names are also not printed in large font, so it will be hard to recognize masked folks. It was weird walking the HIMSS21 hallways and not being able to recognize people since you can’t see their faces. I predict that chance encounters will be greatly reduced.

I snuck into the exhibit hall when a security guard’s attention was diverted. It has the widest aisles and booth spacing that I have ever seen. The exhibitor count has dropped another 20 or so since Friday to 709. Setup was still in progress, so it’s hard to say whether the layout will be thankfully spacious or embarrassingly sparse. Unlike previous conferences, it was quiet instead of risking being run over by heavy equipment that was loading in booth components in a superhighway-like layout.

That was it for my HIMSS21 experience today since the opening keynote and reception didn’t interest me. My room at the Palazzo is excellent and a good deal at $229 and I had great and well-priced happy hour beer (the locally brewed Bonanza, which was outstanding) and oysters on the half shell at its Sugarcane restaurant. I’ll probably spend all of tomorrow in the exhibit hall, leaving my day fully planned except to come up with a dinner idea that hopefully doesn’t involve the mostly overpriced hotel restaurants that are like a food court for rubes who think celebrity chefs are actually in the kitchen cooking. I confess that my favorite Las Vegas restaurants from past conferences are Home Plate, Italian American Club, and the Village Pub at Ellis Island, so my preference is inexpensive, off the beaten track, and devoid of other HIMSS conference badge-wearers. It may be also that exhibitors provide enough snacks to tide me over anyway.

Reader Comments

From Excitable: “Re: HIMSS21. You seem jaded by the conference.” I think everyone who has attended more than a handful of HIMSS conferences would say that they aren’t all that enthused at the prospect of returning or assured of the ROI for showing up. Most of the bubbly folks who tweet out their barely-contained excitement about attending are lower-level employees who don’t have a lot of experience, and for them, I understand, but don’t share, the newbie thrill of travel expense reimbursement, mugging with others for group selfies, and vendor parties. The last thing I want to do at HIMSS is to sacrifice an entire evening just to get free vendor food and drinks or to huddle protectively with other rookies.

Webinars

On-Demand Webinars:

“Key Differences: Value Based Care vs. Fee-For-Service.” Part 1 of a three-part series. Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Bill Winkenwerder, MD, chairman, CitiusTech; Josh Pickus, CEO, Net Health. Dr. Bill Winkenwerder, former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs for the US Department of Defense, shares his unique perspective on the future of value-based care (VBC) systems in the public sector and how VBC differs from fee-for-service models in the private sector. This Part 1 webinar covers which aspects of the fee-for-service health system payment model look the most different compared to fully value-based systems (clinical, back-office, analytics, etc.)

“Current Innovation and Development in Value-Based Care.” Part 2 of a three-part series. Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Bill Winkenwerder, MD, chairman, CitiusTech; Josh Pickus, CEO, Net Health. Dr. Bill Winkenwerder, former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs for the US Department of Defense, shares his unique perspective on the future of value-based care (VBC) systems in the public sector and how VBC differs from fee-for-service models in the private sector. This Part 2 webinar discusses what health systems should know about the transition to value-based care, including macro versus micro shifts.

“Future of Value-Based Care: Predictive Analytics, Technology, Policy.” Part 3 of a three-part series. Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Bill Winkenwerder, MD, chairman, CitiusTech; Josh Pickus, CEO, Net Health. Dr. Bill Winkenwerder, former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs for the US Department of Defense, shares his unique perspective on the future of value-based care (VBC) systems in the public sector and how VBC differs from fee-for-service models in the private sector. This Part 3 webinar discusses the role analytics will play in the shift to value-based care and how financial and clinical ROIs for analytics-oriented products must differ when applied to FFS and VBC models.

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

Sales

• Mount Nittany Health (PA) chooses Health Catalyst’s population health solutions.

People

Luis Saldana, MD, MBA (StarBridge Advisors) joins Zynx Health as VP of clinical strategy.

Announcements and Implementations

First Databank launches FDB CDS Analytics, which supports tracking of the effectiveness of clinical decision support.

Premier brands its benchmarking, analytics, reporting, and clinical technologies under the name PINC AI.

GE Healthcare will offer its imaging applications and Edison Health Services platform on Amazon Web Services.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success video, “Healow Check-In and Healow Pay are Helping Chisholm Trail Pediatrics.”
• CoverMyMeds expands its interoperable prescription decision support technology to clinical staff with MedCheck, its newest in-workflow solution.
• AGS Health has achieved the Leaders and Star Performers category on the Everest Peak Matrix RCM Operations – Services Peak Matrix Assessment 2021.
• Stratum Med will offer CareSignal’s Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring technology to its alliance members.
• OBIX Perinatal Data System, developed by Clinical Computer Systems, will exhibit at the AWHONN Indiana Section Conference August 20 in Fishers.
• Dresner Advisory Services names Dimensional Insight an overall leader in business intelligence in its Industry Excellence Awards.

Blog Posts

• Easy claims management: how a billing consultant keeps it simple (Ability Network)
• Catalysts for Change: Celebrating National Health Center Week 2021 (Azara Healthcare)
• 3 Practical Principles for Managing Data from Different EMRs (CereCore)
• How to Navigate the Relationship Between Telehealth and EHR Documentation (ChartLogic)
• Your Guide to Maximizing Your CPT 99490 Reimbursement – 2021 Edition (ChartSpan)
• Summer Can Mean Orthopedic Trouble and EClinicalWorks Can Help (EClinicalWorks)
• Boost vaccination rates with frictionless self-scheduling (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/9/21

Top News

From the Allscripts earnings call, following Q2 results that beat Wall Street expectations for revenue and earnings:

• The company expects a Microsoft Azure-hosted version of Sunrise to drive new sales due to high availability, cybersecurity, and disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities.
• Quarterly revenue in the core clinical and financial segment was flat, while the Veradigm analytics business delivered double-digit gains that it expects to continue.
• The company booked a $5 million recovery in its Department of Justice settlement over Practice Fusion.
• Allscripts is solving interoperability rule requirements by having a reseller agreement with CarePort, which it recently divested.
• The company will potentially look for bolt-on acquisitions around Veradigm, probably smaller players since those assets are expensive.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents would rather not have contact with a health system employee who has not been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Some comment themes: (a) you shouldn’t be working in healthcare if you don’t believe in science or have judgment too poor to opt in for a lifesaving vaccine; (b) some people are not candidates for vaccination under current guidelines and you can’t blame them for not getting it; (c) the vaccine has not yet earned FDA’s full approval; and (d) it might be OK under urgent circumstances, if employees are required to be tested regularly as an alternative, or if the respondent-patient knows the person hasn’t been vaccinated and can put a mask on. My take – you won’t be able to tell which employees have been vaccinated if health systems don’t require it for all employees, so about all you could to is ask each employee directly (kind of like the “have you washed your hands” patient interrogation effort to reduce healthcare-associated infections), then hope they answer honestly and offer to send someone else in if you object.

New poll to your right or here: Healthcare providers: is your employer mandating COVID-19 vaccination? Use the poll’s comment function to elaborate further on what proof is required, whether a history of infection or antibody test can be substituted, or whether exceptions are allowed.

It’s been nearly two years since Northwell Health and Allscripts announced via press release that they would develop a new cloud-based, voice-enabled, AI-based EHR. How about an update that might also include whether the Avenel EHR, announced by Allscripts in early 2018, will ever see the light of day?

HIMSS21 Updates

From Dateless and Desperate?: “Re: HIMSS21. Attached is the third email I’ve received from HIMSS trying to get me to accept free registration for the digital version of HIMSS21. They must be desperate to get the numbers up. I hope you don’t fly across the country only to find minimally staffed booths with third-tier employees who can’t find their ass with both hands.” Folks who paid $895 for HIMSS20, had their registration involuntarily rolled over to HIMSS21 when it was cancelled, and then decided not to attend HIMSS21 in person probably aren’t thrilled to know that HIMSS is just giving away registrations for the virtual version. HIMSS also charged some unknown number of folks $495 or more for that same, now-free registration.

I also noticed that someone tweeted out the complimentary registration code, so HIMSS21 digital is now like Woodstock, where some suckers bought tickets, but most attendees just crashed the gate.

Some experts say that cloth masks alone aren’t protective enough against the delta variant in indoor gatherings, suggesting instead that people either use N95 masks instead or wear a surgical mask under the cloth one. That made me wonder what kinds of masks will be available from HIMSS and HIMSS21 exhibitors.

Epic’s UGM starts Sunday, August 22. I wonder how many more people might have attended HIMSS21 if it wasn’t so close to UGM?

I’m leaving for Las Vegas Monday morning. I’m not sure if I’ll do anything HIMSS-related on Monday since I find the opening reception to be dull, but I’ll post an update of what I see in general. Dr. Jayne will be covering the virtual conference. Both of us would appreciate hearing your impressions as attendees to avoid that “blind men describing an elephant” HIMSS conference problem. I’ll be as scathing as a Fyre Festival tweeter if I get there and feel duped by small crowds and low energy that I traveled into a COVID hotbed at my own expense to see.

Webinars

On-Demand Webinars:

“Key Differences: Value Based Care vs. Fee-For-Service.” Part 1 of a three-part series. Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Bill Winkenwerder, MD, chairman, CitiusTech; Josh Pickus, CEO, Net Health. Dr. Bill Winkenwerder, former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs for the US Department of Defense, shares his unique perspective on the future of value-based care (VBC) systems in the public sector and how VBC differs from fee-for-service models in the private sector. This Part 1 webinar covers which aspects of the fee-for-service health system payment model look the most different compared to fully value-based systems (clinical, back-office, analytics, etc.)

“Current Innovation and Development in Value-Based Care.” Part 2 of a three-part series. Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Bill Winkenwerder, MD, chairman, CitiusTech; Josh Pickus, CEO, Net Health. Dr. Bill Winkenwerder, former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs for the US Department of Defense, shares his unique perspective on the future of value-based care (VBC) systems in the public sector and how VBC differs from fee-for-service models in the private sector. This Part 2 webinar discusses what health systems should know about the transition to value-based care, including macro versus micro shifts.

“Future of Value-Based Care: Predictive Analytics, Technology, Policy.” Part 3 of a three-part series. Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Bill Winkenwerder, MD, chairman, CitiusTech; Josh Pickus, CEO, Net Health. Dr. Bill Winkenwerder, former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs for the US Department of Defense, shares his unique perspective on the future of value-based care (VBC) systems in the public sector and how VBC differs from fee-for-service models in the private sector. This Part 3 webinar discusses the role analytics will play in the shift to value-based care and how financial and clinical ROIs for analytics-oriented products must differ when applied to FFS and VBC models.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Remote patient monitoring vendor Cadence launches with $41 million in funding and a deal to deliver remote care to 100,000 chronic patients of LifePoint Health. Co-founder and CEO Chris Altchek previously co-founded a publishing company, while co-founder Kareem Zaki co-founded healthcare-related companies Scope Security, Nava, and Cedar.

Nuance announces Q3 results: revenue up 13%, EPS –$0.09 versus $0.06, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings. The company will not host an earnings call due to the expected closing of its acquisition by Microsoft by December 31.

OptimizeRx announces Q2 results: revenue up 55%, adjusted EPS $0.10 versus $0.02, beating analyst expectations for both. Shares are up 294% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 34% gain, valuing the life sciences provider and patient messaging company at $1.2 billion.

Verifiable, which offers a provider credentialing, network enrollment, and onboarding platform that is access via APIs, raises $17 million in a Series A funding round. Founder and CEO Nick Macario previously co-founded a blockchain-powered digital credentials service and a company that developed a remote work platform.

Announcements and Implementations

GoodRx will provide drug discount price information to prescribers using Surescripts Real-Time Prescription Benefit.

Cerner announces a new solution, Cerner Determinants of Health, which includes a dashboard and tools that are integrated with Millennium. Jvion will also integrate its SDOH and behavior health insights with Cerner’s products. 

HL7 posts SDOH Clinical Care for Multiple Domains v1.0.0.

Microsoft renames its Azure API for FHIR to Azure Healthcare APIs. I was interested that the graphic above shows as one of its health data sources as “social influencers of health,” which sounds someone confused SDOH with a Kardashian Instagram, but I learned by Googling that it’s actually a common term.

COVID-19

US COVID-19 deaths have reached 616,000.

Florida’s count of hospital-admitted COVID-19 patients hits a new high. Its seven-day rolling average of new deaths per day has increased from 22 one month ago to 88 now as its overall total breaks through 40,000. Test positivity rate is at 22%. As Eric Topol points out, Florida and Louisiana have the highest per-capita cases of COVID-19 of any state or country in the world except for Botswana. In Texas, Austin’s mayor warns that the situation is “dire” as 180 COVID-19 patients fill most available ICU beds, 102 of them on ventilators, and officials in several other cities deliver the same warning about COVID-19 cases creating staff and bed shortages and prolonged 911 response times. 

This is an insightful tweet that notes yet another lack of actionable COVID-19 data.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota this weekend was expected to draw 700,000 mostly unmasked attendees whose infections will be hard to measure since they will develop symptoms, become hospitalized, or die only after returning home. Sturgis is in Meade County, which has just 37% of its residents fully vaccinated. Chicago’s Lollapalooza festival drew 385,000 attendees last week, but required proof of vaccination or a recent negative test.

A Florida radio personality who referred to COVID-19 as a “scamdemic,” urged followers to not be vaccinated, and railed against mask-wearing dies of COVID-19 at 65. He is among several recent COVID doubters whose deathbed message was to get vaccinated.

Other

Dr. Jayne called out Mount Sinai Health System (NY) for handing out COVID-19 challenge coins to employees on the front line, which were issued with the thanks of President and CEO Kenneth Davis, MD. Understand that Dr. Davis is personally coin-ineligible, however, since he was not actually present on those front lines in those frantic March 2020 days of trash bag-wearing nurses, as he elected to hunker down for weeks in his Florida waterfront mansion. He says his doctor told him to stay in his six-bedroom, eight-bathroom spread because he’s over 70. Decisions, decisions — he chose that $2.6 million home instead of his $2 million Long Island one or his $7 million Aspen digs. He probably doesn’t need a phony coin anyway since Mount Sinai is his own mint — he made more than $12 million in 2017.

Sponsor Updates

• Vocera customers from Baptist Health Hardin and Metro Health – University of Michigan Health will share their respective experiences with Vocera technology during HIMSS presentations next week.
• Wolters Kluwer Health releases Lippincott Skills for Nursing Education, combining evidence-based content with digital learning tools.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new video featuring Prisma, “Our Health Record Information Search Engine in Action.”
• PatientBond attends the 2021 HealthTrust University Conference.
• PatientKeeper co-founder Sally Butta shares “The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing.”
• Protenus CEO and co-founder Nick Culbertson wins EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year 2021 Mid-Atlantic Award Winner.
• The Slice of Healthcare podcast features RxRevu founder and Chief Innovation Officer Carm Huntress.
• Leading children’s hospitals use interactive technology from Sonifi Health to ease pediatric patients’ anxiety.
• SymphonyRM debuts its new Hello Health Podcast, “Where to Start with Health Equity.”

Blog Posts

• 5 Ways to Accelerate your Digital Health Strategy Leveraging the CY 2022 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Proposed Rule (Pivot Point Consulting)
• The Power of Mass Communication: Delivering COVID-19 Updates with OptimizeRx Technology (OptimizeRx)
• Collaborative Approach to Care: North Range Behavioral Health Launches Co-Responder Service (Netsmart)
• Connecting the future of healthcare (Nordic)
• 5 Services to Drive Medicare Patients to Your Medical Clinic (PatientBond)
• A Look Ahead at HIMSS 2021: How Appriss Health and PatientPing are Working Together to Drive Change Through Improved Care Coordination (PatientPing)
• Physician’s Corner: What Post-Acute COVID-19 Looks Like for Physicians – the Good, the Bad, the Interesting (PMD)
• “This Call Is Being Recorded for Quality Assurance:” The Importance of Call Recording for Health Systems (Vyne Medical)
• 5 Questions to Ask Your CISO (Pure Storage)
• Overcoming Common HCC Coding Challenges Part 1: Limited Coder Staffing (RCxRules)
• FIFO Parallel Processing for Healthcare Data Streams (Redox)
• Bunker Model vs. TeleICU: A Comparison (SOC Telemed)
• 5 common HIPAA violations in mobile communications (and how to avoid them) (Spok)
• What it takes to elevate the patient and provider experience (Talkdesk)
• “Yes, we can do this. Yes, it will be hard.” (Tegria)
• Why Using Real-World Data Internally During Clinical Trial Design is a Must for Every Sponsor (TriNetX)
• Why Patient Satisfaction Surveys Matter (Vocera)
• What the Aftercare? How to Use Z Codes in ICD-10? (WebPT)
• Selecting a Comprehensive Virtual Care Platform (VitalTech)

Contacts

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

News 8/6/21

Top News

Healthgrades splits its business, creating a software company that will be called Mercury Healthcare and selling its Healthgrades.com doctor marketplace media business to RV Health, which owns websites such as CNET, Healthline Media, and The Points Guy.

Reader Comments

From Doctor CIO: “Re: HIMSS21. Maybe this is the safest time to visit Las Vegas since the HIMSS is requiring vaccination and masks. Unless you will isolate at home, the HIMSS floor might be the safest places you can see people.” I agree, although the downside is that the conference hotels will be teeming with people of unknown vaccination status outside the HIMSS21 velvet ropes, airports are crowded and still iffy, the multiple HIMSS21 venues require walking among the general public, and always-risky restaurants are mandatory unless you can live on room service. Las Vegas case counts are out of control, so while I will feel comfortable in the HIMSS21 areas  — trying not to think about the possibility that attendees faked their vaccination cards or that my antibody response to the vaccine may not have been robust or long-lasting – the rest of Las Vegas is a Petri dish. While I’ll probably still go even as I constantly reconsider my options, the key issue is whether a stripped-down conference is worth attending given that we’ll be doing it again in six months (or not, depending on viral whims). I think I’m a go unless a bunch of big companies announce their non-participation Friday, which isn’t likely at this point.

From Uh Oh: “Re: HIMSS21. My company pulled out. A former colleague says his company is going, but employees aren’t allowed to leave their rooms all week except to go to the show floor. They will be allowed to eat only in the booth or in a reserved hospitality suite.” I’m fascinated that some companies have said publicly that they are sending only a skeleton crew of junior folks and leaving the executives safely at home.

From Utility Outfielder: “Re: HIMSS21. I keep hearing that more vendors are pulling out. Some that I know have done so still show up on the floor plan. I don’t think the floor plan can be considered accurate.” I don’t know that I would assume that the floor plan is being promptly updated with cancelled exhibitors, if for no other reason than it isn’t in the best interest of HIMSS to fuel a rush for the doors like last year. Still, it seems to mostly align with announced cancellations, although not all cancellations will be announced.

From Scrivener: “Re: health IT media consolidation. HIStalk will eventually be the only independent media outlet left.” TechTarget acquires Xtelligent Healthcare Media, expressing ambition to serve advertising “customers” using “intent data productization” (readers are apparently incidental widgets in this process). I can’t say I’ve ever read any of their 10 sites, but good for them for being acquired.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m just now considering what it will be like to attend an all-masked conference, which is much weirder than just masking up for a grocery store full of strangers. A lot of memorable conference experiences involve random across-the-hall eye contact with someone you know, where you recognize the face, wait for confirmatory matching eyebrow-lifts and smiles, and then launch an unplanned catch-up conversation. We will only be seeing printed names on badges this year, so let’s hope the font is large enough for that same across-the-hall identification.

HIMSS has long said that the digital version of HIMSS21 will be entirely separate in content from the live conference, but it is now waffling by deciding to stream some sessions live using its new Accelerate platform and offer others for next-day playback.

Las Vegas weather: cooling off a bit from Thursday’s high of 112 this weekend to around 106 each day and “plenty of sunshine.”

Early in my interview with Carrie Kozlowski of Upfront Health this week, she casually mentioned, as captured by my recording of the call, “I should preface this, and this may be a first for you, I am presently trapped in an elevator, so they may release me at some point during our call.” Many folks, especially claustrophobes, would skip the call to reschedule once freed, but she soldiered through in what was indeed a first for me. I once did an interview with the CEO of a publicly traded company from a Mexican restaurant due to poor timing on my part, where I joked about the Mariachi music playing in the background, asked my first question just as the food arrived, and then muted the phone so I could crunch chips during their answer. I did another having forgotten about it until the call started, making up questions on the fly with zero preparation and conducting the conversation from the car.

HIMSS21 Exhibitor Updates

Exhibitors that have publicly stated that they won’t attend or that have been removed from the exhibitor list:

• Ambra Health
• Athenahealth
• Clearsense
• First Databank
• Imprivata
• InterSystems (not pulling out, but reducing its show floor presence)
• Medicomp
• Nuance
• Olive
• Premier
• Qliqsoft
• Tegria
• TeraRecon

Exhibitors that readers say aren’t going, but that haven’t confirmed that I’ve seen:

• Accenture
• Amazon Web Services
• Definitive Healthcare
• Philips
• Salesforce

Webinars

On-Demand Webinars:

“Key Differences: Value Based Care vs. Fee-For-Service.” Part 1 of a three-part series. Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Bill Winkenwerder, MD, chairman, CitiusTech; Josh Pickus, CEO, Net Health. Dr. Bill Winkenwerder, former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs for the US Department of Defense, shares his unique perspective on the future of value-based care (VBC) systems in the public sector and how VBC differs from fee-for-service models in the private sector. This Part 1 webinar covers which aspects of the fee-for-service health system payment model look the most different compared to fully value-based systems (clinical, back-office, analytics, etc.)

“Current Innovation and Development in Value-Based Care.” Part 2 of a three-part series. Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Bill Winkenwerder, MD, chairman, CitiusTech; Josh Pickus, CEO, Net Health. Dr. Bill Winkenwerder, former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs for the US Department of Defense, shares his unique perspective on the future of value-based care (VBC) systems in the public sector and how VBC differs from fee-for-service models in the private sector. This Part 2 webinar discusses what health systems should know about the transition to value-based care, including macro versus micro shifts.

“Future of Value-Based Care: Predictive Analytics, Technology, Policy.” Part 3 of a three-part series. Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Bill Winkenwerder, MD, chairman, CitiusTech; Josh Pickus, CEO, Net Health. Dr. Bill Winkenwerder, former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs for the US Department of Defense, shares his unique perspective on the future of value-based care (VBC) systems in the public sector and how VBC differs from fee-for-service models in the private sector. This Part 3 webinar discusses the role analytics will play in the shift to value-based care and how financial and clinical ROIs for analytics-oriented products must differ when applied to FFS and VBC models.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts announces Q2 results: revenue up 1%, EPS $0.15 versus –$0.05.

Clinical decision support vendor EvidenceCare acquires Healthcare Value Analytics, which developed the ValueBar cost transparency tool that lets physicians know the cost impact of their clinical decisions. Both companies are based in Nashville.

Care management software vendor Evolent Health will acquire Vital Decisions, which helps patients with cancer and heart disease and their providers align treatment goals, for up to $130 million.

Healthcare analytics vendor Clarify Health acquires Apervita’s value optimization business.

Change Healthcare announces Q1 results: revenue up 25%, adjusted EPS $0.41 versus $0.25, beating Wall Street revenue expectations but falling short on earnings. Meanwhile, anonymous sources report that the Department of Justice may sue to block the $8 billion cash acquisition of the company by UnitedHealth Group’s OptumInsight, which was announced in January.

JPMorgan recovers from its Haven healthcare cost management failure by investing $50 million in Vera Whole Health, which offers primary care services to employers on a per-patient, per-month basis. Vera has primary care centers in 10 states and also partners with Central Ohio Primary Care. The care model is not unusual for Medicare programs, but hasn’t been tried at scale with employers.

Real Time Medical Systems, which offers a collaboration platform to connect hospitals to post-acute care partners, raises $20 million in a Series C funding round.

People

Pharmacy benefits technology vendor Truveris promotes Nanette Oddo to president and CEO.

Autonomous medical coding technology vendor Nym Health hires Melisa Tucker, MBA (Flatiron Health) as SVP and head of product.

Industry longtimer Merrie Wallace, MSN (FairWarning) joins interpretation platform vendor Boostlingo as chief revenue officer.

Health Data Movers hires Patrick McDermott, MBA (Pivot Point Consulting, a Vaco Company) as business development executive.

Announcements and Implementations

Medicomp launches Quippe Nursing, which allows nurses to quickly complete care documentation and planning using clinical data filtering and links to Clinical Care Classification terminology.

CoverMyMeds announces Med Check, a clinician version of its real-time prescription benefit solution that displays a patient’s previous meds, drug interactions, cash pricing, formulary alternatives, and prior authorization requirements.

Imprivata launches Enterprise Password AutoFill, which allow users to use a proximity badge tap to enter their username and password.

Providence-owned Tegria and Cedar will offer their revenue cycle management services and financial engagement platform, respectively, to each other’s customers. Providence will implement Cedar’s post-visit patient engagement and payment platform. Cedar co-founder and CEO Florian Otto, MD, DDS, PhD was formerly sales VP for ZocDoc and founder of Groupon Brazil.

NTT Data announces a global Health and Wellbeing initiative that focused on closing care gaps in underserved communities and using technology to improve health outcomes.

Change Healthcare announces beta testing of a cloud-native solution for medical imaging in radiology practices. The company will consolidate its cloud-native enterprise imaging solutions under the name Change Healthcare Stratus Imaging.

Government and Politics

The US again ranks last among high-income countries in access to healthcare, equity, and outcomes. It’s also the only one of the 11 countries that does not have universal health insurance. The US finished last in administrative efficiency because of the time patients and providers have to spend filing medical paperwork and arguing with insurance companies.

CMS will use AI to infer a Medicare patient’s race based on their name, ZIP code, and language preference in cases where their race is not available on hospital forms. The de-identified data will be shared with hospitals for reducing inequity, but privacy advocates warn that the algorithm could unintentionally amplify the biases of its developers.

COVID-19

US COVID-19 hospitalizations are trending sharply up and now exceed last year’s peaks in the first two COVID waves, although still falling short of January’s high. Florida has more patients hospitalized with COVID-19 that at any time in the pandemic, with Louisiana and Arkansas not far behind. Meanwhile, Florida hospitals are struggling to obtain oxygen as COVID-19 cases increase and the expiration of the public health emergency limits the supply of truck drivers who are qualified to transport oxygen.

Demand for COVID-19 tests is delaying results reporting and lengthening waiting lines once again. The positivity rate is above 9% versus June’s 2% low.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD notes that CDC’s reporting of breakthrough case hospitalizations and death cover only January through June and thus misses much of what has happened with the delta variant, which he notes reflects CDC’s lack of near-time reporting capability for questions that require analytical methods.

Leana Wen, MD, MSc, MA says in a Washington Post op-ed piece that CDC seemed to be blaming vaccinated people for the need to wear masks again, but unvaccinated people are responsible for most of the spread and risk. She says CDC’s message should have been (a) that vaccinated parents of unvaccinated children need to wear masks indoors in public areas to avoid passing infection to their kids due to the more readily spread delta variant; and (b) the only reason to mandate that everyone wear masks indoors is because unvaccinated people can’t otherwise be trusted to wear them.

New York will extend its Excelsior Pass COVID-19 vaccine verification to create Excelsior Pass Plus, which will interoperate with the SMART Health Cards Framework that was developed by the VCI consortium. The framework has been adopted by several states (including California), Walmart, Apple, Epic, and Cerner. VCI’s steering group includes Mayo Clinic, Mitre Corporation, Microsoft, The Commons Project Foundation, Evernorth, CARIN Alliance, UC San Diego Health, and Apple.

The drummer of the band Offspring is kicked out when he refuses to receive COVID-19 vaccine because of a history of Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Among those arranging his dismissal is molecular biologist Dexter Holland, PhD, who performed research on the molecular dynamics of HIV and who is also the band’s lead singer.

Other

In Thailand, police arrest the director of a state-run hospital in a sting operation that was triggered by a vendor’s complaint that the director was demanding a 35% commission of the company’s $8,500 bid to install a computer system. The accused director admits that he asked for the money and accepted the marked bills, but says he planned to use it for the hospital. He has faced similar complaints in the past.

I enjoy the LinkedIn updates of industry long-timer Steve Hau, who posted photos of new Ukraine-based team members of his Newfire Global Partners. I like seeing health IT workplace pictures.

Sponsor Updates

• 3M Health Information Systems will offer Waystar’s revenue capture solutions to its customers.
• Halo Health publishes a new case study, “Improving HIPAA-Compliant Communication for Accredited Home Care.”
• Twistle publishes a case study from Ashley Clinic (KS), which saw 80% of patients achieve an average BP of 140/90 after completing a 14-day or 28-day cycle of the company’s Controlling Blood Pressure Pathway.
• NTT Data launches a health and wellbeing initiative, and publishes a new white paper, “Improving the Health of Me.”

Blog Posts

• Delivering Digital Exercise Therapy for COVID-19 Patients (GetWellNetwork)
• Leveraging Data to Craft a Best-In-Class Glycemic Management Program (Glytec)
• The COVID-19 Impact on Mental Health & Results of Improved Technology (Halo Health)
• The Prior Authorization Process: Need-to-Know Changes for 2021 (Health Catalyst)
• 4 ways payers are using clinical data to address COVID-19 challenges (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Identity maturity means healthcare security. How does your strategy measure up? Find out now with our new assessment tool. (Imprivata)
• New interoperability solution for Healthcare organization to better leverage and analyze their data (Infor)
• From Transactional to Personal: The Future of Virtual Care (InterSystems)
• Coding for gold: Tokyo 2020 and ICD-10-CM codes (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Getting Smart on SDOH: A Q&A with Dr. John Showalter, Chief Product Officer at Jvion (Jvion)
• Reducing Fragmentation in Digital Care Navigation: A ‘Win-Win-Win’ for Payers, Providers, and People (Kyruus)
• What payers need to know about integrating clinical data (Lyniate)
• How Medhost is migrating electronic health record data to AWS for compliance and gaining valuable insights (Medhost)
• Thinking outside the box with our EHR and Surveillance in the rehab setting (Meditech)
• Tapping Digital Identity to Support the Rise of Retailization and Consumerism in Healthcare (NextGate)

Contacts

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