News 3/2/22

Top News

Amazon announces that Alexa users can access virtual care from Teladoc Health on its Echo devices. The audio-only service, prompted by the command, “Alexa, I want to talk to a doctor,” connects users to a Teladoc call center. Visits may be covered by insurance or will otherwise cost $75, the same cost as initiating a virtual visit directly through Teladoc.

Teladoc’s stock jumped on the news, which caused some to speculate that Amazon might eventually acquire the telehealth company. Teladoc Health CEO Jason Gorevic said last year that he didn’t consider Amazon a threat to Teladoc’s business since Amazon Care’s business was overrated given its limited client base. That base has since expanded beyond the company’s employees in select markets to nationwide services for its employees and other employers.

Teladoc beat Wall Street expectations with its latest quarterly figures, though its share price has dropped 76% in the past 12 months.

Meanwhile, Teladoc warns in its annual report that its October 2020 acquisition of Livongo has created integration challenges that “will continue to be a time-consuming and expensive process” that could disrupt its business. The company suggests that it will take a non-cash goodwill write-down of between $800 million and $4 billion on the Livongo business in Q1. TDOC, whose market cap is $12 billion, paid $14 billion for Livongo 16 months ago.

Reader Comments

From Cannulater: “Re: HIMSS22. Can you provide a link to your exhibitor tips document that I’ve heard about?” I guess it’s that time of year again. Here you go.

From Ali Cart: “Re: paying for play. How much do you charge for doing an interview?” Zero. Companies can buy only two things from me — an annual sponsorship and webinar promotion – both clearly labeled, neither including editorial involvement. Sites that require payment to interview executives, run vendor-cozy propaganda, and promote white papers apparently hope that readers won’t identify that content as thinly disguised ads, but it’s a credibility karma killer for me. I’ve exited several sites and social media groups lately where the organizer tried to monetize it on the sly by having their ego or wallets stroked silently under the table. Sell space if you want, just have the guts to label it as paid content so we know where objectivity is in question.

From Be There or Be Square: “Re: ViVE conference. Why aren’t you attending?” In a nutshell, it’s too close to HIMSS and too hard (and expensive) to attend anonymously. Attendee reports are welcome.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The HIMSS22 web page shows that 74 of the 85 official hotels are sold out of rooms. The exhibitor list includes 945 companies. Sounds pretty bangin’ unless those numbers don’t end up matching the on-the-ground experience.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cloud-based healthcare supply chain software company GHX will fold newly acquired Syft, a vendor of AI-powered inventory control and end-to-end supply chain management software and services, into its value-based care division.

Virtual reality-based healthcare company XRHealth raises $10 million, bringing its total raised to $35 million. CEO Eran Orr, a former Israeli Air Force executive, founded the company in 2016 after experiencing long rehabilitation processes.

Qventus secures $50 million in growth capital from investors that include Thomas H. Lee Partners and Premier, which announced a partnership with the company last month. Qventus, which has raised nearly $100 million, offers AI-powered software to help hospitals automate operations and patient flow.

Healthcare benefits and management platform vendor Nayya raises $55 million in a Series C funding round.

Cigna will provide an additional $450 million to fund its Cigna Ventures venture capital arm, which will be used for investments in analytics, digital health, and care delivery. Cigna says it will focus on repurchasing shares rather than M&A in 2022, but will consider strategic investments and bolt-on acquisitions.

Tenet cancels plans to spin off its Conifer Health Solutions revenue cycle management business due to improved Conifer profit and expectations for increased revenue growth.

Sales

• AZ Sint-Maria Halle in Belgium selects Sectra’s enterprise imaging software.
• The Epsom and St. Helier Hospitals Group will implement Cerner at their four facilities in southwest London.

People

Floyd County Medical Center (IA) hires Cristina Thomas, MBA (The HCI Group) as interim CIO. The hospital is preparing to implement Meditech Expanse in the fall.

Health Gorilla promotes Karla Mills, MS, MBA to COO.

Liza Duncan (Ingenious Med) joins Cloudmed as VP of sales.

David Horrocks, MBA, MPH (CRISP) joins the New York EHealth Collaborative as CEO.

Daniel Chavez, MBA (HealthTech Solutions) joins Santa Cruz Health Information Organization as executive director.

Chuck Suitor, MS retires from MD Anderson Cancer Center after a 26-year IT career, most recently as AVP/CTO.

Swisslog Healthcare, owned by KUKA Group, promotes Cory Kwarta, MBA to CEO of Swisslog Healthcare TransLogic and Hans Schuler, MBA to CEO of Swisslog Healthcare Medication Management. Global CEO Stephan Sonderegger will leave the company.  

Announcements and Implementations

ChartSpan adds remote patient monitoring program enrollment services to its chronic care management offerings.

Hamilton Health Sciences will go live on Epic in June across its 10 facilities in Ontario, replacing Meditech.

Clearwater announces GA of a 405(d) HICP Assessment solution, software, and consulting service that will help providers that have experienced a breach demonstrate that federally-recognized cybersecurity practices have been in place for at least 12 months.

Meditech makes Expanse Ambulatory available to independent and physician-owned practices.

Government and Politics

ONC has received 249 valid information blocking claims submitted through its reporting portal since the regulation took effect on April 5, 2021, with about two-thirds of those issues being reported by patients and most of them involving providers. The most common complaint of both patients and providers was being excessive charges or delays in obtaining patient information, with providers additionally reporting problems getting their EHR vendor to assist with migrating data to a replacement system. ONC will update its status page monthly, although it won’t indicate whether investigations have been opened or concluded.

Sponsor Updates

• Amazon features AdvancedMD in an AWS case study, “AdvancedMD Reduces Time Spent Managing SQL Server Backups by 85% Using Amazon FSx.”
• Actium Health releases a new Hello Healthcare Podcast, “Why Good Brands Go Stale ft. Jared Johnson.”
• Bluestream Health publishes a new case study, “Heritage Valley Health System Needs an Embedded Virtual Care Solution.”
• Current Health publishes a white paper, “Rapid Evaluation of the Virtual Ward at Croydon NHS.”
• Dina will exhibit at the Rise National Conference March 7-9 in Nashville.
• Ellkay will present at the Rise National Conference March 7-9 in Nashville.

Blog Posts

• ECR 2022 – Bringing innovation to you (Agfa HealthCare)
• What I’ve Learned About Leadership as A Woman, A Respiratory Therapist and a Business Executive (Ascom)
• UDS “Season” 2021/2022 is in the Books! (Azara Healthcare)
• Summary of “988 is Coming!” webinar focused on the new mental health crisis number and how states are preparing (Bamboo Health)
• The Real Reason Behind the Growth of Decentralized Clinical Trials? It’s the Patients (Biofourmis)
• Healthcare IT Service Desk: Driving Beyond Customer Satisfaction (CereCore)
• Additional EHR Data Privacy Key for Consumer Data Sharing (ChartLogic)
• The Solution to Remote Patient Monitoring’s Fatal Flaw That All Providers Should Know About (ChartSpan)
• Fax, Phone, and EPA: Why Do Care Teams Balance All Three? (CoverMyMeds)
• UMass Memorial Health: In-Home Hospital Care Focused on Equity (Current Health)
• The Network EHR, Prisma, and Beyond (EClinicalWorks)
• Protecting patient identities as QR codes open up new cybersecurity risks (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 2/28/22

Top News

From the Allscripts earnings call, following Thursday’s announcement of Q4 results that beat analyst expectations for revenue and earnings:

• Allscripts says that investment in its core EHRs has driven cross-selling opportunities in hosting, cloud, telemedicine, cybersecurity, interoperability, outsourcing, and revenue cycle.
• Two hospitals signed to replace their Paragon system with Sunrise Community Care in the quarter.
• Hospital and large practice sales were down for the quarter, while Veradigm’s business grew 9%.
• The company will provide Moderna with integrated EHR and claims data for eight real-world data studies of its COVID-19 vaccine.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents reported no issue with their most recent PCP visit, although waiting for an appointment and then waiting to seen once arrived were the most common complaints. Kendall says that even though they’ve seen the same EHR-using PCP for decades and is an active patient portal user, the practice still shoves a clipboard at them to write down everything that is already recorded electronically. Greg’s PCP left the practice without a heads-up to patients, so when he called about his chronic condition, staff directed him to urgent care who then sent him to the ED because it was beyond their capabilities, with his insurer expecting him to pay out of pocket for both visits.

New poll to your right or here: What was the cause of your biggest financial problem as a patient in the past 12 months?

Attending ViVE 2022? Check out my guide to what HIStalk’s sponsors will be doing there.

Listening: alternative rockers Cage the Elephant, which I first recommended here in 2011. My interest was rekindled by a YouTube highlights reel of Matt Shultz’s death-defying stage dives. He and his brother are disarmingly charming in all the interview and concert videos I’ve seen, which he describes as, “I’ve been blessed to have the right kind of adversities hit me at the right times to keep it humble. And just continuously chasing after and searching for that thing that makes music utterly exciting again.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Definitive Healthcare reports Q4 results: revenue up 38%, adjusted EBITDA $13.1 million versus $12.8 million (the company did not provide per-share information). DH shares are down 49% in the past year versus the Nasdaq’s 10% loss, valuing the company at $2.2 billion.

Sales

• Bayada Home Health Care extends use of its Dina platform to its longitudinal care management program, which includes identifying risks and tracking interventions to improve transitions from hospital to home-based care.
• Aflac will offer NeuroFlow’s self-service mental health resources to its group long-term disability clients.

People

Jared Antczak, MBA (Highmark Health) joins Sanford Health as chief digital officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Sanford Health will go live in April on a workforce optimization system that it co-developed with precision staffing system vendor Flexwise, which will incorporate Sanford-developed features into its commercial product.

Northern Ireland’s Health and Social Care Service goes live on Sectra digital pathology.

Other

Sami Inkinen, CEO of diabetes reversal coaching and app vendor Virta Health, says that employer HR and benefits departments have had a tough challenge in trying to address rising health cost benefits as more and more people become metabolically unhealthy. He classifies the history of their efforts:

• 2000-2010: the pre-digital era, when employers signed up for health plan services and provider networks, performed health risk screenings, held wellness events, and offered employee assistance programs.
• 2010-2015: employers tried digital social networks, gamification, and handing out step and fitness trackers despite zero evidence (and nearly zero results) that they work.
• 2015-2020: digital health entrepreneurs whose lack of company success in “consumers pay via the app store” model started hawking their wares directly to employers, swamping them with sales pitches.
• Today: show me the money, show me the outcomes. Healthcare costs keep rising as digital health shiny objects lose their luster. Digital health vendors who can’t prove that their products save employers money will struggle to survive over the next five years.

Sponsor Updates

• Current Health customers can now launch Zoom from within its care-at-home platform.
• Healthcare Triangle closes its previously announced acquisition of health IT and managed services company DevCool.
• G2 awards Symplr Clinical Communications Best Software Product and Highest Satisfaction Product in the category of clinical Communication and collaboration.
• Sphere integrates MDofficeManager’s RCM solutions with its payments technology.
• Talkdesk publishes a new report, “Creating a better way for health plan member experience.”
• Stryker completes its acquisition of Vocera Communications.
• Vyne Medical publishes a new case study, “Refyne Connected Care Supports Virtual Collaboration Among Montana Pediatricians.”

Blog Posts

• Celebrating our 15th Anniversary – A Letter to Our Winners (Impact Advisors)
• Analysis: How prior authorization approval times and rates for cardiac imaging vary across insurance providers (Olive)
• Why Labor Retention Impacts Patient Experience (PatientBond)
• How to Improve Medical Response Times for Nurses (PerfectServe)
• Avoid Licensure Pitfalls to Open the Door to Telehealth Opportunities (Symplr)
• The Current State of Procure-to-Pay: Healthcare Suppliers Speak Out (Premier)
• Behind the Scenes of an Ideal Prescribing Experience (Surescripts)
• Bridging Gaps in Preoperative Preparation with Coordinated Outreach (Twistle)
• Software in Cash-Based Practice, Part 2: Managing Your Finances (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 2/25/22

Top News

Teladoc Health reports Q4 results: revenue up 45%, EPS -$0.07 versus -$3.07, beating Wall Street expectations for both.

TDOC shares dropped sharply on Wednesday following the announcement, then gained 12% on Thursday. They are down 76% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s flat performance, valuing the company at $11 billion.

Teladoc was touted in August 2020 as having created a $37 billion company with its acquisition of Livongo for $18.5 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m declining to speculate further on attendance at ViVE and HIMSS22 since they are just 10 and 18 days away, respectively. You’re either going or not at this point. The conference and healthcare attendee environment has been reset since the pre-pandemic, pre-virtual status quo, so it’s early days in figuring out what that market wants in education and networking.

Meanwhile, I received an email from HIMSS whose subject line suggests that the healthcare-irrelevant former occupations of its keynote speakers is the big draw.

Listening: video from the 2014 reunion concert – the surprisingly excellent first of many shows after a 16-year break – of one of my favorite bands, Failure. My favorite track: Daylight. The alt-rockers are touring this summer and my ticket procurement process is underway to make up for considering but not attending that 2014 LA show.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor VisiQuate. The Santa Rosa, CA-based company empowers healthcare organizations to achieve peak business health, through expert service-enabled technologies that dramatically improve performance and reduce process waste. They deliver optimized enterprise outcomes through a unique combination of complex data curation, deep AI & ML, advanced analytics, and intelligent process automation. Thanks to VisiQuate for supporting HIStalk.

An obvious core competency of VisiQuate is creating compelling and enjoyable videos, so instead of the usual explainer, I’ve chosen from YouTube a fun company overview set to the tune of “I Will Survive.” You may sing along.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts reports Q4 results: revenue up 1%, adjusted EPS $0.79 versus $0.20. 

Specialty remote patient monitoring vendor Story Health raises $23 million in a Series A funding round.

Omada Health, which offers virtual-first chronic condition care, raises $192 million in a Series E funding round that values the company at $1 billion.

Sales

• Northern Ireland’s Health and Social Care Board chooses medication ordering decision support from First Databank.
• Ciox Health will implement Diameter Health’s Fusion engine to transform patient medical record data into analytics-ready form.

People

Meditech adds COO to the title of 32-year company veteran EVP Helen Waters. The COO role was previously held by President and CEO Michelle O’Connor before her promotion in early 2021.

Patrick Murta (Humana) joins BehaVR as chief platform architect.

Umar Afridi, MPharm, co-founder and CEO of pharmacy fulfillment, telehealth, and diagnostic provider Truepill, is replaced by co-founder and president Sid Viswanathan.

Mark Citrone (Healthfinch) joins Doximity as AVP of national sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Medhost announces two solutions that address CMS’s Promoting Interoperability Program, a Cures 2023 Interoperability Solution and Electronic Case Reporting.

A economic study by healthcare market analytics company Trilliant Health finds that only about one-fourth of Americans have had a telehealth-based encounter during the pandemic and half of those had just one encounter (often to obtain a COVID-19 test), suggesting that people use it mostly when in-person visits aren’t available. The study says that the law of small numbers makes it seem that telehealth is enjoying accelerated adoption, but in reality it hasn’t impacted many people, especially those who need it most, and it hasn’t bridged the gap in available in-person primary care visits. Behavioral care is an exception, where many people prefer virtual visits. The study notes that while the marginal cost of offering a telehealth visit is effectively zero, the retail cost ranges from $59 to $75 and the patient’s payment portion increased by 110% from 2020 to 2021. 

A new KLAS report on medication inventory management (par levels, clean room, facility-to-facility transfer tracking, formulary management, ordering and receiving) finds that Epic has the top-rated functionality even though the company’s doesn’t specialize in pharmacy. Customers of Swisslog are least likely to achieve outcomes such as improved compliance, inventory transparency, purchasing efficiency, and usage efficiency and are also least-satisfied with their vendor relationship.

Government and Politics

The Department of Justice sues to block the $13 billion acquisition of Change Healthcare by UnitedHealth Group, saying that the deal would give the insurer details on how competing insurers bill and then undercut them. DOJ also says that UHG could withhold Change Healthcare’s products from its competitors, keep innovations for itself, and give UHG a monopoly in how claims are checked for errors.

Epic sues non-practicing entity (aka patent troll) GreatGigz Solutions for shaking down Christus Health to pay it licensing fees for its use of MyChart. GreatGiz bought some old online job recruiting patents that is says MyChart infringes on and is demanding that Christus buy licenses. GreatGigz has similarly sued Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Postmates, CVS Health, Subway, ZipRecruiter, Target, Freelancer, Robert Half International, and countless other companies in hopes that they decide that it’s cheaper to pay GreatGigz to go away than to shovel money into mounting a defense. Epic has historically been one of few companies willing to do whatever it takes to defend itself, and in this case, the involvement of one of its customers is likely to unleash its legal dogs.

Privacy and Security

Ireland’s health service says the cost of last year’s ransomware attack has reached nearly $50 million and could rise to over $100 million.

Other

A large Medscape physician survey looks at burnout:

• Nearly half of physician respondents said they feel burned out, up 4% from 2020, with female doctors reporting higher rates and critical care being the highest percentage specialty.
• Sixty percent of doctors say bureaucratic tasks, such as charting and paperwork, are the main issue, double the #2 factor of lack of respect. Computer issues rank #6, with about one-third of respondents naming it as a problem.
• Doctors say the three things that would most reduce their burnout are a better work schedule, higher pay, and more respect (I would say that “higher pay” was more of an aspiration since money isn’t likely to eliminate burnout, just make it more cost effective).

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe publishes a new report, “The Rise of Emoji in Healthcare Communication.”
• TransformativeMed launches its Cores Intelligent Care Platform on Olive’s marketplace, The Library.
• Get Well publishes a new white paper, “Today’s Health Equity Goal: Shifting from Headlines to Impact.”
• Imprivata has recognized partners Softcat, Conecto, Data#3, and SVA with its international IPartner Awards.
• The Engage Your Tribe Podcast features NextGate VP of Global Marketing Richard Dark.

Blog Posts

• Committed to Veterans: Get Well Government Services Year in Review (Get Well)
• CMS Has Decided to Put its Muscle Behind Glycemic Management – Why Now? (Glytec)
• Survey Illustrates Importance of a Strategic Approach to Healthcare Cloud Investment (Healthcare Triangle)
• Hiring and Coaching Leaders to Transform Healthcare (feat. Sarah Richardson) (HCI Group)
• The Benefits of Healthcare Revenue Cycle Outsourcing (Impact Advisors)
• From quality measurement to quality care (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Discussing top IT trends with a fellow innovation enthusiast (Meditech)
• What is patient engagement for a Chief Medical Information Officer? A guide for CEOs (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 2/23/22

Top News

WellSky will acquire TapCloud, whose patient engagement platform collects a one-minute check-in that asks about their symptoms, concerns, and available support.

WellSky says the patient-generated data will expand its dataset to support the development of care models that predict patient risk factors for deploying interventions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Should we be talking about ICD-11, which is being used in 35 countries?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health Catalyst will acquire KPI Ninja, which offers interoperability solutions and population health analytics.

HealthStream announces Q4 results: revenue up 4%, EPS –$0.01 versus $0.03, beating expectations for both. HSTM shares are up 3% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 4% loss, valuing the company at $630 million.

Release of information solutions vendor MRO acquires competitor MediCopy.

Cerner announces Q4 results: revenue up 4%, adjusted EPS $0.93 versus $0.78. The company’s acquisition for $95 per share by Oracle remains on track for sometime in 2022. Shares closed Tuesday before the announcement at $91.83.

People

Nicole Rogas, MBA (Experian Health) joins Symplr as president.

Brian Silverstein, MD (The Chartis Group) joins Innovaccer as chief population health officer.

Global health pioneer, humanitarian, author, professor, and anthropologist Paul Farmer, MD, PhD died Monday at the university and hospital he had established in Rwanda. He was 62. The non-profit group he co-founded, Partners in Health, was an early proponent of considering social determinants of health, questioning why people were being treated for diseases and then returned to the same circumstances that had helped cause them.

Announcements and Implementations

A top pharmaceutical company deploys OptimizeRx’s digital therapy initiation workflow to streamline patient therapy initiation challenges.

DCH Health System (AL) implements real-time patient admission and discharge notification technology from Secure Exchange Solutions.

Windom Area Health (MN) rolls out telemedicine services from TeleHealth Solution for after-hours care.

Veriff announces GA of identity verification solutions for the healthcare industry that include digital health record protection, automated intake, and secure telemedicine and prescription delivery.

Government and Politics

NIH will require researchers to include a data management and sharing plan in their grant requests, which must include the software or tools that were used to analyze the data and a plan for publishing the data publicly. Information from failed or unpublished studies must also be published to potentially help other researchers. An estimated $10 to $50 billion is spent on US research whose data methods are insufficient, with most of the money coming from federal taxpayers. Experts note that most labs and institutions don’t have data managers and are likely to push the task onto trainees and early-career investigators.

A 33-year-old resident of Pakistan is sentenced to 12 years in prison and ordered to pay $48 million in restitution for submitting fraudulent Medicare claims for 20 home health agencies he had acquired in Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, and Texas using false names. Muhammad Ateeq was also ordered to forfeit a $2.4 million cashier’s check and $1 million in cash. Medicare paid his companies $40 million for services that had not been rendered, with DOJ noting that he had control of their billing and EHR systems.

Privacy and Security

HHS’s cybersecurity office publishes a report on EHRs in healthcare, which is mostly a glossy overview of the status quo. They urge healthcare organizations to  review Remote Desktop Protocol and consider protecting it with a VPN that uses multi-factor authentication, use endpoint detection and response, and implement email tools that filter URLS and move attachments to a sandbox.

Other

Some interesting thoughts on digital health companies from investor and former Livongo CFO Lee Shapiro of  7wire Ventures, interviewed by Marissa Schlueter of OMERS Ventures:

• Companies need a cash runway of 18-24 months to weather current market turbulence and should be prepared to describe their expected path to profitability to investors.
• Startups need a CFO, or at least an experienced controller, by their third year to prepare for the historical documentation that investors will want to review down the road in their C and D funding rounds.
• The market valuation of some publicly traded companies is less than the cash on their balance sheets and those could become acquirers or acquisition targets.
• Some companies suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome in expanding in too many markets or attacking multiple go-to-market channels.
• Companies whose revenue is less than $50 million will need to merge to attain the scale that is needed to address the challenges of health plans.
• Virtual-only companies could merge with brick-and-mortar companies to create an omnichannel brand.
• Shapiro recommends that investors should watch what hedge funds are doing, some of which are turning to the bargains that are available in the public market instead of private market investing.

Sponsor Updates

• Azara Healthcare has earned Certified Data Stream status for NCQA’s Data Aggregator Validation Program.
• Bamboo Health has joined the National Association of Mobile Integrated Healthcare Providers.
• Clearwater publishes a new white paper, “Keeping Patient Data Secure in the Cloud.”
• Change Healthcare releases a new podcast, “Enterprise Imaging in the Cloud: Adoption and Outlook.”
• Enlace Health will exhibit and present at the 2022 Healthcare Bundled Payments Conference February 24-25 in Nashville.

Blog Posts

• Value-Based Care Strategies: A Roadmap for Success (Actium Health)
• NCQA’s Data Aggregator Validation Program – What it Takes to Earn Certified Data Stream Status (Azara Healthcare)
• Important Activation Prep Activities to Ensure a Smooth Go-Live (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds Crisis Management Solution helping to support the New Hampshire Rapid Response System (Bamboo Health)
• Nurse Leadership Forum Middle East (Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the OBIX Perinatal Data System)
• CoverMyMeds Leaders Analyze 4 Key Trends from Medication Access Report (CoverMyMeds)
• Handling Hospital ADT Notifications with Direct Messaging (EClinicalWorks)
• Success at a glance: automating healthcare collections (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 2/21/22

Top News

Spok reports Q4 results: revenue down 8%, EPS –$0.86 versus –$2.44.

From the follow-up announcements and earnings call:

• The cloud-based Spok Go, which was introduced in February 2020, will be discontinued and the company will take a $15.7 million impairment charge. Spok says the product’s traction has been limited because of COVID-19, challenges in recruiting and retaining software engineers, and the company’s need to reduce costs and headcount.
• The company will maximize revenue from its legacy product, Spok Care Connect Suite.
• Spok will cut its management team by half and its workforce by one-third in the next 60 days.
• The company will increase its dividend and repurchase $10 million of its shares.
• The company continues to seek a buyer. One interested party is Acacia Research Corporation, whose primary business is buying struggling companies and then filing patent infringement lawsuits to force the purchase of licenses (aka a “patent troll.”) Acacia’s acquisition partner is activist hedge fund Starboard Value, best known in health IT circles for leveraging its tiny position in Cerner into board seats and a “cooperation agreement,” then selling off CERN shares as soon as the price went up as a result.
• Acacia proposed in August 2021 to acquire all outstanding Spok shares for $10.75 in cash. Shares are now at $8.65, valuing the company at $171 million. Spok turned down a $12 per share offer from B. Riley Financial two years ago.
• President and CEO Vincent Kelly says the board’s decisions were influenced by Oracle acquiring Cerner, Stryker acquiring Vocera, and Hillrom (and then Baxter) acquiring Voalte.

Reader Comments

From ViVE Sponsor: “Re: ViVE conference. The attendee list shows 3,000 people, only [low number omitted] of them providers.” Unverified, so I’ve omitted the number. I’ve emailed the conference’s generic email address for press inquiries since that’s the only contact I can find and will update with any response I get. The conference website says it expects 4,000 attendees (it said a year ago that attendance could top 5,500). Readers keep asking me about registration breakouts for ViVE and HIMSS22 that I don’t have, so tell me if you know or if you saw the same list. Meanwhile, the HIMSS22 exhibit hall is looking pretty full with about 800 “real” booths (excluding meeting place, pavilions, interoperability showcase, etc.) and 898 exhibiting companies. I’m hoping that, unlike HIMSS21, it will be worth my time and money to attend.

From TikTokDoc: “Re: videos. Doctors should use them for patient education. Good idea?” TikTok probably isn’t the ideal platform due to its limits on video length, but I can see doctors recording short, generic YouTube videos for patients who have new diagnosis or who need specific information about drugs, procedures, or lifestyle recommendations, then sending those patients a link after their encounter (the videos could be made private on YouTube or not, depending on practice’s goals). I like the idea of recording a quick video recapping the visit and to-do items for the patient’s later review, but malpractice fears probably make that unlikely. I wonder how many telehealth visits are recorded by the patient using screen-capture apps?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Few poll respondents include certification or fellowship credentials on their business cards or email signatures, including two-thirds of the folks who have earned them. LinkedIn is full of credentials that I would have to look up  (or in reality, ignore) – some that I’ve seen recently in profile titles (not just in a list) are CCEP, CHPS, CHC, FACP, CDH-E, CRCR, CVAHP, CHPC, GRCP, CSPO, NEA-BC, PMHNP-BC, LP/NREMT-P, and CSSM. I’ve hired and been hired based on minimum educational level, but I’ve never hired anyone or been hired because of a certification. Actually, that’s not entirely true – Epic certification is required for many health IT jobs and is harder to earn and keep than some of the credentials that are issued by member organizations. I’m curious to hear from readers – what health IT job descriptions have you seen in which a specific certification or fellowship is required? 

New poll to your right or here: What were the negative aspects of your most recent PCP visit within the past 12 months?

Best thing I saw in the internet this week:  “Everyone who confuses correlation with causation eventually ends up dead.”

Last chance – if your company is exhibiting or participating in ViVE, send me your information to be included in my conference guide. Some of the activities I’ll be listing for attendees to consider include sponsorship of the welcome reception, happy hours, live podcasts, presentations and demos, evening receptions, and strategy sessions.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Real-world data platform network TriNetX acquires Advera Health Analytics, which offers pharmacovigilance software for drug safety concerns.

Radiology workspace vendor Sirona Medical acquires the AI capabilities and related employees of Nines, which offers an AI diagnostic solution for respiratory diseases and a triage system for intracranial hemorrhage. Nines will retain its teleradiology business.

The Columbus business paper runs an excellent profile on AndHealth. I interviewed founder and CEO Matt Scantland last week.

Sales

• Emory Healthcare expands its Sectra enterprise imaging system by adding digital pathology.
• Rush University System for Health offers its employees the Transcarent app for finding health information and health coaching  as part of its medical plan.

People

David Pickering, MBA (Indiana University Health) joins St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as VP for clinical applications.

Announcements and Implementations

Cleveland Clinic lists its top 10 medical innovations for 2022, whose only health IT entries are AI-powered sepsis detection and analytics for early diagnosis of hypertension.

Government and Politics

The VA moves two of its 130 instances of VistA to AWS in a pilot project.

Stat reports that health tech vendors are worried about the trend of states enacting consumer privacy laws that, unlike HIPAA, give people control over how their data is collected and managed, which will increase regulatory compliance costs. The possible alternative outcome is developing a national standard for managing patient data. 

Other

The Atlantic looks at “Why America Has So Few Doctors” even as an aging, ever-sicker population now has COVID-19 to deal with few primary care doctors available to see them. Reasons:

• US medical education is the longest and most expensive in the developed world, with programs requiring a minimum of eight years of school (degree plus medical school).
• Those years in college leave graduates hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, encouraging them to pursue whichever specialty pays the most.
• Residency spots and federal funding for them are limited.
• Physicians and physician groups have an economic incentive to claim a physician oversupply to constrain the number of medical school seats.
• Physician groups fight proposals that would allow lower-level clinicians, such as nurses, to do lower-level tasks.
• The medical establishment has made it hard for foreign doctors to practice in the US, especially those from Mexico and Canada whose practice is limited by NAFTA.

Sponsor Updates

• USPTO awards Volpara Health a patent for its method of detecting and quantifying breast arterial calcifications in mammograms.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “WebMD’s Ann Bilyew on Why Scale Matters in a Shifting Market.”

Blog Posts

• 2022 Healthcare Consumer Acquisition Trends to Watch (PatientBond)
• The Importance of Interoperability Rules Compliance for Payers, Providers (Symplr)
• Healthcare: It’s Down to Our Genes (Premier)
• Building Confidence Around Using Helpful Technology (Quil Health)
• Overcoming HCC Challenges in 2022: Provider Burnout, Staffing Challenges, and Coding Gaps (RCxRules)
• 3 things to expect at HIMSS22 (Spok)
• How Accredo Shaved 2 Days Off Its Turnaround Time for Specialty Prescriptions (Surescripts)
• A force to be reckoned with: How Force Therapeutics uses engagement to improve patient care (Talkdesk)
• Do You Have a CAHPS Early Warning System in Place? (Twistle)
• 3 Big Tips for Running a More Organized Front Desk (WebPT)
• 3 Ways Health Plans Can Ensure Risk Adjustment Compliance (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• What Will 2022 Bring for Virtual Care? (VitalTech)
• New CMS 2022 Guidelines: Delivering SAFER Care to Drive Better Outcomes (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 2/18/22

The Department of Justice will file a lawsuit to block the proposed $13 billion sale of Change Healthcare to UnitedHealth Group, a report says, citing two insiders.

Dealreporter says the sources told it that DOJ cannot identify any divestitures that would ease its anti-competitive concerns.

Change Healthcare reportedly considered selling its payment integrity business to avoid regulatory intervention.

Reader Comments

From Fungible: “Re: HIMSS Accelerate. I can’t figure out how to see the activity there. All I see is promotional posts from HIMSS. Can you ask readers if they are using it?” Same for me. It lists a ton of members, but I don’t see any posts, but then again I’m not following anyone and that might be limiting what I see. Still, even Half Wolf hasn’t posted much of anything. I checked maybe 100 user profiles and I would suspect they were auto-added or something since I didn’t see any that had completed their profile or posted any messages. If you’re using Accelerate, please explain what you’re doing on there. You would think it would be lit up given that HIMSS22 is 25 days away.

From Boris Badenov: “Re: [technology company name omitted]. Has cancelled all meetings and has asked all employees to turn over documents with [EHR vendor] screenshots and other IP by the end of the week. Apparently somehow the company has managed to delete records at an unspecified customer and has caused significant damage.” Unverified, so I’ve omitted both company names. The only way I see this happening is that the tech company was using some kind of scripting and screen-scraping tool that ran amok and deleted data by mimicking user interaction, which the original vendor would not be able to detect or prevent. Cancelling meetings and seizing IP seems odd.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Sponsor reminder: tell me what you’ll be doing at ViVE and HIMSS22 and I’ll include you in my conference guides. You’re spending piles of money to participate in the conference, so you might as well publicize it.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Specialty EHR, PM, and RCM vendor ModMed acquires Klara, which offers a virtual care and collaboration platform, for $200 million. ModMed is the former Modernizing Medicine, which eliminated and conjoined some of its letters in December 2021 in hopes of “capturing the company’s mission and reflecting its modern user experience.” I’m not sure it actually worked.

SimpleHealth, which offers subscription-based birth control prescribing services and products via a $15 annual online consultation and low-cost prescriptions, acquires birth control pill reminder vendor Emme. 

CompuGroup Medical acquires anatomic pathology system vendor AP Easy.

Medication and computer cart manufacturer Capsa Healthcare acquires mobile computer workstation vendor Humanscale Healthcare.

Sales

• Four companies choose Canvas Medical’s EMR and healthcare payments platform for digital health developers: Patina (primary care for adults 65+), Circulo (services for physical and behavioral health), UpLift (mental health), and Vivante (digestive health and wellness).
• Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center will analyze claims data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions to identify the needs of underserved communities and choosing optimal service locations.
• Vanderbilt University Medical Center chooses Biofourmis to support a study in which cancer patients will be monitored at home instead of the usual 7-10 day hospitalization following administration of an oncology drug. The system will continuously collect heart rate, temperature, oxygenation levels, and respiratory rate and will measure blood pressure every 4-6 hours, with the results presented on a notification-powered clinician dashboard.
• Healthcare API vendor Particle Health replaces its homegrown master patient index with Verato Universal MPI.
• NextGen Healthcare chooses Verato Universal MPI to incorporate patient matching into its Health Data Hub to integrate information from disparate EHRs.
• The US Social Security Administration contracts with Cerner to electronically transfer disability claims information the EHRs of its customers.
• Insurer Florida Blue, a subsidiary of GuideWell, automates prior authorization approval via AI-powered clinical reviews that are powered by Olive’s AI platform.

People

Industry long-timer Tomas Gregorio, MBA (University Hospital) joins Wellforce as SVP of IT operations.

Impact Advisors promotes Liam Bouchier to VP.

Streamline Health promotes Ben Stilwell, EMBA to president and CEO of ite EValuator Solutions business, also hiring Amy Sebero (NThrive) as chief growth officer for that unit.

Announcements and Implementations

Black Book names 50 recently funded emerging solutions that are challenging the healthcare technology status quo, evaluated by 4,000 healthcare respondents who scored 377 solutions on 18 KPIs.

The Marion County Health Department (WV) goes live on Epic. The health department first experienced Epic when WVU Medicine set up COVID-19 vaccination clinics in Marion County in early 2021.

The Hartford business paper profiles clinical data transformation platform vendor Diameter Health, which grew headcount by 25% last year and expects to hit 100 employees next year. I interviewed CEO Eric Rosow a couple of weeks ago.

Government and Politics

Politico reports that the VA’s pilot of a technology that speeds up benefits decision-making – cutting the average wait time from 100 days to 21 – is being criticized by labor unions that don’t want the jobs of 60,000 VA Benefits Administration placed at risk.

KHN reports that counties and cities that oppose COVID mitigation measures are forming their own health departments and contracting the work out to for-profit companies.

Other

Blind people who received a “bionic eye” implant from Second Sight Medical Products from 2013 to 2019 to gain a small amount of low-resolution vision see their world go dark as the company abandons the technology and approaches bankruptcy after an exodus of its executives and a sale of its assets at auction. Second Sight’s 350 users had its technology installed at a cost of up to $500,000, many of whom complained about poor results. The company is moving on to brain implants.

Sponsor Updates

• Availity launches Availity Essentials Plus, a low-cost subscription service that gives providers online access to more payers through its HIPAA-compliant Essentials platform.
• Fortified Health Security hires Sarah McNulty as executive assistant.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a case study in analyzing and streamlining EpicCare Ambulatory error queues at PeaceHealth.
• NeuroFlow creates a video describing how it helps health plans reduce the costs of care by giving them better behavioral health insights.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new episode of its Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring CEO Dave Lareau.
• RCx Rules recaps its 2021 success, which includes adding 25 customers and strengthening its HCC coding capabilities by adding Chart Prep Engine.
• Netsmart launches the EveryDayMatters Podcast.
• Meditech announces its HIMSS22 activities.
• Nordic releases a new podcast, “How interoperability and cloud transformations can support healthcare organizations.”

Blog Posts

• Importance of Nurses Recognizing Nurses – Today and Always (Get Well)
• Brush Up on Dental Health IT (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• 3 Ways That Patient Education Improves Safety and Quality of Care (Healthwise)
• An Epic Community Connect Program: M&A without the A (Impact Advisors)
• Continuing the power of One Word (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Important Promoting Interoperability Requirements for 2022 (Medhost)
• Overcoming HCC Challenges in 2022: Provider Burnout, Staffing Challenges, and Coding Gaps (RCx Rules)
• Healthcare in 2022: The fluid way forward (Meditech)
• PTA Reimbursement 2022: A Look at the Final Fee Schedule (MWTherapy)
• What is patient engagement to a Patient Access Center Manager? A CEO’s primer (Nuance)

Black Book Research’s list of the 50 top-rated emerging health IT vendors for 2022 includes the following HIStalk Sponsors:

• Bamboo Health
• Enlace Health
• Healthcare Triangle·
• Redox
• Symplr

Contacts

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

News 2/16/22

Top News

The $17 billion sale of Athenahealth to a pair of private equity firms has been completed.

Reader Comments

From Elizabeth Holmes: “Re: Circadia Health. Touts how they do remote patient monitoring, but FDA’s clearance says specifically that ‘The Circadia C 100 System is not indicated for active patient monitoring.’” I emailed the company to clarify, but haven’t heard back. The website says that the touchless system issues a daily report of respiratory rate and time in bed, which seems to be in conformance with FDA’s requirement that its system not be used to monitor vital signs and is “for retrospective analysis only.” Still, the company’s website touts its capability to “prevent the 3rd leading cause of death” in managing acute respiratory distress syndrome, COPD, sepsis, and pneumonia while earning post-acute care facilities a 2% Medicare incentive payment.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors who are exhibiting at or attending ViVE and HIMSS22 – click the link, complete the short form, and I’ll include you in my online and downloadable guide. You may recall from last week that my poll respondents gave as their #2 reason for visiting a booth as simply knowing ahead of time the activities that will be presented there, so share your plans and maybe get more feet onto your expensively rented carpet.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

PriorAuthNow, which offers automated, real-time prior authorization software for providers and payers, raises $25 million in funding. The company says its technology has helped Cleveland Clinic staff reduce the prior authorization process from 45 minutes to four minutes.

Kidney care company DaVita acquires transplant software vendor MedSleuth for an undisclosed sum.

Radial Analytics, a patient care transition software startup based in Concord, MA, raises $3 million in funding.

Automated care management company Memora Health raises $40 million, bringing its total funding to just over $50 million.

Sales

• Community Health Systems (TN) selects remote patient monitoring and virtual care technology from Cadence.
• Davis Health System (WV) will implement Cerner across its three hospitals beginning this summer.

People

Azara Healthcare hires Todd Schlesinger (Jvion) as VP of sales.

Patti Baran (Teladoc Health) joins AliveCor as SVP, Healthcare Americas.

Announcements and Implementations

Little Rock Air Force Base Clinic (AR) will transition to the DoD’s Cerner-powered MHS Genesis system next month. The department plans on rolling out MHS Genesis at 54 facilities this year, which would see the technology deployed at more than half of all military hospitals and clinics.

Guthrie County Hospital & Clinics (IA) will go live on Epic this weekend.

A Tegria-commissioned Harris Poll survey finds that 69% of Americans would consider switching providers to gain access to same-day appointments, convenient locations, and self-scheduling. More than half would be willing to have their first visit with a new provider conducted virtually, although only 37% of those over 65 agree.

Government and Politics

VA Acting Deputy CIO Laura Prietula tells attendees at an AFCEA Bethesda health IT event that the department has made significant improvements to its EHR data transfer processes, adding that it has standardized the majority of the high-priority datasets that are being transferred from VistA to Cerner’s Millennium and HealtheIntent platforms.

Privacy and Security

Puerto Rico-based claims clearinghouse Inmediata will pay $1.1 million to settle a class action lawsuit filed by patients who were affected by a 2019 data breach in which the company failed to secure patient data online, enabling search engines to serve up PHI in search results. I mentioned at the time that the majority of the 1.6 million patients alerted about the breach had never heard of the company. Many received multiple notification letters, with some of those being addressed to other patients.

Avita Health System (OH) notifies patients of a network security incident last week that forced it to revert to downtime procedures.

Other

I’m not sure I noticed until reading the CHIME update below that former HIMSS President and CEO Steve Lieber has been working for CHIME as chief analytics officer since October 2021.

Sachin Jain, MD, MBA says big tech firms have accomplished basically nothing in healthcare because scale is hard to achieve, fee-for-service hasn’t gone anywhere so improving health isn’t a priority, managing healthcare means managing risk, and margins are small. He says companies like Apple need to stop tinkering around healthcare’s edges and instead buy a big health system, where they can demonstrate the benefits of technology, make the argument for value-based care, and integrate payers and providers. He says Amazon’s dabbling in the grocery business didn’t amount to much until it bought Whole Foods.

This is an interesting thought about primary care in considering non-healthcare markets, where generalists could be squeezed out by specialists on the upper end, and on the lower end, by less-expensive substitutes who follow protocols that those experts approve.

Sponsor Updates

• CHIME launches new media resource Digital Health Insights as a digital destination for healthcare industry professionals.
• Ellkay will exhibit at Greenway Health’s Engage conference February 18-23.
• The Kansas Hospital Association’s Health Services subsidiary selects ChartSpan as its exclusive chronic care management partner.

Blog Posts

• Patient-centered Care: 3 Ways Data is Transforming Behavioral Health Outcomes (Arcadia)
• The Doctor Will See You Now: Why Patient Experience Matters (CereCore)
• All the Ingredients for Population Health Management (EClinicalWorks)
• MEDITECH to Showcase Expanse at Inaugural ViVE Conference – March 6-9 in Miami (Meditech)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 2/14/22

Doximity Announces Fiscal 2022 Third Quarter Financial Results

Medical social network operator Doximity announces Q3 results and that it will acquire physician on-call scheduling app vendor Amion for up to $83 million.

Announcing Radial Analytics’ $3M Round led by Initialized Capital

Radial Analytics, a patient care transition software startup based in Concord, MA, raises $3 million in a funding round led by Initialized Capital.

Vocera Announces Fourth Quarter 2021 Financial Results

Vocera announces Q4 results: revenue up 16%, adjusted EPS $0.29 versus $0.28, beating analyst expectations for both.

LifeOmic Acquires Bavard, an Enterprise-grade Conversational AI Platform

Precision digital healthcare company LifeOmic acquires Bavard, which offers AI-powered digital assistant technology.

Monday Morning Update 2/14/22

Top News

Medical social network operator Doximity announces Q3 results: revenue up 67%, adjusted EPS $0.29 versus $0.07, beating Wall Street expectations for both. Shares jumped up sharply on the news, up 14% in the past 12 months versus the Dow’s 2% increase. The company’s valuation is at $16 billion, with co-founder and CEO Jeff Tangney holding 33% of shares. From the earnings call:

• Doximity is acquiring physician on-call scheduling app vendor Amion for up to $83 million and will integrate its offering with Doximity’s secure messaging, CV, referral, and telehealth tools.
• Chief Commercial Officer Joe Kleine will retire this fall, to be replaced with Paul Jorgensen.
• Continuing medical education credits issued are up 25% quarter over quarter as in-person education is being increasingly replaced with online programs.
• Job postings quadrupled year on year as physicians sought new opportunities.
• The company’s video telehealth platform earned Best in KLAS over Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and other services.
• Drug companies whose sales reps can’t visit doctors in person are moving to digital marketing programs and eliminating sales positions. The company says that the count of drug reps has doubled since the mid-1990s to 81,000, but it expects 10% of those reps to lose their jobs in the next couple of years.
• CEO Jeff Tangney says that Fortune 500 companies spend 70% of their marketing budget on digital channels, while healthcare is at 23%.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The fortunes that conference exhibitors spend on fancy booths, catering, glossy presentations, and tchotchkes generate a lower return than the free options – choosing and coaching your booth reps carefully and letting people know ahead of time what you’ll be doing in your expensive patch of carpet. My #1 recommendation is, as always, to confiscate the phones of those who are working the booth – humans seeking information are an irritating intrusion into their cyber-bliss.

New poll to your right or here: Does your business card or email signature list a certification or fellowship credential? I’ve stopped listing both since in my case, their value seems to accrue more to issuers who are looking for recurring revenue than for holders to prove their competence or ethics. Some are still hard to earn and maintain (CPA or PMP, for example) and I would use those if directly relevant to a current or desired job. I also don’t understand listing questionably rigorous, non-selective “executive education” on LinkedIn, especially in lieu of having earned an actual degree from an accredited school. Business card alphabet soup and sitting in front of “I love me” walls plastered with framed, yellowing certificates is a fascinating study in occupational vanity. I’m always intrigued that sales executives, CEOs, and startup founders are often light on formal education, having set a path while young in which formal education would have been a multi-year distraction from their destined accomplishments. I should run a poll asking respondents if they report to someone with less-impressive education credentials.

If your HIStalk sponsor company is spending money to participate in ViVE and HIMSS22, why not boost attention to your involvement with a free entry in my conference guides? Those links lead to forms where you tell me about what you’re doing, which I need to know in the next couple of weeks since said conferencing is imminent.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Biofourmis. The fast-growing, Boston-based global health technology company is focused on leveraging software and data science to deliver virtual care and develop novel digital therapies. Its robust care management platform, Care@Home, enables remote disease management across a range of medical conditions for acute, post-acute, and chronic care. The solution utilizes medical-grade wearables to continuously collect patient data, which is analyzed by Biovitals, Biofourmis’ highly sophisticated, clinically validated AI-powered predictive analytics engine. With support from Biofourmis’ in-house clinical care team, payers and providers can leverage the solution to predict clinical deterioration in advance of a critical event, which enables earlier interventions for better outcomes and cost savings. Likewise, the company discovers, develops, and delivers clinically validated digital therapeutics. These monotherapies or “pill plus” prescription therapeutics support payers and providers in improving patients’ lives while reducing healthcare utilization and associated costs. Thanks to Biofourmis for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Vocera announces Q4 results: revenue up 16%, adjusted EPS $0.29 versus $0.28, beating analyst expectations for both. Stryker’s $3 billion acquisition of the company remains on track.

Sales

• Northwest Primary Care (OR) implements Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring from CareSignal, a Lightbeam Health Solutions Company.

People

Salesforce promotes David Cousins, MS to SVP of healthcare and life sciences.

ReMedi Health Solutions hires Scott Collins (Futura Mobility) as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Virtual care and digital therapeutics company Biofourmis launches Biofourmis Care, a chronic condition management system and virtual care team for heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, lipid management, and atrial fibrillation. The service includes automated medication management for optimizing therapy.

HIMSS22 in-person attendees who plan to voluntarily provide proof of COVID vaccination have until March 11 to use the pre-show online process of Safe Expo, which will send confirmation that allows picking up a conference badge. Attendees who used Safe Expo for HIMSS21 can use last year’s verification based on their email address, which took me a grand total of perhaps 10 seconds today (good job on that, HIMSS). The alternative is to show vaccination proof or a negative result no older than from the previous day at the onsite verification desk, which is ideal for folks who want to kick off their HIMSS22 experience by waiting in line (or “on line” for you New Yorkers).

For those who were annoyed by the HIMSS21 virtual program ambassadors (Dr. Jayne was, emphatically) they will be back for HIMSS22, adding nearly zero value with their chirpy omnipresence.

Other

In Netherlands, the government’s National Coordination Center for Patient Spreading – which hoped to address COVID-19 admission surges by distributing patients across multiple hospitals – paid $1.4 million for a real-time hospital capacity tracking system that was developed by two of the organization’s advisors. The manually updated system proved to be unreliable, to the point that seriously ill patients were being taken to hospitals that showed available beds even though they were full. The government eventually bought the software company itself in a no-bid deal.

Sponsor Updates

• The local paper profiles Cooper University Health Care’s implementation of Nuance’s Dax ambient clinical intelligence solution.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Handling Hospital Notifications with Direct Messaging.”
• AGS Health will exhibit at the ACDIS Virtual Summit February 16-17.
• OptimizeRx CEO William Febbo will speak at the Bank of America Annual HCIT and Digital Health Conference February 23.
• Nordic releases a new podcast, “How interoperability and cloud transformations can support healthcare organizations.”
• Commitment to customer success drives growth at RCxRules in 2021.
• Surescripts congratulates DAW Systems, winner of the 2021 Surescripts White Coat Award for highest e-prescribing accuracy.
• SyTrue caps off a year of tremendous growth in its client base, number of employees, and transaction volume.
• Verato publishes a new report, “Achieving a 360 Degree View of the Patient: Why Accurate Patient Identity is Critical to Health System Success.”

Blog Posts

• Why value-based purchasing matters now to home health agencies (Ability Network)
• Where Will “Homeless Data” Live? (Nordic)
• 5 questions for identifying candidate processes for automation in healthcare (Olive)
• Healthcare Trends in 2022: Top 6 Needs to Consider for Medical Groups (PerfectServe)
• Accelerate the Healthcare Provider Onboarding Process (Symplr)
• Two Healthcare Supply Chain Technologies to Get Excited About (Premier)
• From surviving to thriving – how health plans can drive change and improve healthcare (Redox)
• 4 Prescribing Flags in the EHR – And How Real-Time Prescription Benefit Solves Them (RxRevu)
• Top health technology hazards (and how to address them) (Spok)
• NLP Solutions Can Drive Payer Efficiencies – But They Are Not All Equal (SyTrue)
• The 5 pros and cons of contact center BPO (Talkdesk)
• An Update from our CEO: Another Strong Year for RCxRules and Our Clients (RCx Rules)
• Healthcare Can’t Go Backward When the Pandemic Ends (Tegria)
• EMR or Claims? Here’s Why You Need Both. (TriNetX)
• Patient Engagement Best Practices for Life Science Companies (Twistle)
• Simplify Clinical Communication with Vocera Cloud-Based Solutions (Vocera)
• Today the world, tomorrow the moon (Volpara Health)
• You’ve Landed a New Patient: Now What? (WebPT)
• A 2022 Guide to Choosing a Patient Engagement Platform (Well Health)

Contacts

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

News 2/11/22

Top News

AndHealth — which offers app-based, employer-sponsored treatment, coaching, and medication management for migraine – comes out of stealth mode and raises $57 million in funding.

Investors include Francisco Partners and the AMA’s venture capital arm.

The company will launch a second service line for autoimmune diseases.

AndHealth’s founder and CEO is Matt Scantland, who co-founded and led CoverMyMeds through its $1.4 billion acquisition by McKesson in 2017.

Reader Comments

From Orion Pictures: “Re: HIMSS22. An internal document I saw lists just [unverified number omitted] people attending, which also includes at least some vendors.” I’m hesitant to publish the number that was cited because (a) it’s super low; and (b) my only HIMSS contact who would have verified its accuracy no longer works there. HIMSS claims that nearly 19,000 people – including exhibitor staff – attended HIMSS21 in person, although it sure didn’t look like that many. We’re just a month away and COVID-19 is waning a bit, so I would say everybody has already decided if they are going or not. I’ll be doing my usual daily write-ups, although I expect to be COVID-robbed of my beloved MedData scones.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors – submit your participation information in the ViVE and HIMSS conferences and I’ll include your company in my guide to each.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Owl. Owl gives behavioral health organizations better data, better insights, and better outcomes with its data-driven, evidence-based solutions. Leading organizations — including Main Line Health, Amita Health, Inova Health, Polara Health, and Aurora Mental Health Center — rely on Owl to expand access to care, improve clinical outcomes, and prepare for value-based care. Owl makes measurement-based care easy to engage patients, optimize treatment, improve care, reduce clinician burden, and capture data to optimize business performance. Thanks to Owl for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HealthX Ventures invests in Ideawake, which offers a platform for healthcare leaders to engage employees and their ideas for saving money and improving care via time-based challenges that are transparently tracked. I interviewed CEO Coby Skonord last fall, who summarized, “It empowers anyone at the front lines of the organization, regardless of role or title, to make their voice heard based upon the quality of their idea versus their job title.”

Nuance announces Q1 results: revenue down 7%, adjusted EPS $0.08 versus $0.20. The company’s acquisition by Microsoft remains on track for the end of the first calendar quarter.

Ascension will turn over operation of its hospital-based laboratories in 10 states to Labcorp, which will also buy the health system’s outreach lab business. Ascension will also offer patients services of pharma contract research organization Labcorp Drug Development, which the company created in 2014 with its acquisition of Covance for nearly $6 billion.

Cloud services company 2nd Watch acquires cloud data and analytics consultancy Aptitive.

Thirty Madison, which runs online businesses for hair loss, migraines, GI problems, and allergies, will acquire Nurx, which offers female-focused online services for contraception, STI testing, HIV prevention, and dermatology. Thirty Madison says its combined businesses will bring in $300 million in revenue in 2022.

Germany-based Ada, which offers AI-based health assessments and care, extends its Series B funding round to $120 million. The company plans to expand aggressively into the US market.

Israel-based Scopio, which offers slide-scanning and AI analysis technology to allow peripheral blood smears to be analyzed by pathologists remotely, raises $50 million.

Sales

• Jupiter Medical Center (FL) will deploy Vocera’s Smartbadge wearable and Edge smartphone app for team communication and collaboration. It will also implement Vocera Ease application to allow care team members to communicate with patient-designated friends and family members.

People

Healthwise names Andy Binder, MS, MBA (HP) as COO.

Pharmacy solutions vendor Transaction Data Systems hires Robert Ven (Intrado) as CTO.

Socially Determined hires Paul Matsui (The Antigrav Group) as chief strategy officer and Mike Considine (TransUnion) as chief product officer.

Sandeep Sabharwal, MBA (Accenture) joins Impact Advisors a managing partner and board member.

Announcements and Implementations

CoverMyMeds publishes its annual Medication Access Report, with these findings:

• 84% of patients had to delay or skip in-person healthcare visits in 2021, with primary care being the most-missed visits.
• The percentage of patients who skipped medications because of cost rose from 36% in 2020 to 51% in 2021.
• 84% of patients had a telehealth visit in 2021, about equally split between PCPs and specialists. Their most commonly stated reasons for choosing telehealth were COVID-19, convenience, and reduced wait time.
• Nearly all respondents say they have electronic access to their medical records and can share it with providers.
• Three-fourths of providers can’t see plan-specific prescription costs, deductibles, and pharmacy-specific pricing  in their EHR. Nearly all can’t see social determinants of health information.
• Pharmacists say that the highest-value task they can’t perform on their computer system is checking prior authorization status. They also note that providers don’t usually submit prior authorization requests until the pharmacy contacts them, which delays treatment.

Ascom forms new professional services and customer success organizations to support its healthcare collaboration and communication solutions business.

Government and Politics

US Senators Bill Cassidy, MD (R-LA) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) form a commission that will make recommendations to Congress about updating HIPAA.

NBC News covers ONC’s December 31 deadline for certified EHR developers to provide FHIR APIs, also noting the progress that has been made in the industry’s implementation of EHRs. .

A GAO report reviews the military’s expansion of telehealth for mental health services during the pandemic, with these lessons learned:

• March 2020 guidance allowed providers to use consumer videoconferencing technologies such as FaceTime and to offer services using their personal devices.
• Use of telehealth reduced the stigma of seeking mental health care since in-person services required sitting in a clinic waiting room in full uniform that includes service member name.
• Group sessions were problematic because of confidentiality concerns, the need to train providers on how to lock the virtual room to uninvited participants, and the level of computer equipment and web camera required.
• Providers need to obtain the location and contact information of patients at high risk or with suicidal thoughts so that local authorities can be contacted to perform a wellness check if contact is lost.
• Providers were given training on the technology, the administrative process, and the privacy requirements of conducting virtual visits.

A new report finds that 14% of 1,000 randomly selected hospitals are complying with the HHS requirement that they post their real prices online. HCA Healthcare, Ascension, and CommonSpirit Health – whose combined revenue is $120 billion — had just two compliant hospitals of their 361.

Other

KLAS reports that some Cerner customers are forming contingency plans in reacting to company changes that include hiring a new CEO, a revenue cycle management pivot, executive turnover, and an announced acquisition by Oracle. Notes:

• Cerner’s overall KLAS performance scores haven’t changed over five years and under three CEOs, while confidence in the company’s ability to deliver has declined.
• Some customers attribute their success to their own efforts rather than those of Cerner.
• CEO David Feinberg will need to improve overall customer success, break the company’s history of broken promises and nickel-and-diming, and establish its new revenue cycle product.
• Many customers question Cerner’s choice of the old Soarian platform to develop RevElate, noting that the product is rated only in the 60s and sometimes takes customers years to use effectively. They also question how the lack of native integration will work in an industry that has mostly moved away from standalone applications.
• Company acquisitions tend to work out well about half the time, and when they don’t, customers are twice as likely to abandon the vendor.

The Wall Street Journal notes the sudden proliferation of mashed-up CIO titles to reflect wider responsibilities beyond infrastructure and experience that becomes more customer-focused and operational. Examples: chief technology, operations, and transformation officer (CTOTO) and chief information, data, and digital officer.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Growth Partners advises NThrive in its acquisition of Pelitas.
• Impact Advisors celebrates its 15th anniversary.
• Symplr completes its acquisition of Midas Health Analytics solutions from Conduent.
• Lumeon names Brittany Jones (Memora Health) senior director of business development.
• NTT has been selected by the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System to provide Medicaid Enterprise Systems Roadmap consulting services for Arizona and Hawaii.

Blog Posts

• Social Determinants of Health: Closing the Gap (Get Well)
• Leveraging Everyday Technology to Improve Diabetes Outcomes for Patients Battling Social Determinants of Health (Glytec)
• A 4-Step Approach to Medical Device Security (The HCI Group)
• 2022 Outlook: Health Insurers Face Tech Challenges (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• We Need to Talk: Why Vital Conversations Are So Important in Healthcare (Healthwise)
• Clinical Data is a Resource Waiting To Be Tapped (Diameter Health)
• 20 Heart-Healthy Ways to Fit Exercise into Your Workday (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Biden administration’s new cybersecurity directive champions Zero Trust (Imprivata)
• Browsing the Future of Healthcare (InterSystems)
• The role of clinical terminology in pharmacogenomics (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Leveraging Patient Access APIs to Optimize Risk Adjustment Efforts (LexisNexis Risk Solutions)
• Caring for the Caregivers Through Better Service (Medhost)
• 5 Stories of Success with Meditech Solutions (Meditech)
• A Banner Year for Integrated Behavioral Health (NeuroFlow)
• What is patient engagement to a Patient Access Center Manager? A CEO’s primer (Nuance)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 2/10/22

Thirty Madison and Nurx to merge, creating the leading virtual specialty care platform

Thirty Madison, a direct-to-consumer telemedicine company focused on chronic conditions, acquires Nurx, which offers women virtual care for dermatology and reproductive and sexual health.

Compliancy Group Announces Aldrich Capital Partners has committed to invest $75 million

Compliancy Group, a New York-based HIPAA compliance software and training business, secures a $75 million investment from Aldrich Capital Partners.

Tabula Rasa Healthcare to Sell DoseMeRx

Medication risk management vendor Tabula Rasa Healthcare decides to put its DoseMeRx precision dosing software, acquired in 2018, up for sale.

Morning Headlines 2/9/22

Curve Health Raises $12M in Oversubscribed Series A

Curve Health, which helps hospitals and nursing homes coordinate and manage patient care, raises $12 million in a Series A funding round.

VisuWell raises $10.1 million, plans to nearly double workforce

Telemedicine company VisuWell raises $10.1 million in a funding round that could grow to over $12 million.

Fivos Health Announces the Spin-off of Its Cardiovascular Imaging Business into Astute Imaging

Data solutions vendor Fivos, formerly known as Medstreaming/M2S, will spin off its imaging services business as Astute Imaging, which offers pre- and post-surgery planning and follow-up tools.

Clearlake Capital-backed NThrive to acquire Pelitas

Revenue cycle management company NThrive will acquire Pelitas, which offers solutions for patient access, digital intake, and front-end RCM.

News 2/9/22

Top News

Highlights from the just-announced Best in KLAS awards:

• Epic, Nordic, Galen Healthcare, and The Chartis Group were named as overall best.
• Epic won Best in KLAS awards in 11 market segments.
• Most-improved products include Infor ERP and Greenway Intergy Practice Management.
• Epic was the top-rated physician practice vendor by far, followed by Athenahealth, NextGen Healthcare, Greenway Health Intergy, Allscripts, and EClinicalWorks.
• Topping the overall software suite rankings was Epic, followed by Meditech Expanse, Cerner, CPSI Evident Thrive, and Allscripts.
• Nordic led overall IT services firms, followed by Pivot Point Consulting, Bluetree Network, Experis Health, Impact Advisors, Engage, and Cerner.

KLAS also announced the global software (non-US) winners. Some highlights:

• Nearly all respondents have adopted virtual visit technology.
• Digital pathology is growing rapidly in Europe.
• Top acute care EMR winners are InterSystems TrakCare EPR (Asia/Oceania), Epic (Canada and Europe), Philips (Latin America), and Cerner (Middle East/Africa).

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Volpara Health. The company has acquired CRA Health, LLC and Volpara Risk Pathways is its new solution. It is a complete program for identifying and managing patients who are at high risk for breast cancer. The company applies world-class knowledge and over 15 years of experience in risk and genetics to help prevent advanced-stage cancer. Volpara Risk Pathways can identify lifetime and hereditary high-risk patients in any setting, including primary care, OB-GYN, and imaging. This solution interfaces or integrates with EHRs and genetic testing labs without compromising time or workflow. Volpara Risk Pathways is more than just a score, offering guidelines, recommendations, and tools to help coordinate care for patients at elevated risk. Let Volpara Health leverage its vast experience, including performing over 2 million assessments annually, to help build or improve your high-risk program with both product and consulting expertise. Thanks to Volpara Health for supporting HIStalk.

I found this YouTube video describing Volpara Health’s intelligent cancer screening workflow.

HIStalk sponsors, your company can be listed in my conference guides simply by sending me contact and participation information, even if you are attending but not exhibiting. Fill out the forms for ViVE and/or HIMSS22. 

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Revenue cycle management company NThrive will acquire Pelitas, which offers solutions for patient access, digital intake, and front-end RCM. Pelitas won Best in KLAS for patient access in 2019, 2020, and 2022.

Data solutions vendor Fivos, formerly known as Medstreaming/M2S, will spin off its imaging services business as Astute Imaging, which offers pre- and post-surgery planning and follow-up tools. Medstreaming founders Elseaidy and Ewald de Vries will run the business.

E-consult company AristaMD acquires Preferral, which offers referral management, analytics, and document routing software. Preferral founder and CTO Jon Gautsch will become SVP at AristaMD.

Telemedicine company VisuWell raises $10.1 million. President and COO Gerry Andrady took on the CEO role last April after predecessor Sam Johnson was fired after being caught on video in an altercation with 18-year-old Dalton Stevens, who was was wearing a dress on their way to the high school prom.

Healthcare advisory and analytics firm Press Ganey will acquire Forsta, a customer experience and market research technology business. Press Ganey Chief Strategy Officer Darren Dworkin is a health IT industry veteran, having worked in executive roles at Cedars-Sinai, Boston Medical Center, Stanson Health, and Summation Health Ventures.

Neura Health, a membership-based virtual clinic specializing in headache and migraine treatments, raises $2.2 million in seed funding. The company plans on collecting a massive, anonymized data set of neurological conditions and outcomes to share with researchers and pharmaceutical companies.

Curve Health raises $12 million in a Series A funding round. The startup helps hospitals and nursing homes coordinate and manage patient care.

I missed this during the holiday break: RWJBarnabas Health Children’s Specialized Hospital (NJ) and Pinnacle Solutions have launched Predictive Health Solutions. The new business will offer technology focused on improving patient outcomes, initially focusing on reducing appointment no-shows.

Sales

• King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in England will go live on Epic next year.
• Nebraska-based HIE CyncHealth selects HealthEC’s population health technology and services.
• Community Care of North Carolina selects Bamboo Health’s Pings care coordination and notification software.

People

Healthcare workforce optimization company Prolucent Health names Dan Owens (PatientPoint) CTO.

Greg Miller (Talkdesk) joins Lumeon as chief growth officer.

Announcements and Implementations

NorthBay Healthcare (CA) implements Oracle Cloud ERP and human capital management software with assistance from Alithya Group.

In Australia, cancer center Chris O’Brien Lifehouse goes live on Meditech Expanse.

Amazon Care will expand its employer-contracted urgent and primary care services, which are offered both virtually and in-person, to 20 new cities this year.

Government and Politics

Training issues still plague the DoD’s Cerner-powered MHS Genesis system, according to an annual oversight report from the DoD’s Office of the Director, Operational Test, and Evaluation. Nearly 75% of the report’s survey respondents consider the program’s computer-based training to be “poor,” though a new initiative to give users hands-on practice in a mock environment did see improvement. The report ultimately concludes that the system “is not yet survivable in a cyber-contested environment.”

Other

JAMA publishes guidelines on how hospitals can meet the CMS requirement that they assess their EHR safety using the SAFER Guides, which is provided by SAFER Guides developers Dean Sittig, PhD; Patricia Sengstack, DNP; and Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH.

Athenahealth clarifies its COVID-19 vaccination policy, telling a local paper that the vaccine will no longer be mandated for employees who don’t directly interact with customers. Unvaccinated employees, presumably those who work in the office, must provide a weekly negative test result. All employees have the option to work from home until June.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom signs an agreement with Champs Group Purchasing, giving its members access to Ascom’s communications workflow technology.
• Clearwater promotes Chris Dowhan to principal consultant and Leeanne Lane to director of contracting.
• Divurgent releases a new episode of its podcast, The Vurge, focusing on women in technology.
• Surescripts recaps its 2021 accomplishments, including enhancements to and expanded use of its Medication History services.

Blog Posts

• Oracle and Cerner: Epic Challenger or Epic Failure? (Medicomp Systems)
• What’s the difference between Credentialing & Contracting a provider? (AdvancedMD)
• An initial deployment of IMPAX progresses to Norway’s first EI go-live of Agfa HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging Solution (Agfa HealthCare)
• Automated Tools Save Staff Time in Meditech Expanse Patient Accounting Desktop (PAD) (Cerecore)
• How States Are Trying to Better Understand the Nuances of Pandemic Data (Dimensional Insight)
• One Key for 2022: Staying Focused on Patients (EClinicalWorks)
• How Alternative Payment Models are Revolutionizing Healthcare (Enlace Health)
• Better care starts with better patient identity management (Experian Health)

These HIStalk sponsors were named as Best in KLAS. If I missed your company or if you are signing up as a new sponsor, let me know and I’ll do an addendum.

• Arcadia.io (value-based care management services).
• Change Healthcare (payer IT consulting services).
• Fortified Health Security (security and privacy managed services).
• HCTec/Talon Healthy IT Services (partial IT outsourcing).
• Health Data Movers (HIT implementation leadership, small).
• Impact Advisors (security and privacy consulting services).
• Imprivata (access management).
• InterSystems (interoperability platforms).
• Lyniate (integration engines).
• Meditech (acute care EMR, community hospital; home health, small; patient accounting and patient management, community hospital).
• Nordic (overall IT services firm; HIT implementation leadership, large; revenue cycle optimization; technical services).
• Nuance (speech recognition, front-end EMR).
• Premier (value-based care consulting).
• Sectra (PACS, large; PACS, small).
• Symplr (time and attendance; clinical communications).
• Well Health (patient outreach).
• Wolters Kluwer (infection control and monitoring).
• Zynx Health (clinical decision support – care plans and order sets).

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 2/7/22

Top News

Premier reports Q2 results: revenue down 10%, adjusted EPS $0.73 versus $0.65, beating Wall Street expectations for both.

The pandemic caused an 18% drop in supply chain revenue, while the company’s Performance Services segment – which includes analytics software – saw a 15% revenue increase. PINC shares are up 7% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 2% gain, valuing the company at $4.5 billion.

From the earnings call:

• The company’s analysis of its PINC AI data finds that health system clinical employees are working 50% more hours than they did pre-pandemic.
• Premier is addressing purchasing inefficiencies by scaling its e-invoicing and e-payables technologies with its Remitra supply chain-focused digital payments solution.
• The company is partnering with life sciences companies on prospective research.
• Premier will offer Qventus’s patient flow solution and develop new AI-based solutions with the company.
• The company sees opportunities in clinical decision support, prior authorization automation, and HCC coding.

Reader Comments

From Bob Pshaw: “Re: the HIMSS BrandHIT Marketing Summit. I just realized that this HIMSS conference, which launched in 2017 to help vendors sell stuff, seems to have died quickly and quietly. Heard anything?” The conference, which was presented by HIMSS Media in a startling display of not even pretending to be journalistically objective, seems to have lasted two iterations, one in Las Vegas and the other in Nashville. That’s not exactly a testimonial to the topic in which it claimed expertise, and neither was the inconsistent name that HIMSS used to promote it (sometimes calling it Brand HIT, others BrandHIT, sometimes both in adjacent sentences). I assume HIMSS Media still runs its Media Lab, which sells marketing services, content, webinars, and basically paid access to HIMSS members.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents show a preference for self-scheduling via a webpage rather than an app. Mario brings up the point that contactless appointments don’t triage based on patient need and are therefore problematic, while Rebecca notes that her least-favorite scheduling option is when the practice just tells her when to show up without asking first.

New poll to your right or here: Which factor would most entice you to seek information from a conference booth exhibitor?

Listening: Bartees Strange, who joyously follows his ear in veering from hard-charging rock to melodic hip-hop and making it all sound good.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Enlace Health of Columbus, OH. The Connected World of Enlace empowers payers, providers, and patients to participate together in an economically sound environment. Enlace Health solves healthcare from the inside out, fixing healthcare at its core. The Enlace solution is the only end-to-end infrastructure that bridges the gap between the current, chaotic system and an orderly healthcare world. Enlace always meets clients where they are, creating solutions based on need and maturity in value-based care. Enlace is Sustainable Healthcare. Delivered. Thanks to Enlace Health for supporting HIStalk.

I found this introductory video for Enlace Health on YouTube.

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

Webinars

February 9 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “2022 – Industry Predictions and Medicomp Roadmap.” Sponsor: Medicomp Systems. Presenters: David Lareau, CEO, Medicomp Systems; Jay Anders, MD, chief medical officer, Medicomp Systems; Dan Gainer, CTO, Medicomp Systems. The presenters will provide an update on the health IT industry and a review of the company’s milestones and insights that it gained over the past two years. Topics will include Cures Act implications, interoperability, AI, ambient listening, telehealth-first primary care, chronic care management, and new Quippe functionality and roadmap.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF (EDOC) dropped 10% in the past month versus the Nasdaq’s 11% loss. Digital health stocks have been on a tear lately, “tear” being the kind that pours from the eyes of investors who have watched their former high-flying companies auger into the hard ground of reality, especially those that took the SPAC back door. Private equity seems better suited lately to make startups successful compared to taking those companies public prematurely to ride an investment wave-slash-bubble, so we may see more companies exiting public markets after short, unsuccessful visits there.

Sales

• ChartWise Medical Systems selects SyTrue’s Natural Language Processing Operating System to mine structured and unstructured chart data into its NotePath AI-based chart review system.

People

Terri Sanders, MPH, formerly chief marketing and communications officer of HIMSS, joins Kivvit as managing director.

Announcements and Implementations

Labcorp launches OnDemand, which allows consumers to buy lab tests online and either collect samples at home or at its patient service centers. Competitor Quest offers a similar service, which is also marketed through Walmart. Physicians approve the tests behind the scenes in both cases, in Labcorp’s case via PWNHealth, for which Labcorp absorbs its $6.50 fee in the test purchase price.

Other

Ventilator manufacturer Vyaire Medical warns users of certain models to turn off the HL7 communication option after customers reported that the devices “unintentionally ceased ventilation during clinical use and require rebooting to resume ventilation.”

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “How Records in Prisma Overcame a Language Barrier.”
• Fortified Health Security publishes its “2022 Horizon Report: The State of Cybersecurity in Healthcare.”
• OptimizeRx will present at BTIG’s MedTech, Digital Health, Life Science & Diagnostic Tools Conference February 15, and SVB Leerink’s virtual Global Healthcare Conference February 17.
• Olive announces the five winners of its Hack for Health developer contest.
• Frost & Sullivan has recognized Wolters Kluwer Health with its 2021 North American Company of the Year Award.
• Kyruus announces results from 2021, including expanding its customer base by 25 new healthcare organizations and expanding its online scheduling platform, among other achievements.
• Talkdesk appoints Tom Reilly (Cloudera) to its board.
• Vocera’s clinical communication and workflow solutions are now available for procurement through the NHS Shared Business Services Patient/Citizen Communications and Engagement Framework.
• Well Health announces its 2021 Well Health Award Winners.
• Arcadia publishes an analysis of data involving COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized and discharged from US hospitals in 2020.
• Zen Healthcare IT President and co-founder Marilee Benson has been selected to join The Carequality Advisory Council and the HIMSS Interoperability and HIE Committee.

Blog Posts

• Tapping Technology to Empower Your Workforce (Netsmart)
• How Empathy Can Help Reduce Hospital Readmissions (PatientBond)
• 4 Vendor Relationship Management Strategies for Healthcare (Symplr)
• Coming Soon! Tiny Talk Video Series with Our Privacy Experts (Protenus)
• 5 Ways to Make It Easier to Stay in Our Homes as We Age (Quil Health)
• Providers Are at the Center of Tech-Enabled Care Access (RxRevu)
• Founder Letter: How the Patient Experience Shaped WebPT’s Product Roadmap (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 2/4/22

Top News

Healthcare investment firm Patient Square Capital will acquire acute care telemedicine platform vendor SOC Telemed for $3 per share, about $300 million. That is a 366% premium to the company’s closing share price Wednesday before the announcement.

SOC went public via a SPAC merger in November 2020, with shares opening at $10.

TLMD shares had dropped to around 60 cents prior to the acquisition announcement, with a market cap in the $65 million range

SOC Telemed’s Q3 earnings report from November 2021 showed a loss of $11 million on revenue of $27 million.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor NeuroFlow. The Philadelphia-based company provides best-in-class technology and care services for the effective integration of behavioral health. NeuroFlow’s HIPAA-compliant platform supports over 14 million users across 300 health systems, payors, and organizations, helping them capture behavioral health insights and take action to proactively manage individuals and populations holistically. I noted that co-founder and CEO Christopher Molaro, MBA graduated from West Point and served as a US Army platoon leader deployed to Iraq. Thanks to NeuroFlow for supporting HIStalk.

I found this YouTube video from NeuroFlow that explains how the company’s technology supports organizations that embrace the collaborative care model.

Webinars

February 9 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “2022 – Industry Predictions and Medicomp Roadmap.” Sponsor: Medicomp Systems. Presenters: David Lareau, CEO, Medicomp Systems; Jay Anders, MD, chief medical officer, Medicomp Systems; Dan Gainer, CTO, Medicomp Systems. The presenters will provide an update on the health IT industry and a review of the company’s milestones and insights that it gained over the past two years. Topics will include Cures Act implications, interoperability, AI, ambient listening, telehealth-first primary care, chronic care management, and new Quippe functionality and roadmap.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Advisory CPA firm Baker Tilly, US acquires health IT consulting firm Orchestrate Healthcare. Baker Tilly says it will continue to invest heavily in digital health to support providers who need to control costs and adopt new business models while continuing to deliver high-quality care. The company has 3,150 healthcare organization customers. The 120-employee Orchestrate offers services for EHR implementation. analytics, IT security and health IT staffing.

Relaxation app vendor Calm acquires Ripple Health Group, which offers a care coordination platform. Ripple’s CEO will serve as co-CEO with Calm’s founder and the combined companies will develop a replacement for its Calm for Business app.

Change Healthcare reports Q3 results: revenue up 10%, adjusted EPS $0.36 versus $0.34, meeting earnings expectations and beating on revenue. Its acquisition by UnitedHealth Group remains on track for sometime after February 22 and before its deadline of April 5.

Shares in Meta (Facebook) tanked 26% Thursday after the company reported its first-ever decline in quarterly user count and it warned of expected weaker revenue growth. The resulting $230 billion loss in market value was unprecedented. Meanwhile, Amazon’s shares jumped 17% in after-hours trading after it reported strong earnings and another increase in Prime annual pricing to $139, increasing its market value by around $250 billion.

Sales

• UCI Health will use Epic-integrated digital health solutions from Biofourmis to establish a virtual care for remote patient monitoring and hospital-at-home initiatives, replacing its legacy system.

People

Drug discount management platform vendor Kalderos names industry long-timer Brent Dover (Commure) as CEO.

Nym Health, which offers autonomous medical coding, hires Or Peles (Tasq.ai) as SVP of R&D.

Behavioral health EHR/PM vendor Kipu Health appoints Andy Eckert, MBA (Zelis) as board chair.

Real-world oncology data platform vendor COTA promotes Paige Whitney to SVP of life sciences.

Impact Advisors hires Randy Notes, MPH (RSM) as managing director of its margin improvement practice.

Eisenhower Medical Center (CA) hires Ken Buechele, MBA (Bronson Healthcare Group) as VP/CIO.

Availity hires Nathan von Colditz (McKinsey & Company) as chief strategy officer.

Janice Wurz (Scottsdale Institute) joins Garner as executive partner.

Pam Arora, MBA (Children’s Health) joins the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) as president and CEO.

CliniSys, which just acquired Horizon Lab Systems and merged with Sunquest Information Systems, names industry long-timer Mark Spencer (Abbott Informatics) as SVP of global strategy.

Announcements and Implementations

Memorial Health System Cancer Center (OH) implements Sonifi Health’s interactive platform, which offers on-demand movies, relaxation content, educational programs, and live programming.

A study finds that patient-generated behavioral health data can be reliably submitted via NeuroFlow’s app and was associated with a 50% reduction in suicidal thinking.

MedStar Health goes live on a patient experience platform from B.well Connected Health.

MyConnectSolutions adds virtual care capabilities to its MedConnect platform, powered by Bluestream Health.

Walmart will offer customers the ability to order lab tests from Quest’s QuestDirect online. Their order will be approved by a doctor when required and the company will then either mail the customer an at-home test kit or direct them to a Quest patient service center, depending on the test’s requirements. The patient can share their results with their doctor via Quest’s MyQuest portal.

Other

I ran across MedLion Clinic, which provides a glimpse into the commoditization of virtual primary care. The company’s “unlimited” plan costs $13 per month and offers customers in about half the US states 24×7 texting with an assigned doctor, scheduled video visits weekdays 9-6, management of both acute and chronic conditions, ordering of prescriptions and labs, and access to $1 medications.

The New York Times looks at the use of surveillance tracking by some cities in Japan to find people with dementia who wander, which is the leading cause of its missing persons cases. The country has adopted an “age in place” focus that leads to more wandering incidents. Digital solutions include security cameras, shoe-worn tracking devices, and QR tracking codes on the person’s fingernail. Caregivers initiate the registration process with a medical review required for approval, but individuals themselves are not required to give permission.

Sponsor Updates

• ReMedi Health Solutions publishes a free guide titled “The Health System’s Guide to Cerner in 2022.”
• Black Book names PerfectServe its top client-rated secure communications platform for 2022.
• Fortified Health Security names Ryan Jackson (Churchill Mortgage) billing specialist.
• Kyruus recaps its 2021 customer growth in which it added 25 provider organizations and increased revenue by 150% following its acquisition of HealthSparq.
• Health Data Movers promotes Brandon Camp to director of the project management office, and Michael Martin to director of interoperability.
• Lumeon completes SOC 2 Type II Certification for its Care Journey Orchestration platform.
• Meditech will host its virtual 2022 Home Care Symposium March 21-25.
• NTT Data retains its leader position in Everest Group’s annual Intelligent Automation in Healthcare Report.

Blog Posts

• How Holistic Data Helps Protect Patients and Enhance Clinician Experience (Philips Capsule)
• Study Shows Lower ED Readmission Rates with GetWell Loop (GetWell)
• The Emerging Role of a Chief Digital Officer in Healthcare: A Conversation with Craig Richardville – Part II (HCI Group)
• Vaccine & Testing Programs: Six Imperatives for HR Professionals (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Happyology at Impact Advisors: How It All Got Started (Impact Advisors)
• If 95% of cyber-attacks are due to human error, why have only 24% of clinicians been trained to avoid them? (Imprivata)
• How to create a problem list governance strategy (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Combating Cyberattacks: How Payers and Providers Are Managing Digital Identity Authentication (LexisNexis Risk Solutions)
• Are You Ready for the Updated CMS ECR Mandate? (Medhost)
• A Guide to Medicare Physical Therapy Caps in 2022 (MWTherapy)
• Offsetting the looming physician shortage (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 2/2/22

Top News

Post-acute care software vendor PointClickCare will acquire Audacious Inquiry, a Baltimore-based care notification and coordination technology company. Terms were not disclosed.

Canada-based PointClickCare acquired care coordination platform operator Collective Medical in December 2020 for $650 million. Its earlier acquisitions include Co-Pilot Analytics and QuickMar.

A year-ago minority investment reportedly valued PointClickCare at $4 billion.

Webinars

February 9 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “2022 – Industry Predictions and Medicomp Roadmap.” Sponsor: Medicomp Systems. Presenters: David Lareau, CEO, Medicomp Systems; Jay Anders, MD, chief medical officer, Medicomp Systems; Dan Gainer, CTO, Medicomp Systems. The presenters will provide an update on the health IT industry and a review of the company’s milestones and insights that it gained over the past two years. Topics will include Cures Act implications, interoperability, AI, ambient listening, telehealth-first primary care, chronic care management, and new Quippe functionality and roadmap.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Advanced care planning and virtual palliative care company Vynca raises $30 million. Vynca, which counts Intermountain, Ochsner, and Sutter health systems among its customers, acquired palliative care provider ResolutionCare last summer.

Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital will acquire Citrix for $16.5 billion. They will take the company private and merge it with Tibco Software, an enterprise data management company that includes healthcare providers and payers among its customers.

Seattle-based remote patient monitoring startup Measure Labs raises $4.7 million. CEO Jamien McCullum, CSO Matt Whitehill and CTO Eric Chen are entrepreneurs-in-residence at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which the company lists as an investor.

Cancer care navigation and experience platform vendor Jasper Health raises $25 million in a Series A funding round.

Digital diabetes management company Glooko acquires Xbird, a Berlin-based company that offers diabetes-focused predictive analytics and care management.

Healthcare consumer experiences platform vendor League raises a $95 million funding round. I can’t decipher exactly what it sells, but it has implemented an impressive array of buzzwords. The three co-founders, none of whom have healthcare experience, came from Kobo, a company that sold a e-reader that attempted to compete with Amazon’s Kindle.

Sales

• The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center will use WellSky’s care coordination software and home health service to care for heart failure patients after discharge.
• Cone Health (NC) will implement RadAI’s Continuity care coordination technology to ensure timely, appropriate care is delivered based on radiology reports.
• Walmart will offer its health plan enrollees personalized provider recommendations from Health at Scale, which covers 25 specialties and 34 procedures and imaging with “next best action.”

People

Nathalie McCaughley, MBA, MS (Cigna) joins Agfa HealthCare as president.

RapidAI names Karim Karti (IRhythm Technologies) as CEO.

Andrew Resnick, MD (Mass General Brigham) joins The Chartis Group as chief medical and quality officer.

Quantum Health names Veronica Knuth (CoverMyMeds) as chief people officer.

Pager names Simon Mathews, MD (Vivante Health) chief medical officer, Bulent Ugurlu (Optum) VP of engineering, and Max Anfilofyev (SOC Telemed) VP of product; and promotes Joe Martinez, RN to VP of virtual care and Alison Thomas (not pictured) to VP of partner solutions.

Jessica Beegle, JD — who has worked in healthcare business development for GE, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Walgreens Health – joins for-profit hospital operator LifePoint Health as SVP/chief innovation officer. 

Allscripts promotes Salman Naqvi, MBBS, MPH to VP of professional services.

ResMed hires Urvashi Tyagi, MS, MBA (ADP) as CTO, where she will lead the company’s digital health technology team and investments. She replaces Bobby Ghoshal, MBA, who was previously promoted to president of the company’s SaaS business unit.

Announcements and Implementations

Hackensack Meridian Health (NJ) implements data integration, quality, and management capabilities from Informatica.

Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula says its use of the care management platform of Force Therapeutics helped reduce 90-day admissions following total joint arthroplasty procedures by 26%.

Azara Healthcare launches Care Connect, a care coordination application that draws data from its analytics platform and integrates it with health plan data to support outreach teams.

AliveCor launches the FDA-cleared KardiaMobile Card, a $149 credit card-sized personal ECG device that pairs with smartphones using Bluetooth to detect six common types of arrhythmias. Purchase requires signing up for a $99, automatically renewing annual membership.

Government and Politics

A GAO report finds that the VA did not establish performance measures and goals for migrating data from VistA to Cerner Millennium and HealteIntent before initial go-live in October 2020. The VA concurred with GAO’s recommendation that it establish and use data performance measures and use a stakeholder register make sure reporting needs are addressed. The VA notes that any VistA data can be extracted, packaged, and sent to Cerner automatically even in the absence of a database model, 80% of critical reports are now using Cerner-generated data, and its data migration team is monitoring VistA for changes and patches that may require regenerating extraction code to keep data flowing.

ONC will convene the virtual education sessions of its annual meeting Wednesday and Thursday. Topics include information blocking, TEFCA/QHIN, public health IT coordination, Lantern FHIR tool update, and USCDI expansion.

Other

A Stat special report recaps the 40-year history of what is now IBM Watson Health’s MarketScan, soon to be owned by private equity firm Francisco Partners. The business that was originally known as Medstat holds the employer-provided, de-identified records of 270 million Americans, but Medstat founder Ernie Luder expresses fears that instead of creating disruptive healthcare change in the insurance industry as he had hoped in the pre-Internet era, consumers are losing control of information about them as companies profit from it without their express permission. An attorney and bioethics professor says that the federal government has allowed big businesses “to run amok without almost any regulation whatsoever,” to the point that it’s easier for academic researchers to buy their data from private companies. 

Sponsor Updates

• Cerner distributes 120 gently used laptops and 49 phones to eight charitable partners.
• Agfa HealthCare becomes certified under the Service Capability & Performance Standards.
• Azara Healthcare publishes a new report, “The Future of Population Health 2022.”
• Netsmart becomes the first post-acute technology vendor with its MyUnity EHR to achieve ONC-Health IT 2015 Edition Health IT Certification.
• CHIME releases speaker highlights for ViVE, which will take place March 6-9 in Miami Beach.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of its Informonster Podcast featuring Lyniate Chief Strategy Officer Drew Ivan.
• OBIX Perinatal Data System, developed by Clinical Computer Systems, launches The Perinatal Heartbeat Newsletter.
• Bamboo Health becomes a preferred vendor of the Association for Community Affiliated Plans.

Blog Posts

• 2022 CPT Code Updates: Part Three (AGS Health)
• Three Predictions for Healthcare IT in 2022 (Ascom)
• Healthcare CRM Software: What Health Systems Really Need (Actium Health)
• A Summary of Our 2021 Annual Impact Report (Bamboo Health)
• The Power of Diligence on Data Privacy (CereCore)
• Improving the Patient Experience for Better Outcomes (Change Healthcare)
• Optimum Healthcare IT Completes 200th Training & Go-Live Project (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• IT and Digital Healthcare Trends to Expect in 2022 (ChartLogic)
• Four Big Implications for Patients and the Prescription Journey in 2022 (ConnectiveRx)
• Highlights from 2022 Drug Formulary Updates (CoverMyMeds)
• Proof in the Numbers: How Divurgent Supported MultiCare to Meaningfully Move the Needle on Their Epic Adoption (Divurgent)
• The Right Tools During Challenging Times (EClinicalWorks)
• How Novant Health automated healthcare collections (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 1/31/22

Top News

Politico reports that Crisis Text Line, a non-profit that uses big data and AI to provide text-based behavioral support, shares its anonymized text conversations with a for-profit spinoff that sells customer service software.

Experts question whether the data could be re-identified. They also note that its 50-paragraph disclosure form allows user data to be shared without further user consent, including with Facebook Messenger.

Crisis Text Line’s founder and former CEO has said that text conversations are predictive of self-harm – “numbs” and “sleeves” is 99% predictive of cutting, while chat terms “sex,” “oral,” and “Mormon” indicates that the user is questioning whether they are gay.

The service offers help for COVID-19, anxiety, eating disorders, depression, suicide, and self-harm. It triages texters based on suicidal risk from their first few messages, moving “code orange” texters to the top of the queue in reaching them in an average of 39 seconds.

Reader Comments

From Undulation: “Re: DoD database. Three DoD doctors testified that data from its Defense Medical Epidemiology Database contains ICD codes that document massive side effects from COVID-19 vaccines. They cite numbers so extreme that I suspect they arise from database and/or EHR issues – as compared to five-year averages, an 300% increase in cancers, 269% increase in myocardial conditions, and a 1,000% increase in neurological conditions. I can’t find any fact checks on this.” I don’t know anything about DoD databases, but I’ll invite those who do to weigh in. The hearing was convened by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), whose chosen “second opinion” physician panelists are often labeled as misinformation spreaders. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

About one-fourth of poll respondents who didn’t attend HIMSS21 plan to go to HIMSS22, while 80% of those who attended HIMSS21 will be back this year.

New poll to your right or here: What is your ideal way to make a health-related appointment? I read a New York Times article today about restaurants that have stopped answering phones, believing that it’s more efficient for customers to message them via Instagram or other means instead of taking up employee time to speak to them in real time (some have also decided that a web page is unnecessary). Reader comments were fascinating: some claimed ageism by restaurants that only want young customers for whom actually speaking to someone has become an inconvenience, many don’t like giving big tech sites even more clout, and others said that this change (along with delivery services, ghost kitchens, etc.) will kill the industry since cooking at home is better and cheaper once the social aspects have been eliminated. Some comments wisely questioned why restaurants can’t have a regularly updated, non-social media page that shows wait time since that’s often what people want to know. A wonderfully sarcastic reader opined, “Many folks nowadays cannot handle phone calls because it requires immediate listening, thinking, and responding skills. Texting, email and app driven activities provide a buffer for the slower witted and conformist lot.” Anyway, my take is that the market will sort itself out it always does, and a restaurant that misjudges customer preferences will either reverse course or close. Ditto patient scheduling, at least to the extent that the healthcare market is actually competitive.

Home tech tip: Mrs. HIStalk wanted to stream a  movie from the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and bought a ticket, but Roku’s Online Festival Screenings app geoblocked us for some reason. Ten seconds of Googling alerted me that Roku devices now support AirPlay, which I didn’t know, so we streamed perfectly from her IPad to the Roku and TV.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Nym Health. The New York City-based company translates clinical language into accurate, compliant medical billing codes within seconds, automating revenue cycle management for healthcare providers. Combining computational linguistics and clinical intelligence, Nym’s autonomous medical coding platform is reducing costs and improving payment cycles for healthcare providers across the United States. Along with over 96% accuracy, Nym delivers comprehensive, audit-ready, traceable codes for full transparency. The Nym platform’s clinical language understanding engine processes over three million charts annually in more than 90 emergency department and urgent care settings. Thanks to Nym Health for supporting HIStalk.

I found this YouTube interview with Nym Health founder and CEO Amihai Neiderman, who explains the company’s technological approach to medical coding.

Eric Rosow reminded me in our conversation about the amazing vision of medical records pioneer Larry Weed, MD, which was well captured in his 1971 grand rounds presentation at Emory University, where he spoke eloquently without using notes. I was so taken by re-watching the primitive video recording that I transcribed the whole 53 minutes’ worth for posterity. For those who find a fascinating but long read daunting, here are some quotes, which were so far-reaching that whiz-bang app developers and freshly graduated medical students should still be inspired from them today.

• We really aren’t taking care of records — we take care of people. We’re trying to get across the idea that this record cannot be separated from the caring of that patient.
• You can’t look at the management of a single problem without knowing the context. What are all the problems?
• The practice of medicine is the way you handle data and think with it. The way you handle it determines the way you think.
• If you can’t audit a thing for quality, it means you do not have the means by which to produce quality … If you can’t evaluate what you’re doing, then there’s a very serious possibility that you do not know what you’re doing.
• Under pressure, if you let people get data in a Sherlock Holmes way, they get so they get less and less data, have more and more intuition, draw conclusions more and more prematurely, and get people into more and more trouble.
• This profession truly is a cottage industry, everybody wandering around defining his own game. And when you’re allowed to define your own game, you’re a fool not to define it in a way that you’re always the victor. Of course the medical profession gets the appearance of being arrogant and independent. Anybody that’s been allowed to define his own game all his life, that’s conducive to arrogance.
• The Lord and the chiropractors can get 85% of these people better. The only reason you run these fantastic establishments is to get that other 10%.
• You have to be ruthless with [the doctor] if he does not keep the problem list up to date so that anyone in seconds can be in context and make intelligent decisions.
• When someone says “I take care of that patient. I’m her doctor.” that’s fraudulent. No one points to a Pontiac and says, “I made that car.” A system makes that car.
• We’ve got to fix the system so that students are much more ashamed of being imprecise and dishonest than they are of being unsophisticated.
• Good medicine is a careful, rigorous inching your way towards a more and more secure position. A final diagnosis is a myth.
• In no place in American records do we have an organized approach to what we’re going to tell the patient.
• I’ve yet to have a doctor say to me, I was so busy I didn’t have time to order anything. He’s always so busy he didn’t have time to find out anything, but he’s always got time to order something.
• A doctor has to be a guidance system. He is not an oracle that knows answers. Once he accepts the concept of being a guidance system, then he knows that the data system is the basis from which all his work must take place.
• Art is Hemingway, three weeks on a single paragraph. It’s Bach recording in detail everything he did a couple hundred years ago so we can hear it today. It’s not a scribble in the middle of the night. It’s not saying, “I took good care of her,” leaving absolutely no trail for us to ever find out whether you did or did not. We debase the word art itself when we call what we’ve been doing art. And it’s not science.

Webinars

February 9 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “2022 – Industry Predictions and Medicomp Roadmap.” Sponsor: Medicomp Systems. Presenters: David Lareau, CEO, Medicomp Systems; Jay Anders, MD, chief medical officer, Medicomp Systems; Dan Gainer, CTO, Medicomp Systems. The presenters will provide an update on the health IT industry and a review of the company’s milestones and insights that it gained over the past two years. Topics will include Cures Act implications, interoperability, AI, ambient listening, telehealth-first primary care, chronic care management, and new Quippe functionality and roadmap.

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

Sales

• Mayo Clinic chooses Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite (ERP, supply chain, and HR) and Oracle Fusion Analytics.

People

Cleveland Clinic hires Rohit Chandra, PhD (Sunshine) to the newly created role of chief digital officer.

Patient payments and engagement platform vendor Millennia names Ankit Sharma, MBA (NThrive) as chief data and analytics officer.

Privacy and Security

Other

The New York Times says the government of China is using its digital COVID-19 pass as a “potent techno-authoritarian tool” to control its citizens – tracking them, restricting their movements, and locating fugitives and dissenters. The government was already tracking people by cell phone, but the app also allows them to control travel by using unspecified criteria to change the app’s health code from green to yellow.

The US Consulate issues a “health alert” that a hospital in Los Cabos, Mexico preys on Americans patients by demanding upfront payments, overcharging them, and refusing to release their medical records. Mexican Consulate, you know what to do.

Sponsor Updates

• Divurgent gives their Managed Services customers access to Zendesk’s service desk solutions.
• OptimizeRx will sponsor DigiPharma Connect February 27-March 1 in Savannah, GA.
• Olive publishes a new analysis, “How the pandemic and supply chain challenges have impacted surgical supplies.”
• Symplr announces a golf sponsorship program with four top-ranked professional golfers.
• Protenus will sponsor the HCCA Managed Care Compliance Conference in Phoenix January 30-February 1.
• Relatient’s Dash patient engagement platform achieves certified status for information security by HITRUST.
• The Pharmacy Podcast Network features Surescripts VP and CMIO Andrew Mellin, MD in “Welcome to the 21st Century for Specialty Pharmacy I UN-Scripted by Surescripts.”

Blog Posts

• False Claims Act and MAOs: Important Takeaways for Provider Groups (RCx Rules)
• Should Doctors Care About Your Address? (Nordic)
• Software in Cash-Based Practice, Part 1: Setting Up for Patient Care (WebPT)
• Notes from the Field: Perspective on the NACDS Regional (OmniSys)
• My Top 5 Reasons for Conducting Ongoing Continuous Risk Analysis (Clearwater)
• How to Avoid Stark Law and Anti-Kickback Statute Penalties (Symplr)
• Easing Nurse Burden and Exhaustion Through Technology (Vocera)
• Are We Breaking Up? Requesting a Second Opinion from Your Provider Without Ruining Your Relationship (PMD)
• Accelerate Your Analytics Journey with Insights (Premier)
• Voice assistants in healthcare: Why & how to use them (Sonifi Health)
• What is change management in healthcare? And why should you pay attention to it? (Spok)
• 9 Reasons to Focus on Patient Experience in 2022 (Well Health)

Contacts

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