News 12/8/21

Top News

The Spokane, WA newspaper talks to local patients and employees about the VA’s implementation of Cerner at the city’s Mann-Grandstaff Medical Center, reporting these issues:

• Two former senior VA officials who were involved in the project say it was misguided and is unlikely to improve on the existing VistA system.
• One hour after VA Deputy Secretary Donald Remy assured a House subcommittee that “The Cerner system works,” the system went down for 80 minutes and had at least some downtime 10 times in September and October. The system has gone fully down four times since it went live in October 2020.
• Former VA deputy CIO and CTO Ed Meagher said it is “absolute malpractice” that the VA did not anticipate performance problems by modeling workload against infrastructure, adding that otherwise, “you’re working off of Cerner marketing material.”
• Several veterans said they were unable to navigate the patient portal and it sometimes locks up and fails to deliver messages.
• Prescriptions were not transferred to Cerner, requiring mistake-prone manual re-entry that left some veterans without psychiatric and other chronic care medications.
• Employees sometimes have to fax medication lists when patients are sent to other facilities for emergency treatment that isn’t offered 24×7 at Mann-Grandstaff..
• The VA, which was the subject of a national wait-time scandal in 2014, has removed Mann-Grandstaff from the wait time web page because it hasn’t figured out how to measure wait times on Cerner.
• The VA’s training did not include the referral management module and one veteran whose urology referral was lost was found to have an untreated, aggressive form of prostate cancer when finally seen nine months later.
• A chief of anesthesiology said EHRs are billing systems with text editors tacked on while VistA was written by clinicians whose goal was to provide the best care possible. He says that Cerner told him that one online form requires 90 minutes to complete, and when doctors told the company that the nurse had under five minutes to examine the patient and document the visit, Cerner said they should hire more people.
• Meagher concluded, “What Cerner does best is capture billable events via exhaustive questions and back-and-forth as you input things. That’s what ties them up. They’re answering questions that are meaningless to them. They’re very meaningful to a commercial organization, because that’s how they get paid, but they’re meaningless to the VA.”

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the technologies that most often contribute to clinician burnout, then explain how improving common clinical workflows can help care teams collaborate better and focus on what they do best—taking care of patients. They will describe how a clinical communication and collaboration platform can automate clinical consults and code calls to alleviate burnout.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Accounting and advisory firm BDO USA acquires 90-employee Culbert Healthcare Solutions.

Healthcare voice AI vendor Suki raises $55 million in a Series C funding round that values the business at $400 million.

Change Healthcare will permanently lay off 170 employees in Pittsburgh in February.

Sales

• The Christ Hospital Health Network in Ohio will offer IncludeHealth’s virtual physical therapy service to its pre- and post-operative patients.
• Kidney care company Strive Health selects Bamboo Health’s Pings real-time admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) e-notifications; and interactive, real-time Spotlights performance metrics dashboards.

People

Valerie Simon (Rise Consulting) joins Lumeris as SVP and chief of marketing and communications.

Lee Taylor, MBA (Relatient) joins Health Catalyst as VP of sales. 

Geoff Gibson (Teladoc Health) joins Mend as VP of sales.

Wolters Kluwer Health promotes Greg Samios, MSE, MBA to president and CEO of the clinical effectiveness business unit.

Zach Wood, MBA (Surescripts) joins Well Health as head of corporate development.

Announcements and Implementations

Ochsner Health (LA) has implemented provider data management and API technologies from Kyruus to improve patient-provider matching on its website and apps.

Mach7 Technologies incorporates ImageMover’s EHR-integrated medical imaging capture technology into its vendor neutral archive and enterprise diagnostic viewer.

Surescripts leverages Diameter Health’s data optimization capabilities to ensure specialty pharmacies can easily access accurate patient data through the Surescripts Specialty Medications Gateway.

Holy Cross Health (FL) implements online patient appointment scheduling capabilities from DocASAP.

HCA Healthcare will go live on Meditech Expanse at three hospitals in New Hampshire by the end of 2022, with the assistance of CereCore.

A survey performed by the Center for Connected Medicine and KLAS finds that health system executives expect patient access to be the top area that will be improved by digital health. Respondents name telehealth as the greatest area of technology-driven improvement in the past two years, while 38% expect AI to be the most exciting emerging technology in the next two years but acknowledge that it hasn’t yet met expectations for improving patient outcomes. Nearly all of the respondents say their health systems are placing a high priority on improving access and most of those say they will invest in technology accordingly (most commonly used are telehealth, patient reminders, an online provider directory, and online bill pay). Just over half of responding health systems are using some form of a digital front door, but expect to continue improving and optimizing it while recognizing that not all patients want to connect digitally. Only 17% of respondents are using patient financial financial experience vendors such as Flywire, Patientco, and RevSpring. Health systems  like the idea of price transparency, but recognize that it’s hard to show a given patient their actual cost.

Other

A study using Epic Health Research Network finds that 91% of sore throat patients whose encounter was via telehealth are prescribed antibiotics without having a strep test performed (down from 98% pre-pandemic), while the test was done before prescribing (per AAFP recommendations) for in-office visits about half the time, raising concerns about future antimicrobial resistance.

An imaging magazine says that even though the just-concluded RSNA 2021 conference had two-thirds fewer professional attendees compared to pre-pandemic numbers, vendors were happier because the interactions they had were more serious in the absence of “tire-kickers.” It says that HIMSS21 similarly delighted exhibitors with one-third the usual attendance because only non-buyers stayed home (color me skeptical in a “make lemons into lemonade” sort of way now that brag-worthy record attendee numbers aren’t happening).

Sponsor Updates

• Availity rebrands its suite of provider products to Availity Essentials, and will soon give its customers the ability to gain access to additional payers throughout its network.
• The State of Delaware’s Treatment and Referral Network, built on Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds software, has in its first year seen a 45% increase in treatment referral requests and a 25% increase in the rapid acknowledgment of referrals.
• CHIME names University of Missouri Health Care CEO Jonathan Curtright and CIO Bryan Bliven winners of the 2021 CHIME-AHA Transformational Leadership Award.
• CloudWave congratulates 14 of its hospital partners for being recognized as part of CHIME’s Digital Health Most Wired program.
• Gartner includes Dimensional Insight in its 2021 “Hype Cycle for Healthcare Providers” report as a sample vendor in the Digital Analytics Architecture category.

Blog Posts

• Why Resilience is Not Enough for Today’s Healthcare Cybersecurity and Privacy Programs (Clearwater)
• Introducing: True remote diagnostic imaging workflow (Agfa HealthCare)
• Improve healthcare cybersecurity through Zero Trust (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise)
• Azara Mourns Loss of Cherished Colleague (Azara Healthcare)
• How the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule Creates a Vision for Interoperability and the Delivery of Whole Person Care (Bamboo Health)
• From EHR to Health IT Operations: 10 Ways to Lower Costs and Save Time (CereCore)
• HEDIS 2022 is Here: Everything Payers Must Know (Collective Medical)
• (Part 2) Reaching Patients Along the Specialty Medication Journey: Trusting Patients (ConnectiveRx)
• UMass Memorial Health: In-Home Hospital Care Focused on Equity (Current Health)
• Toward the Liberation of Medical Data (EClinicalWorks)
• Better estimates, faster payments: using automation for a better patient financial experience (Experian Health)
• Driving Value: Taking the Healthcare Revenue Cycle to the Next Level (EZDI)
• Sorting Through ServiceNow Opportunities (Optimum Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/6/21

Top News

Fortive will acquire specialty EHR vendor Provation from its private equity owner for $1.425 billion.

Seller Clearlake Capital acquired the company from Wolters Kluwer in early 2018 for $180 million. Provation then acquired Pentax Medical’s EndoPro endoscopy platform and documentation procedure vendor IProcedures, both in 2021, and EPreop in 2020.

Provation reports annual revenue of $110 million. It has 5,000 health system customers.

Reader Comments

From Sporacide: “Re: Adjuvare. I didn’t see you mention its formation.” I didn’t see it, but added it below. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s NantHealth is involved with the company, which uses technology from one-time high-flyer AirStrip, whose apex was sharing an Apple stage with Tim Cook way back in 2015 after raising $65 million (and another $22 million in 2019). NantHealth has seen its own struggles, with shares down 95% since its IPO and the company’s valuation down to around $100 million, while NantKwest died quietly in being merged with another Soon-Shiong company, immunotherapy developer ImmunityBio, whose shares have dropped 85% in the past 10 months.

From Roman Board: “Re: Boardsi. I was exploring potential board positions post-retirement. They are a pay-to-play setup like ExecRank and spam me with lots of opportunities that require paying to be considered. Do companies really pay them to recruit board members?” I hadn’t heard of the company, which charges candidates $200 upfront and $195 per month (auto-renewing) and in return guarantees nothing. Anonymous complainers claim the company posts fake LinkedIn board position postings and refuses to answer basic questions about percentage of people placed or its user satisfaction rate, while I would characterize quite a few of the glowing online reviews as questionable (no verifiable user or company names, bot-sounding reviews that refer more to job recruiting than board placement). BBB shows 18 complaints, mostly involving being ignored when requesting cancellation, not having emails and calls returned, and having zero companies make contact. Some observe that the few positions the were offered involve informal advisory boards, which pay nothing and aren’t much of a resume builder. Please share your experience with Boardsi.

From Lindy: “Re: VCU Health. The CIO is leaving abruptly in the middle of an Epic rollout, 10 days post go-live, four years into her first CIO job.” Verified. Susan Steagall, MBA will leave VCU on December 16 after its December 4 go-live on Epic.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents expect their employers to struggle with staffing over the next few years. Commenters brought up good points: (a) senior people are leaving, both because they have more opportunity with competitors but also because they have lost trust in their employers due to layoffs and poor corporate culture; and (b) work-from-home has created endless opportunities that devalue geographic loyalty and break through local compensation practices,

New poll to your right or here, following up on last week’s question: Did you change employers in 2021 or do you expect to do so in 2022?

We offer tiny startups a first-year, one-time sponsorship discount. Lorre says she will make that same deal available for companies of any size that have never sponsored HIStalk through December 31. Contact her.

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

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the technologies that most often contribute to clinician burnout, then explain how improving common clinical workflows can help care teams collaborate better and focus on what they do best—taking care of patients. They will describe how a clinical communication and collaboration platform can automate clinical consults and code calls to alleviate burnout.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Netsmart acquires Remarkable Health, which offers AI solutions – including an EHR and virtual clinical documentation — for behavioral health, substance use, and human services.

NantWorks forms Adjuvare, which is built on AirStrip’s patient monitoring solution for remote patient monitoring.

UK-based Vinehealth, whose app collects oncology patient-reported outcomes, raises $5.5 million in funding for a planned expansion to the US. Co-founder and CEO Rayna Patel, MBBS, MPhil is an NHS England National Innovation Fellow.

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF dropped 16% in the past month versus the Nasdaq’s 4% loss. They’re down 15% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 23% gain.

People

The Wall Street Journal profiles recently named Mass General Brigham CIO/Chief Digital Officer Jane Moran, MBA (Unilever). She says the health system is working to extend its EHR with CRM capabilities and is working on remote patient monitoring.

Announcements and Implementations

United Arab Emirates launches Riayati, a national medical record that will be linked to the Wareed and Nabidh EHRs and Dubai Health Authority’s HIE. UAE intends to create an integrated medical record for every UAE resident.

Google adds languages spoken to its medical office search results, although of course it’s up to the office staff to update the information by claiming their Google Business Profile (and making sure that the person who speaks the claimed language is working on any given day). Google previously added the insurances accepted by practices, which is almost certainly wildly inaccurate since even insurers can’t keep track of that.

Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services, Velatura Public Benefit Corporation, and Findhelp will establish a national HIE portal that will offer interoperable social services referrals.

VCU Health (VA) was scheduled to go live with Epic over the weekend, replacing Cerner.

Other

US COVID-19 deaths are at 777,000.

Google will reportedly launch the Pixel Watch smart watch in 2022, which will offer a heart rate monitor and activity tracking. It will not bear the Fitbit name even though Google acquired that company for $2.1 billion in January. Google killed off its first Google-labeled watch before it was scheduled to be announced in 2016, choosing to license its software to other companies instead. Business Insider quotes company sourcea as saying that Google’s offering will be “a pretty direct mirror” of Apple Health.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx names Brandon Feldmeier BI engineer.
• Olive extends its Hack for Health 2021 virtual hackathon submission deadline to December 17.
• VitalTech integrates Bright.md’s asynchronous telehealth solution with its remote patient monitoring technology.

Blog Posts

• Reducing Hospital Readmission Rates Through Discharge Interventions (PatientBond)
• How to Choose the Right Healthcare Predictive Analytics Software (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How to Improve Nursing Communication and Collaboration (PerfectServe)
• Provider Data, Remote Care Management and Telehealth (Symplr)
• Breast Cancer Diagnosis in 36 Hours or Less? (Premier)
• Evaluating AI-driven analytics for radiology: What “good” looks like (Nuance)
• Digital Patient Engagement: What It Does for Patients and Providers (Sphere)
• 3 ways to leverage your hospital contact center to improve clinical communication (Spok)
• Why you should be archiving your legacy EHR data (Summit Healthcare)
• Helping Care Managers Bring Members and Providers Closer Together (Surescripts)
• Be grateful. Count your blessings (Talkdesk)
• Tegria Unites in Second Annual Giving Together Campaign (Tegria)
• Founder Letter: A Year in Retrospect: What Rehab Therapists Learned in 2021 (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 12/3/21

Top News

The VA revises its Cerner implementation timeline to restart the project in early 2022 and complete the rollout in 2024 (click graphic to enlarge).

The VA will also create two new positions to oversee the project, a program executive director for EHR integration and a deputy CIO for EHR.

It named VA executive Terry Adirim, MD, MPH, MBA to the PED position.

A VA update on lessons learned includes:

• Creating an EHR sandbox for clinician training.
• Optimizing the rollout schedule within VISNs.
• Assessing the capability of Cerner’s patient portal.
• Convening a safety summit this month to review how the VA will collaborate with local clinical stakeholders on informatics issues.
• Addressing issues raised at Mann-Grandstaff.
• Implementing a new management and governance structure.
• Finalizing a data strategy between VA and DoD.

Reader Comments

From Long-Timer: “Re: Fruit Street. You blasted them back in 2014 for their tactics. I have health IT people asking me almost weekly if this guy is legit. Google his or the company’s name to see some history.” LT is referring to a reader who said they received an unsolicited LinkedIn invitation to become an advisor to a telehealth company that I didn’t name (Fruit Street Health) in return for being allowed to buy shares and to earn a percentage of sales they facilitate. Fruit Street CEO Laurence Girard, 29, previously ran telehealth company Prevently until they fired him and then went out of business, after which he offered its investors free shares in Fruit Street, which offers digital diabetes prevention, weight loss, and general telehealth. All of Girard’s ventures focus on getting doctors to invest. He quickly put up COVIDMD.com early in the pandemic, offering Salesforce-powered telemedicine visits only for Medicare and cash-paying patients, but that web address now forwards to Fruit Street Clinic. He wrote an article in late 2019 declaring “shame on these investors” who accuse startup founders of being fraudulent or running a Ponzi scheme (he had a few of those), suggesting that the company add a non-disparagement and non-disclosure clause to its stock purchase agreement that call for immediate payment of $10,000 in liquidated damages. His attorney wrote in 2014 that the primary business strategy of three companies he founded (Nutritas, Prevently, and Welliko) was to sign on physician investors, make them his key advisors, and then make money from patient software use and physician software licensing. His now-deleted website provides fascinating reading  — he was involved romantically with the CTO who then tried to take over the company, he accused one physician investor of destroying Prevently by calling Girard’s mother a terrible parent and sending investors his baby pictures, he didn’t have enough money to pay student loans and buy groceries after being fired, and he called one investor a “loan shark” whose Mexican billionaire investors were only interested in tax benefits. The “physicians as investors” strategy isn’t illegal or necessarily unethical, so my takeaway here is that his gripes against just about everybody he worked with is a rare insight into what it’s like trying desperately to save a struggling startup. I imagine that quite a few physician software company investors have discovered that it’s not quite as glamorous or as satisfying as they expected to try to demonstrate knowledge and insight outside of their own field. 

From Promotional Consideration: “Re: job changes and promotions. Some of those you mention don’t include links to the announcement.” I see many of them in my LinkedIn feed, where 3,000 nice industry folks have connected with me and thus I’m able see their otherwise unannounced job changes and news. You can do the same – I accept all connection requests from health IT people. LinkedIn’s news feed is increasingly junked up as it attempts to turn into a business-focused Facebook Junior, but I still find it useful, although I really wish it would allow me to suppress seeing items that my connections have liked or commented on since that’s where the irrelevant noise originates (but of course that’s how Facebook Senior does it in getting users addicted via their baser emotions). 

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the technologies that most often contribute to clinician burnout, then explain how improving common clinical workflows can help care teams collaborate better and focus on what they do best—taking care of patients. They will describe how a clinical communication and collaboration platform can automate clinical consults and code calls to alleviate burnout.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nordic acquires S&P Consultants, whose 90-person team focuses on providing Cerner-related services. The business will continue to operate under its existing name. S&P co-founder and COO Steve Pratt died in 2020.

HealthStream acquires Rievent Technologies, which offers a continuing medical education management  platform.

Omnicell will acquire specialty pharmacy management services vendor ReCept Holdings for $100 million in cash.

A private equity firm takes an unspecified “significant stake” in clinical documentation technology vendor Iodine Software that the company says values it at over $1 billion. Iodine acquired ChartWise Medical Systems and Artifact Health this year.

Private equity firm Carlyle Group will acquire government health IT vendor CNSI from its private equity owner.

Digital consulting firm West Monroe acquires Carbon Five, which offers product management, digital design, and software engineering. West Monroe’s health system offerings include building data-driven operations, developing patient access centers, creating digital products, assisting in M&A, and developing cybersecurity plans.

Wall Street executives urge JPMorgan to cancel its annual healthcare conference that is scheduled for January 10-13, expressing concerns that San Francisco is unsafe for attendees and questioning whether in-person attendance is necessary. The 2021 version of the conference, which usually draws 20,000 attendees plus thousands more who conduct business in neighboring restaurants where captains of industry rent tables rent for hundreds of dollars per hour and sleep in hotels that charge up to 10 times their usual rates, was moved online because of COVID-19.

Sales

• Northwell Health will implement Playback Health’s patient engagement system, which allows patients to receive, replay, and share information from their visits. A co-founder is Lenox Hill Hospital neurosurgery chair David Langer, MD, who was featured in the Netflix documentary “Lenox Hill.”
• Remote care automation vendor Datos Health will integrate its system with provider EHRs using technology from Redox.

People

Jeremy Warner, MD, MS (Vanderbilt University) will join Brown University’s Center for Cancer Bioinformatics and Data Science.

Massachusetts-based health plan Health New England hires Casey Hossa, MBA (Cardinal Innovations Healthcare) as CIO.

Graphite Health hires Ryan Smith, MBA (Intermountain Healthcare) as COO. Intermountain was one of three health system founding members of the company.

Shaun Priest (Clearwave) joins ReportingMD as chief revenue officer.

Rob Lazerow (Advisory Board) joins Health Evolution as SVP.

Clinical data repository vendor Smile CDR hires Shane McNamee, MD (Peraton) as CMIO.

Jessie Minton, MS (University of Oregon) joins Washington University in St. Louis as vice chancellor for technology and CIO. She succeeds interim Stephanie Reel.

Nursing informatics pioneer Virginia Saba, EdD, MS, MA, RN died November 20. She developed the Clinical Care Classification System of standardized nursing terminology for electronic documentation.  

Announcements and Implementations

An ISMP Medication Safety Alert further explains the previously described problem in which three pharmacy data sources sent Surescripts incorrectly formatted medication history instructions, which caused problems such as “take 1 1/2 tablets daily” being sent to the network as “take 112 tablets daily.” Surescripts helped the three data sources fix their problem, removed their medication history response messages until they implement a permanent fix, and offers health systems and technology vendors a report of their impacted patients.

The International Medical Informatics Association publishes a history of informatics.

IT critical event management platform vendor Everbridge launches a Digital Operations Platform that offers analytics-driven decision-making, alert suppression, cross-functional communication, and out-of-the-box integration.

Intelligent Medical Objects collaborates with Amazon Web Services to offer AWS customers migration of their clinical data using IMO’s terminology technology, regulatory code mapping, and semantic normalization.

Zoom is accepting beta customers for its integration with Cerner, which includes notification of patient arrival in PowerChart, clinician sharing of test results and documentation, sending links to additional attendees, and placing patients in the Waiting Room for continuity between multiple caregivers in a visit.

UK-based digital triage and remote consultation solutions provider EConsultHealth will expand its capabilities by using InterSystems IRIS for Health.

CVS Health will work with Microsoft on consumer tools, use of Teams and Office, task automation using Azure cognitive services, expanded use of cloud solutions, and working with technologies such as HoloLens.

Sponsor Updates

• Meditech launches a podcast series in which AVO Christine Parent interviews experts and leaders on the subjects of digital transformation, cloud technology, quality, and care delivery.
• InterSystems announces the availability of HealthShare 2021.2, the latest version of its HealthShare suite of connected health solutions.
• Lumeon publishes a new report, “The New Productivity Era for Perioperative Care.”
• Divurgent publishes a new white paper, “Choosing an Activation Partner: Key factors in selecting a high-performing at-the-elbow support partner for your EHR implementation.”
• Fortified Health Security names Eamon Mulholland incident response specialist.
• Citrix’s Tech Fusion Podcast features Goliath Technologies Director of Product Marketing John Grant.
• Lyniate publishes a new case study featuring MedUSA, “Driving 600% annual growth with Lyniate Rhapsody.”
• Butler Health System (PA) improves access and relationships using Meditech’s Expanse Virtual On Demand Care.

Blog Posts

• Workflow Assessments Offer Insights for Productivity Improvement (Vyne Medical)
• Butler Health System improves access, relationships with Expanse Virtual On Demand Care (Meditech)
• If you try sometimes, you get what you need (Nordic)
• Department Managers Key to Implementation Success (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Taking on Healthcare Consumerism with Digital Health (Get Well)
• Nurse Leader Strategies to Address Alarm and Alert Fatigue (Halo Health)
• 12 leadership tips for a post-modern healthcare CIO (HCI Group)
• Predicting the Future of Healthcare IT: A surge in demand for IT support services (HCTec)
• The Four Pillars of Successful Self-Service Analytics in Healthcare (Health Catalyst)
• 3 Tips for Writing Mental and Behavioral Health Content (Healthwise)
• 5 Top Reasons Employees Stop Sharing Ideas (Ideawake)
• TEFCA: Update for 2022 (Impact Advisors)
• Losing sleep over cyber security insurance? How to get the coverage your HDO needs. (Imprivata)
• Infor shines in hackathon showcasing interoperability (Infor)
• Measuring healthcare quality in a post-pandemic world (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Top 3 Strategy Priorities in Digital Identity Management (LexisNexis)
• Is Staffing in Perioperative Care at a Crisis Point? (Lumeon)
• Medhost Hackathon 2021 Recap (Medhost)
• Evaluating AI-driven analytics for radiology: Understanding the lingo and the landscape (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 12/1/21

Top News

Greenway Health promotes President Pratap Sarker, MBA to CEO, effective January 1.

Sarker replaces Richard Atkin, who will take on the role of executive chairman.

Reader Comments

From Orion’s Roar: “Re: LinkedIn. A telehealth company sent me an invitation to become a strategic advisor, based purely on my profile. They offered the chance to buy shares, get stock options, and earn a percentage of revenue from B2B sales that I would help them earn. I’m sure they could find better advisors and this is just clever bait for investing in their company.” I see nothing impressive about the company (I’m omitting its name), which seems to be selling shares rather than product and recruiting sales affiliates rather than advisors. 

From DeeDee Centralized: “Re: closing the IT department. Is WSJ right?” The IT pendulum is always swinging from “let departments do their own IT work with their own people and budgets” to “we have to regain control of rogue departments whose mini-IT fiefdoms are spending even more money with less accountability and measurable corporate benefit.” Everybody is an IT expert until their cool tech stuff breaks or screws up a downstream department that they failed to consider in their on-the-fly design. The answer is always a less-dramatic compromise that won’t make management professors famous – centralize the technology rule-making to avoid an unreliable hodgepodge of faddish technologies, oversee the IT spend both centralized and decentralized so it can be understood and optimally deployed (in hospitals, failure to do this means the well-connected finance and patient accounting departments get about 70% of the total budget), and embed IT people on the front lines and vice versa to make sure everybody understands the current and desired future state. People who write “first kill all the IT people” articles are no different than those who can’t decide if outsourcing is brilliant or stupid — they just take the opposite position every few years to get press as contrarians despite having no experience running the organizations they advise.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thanks to ConnectiveRx for upgrading their HIStalk sponsorship to Platinum. They have supported HIStalk since 2012.

My Bitdefender Total Security 5-Device subscription was set to auto-renew at $90 for one year. As always, I cancelled the auto-renewal and found a better deal, in this case $30 for two years from Best Buy, saving me 83%. All I had to do was enter the new code into Bitdefender Central to pop the expiration date out 24 months.

I’ve decided that I’ll attend HIMSS22 after months of waffling about whether to go or not, motivated more by habit than desire or high ROI expectations. I compromised by choosing a short stay in which I’ll just go Tuesday and Wednesday.

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the most common clinical technology contributors to alarm fatigue and clinician burnout. They will describe how improving three clinical workflows can increase care team collaboration and reduce non-patient care workload and explain how a clinical communication platform simplifies finding care team members and pulling actionable information from the EHR.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Elsevier acquires digital healthcare educational content company Osmosis, which it will add to its Global Medical Education portfolio.

Analytics and data integration vendor Innovar Healthcare is among several companies that are purchasing the liquidated assets of Bridge Connector, a Nashville-based data migration startup that closed last year. The company, which had raised over $25 million several months before going out of business, and owes its creditors $5.4 million.

Babyscripts increases its previously announced Series B funding round with an additional $7.5 million investment. The virtual maternity care company has raised $37 million since launching in 2013.

Clinical task management software vendor CareAlign raises $2.3 million in seed funding. Former Penn Medicine associate CMIO Subha Airan-Javia, MD created the company in 2014, spinning it out of Penn five years later.

Sales

• UAB Medicine selects specialty pharmacy-focused analytics and data integration services from Loopback Analytics.
• Elsevier integrates Nuance’s PowerScribe radiology reporting software with its STATDx diagnostic decision support tool for radiologists.
• Phoebe Putney Health System (GA) will implement Wolters Kluwer Health’s POC Advisor for sepsis detection and patient management at three hospitals.

Announcements and Implementations

Nuance announces GA of its new Precision Imaging Network, cloud-based technology that transmits AI-generated data and analytics from diagnostic imaging systems to existing clinical and administrative workflows.

UC Davis Health (CA) and Amazon Web Services launch a Cloud Innovation Center that will focus on developing digital health solutions that are accessible and equitable.

Teleradiology service StatRad implements Change Healthcare’s cloud-based Stratus Imaging PACS.

Edifecs announces implementation of a work model that allows most of its employees to work from wherever they think they are the most productive – home, office, or a combination – while allowing them to reduce commuting stress and run personal errands.

Per-diem nurse staffing platform vendor IntelyCare launches a credentialing passport for uploading and providing licenses, screening test results, certifications, and employment eligibility verification.

NextGen Healthcare launches a benchmarking and analytics service for Community Health Centers.

Government and Politics

FDA forces Owlet to stop selling its smart baby monitoring socks that track vital signs and sleep patterns until it earns FDA approval. FDA did not require the company to recall the 1 million sock it has sold over the past six years. Owlet says it will soon launch a new sleep monitoring solution. 

The VA awards a five-year, $65 million contract to Caregility, ThunderCat Technology, Sterling Heritage, and Iron Bow Healthcare for remote patient monitoring software and services that it will roll out through its TeleCare Companion Patient Observation Support and Services Program.

The Pharmacy HIT Collaborative meets with ONC and pharmacy system vendors about pharmacy interoperability, including integrating the information in the Pharmacists ECare Plan with provider EHRs and payer systems, as required by the Cures Act.

HHS OCR settles with five providers that failed to give patients timely access to their records at a reasonable cost under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, with settlement costs ranging from $10,000 to $160,000. A cardiovascular disease doctor who ignored a patient’s request for a copy of their medical record and then ignored OCR investigators waived his right to a hearing in paying $100,000.

Other

Business Insider asks eight big health systems to describe the most interesting tech project they are testing (and in some cases, also investing in):

• Northwell Health: AI analysis of EHR data to identify pregnant women who are at risk for pre-eclampsia.
• New York – Presbyterian: EHR triggers to make sure orders are completed that would otherwise prevent a patient from being discharged as planned.
• Cleveland Clinic: optimize use of unnecessary lab tests and supplies based on historical patient data.
• Providence: allow behavioral health referrals to be ordered during primary care visits.
• LifePoint Health: remote patient monitoring.
• CommonSpirit: open a bricks-and-mortar women’s and reproductive clinic with telehealth startup Tia.
• Universal Health Services: notify providers of patient health or admission status using EHR data sent to a homegrown app.
• UPMC: remote patient monitoring.

Sponsor Updates

• The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust and Agfa HealthCare celebrate Enterprise Imaging’s 34^th UK go-live.
• PRWeek highlights Actium Health’s role in helping Virtua’s marketing team launch a campaign that successfully encouraged patients to come in for missed screenings.
• Intelerad launches a cloud-native disaster recovery solution.
• Cerner staff assemble 200 meal baskets for veterans and families supported by Veterans Community Project and Jackson County Family Court Services.
• Netsmart partners with the National Council for Mental Wellbeing to improve care coordination and use data to drive outcomes for certified community behavioral health clinics.
• A public regional hospital group in Italy will implement Ascom’s Digistat software in several of its facilities.

Blog Posts

• Vendor HIPAA Breach Affects 319K Patients & Their Providers (AdvancedMD)
• The Glidepath to Downside Risk: Future-Proof You Healthcare Business Through Value-Based Care (Arcadia)
• Embracing Interoperability with FHIR (Availity)
• Interoperability is Key to Care Coordination (Bamboo Health)
• The Path to Meditech Expanse: Where Should You Begin? (CereCore)
• Optimize Star Ratings in the Medicare Advantage Market: 3 Strategies for Payers (Collective Medical)
• Five powerful COVID-related shifts in patient care (ConnectiveRx)
• Driving Health Care 4.0 (Diameter Health)
• The Shift to Care-at-Home: Are You Ready? Why You Need to Be (Dina)
• The Future is Online Appointment Scheduling (EClinicalWorks)
• What does the connected generation (Gen C) expect from providers? (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/29/21

Top News

Best Buy discloses in its quarterly earnings call that its cost to acquire remote patient monitoring technology vendor Current Health in October was $400 million in cash.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents feel pretty good about how their employers will fare in 2022.To what degree will resignations and hiring challenges affect your employer’s prospects in the next few years?

New poll to your right or here: To what degree will resignations and hiring challenges affect your employer’s prospects over the next few years? This in response to a comment on last week’s poll in which a reader predicted significant long-term impact of organizations losing experienced health IT employees.

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

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

People

Alexander Scarlat, MD (Codixim) joins Mitre as principal data scientist of its health IT group. He wrote the “Machine Learning Primer for Clinicians” series for HIStalk a while back.

Matt Lungren, MD, MPH (Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare) joins Amazon Web Services as principal for clinical AI and machine learning for worldwide public health.

Announcements and Implementations

Konica Minolta adds Appropriate Use Criteria for advanced diagnostic imaging to its Exa Platform, in which orders placed through its physician portal will be validated electronically against CMS criteria using logic from LogicNets. 

Government and Politics

The MIT Catalyst program announces a new group of VHA Innovation Ecosystem Fellows, who will work to improve veteran care through need-driven biomedical research and innovation.

Medical University of South Carolina sues six of its oncologists and HCA Healthcare, alleging that the doctors – who will leave MUSC on December 1 to take jobs at HCA-owned Trident Medical Center — stole confidential information such as case logs and patient lists to help their new employer create a competing head and neck oncology program. MUSC said the doctors used its email servers to send confidential preference card information to Trident officials.

Other

Several NFL and college football teams are collecting impact data from sensor-embedded player mouthpieces, pairing the force, speed, direction, and location information with video to test helmet effectiveness and to influence future rule-making to reduce concussions.

In Canada, Peterborough Regional Health Centre lays off 84 employees as part of its Epic implementation. The hospital says it is eliminating a “limited number of clerical roles.” The hospital is one of seven Central East Ontario health systems, representing 14 hospitals, that will go live on Epic on December 3.

A Wall Street Journal article titled “It’s Time to Get Rid of the IT Department” says that the typical IT department is a bureaucratic island that hinders innovation, digital transformation, and customer focus, making these points:

• Separating the IT department – both organizationally and physically – from the core business doesn’t make sense, even if the group is given a sexy new name like “global digital solutions.” Technology is no longer optional.
• Treating IT as a partner to the business encourages it to be judged using metrics that are often irrelevant to long-term business outcomes, such as budget, uptime, and project completion. “Meeting specs” doesn’t correlate with success, and businesses isn’t driven by owning, building, and managing IT systems.
• Business units can’t predict their technology needs months or years in advance as required by IT budgeting, making it impossible for siloed IT departments to meet expectations for being faster and more flexible.
• Most IT employees work there because they love technology rather than the company’s core business, creating a culture gap that ignores the fact that the business is the technology and vice versa.
• Some companies are moving toward focusing on realizing value from IT within business units instead of rewarding the IT department for centrally managing it. This makes more sense as cloud computing relieves IT from managing physical assets such as data centers and servers and low-code software development reduces the need for programming talent.
• Companies are organizing their missions around groups that include embedded technical experts, which encourages innovative thinking, deeper subject matter expertise, and fewer handoffs.
• IT decentralization comes with “freedom within a framework,” such as requiring use of standardized development tools, architecture, and security protocols.

RSNA expects 19,000 attendees to attend this week’s in-person conference at Chicago’s McCormick Place, with another 4,000 participating virtually. The exhibit hall will showcase 500 vendors. The last in-person meeting, RSNA 2019, drew 52,000 registrants, with exhibitor personnel making up nearly half of the total.

Sponsor Updates

• In England, North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust implements TrakCare electronic prescribing and medication administration technology from InterSystems.
• CHIME honors HCA Healthcare and Meditech with its Collaboration Award.
• OptimizeRx wins two Digital Health Awards.

Blog Posts

• Why a security component is as critical to your FHIR ecosystem (Infor)
• Is Your Digital Front Door Strategy Welcoming to All? (InterSystems)
• FHIR 101: Solving healthcare’s interoperability problem (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Infographic: Key Patient Access Journey Insights (Kyruus)
• The Evolution of SDOH and Health Data Exchange (LexisNexis)
• Is Staffing in Perioperative Care at a Crisis Point? (Lumeon)
• The unspoken courage of modern nursing (Meditech)
• How to Perform an Analysis on Competitor PT Practices (MWTherapy)
• RSNA 2021: Reconnecting, redefining, and recognizing the challenges and opportunities ahead (Nuance)
• These technologies stand to change healthcare forever, and they already exist (Olive)
• Understanding Psychographics: AJMC (PatientBond)
• Using Analytics to Unlock the Value of Social Determinants of Health Data (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How Nurse Leaders Drive Change and Affect Strategic Goals (Symplr)
• Physician burnout: a history of the not-so-recent phenomenon plaguing clinicians (Spok)
• Amazon and Vocera Elevate the Power of the Patient Voice (Vocera)
• 23 Patient Stories That Show Just How Amazing PTs Are (WebPT)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/22/21

Top News

The Wall Street Journal reports that two private equity firms are close to a deal to acquire Athenahealth for $17 billion, including debt.

Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman LLC are reported to be the high bidders in an auction of the company, which its owners planned to have completed in early 2022.

A private equity firm and hedge fund took Athenahealth private four years ago after they forced the ouster of CEO Jonathan Bush, combining the company with a GE Healthcare unit it had acquired and renamed to Virence Health. Their  total acquisition cost was $6.8 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The significant concern poll respondents have about remote patient monitoring is that they will need services that aren’t readily available, which explains why investor-backed companies are springing up to provide paramedics and other licensed people to visit patient homes for the hands-on component that would otherwise require a trip to a provider’s location. IANAL questions why a patient would choose care at home when it is perceived as inferior and may not save the patient money, while Paula says triaging will be important since not all recoveries or home situations support at-home care. I agree with both comments – it may be that at-home care isn’t appropriate for many or most patients and will never deliver on “hospital at home” expectations, but could provide a way to reduce the length of hospital stays and make some patients happier. Payment will likely drive adoption as it always does in healthcare, so the ball is in the hands of CMS and insurers.

New poll to your right or here: How are your employer’s 2022 business prospects looking compared to 2021?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

I was curious about the stock performance of digital health companies that have gone public in the last couple of years, so I asked Chris McCord of Healthcare Growth Partners – which is my go-to source for brilliant market analysis – if he could save me some legwork with a list of companies. I excluded those that I consider marginally tech related, such as Medicare Advantage insurers and primary care operators, which left me with this list:

• About half of the companies are trading at below their initial offering price.
• Companies that went public via a SPAC merger performed much worse than those that did an IPO. SPAC popularity as a mechanism to go public has plummeted in the last few months, with some of the shell companies failing to find acquisition targets within the required timeframe.
• Buying an equal number of shares of each company at their IPO price would have increased the investment by about 37%, but obviously over various time periods.
• While Phreesia is the big winner in price change, Doximity has earned the highest market cap at nearly $13 billion after just five months of public trading.
• Livongo fell off the list since it was acquired by Teladoc Health, whose share price has increased 516% since its July 2015 IPO even though share price is down 56% from its January 2021 high.

Nuance announces Q4 results: revenue up 8%, adjusted EPS $0.09 versus $0.14. The company’s acquisition by Microsoft is expected to close in early 2022.

People

Population health management platform vendor AssureCare hires Ankit Rohatgi, MD, MBA (Medpulse) as chief clinical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Vocera releases a skill for Amazon Alexa that allows patients to reach the right care team member and obtain stay information using voice requests made to an in-room Echo device.

Spok launches GenA, a one-way alphanumeric pager that includes a high-resolution display, advanced encryption, and over-the-air remote programming to provide reliable, survivable, and affordable critical communications capability regardless of cell coverage.

Sponsor Updates

• Clearwater publishes a new report, “Connecting the Dots Between Cyber Risk and Patient Safety.”
• PMD celebrates its 23rd anniversary.
• Sonifi Health publishes a new case study, “How technology can improve HCAHPS Scores: A 5-year impact case study.”
• Sphere releases the results of a consumer survey focused on the use of online payment tools for medical bills.
• HIStalk Sponsors exhibiting at RSNA November 28-December 1 in Chicago include Agfa HealthCare, Change Healthcare, Elsevier, Lyniate, Mach7 Technologies, Nuance, OneMedNet, Sectra, Visage Imaging, and Wolters Kluwer Health.

Blog Posts

• Be there when your ideal patient and provider meet (OptimizeRx)
• You can’t always get what you want (Nordic)
• 7 reasons payers should adopt AI and join the Internet of Healthcare (Olive)
• Just Say No to Drug(s) Discount Cards (OmniSys)
• How COVID-19 Impacted Timeliness of Care (PatientBond)
• 6 Questions an EHR Consultant Can Help You Answer (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Leveraging Supplemental Benefits: Moving from Extras to Essentials (Dina)
• Accelerating Speed to Care with Unified Healthcare Communication (PerfectServe)
• Benefits of Physician Peer Review (Symplr)
• Advancing Clinical Research with the PINC AI Research and Innovation Collaborative (Premier)
• 3 Steps to Elevated Diversion Monitoring: Takeaways from the 2021 NADDI conference (Protenus)
• How Leading NextGen Users Leverage Our Revenue Cycle Engine (RCxRules)
• ‘Tis the season. Reflections on 2021 and the storm brewing for health plans in 2022. (Redox)
• 7 Tips to Address Medical Practice Burnout (Relatient)
• Let Doctors Be Doctors with Better Patient Data (RxRevu)
• Sky’s the Limit! Two Nuance Managers Share Their Advice (Nuance)
• Why Pagers Still Matter: The History of Pagers (1921-2021) (Spok)
• Magic at the Hospital (Summit Healthcare)
• Nurses are Uniquely Positioned to Bridge Gaps in Care (Twistle)
• Breaking News: CMS Greenlights Automatic MIPS Flexibilities for 2021 (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 11/19/21

Top News

Healthcare payment options platform vendor PayZen raises $15 million in a Series A round.

Reader Comments

From Clicker: “Re: clicks. You have said you track certain clicks on the site. I’m wondering which had the highest numbers.” I usually count clicks for announcement of a new sponsor, a webinar, or anything for which I’m trying to gauge reader interest for future coverage. The most-clicked items (3,000 to 4,000 clicks each) were new sponsor announcements (which make up the top five spots), webinars (six), top-of-page banner clicks (two), and an interview (one). The question made me wonder about our webinar recordings, where I found that the one Frank Poggio and the late Vince Ciotti did in 2014 about Cerner acquiring Siemens Health Services has drawn 8,700 views, including one from me today as I enjoyed hearing Vince’s voice again.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIMSS22 starts in 116 days. Early bird in-person pricing of $895 is good until January 10. I’m still waffling on whether it’s worth my time and money to attend, so I haven’t registered or booked a place to stay. You?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Aptihealth, which matches health plan and health system customers with behavioral health providers, raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

MedArrive, which offers at-home care from licensed professionals such as paramedics as an adjunct to virtual visits, raises $25 million in Series A funding. Co-founder and CEO Dan Trigub spent short stints at Uber Health and Lyft before starting the company last year.

Precision medicine vendor Tempus announces that eight institutions are live on integration with Epic’s genomics module, which embeds Tempus test ordering and genomic data delivery into existing clinical workflows. The companies say that integration timelines will be reduced from months to weeks in 2022.

CVS will close 900 of its stores over the next three years, nearly 10% of its total, as online shopping has reduced customer demand for near-home convenience and the additional of in-store health services creates new demands for layout and location.

Teladoc’s investor day presentation predicts that consumers will expect virtual-first encounters whose quality equals in-person ones and that offer them a variety of coordinated care services. The company says it has evolved from fee-for-service video visits and will become a partner with its customers in offering whole-person care at under value- and risk-based arrangements. It says it will be “the first place consumers turn to for all healthcare needs” for “whole-person care that is personalized, convenient, and connected.” TDOC shares dropped 8% on the day and have shed 25% in the past 12 months, with the company’s market value being $20 billion versus the $18.5 billion in cash it paid to acquire Livongo in late October 2020.

Sales

• Northeastern Center (IN) chooses the SmartCare EHR of Streamline Healthcare Solutions.
• Luminis Health (MD) will implement Cedar’s post-visit patient engagement and payment platform, integrated with Epic.

People

Ochsner Health hires Denise Basow, MD (Wolters Kluwer)  as its first chief digital officer. She has been president and CEO of Wolters Kluwer’s clinical effectiveness business unit for six years and was previously with UpToDate, which was acquired by Wolters Kluwer Health in 2008, since 1996.

Announcements and Implementations

The UK’s NHS chooses 46 companies to provide digital document services and related hardware and software. Among those named for the nearly $7 billion program are Nuance, Conduent, Hyland, and 3M MModal.

A HIMSS report estimates that the federal government will need to spend $30 billion to modernize federal, state, local, and tribal public health reporting and data systems, recommending that Congress provide a minimum of $1.57 billion per year for technology and workforce development. The funding would support electronic case reporting and contact tracing, laboratory information management systems, syndromic surveillance, electronic vital records (births and deaths), a national notifiable disease surveillance system, analytics and visualization staffing, creating incentives for provider data exchange.

HIMSS creates a certification program in digital health transformation strategy, with CPDHTS joining its existing offerings CPHIMS and CAHIMS. Cost ranges from $1,099 to $1,399, while the two-year renewal requires 45 clock hours of continuing education and a payment of $299 or $399.

A review of the de-identified Cerner EHR records of 490,000 COVID-19 patients finds that the use of SSRI antidepressants was associated with a 28% lower relative risk of death.

Three entrepreneurs, including Ricky Caplin (The HCI Group), form The Aurora Forge, which will grow seed-state healthcare and government technology companies and donate the majority of its profits to charity. Several health system CIOs are among its advisors.

Government and Politics

The US Coast Guard finishes its deployment of Cerner as part of the DoD’s MHS Genesis project.

Other

A retiree from Vietnam who was stranded in the US for 18 months because of the pandemic is stuck with a $38,000 emergency glaucoma surgery bill even though the daughter he was visiting had bought him traveler’s medical insurance that had preauthorized the procedure. The insurer declined to pay, saying that his condition was pre-existing even though it hadn’t been previously diagnosed. His only income is a $260 per month pension. The man’s daughter, who had bought him plane tickets home on 14 flights that were eventually cancelled, may be on the hook to pay his bill even though he was finally able to return home because of California’s filial responsibility laws.

In Canada, Halifax family physician Ajantha Jayabarathan, MD wins a family medicine “Big Ideas” contest for her GIS-powered Health Geo-View, which allows virtual visit doctors to visualize the patient’s neighborhood for socioeconomic information, proximity to health services, and environmental risk factors.

Sponsor Updates

• Olive offers its customers the ability to leverage DARVIS solutions including rapid hygiene check, bed logistics, medical inventory, and sterile equipment completeness.
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions will work with secure data collaboration company Karlsgate to develop a secure identity resolution platform for the healthcare market.
• Everbridge introduces the next generation of its Travel Risk Management Solution for business, healthcare, and government customers.
• Lumeon’s Remote Home Monitoring solution earns Gold in the 2021 EHealthcare Leadership Awards in the Best Business Process Improvement Products category.
• Magnolia Regional Health Center (MS) adds Prelude Software’s PayPilot to its Meditech Expanse EHR to save time and increase revenue.
• CareSignal publishes a case study titled “Utilizing Deviceless Remote Monitoring Within a Medicaid Managed Care Plan to Identify Rising Risk for Early Intervention with Promising Results.”

Blog Posts

• Improving Veterans’ Care through Digital Health Technology (Get Well)
• Taking a Deep Dive into Cloud Data Lake Performance: Making Sure Your Gold is Counted (Healthcare Triangle)
• Deliver Better Population Health by Avoiding 3 Mistakes (Health Catalyst)
• 5 Signs you Need a Managed Services Partner (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Innovating With Health Plans: Focus on Outcomes (Dina)
• Veterans Day Reflection: Beyond Thank You (Health Data Movers)
• Flexible, Fast, and First: How UC Davis Health Opened Its Digital Front Door (InterSystems)
• How Leading NextGen Users Leverage our Revenue Cycle Engine (RCxRules)
• Preserving privacy while promoting interoperability in healthcare (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Inside the Lifecycle of a Healthcare Claim with Medhost (Medhost)
• How to Perform an Analysis on Competitor PT Practices (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 11/17/21

Top News

Population health management company Lightbeam Health Solutions will acquire CareSignal, which offers more than 30 condition-specific remote patient monitoring programs, for an undisclosed sum.

I interviewed CareSignal CEO Blake Marggraff last year. He launched the company coming out of pre-med in 2015 at the age of 22.

Webinars

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

Here’s the recording of our recent webinar titled “Increasing OR Profitability: It May Be Easier than you Think,” sponsored by Copient Health.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Ribbon Health raises $43.5 million in a Series B funding round. The company has developed an API that enables health IT developers to access data on doctors, insurance plans, and costs and quality of care.

Workforce management software vendor QGenda acquires Schedule360, which offers Best in KLAS nurse and staff scheduling software.

H1, which offers drug companies a platform to identify opinion leaders and to monitor the drug trials of competitors, raises $100 million in a Series C funding round.

Sales

• The Maryland Department of Health will use NTT Data’s consulting services to enhance its Medicaid Enterprise Systems Modular Transformation program with tech-enabled solutions.
• MetroHealth in Cleveland enters into a managed services agreement with Pivot Point Consulting for its Epic EHR.
• Ergotron will integrate Imprivata’s Confirm ID technology with its CareFit Pro Medical Cart, giving hospital staff password-free access to cart drawer contents.
• Premier’s PINC AI will conduct a hospital-acquired infections clinical trial with medical solutions company Mölnlycke using Premier’s anonymized clinical data and provider network to test interventions, including its TheraDoc clinical surveillance technology.

People

Nasim Afsar, MD, MBA (UCI Health) will join Cerner as its first chief health officer in January.

Oscar Callejas, MSE (Hillrom) joins Olive as SVP of customer programs.

Carrum Health hires Randy Hawkins, MD (ConsumerMedical) as chief medical officer.

Tony Burke (Pivot Health Advisors) joins Teladoc Health as SVP of partnerships and innovation.

Care transitions software vendor ReferWell hires Chad Baugh, MBA (Teladoc Health) as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

PerfectServe brings together its clinical collaboration, physician scheduling, patient engagement, and practice communication technologies under the Unite platform.

Elevate Holistics launches a medical marijuana card platform that includes patient scheduling, an EHR that supports telehealth, an online store for selling nutraceuticals and CBD, and a partner marketing integration system with custom landing pages.

Big news from HIMSS22: Michael Phelps, who used to swim fast, will keynote. Maybe healthcare experts Dana Carvey, A-Rod, and that mountain climber who sawed his own arm off weren’t available to reprise.

Other

Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston develop the Epilepsy Tracking and Optimized Management Engine, an informatics tool designed to help physicians better manage the care of epileptic patients. Neurologist Katherine Harris, MD says the software has helped cut her billing documentation time down from 20 clicks in her EHR to just three clicks using EpiToMe, which also includes modules for reports, statistics, and scheduling.

A Stat investigative report says that Ascension, the country’s largest Catholic health system at 140 hospitals, is running a $1 billion private equity operation like a Wall Street firm rather than as a passive investor.  The article notes that the tax-exempt health system isn’t required to disclose how its investment profits are used to benefit vulnerable patients.

Analysis finds that private equity-owned air ambulance services bill higher rates and generate surprise patient bills more frequently, charging 60% more than other carriers.

Former Sanford Health (SD) CEO Kelby Krabbenhoft, who left the system in late 2020 after making controversial remarks about his refusal to wear a mask, received a payout of nearly $50 million. The health system says he would have been contractually owed the money regardless of his departure circumstances, which involved $15 million in severance, $29 million in retirement payout, and $5 million in salary. Sanford Health ended its planned merger with Intermountain Healthcare because of the leadership change.

Sponsor Updates

• ConnectiveRx team members support Operation Gratitude with a financial donation and cards of support for veterans.
• Netsmart will integrate the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s Continuum and Co-Triage assessment tools with its EHR.
• Al Kindi Hospital in Jordan selects Wolters Kluwer Health’s UpToDate and Medi-Span Clinical solutions.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “PDMP Software for Safe Prescribing of Controlled Substances.”
• The Behavioral Healthcare Executive Podcast features AdvancedMD President Amanda Hansen.
• Actium Health releases a new Hello Healthcare Podcast, “Physician Relations: A Love Letter.”
• Change Healthcare helps measure and reduce carbon emissions from the healthcare industry.
• Optimum Healthcare IT wins the CHIME Foundation Partner of the Year Award.
• Ellkay will exhibit at Modernizing Medicine’s Momentum Conference November 19-21 in Orlando.
• Waystar achieves top rankings in Black Book’s latest customer experience RCM technology and outsourcing report in the categories of end-to-end RCM software & technology, hospital chains, systems, corporations, IDNs & corporation; and end-to-end RCM software & technology, community hospitals & medical centers.
• OptimizeRx will host the second annual Innovate4Outcomes event virtually December 9.
• Health Catalyst partners with Datavant, enabling healthcare and life sciences organizations to exchange tokenized, de-identified data within Health Catalyst’s Research Network and Touchstone Match.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare 2030: Trends That Will Impact Healthcare in the Text Decade (Arcadia)
• Ascom Recognizes Veterans Amongst Our Ranks (Ascom)
• America’s Opioid Epidemic is Getting Worse (Bamboo Health)
• Virtual Consultations in Healthcare are Here to Stay (Bluestream)
• PPCP and CarePort: post-acute care workflows (CarePort)
• Value-Based Care Revenue – Which Programs Actually Deliver (ChartSpan)
• How Trust in Technology Affects Adoption Among Care Teams (CoverMyMeds)
• How to Engage Providers with Healthcare at Home (Current Health)
• Innovating with Health Plans: Focus on Outcomes (Dina)
• A Better Billing Solution for Modern Healthcare (EClinicalWorks)
• Alleviate the healthcare staffing crisis with automation (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/15/21

Top News

Glen de Vries, who rode a Blue Origin rocket into space with William Shatner and others last month, died in a plane crash Thursday along with a flight instructor. He was 49.

De Vries, who was also known as Captain Clinical, was co-founder of life sciences research platform vendor Medidata Solutions, which was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in October 2019 for $6 billion.

De Vries later wrote a book titled “The Patient Equation: The Precision Medicine Revolution in the Age of COVID-19 and Beyond.”

Reader Comments

From Bon Ivermectin: “Re: VPN Solutions in Richmond. I’ve heard from three practices that the hosting company was hit by ransomware on October 31 and their Allscripts clients have been unable to access charts since. Rumor is that the hackers demanded a $5.4 million ransom that was due Friday that won’t be paid.” I’ve emailed VPN Solutions and Allscripts but haven’t heard back so far. One of the practices mentioned — Piedmont Pediatrics in Charlottesville, VA — posted a notice on November 1 that its computers were down, but hasn’t updated since.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Video calls with cameras on are used more than any other one-to-one work meetings, poll respondents say. Some employers or teams mandate the use of video, commenters mentioned.

New poll to your right or here: What would worry you most about being remotely monitored at home while recovering instead of being hospitalized? I didn’t specify a condition, but use your own experience and assume that use cases will be actively developed by organizations that offer these services.

A word that I just realized is odd as I created the new poll: “hospitalized,” given the uncommon usage of “hotelized” since etymologists say that “hospital” and “hotel” share the same Latin root that refers to guests or visitors. It’s also odd in that a hospital can be about as inhospitable as it gets.

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A correction to last week’s post – Surescripts CEO Tom Skelton will retire on December 31, 2022 (not at the end of this year), leading the company through next year, participating with the company’s board to choose his successor, and working with the new CEO through the transition period.

OptimizeRx reports Q3 results: revenue up 53%, adjusted EPS $0.09 versus $0.07.

Sales

• Essen Health Care (NY) chooses Verustat for remote patient monitoring, offering its underserved community patients take-home kits for tracking blood pressure, blood sugar, weight, and oxygen levels.
• Woman’s Hospital (LA) chooses Spok Go for environmental services communication and real-time critical lab result notification.
• Home health services vendor Sholom Home Care (MN) chooses VitalTech’s VitalCare for telehealth and patient-care manager interaction. 

People

David Harse (Cerner) joins HealthMark Group as SVP/GM of patient engagement.

Culbert Healthcare Solutions promotes Julie McGuire, RN, MSN to VP of Epic IT consulting services.

Announcements and Implementations

NYU Langone’s Predictive Analytics Unit in the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science will host the Symposium for Machine Learning Implementation and Evaluation (SMILE) to discuss the latest advances in mobilizing machine learning to practice and evaluating and bringing machine learning to patients. The free, non-sponsored virtual event will be Thursday, November 18 from 12:30 to 5:00 ET.

A group of AMIA members asks folks who are developing FHIR-based software to complete their short survey by November 30. The results will be used to create a worldwide catalog of FHIR applications.

Other

A ProPublica report looks at the money machine that is St. Jude Children’s Research Center, which despite being ranked behind nine other children’s cancer hospitals, raises more many than all of them combined. Its reserves are $5 billion as it has spent only half of its $7 billion in contributions over the past five years on research and care. The hospital doesn’t bill the families of children for their care, but 90% have insurance that it bills. St. Jude has 5,700 employees and just 73 beds, while its fundraising organization has 2,200 employees working from Memphis and 36 regional offices, with 400 of the fundraising employees making more than $100,000. The former pediatrics chair at Albany Medical Center (NY) says St. Jude raises money from its nearby office, but almost all children with cancer are treated locally instead of in Memphis, to which he concludes, “They think of every way they can to make money and the least amount of ways to spend it. They deceive people into supporting something that is totally dishonest.”

Sponsor Updates

• Sectra publishes a new e-book, “Radiology post-pandemic game plan.”
• Talkdesk wins the 2021 Public Relations and Marketing Excellence Award from the Business Intelligence Group.
• Visage Imaging contributes to a new report, “First PACS-integrated artificial intelligence-based software tool for rapid and fully automatic analysis of body composition from CT in clinical routine.”
• Waystar will sponsor Bounce Back Kit family care packages for the Bounce Children’s Foundation.

Blog Posts

• A Salute to Those Who Served (Netsmart)
• Is automation the future of 340B compliance? (Olive)
• The Cost of Patient Engagement: What Is Your ROI? (PatientBond)
• How and Why to Incorporate Veteran Talent into Your Supply Chain Hiring (Premier)
• Challenging and Critical, Compliance Takes Great Commitment (Protenus)
• HCC Coding Automation: NLP Technology vs HCC Coding Software (RCxRules)
• Creating a Personalized Prescribing Experience for Each Patient (RxRevu)
• 4 Factors Healthcare ISVs Should Consider When Choosing a Payments Platform (Sphere)
• Will Teamwork Deliver on the Promise of Value-Based Care? (Surescripts)
• How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are Rapidly Changing Patient Engagement (Twistle)
• New Year, New Regulations: 2022 Final Rule Highlights (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 11/12/21

Top News

LifeScience Technologies sues Mercy, which it claims disclosed trade secrets about LST’s M.Care virtual care platform to telehealth competitor Myia Health.

The lawsuit claims that LST customer Mercy shared its system log-in credentials to Myia Health’s developers, allowing the company to develop a “derivative product” that Mercy then implemented to replace LST.

LST also says that Mercy invested $5 million in Myia Health. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Current Health. The Boston-based company, which was acquired by Best Buy in November 2021, offers an enterprise care-at-home platform that enables healthcare organizations to deliver high-quality, patient-centric care at a lower cost. It integrates patient-reported data with data from biosensors – including its own continuous monitoring wearable device – to provide healthcare organizations with actionable, real-time insights into the patient’s condition. Leveraging clinical algorithms that can be tailored to the individual patient, it identifies when a patient needs clinical attention, allowing organizations to manage patient care remotely or to coordinate in-home care via the company’s integrated service partners. Its platform brings together telehealth capabilities, patient engagement tools, and cellular connectivity to provide a single solution to manage all care in the home. It has designed evidence-based care pathways that can be tailored to the needs of the individual patient, supporting a wide range of clinical conditions and acuity levels. To help its partners scale their care-at-home delivery, it also provides comprehensive logistics management, a Clinical Command Center, and integrations with in-home ancillary service providers, all serving as an extension of your team to help transform how healthcare is delivered at home. Thanks to Current Health 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

Definitive Healthcare, which went public in mid-September and finished its first week of trading with shares up 81%, announces Q3 results: revenue up 43%, adjusted EBITDA flat. The company’s market value is just under $4 billion. Founder and CEO Jason Krantz described the company’s business in the earnings call: “I founded Definitive Healthcare to help companies analyze, navigate, and sell into the complex healthcare ecosystem. We bring clarity and in-depth knowledge of the entire market that we have a deep understanding of the interconnected relationships between physicians, hospitals, providers, insurance companies, government regulators, and the patients themselves.”

Remote patient monitoring startup HealthSnap raises $5 million.

Sales

• SoftWriters will integrate First Databank’s Meducation medication adherence solution with its FrameworkLTC pharmacy management platform.
• Flagler Health+ (FL) will implement Halo Health’s clinical collaboration technology.

People

Surescripts CEO Tom Skelton will leave his role at the end of 2022 in a planned transition.

Former National Coordinator Don Rucker, MD joins interoperability startup 1upHealth as chief strategy officer.

Virtual nurse assistant software vendor Care Angel names Nick Martin (DuPage Medical Group) CIO.

Brad Rennick (Modernizing Medicine) joins NThrive as chief client officer.

Wolters Kluwer Health promotes Gregory Samios to president and CEO of Clinical Effectiveness and Peter Bonis, MD to chief medical officer of Clinical Effectiveness.

Announcements and Implementations

PeriGen announces GA of Vigilance Mobile, giving end users remote access to its AI-based early warning system and clinical decision support tools.

Government and Politics

Representative Kim Schrier, MD (D-WA), a former pediatrician and Cerner end user, shares her concerns with VA Secretary Denis McDonough about EHR usability and its impact on patient care after she toured a clinic that is connected to the VA’s first live Cerner site of Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center (WA). She notes that employees have told her the system frequently crashes, forcing them to re-type lost notes; and that its self-scheduling and prescription management features are so buggy that patients have resorted to calling the clinic, resulting in overwhelmed phone lines. “If they have to scrap this version of Cerner,” she says, “it’s probably better to do that and use something that’s tried and true than to try to fix a system that is just broken from within.”

A VA OIG review of its implementation of Cerner’s patient scheduling system finds that while many schedulers prefer the more user-friendly Cerner system over that of the replaced Vista system, they didn’t receive adequate training on complex scheduling scenarios and weren’t given enough time for practice. The VA also went live without resolving significant lapses in functionality, such as Cerner’s inability to automatically mail appointment reminder letters and to switch a scheduled visit between telehealth and in-person. Scheduling supervisors also reported confusion over measuring wait times, a nationally critical problem that the Cerner scheduling system was supposed to help resolve. After going live, care was delayed as permissions issues limited the ability of schedulers to book certain types of appointments, data migration problems required some information to be manually deleted, and reminder calls had to be turned off because patients were being told to check in at the front desk for visits in which on-site care was not available.

Privacy & Security

Southern Ohio Medical Center reverts to downtime procedures and diverts ambulances as it deals with a cyberattack that occurred early Thursday morning.

Sponsor Updates

• DirectTrust recognizes Cerner Director Greg Meyer as an Interoperability Hero during the third quarter.
• Vocera Communications signs a reseller agreement with MDI Medical in Ireland.
• Vyne Medical releases a new podcast, “How Patient Experience is Leading Hospitals Toward Digital Transformation.”
• Olive adds ClosedLoop to its marketplace for healthcare solutions.
• Fortified Health Security hires Joe Anderson (Geodis) as solutions architect.
• Goliath Technologies rolls out enhancements to Goliath Performance Monitor.
• For World Diabetes Day, Meditech shares stories of access to care.

Blog Posts

• Halo Health acquisition highlights benefits for customers (Halo Health)
• Get Your Head in the Cloud: Managed Cloud Services Help Healthcare Organizations Attain Digital Transformation (Healthcare Triangle)
• The Healthcare Research Network: 5 Modernizing Features (Health Catalyst)
• Engaging Our Community with Event-Based Vaccine Information and Advocacy (Healthwise)
• Why You Should Plan Your EHR Post Go Live Support Before You Go Live (Impact Advisors)
• Talent & the IT Skills Gap – Opportunities to Change the Way we Hire (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Clinicians on the move: Is there more to the healthcare exodus than COVID-19? (Imprivata)
• Infor Cloverleaf continues to outperform the competition in the latest Black Book survey (Infor)
• The Right Tools for the Job: Here’s What Health IT Developers are Telling Us (InterSystems)
• Meds 101: Challenges for interoperability in healthcare (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• The Evolution of SDOH and Health Data Exchange (LexisNexis Health)
• Autonomous Care Journeys – Who Is Driving Your Care? (Lumeon)
• Best Practices for Reducing Supply and Inventory Waste in Your OR (Medhost)
• Anderson Hospital’s strategy to remain independent affords better community care (Meditech)
• What Could the SMART Act Mean for PT Practices? (MWTherapy)
• From Fragmented to Frictionless: The Next Stage of the Health Tech Revolution (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 11/10/21

Top News

General Electric shares jump on the news that the company will spin off GE Healthcare, GE Aviation, and several other segments into public companies within the next two years.

Former GE Healthcare manager Peter Arduini (Integra LifeSciences) will become president and CEO of GE Healthcare in January. The business is expected to become independent in 2023, focusing on equipment, diagnostics, imaging, therapy planning, life care, and digital.

Readers may remember that Veritas Capital acquired GE Healthcare’s software (financial, ambulatory, and workforce management) business in 2018 for $1 billion, rebranding those assets to Virence Health several months later.

Veritas acquired Athenahealth around that same time for $5.7 billion with help from Evergreen Coast Capital, the private equity subsidiary of Elliott Management Corporation, which was the activist investor that targeted Athenahealth and forced out its co-founder and CEO Jonathan Bush earlier that year.

Virence Health wound up merging the former GE Healthcare’s Centricity business with Athenahealth. Veritas dropped the little-known Virence Health brand in favor of Athenahealth’s branding shortly thereafter.

Webinars

November 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Too Important to Fail: How to Bring Better AI to Healthcare.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; Marc d. Paradis, VP of data strategy, Northwell Health. It’s relatively easy to obtain healthcare data and build an AI demo, but getting AI to perform reliably and with meaningful impact is much harder. However, strategies exist for delivering AI products to commercial markets. This fireside chat will review the status of AI in healthcare; discuss the vital importance of data quality, methodological rigor, and product focus; and explore what this means to the startup and investor world.

November 11 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Increasing OR Profitability: It May Be Easier than you Think.” Sponsor: Copient Health. Presenters: Michael Burke, co-founder and CEO, Copient Health; David Berger, MD, MHCM, CEO, University Hospital of Brooklyn at State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University. The OR is a hospital’s biggest source of revenue and its costliest resource, yet it often sits idle because of unfilled block time even as providers with cases ready to book lack access. AI-powered emerging technologies can help fill unused OR time and provide decision support to structure workflows and optimize block allocation. This webinar explores the biggest challenges to profitability faced in the OR and the fastest, most impactful changes a hospital can make to address them.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Sirona Medical, a cloud-based radiology operating system software vendor, raises $40 million in a Series B funding round.

Ambulatory health IT vendor CareCloud reports record Q3 revenue of $38.3 million, a 21% increase over Q3 2020. The company attributes the numbers to organic growth and the June acquisitions of Santa Rosa Staffing and MedMatica Consulting – now known as MedSR. MTBC acquired CareCloud in January 2020 for $17 million in cash and $41 million in total consideration.

Sales

• Family Health Centers will transition to EClinicalWorks at its eight facilities in Louisville, KY.
• NorthShore University HealthSystem (IL) selects Carevive’s Patient Reported Outcomes Mobile Platform.
• Baptist Health South Florida will implement Rx Capture software from Loopback Analytics.

People

Protenus names Michelle Del Guercio (Sunquest Information Systems) chief marketing officer.

Doug Duskin (Equality Health) joins Avel ECare as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

GenieMD announces GA of Continuum, a virtual care platform encompassing telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and chronic care management capabilities; as well as consumer and medical device integration.

Rochelle Community Hospital (IL) will go live on Epic next May.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions develops a Patient Centric Token to more effectively match de-identified patient records used for clinical research and patient care.

Truveta launches its flagship clinical insights platform, giving researchers access to real-time, de-identified clinical data from care sites across 42 states. The Seattle-based startup was launched in February by numerous health systems to provide its hospital owners, drug companies, and researchers with anonymized patient data for approved research projects.

Privacy and Security

Philips alerts end users to two vulnerabilities within its Tasy EHR that could allow hackers to extract data and potentially launch denial-of-service attacks. Upgrading the EHR software, according to the company, will remove the vulnerabilities.

Health officials in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador say health IT systems, including its Meditech EHR, are slowly being brought back online after last week’s cyberattack.

Other

This is interesting: Bluestream Health co-founder and CEO Matthew Davidge sells Med School Tutors to Blueprint Test Prep for an undisclosed amount. Davidge and business partner Joe Covey purchased the company in 2019. It is one of six they’ve acquired since 2008, including patient instructions and teaching systems vendor Logicare and several in-hospital television channels.

Sponsor Updates

• Bamboo Health applauds its ACO partners for generating over $1 billion in the Medicare Shared Savings Program.
• Cerner shares a new client achievement, “Children’s Mercy Kansas City Project HOPE training helps streamline provider documentation efficiency.”
• Divurgent celebrates its membership with the KLAS Arch Collaborative with a newly released badge.
• EVisit will exhibit and present at the virtual HealthImpact Live Fall Forum November 10-12.

HIStalk Sponsors exhibiting at HFMA include Ability Network, AGS Health, Cerner, Change Healthcare, Experian Health, Health Catalyst, Intrado, InterSystems, Nuance, Olive, and Waystar.

Blog Posts

• Understanding Business Processes and Critical Capabilities: A Closer Look at Business Impact Analysis with US Anesthesia Partners (Clearwater)
• Open enrollment and beyond – how to keep revenue on track all year (Ability Network)
• How to Optimize Texting with Your Patients (AdvancedMD)
• #IDoR2021 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Talent and the IT Skill Gap: Opportunities to Change the Way We Hire (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• CPaaS brings healthcare continuity to the Cantabrian region (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise)
• What payers and providers need to know about the No Surprises Act (Availity)
• Azara Patient Outreach – Messaging, Metrics, and Milestones (Azara Healthcare)
• Increase Productivity and Improve Outcomes with Adaptive Learning (Bluetree)
• IT Leadership: The Human Side of Disruption (CereCore)
• An Inspiring Leader of Healthcare: Chasm Talks with Angie Franks, CEO of About (About)
• Streamline Acute Transitions of Care: 3 Strategies for Success (Collective Medical)
• Navigating Changes Along the Patient Journey (ConnectiveRx)
• What Providers Want from Biopharma Field Reps Amid COVID-19 Pandemic (CoverMyMeds)
• Why Improving the Quality of Clinical Data is Imperative to Avoid Public Health Reporting Breakdowns (Diameter Health)
• What We can Learn from Healthcare Collaboration During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Dimensional Insight)
• Evolve At-Home Services to Maximize Value-Based Care (Dina)
• Innova Primary Care: The Upside to Downside Risk (EClinicalWorks)
• 3 data-driven denial management strategies for faster claims processing (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/8/21

Top News

From the Allscripts earnings call, following the announcement of quarterly results that beat earnings expectations but fell short on revenue:

• CEO Paul Black says that NIH has extended its contract for Sunrise for another five years.
• Veradigm revenue grew 10% year over year.
• The company admits being frustrated that Allscripts “stock is cheap” compared to companies that enjoy high multiples while operating businesses similar to Veradigm.
• The core clinical and financial solutions business has seen some shrinking, part of that intentional in focusing on higher-quality clients, but also because of the tail end of a bolus of larger academic medical centers and clients going in a different direction.
• Allscripts believes that non-US opportunities are “a more level playing field” even though those wins are hard to predict because they are mostly public sector clients with inconsistent deal times.
• The company sold 2bPrecise at a small gain in August, taking a non-controlling stake in the combined entity instead of cash.
• Allscripts expects to see managed services opportunities as clients deal with wage inflation and sending teams such as revenue cycle management to work from home, where they could just as easily be someone else’s employee.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

An overall 85% of poll respondents seek ongoing engagement with a PCP, with a slightly higher percentage of over-35s looking for that kind of relationship. David says he wants ongoing engagement, but not ongoing disengagement where he sees the same doctor who never remembers much about him, while Kathy fears the “too many cooks” problem because whatever doctor was available to see her changed her treatment plan.

New poll to your right or here: How do you most often communicate in one-to-one work-related meetings? I’m curious because I do interviews via a conference line where I can record the call, and sometimes surprises people who have learned to spend their entire workday on video calls with cameras on. I say use video for one-on-one calls only if the value it adds exceeds the mental strain of being on camera, and I don’t know of many examples where that’s the case unless documents are being reviewed.

Webinars

November 9 (Tuesday) noon ET. “The Next Generation of Identity Resolution in Healthcare.” Sponsor: Verato. Presenters: J.P. Lugo, solution architect, Verato; Nick Orser, solution architect, Verato. This webinar will provide an overview of person-matching in healthcare, how challenges can be overcome with Verato Referential Matching, and how person-matching technology can support Customer 360, marketing, analytics, IT, and more.

November 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Too Important to Fail: How to Bring Better AI to Healthcare.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; Marc d. Paradis, VP of data strategy, Northwell Health. It’s relatively easy to obtain healthcare data and build an AI demo, but getting AI to perform reliably and with meaningful impact is much harder. However, strategies exist for delivering AI products to commercial markets. This fireside chat will review the status of AI in healthcare; discuss the vital importance of data quality, methodological rigor, and product focus; and explore what this means to the startup and investor world.

November 11 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Increasing OR Profitability: It May Be Easier than you Think.” Sponsor: Copient Health. Presenters: Michael Burke, co-founder and CEO, Copient Health; David Berger, MD, MHCM, CEO, University Hospital of Brooklyn at State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University. The OR is a hospital’s biggest source of revenue and its costliest resource, yet it often sits idle because of unfilled block time even as providers with cases ready to book lack access. AI-powered emerging technologies can help fill unused OR time and provide decision support to structure workflows and optimize block allocation. This webinar explores the biggest challenges to profitability faced in the OR and the fastest, most impactful changes a hospital can make to address them.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Spok reports Q3 results: revenue down 5%, EPS –$0.13 versus $0.16

Early-stage investor Colin Keeley provides a fascinating analysis of Canada-based software giant Constellation Software and its reclusive billionaire founder Mark Leonard. The company’s Harris unit contains a long list of acquired health IT vendors, such as Amazing Charts, QuadraMed, IMDSoft, Iatric Systems, Obix Perinatal Data System, and Picis. Interesting observations:

• The company has acquired more than 500 vertical market software companies and has sold only one of those (in the early days, which Leonard regrets).
• The company was launched in 1995 with the equivalent of $33 million 2021 US dollars. Its has grown at 30% per year to a publicly traded market cap of $31 billion.
• Leonard started the company as a former venture capital operator who was frustrated that VCs were interested only in companies that have a large addressable market. He saw many businesses that were in niche spaces that generated high margins from recurring sales of mission-critical software. Constellation bought many of its companies directly from their founders.
• Acquisition criteria include a mid- to large-sized vertical market software company with consistent earnings and growth, committed management, and an offering price that has already been determined. The average acquisition price ranges from $2 to $5 million, although the company has done bigger deals and says it will continue to do so. They also prefer companies that have low capital investment requirements just in case they need to weather a business downturn.
• The company reportedly made 90 small acquisitions in 2020 alone.
• One analyst estimates that Constellation acquires at a price of just 0.8 times annual sales, which is far below market.
• Constellation leaves the management team of its acquisitions in place, supporting them with best practices and company-wide performance data.
• The company says it offers its business unit managers autonomy, the ability to scale, and an environment in which rules are few and the focus is making the pie bigger, not fighting over how to divide it.
• Constellation believes that growing companies create inefficiency by adding layers of management. They prefer that the original manager keep most of the business but then spin off a new business unit under a groomed protégé who can start with a blank slate and focus on customers.
• All employees are given an explicit career path in which they first learn their particular vertical market, then transition into a leader of people who can run their own business unit. Leonard says, “Become a master Craftsman in the art of managing your VMS business. It is the most satisfying job in Constellation and will generate more than enough wealth for you to live very comfortably and provide for your family. For those whose ambition exceeds their good sense, we have a role that we call a Player/Coach. A Player/Coach continues to run their BU, but ambition drives them to acquire a sizable business, usually in another geography or another vertical “
• The company’s bonus plan requires long-term investment in its shares, which has created several hundred employee millionaires.

Sales

• CyncHealth selects Nuance PowerShare for accessing and sharing diagnostic imaging and reports and to alert ED physicians of prior studies.
• Advanced Pain Care (TX) chooses Athenahealth.

People

The White House nominates Kurt DelBene, MS, MBA (Microsoft) as VA assistant secretary and CIO.

Jeffrey Brown, PhD (Harvard Medical School) joins TriNetX as chief science officer.

Walmart reportedly hires David Carmouche, MD (Ochsner Health) as SVP of its Omnichannel Care Solutions business that includes services that range from primary care to digital medicine and telehealth.

Announcements and Implementations

Nuance collaborates with Collective Medical to launch Nuance PowerShare Image Aware, which alerts ED physicians of prior radiology studies.

Redox announces a solution that enables payers to meet the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule requirements.

Other

The Physician Network Advantage files a lawsuit against Santé Health Systems (CA) and related entities, which the EHR support company says failed to pay $1.5 million for Epic support. Santé says its agreement with PNA called for payment only as funded by grant funding and it notified PNA in September 2020 that the funding would be ending.

The National Nurses Union says its members are “horrified” at Kaiser Permanente’s pilot project for remote patient monitoring, saying it undermines the role of nurses, places the burden of work on family members, leaves patients far away from other services they usually need, and is intended to boost Kaiser’s profits by lowering costs while being paid by CMS at in-hospital rates under COVID-19 waivers for telemedicine.

Sponsor Updates

• The highest-rated HIStalk Sponsor vendors according to the FeaturedCustomers Fall 2021 Hospital Communications Software Customer Success Report include Market Leaders Change Healthcare, Imprivata, Spok, and Vocera; and Top Performers Halo Health and PerfectServe.
• Wolters Kluwer Health VP & GM Vikram Savkar joins The International Association for Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers’ Board of Directors.
• HCI Group publishes a new remote patient monitoring case study featuring Integris Health.
• RCxRules partners with AAPC to deliver an end-to-end physician risk adjustment coding managed service.
• OptimizeRx publishes a new report, “Multiple Sclerosis: Understanding Treatment Barriers and Market Fragmentation.”
• PerfectServe publishes a new customer success story, “Ridgeview Rehab Specialties department reduces no-show rate by 12.6% with automated text messages to patients.”
• Surescripts announces that its Real-Time Prescription Benefit has 550,000 prescriber users and processed 300 million real-time prescription benefit checks in the first nine months of 2021.
• Premier wins an NC Tech Awards winner for the innovative use of technology in the Analytics and Big Data category.
• The Outcomes Rocket Podcast features RxRevu CEO Kyle Kiser, “Enabling Lower-Cost Prescribing at the Point-of-Care.”
• TransformativeMed names Jason Larson (Care.ai) VP of sales.

Blog Posts

• Integris Health’s Rapid Response Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) Program Built on ‘HealthNxt’ Recognized at CHIME21 (HCI Group)
• ICYMI: Elements of Effective Crisis Management (Netsmart)
• Unpopular opinion: Social distancing is the best thing to happen to EHR training (Nordic)
• Can AI Improve Patient Safety? (Symplr)
• How Providers Are Using Data to Determine Drugs’ Appropriate Use (Premier)
• Celebrating 10k PowerShare sites: 10 ways patients and providers are sharing without boundaries (Nuance)
• Fifteen Years: Guarding Data then, now, always (Spirion)
• Healthcare organizations must reimagine the patient experience to thrive (Talkdesk)
• System Change is at the Heart of Well-Being (Vocera)
• Post-Discharge Programs Vital to Good Patient Outcomes (Well Health)
• How to Overcome the Challenges of Integrating EMS Systems (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 11/5/21

Top News

Business management software vendor EverCommerce will acquire EHR/PM vendor DrChrono.

The company previously acquired MDTech, ISalus Healthcare, Updox, My PT Hub, EMHware, Collaborate MD, and AlertMD.

Webinars

November 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Too Important to Fail: How to Bring Better AI to Healthcare.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; Marc d. Paradis, VP of data strategy, Northwell Health. It’s relatively easy to obtain healthcare data and build an AI demo, but getting AI to perform reliably and with meaningful impact is much harder. However, strategies exist for delivering AI products to commercial markets. This fireside chat will review the status of AI in healthcare; discuss the vital importance of data quality, methodological rigor, and product focus; and explore what this means to the startup and investor world.

November 11 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Increasing OR Profitability: It May Be Easier than you Think.” Sponsor: Copient Health. Presenters: Michael Burke, co-founder and CEO, Copient Health; David Berger, MD, MHCM, CEO, University Hospital of Brooklyn at State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University. The OR is a hospital’s biggest source of revenue and its costliest resource, yet it often sits idle because of unfilled block time even as providers with cases ready to book lack access. AI-powered emerging technologies can help fill unused OR time and provide decision support to structure workflows and optimize block allocation. This webinar explores the biggest challenges to profitability faced in the OR and the fastest, most impactful changes a hospital can make to address them.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts announces Q3 results: revenue up 1%, adjusted EPS $0.27 versus $0.11.

Notable, whose technology scans data from EHRs and other applications to trigger task automation workflows, raises $100 million in a Series B funding round. The three founders came from loan processing software vendor Blend.

Cohort Intelligence, whose technology allows doctors to find patients who are candidates for being billed for Medicare’s Chronic Care Management services, changes its name to Engooden. 

Aver raises a $58 million investment and renames itself to Enlace Health. The company’s website is dense with buzzword bingo-speak that leaves me clueless about what they’re selling, so I’ll let them describe: “Enlace Health delivers the only end-to-end solution that solves the infrastructure challenges driving today’s unsustainable healthcare system. Connecting payers, providers, and patients, Enlace empowers any type of healthcare delivery model, from facilitating retrospective programs to enabling risk for prospective programs. Combining executive-level healthcare DNA with an extensible technology platform, Enlace is the bridge from chaotic healthcare to the healthcare world when Triple Aim optimization is truly realized.”

Change Healthcare reports Q2 results: revenue up 9%, EPS –$0.11 versus –$0.13, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. The company’s planned acquisition by OptumInsight is being reviewed by the Department of Justice and won’t be completed earlier than February 22, 2022.

Papa, which offers health plans a “family on demand” service to match older adults with non-medical helpers, raises $150 million in Series D funding, valuing the company at $1.4 billion. The company cites studies that found that its use reduces member loneliness by 68%, which then reduces hospital use. The father of 33-year-old co-founder Andrew Parker founded MDLive, where the younger Parker served in sales and VP roles for five years before Papa was launched in 2017. The company’s Uber-like model involves having “Papa Pals” accept task assignments from the company’s app in being paid as independent contractors.

Sales

• Gundersen Health System will implement Kyruus One and ProviderMatch for Consumers for finding providers and eventually booking appointments.
• Parkland Health & Hospital System chooses Current Health for remote patient monitoring for hypertension.

People

Well Health hires Sean Kelly, MD (Imprivata) as chief medical officer.

Healthcare Triangle names Manish Hindupur (XCM Solutions) as VP of cloud service delivery for life sciences and healthcare providers.

Nuance promotes Vito Augusta to regional VP.

The Providence Digital Innovation Group hires Andy Chu (Bold) as SVP of product and technology incubation.

Announcements and Implementations

In England, Verizon Business and telehealth platform vendor Visionable announce Care Everywhere, while will be sold in the APAC and EMEA regions.

Hospital for Special Surgery (NY) becomes the first US hospital to offer Clear’s Health Pass to expedite the entry of vaccinated patients for visits. Visitors who don’t use the technology will continue with in-person screening and check-in.

Mazda will add in-car cameras that will detect when drivers are having a stroke or heart attack and then guide their vehicle to a safe spot with flashing lights on, starting with next year’s models that are sold in Japan. By 2025, Co-Pilot Concept will also diagnose impending driver health problems and provide advance warning. The carmaker is working with medical experts to allow its cameras to recognize driver positions that indicate problems.

Government and Politics

The federal government will require facilities that are paid by Medicare or Medicaid to fully vaccinate all of their employees against COVID-19  by January 4, 2022. Enforcement will be via CMS surveyors.

CMS increases the minimum penalty for hospitals that fail to comply with the Hospital Price Transparency final rule to $10 per bed per day starting January 1, 2022. The final CMS rule also prohibits hospitals from hiding their machine-readable price files from search engines.

A VA-conducted anonymous survey of employees of Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center finds that 83% say their morale is worse since Cerner went live last fall, 81% report increased burnout, 62% aren’t confident about using Cerner to perform their jobs, and 63% question whether they should continue working for the VA. A Congressional committee questioned whether the VA has moved on prematurely from its first implementation to focus on the upcoming one in Columbus. VA Deputy Secretary Donald Remy says he will visit Mann-Grandstaff, the VA will create a new position for someone with large-scale EHR implementation to oversee daily decisions, and the VA may create a deputy CIO position to oversee the Cerner implementation directly.

Other

Bloomberg Businessweek says that 23andMe has stuck to its business plan from 15 years ago – first to convince consumers to send in their DNA samples to gain trivial insight about ancestral origins, then to use their sequencing data to profitably develop drugs — in creating a new IPO’d business that is “sitting somewhere between a Big Pharma lab, a Big Tech company, and a trusted neighborhood doctor.” The article says that co-founder and CEO Ann Wojcicki, who was formerly married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, was influenced by Google’s strategy to “collect all the data, derive whatever insights you can, and find an adjacent line of business with the potential to yield much bigger profits.” The article notes that consumers who have sent samples might feel baited-and-switched by having the company use the data they paid to contribute used to generate drug profits. Wojcicki says she hasn’t decided how the company will manage its just-announced acquisition of virtual visit company Lemonaid Health, but Lemonaid’s doctors will use genetic information for prescribing drugs once the company has determined the usefulness of genetic risk factors in primary care. She responded to a question about patient privacy by saying that patient data is being widely sold by the medical establishment without the patient’s knowledge anyway, although experts note that 23andMe’s process bypasses a third-party data broker and doesn’t involve paying consumers for using their data to generate profits.

The Onion weighs in on a woman who was charged a $700 ED facility fee by Emory Decatur Hospital even though she left without being seen after seven hours of waiting with a head injury. Emory Healthcare told her that patients are charged before being seen, not for actually being seen.

Sponsor Updates

• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring Phoenix Children’s Hospital EVP and Chief Innovation Officer David Higginson.
• Cerner and transplant software vendor Transplant Connect integrate their systems to automate donor referrals.
• CHIME honors Nordic Consulting Board Chair and former CEO Bruce Cerullo with its Foundation Industry Leader Award.
• Empowered Patient Radio features First Databank Nicole Wulf, “Debunking the Myth of Iodine Allergy Related to Contrast Agents Used in Imaging Procedures with Dr. Nicole Wulf FDB.”
• Fortified Health Security hires Jessica Marshall (ChanceLight Behavioral Health) as VP of human resources.
• Goliath Technologies has achieved record revenue and customer growth during the first half of 2021.
• Health Data Movers publishes a new client story, “EHR Integration Makes Providers’ Jobs Easier.”
• Vanguard Law Mag features Lyniate Chief Legal Officer Merritt McGowan, “Taking a personal approach to health care law.”
• Vyne Medical publishes a podcast titled “How Patient Experience is Leading Hospitals Towards Digital Transformation.”

Blog Posts

• Digital Health Technology as a Key Player in Nursing Efficiency (Get Well)
• Uncovering Obstacles to Healthcare Technology Adoption (Halo Health)
• Managed Services for the Ambulatory Setting (HCTec)
• HAS 21 Virtual in Review: Soaring Satisfaction Rates, Attendee Profiles, and More (Health Catalyst)
• Evolve At-Home Services to Maximize Value-Based Care (Dina)
• Partnering with the AAWP to Bring Health Education to the African American Community (Healthwise)
• Unpopular opinion: Social distancing is the best thing to happen to EHR training (Nordic)
• From ransomware to killware: Is the future of cyberattacks turning more sinister? (Imprivata)
• What’s in a variant? Part IV – Making variant sequencing data useful for patient care (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• How to Address SDOH When Caring for Patients at Home (Jvion)
• Digital Transformation: Just Hype, or Vital to Your Hospital’s Success? (Lumeon)
• 10 Disaster Recovery Capabilities All Hospitals Need (Medhost)
• How jump-starting quality improvement efforts can lead to transformational change (Meditech)
• 7 Ways to Streamline Documentation in Your PT Practice (MWTherapy)
• Early detection and real-time medical image-sharing save lives (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 11/3/21

Top News

Medical practice software vendor Kareo merges with PatientPop, which offers practice growth technology. The combined companies will operate under the name Tebra.

Reader Comments

From Pipette: “Re: Jonathan Bush. He scorns the HIMSS conference ‘boat show’ in an article, but I seem to recall that Athenahealth docked its own figurative craft out there on the show floor with all those other vendors.” JB has always expressed amusing scorn for the show that his then-company supported as a sponsor and exhibitor. His latest piece from his new seat at Zus Health compares the HIMSS conference to HLTH, observing that while HIMSS feels outdated, mainstream companies are required to attend because 95% of doctor visits are still powered by code written by HIMSS members (he misspells Neal Patterson’s name as “Neil,” but so do a lot of people who probably confuse it with Neil Pappalardo). He says HLTH is like a prom of on-the-rise attendees that is more focused on care than technology, with few geeks in attendance and a lot of premature pomp from companies that will probably fail and “provide critical compost for the winners’ crops.” Here’s his introductory paragraph:

​I think I’ve been to HIMSS roughly a thousand times. It was almost comical to walk into that giant convention center and see the booths two and three stories tall, like giant ships at a boats how. Esteemed patrons would climb up gilded, spiraling stairwells for bottled water and espresso shots, while down on the floor, consultants and competitor employees were shooed away by stiff-smiled booth attendants. These booths, massive and imposing, increasingly looked like something a defense contractor might make, until they literally were made by defense contractors. It was a world where technology was starkly separate from care, where vendors would hawk their wares, distanced from the reality of the very institutions they were selling to. Sure, there were some doctors at HIMSS — the “CMIOs” and whatnot — but they were akin to Afghan translators embedded with our troops — good people, feeling a little bit out of place and a little bit worried that they may be viewed negatively by their people.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Question: does it bug you when someone writes “y’all” in an email or social media update? I’ve always liked hearing it said by actual Southerners — kind of like “holler, “howdy,” or “reckon” – but not as much in writing. Blame the English language for not offering a separate plural form of “you”  — other than the outdated “ye” as a plural or “thou” as the singular with “you” as its plural — and thus spawning the workarounds “yinz,” “youse,” and the grating server salutation “you guys.”

Webinars

November 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Too Important to Fail: How to Bring Better AI to Healthcare.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; Marc d. Paradis, VP of data strategy, Northwell Health. It’s relatively easy to obtain healthcare data and build an AI demo, but getting AI to perform reliably and with meaningful impact is much harder. However, strategies exist for delivering AI products to commercial markets. This fireside chat will review the status of AI in healthcare; discuss the vital importance of data quality, methodological rigor, and product focus; and explore what this means to the startup and investor world.

November 11 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Increasing OR Profitability: It May Be Easier than you Think.” Sponsor: Copient Health. Presenters: Michael Burke, co-founder and CEO, Copient Health; David Berger, MD, MHCM, CEO, University Hospital of Brooklyn at State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University. The OR is a hospital’s biggest source of revenue and its costliest resource, yet it often sits idle because of unfilled block time even as providers with cases ready to book lack access. AI-powered emerging technologies can help fill unused OR time and provide decision support to structure workflows and optimize block allocation. This webinar explores the biggest challenges to profitability faced in the OR and the fastest, most impactful changes a hospital can make to address them.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Digital social services referral company Aunt Bertha rebrands to Findhelp.

Sales

• Christus Santa Rosa Hospital – New Braunfels (TX) selects Care Continuity’s care logistics software to facilitate patient transitions from its ED to primary care physicians and specialists.
• Pipeline Health System selects Premier’s supply chain technology and services.

People

WebPT hires Ashley Glover, MBA (RealPage) as CEO. She replaces the retiring Nancy Ham, who will move to board chair.

Hinge Health names Lalith Vadlamannati, PhD (Amazon) as CTO.

HIPAAtrek promotes Amy Coulter to CEO. She co-founded Ability Network, which was sold to Inovalon in 2018 for $1.2 billion.

Southwestern Health Resources (TX) names Mac Marlow, MBA (Lehigh Valley Health Network) CIO and Shashi Vangala, MS (Baylor Scott & White Health) chief data and value creation officer.

Medication management technology vendor Arine hires Todd Christiansen, RPh, MBA (Leidos Health) as chief growth officer, Thomas Cooke (Leidos) (not pictured) as VP of business development, and Amy Mosher-Garvey, MSSW, MBA (Leidos) as VP of client success.

Avia names Anjani Shah, MBA (McKinsey & Co.) SVP of transformation and Dhiraj Patkar, MS (HRGi Holdings) SVP of product for Avia Connect.

Agathos, which sends hospital physicians action-level insights on their practice patterns, hires John Pollard (Nordic) as head of marketing,

Announcements and Implementations

Soma Medical Center has deployed EHR and health information search engine technologies from EClinicalWorks across its 25 facilities in Florida.

A new KLAS report reviews risk adjustment solutions.

Privacy and Security

In Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador struggles to recover from a weekend ransomware attack on its health IT systems that has forced its facilities to revert to downtime procedures and cancel appointments.

Other

Seattle Children’s Hospital electronically replaces allergy reaction descriptions in Epic that contain the the formerly common term “red man syndrome” – which it says is racist language — with “vancomycin flushing syndrome.” The hospital also implemented autocorrect functionality to prevent use of the term. The phenomenon in which IV vancomycin causes a red rash was first documented in 1959 as “Red Man’s Syndrome,” which was the subject of a 1985 proposal to instead call it “Red-neck Syndrome” to recognize that it occurs equally in men and women.

Sponsor Updates

• The Health Innovation Matters Podcast features AdvancedMD Chief Marketing Officer Jim Elliott.
• A newly published peer-reviewed study concludes that Bamboo Health’s NarxCare solution is effective as an “initial universal prescription opioid-risk screener.”
• Philips Capsule Medical Device Information Platform has exceeded the milestone of integrating with more than 1,000 unique medical device models.
• Cerner publishes a white paper, “Unlocking the power of data with the Cerner Learning Health Network.”
• Dina will exhibit at the FirstLight Home Care conference November 4-5 in Salt Lake City.
• Engage, a Tegria company, maintains its position as one of the top firms in a new KLAS Research Performance Insights report, “Meditech Implementations Services 2021: Which Firms are Driving Successful Implementations?”
• Emerge publishes a case study, “Emerge Improved Revenue and Quality for Multi-Specialty Group Using Natural Language Processing.”

Blog Posts

• COVID-19 vaccine requirements: 4 facts SNFs need to know (Ability Network)
• Join Us at RSNA 2021 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Three Key Takeaways from HLTH 2021: Driving Change through Care Coordination to Transform Whole Person Care (Bamboo Health)
• Virtual Telemedicine: Innovative Care Delivery Models (Bluestream)
• The Information Advantage: How Esse Health Reduced High-Risk ED Visits and Drove $3.6M in Savings (CareSignal)
• MEDITECH Customers Named to CHIME’s Most Wired 2021 (Meditech)
• Power in the Portals: How to Get Patients at the Center of Care (CereCore)
• Wrap up on CBI’s Coupon and Copay Conference: TL;DR Takeaways (ConnectiveRx)
• The Power of Teamwork, Training, and Trust (Diameter Health)
• 2021 National Conference: Opening a New Chapter in Healthcare IT (EClinicalWorks)
• Single-Path Coding: Doing Away with Disparate Coding Practices (EZDI)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/1/21

Top News

Cerner reports Q3 results: revenue up 7%, adjusted EPS $0.86 versus $0.72, beating analyst expectations for both.

From the earnings call:

• President and CEO David Feinberg, MD, MBA says that EHR vendors have done a good job of automating processes and digitizing medical records, but their products haven’t reached their potential to allow caregivers to spend less time on the computer. He says one of his top priorities will be to improve system usability, a theme he repeated several times in the call.
• Feinberg says that Cerner has historically tried to do too many things, often without involving other companies. He says the company will focus on high-value areas, sometimes in partnership with others.
• The company says it is making end-of-life decisions for some less-profitable products. It will also end some low-value partnership arrangements.
• Client satisfaction that has “not been as high as it should be” has limited Cerner’s ability to pass along the Consumer Price Index escalators that many of its customer contracts allow.
• Cerner’s data business that is now known as Enviza is generating $130 million in annual revenue.
• Feinberg says that while health system mergers and acquisitions may create customer attrition, losing a customer who is disappointed with Cerner’s products and services “is something that is completely unacceptable to me.” He will meet with any customers that have been identified as unhappy in his first 100 days.
• Feinberg said in response to an analyst’s  question about layoffs that companies can’t shrink their way to greatness. He said, “I think it oftentimes is a reflection of management not predicting where the business is going and getting folks retrained for areas of growth so that this stuff doesn’t happen. We need to right the ship, and I think that’s part of the process here. But in some ways, to me, it’s been lack of discipline and lack of focus.”
• Cerner’s employee count dropped by 1,000 from the end of Q2 to the end of Q3, equally split between layoffs and managed attrition.
• Asked about revenue cycle product consolidation, Feinberg said that it should have been done earlier, but the mindset was that anything built outside of Kansas City couldn’t be the best.
• Feinberg says that HealtheIntent offers a good strategy for population health management, but it needs to be streamlined and some of it is falling behind competing systems.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Insurance companies were most often named by poll respondents as providing poor customer service recently, although the results are likely skewed because fewer people would have had “recent” experience with a hospital or post-acute provider.

New poll to your right or here:  Do you want to have ongoing engagement with a primary care physician who knows your health story? Mike Linnert made me think when he observed in my interview with him that “lifetime value” of health engagement differs among age cohorts – it’s not as simple as younger people behaving less responsibly or thinking they are immortal.

LinkedIn contradictions: (a) bragging that starts with “I’m humbled by …” and (b) personal information posts that lead off with “I rarely post personal information here, but …”

Webinars

November 11 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Increasing OR Profitability: It May Be Easier than you Think.” Sponsor: Copient Health. Presenters: Michael Burke, co-founder and CEO, Copient Health; David Berger, MD, MHCM, CEO, University Hospital of Brooklyn at State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University. The OR is a hospital’s biggest source of revenue and its costliest resource, yet it often sits idle because of unfilled block time even as providers with cases ready to book lack access. AI-powered emerging technologies can help fill unused OR time and provide decision support to structure workflows and optimize block allocation. This webinar explores the biggest challenges to profitability faced in the OR and the fastest, most impactful changes a hospital can make to address them.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Vocera announces Q3 results: revenue up 18%, adjusted EPS $0.28 versus $0.26, beating expectations for both.

NextGen Healthcare reports Q2 results: revenue up 7%, adjusted EPS $0.29 versus $0.30, beating expectations for both. NXGN shares are up 19% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 38% gain, valuing the company at $1.1 billion.

People

Divurgent hires Jason Potter, MBA (Auditec Solutions) as VP of client services and Sonny Sarma, MPH (Reingold) as principal.

Announcements and Implementations

InterSystems IRIS for Health joins Postgres, MS SQL, and Oracle as a data platform for i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) for clinical research data management that includes FHIR-based solution development, certified interoperability, seamless data management, and open analytics.

Redox launches a FHIR API that offers patient health record queries, single sign-on, receiving specific events, and writing events back to the EHR.

NextGen Healthcare adds remote patient monitoring to its telehealth solution, allowing practices to support home monitoring devices such as glucometers and blood pressure tools.

Main Line Health (PA) is working with partners to commercialize technology developed by its nurses, initially focusing on hospital room and facility safety devices, EHR add-on components, clinical tests, and medical devices. Informatics nurse Michelle Gray, RN, MSN developed and EHR charting tool that allows nurses to enter information once for both mother and newborn.

Government and Politics

The US Supreme Court may hear Epic’s appeal of its trade secrets lawsuit against Tata Consultancy Services in which an initial jury award of $940 million to Epic was reduced based on precedents that Epic says were incorrectly applied. Epic is appealing a circuit court decision to cap punitive damages at $140 million, which would limit the total award to $280 million.

Other

China will increase its regulation of the country’s 1,600 online hospitals, requiring telehealth physicians to authenticate their identity and limiting the use of AI to impersonate or replace those physicians. China doesn’t allow online consultations as a tool to sell prescriptions, but the new regulations also prohibit physicians making money from drugs and medical examinations and also from directing consumers to specific vendors of drugs and supplies.

Rapper Megan Thee Stallion will graduate from Texas Southern University next month with a bachelor’s degree in health administration.

In England, an 83-year-old partially disabled man who doesn’t use a computer had to wait in line to have blood drawn at a walk-in clinic after being told that several NHS Derby and Derbyshire  locations only book appointments online.

Germany-based prescription migraine app vendor M-sense wins the Internet with this brilliant dig at Facebook.

Sponsor Updates

• Waystar will partner with Jefferson Community and Technical College in Kentucky to launch the Waystar Scholars Mentoring Program.
• Premier and Resilinc expand their partnership to enhance supply chain visibility and sustainability.
• The Healthcare Americana Podcast features RxRevu founder and Chief Innovation Officer Carm Huntress, “Helping Providers Make Informed Prescribing Decisions Through Actionable Data.”
• Sectra publishes a new case study, “’Cutting-edge’ enterprise imaging enhances workflows and patient care at Mayfair Diagnostics.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT wins the 2021 CHIME Foundation Partner Award.

Blog Posts

• Overcoming Challenges Related to Multiple Sclerosis Treatment: Initiating Treatment (OptimizeRx)
• 5 healthcare use cases for machine learning that reduce costs and improve hospital administration (Olive)
• Getting Reimbursed for Clinical Services: 4 Things You Need to Know (OmniSys)
• Why Digital Health Reminders Make a Difference in Market Share (PatientBond)
• Three Ways Managed Services Can Amplify IT Success (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Artificial Intelligence: A New Tool in the Push for Maternal and Fetal Safety in Labor and Delivery (PeriGen)
• Tech-Enabled and Paper-Free: Bringing Healthcare Purchasing into the 21st Century (Premier)
• Patient Lives Are on the Line: 3 Notes on Cybersecurity Awareness (Protenus)
• 3 ways to improve workflows and reduce clinician burnout with a strong IT-clinical relationship (Spok)
• Using Centralized Scheduling Effectively for Patient Appointments (Relatient)
• Early detection and real-time medical image-sharing save lives (Nuance)
• How bedside patient requests can improve PX (Sonifi Health)
• 4 Ways Providers Can Deliver More Transparency to Patients (Sphere)
• What is an insider attack and how does one start? (Spirion)
• Oh, No! They’re Forming a Human Pyramid … of Robots! (Summit Healthcare)
• From Powerless to Empowered: Solving the Drug Cost Conundrum for Patients, Prescribers, and Pharmacists (Surescripts)
• Improved patient experience is more critical than ever to healthcare organizations (Talkdesk)
• The “Make Me Smart” Question: Healthcare Data Edition (Tegria)
• How Technology Can Help Specialty Pharmacies Support Adherence and Improve Satisfaction (Twistle)
• Work smarter: 3 Cs to better claim monitoring (Waystar)
• 4 Ways to Attract New PT Staff When the Workforce is Dropping Like Flies (WebPT)
• How to Overcome the Challenges of Integrating EMS Systems (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 10/29/21

Top News

Northwell Health and Aegis Ventures form a joint venture that will invest at least $100 million in seed-stage AI-driven healthcare companies.

The companies say they expect the JV to become a multi-billion dollar program that will address healthcare challenges such as quality, equity, and cost.

Aegis committed to the $100 million investment, while Northwell will invest in individual solutions within the program.

Northwell says the JV-launched companies will be able to train their AI-based systems on its extensive and diverse database of patient clinical records, which will allow them to avoid bias.

Reader Comments

From Swing Lube: “Re: health IT executive conferences. Why do they always include golf outings?” Beats me. I always felt left out when attending small-group executive meetings where I was one of few people who don’t play golf. I suppose golf is the default group activity because it’s quiet for networking (unlike, say, a 5K or axe-throwing), it’s expensive and thus a sponsor-supported treat for participants, and those playing are held captive for many hours. Golf outings may incorporate some gender bias, however, since I’ve read that nearly 80% of people who played a round in the past year were male, although I would guess that health IT executive meetings are also male dominated.

From Mark Trade: “Re: product names. Please add the copyright symbol to ours that you mentioned.” This came from a marketing person, who incorrectly believes that any use of a name that has a trademark, copyright, or service mark always needs to be flagged with the corresponding symbol wherever that name is used. Nobody should use those symbols except the company itself, which does so to prevent a competitor from hijacking their name.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Bamboo Health. The Louisville, KY-based company — formerly known as Appriss Health plus Patient Ping – focuses on fostering care collaboration and providing information and actionable insights across the entire continuum of care. As one of the largest, most diverse care collaboration networks in the country, its technology solutions equip healthcare providers and payers with software, information, and insights to facilitate whole-person care across the physical and behavioral health spectrums. By serving 2,500 hospitals, 7,800 post-acute facilities, 25,000 pharmacies, 37 health plans, 45 state governments, and over one million acute and ambulatory providers through more than 500 clinical information systems electronically, the company impacts over 1 billion patient encounters annually in provider workflow. Health systems, payers, providers, pharmacies, governments, individuals, and other organizations rely on Bamboo Health to improve care and reduce cost. See the explainer video on YouTube. Thanks to Bamboo Health 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

Online pharmacy Truepill raises $142 million a Series D funding round, increasing its total investment to $256 million at a valuation of $1.6 billion. The company, which offers its white-labeled platform to health brands and pharma, is expanding into telehealth, diagnostics, and COVID-19 wellness.

Healthcare shift-filling app vendor ShiftMed raises $45 million in a venture funding round.

Sales

• In England, West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust chooses Zivver for sharing data securely via email and file transfer as it moves from NHS Mail to Microsoft 365 Outlook for email.

People

Office Practicum hires Mark Richards (Optimize.health) as chief revenue officer.

Quil names Dwight Raum (Johns Hopkins Medicine) as chief digital officer.

Announcements and Implementations

University Medical Center of El Paso implements advanced clinical documentation improvement, audit, and analytics from EZDI, which was recently acquired by AGS Health.

Premier chooses Glytec as its sole supplier of glycemic management software for its members.

The VA expands its rollout of VA Health Chat to two VISNs that make the chat tool – provided by CirrusMD and now including video capability – available to 2.5 million veterans.

Greenway Health expands its care coordination services to offer remote patient monitoring to its ambulatory care clients in partnership with MD Revolution.

LexisNexis Healthcare’s identity management platform is listed on Epic App Orchard.

Finland-based Navigil launches its wellness watch for seniors in the US on AT&T’s LTE-M network, offering alarm call routing, notification services, and wellness trend analytics. The company intentionally designed the product to look like a traditional analog watch, explaining in a blog post, “No one, especially my mom, wants to wear a device that screams ‘I’m old.’”

A new KLAS report looks at Meditech implementation services. Tegria-owned Engage scores highest although all validated engagements involved under-100 bed hospitals, while Tegria-owned Navin Haffty, Huron, and MedSR (the merged MedMatica and Santa Rosa Staffing) scored high in broader settings. Meditech’s recently launched implementation services also score above average.

Privacy and Security

Security researchers find an unsecured database containing nearly 900 million patient records that belong to Deep6.ai, whose platform queries EHRs to match patients to clinical trials. UPDATE: Deep6.ai says no patient information was exposed – the database contained only dummy data from MIT’s Medical Information Mart of Intensive Care system that was being used as a proof of concept. 

Other

The many companies that are supposedly on Epic’s non-compete list are listed here. Epic employees can’t work for a competing company, an Epic customer, or an Epic sales prospect for one year after quitting unless their new job has no connection to software or related services.

KHN describes how Poudre Valley Hospital (CO) instructed a woman in normal labor to come in through the ED door since it was the hospital’s only unlocked one, then billed her insurance $2,800 for Level 5 ED services that are usually assigned to resource-intensive or life-and-death cases. She had to pay $3,600 out of pocket for her one-night stay after insurance. Several other women reported the same billing surprise. The article cites a white paper by private equity-owned healthcare staffing company TeamHealth that describes how a hospital can increase profit by calling its OB triage area an OB ED, which allows it to “collect facility charges that are otherwise lost in the obstetrical triage setting.” This would be the point where the “blame the game, not the player” debate commences and the non-Americans gasp at the capitalism-driven healthcare system that we accept as normal, at least until we need it.

A jury awards a former marketing SVP of Novant Health $10 million in a reverse discrimination lawsuit in which David Duvall says he was fired without cause in 2018 so the health system could appoint two equally qualified women, one of whom is black, to support its diversity and inclusion program. Duvall says that five other white, male Novant executives were similarly fired, one of them being its CIO (he is presumably referring to Dave Garrett, who left Novant in 2018 after 10 years).

Facebook will change its corporate name to Meta with Facebook as a subsidiary, similar to Google’s creating parent company Alphabet. The company says it has greater ambitions than just being a social media company and will focus on the metaverse that combines virtual and augmented reality. 

Cerner and Epic CEOs just chillin’ with CHIME21 selfies.

Sponsor Updates

• Dina employees participate in World Cleanup Day.
• Clinical Architecture and Wolters Kluwer Health Language will exhibit at the AMIA annual symposium October 27-30 in San Diego.
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions makes its Healthcare Identity Management platform available in the Epic App Orchard.
• Olive announces creation of five partnership programs – Develop, Deploy, Distribute, Alliance, and The Library – that will allow solutions built on Olive to be immediately delivered to health systems, payers, and patients.
• Henry Schein Medical Systems will integrate the Health Language natural language processing solution of Wolters Kluwer, Health into its MicroMD EHR/PM.
• Change Healthcare, sponsor of the Health Evolution Forum, signs the forum’s Health Equity Pledge.
• WEDI’s Collective Voice of Health IT Podcast features Fortified Health Security CEO Dan Dodson.
• Kyruus will host the 8th Annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium virtually on November 9-10.
• France-based medical intelligence platform vendor Synapse Medicine integrates First Databank’s drug database and interoperability module with its medication reconciliation technology.
• Kyruus will host its 8th annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium November 9-10 to focus on expanding flexibility around patient access and care.
• Meditech shares updated guidance on COVID-19 vaccine booster shots

Blog Posts

• The enigma of the edge case in healthcare (Nordic)
• Best Practices Shared by Successful CMIOs and CNIOs (Halo Health)
• Breaking Down Blockchain’s Big Potential: What Pharma Leaders Should Know (Healthcare Triangle)
• Healthcare Cyber Security: Enabling Zero Trust (HCI Group)
• The Internet never sleeps. Neither should your portal support team. (HCTec)
• Surprise Billing in Healthcare: The No Surprises Act Takes a Stand for Patients (Health Catalyst)
• The value of AI and ML for healthcare privacy, security, and compliance (Imprivata)
• Do you know the 3 Ps driving healthcare digital and virtual transformation? (Infor)
• Laterality in clinical documentation: Understanding ICD-10-CM’s new unspecified rule (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• This Time, Interoperability is Real: Part 3 – Patient Access API (LexisNexis)
• Memos from the Medhost CISO: Defining Ransomware and How It Spreads (Medhost)
• Exploring the evolution from transactional to transformational care at Meditech’s 2021 Physician and CIO Forum (Meditech)
• Early detection and real-time medical image sharing save lives (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 10/27/21

Top News

Revenue cycle management platform vendor NThrive and its financial backer Clearlake Capital Group will acquire TransUnion Healthcare, the data and analytics business of TransUnion, for $1.7 billion in cash.

TransUnion reportedly started fielding offers for the business in early September 2021.

TransUnion Healthcare will generate $190 million in revenue this year in serving 1,850 hospitals and 650,000 physicians.

The companies expect the deal to close in Q4.

Reader Comments

From Anointed One: “Re: HIMSS Accelerate. Is anyone actually using this? They are hiring executives like it’s going to take off and I don’t see it.” I didn’t see anything interesting when I first gave it a test drive and still don’t. The skimpy content is mostly HIMSS people trying unsuccessfully to drum up conversations, pitches for HIMSS events, and the Healthcare IT News crew linking to their stories. I occasionally dampen the enthusiasm of people who think that an online platform is needed to support unmet demand for health IT collaboration (I bought this cool hammer – anybody got a nail?) with these observations from experience in watching similar sites die young:

• Sites like Accelerate rely on unpaid participants to create content for each other to consume. Few people are interested in doing that, especially busy executives.
• Free or not, sites need to be clear on what they offer and why users should care. It’s not enough to just put up a discussion site and wait for participation to skyrocket.
• It has always been hard to build and keep an online audience whose needs are inconsistent and who have many alternatives.
• Use of information sharing sites is nearly always sporadic because people don’t log on until they need something from other users (a question answered, a contact provided, experience shared) and then go MIA until their next need arises.
• Discussion sites are like unhosted parties, where just telling people to drop by, bring their own food and drink, and join unknown strangers who have nothing better to do is sure to fail.

Webinars

October 28 (Thursday) 1 ET. “A New Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. IMO and Cerner announce the launch of the IMO Core CSmart app, an in-workflow offering to improve clinical documentation and problem list management in Cerner Millennium. The presenters will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management, discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can reduce clinician HIT burden, and demonstrate how IMO Core CSmart can help clinicians document with ease and specificity, improve HCC coding, and make problem lists more relevant. Additional sessions will be offered on November 17 and December 1.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Anomaly, whose platform identifies payment and billing errors before they occur, raises $17 million in a Series A funding round.

Sales

• Northwell Health (NY) will implement Cedar’s after-visit patient engagement and payment software.
• Kingman Regional Medical Center (AZ) selects Oneview Healthcare’s Care Experience technology.
• LifePoint Health expands its use of Loyal’s patient experience technology solutions and will implement its new platform.
• SCL Health will create a centralized OB hub using PeriGen’s PeriWatch Command Center enterprise-wide telehealth platform.
• CloudWave announces that seven healthcare organizations have gone live on its recently announced OpSus Cloud Services, which offers managed hosting, disaster recovery, systems management, security, backup, and archiving services that support 125 healthcare applications.

People

CitiusTech promotes Bhaskar Sambasivan, MEng to CEO. Co-founders Rizwan Koita (CEO) and Jagdish Moorjani (COO) will leave their executive positions but remain on the company’s board.

Mercury Healthcare (formerly known as Healthgrades) names Chris Hackney (Cision) chief product officer and Manish Goel (Envision Pharma Group) CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

Redox develops a connector to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, giving Microsoft Azure users the ability to convert legacy EHR data to the FHIR R4 standard.

Amazon launches Alexa Smart Properties for healthcare facilities, giving hospitals an easy way to deploy and manage Alexa devices across the enterprise. Early adopters include Boston Children’s Hospital, Cedars-Sinai (CA), BayCare (FL), and Houston Methodist.

Vodafone and Deloitte create a strategic alliance and digital solutions accelerator.

Cerner launches Cerner Enviza, an operating unit that combines expertise from Cerner and its acquired real world data vendor Kantar Health.

Government and Politics

Britain’s finance ministry will allocate $2.9 billion for technology improvements across the NHS as part of an $8 billion spending package aimed at decreasing appointment wait times.

Other

Stamford Hospital and Stamford Health Medical Group recover from a server failure late last week that forced them to enact downtime procedures, including diverting ambulances and rescheduling elective procedures.

Sponsor Updates

• CoverMyMeds raises $175,000 for cancer research.
• Netsmart will exhibit at the 2021 LeadingAge Annual Meeting and Expo through October 27 in Atlanta.
• The Northwest Regional Primary Care Association features Azara Health in “How Automated Outreach with Luma Health & Azara is Helping an Alaska FQHC Keep Patients Healthier.”
• About partners with The Baldridge Foundation to develop new LeaderDialogue content for healthcare leaders.
• Cerner VP and CNO Melissa Solito, RN wins the G2Xchange’s Leading for Impact, Women in Leadership award.
• ChartSpan publishes a new guide, “Help Me Choose: SaaS versus Fully Managed Chronic Care Management.”

Blog Posts

• A splash of colour to kick off your week! (Agfa HealthCare)
• Virtual Care Optimizations: The importance of a Digital Health Steering Committee (Bluetree)
• Why Healthcare CIOs Need Managed IT Services (CereCore)
• Achieving Health Equity Requires a Robust IT Strategy (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Making Every Month Cybersecurity Month (Clearwater)
• Using Data to Drive Patient Adherence, Population Health, and Brand Revenues (ConnectiveRx)
• The New Normal for Hospital Operations, Part 1 (Engage)
• Emerge Improved Revenue and Quality for Multi-Specialty Group Using Natural Language Processing (Emerge)
• Q+A: healthcare price transparency in 2022 (Experian Health)

Contacts

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