News 10/8/21

Top News

Member engagement and wellness app vendor Virgin Pulse will acquire Welltok, which offers analytics-powered multi-channel healthcare communications.

Virgin Pulse, which has made several acquisitions, is owned by Morgan Equity Partners, which was reportedly shopping for a buyer for the company in early 2020 at $2 billion. It acquired the company from Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group in mid-2018 and merged it with digital coaching company RedBrick Health.

Welltok has raised $262 million in funding, most recently a Series E round in July 2020.

Reader Comments

From TAA-Da!: “Re: Ascension IT. Another WARN notice, now approaching 1,000 employees since August. Why does it seem like all this outsourcing is invisible to most people?” Most people pay only casual attention to layoffs and/or outsourcing unless they have direct connections to those affected or the companies involved, especially since cheap-seats opinions are unlikely to reverse the course anyway. There’s also limited benefit to recognizing a possible trend unless you, as an employee who might be affected down the road, have options for mitigating your risk. Lastly, the outsourcing pendulum often eventually swings back for at least some jobs because cost savings and quality were overpromised.

From Nordic Viking: “Re: Cerner. Seems like they are losing ground in the Nordics since the City of Jyväskylä just announced that they withdrew from the Central Finland Cerner program. It will for sure have a negative impact on the already troubled and delayed projects in the South of Sweden.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor OneMedNet. The Eden Prairie, MN-based company provides innovative solutions that unlock the significant value that is contained within the clinical image archives of healthcare providers. Its OneMedNet iRWD offering securely de-identifies, searches, and curates a data archive locally, bringing a wealth of internal and third-party research opportunities to providers. By leveraging this extensive federated provider network, together with industry leading technology and in-house clinical expertise, OneMedNet successfully meets the most rigorous RWD Life Science requirements. Thanks to OneMedNet 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

Carbon Health, which offers telehealth and in-office primary and urgent care from five locations in New York City and Columbus, acquires remote patient monitoring tools vendor Alertive Healthcare.

The private equity owner of advance care planning technology vendor Vital Decisions sells the company to Evolent Health.

Revenue cycle management vendor Aspirion Health Resources acquires Advicare, which resolves clinical denials.

Virtual medical documentation contractor Augmedix launches a $40 million IPO offering.

Sales

• Global imaging platform vendor Arterys chooses OneMedNet to provide de-identified real-world provider data for the development, validation, and regulatory approval of its solutions.

People

Hackensack Meridian Healt hires Kash Patel, MSEE (Penn Medicine) as EVP / chief information and digital engagement officer.

Helia Care, which offers a platform that connects hospitals and medical device companies for ordering, hires Gregg Smith (Sharecare Provider Solutions) as chief commercial officer.

Isabelle Stapf, MS (AppFolio) joins Well Health as SVP of product.

Announcements and Implementations

Cerner launches RevElate as its single go-forward patient accounting system following years of high-profile struggles with Cerner Patient Accounting. The company says it will begin phasing in the product to replace existing Millennium and Soarian systems in 2023. A hospital CIO sent along these notes they took during the announcement:

• RevElate is based on the Soarian Financials platform.
• Former Soarian customers were electing to keep Soarian Financials while migrating to Millennium clinicals.
• Cerner Patient Accounting support will be phased out over the next 5-6 years. New sales will stop immediately.
• Patient access, charge capture, and the charge master will remain in Millennium, while patient accounting, including contract management, will be in RevElate.
• HealtheEDW is the go-forward strategy for reporting and analytics.
• Key development partners BayCare and Charleston Area Medical Center will initially deploy the system .
• Cerner clients that are upgrading to RevElate will undergo a six-month project.
• The product will be available to the full customer base in Q1 2023.
• Demos will be offered during the CHC virtual conference next week.

Data from Premier’s PINC AI predictive modeling shows that hospital clinical labor costs have increased 8% per patient day since the pandemic began, with overtime and agency use adding $17 million in annual costs for the average 500-bed facility.

Health IoT cybesecurity vendor Cynerio launches a small-hospital subscription program to protect against malware, ransomware, and other device security threats.

Abbott’s president and CEO will keynote the CES 2022 technology show in early January, the first time that a healthcare company will take its main stage.

HLTH announces COVID-19 safety precautions for its upcoming in-person meeting in Boston – mandatory proof of vaccination via Clear, PCR testing either within 72 hours before the conference or taken free onsite, and mandatory wearing of masks.

Other

CHIME publishes its list of Digital Health Most Wired for 2021.

In Spain,  the local health service apologizes for a gynecologist who documented “homosexual” as the current illness of a 19-year-old woman. The health service says it was an honest mistake caused by documenting her sexual orientation in the wrong part of the EHR, but the woman says that a hospital employee told her that several of the doctor’s patients had lodged similar complaints.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health launches Best Care Everywhere, a mission-driven movement to build and strengthen global health equity.
• Spok will highlight the importance of healthcare communication at its Connect 21 Virtual Conference October 11-12.
• The Nurse Keith Show Podcast features Glytec Clinical Project Lead Lori Weiss, RN “The Promising Future of Cutting-Edge Diabetes Care.”
• KLAS recognizes Halo Health in its latest report, “Clinical Communication Platforms – Improved Efficiency Leading to Concrete Outcomes.”
• PatientBond achieves 15 million touchpoints in August, sending automated email, text messages, and phone calls to 2.5 million unique patients.
• OncoSpark adds interoperability to it oncology prior authorization platform in partnering with Ellkay.
• The HCI Group’s DGTL Voices with Ed Marx Podcast releases a new episode, “CIO and CMO – the Importance of this Relationship,” featuring Cleveland Clinic CMO Paul Matsen and CIO Matt Kull.
• Health Catalyst will exhibit at HLTH 2021 October 17-20.
• KLAS recognizes Impact Advisors for its advisory and implementation services in its latest report, “2021 Healthcare Consulting & Services.”
• CareSignal publishes a white paper titled “Transform Your Population Health Strategy with Scalable Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring.”
• Imprivata and VMware partner to give clinicians password-free access to any app for smoother, more secure mobile workflows.
• Interbit Data CEO Arthur Young discusses hospital systems downtimes at the HIMSS conference.
• NextGate achieves ISO 27001 Certification for information security management systems.
• NTT Data launches a back-to-work app to support government and business COVID-19 requirements.

Blog Posts

• Integrating Cyber and Physical Security can Better Protect People and Save Enterprises Time and Money (Everbridge)
• FDB Thanks Pharmacy Heroes During American Pharmacists Month (First Databank)
• With cyberattacks on the rise we must all do our part and #BeCyberSmart (Fortified Health Security)
• Rock and Roll Business Inspiration: Key Lessons from the Story of KISS (HCTec)
• Three Ways AI Can Earn Clinicians’ Trust (Health Catalyst)
• How the Right Health Education Can Save Money and Improve Outcomes (Healthwise)
• Cybersecurity Awareness Month (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Deprescribing in Long-Term and Post-Acute Care Settings (MedAware)
• Easing password pains: How CISOS can implement real, complex passwords and keep clinicians happy (Imprivata)
• IMO resource roundup: Clinical terminology and COVID-19 (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Patient Engagement Causes Fragmentation – Instead, Think Experience (Lumeon)
• Is Mobile a Practical Solution to Improving Chronic Disease Management? (Medhost)
• Out with the old and in with the new: Lane Regional Medical Center adopts Expanse Patient Care to make ED hand-off safer and simpler (Meditech)
• 8 Ways for PTs to Maintain a Positive Work-Life Balance (MWTherapy)
• Why Public Health Demands Robust Interoperability and Patient Identification (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 10/6/21

Top News

Quality measurement and clinical intelligence platform vendor Apervita shuts down.

Chief Informatics and Innovation Officer Blackford Middleton, MD, MPH, MSc said in a LinkedIn post that the company was unable to complete a second funding round. It had raised $60 million since December 2012 through a Series A.

Apervita sold its value optimization business to Clarify Health in August 2021.

Reader Comments

From Executive Channel: “Re: females as VPs of HR, legal, and marketing. We would likely see the same phenomenon in IT if technology jobs  weren’t dominated by men.” Health system support departments such as IT don’t contribute directly to profit and loss except as a cost center, which is why executives of those areas aren’t usually seen as prime candidates for broader roles in areas that have dozens or hundreds of insiders who are ready to move up the ladder. Most of the big bumps in CIO compensation and job responsibility over the years came from consolidation into ever-larger health systems and horizontal expansion of CIO responsibility in taking over other support departments such as biomedical engineering, telecommunications, informatics, analytics, and quality reporting (headcount and budget responsibility drive pay in health systems). The few former CIOs who are now COOs or CEOs of large health systems gained experience in other positions, which I would anecdotally observe usually involved only a short stay in IT as part of being moved around for executive grooming — a long stint as a CIO in a single health system likely means you’ve topped out there. It’s not quite the same in vendorland, where CTOs of tech-heavy startups are often co-founders in companies where technology is a core competency rather than a supporting function.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Interbit Data. The Natick, MA-based company’s software automation solutions ensure that clinicians and hospital staff have easy, secure, and reliable access to patient and financial information so they can get back to quality patient care and stay in touch. Its products integrate with any HCIS platform to distribute reports that help care teams stay informed. It is the pioneer and best-practice leader in downtime business continuity, providing reliable access to patient information at the point-of-care during downtimes, as well as during more challenging cyber crises. Using its software automation solutions, hospitals can be more efficient, streamline workflows, and improve overall patient care and safety. It provides secure, reliable, and cost-effective solutions that help 800 healthcare facility customers worldwide remain connected. Thanks to Interbit Data for supporting HIStalk.

I found this explainer video for Interbit Data’s NetDelivery on YouTube.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 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. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

ManpowerGroup finalizes its acquisition of IT staffing and services provider Ettain Group, which acquired Leidos Health in 2019. Ettain will merge with ManpowerGroup’s Experis IT talent and solutions business and will operate under the Experis name.

Sales

• Cancer Treatment Centers of America will implement Lyniate’s Corepoint interoperability platform.
• Rochester RHIO selects Direct Secure Messaging capabilities from Secure Exchange Solutions.

People

Commure promotes Ashwini Zenooz, MD to CEO. She replaces industry long-timer Brent Dover, who will remain as an advisor.

Michael Wagner, MSA (MPRO) joins Honor Community Health as CIO.

QS Systems hires Kendall Stanley (Inovalon) as VP of sales and marketing.

Radiology Partners promotes Jennifer Beaumont to SVP of regional support services and clinical practice integration (she was SVP of IT) and hires Mark Logan (IBM Watson Health) as SVP of IT clinical technologies.

Patient and employee experience platform vendor Qualtrics hires Adrienne Boissy, MD (Cleveland Clinic) as its first chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Central Logic renames itself to About as it integrates recent acquisitions Ensocare (inpatient referral to post-acute care) and Acuity Link (transportation communications and logistics management).

Privia Health implements Kyruus ProviderMatch to enable patients to find and book appointments with physicians.

Sparrow Health (MI) adds a proof of COVID-19 vaccination feature developed by Epic to its MySparrow patient app. It enables users to display a QR code, download a PDF, or export verification to a health wallet.

Intermountain Healthcare, Presbyterian Healthcare Services, and SSM Health form Graphite Health, a nonprofit that will help member organizations vet, access, and implement digital health solutions.

Microsoft releases Windows 11 as a free upgrade for eligible Windows 10 PCs and on new PCs that have it pre-installed. My two-year-old laptop passed Microsoft’s Windows 11 readiness test, so I’ll give it a few weeks and then upgrade.

New Cerner President and CEO David Feinberg, MD, MBA will kick off the two-day virtual Cerner Health Conference 2021 next week.

Mackinac Straits Health System will affiliate with MidMichigan Health to address its IT needs and to implement Epic.

A new KLAS report on point-of-care references for clinical decision support finds that market share leader Wolters Kluwer is loved by physicians who learned to rely on UpToDate in medical school, but health systems say it’s the most expensive of available solutions and they sometimes switch to a cheaper alternative. Users of IBM Watson Health, especially pharmacists, like its NLP search feature even though the company scores poorly in customer support. Elsevier and IBM Watson Health both suffer from content delivery that can run months behind, users report. Ebsco earns the highest overall score with deep content at a fraction of the price of competitors.

Privacy and Security

In Indiana, Johnson Memorial Health and Schneck Medical Center recover from apparently unrelated cyberattacks that forced the organizations to take their IT systems offline.

Other

Business Insider looks at problems in Apple’s healthcare organization, most of which have been described previously:

• Employees say people were disciplined for disagreeing with their bosses over the way health data is being used to develop products and the questionable quality of that data.
• The company expected the Apple Watch to spawn a subscription-based health program in which consumer data would be shared with their physicians, but the engineers who developed Watch designed its features for consumers rather than patients who are seeking medical care. The Watch can identify conditions, but isn’t as strong at measuring them.
• Apple uses its AC Wellness employee clinic as a healthcare workshop, but the company is questioning its cost compared to similar programs such as that of Crossover Health.
• Apple has talked to health plans about selling its HealthHabit app that allows its employees to track fitness goals and blood pressure, but poor user engagement has caused Apple cut back on the project roadmap and to reassign its employees.

Steve Jobs died 10 years ago at 56, having kicked a dent in the universe that outlives him.  

Sponsor Updates

• Availity integrates TruthMD’s MedFax healthcare data solutions with its initiatives for provider data management.
• Olive will hire an additional 300 employees by the end of this year, increasing its employee base by 30%.
• Wolters Kluwer Health CEO Stacey Caywood earns a Bronze Stevie Award in the category of Female Executive of the Year – Business Products.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Using Prisma to Help Staff and Close Care Gaps at Centerpoint Health.”
• CareSignal has partnered with Innovaccer to offer deviceless remote-patient monitoring to organizations and payers participating in value-based care on the Innovaccer Health Cloud.
• Change Healthcare will host its 2021 Virtual Innovation Summit October 12-13.
• CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast, “A Conversation with Sarah Richardson, FCHIME, CHCIO, SVP and CIO, Tivity Health.”
• Clearwater expands its customer training content and security awareness capabilities through a new partnership with cybersecurity education company Infosec.
• CloudWave publishes a new whitepaper, “Enterprise Imaging in the Cloud.”
• CoverMyMeds will present at Epic’s App Orchard Conference October 6.
• A new KLAS report, “Clinical Communication Platforms 2021,” recognizes Vocera as a top-rated vendor in health systems with enterprise-wide deployments.
• Diameter Health Chief Architect Sam Schifman will present at the John Snow Labs NLP Summit October 6.
• Engage publishes a new case study, “From Chaos to Control: How Exeter Hospital Addressed Their Disaster Recovery Challenges.”
• EClinicalWorks will host its national conference virtually October 7-8.
• EZDI wins at the HIC2 in India for the use case “Digital Clinical Assistant for Integrating with Legacy EHR.”

HIStalk sponsors named top-ranking outsourcing vendors in 2021, according to Black Book Research’s latest survey, include:

• Credentialing & Privileging – Symplr/TractManager
• Cybersecurity – Fortified Health Security
• Database Support & Analytics – Health Catalyst
• ERP Support – Pivot Point Consulting
• IT Tech Support – Cerner
• Medical Imaging Systems – Agfa HealthCare

Blog Posts

• How to Get Your SNF Survey-Ready (Ability Network)
• Five Technology Disruptions in Healthcare That Will Stock Post-Pandemic (Ascom)
• After 20 years, one thing stands out. It’s all about multi-payer collaboration. (Availity)
• How Healthcare Organizations are Implementing Innovative Virtual-first Care Models (Bluestream)
• Digital Transformation Starts with Data (CereCore)
• 5 healthcare trends rounding out 2021 (Cerner)
• Solving Healthcare Business Challenges with New Service Models: A Thought Leadership Roundtable (CHIME)
• Highlights from the DIUC21 Keynote (Dimensional Insight)
• Post-Acute 2.0: New Services Needed to Deliver Care at Home (Dina)
• How providers can streamline care to prepare for a “twindemic” of COVID-19 and flu (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/4/21

Top News

David Feinberg, MD, MBA takes the helm as president and CEO of Cerner.

Predecessor Brent Shafer ends his three years and eight months with CERN shares down 6% versus the Nasdaq’s 101% gain.

Reader Comments

From Hmmm…: “Re: HR, legal, and marketing. Do readers think they aren’t important because women are in those roles? They are major players in our organization and are heard and respected.” It’s not a lack of respect for the person or the position, but those jobs have limited headcount and budget and aren’t usually where CEOs are groomed as compared to sales, product development, and finance. I occasionally look at the executive team composition of big health IT companies, so here’s a few that I randomly chose today. Only two companies didn’t have a female VP of marketing, HR, or legal — one because its sole female executive works in another area, the other because it has no female executives. How does your company stack up?

• Allscripts – 10 men, five women (including female VPs in HR, legal, and marketing)
• Athenahealth – nine men, three women (including female VPs in HR and legal)
• Cerner – nine men, five women (including a female VP of HR)
• Change Healthcare – 10 men, three women (including female VPs of legal, HR, and compliance)
• Definitive Healthcare – nine men, one woman
• Cognizant – 10 men, two women (including a female VP of HR)
• Greenway Health – seven men, six women (including female VPs of legal, HR, marketing, and compliance)
• HCI Group – seven men, zero women
• Health Catalyst – 17 men, 12 women (including female VPs of marketing, HR, diversity, and learning)
• Infor – 12 men, three women (including a female VP of marketing)
• McKesson – three men, three women (including female VPs of HR and legal)
• Nuance – eight men, three women (including female VPs of legal and HR)
• Olive – eight men, three women (including a female VP of marketing)
• Premier – eight men, one woman (including a female VP of HR)
• Teladoc Health – 10 men, four women (including a female VP of marketing)
• Transcarent – seven men, six women (including female VPs of legal and HR)

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A big majority of poll respondents see no value in state-by-state clinician licensing.

New poll to your right or here: Have you faxed something in the past six months, and if so, what was the most recent example?

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

It bugs me that Googling my name turns up all kinds of sketchy “people finder” data broker sites that list my age, current and previous addresses, family members, and sometimes email address, phone numbers, and voter registration information. I read about Optery and gave it a try and it has automatically found and removed most of the entries (more than 100 of them). It’s free for finding the sites, for which you then request removal manually without paying anything, or $10 per month to have Optery automatically submit removal requests for the top 80 sites (or up to $25 per month for 150 sites). The privacy benefit is obvious, but scammers also use the information displayed by these data brokers for stealing identities and placing fraudulent orders.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Availity. The Jacksonville, FL-based company is where healthcare finds the answers needed to shift focus back to patient care. It works to solve communication challenges in healthcare by creating a richer, more transparent exchange of information among health plans, providers, and technology partners. As one of the nation’s largest health information networks, Availity facilitates billions of clinical, administrative, and financial transactions annually. Its suite of dynamic products, built on a powerful, intelligent platform, enables real-time collaboration for success in a competitive, value-based care environment. Thanks to Availity for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 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. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health exchange-traded fund dropped 6% in the past month versus the S&P 500’s 4% loss.

Redox announces that its network grew by 291 new integrations in Q3, with 78 digital health companies going live at 208 provider organizations. It was the first live integration for 22% of those companies.

Sales

• Novant Health chooses Visage Imaging to replace multiple legacy PACS in a $30 million contract.
• HNI Healthcare will integrate the RCxRules Revenue Cycle Engine into its VitalsMD mobile charge capture platform.
• L’Institut de Cancérologie de l’Ouest, a leading provincial cancer center in France, joins the TriNetX global health research network.

People

Well Health hires Robin Hackney, MBA (FairWarning) as SVP of marketing.

Ed Stelmakh, MBA (Otsuka Pharmaceutical Companies) joins OptimizeRx as CFO/COO.

COVID-19

Reported US COVID-19 deaths have hit 700,000, as one in 125 Americans aged 65 and older have died of it.

Cerner announces — on new CEO David Feinberg’s first day of work — that it will require all US employees to be vaccinated by December 8, 2021. The company also extended its return-to-office date to January 10, 2022. Cerner had said on August 1 that it would leave vaccination decisions up to individual employees. Meanwhile, Epic reports that less than 0.5% of its headcount – which translates to under 50 employees – left the company instead of being vaccinated by its October 1 deadline.

University of Ottawa Heart Institute researchers withdraw their pre-print article that incorrectly concluded that one in each 1,000 COVID-19 vaccine recipients develops myocarditis. The authors admit that a miscalculation, which was pointed out by readers, overstated the risk by 25-fold. The article was shared widely by anti-vaccine people and groups who, not surprisingly, did not share its retraction.

Merck says its investigational oral antiviral molnupiravir has reduced COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths by half, to the point that the company and FDA agree to suspend the trial and apply for emergency use authorization. Some worry that availability of a $700, five-day oral treatment will convince people to avoid vaccination or to take the medication unnecessarily, some experts note that similar antivirals haven’t proven to be all the useful for COVID-19 when administered to large numbers of patients, and others note that the 50% improvement reflects the study’s less-dramatic drop in hospitalization and death from 14% to 7% among high-risk people with mild to moderate infection.

Scientists in England conclude that people who are vaccinated against COVID-19 are less likely to spread it even if they are infected.

FDA’s vaccine advisory committee will meet several times this month on significant topics – October 14 (Moderna boosters), October 15 (J&J boosters), October 15 (mixing and matching boosters), and October 26 (Pfizer vaccine for children 5-11).

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx publishes a new report, “Addressing Unmet Patient and Provider Needs in Diabetes: New Opportunities Through Pharma through Technology.”
• Netsmart releases a new CareThreads Podcast, “Hospice: It’s Time to Go Back to the Future.”
• Olive will hire an additional 300 employees by the end of 2021, expanding its workforce by 30%.
• The “HIT Like a Girl Podcast” features PatientKeeper VP of Strategy & Innovation Sally Buta.
• Greater Houston Healthconnect uses InterSystems HealthShare to create the largest known COVID-19 outcomes study.
• Symplr releases a new case study, “Mount Nittany Health Embraces Symplr’s Controls & Checks for Peace of Mind.”
• Sectra will be recognized with a Spine Technology Award for its implant movement analysis service at the annual meeting of the North American Spine Society in Boston.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “How Healow Retooled the Front Office During COVID-19.”

Blog Posts

• ClariPi’s CT denoising solution uses AI to provide the best image quality possible, even from low-dose or ultra-low-dose CT scans (Nuance)
• 5 Patient-Centric Use Cases for Predictive Analytics in Healthcare (Olive)
• What is Health Coaching: How Providers Can Implement Programs (PatientBond)
• Three Ways Premier Members are Driving Pharmacy Innovation During COVID-19 (Premier)
• Top Children’s Hospital Leaves Legacy Privacy Monitoring in the Past (Protenus)
• Driving Tech Innovation and Capabilities for Medical Practice Contact Centers with AWS and Amazon Connect (Relatient)
• Credentialing by Proxy for Telemedicine: 7 Things to Know (SOC Telemed)
• Why is endpoint data protection so important? (Spirion)
• Re-Envisioning the Future of Specialty Pharmacy (Surescripts)
• Actium Health – A Clear Plan for Every Patient (Actium Health)
• Talkdesk Phone – Calling is cool again (Talkdesk)
• There’s No Place Like (Healing At) Home (Vocera)
• FAQ: How to Get the Best M&A Deal for Your Company – Before the Window Closes (WebPT)
• Why health payers need insight democratization to unlock the value of data (West Monroe)

Contacts

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

News 10/1/21

Top News

Microsoft makes an unspecified investment in Truveta, the data-selling company that is owned by 17 big health systems. Truveta said in the same announcement that it has chosen Microsoft Azure as its cloud platform.

Microsoft says it won’t have access to Truveta’s de-identified data, but will integrate its platform into Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.  

Truveta’s member health systems have invested $100 million in the company, which launched in October 2020.

Truveta CEO Terry Myerson is a former Microsoft development EVP.

Reader Comments

From LinkedOut: “Re: LinkedIn user articles. Your gripes with LinkedIn should include providing a platform for people whose expertise and abilities don’t deserve one.” The Internet has made it possible for anybody to post an article, publish a book, or create a video or podcast, some of whom do so in the area of health IT. While some creative voices have rightfully emerged as a result, there’s a lot of junk out there that the publishing gatekeepers of old would have turned down immediately for good reason. Some of it finds an audience through persistence, omnipresent familiarity, or self-promoting gimmicks. I will let the market do its job in picking winners.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I looked at the leadership pages of three unrelated health IT vendor websites today while getting news information. Vendor A’s executive team had 12 older white guys and one young female VP of human resources. Vendor B’s page showed 10 less-wrinkly but equally white guys (it was a newer company), two female VPs (HR and marketing), and one female operational exec. Vendor C’s team was nine men and three female VPs (legal, HR, and an operational exec). Toss out legal, HR, and marketing VPs –diversity’s lonely outposts in many companies — and these three random companies had just two female operational executives of 34. I draw no conclusions except it struck me since I wasn’t looking for that information and these aren’t companies I actively follow.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 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. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Bloomberg News reports that Walgreens is considering the acquisition of care management technology vendor Evolent Health. EVH shares, which are up 133% in the past 12 months in valuing the company at $2.5 billion, rose on the rumor.

Weight loss app and telehealth vendor Found – which boasts that it allows bypassing doctor visits even though “obesity is a disease, not a decision” – raises $32 million in funding. The company offers prescription diet medications as well. I took its online questionnaire and it recommended the “Found Wellness,” no-meds plan at $49, which includes SMS-based coaching, weekly goal reminders, and community participation, adding up to one of the least-compelling offers I’ve seen. A business model that relies on overweight consumers who have failed in other weight loss programs to keep paying monthly fees for motivational text messages might warrant investor caution.

Intermountain Healthcare launches Tellica Imaging, whose standalone outpatient imaging centers will offer MRI and CT at flat-rate prices that are lower than hospital charges.

Cerner CEO-in-waiting David Feinberg, MD, MBA says he decided to leave Google Health because he wants to disrupt healthcare, improve lives, and affect healthcare quality and accessibility. He didn’t mention the $35 million compensation package that he gets for leaving the dismantled Google Health.  

ED patient flow and status communications platform vendor Vital raises $15 million in a Series A funding round.

Sales

• UnityPoint Health’s home health services subsidiary chooses WellSky’s care coordination platform and personal care agency network as part of its SNF-at-home program.
• Powell Recover Center (MD) will implement Netsmart’s CareFabric platform, Netsmart network, and MyAvatar integrated EHR.

People

Fresenius Medical Care North America hires Shelly Nash, DO (AdventHealth) as SVP/CMIO.

I missed this last week: The Joint Commission names Jonathan Perlin, MD, PhD, MSHA (HCA Healthcare) as its next president and CEO. He has a strong background in informatics at the VA, HHS, and Vanderbilt University.

Release of information platform vendor Moxe hires Adam Dial (Providence) as SVP of partnerships.

Divurgent promotes Steve Weichhand, MBA to EVP of client service.

Announcements and Implementations

Lyniate launches Rapid, a healthcare API gateway and manager for developing and safeguarding APIs, including FHIR-based ones.

Augmedix will integrate Google Cloud Speech-to-Tex into its Notebuilder NLP-powered clinical note platform.

Nurx launches a birth control and sexual health knowledge skill for Alexa, which can provide pill reminders and answer questions.

A new KLAS report on clinical communications platforms finds that 100% of respondents reported improved communication efficiency, especially with regard to clinician collaboration. Top satisfaction in workflows went to Halo Health (which is being acquired by Symplr) and PerfectServe Telmediq; Hillrom (which is being acquired by Baxter) and Vocera lead in broad adoption; and satisfaction with delivery of new technology is highest with Halo Health and PerfectServe Telmediq. Customers of PerfectServe Telmediq and TigerConnect also note that the companies offer patient communication, while Vocera Edge is the only third-party solution that can support nurse documentation through bi-directional EHR integration.

COVID-19

CDC urges pregnant women to get vaccinated as COVID-related deaths during pregnancy reached 22 in August, the highest monthly total of the pandemic. Only 31% of pregnant women have been vaccinated.

A man who went to a freestanding ED in Texas for a COVID-19 test and is billed $56,000 in out-of-network fees, which his insurer eventually negotiated down to $17,000 and paid in full. Medicare would have paid just $100. The man’s wife was tested with him, but the ED company billed her just $2,000 and her insurance paid less than $1,000. Federal laws require insurers to cover the full cost without co-pays or other patient cost sharing.

COVID-19 is killing rural Americans at twice the rate of those who live in urban areas, with lower vaccination rates also causing already-limited healthcare services to be cut back as urban hospitals are unable to accept their transfers for higher-level care. Rural providers are also being hit by resignations of employees who refuse to be vaccinated despite mandates and their inability to afford the high hourly rates of nurse staffing companies. The head of the National Rural Health Association says nobody is addressing the issues and that “we’ve turned many rural communities into kill boxes.”

The New York Times reviews the use of at-home COVID-19 rapid tests, concluding that they will detect infections 85% of the time (with higher sensitivity when people are most infectious), optimal test timing is 3-5 days after known exposure or immediately if symptoms are present, and the tests give more accurate results if repeated a day or two after the first one. Challenges include a national shortage of the tests, the cost of $10-40 per test, and the inability of public health officials to track case counts unless someone who tests positive at home reports that fact to their local health authorities. 

Documents obtained by The Intercept show that conservative-focused groups are spreading disinformation about COVID-19, then making millions selling their followers telehealth-powered prescriptions for ineffective treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. A hacked database from telehealth platform vendor Cadence Health shows that 281,000 patients – 90% of them referred from America’s Frontline Doctors and its telehealth partner SpeakWithAnMD.com – paid $6.7 million in just two months for consultations alone. The database of digital pharmacy operator Ravkoo was also hacked and showed that the company filled 340,000 prescriptions in 10 months for $8.5 million, with 76% of the prescriptions specifying hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, zinc, or azithromycin. Both Cadence Health and Ravkoo have stopped doing business with the groups. At least one prescriber included a disclaimer in their consultation notes forcing patients to acknowledge that government agencies categorize the drugs as “highly not recommended” and that they will not be held personally responsible for adverse reactions and are not subject to criminal charges, malpractice lawsuits, or state medical board disciplinary actions. The hackers said that the websites of the recently created companies were “hilariously easy” to breach and may have violated HIPAA.

Sponsor Updates

• Frost & Sullivan recognizes Change Healthcare with its 2021 North American Customer Value Leadership Award for clinical decision support.
• Spok publishes its “2021 Report: The State of Healthcare Communications.”
• Gyant is among the 10 startups selected to participate in the inaugural AWS Healthcare Accelerator.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where it Hurts Podcast with Iram Fatima, MBBS, COO of CareCloud.
• CareSignal publishes a white paper titled “Transform Your Population Health Strategy with Scalable Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring.”

Blog Posts

• New Wave of Cyberattacks Has Hospitals Employing Secure Network Connections to Medical Devices (Capsule)
• Drip, Drip, Drip … That’s the Sound of Referral Leakage (Halo Health)
• Making Your EHR Work for You: 7 Roadblocks Faced by Healthcare Leaders (Healthcare Triangle)
• HCTec’s Patient Portal Support Shines During Pandemic Relief Efforts (HCTec)
• HAS 21 Virtual Wraps Up Three Days of Impactful Programming on Data and Analytics in Healthcare (Health Catalyst)
• We’re going strong and Inc. Magazine noticed again! (Health Data Movers)
• 5 Ways to Support Patients and Their Caregivers During COVID-19 (Healthwise)
• EXCEL Program Built to Support Clinicians (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• SMS Patient Reminders Improve Vaccine Uptake (Intrado)
• Side effects of an unhealthy surgical dictionary (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Why the Hospital at Home Movement Needs AI to Succeed (Jvion)
• Closing the Online Scheduling Gap: Top 3 Opportunities for Health Systems (Kyruus)
• How you can tell when your black box, prebuilt healthcare API solution might be a mirage (Lyniate)
• CMS ECQM 2022 Update: Get Ready for New Glycemic Control Measurement (Medhost)
• Exploring the shift from transactional to transformational healthcare (Meditech)
• Providing a Better Patient Care Experience at Your Practice (MWTherapy)
• Addressing Inequities and Social Determinants of Health with Community-Wide Data Matching and Integration (NextGate)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Send news or rumors.
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News 9/29/21

Top News

A Government Accountability Office investigation into the activities of President Trump’s trio of Mar-a-Lago associates finds they were involved in decision-making for no fewer than five VA programs, including its contract with Cerner, despite having no official ties to the agency.

A review of 223 email exchanges between the three men and VA officials found they also weighed in on personnel decisions, budgeting, and ideas around monetizing VA patient data.

One of the three, Bruce Moskowitz, MD, shopped the data-selling idea to Johnson & Johnson, Apple, and CVS after a consultant he employed said that “it can be leveraged into hundreds of millions in revenue.” No personal gain was implied in the proposal. Documents suggest that VA Secretary David Shulkin, MD liked the idea.

Another member of the group, former Marvel Entertainment chairman and CEO Ike Perlmutter, scolded Haley Van Dyck, then deputy administrator and co-founder of the White House’s US Digital Service, for communicating with Apple while excluding “our broader team of subject matter experts.” He accused her of exhibiting “clear disrespect for everyone involved” and “hijacking of this effort,” adding, “I will not allow this to happen while I am involved.”

Reader Comments

From Academic Doc: “Re: Teladoc. I found your commentary about its stock performance interesting. Our hospital started using Microsoft Teams for telehealth early in the pandemic. There were a number of glitches and problems with people downloading the app, but in general it has been pretty usable. We piloted Teladoc and it was horrible in performance and features, although a newer version helped. The main advantages seem to be that you don’t need an extra app installed and Teladoc has their own support to help patients (although we don’t yet know how responsive they really are). It allows patients to complete rating scales, consents, and other forms, which was a weakness with Teams and our patient portal, but it apparently won’t integrate with the EHR except as a PDF. It also doesn’t seem to accessibility features such as closed captioning and doesn’t support group sessions. It integrates with the EHR’s patient schedules but not Outlook, so you have to switch back and forth to see scheduled patients versus other meetings.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I analyzed the first 100 items in my LinkedIn feed this morning, excluding promoted items, which yielded just 13 possibly relevant and interesting items (13%) as LinkedIn becomes more like Facebook every day:

• Annoyingly flowery inspirational story written or liked: 20
• Company or product pitch: 14
• Interesting article link: 11
• Personal article (deaths, new puppy, new school): 8
• Congratulations to a company or person: 8
• Recruiter or job available pitch: 8
• Unrelated local event or link to unrelated article: 6
• Social issue, company complaint, or COVID arguing: 6
• Proud of employer or team: 6
• Preachy how-to business instruction: 3
• Excitement at attending a conference: 3
• Self-promotion: 3
• Need a job: 2
• Mildly interesting company update: 2
• Job update: 2
• Relevant poll: 1
• Irrelevant poll (what is the best chain chicken sandwich?): 1

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 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. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare Triangle will likely go public later this week in an anticipated $40 million IPO. The cloud, security, advisory, and implementation services company was formed in June 2020 through the merger of health IT firm Cornerstone Advisors and software company 8K Miles, now known as SecureKloud.

Former HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan launches a healthcare consulting firm offering advisory services, investor guidance, and legislative and policy expertise.

Sales

• Walmart will implement Epic across all of its health and wellness business lines, beginning early next year with four new Health Centers in Florida. Some, if not all, of its clinics were using Athenahealth when they opened in 2019.
• IHealthHome will add VitalTech’s remote patient monitoring technology to its senior-focused care management software.
• The Marion County Health Department will implement Epic through a software sharing agreement with West Virginia University Medicine.
• Unity Health (AR) will implement Meditech Expanse across its three hospitals and long-term acute care facility.

People

MedeAnalytics names Steve Grieco (ConnectYourCare) CEO.

Chris Powell (Aspenti Health) joins clinical assessment and triage software vendor ThinkMD as CEO.

Lumeon hires Breht Feigh, MSc (Press Ganey) as CFO.

Announcements and Implementations

Southwestern Health Resources (TX) implements analytics and predictive modeling from ClosedLoop.

Carolina Pines Regional Medical Center (SC) rolls out Vocera’s Ease app, enabling care teams to securely send messages to a patient’s family members.

Mile Bluff Medical Center (WI) will convert from NextGen to Meditech Expanse on October 1.

A new KLAS segment insights report looks at how 27 health systems define the term “digital front door.” Click the graphic above to enlarge. Epic customers turn to Epic first for digital front door tools, while Cerner customers more likely look elsewhere to companies like Amwell, Kyruus, R1, and Well Health. Companies that have successfully carved out niches include Kyruus (provider search and match and self-scheduling), Krames (patient education delivered via existing platforms), and Zoom (video visits). Those health systems reported that a wide variety of their C-level executives oversee their digital front door programs, ranging from CEO, CIO, CMIO, chief digital officer, and chief experience officer. Only one-third of respondents sought outside help to create their program.

Sponsor Updates

• Imprivata has celebrated the achievements of customers from the UK and Ireland at its annual HealthCon user group meeting.
• Arcadia announces that its MSSP ACO customers generated $386 million in shared savings in 2020, averaging $10.7 million each.
• Azara Healthcare completes the NCQA HEDIS Health Plan Measure Certification Program for 35 measure year 2021 HEDIS measures.
• Central Logic congratulates Clinical Operations Regional Lead & Solutions Architect Charles Larson on being elected to the American Organization for Nursing Leadership Board of Directors.
• CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast, “A Conversation with Aaron Miri, CHCIO, FCHIME, SVP, CDIO, Baptist Health.”
• Dina will exhibit at the NAACOS Fall Conference September 29-October 1 in Washington, DC.

Blog Posts

• Celebrate Heart Awareness on World Heart Day with Ability CareWatch (Ability Network)
• Texting & Emojis in Patient Communications (AdvancedMD)
• Certifying Azara DRVS for HEDIS and CMS ECQMs (Azara Healthcare)
• Beyond Virtual Telemedicine: Discovering the Future of Virtual Care (Bluestream)
• COVID-19 and the nursing home staffing crisis (CarePort)
• Getting Electronic Medical Record Data Right: How Small Changes are Big Wins (CereCore)
• The future of connected care planning (Cerner)
• Patient Access to EHR Clinical Notes Linked to Better Chronic Condition Medication Adherence (ChartLogic)
• The Importance of Self-Care for Caregivers (OBIX Perinatal Data System, developed by Clinical Computer Systems)
• Navigating Changes Along the Patient Journey (ConnectiveRx)
• How Technology Can Help Your Office Crisis-Proof Chronic Care (CoverMyMeds)
• A Better Front Office Could Be Just Minutes Away (EClinicalWorks)
• Patient self-scheduling as a competitive advantage – interview with the expert (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/27/21

Top News

Clinical research network vendor Elligo Health Research raises $135 million in a Series E funding round.

The company recently acquired research practice management organization ClinEdge.

Existing investor Cerner, which returned for this round, also acquired life sciences analytics vendor Kantar Health for $375 million early this year and created the Cerner Learning Health Network EHR-powered clinical trials service for participating health systems in 2019.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents expect remote patient monitoring and telehealth to affect healthcare more than any other technologies.

New poll to your right or here: Should physicians and other healthcare providers be licensed nationally rather than state by state?

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 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. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

I was curious about the performance of Teladoc Health stock since announced its acquisition of Livongo for $18.5 billion in August 2020. Shares are down 30% versus the Dow’s 27% increase, with the company’s market capitalization now being barely more than the acquisition price of what was touted to be a $37 billion merger (the company is now worth $21 billion). TDOC shares are 56% off their 52-week high. The company lost $134 million in Q2.

Definitive Healthcare’s IPO performance and its resulting multi-billion dollar valuation has piqued curiosity about what the company does. Check out an analysis of its IPO filings by Redpoint Ventures principal Jacob Effron, MBA, who describes how the company has succeeded in offering prospect analytics to support healthcare sales for life sciences and healthcare IT companies as well as provider analytics for health systems.

People

Insurer technology vendor HealthEdge hires Anshul Pande, MS (Stanford Children’s Health) as SVP of R&D and Angelo Devita, MPH (Avalon Healthcare Solutions) as VP of enterprise account management.

Dennis Sutterfield, MS (Temple Health) joins SUNY Downstate Medical Center as VP/CIO.

RCM services vendor Savista (formerly NThrive’s Services Division)  hires Jan Grimm (Butterfly Network) as CEO and board member. He replaces Brenda Cline, who has retired and joined the company’s board.

COVID-19

US COVID-19 numbers continue to improve, with cases, test positivity rate, and hospitalizations all down significantly in the past week, although deaths remain at nearly 2,000 per day.

CDC recommends boosters for some people who have received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine – those over 65, people who live in institutional settings, those with underlying medical conditions, and frontline workers. CDC did not follow its vaccine advisory’s recommendation to exclude at-risk workers. The advisory panel has not yet been tasked with reviewing the need for boosters for the Moderna and J&J vaccines, but some panel members urged a mix-and-match strategy in which those recipients could receive a Pfizer-BioNTech booster.

Anti-vaccine Facebook groups are urging people to remove their relatives with COVID-19 out of hospital ICUs, which they say are blocking the use of “miracle cures” such as ivermectin. Groups whose members have realized that ivermectin is not effective are now touting a “protocol” that includes gargling with iodine and inhaling hydrogen peroxide. A Harvard professor calls it “vigilante medicine” that is “being practiced by laypeople who are reading groups created by other laypeople in echo chambers and silos that, likely, someone in the anti-vax movement is profiting from.” Meanwhile, horse owners can’t get ivermectin paste for de-worming because it is being bought up from feed stores for human use.

A startup launched in October 2020 that runs a dozen COVID-19 testing sites is charging $380 for the same at-home rapid test that drugstores sell over the counter for $20 and for which Medicare pays $41. Omaha-based GS Labs, which has performed 500,000 of the tests, is using a CARES Act requirement that insurers pay a provider’s cash price. The company says it prices are high because it offers premium service, such as fast appointments and a nursing hotline. It is owned by a real estate and investment firm. UPMC Health Plan noticed that 91% of patient claims that included both an antigen and an antibody test came from GS Labs, insurance payment for which is also guaranteed by CARES Act.

Other

I don’t usually post job openings, but this one sounds good. CVS Health is recruiting for a physician to serve as senior medical director of health informatics.

Sponsor Updates

• Nuance announces that it has again ranked highest in customer satisfaction by Black Book Research for AI-powered CDI, speech recognition, and clinical intelligence solutions.
• The HCI Group releases a new DGTL Voices Podcast, “Future of Music in this DGTL Age.”
• The Stevie Awards names Quil Health CEO Carina Edwards a Gold Winner for Most Innovative Woman of the Year in Healthcare.
• RCxRules partners with Athenahealth’s Marketplace Program.
• Spirion marks its 15th anniversary with a Great Place to Work Certification.
• The Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare Podcast features Talkdesk VP of Strategy Greg Miller, “The Digital Front Door of Healthcare.”
• Vyne Medical releases a new podcast, “Connecting with Today’s Consumer: A Closer Look into the State of Healthcare Consumerism.”

Blog Posts

• Access and Affordability Trends in Rare and Orphan Disease (OptimizeRx)
• Keeping Us Productive, Safe, and Supported: Netsmart Facilities Team (Netsmart)
• Everything old is new again (Nordic)
• CRO Recruitment: 3 Steps to Attracting Patients to Clinical Trials (PatientBond)
• Biller’s Corner: Top 5 Avoidable Denials in Medical Billing (PMD)
• Reducing Alert Fatigue in Healthcare (Premier)
• Medical Coding Automation: A Coding Team’s Secret Weapon (RCxRules)
• Meet Dina at NAACOS! (Dina)
• Staying True to Your Values Through Massive Growth (RxRevu)
• Scans in vans, 5G, AI, COVID … are we set for a quantum leap in taking diagnostics to patients? (Sectra)
• Credentialing by Proxy for Telemedicine: 7 Things to Know (SOC Telemed)
• HL7: What it is and why it’s important to understand (Spok)
• Improve Patient Care and Check the CMS “Box” with Tailored Clinical Intelligence (Surescripts)
• 5 Ways Telehealth is Transforming the Patient Experience (Twistle)
• Is It Time to Update Your PT Clinic’s Software System? (WebPT)
• Multilingual Patient Communication Serves Kheir’s Diverse Community (Well Health)
• Finding the keys to your digital front door and building better patient experiences (West Monroe)
• What can $2.1 billion do for infection control in the wake of COVID-19? (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 9/24/21

Top News

Bloomberg reports that Veritas Capital and Elliott Management are considering a sale or IPO of Athenahealth at a $20 billion valuation.

Veritas and Evergreen Coast Capital – a subsidiary of hedge fund operator Elliott — acquired the company for $5.7 billion in cash in late 2018, Veritas had previously acquired GE Healthcare’s value-based care solutions group for $1 billion and named it Virence Health, which was then merged with newly acquired Athenahealth, retiring the Virence Health name.  

Former Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush is among several CEOs who have lost their jobs following campaigns by activist investor Elliott. He reportedly received $142 million when the company was acquired five months after his departure.

Reader Comments

From Adjudicator: “Re: conference poll. Was it a surprise that HIMSS was the preferred conference of readers over HLTH by a two-to-one margin?” Not really. My thoughts:

• Limited sample size (353 respondents) and a self-selected HIStalk poll audience probably favors the longstanding HIMSS conference, particularly among HIMSS exhibitors who have not attended HLTH.
• HLTH is the venture-funded new kid on the block, but it has convened only a few conferences (I think it has offered just two in-person events). It made a shockingly ill-advised mistake in convening its first conference right after HIMSS18 in the same city (Las Vegas), then skipped to the fall of 2019 in hopes of avoiding the competition. It draws big-name presenters outside the usual HIMSS focus on health systems.
• The direct competitor to HIMSS will be the VIVE conference, which is being co-developed by HLTH and CHIME. Its first conference will be in March 2022. Its model is a bit different, however, in offering a “Hosted Buyer Program” that corrals suppliers and prospects together in a matchmaking program in which buyers attend free if they agree to attend at least eight assigned vendor meetings. HIMSS is an unabashedly commercial boat show, but VIVE takes it to the next level in a way that I’ve seen work fairly well in other healthcare-focused conferences. The question there is scalability – how many health IT decision-makers will attend and buy product to draw exhibitor dollars? Does it really need to be a national, big-attendee blowout to support that format? CIOs switching their allegiance from HIMSS to VIVE and the CHIME Fall Forum would be tough on the HIMSS conference.
• Nobody knows how the forced trend of virtual conferences will affect in-person attendance. Will those formerly large in-person audiences seek to reconnect in person, or will they reconsider the value of spending time and money to attend an in-person conference to sit in front of speakers who un-ironically extol the virtues of virtual healthcare?
• We also don’t know how the cancellation of HIMSS20 and the underwhelming HIMSS21 will affect future HIMSS conferences. I can’t say I have a lot of enthusiasm for doing it all over again in March, I get zero value from being a HIMSS member, and their high executive salaries and purely revenue-seeking actions seem a bit tone deaf (although to be fair, I feel the same way about most healthcare systems). I wouldn’t attend if I weren’t covering it for HIStalk.
• It’s not hard to see the appeal or value of user group meetings. All they are missing is the opportunity for broader networking with users of other systems.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The HIMSS22 exhibit hall floor plan shows just over 500 vendors signed up so far, with the big-booth exhibitors being Optum, Epic, and Cerner. I’ll probably ask companies about their HIMSS22 plans in the next few weeks since the conference kicks off in 171 days.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 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. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Analytics platform vendor Clearsense acquires Compellon, which offers a plug-and-play AI predictive modeling solution.

Users of Apple mobile devices can download and store their COVID-19 immunization and test results in Wallet with the just-released IOS 15.1 update.

Verily, the life sciences unit of Alphabet, is reportedly planning to separate from Google’s technology in preparation for an eventual IPO.

Ascension Technologies will outsource the jobs of 330 remote tech support employees in the areas of application and platforms, collaboration and end-user engineering, network and telecom, and field services.

Sales

• TransformativeMed and partner Red One Medical will provide the VA Puget Sound Health System – Seattle Division with the CORES Work Manager suite of clinical decision support tools and the CORES Diabetes Module.
• Cancer Treatment Centers of America connects to the MedAllies HISP platform to develop technology to meet CMS requirements to send patient event notifications to primary and post-acute care providers.
• UC San Diego Health chooses the Unifier platform of Dicom Systems for imaging interoperability.

People

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital hires Shannon Dean, MD (UW Health) as CMIO.

Medical imaging AI vendor Mirada names Mark Crockett, MD (Verge Health) as chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Renown Health announces that it has answered 57,000 questions and completed 700 COVID-19 risk assessments via its rollout of Loyal’s AI healthcare chatbot and live chat solution on its website.

Researchers at MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center develop MedKnowts, a problem-oriented EHR side panel that displays a patient information card and offers a note-taking editor with auto-complete for clinical terms.

Salesforce launches Health Cloud 2.0, which includes a COVID-19 management platform for in-person events, contact tracing, vaccine management, and virtual visits. The product is not specific to healthcare organizations and will be available to all businesses. I’m confused by the product name since Salesforce Health Cloud offers solutions for providers and other healthcare organizations. The announcement’s link to Health Cloud 2.0 refers to a Health Cloud page that doesn’t mention anything new. UPDATE: I reached out to the company, which explained that Health Cloud hasn’t changed, while Health Cloud 2.0 is a bundle that includes Health Cloud plus the new COVID-related functionality. My confusion remains.

Intrado adds SMS-based referral management, along with integration with Cerner and Meditech, to its HouseCalls Pro digital patient engagement platform.

Children’s Health of Orange County joins Cerner’s Learning Health Network research consortium.

Meditech will hold its Physician and CIO Forum September 29-30 as both an in-person and virtual event.

Canada-based Well Health Technologies will acquire specialty EHR vendor Aware MD for up to $8 million.

Bizmatics enhances its PrognoCIS EHR to support the correct scheduling of virtual visits based on the individual time zones of patient and provider.

Prescription discounter GoodRx rolls out GoodRx Health, which will answer the most commonly Googled questions about health. The company says the new site is a cross between NerdWallet and Wirecutter for healthcare.

A new KLAS report on data and analytics platforms finds that Cerner, Epic, and Health Catalyst have the deepest adoption among established analytics solutions, while Innovaccer has high adoption as a newcomer. Dimensional Insight customers report high satisfaction and see the company as a partner, while Cerner has a 40% overall dissatisfaction rate mostly due to overpromising. Click the graphic above to see KLAS’s data and analytics platform framework and the underlying components.

Government and Politics

A GAO review of the DoD’s Cerner implementation finds that the system is live in six of 24 planned waves, system performance has improved, and early issues have been addressed. However, testing and resolution of the issues it raises remain unresolved, users say the training system doesn’t match production, and system change information isn’t being disseminated well.

COVID-19

FDA approves booster shots of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for those 65 and over who received their second dose at least six months earlier and for high-risk people. CDC’s advisory committee is meeting this week to determine those high-risk criteria and to discuss how the new recommendation affects people who received the Moderna or J&J vaccines.

Other

University of Toledo Medical Center will use its $4 million fiscal year surplus to create a $21 million capital reserve that will help pay for its Epic implementation, among other projects.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health will combine its Medi-Span Clinical drug-screening solution with Ecaresoft’s Cirrus EHR to offer a fully integrated NPHIES-compliant solution to providers in the Middle East.
• The HCI Group will sponsor the CHIME Innovation Summit September 23-24 in Chicago.
• Everbridge CEO David Meredith wins the 2021 Globee CEO World Award in the visionary category.
• Health Catalyst CFO Bryan Hunt and SVP of Investor Relations Adam Brown will present during the Cantor Global Healthcare Conference September 30.
• Healthwise celebrates its staff in a new video, “Celebrating Healthwise Yesterday & Today.”
• Intrado offers new capabilities within its HouseCalls Pro digital patient engagement platform, including automated referral management.
• Kyruus opens registration for its Annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium November 9-10.
• National Coordinator Micky Tripathi will keynote Meditech’s 2021 Physician and CIO Forum September 29-30.

Blog Posts

• Vaccine Hesitancy: Understanding Fears and Addressing Barriers to Access (GetWellNetwork)
• Improving Glycemic Management in the ICU with a Pharmacy-Led Initiative: Critical Insights from Texas Health Huguley Hospital (Glytec)
• Why You Need a Mobile Collaboration Strategy (Halo Health)
• Wheels Up on Healthcare Analytics Summit 2021 Virtual! Day One Recap (Health Catalyst)
• What is sepsis and how can clinical data help save lives? (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• What is Patient Experience? (Avtex)
• VA PDMP: Using the Power of Data to Improve Care for Our Nation’s Veterans (InterSystems)
• The Importance of Testing Technology (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Improve Your Pre-Procedure Patient Communication (Intrado)
• Nordic Consulting ranked No. 37 of Best Places to Work in Healthcare in 2021 (Nordic)
• What’s in a variant? Part III – Linking sequence and patient data for clinical research (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• This Time, Interoperability is Real: Part 3 – Patient Access API (LexisNexis)
• Four Ways E-Prescribing Helps to Improve Medication Adherence and Reduce Errors (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 9/22/21

Top News

Former Teladoc executive David Sides joins NextGen Healthcare as president and CEO. Sides spent 17 years as SVP of worldwide consulting at Cerner, and had a shorter, more recent stint as president and CEO of Streamline Health.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 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. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

RCM vendor AGS Health acquires EZDI, a clinical documentation improvement, computer-assisted coding, and auditing business based in Louisville, KY.

Xealth raises $24 million in a Series B funding round led by Advocate Aurora Enterprises, bringing its total raised to $53 million. The Providence Health & Services spin-off has developed software to help providers find and prescribe digital health apps and programs.

Clearlake Capital Group launches the Vive Collective, a program to help foster and potentially invest in digital health companies. Clearlake’s portfolio includes Bamboo Health (the newly merged and rebranded PatientPing/Appriss Health), NThrive, and Symplr.

Pager secures $70 million in financing. The company has developed virtual care navigation and collaboration software that it markets to providers, payers, and employers.

Surgical data analytics vendor Caresyntax adds $30 million to its $100 million Series C investment round, bringing the company’s total funding to $208 million.

Flywheel, a medical research data management company, raises $22 million in a Series C funding round led by 8VC. It has also acquired Radiologics, an imaging research data management and analytics business based in St. Louis.

Enterprise virtual care vendor EVisit raises $45 million in a Series B funding round. The Arizona-based company plans to nearly double its workforce in the coming months.

People

Jeff Gartland (Anthem) joins Relatient as CEO. He takes over from Michele Perry, who will become vice chairwoman.

Sales

• The VA Puget Sound Health System’s Seattle Division will implement TransformativeMed’s Core Work Manager clinical decision support tools and diabetes module.
• Dignity Health’s Yavapai Regional Medical Center (AZ) selects digital front door technology from Phunware.
• Nicklaus Children’s Health System (FL) will deploy wayfinding technology from Gozio Health.

Announcements and Implementations

InterSystems announces GA of its Iris FHIR Accelerator Service for storing and retrieving FHIR data.

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (TN) develops a remote patient monitoring program for COVID-19 patients using MD Revolution’s clinical experts and RevUp technology.

SCL Health implements Nuance Dragon Ambient Experience automated clinical documentation software for its telehealth and in-person exams for cardiology, orthopedics, and primary care across its facilities in Colorado and Montana.

COVID-19

Ellkay resolves a software programming glitch that mistakenly inflated the state of Vermont’s COVID-19 case count by 109 and delayed the reporting of positive test results to 237 patients. Ellkay’s analysis also determined that the slow-down may have impacted reporting in several other states.

COVID-19 has overtaken the 1918 Spanish flu as the deadliest disease event in US history, with 675,400 Americans succumbing to the disease.

Pfizer reports favorable results in its trial of a COVID-19 vaccine for 5 to 11 year-old children.

Other

Apple’s latest operating system gives Health app users the ability to share health data with their providers through EHRs. Six vendors are participating in the initial launch of the feature, first announced this summer, including Cerner and Allscripts. Pilots with several provider groups have shown the data-sharing feature to be well received by patients monitoring their blood pressure from home. 

Sponsor Updates

• Arcadia CMO Rich Park, MD and VP of Enterprise Partnerships Anna Basevich will present at the NAACOS Fall 2021 Conference October 1.
• CereCore has been recognized by Securance Consulting as a Best Practice Meditech Infrastructure as a Service provider for more than five years running.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “Moving from data connectivity to real provider usability.”
• CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast, “A Conversation with William Hudson, SVP and CIO, John Muir Health.”
• Bluetree, Cerner, Clearwater, Divurgent, Optimum Healthcare IT, Imprivata, Clearsense, and the HCI Group will sponsor CHIME Fall Forum October 27-30 in San Diego.
• CloudWave Director of Sales Engineering Mike Donahue will present at the Meditech Users Network Conference September 23.
• CEO Magazine features Meditech International CEO Charlotte Jackson.
• Chris O’Brien Lifehouse has become the first hospital in Australia to upgrade to Meditech Expanse.
• CarePort parent company WellSky announces that former CMS administrator Seema Verma has joined its Board of Directors.

Blog Posts

• Enterprise Imaging supports connected care in Moscow (AdvancedMD)
• Top Telemedicine Problems to Avoid (Bluestream)
• Ambulatory providers: Achieving TCM success (CarePort)
• 5 Ways to Use Epic Flowsheet SmartForms to Capture Regulatory Data (CereCore)
• Navigating Today’s Rapidly Evolving Cyber Insurance Market (Clearwater)
• Where Are They Now? An Update On 2020’s CoverMyQuest Winners (CoverMyMeds)
• What Healthcare C-Suite Leaders Need to Know About Analytics (Dimensional Insight)
• Innovating with Health Plans: Working Together to Drive Outcomes (Dina)
• The Power of Search in Healthcare and Beyond (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 9/21/21

NextGen Healthcare Appoints David Sides President and Chief Executive Officer

NextGen Healthcare names David Sides (Teladoc Health) president and CEO.

Oncology Analytics Announces Rebrand to OncoHealth

Oncology analytics and benefits management vendor Oncology Analytics changes its name to OncoHealth.

iOS 15 will give doctors a window into Apple Health app data

Apple’s latest operating system gives Iphone users the ability to share health data with their providers via EHRs.

Monday Morning Update 9/20/21

Top News

Definitive Healthcare shares end the week at $48.99, up 81% from their IPO price Wednesday. The company’s valuation is $7 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents value their vendor’s user group meeting more than any other conference, while HIMSS has twice the interest as HLTH. A couple of folks mentioned that they would have chosen CHIME Fall Forum if I had included it as a choice.

New poll to your right or here: Which technology will have the most impact on healthcare in the next five years? My list isn’t exhaustive, but it would have been a long poll otherwise.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 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. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Sales

• US Dermatology Partners chooses the RCxRules Revenue Cycle Engine to automate charge import and review.

People

Aaron Miri, MD (Dell Medical School, UT Health Austin) joins Baptist Health (FL) as SVP / chief digital officer / CIO.

Wellbe hires Darcey Nett (DotCom Therapy) as chief growth officer.

David Finn, MA (CynergisTek) joins CHIME as VP of affiliated professional groups.

Christopher Logan (VMware) joins Censinet as SVP / chief security officer.

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare hires Patrick Woodard, MD, MHA (Renown Health) as VP/ chief digital officer.

Announcements and Implementations

In England, Royal Stoke University Hospital goes live with Vocera Badge in its ED.

Government and Politics

The Department of Justice files criminal charges against 138 defendants, 42 of them licensed medical professionals, for their alleged participation in healthcare fraud schemes that generated $1.4 billion. Telemedicine fraud contributed $1.1 billion of the total.

COVID-19

FDA’s vaccine advisory panel rejects the broad rollout of Pfizer vaccine booster shots, recommending their use only in patients who are over 65 or at high risk for infection. The panel said that despite White House plans to encourage booster shots for most people and Pfizer’s recommendation that they be approved, evidence shows that two shots protect people from hospitalization and death and that the goal should instead be to get more people vaccinated. FDA is not required to follow the committee’s recommendation and will announce its decision this week. The issue has raised opposing public viewpoints among FDA scientists who reviewed contradictory data from CDC, Pfizer, the government of Israel, and independent experts on whether a booster dose is needed.

St. Luke’s Health System (ID) won’t enforce its employee vaccination mandate because the state is under crisis standards of care and the health system can’t afford to lose employees.

The New York Times reports that the “nervous affluent” who can afford concierge medical services are having their COVID-19 antibody levels tested regularly even though experts warn that the number is mostly meaningless and the tests don’t measure the important T cell response. FDA doesn’t recommend such testing because the results may encourage some people to take fewer precautions. The article notes that concierge medicine providers are paid to do whatever the customer wants, even in the absence of medical evidence, while poor people have the opposite incentive in avoiding testing for fear that undesirable results could get them fired.

Other

Guardians accessed more than half the patient portal accounts of patients aged 13-18 years in an study of three children’s hospitals. Natural language processing was used to determine how many outboard portal messages were sent by guardians, as evidenced by referring to the child in the third person or containing phrases such as “my daughter.” The authors note that federal and state regulations require that a mechanism be provided to share information with adolescents without the knowledge of their guardians, but effectiveness is limited by these challenges: (a) institutions may not always configure the portal account correctly; (b) adolescents and their parents may not understand the portal’s design; (c) adolescents may voluntarily share their log-in with guardians; and (d) guardians may coerce the adolescent to provide portal access or may use their credentials without permission. They also note that limitations of NLP analysis, as well as inability to detect access in which guardians didn’t send messages, means that actual numbers are probably higher. They suggest that the perspectives of adolescents and guardians be studied to determine how they impact confidentiality.

A UCSF review of national Epic data finds that patient-to-physician messages jumped as the pandemic began and remained at high levels through the January 2021 review period. Twitter comments pondered whether forced use of MyChart to participate in virtual visits drove the increase or whether virtual visits themselves result in more patient messages. It seems that quite a few interesting studies could be performed – the number of messages that were sent just before virtual visits, the number sent immediately after (suggesting that some need was unmet by the virtual visit), the number sent by first-time portal users, message count compared to the number of active portal users, the number of messages sent by patients of varying acuity or chronic condition levels, and message time of day that might indicate access problems.

Sponsor Updates

• ChartSpan publishes a new white paper, “Follow the Money: Medicare’s New Gold Mine is Chronic Care Management.”
• Nuance launches its AI-powered, cloud-based PowerScribe One radiology reporting platform and MPower Clinical Analytics in Australia and New Zealand.
• OptimizeRx names Andy D’Silva SVP of corporate finance.
• Netsmart has been inducted into the Kansas City Business Journal’s Hall of Champions after being recognized as a Champion of Business for three consecutive years.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Caring is Sharing (Data) at Innova Primary Care.”
• CHIME applauds the FTC’s actions to secure consumer health data.
• Pure Storage appoints Operator Collective founder Mallun Yen to its Board of Directors.
• RxRevu founder Carm Huntress will present “Staying True to Your Values During Massive Growth” on October 6 as part of Den Startup Week.
• SOC Telemed announces that David Fletcher will become interim CFO upon the departure of Chris Knibb at the end of the year.
• Spok Holdings postpones its Investor Day Program due to an ongoing strategic alternatives review process.
• Summit Healthcare publishes a new client success story, “Doctors Community Hospital Continues Partnership with Summit Healthcare Post-Epic Migration.”
• University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers feature their use of the TriNetX Research Network in “Advancing clinical research and population health with real-world data.”
• West Monroe will invest $250 million in the expansion of its digital consulting services.
• Zynx Health celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Blog Posts

• Improving financial performance with the Dragon Ambient EXperience (Nuance)
• Compassion, Community, Caring: National Assisted Living Week 2021 (Netsmart)
• Connecting operational and clinical data for optimum performance (Nordic)
• 4 Reasons Why Providers Struggle to Reduce Readmissions (PatientBond)
• Supply Chain in Post-Pandemic Healthcare (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Why World Patient Safety Day is More Important Than Ever (Symplr)
• 3 More Ways to Increase Medical Practice Revenue (PMD)
• Why One Health System Traded Its Legacy Tool for Advanced Privacy Monitoring (Protenus)
• Healthcare is broken. Electronic prior authorization might be the first step in fixing it. (Redox)
• What COVID-19 Revealed About Optimizing Patient Payments (Sphere)
• Strengthening Our Foundation with Eligibility, Formulary and Benefit Data (Surescripts)
• Actium Health – A Clear Plan for Every Patient (Actium Health)
• How workplace culture affects, and is affected by, all aspects of the patient experience (Talkdesk)
• Why Providence is Making the Switch to Cloud-Based Data Management for EHR (Tegria)
• Developing a More Inclusive Clinical Trial Ecosystem (Twistle)
• Vocera Ease Application vs. NICU Camera System (Vocera)
• Three benefits of switching to electronic claim attachments (Waystar)
• Top 3 Drawbacks to Cash-Based Practice, and How PTs Can Address Them (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 9/17/21

Top News

Shares of healthcare commercial data and analytics vendor Definitive Healthcare open at 38% above its IPO price on Wednesday and close for the day up 59%, valuing the company at $4 billion. DH shares rose another 9% Thursday.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 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. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health system digital marketing and CRM vendor Cured raises $10 million in a Series A funding round. The company’s founding team members all spent time at Epic.

Biopharma solutions vendor Syneos Health acquires StudyKIK, which offers tech-enabled clinical trials recruitment and operation tools.

Healthcare data exchange technology vendor Commure has reportedly raised $500 million in funding through a Series D round, valuing the company at $3.5 billion. 

Sales

• Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust selects Hyland Healthcare’s OnBase content services platform.

People

Healthcare benefits navigation and care coordination platform vendor Quantum Health hires Zane Burke (Livongo) as CEO and board member.

Peter Embí, MD, MS (Regenstrief Institute) joins Vanderbilt University Medical Center as chair of its biomedical informatics department. He will also hold the title of senior VP for research and innovation.

AdaptX hires Lisa Counsell, RN (Imprivata) as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Intermountain Healthcare and SCL Health sign a letter of intent to merge into a 33-hospital, $14 billion system.

Penn Presbyterian Medical Center goes live on the PCare Ambulatory digital health and patient engagement system that was jointly developed by PCare and Quil. The system suggests next best action with personalized videos, articles, check-ins, and reminders for therapy, also supporting the participation of family and friends.

The first hospital goes live on a service from Ob Hospitalist Group  and SOC Telemed in which patients receive 24/7 onsite care from OBHG’s physicians and have access to SOC Telemed’s maternal-fetal medicine physicians.

The ProMedica health system launches its Healthcare Redefined Initiative, which includes social determinants of health, senior care, programs specific to its individual markets, and an innovation program.

Government and Politics

The Federal Trade Commission issues a notification that health app vendors must notify consumers if their health information is exposed. FTC, clarifying its Breach Notification Rule, says companies that aren’t covered entities under HIPAA are still accountable when sensitive health information is exposed. It also notes that sharing covered information without the individual’s permission constitutes a breach. FTC says the apps that are mostly likely to be affected by the update are those that track diseases, diagnoses, treatment, medications, fitness, fertility, sleep, mental health, and diet.

The Department of Justice files a fraud complaint against a New York health insurance plan and its analytics company for overcharging Medicare Advantage. The now-closed data mining company DxID, owned by Independent Health Association of Buffalo, analyzed electronic medical records to find missed diagnoses to boost the insurer’s risk score. Another health plan that hired DxID to increase revenue billed $30 million new claims, many of which were not valid or supported by the medical record, such as depression and renal failure. The company pitched its services by requiring no upfront payments and instead taking 20% of paid claims worth tens of millions of dollars, which the whistleblower’s lawsuit described as “trolling patient medical records to gin up, in many cases, new diagnoses exclusively from information derived from impermissible sources.” Independent Health closed the company in June 2021.

A 55-year old Louisiana doctor who has claimed to have been a hired assassin and Medellin Cartel leader at 16 is charged with writing opioid prescriptions totaling 1 million doses for cash, resulting in $5 million in fraudulent insurance billings. Adrian Talbot, MD, JD operated a clinic but didn’t work there because he had a full-time VA job, so he left pre-filled, pre-signed prescriptions for employees to sell without examining the recipient. He self-published a bizarre book a few months back in which he says he’s working on a cure for Alzheimer’s.

FDA reorganizes its IT functions into the Office of Digital Transformation, with newly promoted Vid Desai serving as CEO with a budget of $750 million and staff of 2,500.

COVID-19

FDA meets this week to decide whether to approve the use of COVID-19 booster doses even as two of its top vaccine officials join a group of global scientists who say in a Lancet article that boosters aren’t needed. FDA is also facing pressure to approve doses for children.

The US hits a grim milestone as one of every 500 residents has died of COVID-19.

A KHN review finds that 26 states have permanently curtailed public health authority since the pandemic began. The most common actions were to prohibit mandate masks or quarantines and to ban COVID-19 vaccine mandates or proof of vaccination.

The New York Times finds that India’s government forced its scientists to downplay the possibility of a COVID-19 outbreak that eventually killed hundreds of thousands of people, suppressing and even falsifying data to support the re-election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A scientist who was reprimanded for his less-rosy predictions says, “Science is being used as a political weapon to forward the government narrative rather than help people.” A recent study estimates India’s COVID-deaths at 3 million, 10 times the official government number.

Idaho, which has one of the lowest rates for COVID-19 vaccination, implements Crisis Standards of Care statewide as hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.

Other

Financial Times reports that Houston Methodist hospitals are using Alexa-type voice assistant commands from Amazon Web Services in a prototype OR of the future. The system announces steps that need to be completed and records the results in the EHR. It also records audio of the procedure, with the patient’s permission, that it analyzes to present treatment options.

Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center and its director Adam Wright, PhD publish an annual report covering its first year. A key project was its burnout reduction project Clickbusters, which evaluates Epic Best Practice Advisories to remove those that clinicians find unhelpful.

Sponsor Updates

• LexisNexis human resources employees volunteer with Trees Atlanta.
• First Databank publishes research led by two of their pharmacists that further refutes the concept of iodine allergies.
• Gyant publishes a new case study, “Christus Health Launched Virtual Assistant Supporting Vaccinations Across Four States.”
• Health Data Movers names Marissa Lewis (Invo HealthCare) and Peter Squire (Centauri Health Solutions) account managers.
• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Symplr in its acquisition of Halo Health.
• InterSystems will exhibit at the Hack MIT event September 18-19 in Cambridge, MA.
• Jvion drives adoption of prescriptive intelligence and clinical intelligence with peer-reviewed results, platform integrations, and SDOH solutions.

Blog Posts

• HIMSS’21: Moving Care Home: 5 Takeaways for Success (Dina)
• How Proposed 2021 HIPAA Changes Will Affect Your Healthcare IT (Fortified Health Security)
• Vaccine Hesitancy: Understanding Fears and Addressing Barriers to Access (GetWellNetwork)
• Ensuring Implementation Success with Proven Best Practices (Halo Health)
• World Patient Safety Day 2021 Focuses on Safer Childbirth (Health Catalyst)
• Lessons Learned from a Fully Remote Services Model (Capsule)
• Taming the data tsunami: Leverage the clinical terminology for high-value use cases (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Microsoft Power Apps breach exposes third party security vulnerabilities (Imprivata)
• Optimum Healthcare IT Achieves Premier Status in ServiceNow Partner Program (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• The clinical terminology behind the health IT curtain (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• 7 Things to Look for When Rethinking Patient Engagement (Lumeon)
• Top 10 Features to Look for in an Enterprise Imaging Solution (Mach7 Technologies)
• Impact Advisors Ranked No. 3 on Consulting Magazine’s Best Large Firms to Work For List (Impact Advisors)
• How Medhost’s Cardiac Risk Prediction Successfully Leveraged AWS Analytics Services (Medhost)
• How a modern EHR will help The Aga Khan University Hospitals improve care throughout the developing world (Meditech)
• Why Healthcare Can No Longer Ignore Identity Theft (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 9/15/21

Top News

Healthcare governance systems vendor Symplr will acquire clinician digital communications vendor Halo Health.

Previous Symplr acquisitions include HealthcareSource HR, SpinFusion, The Patient Safety Company, Vistar Technologies, Hayes, TractManager, IntelliSoft, API Healthcare, CBR Associates, Cactus Software, and Phynd.

Clearlake Capital acquired Symplr in late 2018.

Reader Comments

From Inquiring CIO: “Re: HIMSS attendee lists. I’m tired of companies using them to mine sales leads. I’ve emailed HIMSS, but haven’t received a reply. I’m not sure where companies are getting the contact info of conference registrants, but it’s a deterrent to attending.” Inquiring CIO forwarded two emails, both of which contain scammy elements. Email #1 is from someone offering to sell a list of 45,678 HIMSS20 attendees (an oddly linear number series which technically should  be zero given that the conference was cancelled) for $1,999. Email #2 is from a business development guy in India-based company who used “HIMSS conference” in their subject line and content to make a technology sales pitch. The company was not a HIMSS exhibitor. I emailed the originator, but as I expected, received no reply. I contacted HIMSS, which reiterated that (a) it doesn’t sell attendee lists, and anyone who offers one is lying and probably is just dumping a bunch of old, inaccurate industry lists together and claiming they came from an official source; and (b) while HIMSS rents attendee lists to exhibitors for short-term use immediately before and after a conference, the company in Email #2 was not an exhibitor (I pondered the irony that perhaps Company #2 bought their list from Company #1). HIMSS says its legal team would love to have a conversation with Company #2 about its use of the HIMSS name if Inquiring CIO approves.

Webinars

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

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

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 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. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient engagement and activation company SymphonyRM rebrands to Actium Health.

App-based house call and telemedicine company Remedy pivots and rebrands as CareHive, which offers telemedicine, digital front door services, analytics, and clinical navigation. Remedy laid off 82 employees last November, many of whom were hired during the previous summer’s peak of COVID-19 patients. Remedy Chief Medical Officer Ronald Dixon, MD has been promoted to CEO of the new company.

Edifecs acquires Talix, which has developed a natural language processing-enabled risk adjustment coding, retrieval, and analytics platform for providers and payers.

Digital maternity care software vendor Babyscripts raises $12 million in a Series B funding round.

Healthcare payments platform vendor Zelis will acquire provider search and transparency website Sapphire Digital.

HC1 founder, chairman, and CEO Brad Bostic launches a $200 million SPAC that hopes to merge with a healthcare data science company.

Sales

• Legacy Health (OR) selects Simplifi 797 automated cleanroom compliance technology from Wolters Kluwer Health.
• Oroville Hospital (CA) will implement CliniComp’s fetal surveillance and fetal mobile technologies.
• Saina Health integrates Sphere’s healthcare payments and security software with its InstaHealth medical record portal for multiple family members.
• Health Choice Network chooses Epic for its 44 safety net organizations in 16 states in a $400 million deal.

People

CitiusTech names Atul Soneja (Infosys) president of operations.

UC San Diego Health promotes CIO Christopher Longhurst, MD to chief medical officer and chief digital officer.

Verato promotes Arti Pandit to chief customer experience officer and names Mark Erwich (Imprivata) chief marketing officer.

B. Well Connected Health hires Gary Johnson (Atlas Health) as VP of marketing and Romy Carlson, MBA (League Inc.) as VP of partnerships.

Announcements and Implementations

Divurgent develops a Concierge Scheduling Application that gives end users the ability to schedule one-on-one personalization sessions as part of their EHR training.

Powell Valley Healthcare (WY) goes live on Cerner.

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center develops real-time data-sharing software for medical teams and case workers that will be commercialized by Cordata Healthcare Innovations.

EHealth Exchange will award up to $550,000 in grants and incentives to its participants or eligible applicants that are innovating in the exchange of health information or establishing new technical advancements in connectivity.

Leidos will use Nuance’s Mix conversational AI development platform to create digital patient engagement solutions for health systems and federal healthcare agencies. Nuance Mix allows organizations to create conversational experiences for interactive voice response and chatbot systems.

Government and Politics

Bloomberg reports that the VA has issued an RFP for a $1 billion remote patient monitoring – home telehealth contract.

Privacy and Security

In Canada, The Ottawa Hospital apologizes to 391 employees for a software error that caused their names to be visible on an email that was sent to unvaccinated employees ahead of the October 5 mandatory vaccination date.

Children’s Hospital & Medical Center (NE) will pay $80,000 and take corrective actions to settle potential HIPAA violations related to its failure to provide timely access to all of a patient’s medical records despite multiple requests.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore sponsors the American College of Healthcare Executives – Middle Tennessee Chapter’s annual golf outing benefitting Mercy Community Healthcare.
• The Tech Trek Podcast features Well Health CTO Thor Clark.
• Impact Advisors publishes a white paper titled “Achieving Sustainable Value from ERP.”
• Agfa HealthCare achieves the new European Medical Device Regulation certification of its Class IIa Enterprise Imaging and Xero Viewer solutions.
• The Data Masters Podcast features Arcadia Chief Product Officer Nick Stepro, “The Role Empathy Plays in Data Visualization.”
• Clearwater founder and Executive Chairman Bob Chaput publishes a new book, “Stop the Cyber Bleeding: What Healthcare Executives and Board Members Must Know About Enterprise Cyber Risk Management.”
• CoverMyMeds Pod Lead Eda Erkal and Kitchen Manager, Campus Operations Shey Jin join the Leadership Columbus Signature Program Class of 2022.
• Kyruus expands its ProviderMatch online scheduling platform to allow consumers to self-book diagnostic and preventive care appointments, and customers to offer online booking for COVID-19 booster shots.
• OptimizeRx adds a Therapy Initiation Workflow to its point-of-care medication prescription platform.

Blog Posts

• Overcoming quarantine to serve patients in a mental health crisis with telehealth (Ability Network)
• Agfa HealthCare earns #1 customer experience for VNA (Agfa HealthCare)
• Women’s Health: Reporting on a Continuum to Reduce Inequalities and Improve Outcomes (Azara Healthcare)
• Different Types of Virtual Care (Bluestream)
• Shared Care Records bringing health and care closer together (Cerner)
• Medication Management & Patient-Centered Care Coordination Across the Continuum: A Thought Leadership Roundtable (CHIME)
• Reduced to the Essentials – AI/ML Can Wait (Cloudwave)
• Navigating the Wild West of Clinical Data – RISE West 2021 (Diameter Health)
• Covid Care-at-Home: Respond to Surging Cases & Limited Beds (Dina)
• Preparing for the 2021 Virtual National Conference (EClinicalWorks)
• 4 ways to strengthen digital patient access (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/13/21

Top News

Researchers Dean Sittig, PhD and Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH call for additional EHR safety actions beyond CMS’s recent mandate that hospitals self-assess annually using the SAFER Guides framework. Their JAMA Network piece recommends that hospitals and EHR developers share the responsibility for EHR safety since hospitals can’t develop EHR features themselves to meet the SAFER Guides standards:

• EHR developer teams, including clinicians, should self-assess their EHRs annually and report their results as part of the federal government’s certification process. They should ensure that their product can be configured to meet SAFER recommendations and deploy it with the appropriate default settings.
• ONC should convene an expert panel each year to develop any SAFER updates that are needed. That panel would also publish a list of developer non-conformity with an analysis of appropriateness.
• EHR developers should create EHR configuration guides for their product and share them with customers and their certification body. This would ensure that customers understand how to configure the EHR to meet SAFER recommendations and emphasize the safety consequences of failing to do so.

The SAFER Guides for EHR safety were developed in early 2014 by Sittig, Singh, and Joan Ash, PhD, MLS, MS, MBA. CMS requires hospitals to self-assess their compliance with the guides annually, starting with the EHR reporting period in CY 2022.

CMS is planning to require that Eligible Professionals annually attest that they have reviewed the “High Priority Practices” elements of the SAFER Guides, although their involvement would likely be limited to pressing their EHR vendors to comply.

ONC submitted much-publicized plans for an EHR safety center in its 2015 budget request, but funding was not provided.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Many poll respondents have been laid off in their career and quite a few were forced into a job they didn’t want or were fired, but demotions and forced relocation were uncommon.

New poll to your right or here: Which annual conference would you attend if limited to one?

Webinars

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

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

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Spok’s board is reviewing strategic alternatives for the company, including a potential sale, following unsolicited interest in acquiring some or all of its shares.  The company notes that more than 5% of its shares have been recently acquired by Acacia Research, which licenses company patents to pursue litigation, and its partner, activist hedge fund Starboard Value. Cerner gave in to pressure from Starboard in early 2019, adding four board seats with two of those new members being nominated by Starboard. Starboard sold Cerner shares quickly afterward as it usually does with its corporate targets, taking advantage of the short-term price jump to reduce its 1.2% position in Cerner. CERN shares have since risen 19% versus the Nasdaq’s 91% gain. Spok Holdings share price has been flat in the past year, valuing the company at less than $200 million.

Sales

• The VA awards Cerner an 18-month, $134 million task order for its EHR rollout.

People

Medecision promotes Terri Steinberg, MD, MBA to EVP / chief portfolio officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Upfront Healthcare creates the Bartosch Institute for Patient Activation Research.

Health Catalyst launches a research network to allow health systems to establish relationships with drug companies and pharma-related research organizations.

The VA has migrated to Nuance Dragon Medical One.

A new KLAS report on EHRs in the Middle East and Africa finds that Cerner leads in performance and has improved relationships and services quality, Health Insights has improved satisfaction by migrating all customers to its web-based platform but hasn’t made a sale since 2019, and the sales success of InterSystems has caused some growing pains as customers report challenges in reaching its experts.

COVID-19

A CDC review of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths in 13 US jurisdictions from April through July 2021 finds that while the vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing infection has dropped with the delta variant, its protection against hospitalization and death has not changed. However, the underlying numbers suggested that hospital and death percentages aren’t drastically different among infected people regardless of vaccination status.

A Minnesota family physician who is running as a Republican candidate for governor calls for creating a “health freedom sanctuary state” where state residents would be free to ignore federal masking and vaccination requirements. The campaign of Scott Jensen, MD, who says he has not been vaccinated and doesn’t plan to be, has been banned from advertising on Facebook for posting COVID-19 misinformation. Another state Republican candidate and physician, dermatologist Neil Shah, MD, is campaigning against federally mandated vaccination, saying that asymptomatic spread is rare and that the government is working with the medical industry to “destroy science.” 

California releases its digital vaccine record system source code into the public domain. It uses the SMART Health Card framework, which can connect to a state immunization registry, CVS, Walmart, Sam’s Club, and hospitals that use Epic or Cerner.

Eric Topol, MD summarizes the White House’s new vaccine-centric COVID-19 plan versus a more comprehensive one. He has tweeted most frequently about the need for better CDC data and analysis, the need for a Green Pass system for air and train travel, and making at-home rapid tests free to help keep schools open.

Other

Executives and employees of DeepMind, the AI company that Google acquired in 2014, worked on secret plans to break away from Google over several years because they don’t trust the search engine giant. Insiders say they were worried about placing their work within the Google bureaucracy and started hiding their research for fear that Google’s internal AI group was using it without giving credit.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx welcomes Andrew D’Silva as SVP of corporate finance.
• The Edinburg Center expands its use of NetSmart’s CareFabric platform with additional features that include new financial functionalities, integrated reporting tools, and navigation features.
• Olive appoints Eileen Naughton (Google) to its Board of Directors.
• Jvion drives adoption of prescriptive intelligence and clinical AI with new peer-reviewed results, platform integrations, and SDOH solutions.
• Premier and 11 leading health systems have acquired a minority stake in Exela Pharma Sciences to secure supply of pharmaceutical products and support domestic production.
• Pure Storage offers a case study, “Hong Kong Cancer Fund Expands Services and Enhances the Digital Experience for Patients.”
• Talkdesk has earned the number-one spot in 11 G2 Fall Reports for 2021, and has earned G2 accolades in categories related to telecom services for call centers, contact center workforce, auto dialer, speech analytics, and contact center quality assurance.
• Upfront Healthcare, Relatient, and Well Health join Panda Health’s digital health marketplace in the new category of Unified Patient Messaging.
• Vocera releases a new Caring Greatly Podcast, “Streamlining EHR Work to Improve Clinician Well-Being – Annie Ideker, MD.”
• West Monroe Senior Managers Kirsten Lentz and Ken Goebel win M&A Advisor’s Emerging Leaders Award.
• VitalTech EVP of Sales & Marketing Ernie Iance will present at the Virtual Ziegler Link Age Fund Symposium September 9 in Chicago.

Blog Posts

• Length of stay declines persist following the initial COVID surge (Olive)
• PatientBond Insights Accelerator Driving Healthcare Revenue & Market Share (PatientBond)
• Better Learning and Development Habits Build Better Healthcare Teams (Symplr)
• How Can Natural Language Processing Improve Healthcare? (PMD)
• Gear Up for the Mandatory Radiation Oncology Model with Three Key Activities (Premier)
• The Challenge of Ensuring Compliance at Scale as Resources Shrink, Violations Rise (Protenus)
• Let’s Get Personal – How Healthcare Organizations Can Build Personalized and Innovative Solutions at Scale (Quil)
• Overcoming Common HCC Coding Challenges Part 2: Understanding Payer Feedback and Turning it Into Action (RCxRules)
• Texting in Healthcare: The Benefits, Best Practices & HIPAA Rules (Relatient)
• Bringing Better Data to the Room Where It Happens (RxRevu)
• Who is responsible for data security management and compliance? (Spirion)
• Contact Centers are Growth Centers (Talkdesk)
• How Remote Patient Monitoring Can Reduce Healthcare Inequities (Twistle)
• Tools of the Trade: Decoding Common Front Office Puzzles Through Tech (WebPT)
• Frequently Asked Questions About Healthcare Integration Platforms, Interfaces, & Zen (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 9/10/21

Top News

Canada-based Intelerad acquires enterprise imaging provider Insignia Medical Systems.

Insignia, whose offices are in the UK, has 250 UK customer sites.

Reader Comments

From Beeswax: “Re: interviews. It is amazing how many companies are acquired shortly after you interview their CEO. Too bad you aren’t getting a finder’s fee from the buyers!” The #1 reason I lose sponsors is that they get acquired. However, I assume that (a) the acquirer wasn’t just watching my interviews to decide who to buy instead of doing their own market research; and (b) companies may seek exposure to signal their acquisition interest in a robust investment market. Still, it’s like being a HIMSS conference exhibitor who knows that three positive outcomes can result — sales, creating partnerships, and making connections that can result in acquiring or being acquired.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Bluestream Health. The New York City-based company offers a simple yet powerful virtual-first care platform that works the way you work. Through a best-in-market connectivity, integrated interpreting, and a full range of clinical workflows, the platform delivers expert patient care through the virtual care experience. With Bluestream Health, customers get 10 times the visits at one-third the cost. That’s no exaggeration. It is helping major healthcare customers like NY H+H and Medstar boost visits and improve the bottom line. What sets Bluestream Health apart is how easy is to tailor the solution to how your organization works. APIs make it easy to configure to your clinical workflows and integrate with your systems. Add live interpretation services to address the needs of non-native speakers An intuitive user interface and no downloads mean that it’s incredibly easy to use for patients and physicians alike. Download the company’s white paper to learn how upgrading from telehealth to a virtual care solution can simplify the tech stack and increase profits. Thanks to Bluestream Health for supporting HIStalk.

Reader Bill send me a generous donation to support Donors Choose, to which I applied various matching funds, including those of my Anonymous Vendor Executive, to fully fund these classroom projects:

• Hands-on math lessons for Ms. B’s middle school class in Center, TX.
• A financial literacy kit for Ms. S’s middle school class in Baltimore, MD.
• A financial literacy kit for Ms. R’s pre-school special needs class in Indianapolis, IN.
• STEM kits for Ms. A’s elementary school STEM classes in Lithonia, GA.
• An Apple TV to support virtual and in-person instruction for Ms. D’s elementary school class in Pharr, TX.

I’m no longer shocked that many Facebook users aren’t technically bright enough (or ambitious enough) to use Google. Postings in Facebook groups are always full of shameless demands that someone else do their web work for them, such as (a) business postings that elicit indignant “Where is this place?” comments that one click would have resolved, (b) “anybody know” type group posts where someone can’t figure out how to Google to find a lunch restaurant or check a store’s business hours, and (c) users who complain about how Facebook works when it’s obviously a user issue (i.e., you can’t share a “lost dog” post from a private group). It’s a testament to the appeal of Facebook that it attracts loyal users / customers / addicts who can’t or won’t navigate the web or can’t use a keyboard to correct obvious speech recognition errors.

Wondering: have Patrick Dempsey or A-Rod inspired anyone to improve healthcare quality or cost since HIMSS21?

Webinars

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

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

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health information exchange platform vendor Vyne acquires Ahana Health, which offers a connected care solution that allows providers to collaborate with each other and their patients. Vyne will incorporate the solution into its cloud-based Refyne product, which streamlines the exchange of medical documentation between providers and CMS.

Credit reporting agency TransUnion is reportedly seeking a buyer for its TransUnion Healthcare business for up to $2 billion.

Teladoc will integrate Proximie’s surgical and diagnostic procedure recording technology into its Solo hospital platform to support virtual surgical mentoring, proctoring, and support.

Dermatology diagnosis app vendor LuminDx changes its name to Piction Health.

Denmark-based Corti.ai, which offers AI analysis of patient encounters for guidance, documentation and quality improvement, raises $27 million in a Series A funding round.

Provider collaboration platform vendor CareMesh announces Transitions for EHR-integrated referral management.

Sales

• The Verland Foundation chooses the SmartCare EHR of Streamline Health Solutions.
• Temple Health chooses Gozio Health’s mobile platform for patients.

People

WellSky hires Andy Eilert, MBA (Evernorth) as president of emerging markets.

Clinical communications platform vendor Diagnotes promotes Sherry Henricks, MBA to CEO. She replaces founder Dave Wortman, who will remain on the board.

Remote patient monitoring system vendor Optimize Health hires Todd Haedrick (Covetrus) as CEO. He replaces Jeff LeBrun, who will move to chief strategy officer and retain his board chair position.

Altruista Health hires Dan Vnuk, MS (Cotiviti) as CTO.

Woebot Health names Sheetal Shah (SymphonyRM) as SVP of commercial.

Long-time Meditech executive Roberta Grigg, who retired in 2001, died last month at 79.

Announcements and Implementations

MarinHealth goes live on PatientKeeper’s physician charge capture.

Sanford Health (SD) will develop a virtual care center using a $350 million gift from donor Denny Sanford.

In Canada, Bayshore HealthCare launches an after-hours symptoms management app that allows cancer and palliative care patients to connect with a nurse instead of visiting the ED. The CareChart app offers online and telephone triage, self-assessment ahead of virtual visits, and real-time information submission to the patient’s care team.

UK-based real-world data analytics platform vendor Sensyne Health launches Sensight, which provides AI research capability using de-identified data from hospitals in the US and UK for $35,000 per user per year.

Government and Politics

The fraud trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes began Wednesday. A traffic ticket issued that same day to her husband – who is a 27-year-old heir to a hotel chain fortune — revealed that she is commuting to court from an estate that is listed for sale at $135 million.

COVID-19

The US COVID-19 death count has reached 650,000, about the same number of American deaths as in the Civil War or in the 1918 influenza epidemic. The US fully vaccinated rate is #52 among the world’s countries at just over 52%.

More than 50 Georgia hospitals, including Grady Memorial, are postponing elective surgeries and turning away ambulances because of COVID-19 patient loads. Governor Brian Kemp rejected calls to halt elective surgeries in all state hospitals and to extend licensure waivers, adding that he will issue no new mandates and instead asks the federal government to limit the hourly rates of staffing companies as “states are forced to outbid one another using federal coronavirus relief dollars in order to obtain adequate hospital staffing.”

Idaho’s state government activates “crisis standards of care” that allow hospitals to ration their services. Patients whose likelihood of survival is lower will be denied ICU beds and hospitals can admit patients to classrooms and conference rooms. Less than 40% of the state’s residents are fully vaccinated, trailing only Alabama, Mississippi, and Wyoming.

FDA notes that it has authorized more than 400 COVID-19 tests, including 13 rapid at-home ones. It would be helpful to see FDA issue plain-language advice on those 13 – cost, where to get them, advantages and disadvantages, etc. I got a text message while writing this that my latest four-pack of $10 BinaxNow tests was dropped off at my door from Walmart.com, but they are sold out of them again. I’m all for the free market, but I would rather see a single manufacturer’s test sold for $1 and available everywhere rather than making it confusing and expensive to the point that nobody bothers. Other countries are doing this far better.

A randomized controlled trial of hospitalized COVID-19 patients finds that using convalescent plasma did not improve outcomes and may have worsened them. FDA issued its Emergency Use Authorization in the pandemic’s early days, with HHS Secretary Alex Azar touting it as a “very historic breakthrough” as evidenced by a single retrospective study that was published as a pre-print.

Microsoft indefinitely postpones a return to in-person work in the US, providing no date to replace its original October 4 target. Amazon, Facebook, and Google had already delayed in-person work until 2022, meaning that many of their employees will not have worked in company offices for two years.

Texas, Missouri, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Wyoming are submitting detailed COVID-19 health equity data for less than one-tenth of their total cases, with erratic reporting causing data to be missing for 20% of US cases. Two-thirds of the submitted information is also unusable because of fields left blank or filled in as “unknown.” CDC collects where patients live, whether they were hospitalized or died, and demographic information. The most commonly missing information includes race / ethnicity and symptoms experienced.

Other

Pune, India’s efforts to connect hospitals for real-time COVID-19 data sharing via HL7 hits a bump when the the pilot project hospitals decide not to share their information.

Illinois-based Edward-Elmhurst Health and NorthShore University HealthSystem announce plans to merge.

Providence Chief Digital Officer Aaron Martin, MBA – who worked 10 years ago for Amazon’s on-demand publishing group – says Amazon and other tech companies aren’t exiting healthcare for good, but instead are changing their approach. He makes these points:

• Amazon’s failures often turn into successful pivots, such as an auction platform that turned into its third-party sales platform and the Fire phone that died quickly but created Alexa.
• Healthcare is decades behind other industries as it continues to use technologies that create data silos.
• Amazon will probably succeed in mail-order pharmacy and eventually pharmacy benefits management, although Amazon Care is a less-sure undertaking because of the complexity involved.
• Walmart may use its large pharmacy footprint to expand into care delivery.
• Microsoft is sticking to its technology offerings in selling cloud services, competing with Google and Amazon.
• Google still has fitness trackers and other projects, but de-centralizing its healthcare efforts into individual operating units may de-emphasize its focus.
• Apple has the Watch that could be used for remote patient monitoring, although it is IOS-only and expensive.
• The big change could occur with acquisitions like Microsoft buying Nuance.
• Health systems should not assume that disruption is no longer needed now that the big tech threat has diminished. They will always come back and they are learning from their failures.

Sponsor Updates

• LexisNexis Risk Solutions will sponsor the Whole Person Care Virtual Summit September 21-22.
• The Bulls ‘n Bears Podcast features Mach7 Technologies CEO Mike Lampron.
• Meditech shares preparatory guidance for COVID-19 vaccine booster shots.

Blog Posts

• The Most Essential HIT Partnership in a Health System Portfolio (Halo Health)
• Get a Better Night’s Sleep: What Healthcare Leaders Should Know About Blockchain (Healthcare Triangle)
• COVID Boosters & Beyond – Automated Patient Engagement (Intrado)
• What’s in a variant? Part II – Making sense of data through harmonization (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• New Study Shows How Clinical AI Can Improve End-of-Life Care for Cancer Patients (Jvion)
• Best Practices for Managing Seconds-to-Minutes Emergencies (Medhost)
• Must EHRs become platforms? (Nordic)
• 5 ways Expanse addresses the next big challenges in healthcare (Meditech)
• Mentorship 101: How Newfire’s Culture of Support Leads to Career Growth & Success (Newfire Global Partners)

Contacts

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

News 9/8/21

Top News

Invitae will acquire Ciitizen, a consumer-focused health data startup, for $325 million.

The genetics company will integrate Ciitizen’s technology as a health data collection and organization service for its patients.

Ciitizen has raised $20 million since launching four years ago. It acquired HIE vendor Stella Technology in May.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Olive. The Columbus, OH-based automation company is creating the Internet of Healthcare. It is addressing healthcare’s most burdensome issues through automation, delivering hospitals, health systems, and payers increased revenue, reduced costs, and improved efficiency. People feel lost in the system today and healthcare employees are essentially working in the dark due to outdated technology that creates a lack of shared knowledge and siloed data. Olive is driving connections to shine new light on healthcare processes, improving operations today so everyone can benefit from a healthier industry tomorrow. Thanks to Olive for supporting HIStalk.

I found this YouTube demo of using Olive to automate prescription refill requests.

We had a family get-together last week, with a dozen of us traveling to a place we had rented. All of us who are eligible have been fully vaccinated and we all tested negative before arrival with the BinaxNow rapid COVID-19 test. A four-year-old whose family stayed only through the first weekend became symptomatic and tested positive last Monday. Her infection almost certainly came from close contact the week before with an unvaccinated preschool teacher (the school was waffling on its mandatory vaccination plans and was not forthcoming with parents about staff vaccinations). Luckily everybody else in our group tested negative. Testing is once again a US problem as drive-through sites have shut down and not all stores have the $10 BinaxNow tests (CVS had the complicated, expensive, and reportedly less-reliable Ellume tests in limited supply). Not to mention that not all families can afford to buy and keep boxes of tests at home. Other countries are providing the many brands of tests their governments have approved (versus a handful here) at no charge, even mailing them to homes, so that infected people can avoid exposing others, but of course here even people with positive tests can’t be trusted to be responsible. Abbott must be making a fortune even at $10 per test since it looks like maybe 75 cents worth of product and packaging whose fixed cost component has long since been covered. Coronavirus capitalism is interesting.

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Urgent care appointment-booking software vendor Solv raises $45 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $95 million.

Medication management software vendor Omnicell opens a software development center in India.

A new KLAS report on ambulatory surgery center EHRs finds that HST Pathways and Surgical Information Systems lead in adoption with high usability although falling short on anesthesia documentation, while Provation performs highly for specialties.

Sales

• Virginia Hospital Center selects Phunware’s digital front door technology.
• Athenahealth makes ConnectiveRx’s ScriptGuide point-of-care prescription savings messages available through its EHR.

People

Former EMT and health IT long-timer John Danahey joins Picis Clinical Solutions as EVP.

CipherHealth names Mandana Varahrami (RapidDeploy) chief product officer.

Industry long-timer Scott Lenz, who retired from NetApp in 2016, died Friday at 59.

Announcements and Implementations

Mount Sinai Health System’s IT department develops the patient-facing MyMountSinai app.

Government and Politics

Ireland’s national health service has almost totally recovered from the May ransomware attack that severely impacted services across the country for several weeks. Some facilities are still dealing with cancelled appointments, and employee email access has yet to be restored. The hackers ended up giving the HSE the encryption key for “free” after it refused to pay the $20 million ransom.

COVID-19

Hawaii’s COVID-19 case counts are being reported incorrectly as its systems are stressed by volumes as well as inconsistency in how reporting systems – including more than 100 labs – send their data. Not all systems support HL7 and those that do may apply different rules to individual data elements. Another issue that in the absences of a national patient identifier, a misspelled name can cause one person’s multiple test results to be counted as multiple cases. State epidemiologists suggest using seven-day case averages to smooth out one- or two-day swings caused by inconsistent reporting times.

Scripps hospitals in California report that they experienced their highest-ever single day deaths this past weekend, all 19 of them involving patients who were not fully vaccinated. Its employees say they are being called liars by some patients who don’t believe they are infected.

Other

Amazon will reportedly offer in-home medical visits in 20 US cities later this year via its Amazon Care business.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom hires Lori Lyons as director of marketing engagement.
• CareSignal wins the HIMSS 2021 Global Maternal Health Tech Challenge.
• CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast featuring MedStar health SVP and CIO Scott MacLean.
• Dimensional Insight receives a high overall rating in the 2021 “Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer: Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms” report.
• Divurgent celebrates its 14^th anniversary.
• Spok offers a new e-book, “Solving the critical test result workflow challenge with closed loop communication.”

Blog Posts

• Ten steps SNFs must take for stronger infection protection and control (Ability Network)
• Is your phone being spied on? (AdvancedMD)
• Agfa HealthCare’s 2021 Summer Interns (Agfa HealthCare)
• Care transitions: 3 major challenges for post-acute providers (CarePort)
• 3 Problem Areas an IT Asset Inventory Can Uncover in Healthcare Facilities (CereCore)
• Previewing What’s in Store for AAOS 2021 (ChartLogic)
• Why Do So Many Providers Fail to Capture Annual Wellness Visits? (ChartSpan)
• Lessons in cybersecurity from Clearwater Compliance’s Bob Chaput: Part 1 of 2 (Clearwater)
• What’s New in the Cloud? (Cloudwave)
• How to Help Your Patients with Manufacturer Copay Cards (CoverMyMeds)
• Seven Tips for a Successful ERP Implementation (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Top Healthcare IT Challenges in the Aftermath of COVID-19 (Dimensional Insight)
• Why Usability is Critical to Healthcare IT (EClinicalWorks)
• 4 data-driven healthcare marketing strategies to re-engage patients after COVID-19 (Experian Health)
• The Era of Claim Denials and How to Avoid Coding Errors that Cause Them (EZDI)

Contacts

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

HIStalk Polls 2007-2012

A reader asked if the results of my weekly reader polls are available as an archive. They aren’t because of limitations of the tool I use, but I went back and recapped some of the more interesting ones from the earliest of those years. These are listed in order of oldest (2007) to newest (2012). Sorry for the somewhat fuzzy screenshots, but the tool doesn’t have good bulk export tools.

Monday Morning Update 9/6/21

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

Other

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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