News 11/10/21

Top News

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

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/8/21

Top News

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 11/5/21

Top News

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Nuance promotes Vito Augusta to regional VP.

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 11/3/21

Top News

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

Reader Comments

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Digital social services referral company Aunt Bertha rebrands to Findhelp.

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

A new KLAS report reviews risk adjustment solutions.

Privacy and Security

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/1/21

Top News

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

From the earnings call:

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

People

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Other

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 10/29/21

Top News

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

Other

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

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

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

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

Cerner and Epic CEOs just chillin’ with CHIME21 selfies.

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 10/27/21

Top News

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

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

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

The companies expect the deal to close in Q4.

Reader Comments

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

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

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/25/21

Top News

Consumer DNA testing company 23andMe will acquire telemedicine and online pharmacy vendor Lemonaid for $400 million in cash and shares.

23andMe says the acquisition it will extend its ancestry foundation into information about health risks and treatment that will “transform the traditional primary care experience and make personalized healthcare a reality.”

23andMe went public in June 2021 via a SPAC merger that valued the company at more than $3 billion. Shares are up 2% since versus the Nasdaq’s 8% gain.

Reader Comments

From HLTH Watcher: “Re: HLTH and ViVE conferences. Does reader feedback encourage you to attend? I’m considering it for next year or the year after depending on how HIMSS22 goes.” Maybe. Below are the attendee comments I received. My personal challenges with attending to write up the proceeds for HIStalk are: (a) as an introvert, I don’t love attending conferences; (b) I pay my own way to conferences using a phony job title instead of requesting a media pass so that I get a true on-the-ground impression of exhibitors, so my cost would be significant; (c) ViVE ends five days before HIMSS starts, leaving me unsure how to get the most out of two back-to-back conferences in Florida without sensory overload; and (d) HLTH22 is in Las Vegas, a city I avoid whenever possible. I’m sure HIMSS is watching closely since the new competitive threats of HLTH and CHIME could siphon off some of the HIMSS decision-making audience that has kept exhibitors paying, although HLTH momentum could fade if the stock market takes a hit that deflates some high-flying digital health startups that it draws. Meanwhile, HIMSS updates its conference page to reflect HIMSS22, which will offer both an in-person and digital track. The exhibitor count is at 378.

From John Moore: “Re: HLTH. I attended and it’s mostly a conference for smaller VC-backed companies and their investment partners. Exhibit hall was quiet with exceedingly few end user buyers and customers. Small companies had the ability to meet with larger health IT incumbents for potential partnerships. The good part of HLTH is that no other event outside of JPMorgan brings in executives from all facets of healthcare, which provides a broader perspective. The not-so-good is that outside the love fest between startups and their investors, there’s not much for users or patients, it has excessive glamor and glitz, and it’s definitely not worth the expense of attending unless you have networking objectives.”

From Dan Nigrin: “Re: HLTH. I was again impressed. The content and exhibitors represent the future of our industry. At least 100 small startups had friendly people stationed in their small spaces ready to explain things intermingled with larger companies instead of being relegated to some faraway exhibition space. Equally interesting was the gradual entry of more traditional HIT vendors. Panel and keynote discussions were interesting and relevant, many of them with standing room only. Disclaimer – I’m on the CHIME board, which is putting on VIVE together with HLTH this spring.”

From Diligent Scribe: “Re: HLTH. The exhibit hall was never overwhelmingly crowded, but flow of folks was consistent. It felt about perfect since booths were spaced but the exhibit hall didn’t feel bare. As a first-time attendee, what struck me was the quality of attendees and the variety of titles they represented. such as lots of transformation and innovation folks. This led to deep, high-quality conversations in our booth as well as offering a tremendous opportunity to talk with existing and prospective partners. The educational sessions were informative and not a regurgitation of the same old, same old. I felt it was a worthwhile use of my time and the company’s expense, to the point that I’m considering skipping HIMSS next year and just doing CHIME, VIVE, and HLTH since all three together cost less than HIMSS and likely deliver better results due to their content and the audience.”

From Love Doctor: “Re: Surescripts medication histories. Our health system received a patient safety notification that medication histories from two pharmacies were missing the slash or hyphen in the dose, which could cause a dose of ‘take 1-2 tablets a day as needed’ to display as ‘take 1 2 tablets a day as needed’ in Epic. Surescripts has removed the dosage portion of the medication history and Epic has provided a list of patients whose reconciled histories were impacted and removed those that were uncreconciled.” 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two-thirds of providers failed to review the available medical records from other providers in the most recent encounter of poll respondents.

New poll to your right or here: Which healthcare organization provided the poorest customer service in your recent personal or family experience?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Verato. The McLean, VA-based company — the identity experts for healthcare — enables better care everywhere by providing the single source of truth for identity to organizations across the care continuum, including providers, payers, healthcare technology, life sciences, public health, and HIE organizations. Over 70 of the most respected brands in healthcare rely on Verato’s next-generation cloud identity resolution platform for a complete and trusted 360-degree view of their patients, provider networks, and customers in their communities. Organizations can integrate with its HITRUST-certified platform at every step of the care journey across CRM, EHR, enterprise analytics, and digital health experiences quickly and at scale. Thanks to Verato for supporting HIStalk.

I found this explainer video for Verato’s MPI on YouTube.

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner President and CEO David Feinberg, MD, MBA confirms an anonymous employee’s Reddit comment that Cerner will lay off 150 workers in early November.

Shares in London-based digital health tools vendor Babylon Health closed their first day of trading Friday up 18% following its SPAC merger, making founder and CEO Ali Parsadoust, PhD a billionaire. The company predicts 2022 revenue of $710 million and that its losses will turn into profit in 2024.

Medicare primary care provider Oak Street Health acquires RubiconMD, which offers PCPs electronic patient consults with specialists.

Sales

• Hendrix Medical Center (TX) goes live on a newly created TeleMFM (maternal-fetal medicine) service offered by SOC Telemed and Ob Hospitalist Group. SOC program allows 94% of women with high-risk pregnancies to receive prenatal care and delivery services in their own communities instead of seeing specialists in urban centers.

People

KONZA National Network hires Jeff Messer (ToolWatch) as COO/CFO.

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

Hillrom promotes J. B. Leeming to area VP of digital health.

Announcements and Implementations

Ninety-one percent of surveyed healthcare professionals say that fixing broken administrative processes is healthcare’s most urgent need for improving patient care, while patients having their medication history readily available to any provider they see would do the most to improve their outcomes. Nearly all healthcare professionals in the Olive-sponsored survey predict that healthcare AI use will be widespread by 2026, but patients remain skeptical.

Government and Politics

A Florida state audit finds that case managers of its compensation program for brain-damaged children didn’t consult experts and instead Googled medications, therapy, supplies, and surgeries to decide which were medically necessary. The organization amassed $1.5 billion in assets while sometimes arbitrarily denying or delaying care while offering no appeals process for parents. It did not use a system to track denials or complaints, leading the state’s CFO to observe, “Why is a program of this size doing record-keeping with CD-ROMs?” The program’s executive director resigned on September 21 ahead of the report’s release.

Other

The employee relations department of Phoenix Children’s Hospital (AZ) emails 370 unvaccinated employees using CC:, thus exposing the list of recipients to all. I was thinking as I was writing this that not many people have seen an actual “carbon copy,” just as many computer users know the “save” icon even though it depicts a floppy disk that they have never physically touched.

Sponsor Updates

• Olive launches The Library, a marketplace offering key distribution channels for industry pioneers.
• Ascom and Ellkay bolster their respective offerings with RingCentral’s message, video, phone, and call center capabilities.
• RxRevu receives Cerner’s Partner of the Year Award.
• Sectra publishes a case study, “One for all – native support for automated breast ultrasound in Sectra’s expanded breast imaging PACS.”
• Spok publishes a new infographic, “Burnout in healthcare contact centers.”
• Waystar will exhibit and present at the MGMA MPE21 Conference October 24-27 in San Diego.
• West Monroe publishes a client story, “Demand for a seamless patient experience drove this health system to innovate – and led to 5X faster results.”
• Vyne Medical plants hundreds of trees as part of its “Growing Vyne Day” environmental sustainability effort.

HIStalk sponsors exhibiting at the CHIME Fall Forum October 27-30 in San Diego include Bluetree, Clearwater, Meditech, Divurgent, Ellkay, Optimum Healthcare IT, Clearsense, Imprivata, Cerner, HCI Group, Spok, InterSystems, Infor, Quil, Experian Health, and Agfa HealthCare.

Blog Posts

• How to Integrate Your Care in a Way That’s Proven to Work (Netsmart)
• Is the EHR a Provider? (Nordic)
• The Benefits of Optimizing Patient Engagement (PatientBond)
• The Five Things You Need to Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October (PerfectServe)
• Pair Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Healthcare-Specific Contract Management for Rapid ROI (Symplr)
• The Future of Health Care in Value-based Care (PMD)
• Premier Inc. Selected as Finalist for 2021 NC Tech Awards (Premier)
• Keeping Pace: Complex Immunization Requirements (RCxRules)
• From telepsychiatry Skepticism to Advocacy – and Beyond (SOC Telemed)
• 7 Things to Consider When Classifying Your Sensitive Data (Spirion)
• 10 steps to find the best call center industry benchmarks (Talkdesk)
• Healthcare Can’t Go Backwards When the Pandemic Ends (Tegria)
• CCTS & TriNetX: A new paradigm to bridge sponsors, trial sites and investigators in the conduct of clinical trials (TriNetX)
• How Digital Innovation Can Improve the Patient Experience (Twistle)
• Smart Hospital, Resilient Organization (Vocera)
• The Physical Therapist’s Guide to Cash-Based Practice (WebPT)
• The Evolution of Digital Patient Engagement Platforms (Well Health)

Contacts

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

News 10/22/21

Top News

Vanderbilt University Medical Center finds that immediately releasing lab results to the patient portal, as required by the Cures Act, was associated with a doubling of the number of patient-to-clinician messages that were sent immediately afterward.

The percentage of patients that saw their results before their provider had reviewed them jumped from 10% to 40%.

The report didn’t investigate whether patient questions about their results drove the increased messaging.

VUMC delayed release of results to patients based on test sensitivity and complexity until January 2021, which it met Cures Act requirements.

The authors question whether the unintended consequences of immediately sending results to patients, such as patient wellbeing and clinician workload, outweigh the benefits. 

Reader Comments

From Dolla Bill: “Re: executive compensation. Obscene and pointless – you can only spend so much.” Business ambition is another ultimately pointless diversion in the continuum of birth to death since we all know that hearses don’t pull U-Hauls. We all strive in our own ways to earn “gone, but not forgotten” status even though the legacy we create – other than our children – usually fades away after one generation no matter what we leave behind.

From Periodically Panned: “Re: new health IT publications. Seen these? New HDM and something from Modern Healthcare.” Health Data Management has been resurrected as part of a South Carolina non-profit health collaborative, while Modern Healthcare owner Crain Communications has announced a “digital media brand” that rolls up some databases it bought via an acquisition this summer. I didn’t see anything on either website that hasn’t been amply covered elsewhere and most of their content would have been irrelevant to me personally, but it’s the opinion of a potential audience rather than mine that counts.

From HLTH on Wheels: “Re: HLTH21. What have readers said about the conference compared to HIMSS?” I haven’t heard from anyone who attended, but I’m interested as well, especially with regard to sponsors and the exhibit hall since those are what make or break a conference. Most of the social media comments I saw were from folks who focused on socializing or attending celebrity panel discussions for which in-person attendance seems to add little value over virtual viewing. Perhaps academically focused attendees could research the validity of the oft-repeated conference-goer claim that the networking alone makes in-person attendance worth it (they don’t usually add “to my employer, who is paying the cost.”)

From Rx Wrangler: “Re: Walmart and Surescripts. I heard that incorrectly barcoded medications caused medication reconciliation errors this past weekend, similar to incidents from 2014 in which special characters in a drug database caused prescriptions to be listed incorrectly. Have you heard anything?” I haven’t, but reports are welcome.

From Cricket: “Re: high-cost patients. See this Twitter thread from Jay Parkinson, MD, MPH.” I like it. Jay postulates that nearly all VCs are seeking investments that address the 5% of Americans that consume 50% of healthcare costs, but the reality is that improving their situation won’t move the needle much on overall costs because those people in the 5% fall into three groups:

• Those who are chronically sick whose situation can be improved with interventions. That might reduce overall cost 3% at best.
• Those who have an unpredictable incident, such as an accident, who will go back to being low spenders the next year.
• Those who are dying expensively. It’s easy to predict who they are, but there’s little ROI to intervene because the health system is geared to take advantage of heroic Western medicine by making huge profits from their final months.

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Hackensack Meridian Health becomes one of the first health systems to use Google Workspace and Chrome OS devices (3,000 Chromebooks and Chromeboxes running Citrix) across its clinical and business environment. The health system will also deploy Google Cloud’s AI/ML solutions for screening and disease detection.

AI Visualize sues Nuance and Mach7 Technologies, demanding royalties for what the company says is infringement on its image-sharing technology patents. AI Visualize has a minimal web presence and seems to employ mostly patent attorneys.

Venture funds operated by investment firm Carlyle invest $430 million to take a majority position in clinical trials management and analytics platform vendor Saama.

Microsoft announces enhancements to Cloud for Healthcare:

• Microsoft Forms has been integrated into Bookings so that schedulers can collecting patient information while scheduling virtual visits.
• Microsoft Teams adds a Waiting Room so that virtual visit patients can receive messages and notifications providers can send from their queue view.
• Providers using Cerner PowerChart can launch virtual visits from the patient portal or SMS with no patient app download required. Multi-participant virtual visits will also be supported.

Sales

• In the UK, NHS Wales chooses Australia-based Citadel Health’s Evolution VLab software for pathology, replacing three separate systems that manage 35 million tests each year.
• Blue Shield of California will move toward real-time provider payments using AI/ML tools from Google Cloud.
• Pharmacy benefits management company Vivid Clear Rx chooses Banjo Health’s prior authorization management solution.

People

Hospital medical equipment tracking system vendor Cohealo hires Tom Cady (Kareo) as SVP/COO.

Announcements and Implementations

An InterSystems-sponsored study finds that 80% of surveyed health system executives don’t trust the data they use to make decisions. Half of the respondents say that lack of data integration and interoperability is the biggest barrier to achieving their strategic data analytics priorities.

The Vaccine Credential Initiative and The Commons Project will hold a webinar next week on using SMART Health Cards as a digital vaccination certificate that includes well-known speakers such as Andy Slavitt, John Halamka, Micky Tripathi, and Aneesh Chopra, 

Government and Politics

A federal court rules that the insurer for HIMSS20 has to cover the organization’s settlement with exhibitors of the cancelled conference.

The Department of Defense’s program to use smart watches and rings to predict COVID-19 infections ends, with its former program manager blaming DoD’s sluggish innovation processes. A team that included Philips Healthcare ported a previously developed algorithm that mined EHR data to predict illness to commercially available wearables as a “check engine light” indication that something unusual is happening. The program manager says the big problem was that DoD needs to categorize projects to determine which regulations apply (is it a weapon, a platform, or a system?) and it could not decide if the tool was a medical device.

Sponsor Updates

• EVisit launches the Change Healthcare Podcast featuring co-founder and CEO Bret Larsen and co-founder and CTO Miles Romney.
• The Surescripts White Coat Award recognizes a dozen healthcare leaders for improvements in e-prescription accuracy and patient safety.
• Everbridge launches its Unlocking Resilience Podcast with an episode featuring William Shatner, “Resilience Makes the Leader.”
• Vyne Medical publishes a podcast titled “Connecting with Today’s Consumer: A Closer Look into the State of Healthcare Consumerism.”
• Jvion publishes a new whitepaper, “Smart Healthcare: The AI-Enabled Patient and Population Healthcare Journey.”
• Lyniate names Shelley Wehmeyer (Cerner) director of product marketing.
• Meditech congratulates customer Kingman Regional Medical Center (AZ) for on receiving Health Current’s 2021 Health IT Innovation Award.
• Nuance will present at the CHIME Fall Forum October 27-30 in San Diego.

Blog Posts

• Ransomware Risks: Analyzing Corrective and Preventive Controls (Clearwater)
• FDB Celebrates National Pharmacy Technician Day (First Databank)
• Fortified Roundtables: Connect, Network, Exchange Best Practices with Healthcare Cybersecurity Peers (Fortified Health Security)
• Welcome to the New Get Well (Get Well)
• Meet Dina at FLAACOs! (Dina)
• Ransomware Attack Connected to Fetal Death (Halo Health)
• Supercharging Cloud Performance: Why a Self-Service Platform Could Make the Difference (Healthcare Triangle)
• Reflecting on HAS 21: 6 Key Takeaways (Health Catalyst)
• The haunting of health IT: Thirteen ICD-10-CM codes for Halloween (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Care Orchestration Explained (Lumeon)
• A Care Coordination Game Changer: Secure Mobile Messaging (Medhost)
• Trust: The Key to Healthcare’s Digital Front Door (NTT Data)

Contacts

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

News 10/20/21

Top News

General Catalyst and Jefferson Health form an innovation partnership in which the health system will use technologies from the venture capital firm’s Health Assurance Network of companies.

GC’s Health Assurance Network portfolio includes Commure, Tendo, Transcarent, and Olive.

The announcement suggests that Jefferson will de-emphasize the “hundreds of technology solutions who are vying for a piece of the hospital system’s growing technology budget” and instead will give preference to the General Catalyst-backed vendors.

Retiring Jefferson Health CEO Stephen Klasko, MD, MBA co-wrote “Unhealthcare: A Health Assurance Manifesto” with General Catalyst managing partner and billionaire Hemant Taneja last year.

Reader Comments

From Yuma Dew: “Re: having a PCP who knows you. It seems more important that they know your data.” I agree that “knowing about me” is a lot more important and achievable than “knowing me.” One of the most important clinician functions should be contributing and consuming patient data across providers, even though patients have low expectations and payers don’t seem to care. Thoughts:

• My direct primary care doctor “knows me” because of the nature of that kind of relationship, but I doubt that has much impact on my health. She still documents the elements she needs to remember.
• I don’t have records from other providers to review, but if I did, I should expect (and prepare to be disappointed) that they will be available if needed.
• The provider should review my documentation before my visit, whether in-person or virtual, so they aren’t wasting our limited time together. Taking a 10-second glance at a printout before knocking on the exam room door is not ideal.
• EHRs aren’t always ideal at allowing providers to tag those parts of a patient’s record that they find especially important or relevant.
• The provider should document whatever is important to both of us even if it is in narrative form. My perception of symptoms her to-do items for down the road are as important as recording conveniently numeric lab or vital signs data. For that reason, Microsoft Word with speech-to-text might be a better documentation platform than an EHR if it didn’t have to generate bills.
• We should all choose providers who value our data, maintain it rigorously, and share it with us so we can verify its accuracy and understand their thought process. That data should paint a concise picture for another provider who receives our records via interoperability.
• Every provider who is being paid to work on the patient’s behalf — specialist, telehealth, therapist, pharmacy, urgent care, etc. — should be held accountable for documenting their work into the patient’s “permanent record” that at this stage of interoperability is mostly a pipe dream. By definition, they are documenting what is important to them, so that same information would likely be important to other providers and thus to the patient. Why should we expect less?

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Israel-based Navina, whose AI model turns point-of-care data into a “Patient Portrait” for PCPs, raises $15 million in a Series A funding round. The co-founders worked in Israel’s military intelligence AI labs.

Privacy-enforcing data sharing platform vendor TripleBlind raises $24 million in a Series A funding round that includes the participation of Mayo Clinic.

Trinity Health (MI) invests $1 million in digital prescription referral vendor Xealth, increasing its Series B funding round to $25 million.

Redi.Health raises $1.3 million in seed funding to develop technologies and services for chronic disease management. Offerings currently include a patient-facing app with medication management, symptom tracker, educational content, and PHR. The startup offers pharma support companies the ability to integrate their services with the app. Co-founder and CEO Luke Buchanan was previously with CoverMyMeds, as was co-founder and Head of Business Development Nate Rehm.

Insiteflow raises $2.3 million. The company has developed integration software to enhance the interoperability between third-party apps and EHRs.

Health insurer software vendor HealthEdge will acquire Wellframe, which offers digital health management solutions for health plans.

Sales

• UnityPoint Health (IA) will work with B.well Connected Health to offer patients access to all of its digital health tools in a single app.

People

Fivos hires Susan Andrise (Global Payments) as CFO.

Availity names former US Navy SEAL Jim McNary (Consortium Health Plans) COO.

Remote patient monitoring platform vendor Veta Health hires James Sutcliffe (DayToDay Health) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

InnovaQor subsidiary Health Technology Solutions announces GA of virtual CIO services focused on IT infrastructure security and management.

Grand Rounds Health and Doctor on Demand rebrand as Included Health, the name of the healthcare navigation and care concierge vendor the merged companies acquired several months ago.

Other

A CHIME survey of member CISOs finds that nearly 50% have experienced a phishing email or compromising business email at their organizations within the last year, while nearly 30% have suffered through an EHR or system outage. Fifteen percent have experienced a patient safety incident related to a cyber event, and 10% have had to divert patients as a result. Top areas of needed cybersecurity assistance include grants and federal assistance, and on-site guidance and expertise from cybersecurity experts associated with regional extension centers.

Sponsor Updates

• Change Healthcare releases a new podcast, “Cost Transparency: Driving Better, More Informed Care Decisions.”
• CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast featuring John Kravitz, chairman of the CHIME Board of Trustees and CIO of Geisinger Health, and Marc Potash, founder and CEO of Certify Global.
• Clearwater Chief Risk Officer and SVP of Consulting Services Jon Moore will present at The Healthcare MSO Conference October 22 in
• Dimensional Insight announces it has been named a top performer in KLAS Research’s “Data and Analytics Platforms 2021” report.
• Tegria publishes a new case study featuring Engage, “EHR Implementation Project Transcends Multiple Natural Disasters.”
• EZDI will exhibit at the ACDIS Conference October 25-28 in Dallas.
• Healthcare Triangle advances to Google Cloud Premier Partner status based on its success in building, deploying, and managing Google Cloud solutions for healthcare and life sciences organizations

Blog Posts

• Critical Insight’s 2021 Health Data Breach Report (AdvancedMD)
• Introducing Bluestream Health Care Navigator: The Future of Virtual Care (Bluestream)
• PPCP and CarePort: Complex care management (CarePort)
• Alert Fatigue: A Story from the Patient’s Perspective (CereCore)
• How Care Coordination Activities Create the Blueprint for Positive Patient Outcomes (ChartSpan)
• Healthcare Remains a Target for Cyberattack (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Imagining Forward – The Personal Health Record (CloudWave)
• From Potential to Power: How Verisk and Diameter Health are Harnessing the Untapped Potential in Raw Clinical Data to Drive Underwriting Decisions (Diameter Health)
• Delivering In-Home Care: Technology is Key to Solving Complex Challenges (Dina)
• Five Best Practices for Virtual Care Training (EVisit)
• No Surprises Act Summary: What your organization needs to know (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/18/21

Top News

Transcarent will offer Walmart’s pharmacy services to its self-insured employer customers.

Reader Comments

From Slattery: “Re: digital health. Are prescription delivery services really digital health companies or technology disruptors?” Startup folks have been motivated by investors to declare that just about any healthcare business that has a website and app is “digital,” hoping to be anointed as the next high-valuation Facebook or Salesforce. Examples: mail order pharmacies, Medicare Advantage insurers, vanity prescription drug companies, weight loss companies, primary care chains that have developed a basic app, online counseling services, and fitness tracker manufacturers. Health IT websites and publications gush over their latest funding rounds and acquisitions without asking questions such as, (a) are they really doing anything new? (b) can they can improve outcomes or cost? (c) does their incidental use of technology really make them a tech company that can scale with low overhead? and, (d) do they offer a sustainable competitive advantage with a high barrier to entry over the companies that are already serving their potential customers? I also look hard at who is paying for their services and whether those buyers are likely to continue doing so given that companies live or die by recurring revenue that must be predictably extracted from fickle markets. There’s also the telehealth-highlighted tension between giving consumers what they want versus what the science says is best for them in a a transactional environment where they won’t likely see the patient again anyway. Healthcare is different because it’s horrendously expensive, notoriously consumer-indifferent, and loaded with bureaucratic paper-pushers, but odds are slim that a couple of kids and their slick app will take money away from the incumbents. Maybe worst of all is that companies will profit by catering to the most financially capable users while not only failing to make the underlying health system better, but quite possibly making it even worse than it already is for those without those means.

From Tubeless Tired: “Re: blood collection tubes. Our hospital has been told that we can get just half our normal supply of blue top, pink top, and light green top tubes over the next several months. We are asking providers to evaluate the clinical need for tests, evaluate and reduce when possible the frequency of standing orders such as PT/INR, and only draw a tube when actual testing has been ordered instead of as part of any hold request.” This is probably a useful heads-up for informatics teams that will probably need to make system changes to preserve blood tube supplies.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s not EHR vendors that are making doctors unhappy, poll respondents say. Good comments: HITPM says doctors are trained and paid to treat acute illness reactively, so the high-earning specialists who swoop in and out of a patient’s life aren’t the ones complaining – it’s the lesser-compensated physicians who help keep people away from those specialists who aren’t happy. IANAL ponders whether doctors who envy their overseas counterparts do so selectively in forgetting that along with the absence of administrative overhead and price-gouging in those countries comes lifetime earnings that could be half or three-quarters less. IANAL also adds that doctors themselves spawned the role of insurers and their overhead by pushing to keep physician compensation private.

New poll to your right or here: In your most recent physician or hospital encounter, did your provider review your records from a different organization?

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

MSD Partners will make a strategic investment in digital consulting firm West Monroe.

Sales

• Stillwater Medical Center (OK) will implement system integration from Summit Healthcare and patient identity modernization from NextGate to provide a simplified and interconnected health record.
• Physicians Ambulance Service (OH) chooses Spok Go for communication between ambulance staff and hospitals during critical patient transports.
• In Switzerland, University Hospital Basel will implement Sectra’s radiology module.

Announcements and Implementations

A Well Health survey of frontline clinical support staff finds that most are burned out by communicating with patients on the telephone, which has worsened during the pandemic as those employees try to coordinate complicated vaccination appointments and to support virtual care. 

The NBA will allow its players to self-test for COVID-19 via Cue Health, which provides a smartphone-connected nasal swab reader to provide results in 20 minutes. Only unvaccinated players – about one player per team – will be required to take the test on practice, meeting, and travel days, while all players will still need to pass a PCR test right before a game.

In Abu Dhabi, all 59 public and private hospitals, 1,100 clinics, and 380 pharmacies have connected to the Malaffi HIE as mandated by the emirate’s Department of Health.

A Waystar survey of health system executives finds that 64% of organizations plan to implement robotic process automation and/or AI in their revenue cycle in the next three years, most often to improve financial performance.

Other

A pharma article describes the benefits of using real-world data (such as from EHRs and claims) to develop drugs for rare diseases: (a) patients are dispersed geographically and can’t be easily found and studied otherwise; (b) FDA hasn’t developed study endpoints for conditions that have no approved treatments; and (c) small numbers of patients and doctors mean that symptoms, diagnosis, and progression are hard to understand. The author mentions AllStripes, which uses EHR data (including unstructured physician and encounter notes), imaging data, and genetic testing results. The company recruits individual patients to participate.

Virtual-first health insurance plans cost less and are convenient, but online visits aren’t ideal for first encounters or for detecting new problems. The KHN article also observer that telemedicine doctors are often work-from-home contractors who are paid based on patient volumes and who often don’t have access to medical records from other providers.

Fascinating testimony from the trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes: the company’s second lab director had zero lab experience or credentials – he was the dermatologist of COO Sunny Balwani. Sunil Dhawan, MD, who replaced the previous (and qualified) director who quit over the company’s questionable technology, testified that he was paid $5,000 per month to sign whatever Balwani sent him, having never met any company employee, patient, or clinician and without knowing anything about its technology.

Sponsor Updates

• OneMedNet will provide imaging platform vendor Arterys with real-world data to aid in the development, validation, and regulatory approval of its solutions.
• NetSmart will exhibit at the Fall Conference October 19-21 in Memphis, TN.
• Pure Storage announces it has been positioned by Gartner as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage.
• The Philadelphia Business Journal names Quil Health CEO Carina Edwards a 2021 Woman of Distinction.
• Redox adds former MuleSoft executive Simon Parmett to its Board of Directors.
• Goldman Sachs recognizes Talkdesk founder and CEO Tiago Paiva as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of 2021 at its Builders + Innovators Summit.
• Tegria partners with the Seattle Kraken’s One Roof Foundation to support South Park community health initiatives.
• Vocera publishes a new case study, “MercyOne Elkader Medical Center – Unifying Staff Through COVID-19.”

Blog Posts

• Delivering In-Home Care: Technology is Key to Solving Complex Challenges (Dina)
• Supercharging Your Pharma Marketing Strategy with RWD: Takeaways from Xpectives Health Summit (OptimizeRx)
• Why we do what we do (Nordic)
• Making the healthcare ecosystem a reality (Olive)
• 3 Ways to Improve the Patient Experience for Immune-Compromised Patients (PatientBond)
• Dynamic Intelligent Routing Delivers the Right Message to the Right Person at the Right Time – No Matter the Setting (PerfectServe)
• The Benefits of Cloud Computing in Healthcare Operations (Symplr)
• How to Improve Medical Coding Quality & Accuracy (PMD)
• The Current State of PPE Costs: Are Providers Out of the Woods? (Premier)
• New View of HHS Breach Data Spotlights Need for Complete Privacy Protection (Protenus)
• 2021 Outlook Report: Enabling Value-Based Decision Making at the Point of Care (RxRevu)
• Reduce Mortality by Keeping More Cardiology Patients Local: TeleCardiology 3.0 (SOC Telemed)
• Data breach notification laws by state: How to notify, who to notify, and when (Spirion)
• Connect 21 Virtual: See what you missed (and how you can still get access!) (Spok)
• CMS Should Proceed with EPCS Requirement Without Another Delay (Surescripts)
• 4 Tips to Make the Credentialing Process Better for PTs (WebPT)
• Healthcare Worker Burnout So Severe That Many Want to Quit (Well Health)

Contacts

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

News 10/15/21

Top News

Imaging management platform vendor Intelerad acquires competitor Ambra Health, whose clients include Johns Hopkins Medicine, Memorial Hermann, and New York Presbyterian.

The reported price was $250 million, valuing the combined companies at nearly $2 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor EVisit. The Mesa, AZ-based company simplifies healthcare delivery with its market-leading virtual care platform, which works seamlessly across enterprise service lines and departments to improve outcomes, reduce costs, and boost revenue by enabling healthcare organizations to deliver faster, more accessible virtual care using their own network of providers across any specialty. With its distinct and leading position in the telehealth marketplace as a business-to-business company supported by a team of expert virtual care consultants, the flexible, end-to-end technology platform can match and virtualize any clinical workflow. Its system does not come with a competing provider network. EVisit is helping HCOs, including the largest systems in the US, innovate and succeed in today’s changing healthcare market. The company is the leader in the “Forrester Wave: Virtual Care Platforms in Digital Health, Q1 2021” and is a representative vendor in the “Gartner 2020 Market Guide for Virtual Care Solutions.” See them at HLTH21 next week. Thanks to EVisit for supporting HIStalk.

I found a brand new EVisit overview video on YouTube.

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in healthcare cloud and data technology vendor Healthcare Triangle closed down 10% on their first day of trading Wednesday. They shed another 2.5% at Thursday’s market close, valuing the company at $118 million.

Medsphere acquires Plano, TX-based Systeem Medical, which offers managed IT services to medical practices.

Walgreens invests another $5.2 billion in value-based primary care center operator VillageMD, increasing its stake to 63% and supporting the opening of 1,000 in-store practices by 2027.

GetWellNetwork renames itself to Get Well.

Sales

• Atlantic Health System will implement Syft’s enterprise-wide supply chain management system.
• In Netherlands, Amsterdam UMC chooses Infor CloudSuite Healthcare with the support of system integrator Avaap.
• Virginia Cardiovascular Specialists selects HealthSnap’s remote patient monitoring platform for chronic condition management.

People

Industry long-timer Matthew Tuck, MBA (IRIS) joins NextGen Healthcare as VP of account management.

Medical equipment tracking software vendor Cohealo hires Tom Cady (Kareo) as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Several big-name health systems form the Advanced Care at Home Coalition advocacy group, which will seek to extend COVID-driven payment coverage for at-home care permanently.

Nordic opens a security operations center at its Madison, WI headquarters.

Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital (VA) goes live on enterprise imaging from Mach7 Technologies. Twelve Sentara hospitals have migrated 22.5 million studies from multiple PACS into Mach7’s vendor-neutral archive.

Bluestream Health announces Care Navigator, which offers patients a personalizable page and link from which they can initiate a app-free visit in which a dropped connection will reconnect automatically.

CHIME names Daniel Barchi, MEM, CIO of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, as its CIO of the Year.

GE Healthcare and Apprise Health Insights launch an HHS-funded real-time hospital occupancy solution in Oregon that will be implemented statewide next year. The system will be expanded beyond beds and ventilators to include specialty bed, PPE ED, and ECMO capacity as extracted from hospital EHRs.

A small study of the Epic Signal event log activity finds that ambulatory care network physicians who spent less time working in the EHR, especially in managing their inbox, were more likely to quit. The authors speculate that the counterintuitive findings may have been caused by physicians who were planning to leave and thus were winding down their patient activities or that EHR-proficient doctors may have been more marketable for new jobs. They also think that EHR workload or burnout is perhaps less directly related to turnover than other studies have suggested.

A Kyruus survey finds that consumers are increasingly using and preferring digital access channels to research providers, services, and care sites. Health plan websites have a strong role that is growing. Consumers place high value on understanding insurance acceptance, clinical expertise, reputation, and appointment availability and 40% of them prefer booking appointments online. 

KLAS looks at health systems that manage downside risk contracts, which make up just 10% of the average system’s revenue. Successful organizations say that contract management is crucial and that interoperability with systems and payers needs to improve to apply advanced analytics. Vendors that primarily serve ambulatory providers – such as Azara Healthcare, HealthEC, and Cedar Gate Technologies – earner higher functionality ratings, while Innovaccer scores well for integration in larger organizations. Allscripts customers report frustration with interface management.

COVID-19

A highly anticipated study finds that it’s OK to mix and match initial vaccine doses and boosters, and in fact those people who initially received Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine initially mounted a stronger immune response when given a Moderna or Pfizer booster instead of another round of J&J.

FDA’s vaccine advisory committee unanimously recommends approving a half-dose booster for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for the same high-risk groups for which Pfizer’s vaccine was cleared.

Time magazine describes how a cobbled-together chain of acquired pharmacies took advantage of loosened telehealth rules, millions in PPP loans, and demand for unproven COVID-19 treatments to make millions selling ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine at exorbitant prices via telemedicine visits, sometimes failing to deliver the expected medication to the desperate families of unvaccinated patients. Ravkoo, a “digital pharmacy” whose predecessor organization had several executives charged with running various opioid and kickback schemes, has not drawn scrutiny from the federal government even though customers – most of them referred by partner America’s Frontline Doctors — complain of price-gouging, lack of responsiveness, and threats about negative reviews.

Other

A security researcher finds that FHIR APIs are vulnerable to hacking, noting that a single log-in provided access to 4 million patient and clinician records. Every FHIR app tested gave access to the information of other people. EHR security was strong, but third-party data aggregators and mobile apps were full of security holes. The report calls for use of API security shielding solutions such as that offered by study sponsor Approov.

An EpicShare report describes how Seattle Children’s involves its patient family advisory councils in technology decisions. Parents provided input on its initial Epic and MyChart configuration for scheduling complex appointments, requesting prescription refills, and providing access to multiple caregivers. The council also tested its virtual visit access instructions for patients early in the pandemic. 

Sponsor Updates

• Everbridge announces that its CareConverge telemedicine solution has won a 2021 Stratus Award from the Business Intelligence Group.
• Black Book Research recognizes Fortified Health Security as a top outsourcing vendor for cybersecurity.
• Jvion CMO John Frownfelter, MD will present a Tech Talk on AI and health equity at HLTH October 18 in Boston.
• Kyruus publishes its fifth annual “Patient Access Journey Report.”
• University of Michigan Health-West expands its adoption of Nuance’s Dragon Ambient EXperience across its entire primary care group.

Blog Posts

• Health Literacy Month – Building Awareness Through Action (First Databank)
• Do Your Part #BeCyberSmart: A Look at Fort Healthcare (Fortified Health Security)
• Why the Next Wave of Insulin Innovation Needs to Focus on Inpatient Management (Glytec)
• Why we do what we do (Nordic)
• Helping Physician Practices Connect for Success with EHR Usability Support (Healthcare Triangle)
• Meet Dina at HLTH! (Dina)
• 3 Areas of Focus for a new Healthcare Chief Digital Officer [Feat. Jeff Sturman] (The HCI Group)
• Advancing Health Equity: A Data-Driven Approach Closes the Gap Between Intent and Action (Health Catalyst)
• Five Things to Know About the Biden OSHA Vaccine Mandate (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Six Key Principles of Successful Change Management (Impact Advisors)
• New developments for the Inpatient Only List (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• The Three Keys to Digital Transformation at Hatfield Medical Group (Kyruus)
• Taking the Pulse of OR Leadership (Lumeon)
• Is Mobile a Practical Solution to Improving Chronic Disease Management? (Medhost)
• Building a Cyber Resilient Backup Strategy  (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Val Verde Regional’s patients stay engaged at home through Expanse Remote Patient Monitoring (Meditech)
• 6 Niche Add-On PT Services That Bring in More Patients (MWTherapy)
• Vaccine Attestation and COVID-19 Testing Mandates – I’ve Got an App for That (NTT Data)

Contacts

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

News 10/13/21

Top News

Best Buy will acquire home monitoring platform vendor Current Health, which raised a $43 million Series B round earlier this year.

Co-founder and CEO Christopher McCann will remain with the company. He completed a master’s in computer engineering and left medical school in Scotland to start the company in 2015 with his co-founder and CTO, who had just completed a PhD in computing science.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner President and CEO David Feinberg, MD. MBA kicks off the virtual Cerner Health Conference with a call to “eliminate the noise in healthcare” by getting the right information to the right people at the right time. He mentioned the essential clinical dataset, defined by 12 Cerner clients in 2016 as the EHR data elements that are essential for providing quality care.

Sales

• CDC will use HealthVerity’s privacy-protected data exchange to develop a real-world dataset for projects related to COVID-19, viral hepatitis, and HIV.

People

Andrea Marks (UnitedHealth) joins Walmart as VP of clinical performance, overseeing the clinical data and analytics team.

Announcements and Implementations

MSU Health Care (MI) leverages remote Care Everyday patient monitoring technology from Higi as part of its RPM program for patients with chronic conditions.

Government and Politics

Rumors of an enterprise Epic implementation across the NHS in England begin swirling after NHS England Director of Transformation Ian O’Neil attended “high-level meetings” with Epic CEO Judy Faulkner. Adding flame to the fire of speculation is the fact that Tim Ferriss, NHS England’s new head of digital transformation, comes from Massachusetts General Hospital, which rolled Epic out in 2016.

In Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador’s COVID-19 vaccine passport system crashes just a few hours after launching due to overwhelming traffic. At one point, 600 QR codes were being downloaded every minute to the province’s NLVaxPass app.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart VP and GM AJ Peterson and customers present at the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living 2021 Convention and Expo through October 13 in Washington, DC.
• Istishari Hospital in Jordan selects Wolters Kluwer Health’s UpToDate and Medi-Span Clinical clinical-decision support tools.
• CareSignal publishes a new case study featuring The Andrews Center, “High-Touch Care: Remote Patient Monitoring for Mental Health Identifies Potential Crises Ahead of Time.”
• CHIME awards 10 healthcare organizations the highest level of its Digital Health Most Wired Survey.
• CloudWave’s OpSus Healthcare Cloud attains SSAE18 standards certification renewal plus HITRUST.

The following HIStalk sponsors will exhibit at HLTH 2021 October 17-20 in Boston:

• InterSystems
• NTT Data
• CoverMyMeds
• Olive
• Cerner
• Ellkay
• Infor
• Jvion
• Quil
• RxRevu
• Talkdesk
• Well Health
• CloudWave
• Dina
• Gyant
• Health Catalyst
• Lumeon
• Pure Storage
• Relatient
• Upfront Healthcare

Blog Posts

• What the North Carolina Medicaid managed care bill means for your practice (Ability Network)
• PPCP and CarePort: real-time patient management (CarePort)
• ONC Creates New Health Protocols to Increase Interoperability (ChartLogic)
• Cyber Risk and Patient Safety: A Tragic Call to Arms (Clearwater)
• COVID-19 Highlights an Acute Need for Digital Patient Intake Solutions (Experian Health)
• The Biggest Challenges to Outpatient Coding (and What It Takes to Overcome Them) (EZDI)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/11/21

Top News

The VA hires an independent body to review its Cerner implementation and to provide an estimate of the project’s full cost. It expects to see the results in 12 months.

The VA hopes that the review will finally capture all of its project-related expenses, including infrastructure upgrades that were omitted from previous estimates due to inconsistent cost tracking methods across its organizations.

Conducting the review is Institute for Defense Analyses, a non-profit that administers three federally funded research and development centers.

The most recent cost estimate was $16 billion versus its initial $10 billion price tag. 

Reader Comments

From Critical Mass: “Re: Optum-Change Healthcare merger. Survey your readers whether it should be allowed and why or why not.” I don’t know that many or most readers have an opinion either way and I question whether a yes-no poll would be enlightening, but feel free to click the Comments link and add your thoughts.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

About one-fourth of poll respondents have faxed something in the past six months, most commonly to a physician’s office and rarely to a hospital. My own experience matches that of poll comments – don’t even bother trying to enlighten the front desk person why it doesn’t make sense that the practice will accept only faxes while refusing emailed scans that they could print. I think it’s probably as much laziness as anything else since it’s easier to make the sender jump through hoops in trying to set up a free online faxing service while the recipient just occasionally wanders by the fax machine to see what’s new. Office Depot still sells exactly one model of fax machine (a pretty slick Brother for $200) but you would need a plain old telephone line that is increasingly uncommon.

New poll to your right or here:  Who is most responsible for physician dissatisfaction? Remind me to run the same poll for nurses next week.

It’s nearly that time of year when I should be registering for HIMSS22 and booking somewhere to stay, but I have to say that the lackluster HIMSS21 makes me at least consider bailing for the first time in many years.

Webinars

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

Sales

• In Portugal, Unilabs chooses Sectra’s enterprise imaging solution.
• Colombia’s Clínica Imbanaco joins the TriNetX global health research network.
• SSM Health will outsource technology-focused inpatient care management, digital transformation, and revenue cycle management to Optum, rebadging a reported 2,000 SSM Health employees.

People

Heather Nelson, MHA (University of Chicago Medicine) joins Boston Children’s Hospital as SVP / CIO.

Memorial Healthcare System (FL) promotes Jeffrey Sturman, MHA from CIO to SVP /chief digital officer.

GE Healthcare promotes Catherine Estrampes, MBA to president and CEO of US and Canada.

Announcements and Implementations

China’s largest retailer, JD.com, extends its telehealth services from humans to pets. JD Pet Hospital has signed up 3,000 veterinarians who provide 24×7 online consultations and connect users to in-person providers. The company says it will attempt to solve problems such lack of industry standards, price transparency, and availability of timely services.

Other

I took a look at productivity software Notion after reading that the company’s valuation has reached $10 billion, bolstered by viral TikTok videos by users – many of them of Generation Z – who are happy to have a minimalistic team workspace tool for remote work. I don’t know how it stacks up against its many competitors, but it looks interesting. The personal version is free and a team edition is $8 per user per month.

Sponsor Updates

• Diameter Health names former Anthem BCBS executive Jill Hummel to its board as an independent director.
• CHIME announces incoming board members and 2022/2023 board officers.
• OptimizeRx joins the S&P 600 Small Cap Index.
• PatientBond surpasses company growth and patient engagement results milestones.
• Spok publishes a new infographic, “The state of healthcare communications.”
• Vocera receives high ratings for demonstrating positive outcomes in the latest KLAS report, “Clinical Communication Platforms 2021.”
• Zen Healthcare IT publishes “The Zen Guide to Mirth Connect for Vendors.”

Blog Posts

• Intelligence at Work: Avicenna.AI detects and prioritizes suspected intracranial hemorrhage and large vessel occlusion via Nuance AI Marketplace (Nuance)
• Why We Need to Go Back to the Future with Hospice (Netsmart)
• Informational parity is the key to better value-based care agreements (Nordic)
• Integrating Patient Engagement Technology Within a Care Plan (PatientBond)
• Texting Drives 600,000 Patients to Engage in COVID-19 Vaccination Scheduling at Hartford HealthCare (Upfront Healthcare)
• Integrated Delivery Networks as “Payviders” Aim to Succeed at Value-Based Care (Symplr)
• Therapeutic Drug Monitoring and the Patient Adherence Dilemma (PMD)
• PINC AI Data: Rising Healthcare Utilization and Costs Linked to Persistence of Severe Acute Kidney Injury (Premier)
• One Cancer Organization’s Journey Toward Key Compliance Efficiencies (Protenus)
• Overcoming Common HCC Coding Challenges Part 3: Making the Case to Leadership to Expand HCC Coding Efforts (RCxRules)
• Cyber Risk and Patient Safety: A Tragic Call to Arms (Clearwater)
• Allow Patient Appointment Requests from Anywhere at Any Time (Sphere)
• From Health to IT, with love (Talkdesk)
• Ready or Not, Here They Come: How to Maximize Your Tech to Meet High Patient Volumes (WebPT)
• FQHC Reduces Abandoned Calls with Call to Text Business Messaging (Well Health)

Contacts

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

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.