News 9/17/21

Top News

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

Webinars

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

October 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET.  “A New, Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

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

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 9/15/21

Top News

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

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

Clearlake Capital acquired Symplr in late 2018.

Reader Comments

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

Webinars

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

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

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

October 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET.  “A New, Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient engagement and activation company SymphonyRM rebrands to Actium Health.

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

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

CitiusTech names Atul Soneja (Infosys) president of operations.

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Powell Valley Healthcare (WY) goes live on Cerner.

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/13/21

Top News

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

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

Sales

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

People

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

Announcements and Implementations

Upfront Healthcare creates the Bartosch Institute for Patient Activation Research.

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

The VA has migrated to Nuance Dragon Medical One.

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 9/10/21

Top News

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

MarinHealth goes live on PatientKeeper’s physician charge capture.

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 9/8/21

Top News

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

CipherHealth names Mandana Varahrami (RapidDeploy) chief product officer.

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Government and Politics

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

COVID-19

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

HIStalk Polls 2007-2012

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

Monday Morning Update 9/6/21

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

Other

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 9/3/21

Top News

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

Provation acquires Pentax Medical’s EndoPro endoscopy software. 

Accenture acquires Canada-based healthcare technology consulting firm Gevity. 

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

COVID-19

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 9/1/21

Top News

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

The VA promotes Neil Evans, MD to acting CIO.

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Government and Politics

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

COVID-19

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

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

Other

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/30/21

Top News

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

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Government and Politics

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

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

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

Contacts

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

News 8/27/21

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

Holon Solutions promotes Scott Tatro to chief customer officer.

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 8/25/21

Top News

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

HIMSS Financial Highlights

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

Income and Expense

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

Program Service Revenue

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

Revenue from Related Organizations

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

HIMSS also reported taxable partnerships through its Healthbox consulting firm. 

Major Expenses

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

Highest Compensated Employees

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

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

Monday Morning Update 8/23/21

Top News

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

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

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

Google says its health work will continue within individual teams.

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

HIMSS21 Survey Results

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

In-Person HIMSS21, Paid Attendees

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

Virtual HIMSS21 Attendees

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

Government and Politics

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 8/20/21

Top News

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Medical scales vendor Seca will deploy user authentication from Imprivata.

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 8/18/21

Top News

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

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

Other

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/16/21

Top News

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

The nine categories of the Guides are:

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s an Ideawake intro video.

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Imprivata rolls out a new digital identity maturity assessment tool.

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

Adventist Health joins Cerner Learning Health Network.

Government and Politics

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

COVID-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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