News 1/29/21

Top News

Athenahealth will pay $18.25 million to settle federal False Claims Act allegations that it paid kickbacks to increase sales of its products from January 2014 through September 2020.

The federal government says the company’s marketing programs:

• Provided prospects with all-expense-paid sporting, entertainment, and recreational events, including luxury trips to the Masters Tournament and Kentucky Derby.
• Paid customers up to $3,000 for each new physician who signed up after being identified by the customer as a prospect.
• Entered into deals with companies that were retiring their health IT products (SOAPware was the biggest such arrangement) to refer their users to Athenahealth.

Reader Comments

From Dirty Martini: “Re: Olive. I interview with them just over a year ago for a solution architect position, which reviews tasks that are candidates for automation and then translates the requirements from the customer to the development. Nothing about their services involved AI and customers could do everything they were proposing with standard Epic enterprise functionality. It’s interesting to see how much they’ve grown, but I’m not confident they have actual AI or will have it in the near future.”

From Dripping Faucet: “Re: Baylor Scott & White. Stay tuned for outsourcing and layoffs.” The health system announced Monday that it will outsource or reassign 1,700 employees in hoping to save $600 million over five years. Two-thirds of those affected will be transferred to third-party partners, while 650 jobs will be eliminated with the possibility of retraining for different positions. The health system didn’t announce those third-party partners, but employees reported that one of them is Atos.

From Pondering Exhibitor: “Re: HIMSS21. Looks like there a lot of available spaces or those labeled ‘HIMSS’ on the show floor. Will you be doing an updated survey to ask vendors and attendees about their HIMSS21 plans? The deadline to cancel booth space is February 4.” That’s just a week away, so I’ll run a special poll now: For those who signed up for HIMSS20 as an attendee or exhibitor, what are your HIMSS21 plans? You can add a comment with an explanation of your decision after you vote. The floor plan shows 401 exhibitors, no keynotes have been announced, and the call for proposals runs until February 24, so it will be a leap of faith to commit without knowing who is presenting and exhibiting, not to mention that COVID limitations are hard to predict these days. I have heard nothing as a member or HIMSS20 registrant, but an exhibitor passed along a rumor today that HIMSS will make some kind announcement about HIMSS21 in the next three days, and given its quietness otherwise, it could be a significant one that will make my poll instantly obsolete.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Quil. The Philadelphia-based company, which is a joint venture between Independence Health Group and Comcast, is the digital health platform that offers personalized and interactive health journeys to consumers and their caregivers. Quil is committed to educating and engaging consumers, leading to better health experiences and better outcomes, at a lower cost. Quil serves patients, members, and their caregivers in partnership with their healthcare providers and health plans nationally. Thanks to Quil for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

February 24 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Maximizing the Value of Digital Initiatives with Enterprise Provider Data Management.” Sponsor: Phynd Technologies. Presenters: Tom White, founder and CEO, Phynd Technologies; Adam Cherrington, research director, KLAS Research. Health systems can derive great business value and competitive advantage by centrally managing their provider data. A clear roadmap and management solution can solve problems with fragmented data, workflows, and patient experiences and support operational efficiency and delivery of a remarkable patient experience. The presenters will describe common pitfalls in managing enterprise information and digital strategy in silos, how to align stakeholders to maximize the value of digital initiatives, and how leading health systems are using best-of-breed strategies to evolve provider data management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

GetWellNetwork acquires consumer engagement software vendor Docent Health.

Emids acquires software development consulting firm Macadamian.

EHR-integrated patient-specific prescription pricing platform vendor RxRevu raises $7 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $28 million.

Investors are reportedly discussing executing a deal in which consumer health information platform Sharecare would be merged with AI vendor Doc.ai with the combined companies then being taken public at a valuation of $4 billion.

SCP & CO Healthcare Acquisition Company, a health IT-focused SPAC, closes its initial offering for $230 million and will begin looking for one or more companies to absorb.

NextGen Healthcare reports Q3 results: revenue up 3%, adjusted EPS $0.26 versus $0.23, beating Wall Street expectations for both. NXGN shares are up 59% in the past year versus the Nasdaq’s 45% gain, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.

The Cincinnati business paper profiles clinical collaboration platform vendor Halo Health,  which just announced new financing and the hiring of its first chief marketing officer and CTO.

Sales

• The state of West Virginia will use Everbridge’s COVID-19 Shield Vaccine Distribution – an extension of its critical event management system —  to coordinate vaccine distribution and schedule appointments.
• UNC Health chooses Medicom Health’s Epic-integrated Rx Savings Assistant solution to notify prescribers of pharma discounts and free trials for their patients.

People

4Medica hires Cynthia McIntyre (IBM Watson Health) as SVP of sales and marketing.

Children’s therapy provider The Theraplay Family of Companies names Fran Spivak, MS, RN (Strive Health) as VP of IT.

Verily hires Preston Simons, MBA (Simons & Associates) as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Optimum Healthcare IT will offer its CareerPath health IT apprenticeship program at University of Colorado Denver, giving students three months of health IT training, then hiring them on after completion.

Darena Solutions offers a free version of its BlueButtonPro solution for meeting Cures Act interoperability and patient access requirements.

A new KLAS report on quality management solutions — which includes quality and regulatory reporting, performance improvement and benchmarking, and patient safety and risk – finds that Naunce and Medisolv lead in overall performance, while Conduent users are dissatisfied and the company has backed away from its Juvo product and is again developing the Midas platform. IBM Watson Health has the lowest “would buy again” percentage as users report lack of innovation and the feeling that the company has forgotten them. Premier scores well for advanced users but is seen as being expensive, while Vizient users like its peer-hospital comparison but think the product is cumbersome.

A Black Book population health management poll of hospitals, practices, and payers finds that most expect to spend more for systems and integration, while one-third expect the government to offer incentives for providers who participate in information blocking rule fixes. Some of the PHM system vendors that score tops in customer satisfaction and loyalty are Azara Healthcare, Inovalon, I2I Population Health, Cerner, Datarobot, Casenet Trucare, and Epic MyChart.

Government and Politics

Oki Mek, recently promoted to HHS’s first chief AI officer, shares its AI plan, in which it defines its role as an AI regulator, investor, convener, and catalyst.

The state of Oklahoma rejects a protest from non-profit HIE MyHealth Access Network, whose $19.9 million software bid for a statewide HIE was turned down in favor of $49.8 million offer from Orion Health.

CACI wins a $96 million US Army task order to test, train, and deploy its MC4 battlefield EHR.

COVID-19

CDC reports that 26 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 48 million distributed (54%).

A KHN report says that information about who has been given COVID-19 vaccine is only as good as the US’s 64 unconnected vaccine registries, which is to say not good at all since many immunization records are missing race, ethnicity, or occupation that might be useful in monitoring progress.

Seattle’s Overlake Medical Center & Clinics is chastised by the governor for emailing 100 big donors with a link to sign up for invitation-only COVID-19 vaccination even though its public-facing scheduling site showed no available appointments. The email said that the hospital had reserved 500 openings over a week and contained an access code for access. The hospital apologized and said the invitation was a quick fix that followed last week’s eligibility expansion to anyone 65 or over, with the demand that followed overloading its scheduling system. The hospital says it simply contacted the people whose email addresses were on file as an efficient way to open up slots that couldn’t be moved easily to the new scheduling system.

California will turn over its struggling COVID-19 vaccination program to Blue Shield of California, which will oversee distribution and most likely replace the state’s complex vaccine eligibility rules with age-based ones that aren’t dictated by where the individual lives or the jobs they hold. Governor Gavin Newsom had challenged state residents to hold him accountable for administering 1 million doses in 10 days, but two weeks later, found that coding errors and lags in reporting made it impossible to even know how many doses have been administered.

North Carolina’s state hospital association complains to the governor that the state’s Accenture-developed COVID Vaccine Management System is burdensome and ineffective, creating bottlenecks in vaccine delivery. The system, which will cost $7 million through May, does not provide vaccination scheduling or text message reminders as the state’s contract requires. One hospital says it takes 8.5 minutes to upload the data of a single patient, while another reports that a 1,000-shot clinic requires 5-6 nurses to perform data entry for two days afterward since the system requires entry of 14 fields that are required by the federal government and another seven that the state added.

Salesforce announces Vaccine Cloud, which helps government agencies, healthcare organizations, and others deploy and manage their vaccine programs. Provider functionality includes inventory management, staff training, payment, and community communication for notifications and second-shot reminders.

The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein asks public health experts how to prepare for a 50% jump in COVID-19 contagiousness six weeks now because of the B117 variant, which could kill up to 300,000 more Americans:

• Increase the use of genomic sequencing to see how and where the virus is mutating.
• Don’t reopen restaurants and bars just because recent numbers are coming down.
• Avoid total lockdowns and instead get the FDA to speed up approval of rapid, at-home tests.
• CDC should give direct guidance on what kinds of masks to wear in various situations and the government should consider distributing high-quality masks.

Other

ECRI lists its top 10 health technology hazards for 2021:

1. Managing medical devices that are marketed under FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization.
2. Order entry mistakes caused by accepting partial names of drugs. ECRI recommends populating search fields only after the first five letters of the name have been entered.
3. Revisit the quick rollout of telehealth to consider patient technology inequalities, user training, integration with other systems, and determining which patients are well suited for telehealth visits.
4. Review imported N95 masks, especially KN95 masks from China, because they sometimes fail to provide the claimed level of protection.
5. Avoid the use of consumer-grade monitoring devices in the acute care environment wherever possible, including pulse oximeters, blood pressure cuffs, and glucose monitors.
6. Review the capabilities and use of UV disinfection devices, which are not usually regulated by FDA.
7. Assess the capability of medical device vendors to manage the third-party software they use.
8. Conduct a risk-benefit analysis of AI functionality to make sure that the data a system was trained on is representative of the organization’s population.
9. Avoid remote operation of medical devices whenever possible in trying to conserve PPE, which can lead to less-frequent patient observation, placing devices where staff can’t see or hear them, and creating tripping hazards from hallway placement.
10. Employ QA measures and clinician approval of 3D-printed devices.

Sponsor Updates

• WellSky-owned CarePort’s Interop interoperability solution is made available in Epic App Orchard to satisfy CMS’s April 30, 2021 Conditions of Participation requirement that hospitals notify a patient’s other providers of ADT activity.
• The HCI Group VP of Provider Delivery Will Conaway celebrates two years on the Forbes Technology Council.
• MHS will integrate its CareProminence platform with the Healthwise Care Management Solution for health education.
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions wins CyberSecured Awards from Security Today in the categories of fraud protection and threat intelligence.
• Cerner receives a fourth consecutive perfect score in the yearly Corporate Equality Index.
• Optimum Healthcare IT and the University of Colorado Denver partner to offer recent college graduates an apprenticeship pathway to high-paying healthcare IT jobs.
• Ellkay features Meditech’s Helen Waters in its Women in Health IT series.

Blog Posts

• Industry Alert: Urgent Care Named as Key Venue in Biden’s Vaccine Distribution Strategy (Experity)
• Four Predictions for Diabetes Management and Technology in 2021 (Glytec)
• Physician On-Call Scheduling is Changing – What You Need to Know (Halo Health)
• 2021 Revenue Cycle – What to Expect? (Healthcare Triangle)
• 5 key differences between consumer and enterprise biometrics (Part 1) (Imprivata)
• Vaccine Administration – And All That It Requires – Is Overwhelming Health Systems (HCTec)
• Healthcare Process Improvement: Six Strategies for Organizationwide Transformation (Health Catalyst)
• Scottsdale Institute CIO Summit Examines New Alignment for IT (Impact Advisors)
• Exploring the need for patient data normalization (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• How to Simplify Your Healthcare Worker Vaccination Program (LiveProcess)
• The 2021 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference & How Hospitals Stay Relevant After COVID (Loyale Healthcare)
• COVID-19 vaccination self-scheduling – why we’ve released our own vaccine management solution (Lumeon)
• Improving Operating Room Utilization (Medhost)
• Anticipate the unimaginable: 5 steps to mitigate crises (Meditech)
• 4 Essential Physical Therapy Themes to Watch in 2021 (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 1/27/21

Top News

Provider management, credentialing, and payer enrollment technology vendor Symplr acquires Phynd Technologies, which offers provider data management software.

The acquisition price was not disclosed. Phynd had raised $11.4 million in funding through a year-ago Series B round.

Symplr parent company Clearlake Capital Group had considered selling the company last July at a valuation of up to $2 billion.

The Phynd acquisition is Symplr’s sixth since Clearlake took ownership in 2018.

Reader Comments

From Long-Time Fan: “Re: Olive. I’ve been bombarded with ads for the company in news feeds, social media, and now a giant billboard. I’m astounded by the scale of their customer and recruitment campaigns and their ability to attract venture capital, but the company seems kind of fluffy and ambiguous. The most specific service I can understand is a claims scrubber, which is nothing earth-shattering. I thought you might jump on the case with an interview or something.” I suspect that an interview would not be fruitful, although I’m willing to talk with CEO Sean Lane, who has a stellar military background but no healthcare experience that I can find. They list a bunch of healthcare customers like Yale New Haven, Centura, and MedStar, so if you work there and have personally seen Olive’s impact and potential whether good or bad, tell me and I’ll keep both you and your employer anonymous.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor LexisNexis Health Care. The Alpharetta, GA-based company helps providers meet interoperability goals and gives patients more control of their health data. It offers the most robust and accurate provider, patient, and member data in the industry. It helps improve patient engagement and outcomes through proprietary linking, claims analytics, SDOH data, and predictive science. The company’s identity access management platform helps protect patient identities and prevent fraud. Thanks to LexisNexis Health Care for supporting HIStalk.

I found this LexisNexis Health Care video that explains best practices for creating a Social Determinants of Health program.

I lose thankfully few HIStalk sponsors, and most of those defections involve companies that have been successfully acquired by another sponsor (I admire this even though it’s depressing losing sponsors). I still fret over the others, who sometimes leave for good reasons (“we don’t have any money”) or bad reasons (the new marketing rep assigned to us has zero industry knowledge and has never heard of HIStalk but wants to look decisive by cancelling). Here’s a win-win for these pre-HIMSS21 times where we’re all just making it up as we go — if your company last sponsored more than a year ago, I’ll spiff you some extra months on your first comeback year. Contact me.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health IT, supply chain, and consulting company Medsphere acquires Marketware, a developer of relationship management software and analytics for healthcare organizations. Marketware CEO Alex Obbard came to the company from patient relationship management vendor Solutionreach.

OptimizeRx, whose communications platform connects life sciences companies, physicians, and patients, expects Q4 revenue to increase 117% to $16 million.

Sales

• RML Specialty Hospital (IL) selects Engage to provide cloud hosting for its upcoming implementation of Meditech Expanse.
• La Rabida Children’s Hospital (IL) will integrate Emerge ChartScout and The Floating Hospital (NY) chooses Emerge’s data conversion services for its EHR implementation.
• The MetroHealth System will implement Montreal-based Tactio Health Group’s CareSimple remote patient monitoring solution, integrated with Epic.

People

Fern Health, which offers employers a digital platform for chronic back and joint pain, hires Brad Lawson, MBA (Marshalsea Health) as CEO. He replaces Travis Bond, who has joined dementia risk prediction technology vendor Altoida as CEO.

The Chartis Group promotes Catharine Wilder to VP of practice operations.

Interlace Health (fka FormFast) promotes Allison Reichenbach to president.

Lumeon names Tom Zajac as executive chair of its board.

Announcements and Implementations

Consulting firm ReMedi Health Solutions assists a Northeastern health system with a virtual Cerner go live across 23 facilities.

Halifax Health (FL) implements Pure Storage’s FlashArray to ensure the stability of its Meditech system during natural disasters.

The AMA’s technology development subsidiary AMA Innovations and Onyx Technology will develop a FHIR-based messaging solution to connect providers and social care networks, which it will enter in an HHS social care referral challenge.

A new CoverMyMeds report finds that 65% of patients have been impacted by the pandemic, 36% skipped medications and treatments to pay other bills, and more than 40% either diverted payments for essential items for prescriptions or stretched their prescriptions by taking fewer or smaller doses than were prescribed. Most asked their provider about price and affordability options and 43% checked a pharmacy price comparison app when a prescription cost more than they expected.

SOC Telemed launches a TelePulmonology consultation service through its Telemed IQ on-demand telemedicine platform..

A new CHIME-KLAS white paper on EHR interoperability finds that deep interoperability is progressing but still too low and most vendors have improved their ability to connect with outside EHRs. However, cost remains the most frequently identified provider barrier, especially in smaller health systems. The highest-valued interoperability method is public HIE, but that is followed closely by national networks and direct messaging. Use of FHIR APIs still lags proprietary APIs and mostly involves customers of big EHR vendors using them to exchange patient records and to support clinician and patient tools. Respondents identified deeper patient-record exchange and population health as the most-needed use cases in the next 2-3 years.

COVID-19

HHS seeks approval make its July switchover in hospital COVID-19 reporting systems permanent, which would make the TeleTracking-developed system the standard in replacing CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network.

Several industries and companies are developing vaccination passport apps without national or international coordination, leading to the possibility that an individual might need to install and maintain several for specific purposes. Questions are also coming up about how to get electronic vaccination information into those systems without the possibility of fraud since the only official patient record in the US is a handwritten paper card.

Philadelphia’s health department ends its partnership with Philly Fighting COVID, the overseer of its largest vaccination site, after discovering that its registration website is operated by a recently formed for-profit arm whose privacy policy does not precluded disclosing the information of those who sign up. The site says the information entered by users – 60,000 of them so far – is shared with the city’s Health Department, which denies involvement with the site. Philly Fighting Covid originally performed COVID-19 testing, but quickly shut those locations down and cancelled appointments when it was chosen to administer vaccine. The organization was reported to have given shots to anyone who signed up regardless of their assigned priority.  A nurse claims that the CEO of both organizations, 22-year-old Drexel graduate student Andrei Doroshin who has no healthcare experience, took vaccine vials offsite to administer to private individuals, while a vaccination site volunteer said teenaged students were vaccinating each other and taking photos as the clinic ended. Doroshin also lists himself a filmmaker, an executive with a cell therapy company, a resort developer, and manager of an investment company.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH says that the federal government doesn’t know many doses of COVID-19 vaccine it has on hand, leaving state health officials to work blind in setting up vaccination sites, scheduling staff coverage, and issuing appointments without knowing how many doses they will receive.

A VA study finds that the mortality rate of COVID-19 patients in the ICU doubled when the unit was overloaded with coronavirus patients.

Google will donate $150 million to help promote COVID-19 vaccine education and equitable distribution, and will incorporate vaccination clinic locations and details in its Search and Maps tools starting with Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

The CEO of casino operator Great Canadian Gaming Corp. resigns after he and his wife were caught flying to Yukon Territory, skipping the mandatory self-isolation, and posing as motel workers so they could jump the COVID-19 vaccine line.

Other

A longtime resident of Tiny Township in Ontario makes a $5 million donation to its Georgian Bay Hospital, $1 million of which will be used to upgrade the hospital’s record-keeping to Meditech Expanse.

Corporate therapists say that remote workers who use social media-resembling tools like Slack all day exhibit the same “mix of hyper-engagement and lack of empathy” as they might on Facebook. Company cultures are being lost as remote workers use company time and tools to argue politics, bully each other, ignore requirements to turn on their webcams during video calls, confront management, and spend their day chatting constantly in ways that might alienate older workers who were not raised sharing their whole lives electronically. Employment lawyers urge employers not to let use of online tools get out of hand to avoid lawsuits, offended co-workers, or unfair performance reviews.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Symplr in its acquisition of Phynd Technologies.
• The UpTech Report features Saykara CEO Harjinder Sandhu.
• Agfa HealthCare releases a new case study focused on enterprise imaging’s role in personalized, end-to-end care for cancer patients at IFO in Rome, Italy.
• CereCore recognizes 13 team members with its annual Rock Solid Award.
• NEJM Catalyst features the Arizona Surge Line and its innovative use of Central Logic technology to coordinate public health services across the state.
• Cerner donates 100 laptops to Kansas City students.
• Change Healthcare releases a new podcast, “The Policy Connection: Healthcare Policy and the Road Ahead for States.”
• Clinical Architecture names Morgan Johnson to its Team Services group.
• Hunt Scanlon includes Direct Recruiters on its list of “Top 40 Cyber Technology Search Firms.”
• Divurgent releases a new podcast, “The Integration of Music Therapy in Biotechnology.”
• Former health IT executive Tom Zajac joins Lumeon’s Board of Directors as executive chairman.
• SOC Telemed adds tele-pulmonology consulting services to its Telemed IQ platform.
• CoverMyMeds publishes the “2021 Medication Access Report.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health launches Lippincott Connect, an interactive digital medical textbook.

Blog Posts

• Leveraging Health IT Offshore Services for 24/7 Customer Support (314e)
• Are you on track to comply with CMS’ new Conditions of Participation (CoP) requirements? (Audacious Inquiry)
• CMS’ Geo Model – The New Disruptor in Value-Based Care? (Bluetree)
• Healthcare Data Privacy: We Have Met the Enemy and They are Us. (CloudWave)
• The Evolution of EHRs and Patient Price Transparency (CoverMyMeds)
• 5 Healthcare Trends to Look Out for in 2021 (Dimensional Insight)
• 3 Ways Health Plans Can Open the Door to In-Home Care (Dina)
• 3 ways AI is shaping the future of clinical research (Elsevier Clinical Solutions)
• Optimization Services: Make a Difference in 2021! (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 1/25/21

Top News

ONC opens a challenge project to create realistic patient data for the open source Synthea synthetic health data engine.

Synthea creates simulated lifelong health records that can be used by developers and researchers to support patient-centered outcomes research while they are waiting for access to real clinical data.

Up to six winners will be chosen for prizes of $10,000 to $50,000.

Reader Comments

From Maybe Going: “Re: HIMSS21. No registration page yet?” The conference site says that registration will open in January. The latest entry on the “Conference News & Announcements” page is from five months ago. We are just over six months away from the scheduled start of HIMSS21. HIMSS22 is scheduled for seven months later in March 2022 in Orlando.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents who have worked for an acquired company say their jobs got worse afterward.

New poll to your right or here: Have you argued with, criticized, or publicly disagreed with someone on Facebook who you have never met personally? Background: I don’t understand the perceived benefit of arguing publicly online and I can’t identify with how someone’s political or social beliefs can be so defining to their self-worth that they need defend them to faceless strangers, but Facebook fight-picking seems to be everybody’s favorite pastime. Mrs. HIStalk sometimes gets worked up over some clearly stupid or trolling comment and wants to respond, but I always provide my unsolicited advice: (a) you’ve never had your mind changed by a stranger’s Facebook comment and neither has anyone else; and (b) do you really want to spar with some keyboard warrior who can find our address from your name? I would consider social media to be a place for thoughtful discussion only if (a) everybody had to register with one and only one account using their validated name and address; and (b) I could click any comment to mute the author permanently.

I’m puzzled at why I’ve seen the city of “St. Louis” – its legal name – spelled out several times in the last week or two as “Saint Louis” by folks whose tendency seems to be to erroneously shorten rather than lengthen words (“Saint Louis University” is correct only because it is named after the actual saint and not the city). The city’s pronunciation is equally vexing – it should be “loo-EEE” given that it was named by French speakers who were referring to their king, whose delight would probably be diminished upon hearing that ‘Murcans mispronounce his name as LOO_us. Even the state’s name is illogically converted by some residents to Missou-ruh. It’s interesting that we choose names from other languages, but then mispronounce them intentionally or otherwise to make them uniquely ours (see Texas, just north of “I see an X so I’m saying an X” Mexico).

It’s a slow-to-no news day compared to the usual HIMSS-focused seasonal burst of PR activity. Enjoy the few minutes you will save as a result.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Announcements and Implementations

Eighteen hospitals of Steward Health Care complete their virtual implementation of a regionally shared Meditech Expanse EHR.

Divurgent launches a Virtual Patient Support Solution to help providers manage COVID-19 vaccination scheduling calls.

A Mass General / Harvard Medical School study that was performed using real-world data from the TriNetX global health research network finds that people who have autoimmune or immune-suppressing rheumatic conditions are less likely to experience severe COVID-19 outcomes. The authors, who reviewed the de-identified information of 8,500 patients, also noted that the death risk to those patients remains substantial at 5-6% within 30 days of diagnosis.

Beverly Knight Children’s Hospital goes live on Vocera Ease for connecting parents with their NNICU babies. Employees applied for and received a Pampers Bright Beginnings NICU Connectivity Grant to fund the project.

COVID-19

Sunday’s COVID-19 hospitalizations in the US dropped to 110,628, new deaths to 1,940, and new cases the lowest other than on Christmas Day since December 1 at 142,949. The numbers are likely retreating after holiday-caused spikes, but the lull may be temporary as the B117 variant increases in prevalence. The US death count is at 417,000.

CDC reports that 20.5 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 41.4 million distributed (50%). The federal government says that vaccine availability won’t improve until April due to manufacturing capacity, so experts urge the government focus on fixing state and local vaccination center problems that can’t even get existing limited supplies into arms.

The New York Times warns that the US should learn from Britain’s experience of hospitals becoming overwhelmed with patients, partly driven by the more contagious B117 coronavirus variant. One example is overloaded liquid oxygen pipes, caused by the use of high-flow oxygen for COVID-19 patients in trying to avoid the use of ventilators. The article also notes that hospitals have been reluctant to delay elective procedures, causing staff burnout, and quotes doctors who worry about how COVID survivors can be rehabilitated.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx will present at the B. Riley Securities 2021 Vision Day Virtual Conference January 28.
• PatientPing publishes a new white paper, “CMS Direct Contracting: Preparing for the New Model & How to Succeed with Real-Time Data.”
• Arcadia congratulates Micky Tripathi on his new leadership role as National Coordinator for Health Information Technology with the Department of Health and Human Services.
• TrustRadius has recognized Pure Storage’s FlashArray for Best Customer Support and Best Usability.
• Relatient publishes a new case study, “The Warren Clinic Leverages Epic and Relatient to Distribute COVID-19 Vaccines.”
• Spirion will host a series of virtual events January 26-28 in support of Data Privacy Day.
• MD Tech Review names Zen Healthcare IT a “Top Healthcare Interoperability Solution Provider of 2020.”

Blog Posts

• Telehealth – here to stay. The growing need to expand access to care. (Nuance)
• Every season is immunization season. How can you maximize your patient experience? (OmniSys)
• Healthcare interoperability and the vendor-system divide (Nordic)
• How Can Application Rationalization Create Immediate Value During M&A? (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Physician Burnout with Information Technology (PMD)
• Premier Data: Supplies for COVID-19 Testing, Diagnostics and Treatment at Risk of Shortage (Premier)
• COVID-19 Vaccine Reporting for Public Health Agencies from Redox (Redox)
• How Does the Cloud Work? Understanding Cloud Computing in Healthcare (Spok)
• How one DME supplier took on the challenge of same or similar denials (Waystar)
• 4 Things to Consider When Restructuring Your Clinic’s Compensation Plan (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 1/22/21

Top News

The Biden administration chooses Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP as National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. He replaces Don Rucker, MD, MS, MBA, who was named national coordinator in April 2017.

Tripathi was chief alliance officer for Arcadia, which last year acquired the assets of the closed Massachusetts EHealth Collaborative, of which Tripathi served as CEO for 15 years.

Tripathi has resigned from the boards of Datica, HL7 FHIR Foundation, CommonWell, and The Sequoia Project.

Reader Comments

From Rad Idea: “Re: PACS. Mach7 (which acquired Client Outlook and its eUnity viewer last year) won the enterprise viewing RFP from Trinity Health this past November, with an option to add VNA, diagnostic viewer, and worklist. It’s a big deal since Trinity does 60% more studies than the big academic radiology heavyweights.” Thanks. Australia-based Mach7, which restructured and fired its CEO a couple of years ago in a cost-cutting effort, has an impressive roster of big customers. Trinity signed a seven-year, $5 million contract for its enterprise viewer in November. Shares in M7T, which trade on the ASX, value the company at $313 million.

From PEI: “Re: Nano-X. Ever run across them? I’ve heard some interesting stories and wondered about your thoughts.” The technology explanations of Israel-based Nano-X goes way over my head, but it involves low-cost and portable diagnostic imaging, which has yet to earn FDA approval. The chairman and CEO apparently invented wireless phone charging. NNOX did its IPO in August 20 and shares are up 166% since, valuing the company at $2.7 billion. Fun reading of the “interesting stories” variety (but of unverified validity) is the analysis of fraud chasers Citron Research, which calls the company “Theranos 2.0” with just 20-odd employees and “nothing more than a science project with a simple rendering, minimal R&D, fake customers, no FDA approval, and fraudulent claims that are beyond the realm of possibility.” Perhaps readers have more information to contribute.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Dr. Jayne’s office chair write-up spurred me to long-deferred action to replace my old, cheap Office Depot model, whose defective height-adjusting mechanism made it a poor man’s carnival drop tower ride. I was happy to find a local office furniture store that buys used chairs from closed or relocated businesses, refurbishes them, then sells them cheap with a one-year warranty. My new chair is a fully tricked out Herman Miller Celle that came from a closed Blue Cross Blue Shield office that turned in 1,000 of them. The retail price is $750, so $199 seemed like a bargain. I didn’t realize how un-ergonomic and cheap-feeling my old chair was until I sat in a decent, highly adjustable one where my back actually touches the chair.

Listening: new soul / R&B from Grammy winners Black Pumas, which I ran across before finding that they played virtually at the inauguration this week.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HealthStream will acquire policy management technology vendor ComplyAlign for $2 million in cash.

Text chat-based telehealth vendor K Health raises $132 million in a Series E funding round that values the company at over $1 billion. K Health offers unlimited online doctor chats for $9 per month, also offering pediatrics in 15 states and single urgent care visits for $19. Co-founder and CEO Allon Bloch, MBA previously started several online businesses, none of them related to healthcare.

UnitedHealth Group reports Q3 results: revenue up 8% to $65.1 billion with Optum as its biggest percentage contributor, EPS $2.51 versus $3.90, beating estimates for both. The company said in the earnings call that its OptumCare business will add another 10,000 employed and affiliated physicians to its existing 50,000 in 2021. It expects the combination of its acquired Change Healthcare and OptumInsight to allow it to introduce evidenced-based criteria into clinician workflow.

Healthcare outcomes and community service connection vendor Pieces acquires Bowtie Business Intelligence, which offers a data management platform.

Compute Health Acquisition, a SPAC that will focus on healthcare technology, files for a $750 million IPO that will value the company at around $1 billion. The company is led by Intel Chairman Omar Ishrak, PhD, who was formerly CEO of Medtronic. Medtronic is interested in buying 1.5 million shares in the company, he says.

Hillrom will acquire ambulatory ECG monitoring vendor Bardy Diagnostics for $375 million in cash.

Healthcare conversational AI vendor MPulse Mobile acquires health video course developer The Big Know.

Sales

• Community Care Plan chooses CareSignal’s Deviceless Remote Monitoring program to send self-management text messages to its Medicaid members.
• New York State Office of Mental Health chooses Cerner’s hosted revenue cycle management solutions in a 10-year contract that covers 23 inpatient and 155 outpatient facilities.

People

Cerner hires Mark Erceg (Tiffany & Company) as VP/CFO. He replaces Marc Naughton, whose departure was announced last fall. Cerner’s entire executive team has now been replaced since Brent Shafer was hired as chairman and CEO in January 2018, with the exception of Don Trigg, who was then president of Cerner Health Ventures and is now president of Cerner.

David Tavares, founder and CEO of alarm and event notification vendor Connexall, died last week at 73.

Announcements and Implementations

Jvion launches its COVID Vaccination Prioritization Index, which helps public health officials determine which areas need more vaccines based on an AI-powered analysis of each community’s makeup. I randomly chose Roane County WV, which is high priority as explained in the graphic above.

AI researchers from Facebook work with NYU Langone Health to develop software that analyzes chest x-rays to predict if COVID-19 patients will deteriorate or require oxygen. The researchers say their models are research solutions rather than products and will make them open source to allow hospitals to tune them using their own data.

The local TV station covers how SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital allows the family members of patients to send photos electronically to their in-room entertainment system. The video doesn’t mention the interactive patient system vendor that does the heavy lifting, but freeze-framing the video shows that it’s PCare.

Government and Politics

Implementation of HHS’s December 10 rule that reduces the time providers have to give patients copies of their records will be delayed for 60 days in a Biden administration review of all recent HHS actions.

HHS OCR will not impose HIPAA penalties related to use of online scheduling to make COVID-19 vaccination appointments.

COVID-19

The COVID Tracking Project shows 122,700 people hospitalized in the US, with the trend continuing down. Deaths hit a daily record 4,409 as the US total increased to 406,000.

CDC shows as of Wednesday that 16.5 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 36 million distributed (46%).

Amazon offers in a letter sent to President Biden to use its operations, IT, and communications to help get people vaccinated.

Experts question the COVID-19 vaccination plan of Washington, D.C. – which is already struggling with vaccine distribution problems – to open up priority slots to anyone who is overweight, which would be more than half of the district’s residents. An obesity researcher says that “it’s not much of of a discriminator any more if you define a co-morbidity as something that almost everybody has.” The city will also use the honor system in requiring those showing up for a vaccine to answer two questions – are you a resident, and do you have at least one priority chronic condition – with no proof required.

The White House publishes its 200-page national COVID-19 strategy, in which the federal government will:

• Provide expert-led, science-based public briefings and CDC-led communication and guidance.
• Give states more support and funding to “convert vaccines into vaccinations.”
• Expand vaccine production and purchasing.
• End the policy of holding back second doses and encourage states to move quickly through the priority groups.
• Create as many vaccination venues as are needed, including federally run centers in stadiums and conference centers, drugstores, VA hospitals, physician office, hospitals, urgent care centers, and mobile clinics.
• Compensate providers fairly for administering the vaccine, expanding the FMAP to 100% for Medicaid enrollees and assigning CMS to review whether payment rates are appropriate.
• Strengthen the federal government’s approach to vaccination data collection.
• Have CDC and FDA perform real-time safety monitoring of vaccines through expanded systems.
• Expand provider scope-of-practice laws and waive licensing requirements to meet community workforce needs.
• Require masks and distancing within federal buildings and lands and require mask-wearing on planes, trains, and other public transportation.
• Develop a COVID-19 treatment discovery and development plan.
• Establish a US Public Health Jobs Corps to provide 100,000 contact tracers, community health workers, and public health nurses.
• Provide technical help with the use of technology and data to guide response.
• Invoke the Defense Production Act to fix supply problems with vaccination and testing supplies and PPE.
• Implement a national strategy to support the safe reopening of schools, with most K-8 schools to be open within 100 days, including Congress-approved funding.
• Provide emergency funds to help hard-hit childcare providers remain open and to support higher education operation.
• Restore the US’s participation in the World Health Organization.

Other

The non-profit, Tulsa-based MyHealth Access Network protests the state’s selection of Orion Health to provide a statewide HIE platform for $49.8 million, which is nearly $30 million more than its own bid. ONC warned the state in a January 6 email that scrapping MyHealth and starting over was a bad idea. MyHealth bid $106.6 million on December 30, 2019, then lowered its price nine months later to $41.7 million when the state asked for its best and final offer, then lowered its price again to $19.9 million. The federal government will pay 90% of the cost.

I mentioned that health IT long-timer Amy Gleason had a big role in the successful implementation of HHS’s COVID hospital data reporting system as part of the US Digital Service. She invites other industry folks to join the group. I’m fantasizing about how cool it must be to casually name-drop “The White House” as a current or previous employer when meeting someone.

Sponsor Updates

• Everbridge launches its enhanced Public Warning System.
• Experity adds distribution phase information to its state-by-state COVID vaccine plan tracker.
• The HCI Group hires Blake Richardville as a business development executive, and Eli Lemkin as an account executive.
• Kyruus adds online consumer scheduling for COVID-19 vaccine visits to its patient access platform.
• Lumeon publishes the “US Patient Access Leadership Report 2020/21.”
• Medicomp Systems sponsors the awards section of the Physician Burnout Symposium through January 29.
• Meditech customer Northeastern Vermont connects the full birth experience with Expanse Labor and Delivery.

Blog Posts

• 4 Predictions for Diabetes Management and Technology in 2021 (Glytec)
• Secure Text Messaging Benefits Extend Beyond EPHI Protection (Halo Health)
• The 2021 Healthcare Financial Forecast: What to Expect, How to Prepare (Health Catalyst)
• Cooking and Consulting with Joe – Week 1 – Mustard Crusted Salmon (Health Data Movers)
• Digital Programs Let You Enroll More Patients in Cardiac Rehab (Healthwise)
• 2020 ushered in the era of the “Payvider” (Infor)
• Shifting Mindsets for Population Health (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Transform Situational Awareness into Hospital Efficiency (LiveProcess)
• Parallels between HIPAA and 21st Century Cures Act (Medhost)
• 3 Things to Know About ONC’s Project US@ (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 1/20/21

Top News

The co-founder of The COVID Tracking Project outlines the success of HHS’s fast switchover last summer from the CDC’s National Health Safety Network hospital reporting database to the TeleTracking-developed HHS Protect.

The article in The Atlantic urges the new administration to continue using the HHS system instead of switching back to NHSN.

Many observers assumed that the government made the change to marginalize CDC and to make its COVID-19 response appear to be more effective, but the author says The Covid Tracking Project’s investigation found no evidence of “cooking the books.”

Some points:

• CDC approved the reporting change, contrary to media reports saying its scientists were blindsided by the White House.
• NHSN is an old system that was jury-rigged to collect COVID-19 hospital data. Leidos maintains the system under a $60 million contract. Adding urgently needed data collection fields was taking weeks.
• HHS Protect’s data was all over the place at first, as hospitals worked to make the switch. Its reports now match those that states submit and have eliminated NHSN’s odd data swings and unexplained variability.
• By the end of 2020, 96% of hospitals were reporting their data to the new system every day.
• The system has been enhanced to include metadata, staff shortage details, and hospital-level capacity data to show where health systems are overwhelmed.
• The COVID Tracking Project concludes that the system has “enormous potential to be the federal numbers we’ve always wanted” and urges the new administration to keep using it.

The leader of the development team was health IT veteran Amy Gleason of the White House’s inter-agency United States Digital Service, which was created by the Obama administration to bring private industry technologists into government. She is credited with making the system production-worthy and fixing data issues. She has previously worked for CareSync, Allscripts, MediNotes, Bond Technologies, and Misys Healthcare.

Reader Comments

From Bone Spur: “Re: podcast. My list of good and bad ones. ” As a hardcore radio and TV channel-flipper, I don’t have the attention span to spend 15 minutes listening to what I could read in 15 seconds (or abandon in five). Maybe I would feel differently for something funny or dramatic where getting to the point isn’t the primary objective, but not news, opinion, or freeform yakking. My perception is that industry leaders who are busy holding jobs of responsibility — the folks I might find interesting enough to listen to — mostly aren’t screwing around doing podcasts and YouTube videos. Industry podcasts remind me of “King of Comedy,” the Scorsese-De Niro cult film that I watched the other night in which aspiring comedian Rupert Pupkin wows an imaginary TV audience from a talk show set that he built in his mother’s basement. Still, I figure that Katie the Intern might need more video production on her journalism resume, so I’ve suggested that she do some video interviews. Plus Pupkin actually did become a star in the movie’s darkly predictive ending, so you never know.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Philips will acquire medical device integration vendor Capsule Technologies for $635 million in cash.

Accountable care organization operator Aledade, which was co-founded by former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD in 2014, raises $100 million in funding round that increases its total to $294 million and values the company at over $2 billion.

Conversa Health, which offers a virtual care and triage platform, expands its Series B funding round to $20 million

Newfire Global Partners will launch an office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia next month that will provide around-the-clock technical operations to clients in healthcare and other critical industries.

Sales

• The State of Pennsylvania selects Aunt Bertha to help it build a statewide resource and referral portal for healthcare and social services.
• Yale New Haven Health System (CT) will work with Gozio Health to develop an app with wayfinding, patient portal, and virtual care features.
• Behavioral health provider Springstone (KY) will use VisiQuate’s RCM software and consulting services.

People

GetWellNetwork promotes Nikia Bergan to president.

John Ward (Atos North America Healthcare) joins Divurgent as CFO.

Karen Marhefka (Impact Advisors) joins RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers Health as deputy CIO and VP of IT for their combined medical group in New Jersey.

CI Security promotes Kristoffer Turner to VP of security operations for its Critical Insight Security Operations Centers, and hires Steve Sedlock (EPSi) as chief revenue officer.

Christine Boyle, who held marketing executive roles in Oncology Analytics, Get-to-Market Health, Caradigm, Microsoft, and Sentillion, died of cancer on January 9. She was 50.

Announcements and Implementations

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences regional campuses implement Epic.

UnitedHealthcare launches a virtual primary care service for employers powered by Amwell. The payer had attempted before COVID to offer telemedicine services through its network of primary care practices, but found physician uptake slow due to reimbursement issues.

East Orange General Hospital (NJ) rolls out bedside tablets from PadInMotion for patient education, entertainment, and care team messaging.

Government and Politics

ONC will invest $20 million in projects related to helping communities share vaccine-related data, and supporting immunization-related collaborations between HIEs.

A reader who is a nationally recognized provider-side HIPAA expert (I’m leaving them anonymous) called out a recent court decision about MD Anderson, which they say will change how entities look at HIPAA breaches, enforcement, and penalties. Here’s the summary:

• An appeals court last week vacated MD Anderson’s $4.3 million HHS OCR civil money penalty that was imposed in 2017 following three lost device incidents in 2012 and 2013. The unencrypted mobile devices contained the information of 35,000 patients.
• The court ruled that the penalty was “arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law” in questioning how HHS OCR interprets HIPAA violations and sets penalty amounts.
• The ruling noted that MD Anderson had provided IronKey technology to encrypt PHI on mobile devices and the training to use it, but employees had not enabled it on the lost laptop and two USB drives. The court said that HIPAA requires only that covered entities “implement a mechanism to encrypt,” also noting that the health system’s IT user agreement requires employees to enable the provided encryption.
• The court also questioned whether information has been “disclosed” to an outside entity, as HIPAA defines, when it is stolen or lost. It said, “It defies reason to say an entity affirmatively acts to disclose information when someone steals it” and that the word “information” means that someone has been “informed” by it, which hasn’t been proven just because devices can’t be located.
• The court’s conclusion, which HHS could contest, is that losing unprotected PHI is not disclosure and likely isn’t an enforceable action under HIPAA.

COVID-19

Monday’s US COVID numbers: 123,848 hospitalized, 1,393 deaths, as the numbers trend sharply down but with potential underreporting due to the MLK holiday. It’s just a short break in any case, experts warn, as the more contagious B117 coronavirus variant spreads. The US crossed the 400,000 death mark Tuesday and the incoming CDC director predicts 500,000 by mid-February.

CDC hasn’t updated its vaccination numbers since Friday morning. Meanwhile, Florida reports that 45,000 people are already overdue for their second shot.

Lumeon announces GA of its COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign Management software featuring automated patient outreach, self-scheduling, and surveys.

Sponsor Updates

• In Australia, InterSystems TrakCare and Launceston General Hospital become the first to support the new ISBT 128 blood labeling standard with a digital interface to the National Blood Authority’s BloodNet online ordering and inventory management system.
• CNBC’s Squawk Box features Change Healthcare and the Vaccination Credential Initiative.
• The Chartis Group promotes Brian Spendley to principal in its strategy and private equity advisory practices.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new Informonster Podcast, “CommonWell Health Alliance and the Mission to Bring People and Data Together.”

Blog Posts

• Tips for Making EHR Digital Learning More Productive (314e)
• COVID-19 vaccinations: Ability helps providers get paid (Ability Network)
• Top 3 Healthcare IT Trends of 2021 (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• AdvancedMD launches Hub, customer community portal (AdvancedMD)
• Bluetree Network, a Tegria Company, Honored as One of the Best Places to Work in 2021, a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award Winner (Bluetree)
• Leveraging Technology to Power Improved Outcomes in Acute and Post-Acute Care (CarePort Health)
• Three Ways Health IT Project Kickoff Meetings Fall Short (CereCore)
• Honoring the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. (Cerner)
• How Providers Can Keep Their Focus During the COVID Era (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 1/18/21

Top News

Cerner announces that Chief Client and Services Officer John Peterzalek and Chief Legal Officer Randy Sims will leave the company. They will be replaced by Cerner Government Services President Travis Dalton and SVP of Cloud Strategy / Chief IP Officer Dan Devers, respectively.

Cerner Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer said in the internal announcement that the company’s annual client survey results require a greater sense of urgency in strengthening relationships, delivering on promises, innovating faster, and executing on strategies.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents don’t have a significant chunk of their net worth invested in health IT company ownership.

New poll to your right or here: For those who have worked for a company or healthcare organization that was acquired, how was your job afterward? I’ve mostly worked for big health systems that were the acquirer, which worked out well for me. My job also didn’t change much during my stint with a bottom-feeder vendor whose series of owners couldn’t wait to pawn it off on someone else like a gas station Christmas fruitcake, but only because (a) it wasn’t that great of a job to begin with; (b) I was somewhat safe as a clinical-technical subject matter expert who was happy to keep my head down while the mahogany row battles were being fought above me (literally and figuratively). My sense is that having your company acquired for unfavorable terms brands you with the collective stench of your previous employer’s failure, while those who actually captained the ship into the iceberg elbow women and children aside in fleeing for the corporate lifeboats.

The suddenly overused word that I’m sick of hearing: all forms of “lean,” including lean in, forward-leaning, left- or right-leaning, and leaning into. Unless you’re talking about someone who is unsteady on their feet, a carburetor, quality improvement, the director of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” or that tower in Pisa, better word choices are available.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

People

Former Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt, who was previously CEO of OptumInsight and more recently founder of non-profit United States of Care, will take a temporary role as advisor the President-elect’s COVID team. That’s him accepting his “Healthcare IT Industry Figure of the Year” award at the final HIStalkapalooza in New Orleans in 2017, which was right after I interviewed him.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthcare development platform vendor Commure joins the Postman API Network, making its FHIR and authentication APIs available to healthcare developers. Clinical scenarios covered include telehealth, care team management, inpatient medical workflows, and capturing data with forms. Commure’s co-founder and executive chairman is investor Hemant Taneja, who started and sold Livongo, while its CEO is Brent Dover, who was president of Medicity and Health Catalyst. The company has raised $42 million in funding.

COVID-19

Saturday saw 126,139 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US, with 3,695 deaths. The death total will pass 400,000 early this week.

CDC says the more contagious B117 coronavirus variant will become the dominant strain in the US by March, which some experts predict will happen even sooner based on UK experience. In addition, the B1351 variant is probably already active in the US and may be resistant to at least one antibody therapy. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says that new COVID-19 cases have likely peaked, but deaths and hospitalizations will continue to grow over the next few weeks as a lagging indicator. 

CDC reports that as of Friday, 12.3 million people have received COVID-19 vaccine first doses versus 31.2 million doses distributed, with less than 40% of available doses actually given.

Operation Warp Speed held CDC’s vaccine distribution plan for two months last summer, leaving state and local officials little time to implement mass vaccination programs. 

HHS imposes term limits on its top few dozen scientists at FDA and CDC, who would face reassignment every five years, in a rule that the new administration is likely to cancel.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx promotes Kennedy Whitney to marketing coordinator.
• D CEO and Dallas Innovates recognizes Phynd Technologies CEO Tom White as a finalist for their Start-Up Innovator of the Year award.
• KLAS Research recognizes Relatient as the highest rated patient engagement platform with 10 validated capabilities.
• Everest Group names Nordic a “Leader” in its “Healthcare IT Services Specialists PEAK Matrix Assessment 2021.”
• Spirion introduces its Customer Marketplace, an online hub for third-party data privacy and security integrations, applications, best practices, and training information.
• TriNetX will present during the Friends of the National Library of Medicine’s virtual workshop January 27 on real-world data and EHRs in clinical research.
• Well Health joins the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’ KidsX digital accelerator as part of its initial cohort.

Blog Posts

• Inference Analytics Advanced Neural Network generates impressions based on radiologist findings (Nuance)
• American use of the EHR: What can we learn from others? (Nordic)
• Will 2021 be the Year of the Digital Health Platform? (PatientBond)
• When Plans Change: Lessons for Business Leaders from the Pandemic (PatientKeeper)
• Patient Simulators: Innovation Through Necessity (PMD)
• Five Issues Limiting the Vaccine Rollout – and How to Fix Them (Premier)
• The ABCs of healthcare IT (a vocab sheet) (Redox)
• The COVID-19 Vaccine Has Arrived: Here’s How Relatient is Helping (Relatient)
• A Nurse’s Greatest Fear, Part 2: Giving Clinicians Greater Insight & Improving Patient Safety Outside of the ICU (Capsule Technologies)
• 8 steps to take in the event of a data breach at your hospital (Spok)
• Thriving in a Virtual Work Environment (Summit Healthcare)
• Empowering Patients with Another Relationship They Can Count On (Surescripts)
• Interview / AI Research Insights (Visage Imaging)
• Revenue Cycle 101: Prior Authorization (Waystar)
• Beat the Heat: How to Fight Burnout in Your Rehab Therapy Practice (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 1/15/21

Top News

Health and technology leaders announce the Vaccination Credential Initiative, which hopes to provide digital access to COVID-19 vaccination records using the open SMART Health Cards specification.

Individuals could obtain an encrypted digital copy of their immunization credentials to store in a digital wallet or could receive a paper form containing a QR code.

The goal of the initiative is to connect to The Commons Project Foundation’s CommonPass, which is being used for travel and return-to-work vaccine verification.

Participants include CARIN Alliance, Cerner, Change Healthcare, The Commons Project Foundation, Epic, Evernorth, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Mitre, Oracle, Safe Health, and Salesforce.

Reader Comments

From Assign Me Up: “Re: email updates. Please enroll me at this new address and remove the old one.” I’ve been remiss in not providing self-service email signup instruction reminders in many months, so here’s a refresher:

• Sign up for updates here or using the “Subscribe to updates” menu option under Contact (desktop format) or the “Get email updates” menu option (mobile format).
• Watch for the verification email that follows since it may end up on your spam folder and you’ll receive no further emails unless you confirm this one.
• Review your email rules, whitelist, company email server setup, etc. if you aren’t receiving the emails you signed up for. The automatic sending of the emails is highly reliable, but the receiving of them is much less so and is not something I can control (spam tools have eliminated the reliability and timeliness of email delivery, unfortunately).
• Unsubscribe your old address by clicking the ‘”unsubscribe” link that is at the bottom of each email. Or, do nothing since your inactive old address will cancel itself even if you do nothing.
• Reminder: I do absolutely nothing with the email addresses, so all you’ll get as a result of signing up is a notice that I’ve posted something new. I collect only the actual email address itself, don’t use those addresses for anything else, and don’t make them available to others.

From Clog Queen: “Re: HIStalkapalooza shoe contest. I think that in these challenging times (don’t all emails start with that phrase these days?) you should do a virtual version.” Certainly the shoe contest would virtualize better than most conference components since judges would just need to review photos, perform their deliberations, then announce the winners. I bet closets are full of low-mileage yet stylish zapatos since they add no value to a Zoom call.

From Dunning Notice: “Re: HIMSS21. Are you doing a booth this year, assuming the conference goes on?” No. It’s been nice in the past to have a place to say hello to readers on the show floor, but it’s not worth the several thousand dollars that a microscopic 10×10 foot space costs when I have nothing to sell that would offset that personal expense. I’ll probably (not certainly as of yet) be treading the thick exhibit hall carpet as a paying attendee, using my HIMSS20 registration rollover, if HIMSS21 happens. Thank goodness I ended HIStalkapalooza in its 10th iteration at HIMSS17 since I would have faced financial Armageddon otherwise from the cancelled HIMSS20.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor PatientBond. The Salt Lake City company applies consumer insights and innovative technologies to digital patient engagement. Its Digital Health Platform uses a proprietary psychographic segmentation model that allows health systems, urgent care facilities, and medical practices to personalize messaging and digital channels to each individual’s motivations and preferences, supporting market share growth (patient acquisition and loyalty, service line marketing, and social reputation management);  improved patient outcomes (closing care gaps, improving medication adherence, and automating care coordination); and increased patient payments (reminders, online payments, digital statements, and card-on-file messaging). The cloud-based, API-driven platform requires no training, no software to install, and offers easy integration with most CRM, EMR, and PM systems. Discover which of its five psychographic segments you fit in as a patient by answering a 12-question survey. Thanks to PatientBond for supporting HIStalk.

Thanks to the 2,000 folks who completed my once-yearly reader survey. Resultant factoids:

• 94% of respondents say they have a higher appreciation for companies they read about in HIStalk, while 82% have a higher appreciation for HIStalk sponsors.
• 94% say that reading HIStalk helped them perform their job better in 2020, which is a relief since that’s my most-valued metric.
• I’ve emailed the winners of $50 Amazon gift cards who were randomly drawn from participants. Thanks to all who completed the survey.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Provider and resource scheduling system vendor QGenda acquires Shift Admin, which offers shift-based specialty scheduling for emergency medicine, urgent care, and hospital medicine.

Signify Research says the EHR market in Europe and EMEA in 2020 was better than in the US, which declined due to COVID-related financial challenges. It also notes that consolidation is picking up in Europe, with Dedalus acquiring Agfa’s HCIS business, CompuGroup Medical buying parts of Cerner’s non-Millennium assets, and the merger of big Nordics vendors Tieto and EVRY.

Lumiata — which applies AI to 120 million patients records to predict patient outcomes, clinical costs, and risks for providers and payers – raises $14 million in a Series B funding round.

Cerner says in its J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference investor presentation that it will create a billion-dollar data business in selling de-identified patient data as real-world evidence to drug companies, partly driven by its $375 million cash acquisition last month of Kantar Health.

Walgreens says in its J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference presentation that it will create a tech-enabled healthcare startup as a “company within a company” that will offer a customer engagement platform, a personalization engine, a care integration platform, and a health marketplace. The company says that neither a digital-only nor a physical-only platform can be successful. It will partner with best-in-class companies as an integrator. The company said in Q&A that it expects to be part of the care team in offering patients real-time information for managing conditions and recommending medication changes to doctors, enabled by the increasing scope of pharmacist practice in some states. Walgreens has seen a 40% jump in pharmacist involvement with medication therapy management. It adds that a patient with multiple chronic conditions is forced to log into multiple apps, a process that it intends to simplify.

NextGen Healthcare’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare deck highlights its December 2019 acquisition of telehealth platform vendor Otto Health for a reported $22 million, after which its virtual visits have increased by 68%, active user count has jumped from 300 to 13,000, and contracted annual recurring revenue has increased from $200,000 to $9 million.

Sales

• Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services chooses Cerner’s EHR for four additional behavioral health facilities. 
• Konica Minolta Japan will use InterSystems IRIS for Health and its HL7 FHIR interoperability capability to connect its devices with other systems, such as the EHR.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthwise announces five Digital Health Programs – for diabetes, cardiac rehab, colonoscopy and endoscopy, orthopedics, and pregnancy and newborn – that allow providers to send education and reminders and receive individual and aggregated analytics to monitor patient progress.

Meditech offers a short-form Quick Vaccination solution that allows hospitals to administer COVID-19 vaccine at high-volume locations and transmit vaccine data to state systems.

Specialty EHR vendor Modernizing Medicine acquires Exscribe, which offers an orthopedics EHR.

A new KLAS report on structured reporting in cardiology finds that Change Healthcare and IBM Watson Health lead in adoption, Epic saw the biggest adoption increase but Cupid still requires a lot of work and is missing some functionality, and customers of Lumedx are frustrated with poor training, support, and development.

Government and Politics

Flo Health settles FTC charges that its Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker app shared user information with Facebook, Google, and other companies while assuring users that it would keep their information private. The company will have its privacy practices independently reviewed and will get user consent before sharing user data. Some members of FTC’s panel dissented parts of the settlement, saying that FTC should have charged Flo with violating the Health Breach Notification Rule that would have required notifying individual users, while Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips issued a statement saying that simply requiring a company to notify users isn’t worth much if those users have no remedial actions available to them.

A Department of Defense annual review of its MHS Genesis Cerner implementation (thanks to reader Vaporware? for sending the link) finds that:

• MHS Genesis “is not operationally suitable because training remains unsatisfactory, dissemination of system change information is inadequate, and usability problems persist.”
• The system is operationally effective for basic operations in conventional clinics, but not for some specialty clinics and business areas.
• Performance scores increased from 45% of tested performance measures to 78%, with improvements needed in medical readiness, provider referrals, business intelligence, billing, coding, and reporting.
• System usability improved from “unacceptable” to “marginal-low.”
• The project has 158 open high-priority issues.
• Information exchange with required external systems was “sporadic, and the data were sometimes inaccurate and complete.” AHLTA-housed patient allergies, meds, and immunizations didn’t transfer to Cerner 13% of the time and care was sometimes delayed because of the manual reconciliation that was required.
• Cybersecurity experts found the system to be “not survivable in the complex, cyber-contested environment of a major medical facility.”
• Testing has not yet been performed to determine if the system can sustain the expected number of users at full deployment.

COVID-19

US COVID-19 hospitalization numbers dropped a bit on Wednesday, with 130,383 people in hospital beds with COVID. Daily deaths were also below record numbers at 4,022. Hard-hit UK and Ireland, which have high B117 variant activity, also showed a sharply reduced number of cases. CDC reports that 11 million vaccine doses have been administered of 31 million distributed, leaving two-thirds of them sitting unused.

The COVID Tracking Project warns that it will no longer report “recovered” patient numbers since not all states report that number and the term “recovered” has no standard definition and thus is reported in different ways by individual states. It also notes that many people who have had COVID-19 still don’t consider themselves to be free of symptoms.

CDC will require all travelers who are entering the US – including US residents — to show either (a) their negative coronavirus test results from within the previous three days; or (b) proof that they have recovered from COVID-19. Airlines will be instructed to not allow boarding to any passengers who cannot provide the documentation.

China locks down 22 million residents of several cities following a COVID-19 outbreak. The entire country of 1.4 billion people is reporting 109 new cases per day, while the US has that many new cases every four minutes with one-fourth of China’s population.

A Public Health England pre-print study finds that people who have already had COVID-19 are 83% less likely to get it again and are probably protected for at least five months.The researchers note that nobody knows if they can still spread infection to others.

People from Canada and Argentina are traveling on private jets to Florida to get COVID-19 vaccine, taking advantage of the state’s policy to vaccinate anyone over age 64 regardless of residency.

Stormont Vail Health disables its employee COVID-19 vaccine sign-up site after discovering that outsiders were able to sign up for shots using links that employees had shared with them. The hospital will now require those who are being vaccinated to show their badges, which it wasn’t doing before.

The former president and CEO of Canada’s London Health Sciences Centre sues the hospital for $2 million, claiming that he was fired this week for making five trips to the US despite Canada’s ban on non-essential travel across the border. Paul Woods, who is a Canadian citizen who holds permanent resident status in the US, says the hospital’s chief counsel approved his request to visit his daughter and his fiancée in Michigan as long as he self-isolated afterward. The hospital’s board chair resigned the day after the lawsuit was filed, admitting no wrongdoing.

Other

AdventHealth’s replacement of Cerner, Athenahealth, and Homecare Homebase with Epic will cost $370 million in capital cost plus $290 million in operating cost, according to its J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference presentation. AdventHealth, the former Adventist Health System, says Its first go-live will be in Q4 of this year and the last will be finished a year later. The Florida-based system has 50 hospital campuses in nine states, 2,300 employed physicians, 80,000 employees, and $12.5 billion in annual revenue.

Prosecutors say that Theranos destroyed the SQL database of its laboratory information system when it closed its New Jersey facility in 2018, making its patient records unavailable for use in the federal government’s fraud case. The company paid a firm that was run by an associate of former Theranos COO Sunny Balwani $10 million over seven years to administer the database. Theranos provided the government with three versions of the backup before the company shut down, but all of them were encrypted with a password that everyone involved claims they have forgotten. Prosecutors hoped to use the database to prove their claims that tests offered by Theranos were unreliable, including one thyroid test whose failure rate was over 50%. The government also asked the court to deny the motion by former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to exclude what she calls “anecdotal” test results since the company destroyed the database while under subpoena.

A public hospital in China becomes the first to bill a patient using its blockchain-based invoicing system, which allows patients to review their medical and billing records on their phones. 

HIMSS21’s home of Las Vegas, which has the highest unemployment rate of major US metro areas at 11.5%, is taking another hit this week with the move of the Consumer Electronics Show to a virtual format. CES was supposed to be the first event in the $1 billion expansion of the Las Vegas Convention Center, which remains unused. CES expects its show to return in 2022, but most likely in a partially digital form.

Talk about positive patient ID: Denver police arrest the wrong woman for burglary after being told their suspect was an inpatient at St. Joseph’s Hospital, which they confused with Denver Health, where they arrested patient Sarah Cook in her hospital bed. Cook, who is a nurse, spent two nights in jail until police checked surveillance footage and realized that the brown-haired Cook wasn’t the blonde suspect they were seeking. The police department apologized, the officers were suspended for 10 days for failing to positively identify Cook before arresting her, and Cook is suing the police department.

Sponsor Updates

• The United States Park Police and the District of Columbia government will use Everbridge software to provide subscribers with safety, weather, traffic, event, and emergency alerts leading up to and during the presidential inauguration.
• Experity offers updates on state-based COVID-19 vaccine provider enrollment information.
• The HCI Group Chief Digital Officer Ed Marx will speak at the HIMSS Dallas/Forth Worth Chapter’s Annual C-Suite Panel January 29.
• Konica Minolta Japan selects InterSystems IRIS for Health for rapid, FHIR-based data integration for imaging devices.
• Nordic is named a leader in Everest Group’s Healthcare IT Services Specialists PEAK Matrix Assessment 2021.
• Ten health system customers of Kyruus are using its COVID-19 vaccine scheduling capabilities and have booked 100,000 appointments in the first month.
• The local paper profiles the way in which a Medical University of South Carolina student used Jvion’s technology to find patients at risk for COVID complications.
• Meditech offers customers access to its complimentary Quick Vaccination solution to reduce the burden of COVID-19 mass vaccination distribution.

Blog Posts

• Build vs. Buy: Insulin Dosing Software (Glytec)
• Value-Based Care: A 2021 Priority (Halo Health)
• Why Data-Driven Healthcare is the Best Defense Against COVID-19 (Health Catalyst)
• Why Virtual Diabetes Programs Should Be the New Normal (Healthwise)
• COVID-19 has created additional digital identity management challenges in healthcare, Imprivata survey reveals (Imprivata)
• Save the dates: 2021 code system updates at-a-glance (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Advancing digital health solutions beyond the pandemic (Meditech)
• 2020 Year End Review: Our Most Accessed Patient Experience Resources (Kyruus)
• How COVID-19 Has Changed Healthcare (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Haven Shuts Down But Disruption Thrives (Loyale Healthcare)
• More Than Just Compliance, EPrescribing Can Reduce Opioid Misuse and Overdose Deaths (Medhost)
• Department of Health and Human Services Extends Public Health Emergency (MWTherapy)
• Top Trends Shaping the IT Industry in 2021 (Newfire Global Partners)

Contacts

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

News 1/13/21

Top News

ONC releases United States Core Data for Interoperability Draft Version 2 for public comment.

Reader Comments

From What the HIMSS?”: “Re: HIMSS21. Any idea of how it will look? I hear a hybrid in-person and virtual approach. I’m not sure what that would even look like or if it would be worth my time to attend.” I haven’t heard anything, but I am interested in what readers have heard, especially exhibitors who are usually the first to know. Big conferences seem iffy to me for 2021 given that:

• Our country’s vaccine rollout in a raging pandemic is plodding along, pushing herd immunity  far down the road, and that’s assuming that new virus variants don’t make the situation worse.
• Attendance, presentation, and exhibitor decisions will need to be made fairly soon even as attention and stretched cash are being directed elsewhere because of the pandemic.
• An unknown number of folks won’t be comfortable herding into crammed spaces of unknown ventilation any time soon, regardless of mitigation measures.
• Hospital employees are busy dealing with COVID demands that may or may not end by August.
• It will have been 18 months since HIMSS19 when HIMSS21 rolls around, so the bandwagon effect that has always guaranteed big registration numbers will be diminished.

From Listicle: “Re: Becker’s. Found this on Twitter.” The various Becker’s publications are mostly written by recent college grads (this one from the class of 2020) whose entire job is looking up stuff someone else posted online and paraphrasing it while applying no expertise beyond wordsmithing. Most “news” sites think their readers are too unmotivated to read a story that doesn’t have pictures, so they resort to using irrelevant stock art and photos when everything else is copyrighted by the original source. Adding insult to injury in this case is that the Tweeter declared the swap of the photo of a black doctor with a white one to be racist, failing to notice that the original one isn’t Adekunle Odunsi, MD, PhD either (Google would have saved her some embarrassment). Not to mention that it’s pretty obvious that these are stock photos. Anyway, that’s just how these sites work since news has turned into a zip-bang-pow comic book for people who can’t read more than three consecutive sentences without breaking for a fun video.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I might be the only person who didn’t know that several companies sell USB 3.0 flash drives that are equipped with a Lightning plug that lets you move photos off your IPhone, perform automatic backups, stream video, and exchange files with other devices. It’s probably worth a shot at around $40 for 128 GB, even with some user reports of buggy required software, but still frustrating that you just plug MicroSD cards into Android phones while Apple’s lack support for external memory requires after-market gadgets, cords, and adapters.

Listening: The Fly-Bi-Nites, a long-defunct psychedelic band from Atlanta that made the “Found Love” 45 single in 1967, sold 300 copies, then disbanded when its members went to college. Singer and co-writer Greg Presmanes still records occasionally (country music, though, in an interesting pivot) and is a 72-year-old partner in an Atlanta law firm who must have some great stories to tell his grandkids. I Shazam’ed the song while watching Season 1 of the pretty good “Hap and Leonard” series on Netflix and appreciating its bizarre soundtrack that ranges from the aforementioned psychedelia to hippie-hating, throaty country warblers that were all the rage in the Vietnam-divided 1960s.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “The One Communication Strategy Clinicians Need Now.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenters: Clay Callison, MD, CMIO, University of Tennessee Medical Center; Nicholas E. Perkins, DO, MS, hospitalist and physician informaticist, Prisma Health. Healthcare organizations are leveraging their current investments and reducing their vendor footprint, so there’s no room for clutter in healthcare communication. The presenters will describe the one communication strategy that clinicians and organizations need today, how to improve patient experience and protect revenue, and how to drive the communication efficiency of clinical teams.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Home care coordination software vendor Dina raises $7 million in a Series A funding round. The Chicago-based company has also developed an AI-powered virtual assistant for patients and software to help employers with staff availability tracking and automated COVID-19 screening.

Health data and analytics company Komodo Health secures $44 million in Series D funding and acquires Mavens, a cloud-based technology company that is focused on biotech, rare disease, and specialty pharma markets.

Central Logic acquires Acuity Link, a developer of communications and logistics management software for healthcare transportation.

Sales

• Community Health Network (IN) selects automated appointment scheduling and chatbot software from Loyal.
• Scripps Mercy Partners (CA) will implement Doctible’s patient relationship management technology across its practice network.
• La Rabida Children’s Hospital selects Emerge for clinical data access.

People

Jim Corrigan (ERT) joins ConnectiveRx as president.

SOC Telemed names Ron Egan (GE Healthcare) chief customer officer.

Heidi Kemp, MEd (The SSI Group) joins Medstreaming as VP of marketing and channel partners.

Announcements and Implementations

Dominion Radiology Associates (VA) implements Spok Go care team messaging software.

Nuance announces GA of its Patient Engagement Virtual Assistant Platform.

Prescription patient engagement service vendors Pleio and Medisafe launch GoodStart, in which patients who are starting new prescriptions are supported with live calls and digital nudges from Pleio’s concierge program, then transition to Medisafe’s medication management services.

Athenahealth will include health plan data in its display of patient medical records in a collaboration with insurer Humana.

Healthcare Growth Partners publishes its twice-yearly market review, which is so brilliantly written and admirably concise that any attempt I would make to summarize it would do more harm than good. It’s not a dispassionately nerdy investor view of obscure data points, but rather a big-picture view of our entire industry. I don’t strew editorial superlatives indiscriminately, but I can’t help but fawn over an investor-focused report that grabs me with this brilliant opening paragraph that is as close to poetry as you’ll get in a financially focused report:

The paradox of a raging bull market amidst a raging pandemic is a reality nearly impossible to reconcile. While health IT fundamentals are as  strong as ever, it feels cavalier to begin our market discussion without recognizing the toll of this pandemic. After all, we at HGP and readers of our research choose to be in healthcare because we collectively believe in the industry’s responsibility to serve the greater good. We know our industry is fraught with moral hazard, and while a few seek to exploit, most aim to solve. Fueled by low interest rates and stimulus, the pandemic has bolstered the investment thesis in health informatics, yet we know the gains will never atone for the losses.

Government and Politics

HHS allocates $8 million to the three-year Telehealth Broadband Pilot program, which helps rural providers assess broadband capacity and implement virtual care.

Banner Health pays $200,000 to settle HIPAA Right of Access violations involving five-month delays in giving two patients access to their records.

The owner of an Orlando telemarketing center is convicted of federal charges of healthcare fraud for cold-calling Medicare beneficiaries to offer them “free” cancer genetic tests, bribing telemedicine doctors to order the $6,000 tests without ever talking to the patient, and then selling the resulting orders to laboratories in return for kickbacks. Labs submitted $2.8 million of the claims, Medicare paid $880,000, and the call center owner made $180,000.

COVID-19

The latest COVID-19 statistics for the US as of Monday:

• 129,748 people are hospital inpatients.
• 1,739 people died.
• Deaths are at 376,000.
• States with the highest number of deaths per 100K population in the past week are Arizona, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
• 9 million vaccine first doses have been administered of the 25.5 million doses distributed, leaving two-thirds of available doses sitting in freezers.

US Representatives Bonnie Coleman (D-NJ), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Brad Schneider (D-IL) test positive for COVID-19 after sheltering in place in the Capitol last week along with several Republican colleagues who refused to wear the masks that they were offered. Congresswoman Coleman is a 75-year-old cancer survivor.

New York City’s comptroller says that online COVID-19 vaccine signup is so complicated that appointment slots aren’t being filled. He says that setting up an account involves a multi-step verification process, six more steps are needed to set up an appointment, and the user is required to complete up to 51 data fields and upload an image of their insurance card. A college professor says it took her 4.5 hours to find a location and make an appointment. The city has three sign-up websites, seven community clinics each have their own, four require calling them on the phone, and one involves email.

HHS will ask hospitals to submit weekly numbers on how many of their employees and patients have been vaccinated.

The family of a healthy, 50-year-old Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who died of COVID-19 says he was infected when a patient on whom he was performing a lip injection coughed on him, then called the office days later to let them know she had since tested positive for COVID-19.

Former White House coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas, MD deletes his Twitter after complaining that he lost 12,000 followers in a purge of accounts that were spreading misinformation.

A London-based mathematician-epidemiologist and public health professor illustrates the potential number of deaths from a more transmissible strain such as the B117 variant (yellow line) versus a strain that is 50% more lethal (red) or the original virus strain (gray). Ireland’s case count has jumped six-fold in just a couple of weeks as B117 became the dominant strain (9% of cases on December 27 versus 46% on January 10).

Beaumont Health (MI) CIO Hans Keil says the system tripled its server capacity over the weekend to better handle patient requests for COVID-19 vaccine appointments through its Epic MyChart patient portal. The system crashed Friday morning after nearly 9,000 patients — 10 times the usual number — attempted to access it at the same time.

WHO says that global COVID-19 herd immunity is not likely to be reached this year, making it critical that countries maintain mitigation measures, especially as poorer countries struggle to obtain vaccine whose supply is being bought up by wealthier ones.

Well Health develops a COVID-19 vaccine rapid deployment and implementation program that includes pre-appointment resources.

Other

An analysis in JAMA of medical fundraisers conducted on GoFundMe shows that users sought more than $10 billion and raised $3 billion in charitable contributions over an eight-year period. Treatment for cancer and trauma/injury were the top fundraising categories.

Sponsor Updates

• Santa Rosa Consulting staff donate toys and books to Toys for Tots.
• A local news podcast features Arcadia Chief Medical Officer Rich Parker, MD discussing Community Health Plan of Washington’s rollout of the company’s COVID-19 vaccination education and engagement platform.
• Artifact Health publishes a new case study, “OU Health standardizes physician query workflow and achieves positive results.”
• Vaco and Pivot Point Consulting launch a LinkedIn Live series that showcases female leaders across all industries.
• The Chartis Group unveils Next Intelligence branding.
• Ellkay features Meditech EVP Helen Waters in the latest installment of its Women in Health IT series.
• The National Quality Forum re-appoints Health Catalyst SVP of Professional Services Stephen Grossbart to its Primary Care and Chronic Illness Standing Committee.
• Change Healthcare helps providers comply with the CMS Price Transparency Rule with its Shop Book and Pay and Clearance Estimator Patient Direct solutions.
• Saykara wins a 2021 BIG Innovation Award for its AI-powered voice assistant that automates clinical charting, and the 2021 Sharp Index Award for “Best Health Tech Company to Reduce Burnout.”
• Central Logic adds Intelligent Transport and Bed Visibility capabilities to its healthcare access and orchestration technology.

Blog Posts

• Why It’s So Important to Perform Clinical Validation During EHR Data Conversion (314e)
• Top 10 Tips to Start Your Healthcare ESignature Project Now (Access)
• Prestera Health exposes 3,700+ patients’ info in email breach (AdvancedMD)
• Agfa HealthCare supports leading hospitals in Latin America (Agfa HealthCare)
• Differentiate Yourself: Upgrade Your Virtual Care Platform Strategy (Bluetree)
• The Hidden Benefits of a Legacy Data Management Strategy (CereCore)
• The Compelling Case for ‘Healthcare Access and Orchestration’ and Why It Matters (Central Logic)
• The 4 cybersecurity resolutions every care provider should make in 2021 (Cerner)
• Combating Ransomware: Preparation and Teamwork (Dimensional Insight)
• How HEDIS Analytics is Helping Healthcare Practices (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 1/11/21

Top News

Shares in Medicare Advantage insurer Clover Health began trading Friday on the Nasdaq. The company, which went public in a reverse merger with a SPAC, is valued at $7 billion despite a low Medicare star rating, availability in just some counties of eight states, and 50,000 members.

Clover Health offers doctors the free, web-based Clover Assistant, which provides access to patient data, personalized care plans, and faster payment.

Clover Health’s leadership team with health IT connections includes CEO Vivek Garipalli (co-founder of Ensemble Health and founding investor of Flatiron Health); Chief Clinical Informatics Officer Sophia Chang, MD, MPH (CareMore Health Plan and VP/medical director at Accretive Health); and Calvin Chock (McKesson).

Reader Comments

From Plymouth Meeting:: “Re: hospital IT meetings. What would you do to improve them?” Ideas:

• Identify the one person who is in charge. They don’t have to actually run the meeting, but they need to state why the meeting is being held, explain why each attendee was invited, and make assignments. It’s common for a hospital meeting to start with, “Whose meeting is this?” and nobody can answer.
• Start and end on time. Do not wait for stragglers, which is almost everyone in hospitals, because that will encourage them and make the meeting seem less urgently important.
• Send out an agenda days in advance with assignments. If nobody can find the time to do that, then cancel the meeting.
• Implement a “no looking at electronic devices” policy.
• Assign someone to keep the meeting moving and to take notes. I used to scoff at needing to record minutes until I attended my first meetings where they were scrupulously maintained and distributed by someone, and it was eye-opening. And someone needs to muzzle the attendees who can’t shut up (which is often a reflection of job title) and engage those who have tuned out because nobody’s listening to them or they are intimidated by higher-ranking or more verbally aggressive co-workers. A junior person who has little knowledge of the meeting’s topic is ideal for recording minutes – they have no skin in the game, they will follow up, and their lack of the understanding of the specific issue forces them to ask basic questions that nobody else noticed weren’t answered.
• Don’t invite more than 5-10 people to a meeting where a decision will be made. Otherwise, the only decision that results will be to have more meetings.
• When making a decision, do a voice vote and record each person’s choice to make sure they aren’t just coasting on in-room dynamics and that they understand that their consideration of the issues has consequences.
• Don’t allow guests or uninvited add-ons. Hospitals are supportive democracies where most folks would never ask, “Why are you here, again?” and some people just love conference room gamesmanship.
• Groups larger than a handful of people will never be able to reach consensus among all the position-jockeying. Get the ideas on the table in one or more larger meetings, but don’t give those big groups voting power beyond making recommendations to the smaller group. Big groups should be for brainstorming only.
• Don’t make IT decisions without getting input from the users who will be most affected. Many IT attendees have quirky personality types, the inability see any nuance that isn’t black and white, and overreliance on either “I’ve been here a long time and that didn’t work when we tried it before” or “I’ve not been here long and I wish you would all stop living in the past and think boldly.” Make those users part of the brainstorming meeting, not the decision-making meeting, because they are seeing just a small part of the elephant at hand but will feel passionately that they are right.
• Make sure standing meetings are really necessary. Those often waste the most time in hospitals because the only expectation of attendees is to show up and share their feelings, which hospital people do readily.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

My once-yearly and newly shortened reader survey takes seconds to complete and will earn you my gratitude and possibly a randomly drawn $50 Amazon gift card. I don’t know who’s reading otherwise since I don’t require registration or hide articles behind a paywall. Thanks.

Less than one-fourth of poll respondents say their health is worse now than a year ago.

New poll to your right or here: Is more than 10% of your net worth invested in health IT-related company shares or equity? I make it a point to not hold any such ownership since I don’t think it would be right as someone who reports news and rumors, but I suspect it’s common and entirely reasonable for employees of publicly traded companies to hold shares in their retirement or incentive plans.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Sphere. The Nashville-based financial technology and software company’s cloud-based platform is used by the country’s largest health systems to reduce friction and facilitate better, more secure patient payments in a single platform. Its integrated payments offering supports the native workflows of leading EHRs such as Epic, while its Health IPass solution enhances provider revenue collection and a streamlined consumer experience from appointment to final payment. It includes security and fraud tools, API integration, robust reporting and reconciliation, support for billing plans and tokenization, and support for all payment types and flexible spending accounts. Thanks to Sphere for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “The One Communication Strategy Clinicians Need Now.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenters: Clay Callison, MD, CMIO, University of Tennessee Medical Center; Nicholas E. Perkins, DO, MS, hospitalist and physician informaticist, Prisma Health. Healthcare organizations are leveraging their current investments and reducing their vendor footprint, so there’s no room for clutter in healthcare communication. The presenters will describe the one communication strategy that clinicians and organizations need today, how to improve patient experience and protect revenue, and how to drive the communication efficiency of clinical teams.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Transplant testing, lab, and software vendor CareDx acquires TransChart, which sells a transplant center EHR.

Carrum Health, whose marketplace connects employees of self-insured companies with company-screened, bundled-price surgery providers, raises $40 million in a Series A funding round. The company supports orthopedic, spine, cardiac, and bariatric procedures.

Hinge Health, which offers employers and insurers sensors, apps, and coaching to prevent and treat chronic back and muscle pain, raises $300 million in a Series D funding round, valuing the company at $3 billion. The company plans to launch an IPO in 2022.

Announcements and Implementations

KLAS takes a look at the hospital EHR market in Canada, which in many cases involves group- or province-led collective decisions that are intended to keep costs down. Meditech leads Epic in hospital count, but has lost some market share as 88 big-system hospitals have replaced Meditech with mostly Epic from 2015 to 2019, while 31 legacy Meditech hospitals have upgraded to Expanse. Customers report satisfaction with Expanse, but say they could have used more guidance and best practices before going live and a better idea of the maintenance requirements afterward. Satisfaction with Cerner is stable, but customers say the Citrix-heavy client-server footprint requires a lot of maintenance, although experience with Cerner’s recently introduced remote-hosted option is good. Allscripts hasn’t had a new Sunrise sale in Canada in the past 10 years, Harris Healthcare is rarely considered in new deals, and Telus Health’s Oacis is rarely considered and hasn’t sold since 2015.

Government and Politics

The American Hospital Association lost its lawsuit challenging the federal government’s hospital price transparency rule last week, so it now asks HHS to not enforce it, saying that hospital IT employees are too busy with COVID-19 work.

COVID-19

Saturday’s COVID-19 stats: 3,500 deaths and 130,777 patients in hospitals. Last week was the highest number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths of any week in the pandemic.

CDC vaccination updates: 6.7 million first doses administered of 22 million doses distributed. At a goal of vaccinating 70% of Americans to reach herd immunity, we are less than 10% finished with first doses alone. Nursing homes have administered only 17% of the 4 million doses they have received.

Denmark’s CDC warns that the B117 variant is so contagious that it will become the dominant virus in the country and likely the world by mid-February. Even Tier 4 restrictions – stay-at-home requirements, closed shops, no public gatherings, no overnight travel – will not stop its spread, they say, as UK districts under Tier 4 stay-at-home orders are seeing a 10-fold increase in B117 cases every three weeks. US FDA says existing TaqPath and Linea tests can specifically identify the B117 variant and retesting previous positive samples to see whether B117 was involved does not require its approval.

The UK approves use of two rheumatoid arthritis drugs – tocilizubam and sarilumab – for treating COVID-19 patients in the ICU, where they appear to reduce the risk of death by 24% if given within 24 hours of admission.

California’s slow COVID-19 vaccine rollout is being partially blamed on problems with PrepMod, the state’s vaccine management system that coordinates waitlists, tracks inventory, and sends proof of vaccination to patients. The system, which is used by several states, appears to have been developed by the non-profit Maryland Partnership for Prevention. California’s COVID-19 testing program was hampered last year by problems with the CalREDIE results data collection system. The state says it knew that both systems weren’t ideal for their current use and is designing replacements.

A large study of discharged COVID-19 hospital patients in Wuhan, China finds that three-fourths still have symptoms six months later, including fatigue, insomnia, depression, anxiety, and lung problems. Excluded from the study were the sickest people, such as those who could not be interviewed or who were readmitted in the six-month period.

Experts question whether health systems and states that use online systems and other technology for COVID-19 vaccine administration are limiting access to elderly, low-income, and rural populations.

The city of Nangong, China will pay $75 to anyone who reports a resident who has not received a mandatory COVID-19 test. Areas with outbreaks of a few dozen cases are being locked down, every resident is being tested, highways have been blocked, and some cities allow only one member of a household to leave their homes every days to buy supplies.

Sponsor Updates

• OpenText donates $15,000 to the Manna Food Center in Gaithersburg, MD.
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces integration of its Health Language clinical interface terminology solutions with Henry Schein MicroMD’s EHR platform.
• Rush University Medical Center expands its deployment of Nuance Dragon Ambient Experience to 14 clinical specialties.
• OptimizeRx will present at the HC Wainwright Virtual BioConnect Conference on January 11.
• Nordic releases a new podcast, “Creating and leveraging a successful Super User program.”
• Pure Storage will participate in fireside chats during the Needham Virtual Growth Conference on January 11, and the Goldman Sachs Virtual Tech and Internet Conference on January 12.
• The local news features a story on how one family stayed connected to their hospitalized infant through Vocera’s Ease app.
• Saykara President and Chief Medical Officer Graham Hughes, MBBS publishes a guest article titled “Physician Groups Turning to AI for Relief from EHR Documentation Burden” in AI TechPark.

Blog Posts

• Worried Sick: 5 Major Risks with Telehealth Data Security and How to Mitigate Them (Spirion)
• Physician groups turning to AI for relief from EHR documentation burden (Saykara)
• Digital Front Door, Ambient Technology, AI, and the Revenue Cycle (Nuance)
• Cybersecurity in Conversation: Experts Answer Must-Know Questions (Netsmart)
• If You Choose Not to Decide, You Still Have Made a Choice (Nordic)
• Support COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts with Provider Data Platform (Phynd Technologies)
• Miscommunication in Patient Hand-Offs and Its Impact on Patient Care (PMD)
• How Two Health Systems are Carrying COVID-19 Innovations into the New Year (Premier)
• How to Design Products for EHR Integration Using Clinical Workflows (Redox)
• Improve Medication Ordering Workflows with Better Patient Data (RxRevu)
• Acute Telemedicine in 2020: A Wrap Up (SOC Telemed)
• Data Privacy and Security Trends in 2020 (Spirion)
• 8 lessons from the pandemic to guide us in 2021 (Spok)
• FHIR Power: Picture-Perfect for Patient Engagement (Krames)
• Scrambling to Complete High-Volume, Repetitive Data Entry Tasks Before Year End? (Summit Healthcare)
• Lessons Learned About Information Sharing During a Pandemic (Surescripts)
• The Complete Guide to Implementing a Physical Therapy Software (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 1/8/21

Top News

UnitedHealth Group-owned Optum will acquire Change Healthcare in a deal valued at $13 billion.

Optum will combine Change Healthcare with its OptumInsight software and analytics business.

Change Healthcare President and CEO Neil de Crescenzo will become CEO of OptumInsight when the acquisition closes in the second half of the year.

Reader Comments

From Mandrake: “Re: Obix being acquired by Harris. What does this mean to the health system? Any key executives departing What was the cost of the sale? Who is the buyer since I’ve never heard of them?” Harris Healthcare Group is part of a Canada-based company that has done a lot of health IT acquisitions. I’ve included a partial list is further down the page. I’ll invite readers to provide answers to any of these questions, especially with regard to how customers fared after Harris acquired their vendor. KLAS data would be interesting.

From Barry Gibberish: “Re: health system IT strategy meetings. You’ve written about the psychology involved. Repeat, please.” I don’t recall what I wrote and I’m too lazy to look it up, so here’s my off-the-cuff list of what hospital meetings are like:

• Any hospital meeting will be full of people who are empowered to say “no” but nobody whose authority allows them to say “yes.”
• Ever-larger meeting rooms are needed because people keep inviting themselves or others to validate their importance.
• It’s almost guaranteed that none of the attendees have given the slightest thought to the issues at hand since the previous meeting, and any assignments they were given will be quickly thrown together while others are talking.
• Clinicians will either be uninvited or marginalized because they are seen by the suits as being untethered from reality and dangerously unfiltered.
• Nobody will argue for changing the status quo unless they see personal or departmental benefit. They are the people who thrive in the current state they built.
• Some people can always be counted on to say why any given action shouldn’t be taken, but they never have ideas of their own because that would be bold. This is the dynamic in which every mid-level attendee takes a position to set themselves apart from everybody else in asserting their contrarian thinking (you don’t get points for agreeing). I guarantee that some of those folks enter the room planning to take the “let’s do it” position, but finding it already taken, flip-flip equally passionately to “this is a terrible idea.”
• Hospitals are awkward, department-driven democracies where nobody except the million-dollar leadership club can be identified as inarguably in charge, so many meetings are free of agendas, objectives, facilitators, assignments, and conclusions. It’s fun talking about stuff, but the seriousness of actually making a decision and attaching names to it means it often doesn’t get done.
• Committees that spend great amounts of energy and research to reach a decision will often be overridden by an executive afterward who believes their superior analytical powers and gut instinct takes precedence.

From Be the Ball: “Re: price transparency. Some providers are live with consumer-friendly searches. Examples of our Change Healthcare customers are Rush Health Systems, Levi Hospital, and South Central Regional Medical Center.”

From Wooster: “Re: J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference next week. Usually there’s an entire subculture of meetings around the conference venue. What are everyone’s plans?” Readers are welcome to weigh in on how, if at all, they will participate in a virtual version of a conference whose biggest draw is what happens near but not actually in the actual conference venue.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I could really use your help in completing my one-yearly, eight-question reader survey that takes maybe 30 seconds. You’ll earn my appreciation, feel good about voting, and be eligible to win a $50 Amazon gift card. Thanks for helping me out.

Reminder: we have dedicated news history pages for Cerner and Meditech, as requested by readers and maintained by Jenn. If you read HIStalk in desktop mode (not the mobile format), links are under the Company News History menu item. Let me know if you find those useful.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “The One Communication Strategy Clinicians Need Now.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenters: Clay Callison, MD, CMIO, University of Tennessee Medical Center; Nicholas E. Perkins, DO, MS, hospitalist and physician informaticist, Prisma Health. Healthcare organizations are leveraging their current investments and reducing their vendor footprint, so there’s no room for clutter in healthcare communication. The presenters will describe the one communication strategy that clinicians and organizations need today, how to improve patient experience and protect revenue, and how to drive the communication efficiency of clinical teams.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Harris acquires Clinical Computer Systems, Inc., which offers Obix perinatal software. Other health IT brands owned by the acquisition-focused Harris – formally known as N. Harris Computer Corporation as an operating group of Canada-based Constellation Software – include Amazing Charts, Iatric Systems, IMDSoft, Just Associates, GEMMS, Picis, PulseCheck, and QuadraMed. The company looks for acquisitions that have a diversified customer base, offer mission-critical enterprise software, low customer attrition, leading or increasing market share, fragmented competition, and the potential to grow geographically or via product expansion.

Healthcare communication platform vendor TigerConnect acquires Critical Alert, which offers middleware for nurse call, alarm and event management, and medical device interoperability.

Cybersecurity services vendor Intraprise Health acquires HIPAA One, which offers HIPAA compliance automation software.

GE concludes that it has no legal recourse to try to reclaim the compensation it gave to former CEO Jeff Immelt, who disastrous operational and acquisition decisions left the company drowning in debt, selling off pieces and parts, and removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. GE says that independent counsel has advised that Immelt wasn’t guilty of misconduct, just incompetence (I’m reading between the lines here, and it should be noted that the board left him in charge for 16 years). Immelt, who was promoted from what was then GE Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare), was forced out in 2017, then spent a few months as executive chairman of Athenahealth in brokering a deal to sell the company to a private equity firm.

People

Halo Health hires Steve Smerz (NovuHealth) as CTO.

Carl Swart, MHA (Ensemble Health Partners) joins ApprioHealth as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Urgent care operator CityMD launches a virtual line solution using technology from urgent care software vendor Experity, hoping to eliminate hours-long lines of people waiting for COVID-19 tests.

Tele-ICU services vendor Advanced ICU Care renames itself to Hicuity Health.

Walgreens will open up to 700 in-store Village Medical primary care clinics in the next four years following its previous $1 billion investment in VillageMD.

Beebe Healthcare goes live with TransformativeMed’s Core Work Manager, which it will use to increase situational awareness of patients at both the employee and care team levels.

A new KLAS report on rapid telehealth uptake during the pandemic finds that few Amwell and Teladoc Health customers plan to use their solutions to meet all their telehealth needs. More focused solutions have high satisfaction, such as Caregility for teleICU (it has multiple capabilities) and Mend for virtual clinic visits. Videoconferencing platforms from Zoom and Doxy.me feature easy rollout and low cost, but 30% of users will replace them with products that offer better support, EHR integration, and a simplified clinical experience. Microsoft Teams performs well but falls short on patient experience, while more than half of Vidyo customers are unhappy. Telehealth solutions from Epic and NextGen Healthcare earn high customer satisfaction because of integration with their EHR, a feature that customers of other EHR vendors are hoping to get.

Another new KLAS report on credentialing during COVID-19 finds that Verge Health leads in remote credentialing; Verge Health, Modio, ASM MD-Staff score highly for emergency credentialing; and most vendors perform well at telehealth credentialing across state lines. 

Government and Politics

Cerner VP of strategic growth Amanda Adkins leaves the company after losing her bid to unseat Rep. Sharice Davids (D-KS) in the November US House election. She had been with Cerner for 15 years, but took a leave of absence a year ago to campaign. She lost by 10 percentage points as the Republican candidate.

COVID-19

Wednesday’s COVID-19 hospitalization set another record at 132,476. Nearly 4,000 new deaths pushed the US total to 361,000. States are continuing to catch up with posting holiday-delayed data. The worst spread of any area of the world is in Arizona, where hospitalizations are at almost 5,000 and 297 people died of COVID-19 on Wednesday.

Scientists warn that the US is not equipped to track mutated versions of coronavirus since no national surveillance program is in place, with genomic sequencing being performed on only 3,000 of 1.4 million positive samples each week.

The Surgeon General urges states to aggressively expand vaccinations to other phases if their vaccine supply exceeds Phase 1a demand (healthcare personnel and long-term care residents). Phase 1b includes frontline essential workers and those over 74. Meanwhile, NYC Health and Hospitals says it has given every public hospital employee shots who wanted them – 30% did not – but the city has not received state permission to start administering the vaccine to first responders, corrections officers, and people over 74.

Other

Weird News Andy intones mellifluously (in my mind, at least) that, “It is better to have loved and flossed …” in hair-balling up this story, in which a woman experienced gingival hirsutism, i.e. she sprouted hair from her gums.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Digisonics in its sale to Intelerad, PatientMatters in its sale to Firstsource Solutions, and HIPAA One in its merger with Intraprise Health.
• Health Catalyst will present virtually at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference January 11.
• The local news covers Cerner’s efforts to help Truman Medical Center (MO) streamline patient scheduling and registration for the COVID-19 vaccine.
• Everbridge surpasses 5 billion communications in 2020 from its Critical Event Management Platform, supporting healthcare, business, and government organizations around the world.
• Fortified Health Security will present at the ISACA Huntsville Chapter virtual meeting January 25.
• Goliath Technologies enters an equity partnership with Cloud-Oculus to expand its cloud-monitoring product portfolio.
• Healthcare Triangle publishes a new case study, “2020 Epic Program Spotlight: Tanner Community Connect.”
• With support from InterSystems and its Veterans Data Integration and Federation Enterprise Platform, the VA has launched its COVID-19 vaccination program, while treating 130,000 cases.
• Meditech adds the Northside Achievement Zone in Minneapolis to its charitable giving program.
• Medrah IT expands its reseller agreement with NextGate.
• Several HIStalk sponsors take home Best in Biz Awards: CoverMyMeds (Bronze, Most Innovative Product of the Year – Healthcare and Medical); Spirion (Bronze, Enterprise Product of the Year – Security Software); Lumeon (Gold, Best New Product of the Year – Healthcare and Medical); and Waystar (Silver, Best New Product of the Year – Healthcare and Medical).

Blog Posts

• 4 Lessons Learned from COVID-19 in 2020 (Halo Health)
• Provider Education: Comparative Billing Reports (CBR) and the MDaudit Platform (Hayes)
• Epic, Cerner, and Meditech Analysts in High Demand as Health Systems Prepare for COVID-19 Vaccines (HCTec)
• Three Analytics Strategies to Drive Patient-Centered Care (Health Catalyst)
• How Structured Content Powers Health Education at Healthwise (Healthwise)
• Recruiting is Sales (Impact Advisors)
• Imprivata named one of the IGA solution providers focused entirely on healthcare market in latest Gartner report (Imprivata)
• 2020 MIPS Relief for Extreme and Uncontrollable Circumstances (Ingenious Med)
• Lessons Learned in a Year Like No Other (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Jvion Looks Ahead to Tackle the Next Wave of Critical Healthcare Priorities Head On (Jvion)
• Planning for the ‘Next Normal:’ Insights from Kyruus Leadership (Kyruus)
• Level Up: How to Exceed Interoperability Expectations (InterSystems)
• Healthcare in the 2020s: The Consumer Rules (Loyale Healthcare)
• Decreasing Distractions in the Operating Room to Improve Patient Safety (Medhost)
• The Sun Never Sets at Newfire: Our 2020 Recap (Newfire Global Partners)

Contacts

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

Optum Acquires Change Healthcare for $13 Billion

UnitedHealth Group-owned Optum will acquire Change Healthcare and combine it with its OptumInsight software and analytics business, the companies announced this morning.

Change Healthcare President and CEO Neal de Crescenzo will serve as CEO of OptumInsight.

The acquisition price is $25.75 in cash, a 40% premium over Tuesday’s closing price of Change Healthcare shares. That represents $8 billion plus the assumption of $5 billion in Change Healthcare debt.

OptumInsight generates about $9 billion per year in annual revenue of UnitedHealth Group’s $225 billion, but is its highest-margin segment at around 20%. Change Healthcare’s annual revenue is $3 billion.

News 1/6/21

Top News

Value-based care performance management company Cedar Gate Technologies acquires population health IT vendor Enli Health Intelligence.

Enli earned “Best in KLAS” designation for population health management in 2017, 2018, and 2020.

Enli’s roots go back to 2001 as Kryptiq, which then worked with Providence Health & Services to commercialize the latter’s CareManager starting in 2016. Kryptiq acquired CareManager in 2012 and was then itself acquired by Surescripts the same year, and Surescripts spun off Kryptiq in 2015 as Enli.

Kryptiq was founded by Luis Machuca (Enli CEO), Jeff Sponaugle (CTO of Surescripts), and Murali Karamchedu (Enli CTO).

Reader Comments

From Peony Picker: “Re: Haven. Why do you think it failed?” We don’t know much about the company’s mission, priorities, and plans, but  here’s my armchair quarterback opinion:

• The idea that Haven’s three big bureaucracy owners would join hands and fix healthcare was naïve from the start. Companies that size can’t change the impenetrable fortress of healthcare by halfheartedly forming a company that was barely bigger than their bathroom supply expense task force. Politics and conflicting objectives make just about every joint venture a failure.
• Amazon was the only one of the three participants that knows anything about healthcare beyond what it costs and had little incentive to share its knowledge instead of creating new business lines, as it is doing now with PillPack. I would bet that most of whatever commercially viable “learnings” can be plucked from the ashes of Haven will end up as Amazon products.
• It took 14 months for the company to even choose a name for itself and it never made it clear exactly what it was doing. Haven basically disappeared immediately without displaying any anger, joy, or boldness, basically launching itself like wheezing legacy business that was just trying to hang on under journeyman leadership.
• Atul Gawande is big-picture influential, but was probably not necessarily the best person to lead this kind of business, not to mention that we don’t know what kind of marching orders and resources he was being given by his many bosses.
• The three owner companies have employees scattered all over the place, and other than maybe Seattle in the case of Amazon, they weren’t going to scare big health systems very much by threatening to take their business elsewhere. Those health systems have spent fortunes building their brands, and while their self-developed reputation may not always be matched by their outcomes, their employees wouldn’t be thrilled to be excluded from the gleaming skyscrapers downtown and instead turfed off to lesser-known but better and/or cheaper hospitals.
• Health systems hold nearly all of the useful personal and aggregated health data and don’t share it freely with competitors, making it easy to starve out an outsider whose business model is based on analytics.
• All big companies hate paying high healthcare costs and getting poor outcomes in return, but none of them have had any success whatsoever in disrupting the status quo. The idea that employers hold power over the healthcare system has been repeatedly proven to be untrue.
• Employers want to reduce healthcare costs to the maximum extent possible without driving away their most valuable employees. That tension varies by company, region, and overall benefit design. It would be easy for companies to either reduce their healthcare costs to zero (by not offering any healthcare benefits) or to spend a lot to make recruitment and retention easier, but anything in between is hard to tailor to meet those competing company objectives.

From Rants On Fire: “Re: grammar. It’s like wearing masks — you do it for others.” Actually, it’s like masks in that correct use benefits both parties. Many in the anti-mask cohort are perceived rightly or wrongly as lacking intellectual ability, possessing little empathy for others whom they could protect with the tiniest of efforts, and choosing a puzzling platform to convince themselves of their illusory autonomy. Taking the extra time to communicate clearly within the broadest rules of the road is the same — you look smarter, it shows that you value your own message, and it demonstrates that you’ve found meaningful ways to display your rugged individualism beyond exhibiting sloppiness and defying anyone to criticize you for it. Most of us are knowledge workers in which rewards seldom accrue to those who appear lazy, ill-informed, or selfish.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “The One Communication Strategy Clinicians Need Now.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenters: Clay Callison, MD, CMIO, University of Tennessee Medical Center; Nicholas E. Perkins, DO, MS, hospitalist and physician informaticist, Prisma Health. Healthcare organizations are leveraging their current investments and reducing their vendor footprint, so there’s no room for clutter in healthcare communication. The presenters will describe the one communication strategy that clinicians and organizations need today, how to improve patient experience and protect revenue, and how to drive the communication efficiency of clinical teams.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Haven, which launched in 2018 with the goal of improving healthcare costs and outcomes for employers, notifies its 57 employees that it will shut down by the end of February. The joint venture among Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway started losing executives in 2019 with the departure of COO Jack Stoddard, followed by high-profile CEO Atul Gawande, MD last May, Head of Measurement Dana Safran in July, and CTO Serkan Kutan in September. Analysts believe the company’s efforts to improve care access, insurance benefits, and prescription prices were stymied by separate, employee-focused projects that were being conducted by its founding members.

Population health technology company Color raises $167 million in a Series D funding round led by General Catalyst, bringing its total financing to $278 million.

France-based Volta Medical, which has released AI-powered arrhythmia management software and is working on software to improve the first-procedure accuracy of ablation surgery for atrial fibrillation, raises $28 million. President and co-founder Julien Seitz is an interventional cardiologist at Saint Joseph Hospital in Marseille.

Healthcare compliance, consulting, and credentialing firm VantagePoint Healthcare Advisors merges with assurance, tax, and consulting firm BerryDunn.

Sales

• State of Franklin Healthcare Associates (TN), Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists (NY), and Hudson Headwaters Health Network (NY) choose Emerge’s health data integration and aggregation software and services.
• Adena Health System (OH) will implement Epic through a Community Connect partnership with Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
• Withings will use Redox’s API to connect its Med Pro Care remote patient monitoring devices with EHRs.

People

Sam Hanna, PhD, MBA joins Divurgent as EVP of innovation and consulting / chief strategy officer.

Direct Recruiters promotes Mitchell Herman to partner.

Ken Levitan, who served as CIO of Einstein Healthcare Network for 10 years through 2015 and is now EVP/CAO, is named as its interim president and CEO.

Industry long-timer Jay Deady (Jvion) joins claims cost and payment optimization solutions vendor Zelis Healthcare as president. He rejoins fellow Eclipsys alumnus Andy Eckert, who is CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Arcadia announces GA of solutions to help providers with COVID-19 vaccine programs, including patient-focused resources for education, targeted outreach, engagement, stratification, and dose tracking; plus reporting and analytics.

The University of Vermont Health Network pushes back the second and third phases of its Epic implementation, citing the need to focus its resources on COVID-19 response efforts and continuing recovery from an October ransomware attack.

West Virginia OrthoNeuro implements Emerge’s ChartGenie to convert data to its new Athenahealth EHR and archive legacy data.

Ochsner Health (LA) goes live on Vynca’s advanced care planning software, giving physicians access to Louisiana Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment forms from within Epic.

Retia Medical uses the Device Driver Interface development strategy from Capsule Technologies to connect its Argos Cardiac Monitor to other systems.

Independent urgent care provider FastMed goes live on EvoHealth’s zero-footprint PACS in its 100 locations.

Government and Politics

ONC publishes Cures Act developer resources, including a summary of compliance dates and an API resource guide.

A Nature paper by health privacy expert Deven McGraw, JD, MPH and Boston Children’s Hospital’s Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH says that US privacy and security protections are not sufficient to fuel a learning health system, making these points:

• Non-traditional health data is used widely for commercial purposes without regulation.
• Social determinants of health information could be improperly used by companies, such as to avoid high-cost areas and populations.
• Health data protections need to include penalties for uses that harm people or populations.
• HIPAA coverage is based on which organizations hold patient data rather than the data type itself, and much of the health-related information that is being collected (such as by apps) falls outside of HIPAA.
• Regulatory authority shifts from HHS OCR to the Federal Trade Commission as data flows from covered entities through APIs to consumer apps. FTC’s authority does not extend to non-profit organizations and insurers and FTC’s protections and enforcement mechanisms are not comprehensive to healthcare.
• The public is realizing that HIPAA offers them little protection, such as allowing covered entities to sell their de-identified data that can be readily re-identified.
• Big tech companies are getting involved in healthcare who have behaved questionably in their data collection and consumer tracking.
• It isn’t adequate to provide consumers with a notice of how their data will be used as a condition of using an app or service. The notices are hard to understand, seldom read, sometimes changed without notice, and require consumers to consent to just about any use of their information that companies might come up with in the future. It also puts the privacy burden on the consumer. 
• GDPR and state privacy laws, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, continue to rely on consent and haven’t limited how businesses collect and use personal data.
• De-identified patient data can be re-identified and no penalties exist for doing so.
  HIPAA focuses more on what covered entities can do with data rather than which information they collect in the first place and for what purpose, which might be something that should be spelled out, and companies could be prohibited from collecting and selling patient information except for uses that consumers might expect and that would benefit them.
• Companies that collect, use, or disclose both identifiable and de-identified patient data should establish independent data ethics review boards.
• Stronger protections are needed for discrimination so that marginalized populations will be confident that they can allow their data to be collected for healthcare learning purposes.

COVID-19

Monday saw another record day of COVID-19 hospital inpatients at 128,210.

CDC’s data tracker says that 15.4 million coronavirus vaccine doses have been distributed and 4.6 million administered, both falling far short of projections. The states with the lowest percentage of people injected are Michigan, Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

FDA declines to adjust its approved COVID-19 vaccination regimen to speed up rollout by stretching the interval between doses, giving lower doses, or mixing and matching products, warning that such use has not been studied for effectiveness and may place the public at risk. FDA also warns that studies didn’t continue following participants who failed to get the second shot  in the designated time, so assessment of one-shot effectiveness is not possible without additional studies.

Meanwhile, a just-published analysis (not a preprint) in Annals of Internal Medicine finds that the best use of the limited supply of vaccines would be to vaccinate more people initially — using most of the available initial supply and production for the first three weeks instead of holding back half for second doses as is being done today —  then holding more vaccine for follow-up injections.

Los Angeles County orders ambulance crews to not transport patients with low survival odds and to conserve oxygen for the most critical patients. Ambulances are waiting up to eight hours before they’re allowed to take their patients into the ED.

New UK research finds that family members who are under 17 are more likely to bring coronavirus into the household than adults and those aged 12-16 are seven times as likely as adults to be the household’s first case. Data consistently indicates that coronavirus transmission is lower when schools are closed.

COVID frontline primary care doctors who aren’t affiliated with hospitals have no access to COVID-19 vaccine, with most of those surveyed saying they don’t even know where they will get the vaccine. Most states seemed to have forgotten that not all doctors work for hospitals, whose highest priority is vaccinating their own employees and those doctors who generate the most revenue.

UCHealth (CO) uses Conversa Health’s automated vaccine monitoring software as part of its employee vaccination program. Data collected from a wearable two days before and seven days after vaccination will be analyzed to help researchers better understand the vaccine’s effects, particularly on high-risk patients and long-term care residents.

States that were somehow caught off guard by the release of COVID-19 vaccines and don’t have online appointment systems for signups are instead using free party RSVP sites such as Eventbrite and SignUpGenius. Others are using sign-up sites that are crashing under heavy volumes and some are simply telling people to join long lines and hope that the shots don’t run out.

Other

ED residents are finding few available jobs upon completion of their programs, as COVID-lowered ED volumes caused hospitals to stop recruiting ED doctors. More than half of US ED doctors work for investor-owned staffing companies that have been more aggressive in cutting back staffing. Some of the residents are doubling down on emergency medicine by signing up for low-paying fellowships.

Private equity-owned medical practices — many of them in dermatology, gastroenterology, and obstetrics — are requiring patients to sign binding arbitration agreements to prevent them from filing medical malpractice lawsuits.

Sponsor Updates

• ReMedi Healthcare Solutions publishes a white paper titled “Increase Go-Live Efficiency with a Virtual Model.”
• Audacious Inquiry customer Texas Health Services Authority receives ONC’s STAR HIE Program Award.
• Change Healthcare announces the successful introduction of its first cloud-based medical tools for radiologists and other specialties.

Blog Posts

• How 3 CEOs Successfully Navigated 2020 (Get-to-Market Health)
• Secure Healthcare IT Offshore Services to Meet Domestic Standards (314e)
• Making sense of the new No Pay RAP (Ability Network)
• COVID-19 Exposes Need for Interoperability & Integration in Healthcare (Part 2) (AdvancedMD)
• AdventHealth – One Unified System. One Team. One Holistic View. (Agfa HealthCare)
• Is Your Patient Engagement Strategy Ready for the COVID-19 Vaccine? (Arcadia)
• Condition Coding Management: Maximize Reimbursement Through Accurate Coding Practices (Bluetree)
• 2020 MIPS Relief for Extreme and Uncontrollable Circumstances (Ingenious Med)
• Exploring Post-Acute Authorization (CarePort Health)
• Healthcare Triangle’s Keys to a Successful Application Support Services Transition (Healthcare Triangle)
• 2021 Health IT Predictions: Fasten Your Seatbelts for Dramatic Transformation (CereCore)
• Access Centers and Patient Orchestration: What Health Systems Need to Know (CentralLogic)
• A word of thanks to front-line health workers (Cerner)
• Enterprise Imaging: Getting Organized and Collecting Data (Impact Advisors)
• How Increased Interoperability in Eprescribing Can Elevate Patient Safety (ChartLogic)
• Telehealth Prescribing is Low – Decision Support Can Help (CoverMyMeds)
• Optimum Healthcare IT Top 5 Blog Posts of 2020 (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Optimization Shouldn’t Be Confined to the EHR (Divurgent)
• Thirlby Clinic: Using Telehealth and CCM for Better Disease Management (EClinicalWorks)
• Advancing digital health solutions beyond the pandemic (Meditech)
• Stop Digging, Start Climbing: How to Increase Revenue Without Cutting, Cutting, Cutting (EnsoCare)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 1/4/21

Top News

Hospitals were required to publicly post their negotiation insurer rates and list of shoppable services on January 1, so I checked websites of the country’s five largest health systems.

Issues: (a) the lists aren’t necessarily easy to find; (b) they involve huge downloads; and (c) they aren’t really worth much to consumers who don’t have a choice or who wouldn’t understand what they are looking at.

It’s still a federal requirement, though, so here’s what I found:

• Cleveland Clinic – has posted its list in downloadable format.
• Mayo Clinic – no list found.
• Cedars-Sinai Medical Center –no list found.
• New York-Presbyterian Hospital – has posted its list in downloadable format, at least for Hudson Valley Hospital.
• Massachusetts General Hospital – has posted its list in downloadable format.

Reader Comments

From Ragged Glory: “Re: LRGHealthcare. Something is fishy about the bankrupt system saying it is spending 9% of annual revenue on Cerner. I suspect that’s posturing for the public and for the bankruptcy court. The system’s annual report suggests that Cerner costs are less than 1% of reported gross revenue and 2% of net revenue. Clearly they are using creative math to pressure Cerner to lower the costs and trying to blame others for their own decision-making, perhaps also hoping the bankruptcy judge will make Cerner lower their fees.” I agree that the number seems suspicious. The health system’s interim budget, as filed with the bankruptcy court, projects $11 million in income for January 2021 and a Cerner expense of $131,000, which is just over 1% of the total (and a much smaller percentage of its revenue for the salad days of 2019). The health system blames its financial woes on incompetent prior leadership that made bad strategic decisions and piled up debt, so either they were tardy in parting ways with underperforming executives or they’re just trying to protect their own future employability.

From Talk Talk: “Re: interviews. I would like to see more provider interviews.” So would I, but it’s tough to find interesting folks who can spare the time and who have their employer’s permission to be quoted. In their absence, I interview CEOs, mostly those of Platinum-level sponsors since I like to learn more about them, but sometimes CEOs of other companies provided that their LinkedIn interests me enough to want to spend the time with them. I look for deep industry experience, a sense of humor, and non-healthcare accomplishments, with bonus points for weird former jobs, military service, or notable volunteer work. My interviews mostly cover non-company topics, so interviewees need to be interesting on their own beyond their job title.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The most recent medical encounter reported by poll respondents was usually an in-person visit, during which the physician most often wore a white coat, while most video visit doctors wore street clothes. Folks who haven’t worked in hospitals would be surprised at the clinician caste couture, where rules that may or may not be spelled out explicitly dictate the style and length of lab coat, the presence of reference materials and tools in the brimming pockets of residents and their absence in those of attendings, and in many cases of a medical inferiority complex, the prominent draping of a stethoscope that hasn’t been used in decades over a crisply pressed white coat, often brandished by doctors whose specialty is non-clinical or whose education was extraterritorial.

New poll to your right or here: How is your health now compared to a year ago?

I’m feeling the loss, maybe in a good way, of a post-New Year’s Day without having the HIMSS conference suddenly looming. Monday would usually commence the Super Bowl-like madhouse that reaches its crescendo with the opening keynote, but I don’t know what to expect this year. I’m not even feeling inspired to do the HISsies awards.

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

A generous donation from reader Natalie, with matching funds from my Anonymous Vendor Executive and other sources applied, fully funded these Donors Choose teacher grant requests:

• An IPad for use as a document camera for remote learning for Ms. Y’s middle school class in Chula Vista, CA.
• Electronic content and headsets for the advanced placement psychology class of Ms. B in Davenport, IA.
• Hands-on math and letters materials for the pre-school class of Ms. R in Seabrook, NJ.
• Math manipulatives for Ms. W’s elementary school class in Lindon, UT.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Divurgent. The Virginia Beach, VA-based company has for 13 years helped its clients improve operational effectiveness, financial performance, and customer experience by using data-infused, flexible, and scalable solutions that demonstrate and quantify value. Specific offerings include implementation and support, technology and infrastructure, data engagement and process improvement, IT security and strategy, and customer management. The company is privately owned and self-funded, which allows it to make the best decisions for clients rather than shareholders. The company received A grades in all customer experience pillars  in KLAS’s 2020 report on implementation leadership and 100% “would buy again.” It was also recently named as #3 on Modern Healthcare’s “Best Places to Work in Healthcare” for 2020. Thanks to Divurgent for supporting HIStalk. 

Listening: Metallica rocking “Enter Sandman” in front of 1.6 million concertgoers live in Moscow in 1991 as the Soviet Union was sagging with its last breath into history’s ash heap, with Red Army soldiers in uniform among the endless throngs of people who were cheering four thoroughly American headbangers whose miles-long view to the horizon was nothing but moshing Soviets.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF (EDOC) rose 4.1% in the past month versus the Nasdaq’s 4.4% gain and the S&P 500’s 2.6% increase. EDOC is up 23.7% since its July 30 inception.

People

Renee Broadbent, MBA (Wolf & Company) joins Soho Health as VP of IT.

Abingdon-Jefferson Health promotes interim president / COO and former CIO Alison Ferren, MBA to the permanent role.

COVID-19

US COVID-19 deaths are approaching 350,000 as the case count passes 20 million, both representing around 25% of the global total. Hospitals reported housing a record 125,544 COVID-19 inpatients on Sunday, even with seven states failing to report any data at all and another seven states not reporting hospitalizations.

IHME predicts 567,000 US COVID-19 deaths by April 1, with hospital bed demand peaking on January 16 at 185,000.

CDC reports indicate that poorly planned and executed logistics are hampering COVID-19 vaccination as they did distribution of PPE and tests, with just 12.4 million doses distributed and only 2.8 million of those administered even though the December vaccine release was expected for months and the easiest-to-reach populations—captive nursing home residents and hospital workers – are going first. Reaching herd immunity will take 10 years at that rate. The logjam also raises the question of whether hospitals have the urgency, efficiency, and excess capacity to lead vaccination efforts.

The UK will allow “mix and match” use of two different COVID-19 vaccines for the two-shot regimen if someone’s first injection is not known or the product isn’t available, a practice that has not been studied and that is therefore of unknown effectiveness. A US vaccine expert says that British officials have abandoned science and “are just trying to guess their way out of a mess.”

Eighty percent of the COVID-19 antibody doses that the federal government sent to hospitals are sitting on the shelf, as some hospitals decline their allotments and others are too busy to offer the outpatient treatments. Experts feared that after President Trump was given the drug and touted it that demand would far outstrip supply, but effectiveness data is nearly non-existent and many doctors question its value.

A London infectious disease modeler warns of the exponential risk of mutated coronavirus strains that are more infectious. A typical city in Europe would see COVID-19 deaths rise from 129 per month to 193 if the fatality rate were to jump 50%, but that same 50% increase in transmissibility would cause 978 deaths. It would be much worse in the US unless the B117 variant turns out to be rare here, making increased mitigation measures and rapid vaccination as critical as they are unlikely.

In England, Royal London Hospital warns that it can no longer provide high-standard critical care, as it is overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients and ambulances line up outside with more. Meanwhile, the city’s St. Thomas’s Hospital is surrounded by maskless New Year’s Eve revelers chanting “COVID is a hoax.”

State and local jails and prisons are closing and transferring inmates elsewhere as COVID-19 leaves too few healthy guards to staff them, with experts warning that transferring residents increases outbreaks, as does overcrowding. Nearly 100,000 correctional officers have tested positive for COVID-19 and 170 have died.

Officials of the Parker, Colorado Republican party post the names and home addresses of local public health employees in its “Revolt Against Shutdowns” efforts, warning the employees that “patriots are going to show you the error of your ways” and “we’ll see how strong they are at their homes.”

The West Virginia National Guard, which was running a vaccination clinic at a county health department, injects 42 people with antibody treatment instead of Moderna’s vaccine.

Maricopa County, AZ blames vaccine rollout delays on the state’s vaccine management system, which it says didn’t email people to schedule their vaccination appointments, sent them to sites outside the county, has no text messaging option, locked people out who tried to use their Cox email address, and failed to show certain locations. The state says its system works but had an interoperability problem with the county’s pre-screening tool and the statewide system, also noting that Banner Health and Honor Health decided to use their own systems instead of the state system.

An employee of Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center who wore an inflatable costume on Christmas to cheer up patients is believed to have created an outbreak in which 43 ED employees have tested positive.

Other

Another bit of Internet history goes away, as Adobe disables any remaining installations of its long-retired, always-updating Flash browser plug-in.

I dunno, HIMSS – these don’t sound like “open-source initiatives” to me.

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• ERP End-to-End Testing in the Virtual World (Impact Advisors)
• Want to Improve Rural Care? Start with High-Speed Internet. (Medsphere)
• 5 things hospitals need to know about managing COVID-19 vaccines (Wolters Kluwer)

Contacts

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

News 12/30/20

Top News

A federal appeals court upholds hospital price transparency rules that will go into effect Friday.

The court rejected a lawsuit that was brought by the American Hospital Association to keep hospital-insurer negotiated rates secret.

Hospitals must post their standard charges on a public-facing website, both as a machine-readable file of all hospital charges and a consumer-friendly display of 300 “shoppable services.” Both must include the discounted cash price, payer-specific negotiated charges, and de-identified minimum and maximum negotiated charges.

HHS says it will monitor and enforce the requirements starting Friday, and non-compliant hospitals can be issued a warning notice, required to develop a corrective action plan, or have a civil monetary penalty imposed.

Webinars

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

Sales

• Syracuse Orthopedic Associates chooses Emerge’s platform to create dashboards using structured and scanned data from its Allscripts TouchWorks EHR.

People

Kaleb Huhl, MBA (Curaspan) joins Olio as VP of sales.

HIMSS hires Julius Bogdan, MBA, MGM (SCL Health) as VP/GM of analytics for North America.

Government and Politics

The Defense Health Agency awards Cherokee Nation Operational Solutions a one-year, $42 million contract to support DoD’s MHS Genesis rollout of Cerner.

COVID-19

US hospitals reported 124,696 COVID-19 inpatients on Tuesday, another record high.

CDC reports that 2.1 million Americans have received their first of two COVID-19 vaccine shots, far short of Operation Warp Speed’s goal of 20 million vaccinated citizens by December 31. California was allocated 1.7 million doses, of which it has received 438,000 and administered just 70,000. HHS Secretary Alex Azar said in October that 100 million doses would be available by December 31, but the actual number is at 11.5 million. States have received minimal money and help from the federal government to address the “last mile” of getting injections into arms, and some state health departments see their role as making sure hospitals and clinics get vaccine doses and figure out on their own how to get them administered. HHS disputed the vaccination numbers in a tweet storm Tuesday following exasperated tweets from Ashish Jha, MD, MPH, dean of Brown School of Public Health, saying that data reporting is lagging and that it will ship 20 million first doses by Friday and hold another 20 million for the second round of injections.

Hospitals in England report record hospitalizations even with aggressive mitigation measures in place, as a more contagious coronavirus variant has also pushed case counts to record levels. The first known US case of the mutated virus was discovered Tuesday in Colorado.

Russia admits that 186,000 of its citizens have died of COVID-19, triple the number that has been officially reported, based on excessive death counts. The country has been criticized for counting only deaths in which an autopsy confirms that the virus was the main cause. The new estimate places Russia behind only the US (335,000) and Brazil (192,000) in coronavirus deaths.

TSA screened 1.3 million air travelers on Sunday, the highest count since the pandemic began and the sixth day in the past 10 that traveler volume exceeded 1 million.

Five LA-area hospitals declare internal disasters, including implementing patient diversion, due to overloaded patient room oxygen pipes that are pumping the high volumes – up to 10 times the normal flow – that COVID-19 patients require.

The Atlantic interviews 30 experts about how the pandemic’s second year could play out in 2021:

• Understaffed public health departments will need to get people vaccinated despite low budgets, lack of a national strategy, and rampant disinformation that may increase the significant percentage of vaccine-hesitant people even more.
• The uneven deployment of vaccines due to states that are working from their own priority rules and resource availability could delay herd immunity and introduce risk in traveling between areas with high and low immunity levels.
• The vaccine’s impact could be blunted if states relax mitigation measures or if those people who have been vaccinated mistakenly believe those practices no longer apply to them.
• The questions of how long immunity lasts and whether the vaccine will protect against mutated strains will begin to be answered, but could trigger another cycle of urgent vaccine development and deployment.
• A weakened healthcare system and its depleted clinician ranks will be difficult to restore to normal levels given the years of study that are required and the US’s anti-immigration policies, making it even harder for aging people, those with chronic diseases, those with mental health needs, and a new population of COVID long-haulers to find care.
• The country will need to learn from its mistakes in many ways — including preparing for the next pandemic, funding public health, and addressing social determinants that go beyond vaccine availability –- in a divisive environment where consensus is unattainable on even identifying the problems, much less their potential solutions.

Advocate Aurora Health throws out 500 doses of COVID-19 vaccine after an employee removes it from the pharmacy refrigerator to get something else, then forgets to put it back within the allowed 12-hour post-refrigeration window. Meanwhile, eight home care workers in Germany are given entire vials of five vaccine doses as a single shot due to human error.

Other

Concord Hospital (NH) will acquire bankrupt two-hospital LRGHealthcare (NH) for $30 million. LRGHealthcare blames its financial woes on excessive investment in inpatient services as demand was shifting to outpatient as well as its “massively expensive” EHR, on which it was spending 9% of total organizational revenue each year to run its two hospitals that have a combined 162 licensed beds. The Concord paper reports that LRGH runs Cerner, paying $342,000 per month as its 75% share in a services agreement with Speare Memorial Hospital. Concord Hospital also runs Cerner.

Michele Kang, MPPM, founder and CEO of health and human services software vendor Cognosante, buys a stake in the Washington Spirit professional women’s soccer team.

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/28/20

Top News

Service sector business software vendor EverCommerce acquires Updox, which offers healthcare solutions for faxing, electronic forms, video chat, and secure messaging.

Updox had raised $16.7 million in debt financing and in a May 2017 Series B round.

Other EverCommerce healthcare brands include AlertMD (charge capture and messaging), CollaborateMD (medical practice billing software), AllMeds (EHR/PM), and ISalus (EHR).

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents are anxious to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at their first opportunity.

New poll to your right or here, inspired by Dr. Jayne’s comments: What was the physician wearing as their outermost layer during your most recent visit?

I didn’t post a Christmas day edition of Weekender where I provide a Donors Choose update, so here ‘tis. Readers funded the teacher grant request of Ms. V in New Mexico, who asked for a library of 18 books for her elementary school class. She reported in July, “A couple of the photos I posted are of the last day I was with my students this school year. They had earned a reading celebration and we turned our classroom into a huge reading fort (and they got to wear their pajamas). We read ALL day! Thank you so much giving my students wonderful books! They will be enjoyed by 100’s of students for years to come!”

Speaking of Donors Choose, reader Vicki’s generous contribution, when amplified by matching funds including those provided by my Anonymous Vendor Executive, fully paid for these teacher projects:

• A second monitor for online teaching of Ms. S’s elementary school class in Los Angeles, CA.
• Robotics and coding learning tools for Mrs. P’s K-5 girls’ coding program in New Orleans, LA.
• Headphones for the remote learners of Ms. S’s elementary school class in Irving, TX.
• Distance learning materials for Ms. S’s second grade class in Henderson, NV.

Meanwhile, for one more Donors Choose uplift in a thankfully ending year that could use it, here’s what Ms. S had to say upon hearing last week that HIStalk readers had funded her project with matching funds from my Anonymous Vendor Executive and San Diego Gas & Electric.

Lorre stayed busy pre-holiday, bringing three new sponsors on board on Wednesday 12/23 alone in what is normally a glacially slow time of year. Her thesis is that companies are anxious to get their 2021 marketing plans going, especially with the delay in the traditionally early HIMSS conference. Contact her if you have 2020 marketing budget that needs to be quickly rehomed in return for a full year of benefits.

Webinars

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

Sales

• Cerner announces four new rural hospital clients of CommunityWorks.

People

Arkansas Children’s Hospital promotes interim SVP/CIO Erin Parker, MBA to the permanent role.

UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics Professor Lex Frieden, MA is named the 2020 Katie Beckett award recipient for his lifelong work in disability advocacy, which includes playing key roles in development and passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

COVID-19

The COVID Tracking Project warns that COVID-19 tests, cases, and deaths will be underreported through the second week of January, when everybody gets back to normal work schedules. The only reliable daily stats will be hospitalizations, which are reported without interruption since hospitals don’t close for holidays. That number stood Saturday at 117,344, down slightly from Friday. One out of every 1,000 Americans has now died of COVID-19.

IHME’s latest COVID-19 model projects that US deaths will reach 567,000 by April 1 or 731,000 if states ease their mitigation mandates, estimating that planned vaccination timelines will save 33,000 lives. US deaths are at 332,000.

COVID-overwhelmed hospitals in Los Angeles County, CA are running out of oxygen and other supplies and their ambulance-arrived patients are waiting curbside for up to eight hours before being brought into overcrowded EDs. Southern California’s ICU capacity is at 0%, with peak, post-holiday travel hospital demand still likely a month away. 

Huntington Hospital (CA) alerts patients and families that it may begin rationing care in allocating scarce ventilators, ICU beds, and clinical staff to patients who are more likely to survive, as directed by a team that includes doctors, a community member, and a bioethicist. The hospital reminds the public that those resources are shared by patients with all medical needs, not just COVID-19.

Florida’s Department of Corrections removes daily prison-level COVID-19 case counts and testing numbers from its public dashboard right after two big outbreaks that involved more than 400 inmates. The department says it changed the dashboard because the information it contained was cumulative from the beginning of the pandemic and therefore was not helpful in monitoring new information, but didn’t explain why prison-level reporting was eliminated.

New York hospitals apologize for their vaccination teams giving COVID-19 vaccine to anyone who joined the line instead of limiting doses those workers who were on the high-priority list as was planned, eliciting protests from employees who observed that the queue included people who have been working from home and doctors who falsely claimed that they perform COVID-related procedures. According to one doctor, ”Clearly, we’re ready to mow each other down for it.”

The suddenly worrisome new coronavirus variants are likely already circulating in the US, going undetected since this country is #43 in the world’s percentage of cases that are analyzed genetically. The strain was discovered in Britain, which has sequenced 160,000 samples versus 51,000 here, and appears to be more contagious, including in children. Japan has barred entry to all foreigners through the end of January after the variant was discovered travelers from Britain.

The Washington Post describes conditions in a $31 million field hospital that was created in the former headquarters of a bank in Rhode Island. Most of the nurses are working under short-term agency contracts, IVs are delivered by gravity drip instead of electronic pumps, EHRs are not available, and patients summon help by ringing a bedside metal bell instead of pressing a call button. The hospital is run by Care New England Health System, whose nearby Kent Hospital is reporting that ED patients are waiting 2-3 days for a bed.

AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine may earn UK approval this week as the company says that new data shows its product, like those of Pfizer and Moderna, is 95% effective. Initial trial results were clouded by underdosing of some patients due to a University of Oxford mistake in analyzing the strength of a vaccine batch. Epidemiologists question what the new data could be given that the trials are completed and no new signups are likely when competing vaccines are available instead of a test dose that has a 50% chance of being a placebo.

Other

Sumner Regional Medical Center (TN) goes back to paper when the Nashville RV explosion on Christmas morning caused connectivity disruption.

A Connecticut OB-GYN practice pays $2 million to settle malpractice charges brought by a woman whose daughter was born with cystic fibrosis even though the practice told her that her genetic tests – including one for CF – were normal. The physician found that the test had never been ordered, which the plaintiff’s attorney believes was due to the difficulty involved in accessing lab results through the practice’s new EHR. 

England’s Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals creatively used their Vocera devices to make calls to Santa on behalf of their young ED patients on Christmas day, which were answered and followed with presents dispatched.

Contacts

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

News 12/23/20

Top News

Medicaid technology vendor Gainwell Technologies will acquire publicly traded HMS, which offers cost and outcomes systems, for $3.4 billion in cash.

Gainwell is backed by private investment firm Veritas Capital, which says it will optimize HMS’s solutions with those of Cotiviti, another of its investments.

Reader Comments

From Writer Blocked: “Re: Readers Write articles. Why do you allow only a single author?” This question has come up several times in the past couple of weeks, oddly. Answer: those are supposed to be personal opinion pieces of about 800 words, so they should not require enlisting a helper. On that topic, I really wish vendor authors would write their own imperfect but honest and insightful articles instead of outsourcing the job to PR companies whose only attainable goal (since they are not health IT experts) is marketing disguised as shallowly presented thought leadership. That’s a failing of the vendor, not their PR firm. I also draw a firm line on interviews — I only interview CEOs, I don’t provide a list of questions in advance since it’s a dynamic conversation, nobody else can be on the call because I’m not interested in what the handlers say and I know they’ll say it anyway, and I don’t provide a draft before the interview runs because the marketing people will form a committee to edit the life out of it. My co-existence with marketing and PR people is comfortable since most of the experienced ones know how I work, respect the process, and add value in making the connection and letting me do what I’ve been doing for nearly 18 years. Other sites provide examples of what happens when you cozy up with advertisers and send readers fleeing for the exit.

From No-Fly Zone: “Re: travel. A friend’s daughter has received a job offer from a children’s hospital that is requiring an on-site interview, which is a 1,500-mile flight, to complete the I-9 employment eligibility verification process. The HR department recommends making the trip immediately and won’t allow using a remote I-9 service. Who is flying for work these days, how is it in the middle seat, and what precautions are people taking?” Readers are welcome to weigh in. ICE has relaxed the Form I-9 document examination requirements through December 31 under some situations, but it’s up to the employer and hospital HR departments are notoriously unwilling to deviate from the rule book (maybe ask the hiring manager to intervene with HR – that has always worked for me). I wouldn’t be afraid to fly regardless of the “middle seats open” claim (that’s just a PR illusion since you’re still crammed in with strangers with spitting distance regardless) as long as the airline enforces mask-wearing. The plane’s ventilation system is probably most important of all, but you have no way to evaluate that. All things considered, a direct flight on Southwest would be my top choice. Bottom line for me is if the job is important and the hospital is unyielding, I would take the flight instead of waiting, even though I can’t imagine why a hospital with half a brain about COVID-19 wants remote job candidates fresh off a plane running around a campus they’ll never see again.

From Breach Victim: “Re: Mednax. Just reported a breach of 22,000 patients in July, of which my son was one. He was seen 12 hour after his birth for a total of five minutes by a hospitalist that we found out afterward was contracted through a private physician group that uses Mednax. Our insurer denied the payment, so the five minutes cost $500 out of pocket, and now we have the security breach. Is the hospital liable for any of this?” I’m guessing no since is unfortunately common for hospitals to outsource key services to companies that bill separately, without the patient’s advance knowledge, and without accepting insurance (how is “hospitalist” not a core business of a “hospital?”) The hospital wasn’t a Mednax client, so like your ridiculous bill, they will disavow any knowledge of what the contractors they hired did while rendering services within their building. I would be tempted to sue both the hospital and the practice just because this is litigious America, hungry plaintiff lawyers work cheap, and the hospital should feel some heat that goes beyond paying “consumerism” lip service.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

My Christmas wish, beyond seeing COVID-19 go away, is this — please stop saying “build out” instead of just “build,” which expresses precisely the same thought in half the number of syllables (bonus – it also separates you from the big hat, no cattle posers and lingo-flingers who use the term despite never having “built out” anything in their lives). No word or phrase grates on me more, except perhaps faking heartfeltness by leading off a sentence with the superfluous “Please know,” as in, “Please know we in management wish you and yours the best even though we marched you off our property to join the newly unemployed on Christmas Eve.” Remove “please know” and it says exactly the same thing.

Generous donations from HIStalk readers Ben, Michael, Steve, and Dennis – with matching funds from my Anonymous Vendor Executive and other sources – fully funded these Donors Choose teacher requests this morning:

• STEM kits for Ms. B’s special education class in Buckeye, AZ.
• An Apple TV for the seventh-grade science class of Ms. S in El Cajon, CA
• Journal-writing and emotional support supplies for Ms. S’s first grade class in New York, NY.
• Student of the week prizes for the all-remote learners in Ms. V’s middle school class in San Luis, AZ.
• Headphones with microphones for remote learning students of Mr. P in Los Angeles, CA.
• Hands-on games for the virtual pre-kindergarten students of Ms. A in Mount Hope, WV.
• A document camera and speakers for the remote learning third grade class of Ms. M in Houston, TX.
• STEM kits for after-hours classes of Ms. M in Mobile, AL.
• Home learning kits for the remote learning elementary school class of Ms. G in Buffalo, NY.
• Digital resources for the remote learning kindergarten class of Ms. L in Chicago, IL.
• Home learning kits for Ms. R’s kindergarten class in Somerton, AZ.
• An all-in-one HP computer for the high school senior International Baccalaureate class of Ms. G in Houston, TX.

I’m probably one of few people who mentally celebrate December 21, which I can accept as the first day of winter (not my favorite season) only because that also means that every day gets longer from now through June 20. I’ll get another psychological pick-me-up on March 14, when Daylight Saving Time restarts and it gets dark later. Example: the sun sets in Boston today at a ridiculous 4:15 p.m. EST, that won’t happen until 6:50 p.m. EDT on March 14, and our nearest star will remain visible until 8:25 p.m. EDT on June 20. DST may be an irrational policy, but I like it. I would not like living at extreme northern latitudes, however, where the sun never rises in early winter but then never sets in early summer.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Population health technology vendor Azara Healthcare merges with the population health division of SPH Analytics. The business will operate as Azara Healthcare, with Jeff Brandes continuing as CEO and Kevin Weinstein, MBA from SPH Analytics assuming the president / chief growth officer role. SPH Analytics will remain a minority shareholder and active business partner of Azara Healthcare and will continue its focus on healthcare consumer experience measurement.

Sales

• West Virginia OrthoNeuro chooses Emerge ChartGenie to convert its legacy EHR data to Athenahealth.
• Avita Health system will use Dimensional Insight’s Diver Platform to gain insights from Epic.

People

Bob Allen (TransUnion) joins NView Health as VP of strategic partnerships.

Announcements and Implementations

A newly updated KLAS report on EHR interoperability finds that “deep interoperability” (access to outside data, easy location of patient records, visibility of outside data within EHR workflow, and positive impact on patient care) has improved considerably since 2017 except in the most important “impact on care” category. Epic is the clear leader in record-sharing, while Cerner is improving significantly and EClinicalWorks is doing well but isn’t proactive. Little progress has been seen for Meditech, Greenway Health, and Allscripts. Cerner has the highest adoption rate of APIs, especially FHIR ones, while Epic is being selective on which vendors it will work with and is less focused on APIs. 

The VA uses InterSystems HealthShare to identify its need for COVID-19 vaccine by filing case count data with CDC. The VA also uses the data platform to monitor case spikes, testing volumes, and COVID-related resource availability.

Verily Life Sciences announces Verily Patch, which alerts the user via its Bluetooth-connected mobile app if their temperature rises beyond the threshold they set. The continuous monitoring patch, which is being marketed under FDA’s relaxed requirements for thermometers during the pandemic, lasts 90 days and is offered only to participants in specific programs.

Government and Politics

Politico reports that the American Hospital Association has filed an emergency motion to prevent the federal government from implementing price transparency rules that take effect January 1.

HHS OCR imposes a $36,000 HIPAA settlement on a Georgia primary care doctor who ignored a patient’s request for copies of their medical record, received technical assistance from OCR in response to the patient’s complaint, and then again failed to provide copies. The patient finally got their records 13 months after filing their original complaint.

COVID-19

A record 115,351 people were hospital inpatients with COVID-19 in the US on Monday. The death count rose to 320,000.

Mass General Brigham apologizes to its employees after a crush of sign-ups for receiving COVID-19 vaccine takes down its appointment system. Meanwhile, only 600 of Howard University Hospital’s 1,900 have signed up to receive its 725 doses, with the CEO saying that they know about the US Public Health Service’s Tuskegee studies of 1932 to 1972, in which hundreds of black men with syphilis were left untreated just to see what would happen.

California is reaching out to foreign countries in hopes of finding 3,000 temporary ICU-trained nurses as the supply of travel nurses dries up due to nationwide COVID-19 demand. The state has 18,359 confirmed COVID-19 patients hospitalized, and its prediction model forecasts that the number could swell to 100,000 hospitalized patients in the next few weeks. COVID-19 patients are occupying 3,600 California ICU beds and Los Angeles County says it has just 30 beds available.

A Southern California hospitalist reports battlefield conditions from his hospital.

A study finds that COVID-19 mortality rates vary significantly by hospital even as overall hospital mortality declines, mostly driven by their level of being overwhelmed by high community case rates. In other words, flattening the curve works, and our current inability to accomplish that portends higher hospital death rates.

A New York Times poll of experts finds that while people who have received COVID-19 vaccine will be safer, they still need to continue most precautions until 70% herd immunity is reached since 95% vaccine effectiveness still leaves a decent chance of being infected with all the virus that is circulating. Two-thirds of epidemiologists say they won’t change their behavior until herd immunity is reached, although they say small-scale socializing is OK as long as all participants have been vaccinated. Once herd immunity is reached, public gatherings, eating indoors at restaurants, and taking public transportation should be safe. This coming summer should be much better, although next winter’s “flu season” will turn into “flu and COVID season” as indoor gatherings create outbreaks.  

Stanford Medical Center initially blamed mistakes in “a very complex algorithm” and artificial intelligence for excluding most medical residents and fellows from the first wave of COVID-19 vaccinations, but the algorithm was actually just a simple rules-based formula that looks at and the prevalence of COVID-19 testing, positive results, and active infection for each employee’s job role. House staff who deliver direct COVID-19 care apparently fell out of the top risk tiers because they are in the lower-risk age band of 25-65, COVID prevalence didn’t take into account those employees who were infected by patients instead of in the community, and residents didn’t earn priority points for their work area because they don’t have a permanent assignment. An internal Stanford email says that program heads, department chairs, attending physicians, and nurses were not involved in designing the formula. Residents protested publicly after finding out that only seven of the 1,300 of them earned a spot in the first 5,000 employees to be offered vaccination.

A Tennessee hospital whose nurse manager fainted on camera from a longstanding vagal condition just after receiving COVID-19 vaccine last week posts a time-stamped current photo of her in hopes of squelching conspiracy theorists from spreading rumors on social media that she had died immediately.

Other

The bankruptcy reorganization plan of Astria Health (WA) gets closer to approval as the health system resolves objections from Cerner, which wanted $10.7 million to be set aside to cover its overdue bills for software and revenue cycle management services. The health system says it did not plan to pay Cerner because problems with its billing system and RCM services cost it $150 million.

University of Vermont Health Network admits that its month-long computer downtime and return to paper charting was caused by ransomware. Officials say they were never contacted about paying a ransom, however, although the malware provided contact instructions that the health system assumed was for demanding payment. The health system has still not restored 20% of its systems from the October incident, which is still being investigated by the FBI.

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Monday Morning Update 12/21/20

Top News

Imaging worklow vendor Intelerad acquires Digisonics, which sells cardiovascular and OB/GYN information systems.

Reader Comments

From Money Heist: “Re: investment. Why the sudden overabundance of investment news in HIStalk? Are your interests changing?” Health IT investment activity is soaring, especially with the sudden popularity of backdoor IPOs via special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) that are required to complete a deal within two years or give investors their money back. Accordingly, acquisition prices are way up and expectations from folks who paid high per-share prices will follow, meaning it’s important to see how customers and competitors are affected by these financial gyrations. There’s only so much to say about the Big Three inpatient EHR vendors now that the HITECH land grab is over (unless they make an acquisition, of course), so the industry is focused on new sectors and new players, especially those that aim to pick the deep pockets of insurers, pharma, drug store chains, and even masses of consumers who are happy to lay out cash for whatever prescriptions, diagnostics, and treatments they want in bypassing the usual gatekeepers. Healthcare is, unfortunately, almost entirely driven by profits, the actions of big companies, and the heavy involvement of government as an insurer, provider, and legislator — the rest of us, including patients, are just gawking bystanders. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Many poll respondents say that their job represents a big part of their identity and life satisfaction, which I guess is a good news-bad news sort of situation where they are happy with the work that contributes so heavily to the perceived quality of their existence, but that perhaps dangerously makes them dependent on an employer whose goodwill is situational (my personal experience is that a new boss, company sale, financial stumble, or backstabbing colleagues can end those happy workdays quickly). Look down the road as well to unintentional unemployment or retirement, when the well-meaning but misguided question of “What do you do?” (meaning, “to whom do you sell time and for doing what as your primary identity?”) has no easy, pat answer.

New poll to your right or here: What are your COVID-19 vaccination plans?

I’m fascinated by the argument over whether someone who has earned a non-medical doctorate should use the title of “Dr.” and in what setting. Even with medical doctors it’s not cut and dried — UK doctors earn an MBBS, which is a professional bachelor’s degree that is equivalent to MD, and I’ve heard that they called generalists “Dr.” and specialists “Mr.,” although I’m too lazy to look that up. I say we stop calling everyone Dr. as part of their name since that term is vague (I’m thinking of those chiropractors who place “Dr.” in front of their name instead of “DC” after it in their ads, hoping for some beneficial confusion.) Meanwhile, I’ll defer to the AP Stylebook, which says to use Dr. in the first reference to someone who holds specific medical degrees such dentistry, allopathic or osteopathic medicine, podiatry, or veterinary medicine – notice that list does not include pharmacists, doctorate-level nurses, physical therapists, or PhDs. Actually, I’m not sure that we even need any titles as part of names in our stridently informal society, especially with the gender-signifying issues that result – does someone really need to be Mr. Smith instead of just John? Meanwhile, feel free to address me as Reverend Doctor HIStalk since I bought those credentials from the Universal Life Church with college work-study money in hoping to created a higher-power aura that women would find irresistible (pretty much like a lot of people who wave their “Dr.” titles in the faces of strangers, in fact).

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Tenet Healthcare will sell 87 of its CareSpot and MedPost urgent care centers to FastMed Urgent Care for $80 million as it refocuses on the 45 ambulatory surgery centers that it is buying for $1.1 billion. North Carolina-based FastMed operates 104 locations in Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas. Googling suggests that CareSpot and MedPost use NextGen, while FastMed announced in January 2020 that it was implementing Epic in all of its locations.

In Canada, Telus Health acquires virtual care provider EQ Care.

Sales

• The State of Virginia will spend $10 million in federal coronavirus aid money to implement Unite Us to connect the EHRs of health systems and medical practices to manage social services referrals.
• Highmark Health chooses Google Cloud in a six-year deal to develop Highmark’s Living Health Model, described by Highmark marketing committees who flung buzzwords like a zoo monkey’s feces until this vague “Curated Design” description earned the most colored sticky dots: “Our new design will have health care operating differently — better. It will become an experience that is simple, easy, and streamlined for all parties.” Highmark says it is changing a broken healthcare system (in which it profitably participates with $20 billion in annual revenue and an $8 million CEO) because of its sudden realization that “it’s the right thing to do.” Remind me to check back in a couple of years to see if Highmark makes good on its promise that its relationship with Google will end healthcare-related stress, confusion, fragmentation, reactive processes, complexity, and high cost.
• NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board join the TriNetX global health research network, which has presented 7,800 clinical trials opportunities to 170 healthcare organizations in 30 countries. 
• Ochsner Health chooses Loyal for patient self-scheduling and website live chat. 

People

Jason Dvorak (Hillrom) joins Lohman Technologies as president.

Government and Politics

HHS OCR publishes guidance on how HIPAA allows covered entities and business associates to disclose PHI via HIEs for public health activities. High points:

• Covered entities can send patient data to HIEs when disclosure is required by law, such as sending infectious disease lab testing data.
• Covered entities can assume that whatever information the public health agency requests is minimum necessary, such as the Common Clinical Data Set, without making their own determination. CDC’s request for COVID-19 patient data via Electronic Case Reporting and state influenza reports are examples. 
• Covered entities may disclose bulk PHI to public health agencies via an HIE without individual patient approval as long as they verify that the agency has permission to collect the data.
• OCR will not impose penalties on business associates or covered entities that transmit PHI for public health activities, regardless of whether their business associate agreement specifically permits such disclosure.
• Covered entities must provide requesting individuals with an accounting of disclosures that includes public health reporting.

COVID-19

Friday set a US COVID-19 hospitalization record of 114,751 and another 2,751 deaths. Tennessee has the world’s worst infection rate per capita at 1,300 per million residents and rising, joining California as the only state whose rate exceeds 1,000. Tennessee announced Saturday tat it has passed 6,000 deaths, has 2,893 people hospitalized, and is showing a test positivity rate of 30%. COVID Tracking Project keeps having to make up new colors in extending beyond red to illustrate the uncontrolled US coronavirus spread. 

A newspaper investigation concludes that Florida stopped reporting backlogged deaths from October 24 to November 17, creating big drop in the death count right before and after the election. Governor Ron DeSantis has changed the reporting requirements multiple times and is accused by fired state COVID-19 data scientist Rebekah Jones of falsifying the numbers to support the state’s aggressive reopening, which he denies.  

FDA issues its Emergency Use Authorization to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, with the first doses to be administered Monday.

A CDC panel recommends that people over 74 years of age and 30 million frontline essential workers get COVID-19 vaccine first, with Monday’s expected approval of those recommendations being sent to states as guidance. CDC says that 556,000 people in the US got their first shot in the past week.

Stanford Medicine medical residents and fellows protest at being mostly left out of its COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan, as only seven of the 1,300 made the list even though many of them are frontline COVID-19 caregivers. The health system and medical school apologized, explaining that their algorithm prioritized recipients based on work unit and age, but nobody noticed that house staff were skipped over because they don’t have an assigned location that indicates their involvement with COVID-19 patients. Stanford University is of course a globally recognized Silicon Valley center for AI excellence, but perhaps its humans – especially the non-executive ones — needed to be more involved in double-checking how its AI evaluates equitable access. 

In the UK, Boris Johnson imposes a full emergency lockdown of London and southeast England following the rapid spread of a new COVID-19 strain that is responsible for 60% of new infections, which doubled in London in the past week. The new strain is no deadlier and offers no new vaccine resistance and is therefore curious but not alarming to epidemiologists, but it does appear to be more contagious.

A United Airlines passenger with COVID-19 symptoms dies on a flight from Orlando to Los Angeles, which his wife says he was able to board because he lied that he was symptom-free on the passenger declaration form. Three fellow passengers performed CPR for an hour until the flight landed in New Orleans after being diverted, and one of them is now experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.

Other

University Hospital (GA) says that hackers are attempting to penetrate its Epic MyChart system 550 times each day, while its email security system is rejecting 20% of incoming email due to security threats.

Seattle-area drugstore chain Bartell Drugs will pay $800,000 to settle DOJ charges that it failed to implement a computer system to verify prescriber licensure, which allowed pharmacists to fill 400 opioid prescriptions that were issued by doctors whose licenses had been suspended, some of whom had been sanctioned or indicted for federal violations. The chain is being sold to Rite Aid for $95 million.

Sponsor Updates

• Pivot Point Consulting releases its new Quarterly Pivot report, focusing on trends to watch in Q1 2021.
• Pure Storage makes available Pure as-a-Service in the AWS Marketplace, and launches its Cloud Block Store Efficiency Guarantee to improve cloud economics.
• Zynx Health publishes a review of COVID-19 vaccine administration guidelines as the FDA authorizes emergency use of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
• Meditech customer Sunderland Royal Hospital becomes the first hospital in the North of England to earn HIMSS Stage 7 recognition.

Blog Posts

• Trends to Watch in 2021: Telehealth, Consumerization and AI-powered Clinical Decision Support (Nuance)
• 2020 Year in Review: Pharmacy is the Answer (OmniSys)
• Top 4 trends for digital transformation in Life Sciences in 2021 (OpenText)
• Preparing for the 2021 E/M code transition begins with education (Nordic)
• Making Software More Inclusive to Improve Patient Care and Safety (PMD)
• The ABCs of ACOs (Premier)
• Virtual Visits are More Important Than Ever. Is Your Practice Ready? (QliqSoft)
• 12 Healthcare Solutions for our Favorite Holiday Songs (Redox)
• Building a telemedicine training program for clinicians (SOC Telemed)
• Spirion employees recognized for taking local action during global pandemic (Spirion)
• 3 ways to optimize your hospital’s directory and on-call schedules to reach providers faster (Spok)
• Understanding the mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine (Krames)
• Three Ways Healthcare Technology is Accelerating (Surescripts)
• Health AI University Recap (SymphonyRM)
• RSNA 2020: Visage’s Top Five (Visage Imaging)
• Nurses and Other Frontline Workers Need Our Support Now More Than Ever (Vocera)
• The future of Medicare Advantage: what providers need to know (Waystar)
• 10 Ways to Cultivate a Positive Culture in Your Clinic (WebPT)
• Well COVID-19 Vaccine Tip Sheet (Well Health)
• Here Are Some Opportunities to Enhance the Virtual Healthcare Experience (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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