Monday Morning Update 7/12/21

Top News

VA OIG looks at training deficiencies in the VA’s first Cerner rollout at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center, in Spokane, WA, noting:

• The VA Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization is charged with the implementation, but the involvement of VHA, which houses all of the system’s users, is not clear.
• Training design was internally called “button-ology” because it focused on telling users which buttons to push to get a desired outcome, with little context provided to users who then failed to understand how to use the system.
• Users struggled because the classroom training didn’t focus on workflow.
• The system that was made available for user practice did not match the VA’s actual system.
• Cerner’s classroom trainers were not capable of answering questions and raised facility concerns because they lacked a clinical background and EHR knowledge. Users complained that Cerner’s trainers would defer many basic questions to the “parking lot,” which became a running joke among employees being trained.
• All of the 30 super users said their training was a waste of time that left them demoralized, distrustful of Cerner and the VA project team, and less prepared to help users than before the training.
• Leaders did not fully understand Cerner’s role-based permissions and how to manage staff who required multiple role assignments, causing users to be assigned to the wrong training classes.
• VA contracting officials scored Cerner’s training work as “satisfactory,” the minimum level that meets contractual requirements.
• The post-live decrease in user productivity and morale was attributed to EHR training factors.
• The project’s change management group withheld some OIG-requested training evaluation data and altered other data before sending it.

Reader Comments

From Uniquely Qualified: “Re: company reps. My BS detection tip – it’s not actual knowledge they are selling if the answer to every problem is that company’s solution.” That’s true for life in general. I immediately tune out anyone whose industry viewpoint, politics, worldview, sports team loyalty, or entertainment choices are unwaveringly consistent and represent so much of their identity that they belittle those whose opinions differ. Anyone who can’t find an occasional good point being made by someone from the “other side” of any given issue is either a self-serving deceiver or intellectually comatose hack. Salespeople should believe in their product, but surely they can see as plainly as the rest of us that it is imperfect and sometimes fails to achieve the promised results for reasons that may or may not be under the company’s control. I started HIStalk 18 years ago for that reason – the lame publications were paid cheerleaders for advertisers and would studiously ignore the real-life challenges I saw every day working in hospital IT. My experience is that good companies get better by paying attention to constructive criticism from experienced outsiders, while bad ones sputter indignantly and shoot the messenger.

From Mr. Softy: “Re: Microsoft 365 Business Basic. I’m a user and the pros are that it’s a good deal, I strongly prefer Teams over Google Meet, performance is good, it’s easy to set permissions for a growing team, and the company’s support agents have been prompt and helpful. Cons are that you only get web versions of the Office apps and those lack a good number of advanced features of the desktop versions, Google has a more comprehensive feature set, the products could use some polish, and Microsoft sometimes makes security recommendations that aren’t available to users of the Basic plan.” Thanks much for that review.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The expensive technology that is being used by providers and insurers is doing little to make poll respondents healthy and happy.

New poll to your right or here: If two Epic-using providers in the same area don’t share patient data, would you assume they’re guilty of information blocking? Looking at it another way, if we know that every Epic client can theoretically share information with all the others, then what reasons other than intentional information blocking would explain why they aren’t? (you can elaborate on that in the poll’s comments).

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Clearsense. The Jacksonville, FL-based company’s data platform-as-a-service integrates data from any source, maintains line of sight from source to target, and jumpstarts the ROI of existing business intelligence tools without the need to hire specialized staff. Its DataHub operates as the central nervous system for healthcare data to automate data curation, preparation, normalization, and governance to allow it to be used meaningfully and with full transparency. Customers benefit from strong privacy and security, ease of use, an end-to-end solution from a single partner, accelerated data maturity, and the Clearsense Data Science Workbench that empowers citizen data scientists in delivering data science on demand. Sign up for a private meeting with the company at HIMSS21 or attend its lunch and learn. Thanks to Clearsense for supporting HIStalk.

A YouTube cruise turned up this Clearsense overview video on YouTube.

Can we all agree to dress comfortably and casually for HIMSS21? Not only are most of us readjusting to venturing out again and frowning that our dressy clothes seem to be a bit snug these days, Las Vegas hit 117 degrees Saturday. The health IT industry won’t collapse if we attend a conference in shorts and tee shirts, so I’m calling for a clothing truce. Conferences should be like schools that provide mandatory uniforms so that people won’t waste time and money trying to impress each other with a few ounces of thread.

Another Las Vegas issue – COVID-19 test positivity is at 10%, COVID-19 metrics have risen to February levels, only half of residents have been vaccinated, and travelers come and go from all over the place within the incubation period. As Andy Slavitt tweeted, “Whatever happens in Vegas isn’t staying in Vegas.” It’s still a life-threatening pandemic, just one that is limited mostly to the unvaccinated.

Webinars

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

People

Industry long-timer and Cerner SVP of Consumer and Employer Solutions David Bradshaw resigns.

Health policy attorney and disability rights advocate Erin Gilmer, JD died by suicide last Thursday.  

Announcements and Implementations

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign launches a self-paced, online “AI in Medicine” certificate at a cost of $750.

Toronto General Hospital goes live on Vocera Smartbadge in three of its ICUs.

Government and Politics

A White House executive order calls for the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to review guidelines for hospital mergers, which economists say have increased healthcare costs. The order also calls for HHS to support existing rules to limit surprise medical bills and to require hospitals to disclose their prices.

Other

A study of physician recommendations to improve EHR inbox notification design and workflow identifies these broad user suggestions:

1. Limit inbox messages to issues that are actionable to patient care and that are relevant to the receiving clinician.
2. Make the EHR inbox more like email by giving users explicit control of deleting messages; providing the equivalent of an email trash folder for retrieving deleted messages; allowing messages to be turned into a reminder or to-do item; and allowing users to send themselves reminders that are tagged with a future date.
3. Reduce the number of clicks required to manage messages by adding tools such as macros, templated text, preference lists, and routing lists. Other suggestions included the ability to add comments to a previously reviewed message without reopening it and including EHR information within relevant messages to avoid navigating the patient’s record, such as with medication refill requests and reviewing lab results.
4. Redesign inboxes to support team-based care, such as allowing support staff to triage the inbox and for care team members to message each other within the system.
5. Employers should support the time required to manage inbox messages without interruption.

A review of how PCPs in 349 ambulatory healthcare organizations use Epic finds that total daily EHR time was 95 minutes for pediatric clinicians, 121 minutes in general medicine, and 127 minutes for family medicine clinicians. After-hours time ranged from 24 to 34 minutes daily. Pediatric clinicians spent half as much time managing their inbox, receiving only one-fifth as many prescription messages, one-third as many patient messages, and half as many team-related and results messages compared to family medicine and general medicine clinicians.

A Kaiser Health News healthcare reporter reviews price worksheets to compare the charges of two health systems – the publishing of which is required by a CMS rule – and finds that it can’t be done due to the timing of charges, bundled billing practices, and the omission of physician charges. The reporter says that it’s nearly impossible to calculate the cost of one person’s medical procedure, much less to compare that cost among hospitals. He also notes that imaging and surgery centers, which usually charge less, aren’t required to publish their prices.

A Texas man is sentenced to 48 months in federal prison after being found guilty of stealing patient information from a provider’s EHR and then packaging it into physician orders that he sold to durable medical equipment providers, which netted the man an two co-conspirators several million dollars in kickbacks.

Sponsor Updates

• Quil publishes a new white paper, “Home as Healthcare Hubs.”
• Nuance has been named a “Best Company to Sell For” by Selling Power for the second consecutive year.
• The CEO Blindspots Podcast features OptimizeRx CEO Will Febbo.
• PeriGen hosts a Go Live Luau at Banner Health.
• RxRevu publishes a new white paper, “How Accurate Prescription Data Can Drive Valuable Decision Making at the Point of Care.”
• Talkdesk publishes a white paper, “Building a patient-centric healthcare contact center.”

Blog Posts

• The 6th “R” in Medication Administration (OptimizeRx)
• How to Prepare for the Next Healthcare Crisis (PatientBond)
• Reduce Physician Burnout: Improve the Provider Experience with PatientKeeper’s Clinical Communications Suite (PatientKeeper)
• Who Are Ransomware Attackers and What Are They After? (Pure Storage)
• Tips for Querying a Physician to Improve HCC Coding Accuracy (RCxRules)
• Telemedicine’s Two Separate – and Different – Worlds for Hospitals (SOC Telemed)
• Extending Your Payments Reach Beyond the EHR (Sphere)
• 10 interesting facts about nurses (Spok)
• Script Migration Success Story: Henry Schein MicroMD (Surescripts)
• You Can’t Just Say: “Tomorrow, we’re going to be a High Reliability Organization” (TransformativeMed)
• The 5 Key Benefits of Remote Patient Monitoring (Twistle)
• Why Using Word Templates for Your PT Documentation is a Terrible Idea (WebPT)
• Auto-Indexing Technology Connects Data to Patient (Vyne Medical)

Contacts

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

News 7/9/21

Top News

FDA issues 510(k) clearance for the use of AliveCor’s $149 KardiaMobile 6L by healthcare professionals to calculate QTc interval from its EKGs. That value is used to diagnose certain disorders of electrical conductivity that can cause irregular heartbeat.

The company also offers a service to measure QT intervals.

I was an early user of KardiaMobile and am surprised every day that the company hasn’t been acquired by Apple or some other remote monitoring / wearables vendor given its strong history of working within FDA’s regulatory framework.

AliveCor has raised $154 million in funding, including a $65 million Series E round in November 2020 whose participants included the venture funds of Qualcomm and Omron.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m trying to understand the mental process that leads people to think that “app” should be spelled “APP.” Short words need more caps?

I received a robocall whose caller ID showed Clackamas, OR, so I’ve changed my fake LinkedIn location to the closest town to that it would allow, Happy Valley, OR. I looked it up and found that Tony Award nominee Hailey Kilgore was born there. I saw her in “Once on This Island” on Broadway few years back, so maybe that was her calling me to catch up.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Intelerad acquires medical image management technology vendor Heart Imaging Technologies.

Marketing company Finn Partners acquires health IT-focused communications and marketing firm Agency Ten22, whose founder and CEO Beth Friedman will join Finn as senior partner.

Sales

• Knox Community Hospital (OH) chooses Hicuity Health to provide tele-ICU and cardiac telemetry services.
• Specialty drug management vendor Magellan Rx Management will offer its members live behavioral health support and wellness coaching from Heuro Health.

People

Edifecs promotes Venkat Kavarthapu, MBA to CEO. He replaces founder Sunny Singh, who will move to board chair.

Industry long-timer Jamie Trigg, MSITM (Virginia Mason Medical Center) joins CommonSpirit Health as national system director of Cerner.

Payer software vendor HealthEdge hires Ryan Mooney (Cotiviti) as EVP/GM of its payment integrity product division.

Bon Secours Mercy Health names Jason Szczuke, JD (Cigna) as its first chief digital officer.

Kansas City-based worker compensation technology vendor Bardavon Health Innovations hires Ed Enyeart (Cerner) as CFO. He was recruited by former Cerner President Zane Burke, who joined Bardavon’s board in January 2021.

Government and Politics

A second VA OIG review of the infrastructure cost of implementing Cerner adds another several billion dollars to the project’s likely final cost. OIG notes, however, that the two infrastructure cost reports its office performed were conducted separately, so overlap is likely. The cost of the project, which was initially estimated at $10 billion and then $16 billion, could be as high as $21 billion if the estimates for cabling, user devices, and interfaces do not overlap. The VA – which OIG says underreported costs in its poorly documented estimates — agreed to all of OIG’s recommendations, which include having an independent cost estimate performed and ensuring that any additional project funding that is required is made available.

Announcements and Implementations

Philips and Cognizant will co-develop digital health solutions for Philips HealthSuite.

A AHRQ-funded Regenstrief study finds that EHR alerts that are intend to reduce prescribing of dementia-linked anticholinergics in older adults are nearly never read by providers or medical assistants, so their effectiveness could not be measured. The authors conclude that human-based interventions might work better than computer-issued nudges for reducing anticholinergic prescribing.

The Commons Project releases a free SMART Health Card Verifier App for IOS and Android that will allow businesses and other organizations to scan a COVID-19 vaccination card that uses the SMART standard to determine its validity and display vaccination details.

Other

I ran across information for Microsoft 365 Business Basic, which seems like a great deal for $5 per user per month, with no mention of a minimum number of users. It includes web versions of Office apps, 50 GB of mailbox storage with Exchange, 1 TB of OneDrive storage and sync, a full implementation of Teams that includes webinars and 300-user meetings, and some elements of SharePoint that I don’t quite understand. No desktop app versions are included, but I’m pondering getting a lot of storage plus a Webinar platform for just $60 per year, which also includes 24-hour support.

Business Insider says that prospective business customers of its Amazon Care virtual service want it included as a benefit in their health insurance plans, but those insurers are balking, possibly because Amazon is recommending value-based contracts and the insurers would rather pay under fee-for-service deals.

Eric Bricker, MD of First Stop Health notes a trend in physicians selling their medical practices to private equity firms, as follows:

• The PE firm offers the physician owners of the practice a lump sump of cash and offers to take over its billing and collections.
• The practice agrees to pay the PE firm up to 40% of future annual revenue.
• The PE firm takes advantage of its now-larger group practices to squeeze insurers for higher payments.
• Healthcare costs increase, but the doctors in the practice who weren’t owners – most of them younger — make less, allowing the PE firm to pocket the difference.

Sponsor Updates

• Impact Advisors receives a high overall score in the KLAS “Security & Privacy Services 2021 Report.”
• Redox enables its customers to create digital health apps using Unqork’s no-code platform that are interoperable with any organization in the Redox Network.
• Healthcare Triangle achieves Google Cloud affiliate Partner status.
• CereCore welcomes Michael Gagnon as its first Enterprise Fellow, where he will provide technical direction in IT solutions, cloud, and disaster recovery management.
• VirtualHealth adds Healthwise’s educational healthcare content to its Helios care management platform for payers.
• Vocera will relocate and expand its San Jose headquarters early next year.

Blog Posts

• Why Healthcare CIOs Should Consider ServiceNow (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Five Essential Tips for Using E/M Modifier 25 (Experity)
• Important Facts That Frequent Users of NSAIDs Should Know (First Databank)
• How Goliath Technologies is Complimentary to Cerner Lights on Network (Goliath Technologies)
• Addressing the Decline in Clinician Trust During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Halo Health)
• A Five-Step Audit for Peak Charge Capture Performance (Health Catalyst)
• Clinical terminology enables better patient care (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• 4 Tips for Successful EHR Interoperability (Lyniate)
• Tips for Querying a Physician to Improve HCC Coding Accuracy (RCxRules)
• Online Bill Pay is Key to Receiving Timely Payments from Self-Pay Patients (Medhost)
• Meditech’s Nurse Forum 2021: From “New Normal” to “Better than Normal” (Meditech)
• Standardizing Patient Addresses: ONC’s New Specification to Improve Record Matching (NextGate)
• Cooking Up the Future of Healthcare Technology (NTT Data)

Contacts

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

News 7/7/21

Top News

UC San Diego Health adopts the SMART Health Card, giving patients and employees digital access to their vaccine records through the health system’s patient portal.

Reader Comments

From Informatics Nurse: “Re: COVID-19 vaccination. Since the ruling was upheld to allow hospitals to make COVID-19 vaccination a condition of employment, five consulting companies have reached out, saying they have a need for vaccinated go-live staff. The contracts are for 2-4 weeks, starting immediately, with all expenses paid and at hourly rates not seen since 2009. The reason is the termination of unvaccinated hospital IT staff who must have felt themselves indispensable and immune (pun intended) from termination after years of working on the project with go-live impending.” Unverified. Consulting folks – are hospitals calling to get quick, short-term replacements for IT-related staff who were let go because they declined vaccination?

From Inappropriate Umbrage: “Re: interviews. Some you’ve done contain fun or insightful tidbits, while others seem to recite the obvious. How do subjects prepare?” They don’t, because I don’t give them a topic list in advance, I don’t allow anyone else to get on the call, and I don’t give them the interview transcript draft afterward for their approval or editing. I decided early on to  buck the trend of dull health IT “interviews” that are really just committee-formulated company responses to a emailed list of non-insightful questions. I interview CEOs only, talk about whatever interests me, and then run a full transcript of that conversation, so give those interviewees credit for being willing to have an actual unscripted dialog — much of it related to the industry as a whole rather than the company — and have it just appear on the site without any other personal or company involvement. That requires a certain amount of courage and trust by the subject and some tolerance by readers who might not recognize the pressure the subject is under in being interrogated by an anonymous nobody of uncertain agenda in an unfamiliar setting.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I watched Questlove’s powerful, exuberant “Summer of Soul” Monday on Hulu and it was a stunning documentary, a historical look back at the tumultuous 1960s that is backdropped by concert footage of the forgotten “black Woodstock” of 1969’s 300,000-attendee Harlem Cultural Festival over six weekends. Musical highlights for me were shockingly charismatic The 5th Dimension and Sly and the Family Stone (I’m not really a gospel-funk fan even though I acknowledge the obvious talents of Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples) and seeing Stevie Wonder drumming better than most drummers. The film sat unprocessed and forgotten in a basement for 50 years — thank goodness it wasn’t on videotape — yet it offers perfect audio quality and depicts a bold palette of 1960s colors that, like the festival, have been largely forgotten (seen any bands wearing matching Creamsicle orange suits lately?) Questlove is a multi-talented and curious genius, of course, and he stayed out of the film’s way, allowing the tears and wistful reminiscing glow of festival performers and attendees who were shown footage 50 years after the event to provide the narrative. This festival was 100 miles geographically and light years away culturally from Woodstock. Segments about the Vietnam war, assassinations, and the moon landing are jaw-dropping, and you’re left with the message that while the music and fashion have changed, the struggle has not. 

I’m peeving once again on people who say they have “over 12 years of experience.” We know it isn’t 13 years or their carefully enumerative precision would have said so, maybe even rounded up if it was more than 12 years and six months, so why not just say “12 years of experience” and assume that the absence of those few extra months is immaterial? Otherwise, every since person’s resume would, except for one day per year, pointlessly describe their years of experience as “more than.”

Webinars

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

People

CMS appoints Meena Seshamani, MD, PhD (MedStar Health) as deputy administrator and director of the center for Medicare.

Dina hires Maryann Lauletta, MD (Inspira Health) as its first chief medical officer.

John Sheehan (All Tier Health Care Consulting) will join Rochester RHIO as CEO on August 1.

Announcements and Implementations

The incubator of Innovation Institute — whose members include Bon Secours Mercy Health System and MultiCare — will co-develop solutions with process automation vendor Olive and share commercialization revenue.

Children’s Hospital & Medical Center implements cloud-based enterprise imaging informatics and data insight solutions from Philips across its facilities in five states.

An InterSystems TrakCare Unified Health Information System update includes integration with its HealthShare Personal Community patient portal to support appointment scheduling and synchronization of third-party app data with patient records; support for virtual visits using Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and WeChat; and support for SMART on FHIR apps. TrakCare is used in 27 countries, although not the US.

Privacy and Security

In England, an Information Commissioner’s Office analysis finds that more data breaches occurred in healthcare between 2019 and 2020 than in any other sector examined, prompting NHS Digital to delay its plans to share the health records of NHS patients with third-party organizations.

Other

A randomized controlled trial of a large company’s multi-site workplace wellness program after three years finds that while employees said they more actively managed their weight using the program, it otherwise had no impact on self-reported health, clinical health markers, healthcare spending or utilization, absenteeism, or job performance.

A Kaiser Health News report finds that rural, volunteer-based ambulance services are struggling to respond to calls due to a shortage of volunteers who are wiling to take the extensive emergency medical technician training and tests. it also notes that Medicare and Medicaid payments cover only about one-third of actual costs, leaving the services running in the red. Suggested solutions include funding EMS services via taxes, merging the services with fire departments, or turning them over to hospitals. 

Saint Vincent Hospital (MA) CEO Carolyn Jackson cites an ongoing nurses strike as the reason for the Tenet-owned hospital’s decision to delay its Cerner implementation until early next year. The strike, which mostly involves concerns about nurse-to-patient staffing ratios, has been going on for nearly five months.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “PrimeCare Medical Clinic: Rocking Patient Engagement in Little Rock.”
• Agfa HealthCare adds a chest X-ray visualization package to its Rubee for AI workflow software for radiology.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new The Informonster Podcast, “Working Towards Price Transparency in Healthcare.”
• Divurgent releases a new The Verged Podcast, “The Promise of the FDA Real-World Evidence Program.”
• Ellkay recognizes VP of Customer Success Sunita Pradhan as part of its Women in Health IT Program.
• Experian Health’s Enterprise Health Patient Identifier Solution and Hospital Claims Management Systems have been recognized as top-rated solutions in Black Book’s “Top Client-Rated Financial Solutions Achieving Accelerated Digital Transformation in the Nation’s Healthcare Systems” rankings.

Blog Posts

• Medicare simplifies home health claims, phasing out RAPs (Ability Network)
• 2021 Mid-year Postage Rate Increase (AdvancedMD)
• Conditions of Participation Guidance: 5 Key Takeaways (Audacious Inquiry)
• Using Care Gaps for Targeted Adult UDS Measure Validation (Azara Healthcare)
• Do you love your LMS? (Bluetree)
• Scripps Health: Discharge Planning, Patient Choice, and Post-Discharge Monitoring (CarePort)
• Perspectives from CIOs: Results from Online 2021 IT Priorities Survey (CereCore)
• 3 Ways New Interoperability Regulations Will Impact Payer-Provider Collaboration (Collective Medical)
• How Fully Informed Prescribing Helps Develop a Fuller Patient Picture (CoverMyMeds)
• Step Back to Move Forward on Interoperability (Cumberland Consulting Group)
• How do I know if my EHR help desk is any good? (Engage)
• Record Retrieval Made Easy with PRISMA (EClinicalWorks)
• Rescheduling COVID-deferred screening appointments with automated patient outreach (Experian Health)
• How to Smoothly Transition to 2021 E/M Coding Guidelines (EZDI)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 7/5/21

Top News

Three University of Texas organizations – University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, The University of Texas at Arlington, and The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center – form the Texas Health Informatics Alliance.

THIA will hold its first conference virtually on September 9.

Reader Comments

From Censored: “Re: HIMSS21 podcasts and video. The conference guidelines say that audio and video recording are mostly banned. Attendee interviews must be scheduled in advance and recorded in an enclosed location outside the aisles. Perhaps that applies to press only.” I’m one of few people who have been threatened (years ago) with expulsion by the HIMSS police for daring to snap a photo of a booth I was walking by. Despite that, I expect it’s mostly a complaint-based system designed to protect exhibitors from competitive espionage. According to the HIMSS21 guidelines:

• Video recording, audio recording, and photography is prohibited during keynote sessions. HIMSS warns attendees that its staff will immediately escort anyone out who takes photos (good luck with that).
• In the exhibit hall, photos and videos can be taken only in the exhibitor’s booth, with cameras or other equipment facing into that booth. Recording another exhibitor’s booth may result in termination of future exhibiting privileges. Media members must have HIMSS media credentials to take video or photos in a booth.
• Attendees may not record interviews by walking up to people – interviews must be scheduled ahead of time and done in a booth or enclosed location away from the exhibit hall aisles and hallways outside keynote presentations.

Bottom line, as the reader is suggesting, anyone who is recording or taking pictures other than in an individual exhibitor’s booth is breaking conference rules. I swear last conference you could barely walk around without constantly running into someone who was recording an interview that the world cared nothing about.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents don’t believe that the compensation of remote workers should be adjusted based on their local cost of living, with comments reflecting a “just pay people what the are worth” belief.

New poll to your right or here: How much impact has the information technology used by your providers and insurers had on your overall health and happiness?

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

I’m fascinated by the sad situation at the collapsed Champlain Towers South in Florida, mostly because it is unfolding nearly exactly as laid out by John D. McDonald’s 1977 novel “Condominium.” The book weaves a tale of Florida condo builder greed, the misery of living under HOA oversight, volunteer condo board members who are personally attacked by their neighbors over the necessary but potentially unaffordable cost of maintaining their shared homes, construction shortcuts that builders get away with, and Florida’s draw of newcomers who treat every day as a responsibility-free vacation. I got my copy in a “fill a bag with books for $5” library sale years ago and I’ve read it at least 10 times since, although I’ve misplaced that copy and am balking at paying $12 for its Kindle replacement. It’s a great read at nearly 600 pages, so I’ll probably pull the trigger even though I would be happier if Amazon allowed me to lend or gift the Kindle copy after I’ve read it for the 11th time as I did its $0.25 predecessor.

Webinars

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

Sales

• Virtual care vendor Orb Health chooses Redox to enable access to provider EHRs.

People

TransformativeMed hires industry long-timer Shawn DeWane (Hayes MDaudit) as president and CEO.

Mon Health (WV) promotes Mon Health Medical Center Chief Administrative Officer Mark Gilliam to SVP of the health system (he was the health system’s first CIO through June 2021) and promotes Associate CIO Mark Combs, MBA to CIO.

The city celebrates retiring Huntsville Hospital CEO David Spillers, MBA, who started his healthcare in the 1980s as an IT analyst and then became CIO of Mission Hospitals (NC). 

Announcements and Implementations

Belma Andric, MD, MPH, chief medical officer at Health Care District of Palm Beach County, celebrates its Epic go-live with a team photo. 

Other

Providence St. Joseph Health Senior Clinical Data Engineer Angelique Russell, MPH lists reasons that sepsis predictive models – like the one offered by Epic – fail:

• Hospitals don’t equip many of their beds with continuous monitoring technology, so manual vital sign measurement and entry is delayed.
• Hospitals upcode to maximize revenue, as coders are prodded to find enough sepsis criteria in “rule out sepsis” orders to justify higher bills that may not meet a strict clinical definition of sepsis. Systems that use bill codes for clinical purposes are likely to be unsuccessful.
• Models developed elsewhere may not be generalizable depending on the other facility’s clinical definition of sepsis and the at-risk populations it treats.
• No evidence exists to guide sepsis treatment that is predicted hours in advance.

I don’t usually get involved with open positions, but Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas in Pittsburg, KS is recruiting a CIO. I figured they could use some pro bono help and I’ve got little to write about this holiday weekend, so there you go. Pittsburg is a two-hour drive from Kansas City or Tulsa and you can get a lot of house for the money – a richly detailed 4,000 square foot two-story from the early 1900s is less than $300K. I’ve heard of the town because it has two fried chicken restaurants next door to each other, Chicken Mary’s and Chicken Annie’s (their curious existence spawned a well-received fictional novel called “The Chicken Sisters.”) Anyway, I’ve worked in rural health systems and the opportunity and quality of life can be excellent, so consider your career objectives and whether a CIO job might help you attain them.

Sponsor Updates

• Intrado’s HouseCalls Pro digital patient engagement platform earns a score of 88.3 out of 100 in a new First Look report from KLAS.
• Protenus Chief of Staff Sherrod Davis wins a Baltimore Business 2021 Best in Tech Award.
• Talkdesk launches Talkdesk for Service Cloud Voice on Salesforce AppExchange.
• Business First Louisville names Waystar CFO Steve Oreskovich to its Best in Finance list.

Blog Posts

• 3 Practical Applications of Psychographic Segmentation (PatientBond)
• The Future of Mobility in Healthcare (PatientKeeper)
• Operating Room Management: Scheduling and OR Efficiency (PerfectServe)
• Charge Lag & Reconciliation: The Bottom Line! (PMD)
• Indiana Health System Boosts Bottom Line by $7 Million with HCC Alerts (Premier)
• Partnering with the Mental Health Center of Denver to Support Our Community (RxRevu)
• Survey says: How to ask better patient feedback questions (Sonifi Health)
• How to Meet Your Compliance Obligations with Data Protection (Spirion)
• Our most popular clinical communication blog posts of 2021 (so far!) (Spok)
• SCRIPT Migration Success Story: Henry Schein MicroMD (Surescripts)
• 3 ways the contact center has become the hub of health plan member experience (Talkdesk)
• Why Using Word Templates for Your PT Documentation is a Terrible Idea (WebPT)
• 5 takeaways from our CEO Panel: Driving Transformation Amid Uncertainty (West Monroe)
• Acronyms, Audits and Automation – Oh My! (Vyne Medical)
• Three Essential Strategies for Keeping Your Data Flowing (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 7/2/21

Top News

HIMSS will offer HIMSS21 attendees three options for proving that they have received COVID-19 vaccine, which is required for picking up their conference badge and entering the conference venue:

1. Install the Clear Health Pass app and either link to their vaccine provider’s records or upload a copy of a CDC-issued vaccination card. This option is not available for attendees from outside the US.
2. Book an appointment to show paper or digital vaccination record in a virtual call with a Vaccine Concierge, who will then email a verification card for printing or displaying on a mobile device. Appointments for the video calls will be available weekdays starting July 12.
3. Bring paper or digital vaccination records to the conference and have them reviewed on site at one of four Vaccine Verification Centers.

Other safety procedures:

• Attendees will not need to show vaccine-related records once they have picked up their badge.
• Mask-wearing won’t be required.
• HIMSS has eliminated its previous requirement that presenters wear face shields.
• Exhibitor staff will need to pick up their badges individually since they will be required to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
• COVID-19 testing will be offered on site.

Reader Comments

From Servile Pleaser: “Re: HIMSS21. Any updates?” We’re just about five weeks out, it’s 110 degrees every day in Lost Wages, and the enthusiasm I’ve seen mostly comes from excessively exuberant amateur podcasters and video-makers who can’t wait to clog up the exhibit hall aisles with self-important “broadcasting” that nobody will actually consume. Exhibitor count has improved to 626, about half the usual number. I usually get many dozen HIStalk sponsors providing their information for my HMSS guide, but so far I’ve received submissions from just five companies (the last chance to be included is at hand – submit your information here). I’m dreading going, but happy it will likely be far from the usual grueling marathon – I’ve rearranged my travel to leave on a Thursday night redeye to minimize my time in Las Vegas.

From Grammar-Minded Lad: “Re: Bill Cosby getting off on a ‘technicality.’ Wondered what you think about the use of that term?” Labeling a controversial but legally supported decision as being due to a “technicality” or a “loophole” is an insidious way for news organizations to pander to armchair experts who think they know more than actual experts (i.e., just about anyone who uses Facebook or Twitter and will obligingly click an inflammatory link). Our democracy is built on technicalities and loopholes, such as reading a suspect their rights even though they’ve heard them on TV a thousand times. Both are, by definition, legal and thus ethical. I’m skeptical that high-horsers who claim they would not personally take full legal advantage of tax or criminal laws that would give them huge personal benefit. As has been said way too many times, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor EZDI. The Louisville, KY-based company offers a cloud-based, AI-powered integrated clinical documentation and medical coding platform (computer-assisted clinical documentation, computer-assisted coding, computer-assisted coding compliance, comprehensive data analytics, and clinical NLP APIs). Its computer-assisted coding platform earned the top overall KLAS score of 92.5 among competitors. Its clinical NLP APIs extract meaningful clinical entities (problems, procedures, modifiers, lab data, etc.) from structured and unstructured data such as physician notes, clinical reports, and lab reports for use cases such as risk adjustment, prior authorization, fraud detection, semantic search, clinical trials management, population health, and predictive analytics. Thanks to EZDI for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Process automation vendor Olive raises $400 million in a funding round that values the company at $4 billion. The company says its products are being used in 900 US hospitals.

Netsmart acquires post-acute care reimbursement and quality measures analytics vendor SimpleLTC.

Virtual musculoskeletal pain physical therapy vendor Sword Health raises $85 million in a Series C funding round.

Tendo Systems raises $50 million in a Series funding round, valuing the healthcare digital engagement platform vendor at $550 million less than a year after its founding. The company’s website is maddeningly vague on exactly what it is selling.

People

Lawrence General Hospital (MA) promotes Gerald Greeley, MHA to CIO.

NThrive names Hemant Goel, MBA (Capsule Technologies) as CEO and James Evans, MBA (ESolutions) as CFO.

Bryan Wolf, MD, PhD retires from a long career at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn’s medical school that included years as CIO and chair of the department of biomedical and health informatics.

Government and Politics

VA Secretary Denis McDonough reaffirms its commitment to its Cerner implementation as a review of the project concludes, indicating that any changes to the VA’s program will be announced within two weeks.

Privacy and Security

Google asks a California federal judge to dismiss a proposed class action lawsuit that claims the company’s COVID-19 free contact tracing app – which it developed with Apple — exposes the confidential information of Android users. Google says the plaintiffs are making theoretical arguments related to storing contact tracing data in Android system logs, which it says has never resulted in an actual exposure of information. Google cites previous rulings that information must be viewed to violate someone’s privacy and that California privacy claims must allege that information was wrongfully disclosed.

Other

Screenshots have been leaked by supposed early testers of the Google Health medical records management app, Android’s equivalent of IOS-only Apple Health Records.

The New York Times reviews the roughly 80 medical schools – most of them for-profit — that operate from the Caribbean, noting that 60% of their graduates are chosen for US residencies versus 94% of graduates of US schools. The Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates will stiffen school accreditation requirements by 2024 and has already banned certification of graduates of two Caribbean schools.

Interesting: IBM employees report a multi-day loss of access to emails and calendars after the company’s attempt to convert from an old version the Notes platform it formerly owned. IBM sold the former Lotus Notes and Domino to India-based HCL Technologies awhile back, then decided to migrate off that platform because its employee email data would have been stored in that country.

Sponsor Updates

• Summit Healthcare publishes a new client use case, “Cottage Hospital Improves Physician Relationships, ROI, and Secure Data Exchange with Summit All Access.”
• Glytec publishes the largest descriptive analysis of adult T1D patients with and without diabetic ketoacidosis treated with insulin management software.
• Goliath Technologies publishes a new case study, “Universal Health Services Uses Goliath to Prevent EHR and VDI Logon Issues.”
• The How AI Happens Podcast features Gyant co-founder and CEO Stefan Behrens.
• Halo Health publishes a new case study, “Improving Clinical Communication and Collaboration at Great River Health System.”
• Jvion’s clinical AI wins a Globee in the 2021 IT World Awards.
• Optimum Healthcare IT adds Robert Morris University as a partner in its CareerPath program.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring Amy Gleason, project lead at the US Digital Service.
• Pivot Point Consulting publishes its Q3 healthcare insights and trends report.
• Meditech customers receive top hospital safety grades from the Leapfrog Group.
• HealtheConnect Alaska renews its contract with NextGate for patient identification and statewide data exchange.

Blog Posts

• Ransomware on the Rise: They’re Back. (CloudWave)
• The New Summit Customer Care Center (Summit Healthcare)
• 5 Focus Areas for Cyber Resilience (Everbridge)
• How to Retain Patients in a New Era of Urgent Care (Experity)
• Working for You: Fortified Offers NIST Counsel on Resource Guide (Fortified Health Security)
• Back-to-Basics: On-Call Scheduling (Halo Health)
• Five Practical Steps Towards Healthcare Data Governance (Health Catalyst)
• Using Technology to Build Stronger Relationships (Healthwise)
• Spelunking through the medical chart (Nordic)
• How to Ensure a Healthy Relationship with Your Epic Community Connect Partner (Impact Advisors)
• Positive patient identification improves patient safety, security, and experience (Imprivata)
• Watch it Live: Healthtech’s Evolutionary Punctuation Event Happening Right Now (InterSystems)
• In My Opinion: Investing in employee success with Dan Tyner (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• 4 Fundamental Ways the Pandemic Has Changed Patient Access Forever (Kyruus)
• How SOC 2 Type II Compliance Can Improve the Patient Experience (Loyal)
• How to Build a Better Digital Front Door for Healthcare (Lumeon)
• Take-out Pad Thai is good, but you know what’s better? Not working the weekend. (Lyniate)
• Post-COVID Rural Healthcare Outlook with Alan Morgan, CEO of NRHA (Part II) (Medhost)
• HIMSS CMIO Roundtable preview: How COVID-19 changed telehealth (Meditech)
• Setting Up an Effective Management Structure for Your PT Practice (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 6/30/21

Top News

Harris acquires physician practice and hospital software vendor Ingenious Med.

Webinars

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Providence Ventures invests in RxRevu one year after its affiliated health system in Seattle deployed the company’s SwiftRx real-time prescription benefit software.

Stone Point Capital acquires and combines Verisys and Aperture Health, creating a company focused on credentialing, enrollment, and provider data management. Aperture Health CEO Charlie Falcone will lead the new company.

Utilization management software and physician services company Xsolis secures a $75 million investment from Brighton Park Capital. The company recently hired Mandy Cruz (Sunquest) as VP of customer delivery and Tim Mueller (Optum) as VP of client success.

Healthcare governance, risk, and compliance solutions vendor RLDatix acquires UK-based Allocate Software,. which offers human capital management solutions.

Hospital IQ, an operational management software vendor based in Massachusetts, raises $25 million in a Series C funding round.

Nearly 500 One Medical employees (excluding physicians and other clinicians) announce their intent to unionize to address the mistreatment they say they’ve suffered during the pandemic. Their complaints include:

• The company’s mismanaged COVID-19 vaccine program, which wound up making national news after company whistleblowers alerted the media to the fact that ineligible patients – some with ties to leadership – received the vaccine ahead of eligible patients, resulting in a congressional investigation.
• Denial of hazard payment to frontline workers.
• The wrongful termination of 19 employees.
• Hiring unlicensed and/or inexperienced phlebotomists.
• Sub-par care for community members who couldn’t afford One Medical’s typical membership fees.

One Medical went public earlier this year, and acquired senior-focused primary care company Iora Health several weeks ago for $2 billion.

Sales

• CyncHealth, an HIE that serves seven Midwestern states, selects Lyniate’s Rhapsody software to improve participant onboarding, privacy, and security.
• Marshfield Clinic Health System (WI) will implement NowPow’s community services referral software.
• USMD Health System and WellMed (TX) select Leading Reach’s referral communication and care coordination software.
• The North Estonia Medical Centre joins the TriNetX network to increase its engagement with the international healthcare research community.
• UBC will use Surescripts Specialty Enrollment service in its biopharma support services that include REMS enrollment, clinical studies and registries, and patient support services.
• In Canada, six Ontario hospitals will implement a shared regional instance of Cerner Millennium.

People

Chuck Podesta (UConn Health) joins Renown Health as CIO.

Eron Kelly (Amazon Web Services) joins Inovalon as president.

Announcements and Implementations

The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation will use data normalization services from Intelligent Medical Objects to improve clinical data from its CureCloud and CoMMpass clinical trial programs.

A new KLAS report on security and privacy consulting services finds that Meditology, Clearwater, and CynergisTek top the list of companies that are most often viewed as partners by customers. The report notes that Impact Advisors has the highest overall performance score at 99.1 on a 100-point scale even though its security offering is less widely known. Clients of audit-focused firms such as Deloitte, EY, and PwC are more likely to seek less-prominent companies in search of  higher value or staff quality, with Deloitte customers in particular reporting problems with executive involvement, quality, delays, and its perceived use of a B-team of inexperienced employees

Other

Ireland’s health service facilities continue to operate under downtime procedures after a ransomware attack took out their computer systems six weeks ago. The health service estimates that recovery costs will exceed $600 million.

Sponsor Updates

• Cerner employees assemble 300 hygiene kits, prepare 100 dental bags, and stuff 2,000 envelopes for its Care Kits and Healthe Kids Screenings programs.
• Dina CEO Ashish Shah will speak at the Home Care 100 Leadership Conference June 30.
• Lumeon publishes “The Future of Digital Transformation in Healthcare Report 2021.”
• Surescripts announces that last year more than 745,000 individuals and organizations used its Clinical Direct Messaging to improve transitions of care, send immunization notifications, coordinate medication management efforts and achieve federal incentives requiring the use of secure electronic messaging.

Blog Posts

• Close the gaps between your claims data, insights and actions (Ability Network)
• Best Practices for Epic Analysts – and Their HCOs (Bluetree)
• Care Coordination and Behavioral Health: A Q&A with Vertava Health’s Jordan Cruz (CarePort)
• A Pandemic Melts Traditional Healthcare Silos, Shining a Light on How to Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity (CentralLogic)
• Technology and Data Security Risks In Healthcare’s Remote-Driven Work Environment (Vyne Medical)
• How to Add an Additional Revenue Stream for Your Practice with Chronic Care Management (ChartSpan)
• 3 Ways New Interoperability Regulations Will Impact Payer-Provider Collaboration (Collective Medical)
• Physician’s Time – A Critical Asset (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• Why Move Your Analytics to the Cloud? (Dimensional Insight)
• Dermatology Made Easier This Summer (EClinicalWorks)
• Healthcare organizations need a data breach response plan (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/28/21

Top News

Health Catalyst will acquire patient engagement technology vendor Twistle, which it says will allow it to offer a comprehensive population health management solution to healthcare providers and life sciences companies.

SEC filings indicate that Health Catalyst will pay up to $170 million for Twistle, which has $8 million in annual revenue and will lose an expected $3 million in 2022.

Reader Comments

From William Pay: “Re: Doxo. Our hospital is getting complaints from patients about Doxo. The consumer bill pay network is paying for Google search results for specific hospital names.” Doxo came up in the top handful of my Google results for some randomly chosen hospital names plus “online bill pay.” The link leads to specific webpages that Doxo has created for those hospitals. Each hospital’s Doxo page clearly says that Doxo has no connection to that hospital. Doxo has generated 185 complaints on the Better Business Bureau website, quite a few of them from people who had problems with fees or delayed payment resulting from their use of Doxo to pay their hospital bills. Several business and city government websites have warned their customers against using Doxo, with some of them directly calling Doxo a scam.

From Informatics MD: “Re: Epic Sepsis Model. The published work is important and highlights the need for internal validation, but their experience is not shared by our institution or others we’ve interfaced with since. The implication is that health systems implemented the model without validation or careful oversight. We validated it in a unique, limited setting (the ED) and found its performance to be acceptable enough to proceed with cautious implementation through a controlled quality improvement intervention. Our results are forthcoming, although we can’t discuss them yet due to standard journal embargo policy.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Personal connections enabled half of poll respondents to get their present jobs.

New poll to your right or here: Should companies pay remote workers based on their local cost of living?

Webinars

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares of Doximity closed at $55.98 on Friday, valuing the physician social network platform vendor at $10 billion. The company booked $207 million in revenue and $50 million in net income in the latest fiscal year. CEO Jeff Tangney has beneficial ownership of $3 billion worth of shares.

Announcements and Implementations

HIMSS announces that Dwight Schrute from “The Office” (actor Rainn Wilson) will keynote at HIMSS21. HIMSS says he will deliver a hilarious, insightful talk full of anecdotes and warmth.

Government and Politics

Britain’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock resigns after a tabloid publishes photos of him kissing a health advisor-lobbyist in early May before indoor cross-household contact was allowed under national COVID-19 restrictions. He and the advisor, who he appointed, are married to others. The government is investigating whether the photos were intentionally leaked. Hancock’s replacement will be former Chancellor and Home Secretary Sajid David. 

Other

UF Health (FL) restores its EHR at its Leesburg and The Villages campuses after nearly a month of ransomware-caused downtime.

Sponsor Updates

• Divurgent launches a Customer Experience Program focused on creating additional value for its clients before, during, and after an engagement.
• Vocera announces that its solutions are used in six out of 10 children’s hospitals included in the latest US News & World Report honor roll.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Record Retrieval Made Easy with Prisma.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT adds The University of Texas at San Antonio Alumni Association to its Optimum CareerPath apprenticeship program.
• Summit Healthcare publishes a new client use case, “Cody Regional Health Enlists Summit Healthcare’s Integration Services to Support Epic Migration.”
• EY announces that Protenus co-founder and CEO Nick Culbertson is an Entrepreneur of the Year 2021 Mid-Atlanta Award finalist.
• Parity.org includes Quil Health on its 2021 Best Companies for Women to Advance list.
• Ascom expands its Unite software ecosystem with the addition of the new Unite Collaborate communication application.
• Twistle publishes a new case study, “ChristianaCare: Improving Detection and Management of Postpartum Hypertension.
• Well Health receives a Rising Star Award as part of the 2020-2021 South Coast Business & Technology Awards.
• Vyne Medical releases a new podcast, “The New Era of Patient Access and Revenue Cycle.”

Blog Posts

• Automating Clinical Workflows with AI (Nuance)
• #Innovate4Outcomes: Expanding Professional Healthcare Communities for Innovative Collaboration (OptimizeRx)
• Keeping Us Productive, Safe, and Supported: Enterprise IT (Netsmart)
• Healthcare Technology Consumers Wan to Use After the Pandemic (PatientBond)
• Pivot Point Consulting Celebrates 10 Years: 10 Things We’ve Learned (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Positive Takeaways from 2020 – Empathy, Understanding, and Flexibility (Summit Healthcare)
• Gen Z Has Arrived, What Does It Mean for Telehealth? (PMD)
• Banner Health’s Three Innovative Supply Chain Strategies During COVID-19 (Premier)
• The Key to Denial Management in Healthcare: Intervene on the Front End (RCxRules)
• Clear Communication Benefits Both Patients and Providers (RxRevu)
• Using Telehealth to Enhance Consumers’ Overall Health Experience (SOC Telemed)
• Identifying and Removing Communication Barriers in Healthcare Experiences (Avtex)
• Connect 21: In person or virtual – we’re here for you (Spok)
• Network Upgrades in the Name of Patient Safety (Surescripts)
• The ultimate guide to customer satisfaction (Talkdesk)
• What’s Old is New Again: Custom Development and Integration in a Post-EHR World (Tegria)
• Lessons from ISPOR 2021: The Importance of Real-World Data and Real-World Evidence in Chronic Disease Research and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic (TriNetX)
• The future of Medicare Advantage: What providers need to know (Waystar)
• Breaking News: The CDC Recommends Rehab Therapy for Patients with Long COVID (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 6/25/21

Top News

Shares in Doximity, which set an IPO share price of $26 versus the expected range of $20 to 23, close at $53.00 on their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, valuing the physician network vendor at $7 billion. 

Reader Comments

From Muumuu Summer: “Re: Epic. Are you hearing that they seem to be losing more employees than usual? It seems like they are bringing back a previous break-the-glass strategy by having senior people cover open positions until they can be filled, which can leave clients without a permanent person for months.” Epic clients are welcome to report their experience.

From Watcher of the Data: “Re: Avaneer and blockchain. You are dead right about this. The most amusing part of this is that blockchain won’t ‘solve’ the interoperability problem – it can become useful only once the problem has been solved.”

From Percolator: “Re: Epic’s sepsis model. Cerner has a free one that gets little use, and the company has had trouble selling models for other conditions. Every condition needs to be mapped to hospital work flow – who do you alert and how, and what is the recipient supposed to do? These models add little incremental value because (a) doctors are already very good at detecting sepsis and starting antibiotics, and (b) 90% of sepsis is community acquired before the patient is admitted. ‘Watch this patient more closely’ is not worth much, especially if doctors and nurses already suspect sepsis.” Thanks. I’ve removed identifying information since I wasn’t sure this comment was intended for public display.

From Ossify: “Re: Epic’s sepsis model. Why should anyone care what the algorithm does as long as it works?” You wouldn’t want to harm someone, either by overtreating or undertreating, because a software model was trained on a bunch of data and “learned” from facts that are clearly irrelevant or not universally applicable. Example: Epic developed a patient no-show model awhile back that incorporated the patient’s religion and body mass index in predicting whether they would show up for appointments, and researchers found that removing those features didn’t reduce the model’s predictive powers but eliminated some inequity issues. Did Epic really think those factors were relevant, or was their data science knowledge insufficient? Then there’s the “what do we do with this” issue – should appointments be double-booked in case those patients really do skip their appointments (and what happens if they don’t?) or perhaps could the information be less invasively and more constructively used to send reminders or to understand that particular patient’s possible issues with venue location, transportation, or available hours that could be resolved by suggesting a different location? AI is amazing for being able to detect data patterns that humans haven’t, but if pitched to replace or even enhance expert judgment, it’s the customer’s job to make sure that the algorithms work in their particular situation. I’m not sure the average health system has the expertise to make those evaluations, so that’s why outside review is a reasonable recommendation.

From Bagna Cauda: “Re: mental health apps. Which ones are best?” I’m skeptical that any of them accomplish much given the lack of peer-reviewed studies on their outcomes. FDA seems to lack interest in holding their developers accountable even when they are clearly being pitched for use in medical or psychological situations. It doesn’t help that psychological counseling itself may have outcomes that are hard to prove. Lastly, the nature of these behavioral health app companies is that they are pandering to investors who demand fast growth Silicon Valley style, which means their customers will have minimal human involvement and instead will interact with scalable, cookie cutter technology that offers the opposite of the human interaction that many people crave. It also seems that some vendors expect users to stop paying once the limited value of the app becomes clear, so they refocus on selling to employers and insurers (healthcare excels at separating the people who consume a service from those who pay for it).

Webinars

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Providence-owned Tegria acquires healthcare AI vendor KenSci.

Subscription-based opioid use disorder virtual care vendor Bicycle Health raises $27 million in a Series A funding round.

National emergency medical services provider Priority Ambulance acquires software vendor Randseco, which offers the StatCall digital patient logistics solution that supports information exchange among ambulances, hospitals, payers, and non-medical transportation services.

CitiusTech acquires Pittsburgh-based payment technology consulting firm SDLC Partners. 

Sales

• The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston engages ReMedi Health Solutions to offer personalization training for 2,000 clinicians in 18 specialties as it implements Epic. The company also provided an AI-powered virtual assistant for workflow help and tipsheets.

People

Healthcare IT Leaders hires Patrick Dougherty (Allscripts) as CTO.

Pallav Sharda, MBBS, MBA, MMI (Google) joins employer bundled health services platform vendor Carrum Health as chief product officer. 

Well Health hires John Knotwell, MBA (Get Bridge) as chief revenue officer and Marissa Morrison (Foursquare) as VP of people.

Sheeza Hussain (Hillrom) joins remote patient monitoring technology vendor Bifourmis as chief commercial officer.

RCM services vendor Kemberton names Deanna Gray (Millennia) as SVP of customer success.

Peter Arduini (Integra LifeSciences) is named president and CEO of GE Healthcare, effective January 3, 2022.

Virtual-first urgent care and primary care clinic HealthTap promotes co-founder and COO Sean Mehra, MBA to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthcare Triangle releases DataEZ, a cloud-based analytics service that that can manage large quantities of data, including real-world data from remote monitoring, digital health services, and clinical trials.

Medical imaging software vendor Novarad announces GA of a software-only version of its CryptoChart image sharing product that uses a QR code to access the cloud-based information.

Rehabilitation therapy platform vendor WebPT recaps its recent accomplishments – 20,000 clinic customers and a 40% market share, release of its Digital Patient Intake tool, key leadership appointments, and launch of an integrated virtual visit solution.

WellSky-owned CarePort announces a care coordination solution for ambulatory providers, which will allow them to connect patients to home- and community-based organizations directly from their EHR and to maintain two-way communication during the referral process.

3M will establish a Digital Science Community in Dublin, Ireland, employing 100 people to do R&D work for its HIS division.

MGMA and WhiteSpace Health release MGMA DataDiscovery, a physician practice performance analytics tool for medical groups.

Allscripts-owned Veradigm and pharma contract research organization PRA Health Sciences develop an EHR-based clinical research network that uses Veradigm’s StudySource platform. 

Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women launches PeriWatch Vigilance in Malawi, with the fetal monitoring system being provided at no charge by PeriGen.

Omny Health develops a de-identified EHR data repository for dermatologic pharma research, offering the data of 7.5 million patients that was collected from 1,000 dermatology providers. The company announced GA of its anonymized data research platform in early May. Co-founder and CEO Mitesh Rao, MD, MS was Stanford Health Care’s chief patient safety officer through 2017 and remains an emergency medicine professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Other

England’s NHS publishes a draft data strategy that outlines NHSX’s use of data to give patients better access and control, to allow systems to share records, and to support research. It calls for the NHS app to allow patients to review test results, medication lists, procedures, and care plans and to be able to manage appointments, refill prescriptions and contact health and care staff. NHS also responded to concerns about its data-sharing plans by committing to publish a health data transparency statement by 2022.

Epic spokesperson Barbara Hernandez responds to the study in which Michigan Medicine researchers found that its sepsis alerting tool performed poorly, leading the authors to urge health systems to review the inner workings and past performance of such algorithms before using them in patient care. Epic’s points:

• Customers have access to the full model, its formulas, and its accuracy measurements, all of which are published on Epic’s UserWeb.
• The authors used a hypothetical approach that did not consider the analysis and tuning that is required before real-world deployment.
• The tool has helped clinicians provide life-saving interventions to thousands of patients that might have been missed otherwise.
• Michigan Medicine provided a positive review of the system in a UGM presentation in describing how pediatric patients are screened within two minutes of developing symptoms. 

Meanwhile, one of the authors of the Epic Sepsis Model article that was published in JAMA Internal Medicine – nephrologist, assistant professor, and machine learning lab director Karandeep Singh, MD, MMSc of University of Michigan Medical School – provides further information via Twitter:

• The authors ruled out configuration and mapping errors that often create low data AUCs (area under the curve). Epic’s AUCs were much higher in its own sensitivity analysis.
• Singh notes that AUC is driven by two factors – the method of calculation (which was not a factor in their study) and the outcomes being considered (which was significantly different). Epic defines sepsis as presence of an ICD-10 code whose usage varies so much among hospitals that nearly nobody trusts it, including CDC and CMS, which don’t rely on the code to track sepsis or measure sepsis outcomes, respectively. The authors used the criteria that UM sepsis committee developed for quality measures tracking, which is a composite of the CDC and CMS definitions.
• Singh raises the possibility that Epic’s model may infer sepsis from the ordering of sepsis-related medications, with the model’s data “leakage” making it look better than it really is.
• Epic’s model identified only a tiny percentage of patients that clinicians would have otherwise missed.
• Singh concludes that UM is using the model as part of a broader sepsis intervention that includes frequent nursing checks, but will be revisiting the model’s usage.
• Singh’s recommendations to Epic, which he presented to its data science team in April, include releasing its models publicly for independent review as Cerner has done, increasing the transparency of the model’s coefficients and modeling code, and making it easier for Epic customers to run competing open models instead of limiting them to those offered by the company as “a walled-garden app store.”  

Vanderbilt University Medical Center informatics professor and department chair Kevin Johnson, MD, MS posts “Living Through Going Live,” a video recap of VUMC’s 2017 go-live on Epic.

Sponsor Updates

• Newfire Global Partners offers its team members an interoffice exchange program, such as employees from its Ukraine office working and culture-exploring on Croatia.
• Users rate Halo Health the top clinical communication and collaboration platform in G2’s latest “Clinical Communication and Collaboration Grid Report.”
• Health Data Movers publishes a new client story, “Data Conversion for Oncology EHR to Epic.”
• InterSystems announces the latest release of its Iris data platform, which includes adaptive analytics capabilities and additional SQL extensions for analytics to improve the process of implementing an enterprise data fabric architecture.
• Jvion will present at the Home Care 100 Leadership Conference June 27-30 in Marco Island, FL.
• Ellkay joins the Active Archive Alliance.
• CHIME President and CEO Russ Branzell, MBA interviews National Coordinator Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP at the summer forum.
• Nordic and the American Medical Association publish a white paper titled “2021 E/M Transition: How Organizations Are Moving Forward Successfully.”
• Mental health patients at Citizens Memorial Hospital have chosen virtual care via Meditech.
• Everest Group recognizes NTT Data as a Leader in its SAP Services PEAK Matrix Report.

Blog Posts

• Defining the Opportunity Window for Managing Blood Glucose Levels in Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients – And How to Meet It (Glytec)
• Turning Data Into Actionable Insight: How AI is Making a Difference (Healthcare Triangle)
• Observations of High-pressure and Rapid Shallow Breathing in Mechanically Ventilated COVID-19 Patients: An Interim Assessment (Capsule)
• How SOC 2 Type II Compliance Can Improve the Patient Experience (Loyal)
• Five Ways Activity-Based Costing Can Maximize Earnings (Health Catalyst)
• International considerations for digital health passes (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• The Evolution of Healthcare Delivery Models (Avtex)
• SIIM 2021 | Visage’s Top Five (Visage)
• Why Patient Engagement is Failing Us – And What You Should Do (Lumeon)
• 3 paths payers can take to actualize value from the CMS interoperability rules (Lyniate)
• How to Ensure a Healthy Relationship with Your Epic Community Connect Partner (Impact Advisors)
• Post-COVID Rural Healthcare Outlook with Alan Morgan, CEO of NRHA (Part 1) (Medhost)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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News 6/23/21

Top News

The Epic Sepsis Model predicts sepsis poorly while flooding clinicians with inappropriate alerts, a Michigan Medicine study concludes.

The authors note that while hundreds of hospitals are using the Epic-distributed model, the company has divulged little about its methods or its real-world performance.

They also note that at UM, clinicians would have needed to investigate 109 Epic-flagged patients to find one that required sepsis intervention.

The article warns of “an underbelly of confidential, non-peer-reviewed model performance documents that may not accurately reflect real-world model performance.”

An accompanying JAMA Internal Medicine editorial warns that Epic’s model was developed in just three US health systems six years ago and health systems should validate and recalibrate such models before implementing them. They draw the parallel that just as clinician decision support rules are reviewed by local clinicians before they are offered for use in patient care, local data scientists should evaluate any algorithms that were developed elsewhere.

Reader Comments

From Map Bucks: “Re: pay for remote work. My health IT employer is considering adjusting pay to local conditions for those who work remotely (the company is in an expensive metro area). Does this seem OK?” It’s a complex issue. The black-and-white side of me says that companies should pay based on the job, not where the worker sits while performing it. A Dallas company might not be able to hire someone from the Bay area for what it pays locally, but that candidate always has the option to move to Texas. Companies shouldn’t pay more just because an employee chooses a long commute, a more expensive house, or to live across the state line where it costs more – that seems to be a slight creep toward socialism, as in “you need to give me a raise to perform the same work because our new child is costing us more.” I would also not put it past some employees to fake their residence to earn more, such as borrowing a relative’s New York City address. Perhaps the stickiest issue is reducing compensation for someone who leaves an expensive metro, although that doesn’t make sense to me. My hot take is that the job is worth what it’s worth and the employee is free to live wherever they want but also with the expectation that their voluntary choice doesn’t affect their paycheck.

From D.V. Wormer: “Re: Avaneer. Which problem of interoperability can blockchain really solve?” Dean Wormer, instead of being a downer who undermines the work of roomfuls of vendor marketing people, just mindlessly accept that the US healthcare system lags the civilized world in accessibility, outcomes, and cost only because we don’t use enough AI, blockchain, and robotic process automation (try not to notice that those many countries who outperform us also don’t use it and that the folks touting those technologies are the same ones who sell it). IBM is involved in Avaneer, which isn’t a strong indicator of commitment, and so far the only customers I’ve seen mentioned are also Avaneer investors. Blockchain is a hammer looking for nails that never seem to get pounded, and while healthcare has a ton of inefficiency and lack of interoperability (weren’t government-subsidized EHRs and HIEs supposed to fix those problems?), the historic safe bet is to be skeptical of companies that pre-profess their technology’s ability make it better. I’ve been in health IT enough to skew cynical, so I’ll invite more glass-half-fullers to weigh in. I’ll be as interested as the next person to see hard data from an Avaneer-using health system that saves a ton of money and passes those savings along to patients (if for no other reason, because that has never happened in our profit-motivated system).

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

NextGen Healthcare announces that President and CEO Rusty Frantz will leave under a “mutual separation” agreement that is effective immediately. He has also left the company’s board. Frantz did not indicate the reason for his departure, but he said in a statement that leaving the company will allow him to “put 100% of my focus on my most important priority – my family.” The company has launched a search for his replacement. Frantz took the role in June 2015, with NXGN share price increasing 5% in that time versus the Nasdaq’s 181% gain.

Cleerly, which applies AI to coronary imaging to predict heart attacks, launches itself with a $43 million Series B funding round. Founder and CEO James Min, MD was a professor of radiology and medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, where the company’s technology was developed.

RCM services vendor Services Solutions Group, formerly the services division of NThrive, renames itself to Savista.

Sales

• Arkansas Pediatric Clinic chooses Emerge data conversion and integration solutions for its migration to Athenahealth.
• FirstLight Home care joins Dina’s digital home care coordination network.
• The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center will offer Type 2 diabetes patients access to Teladoc Health’s Livongo for Diabetes Program.

People

Industry long-timer Tim Knoll, MBA (PatientSafe Solutions) joins healthcare staff safety technology vendor Strongline as VP of sales.

Glytec hires Nausheen Moulana, MBA, MSEE (Kyruus) as CTO.

Ascend Medical hires Michael Justice, MBA (Trinisys) as CTO.

Meera Kanhouwa, MD, MHA (Deloitte) joins Ernst & Young Global Consulting Services as executive director in digital health. Her experience includes 10 years as a US Army ED physician with deployment during Operation Desert Storm.

Announcements and Implementations

Amazon launches AWS Healthcare Accelerator, a four-week virtual program for 10 startups that will learn about using AWS to develop healthcare solutions.

A new KLAS report on population health management technology vendors finds that Arcadia, Epic, and Innovaccer stand out.

Government and Politics

A federal appeals court rejects Stanford Healthcare’s argument in a $500 million Medicare billing fraud case involving records Epic-enabled upcoding and unbundling of charges.The complaint says that Stanford doubled its Medicare revenues without increasing its expenses, which the complaint says could only be done by creative coding.

In Australia’s New South Wales, NSW Health will receive $105 million from the state’s digital services initiative for the first phase of its EHR replacement project, with additional funds budgeted from its COVID-19 relief package to expand telehealth and to improve integration between ambulance services and hospital EDs.

Other

KHN notes that big US health systems are opening medical facilities in other countries, such as Cleveland Clinic spending $1 billion to open a clinic across the street from London’s Buckingham Palace Garden that will offer only profitable elective surgeries and treatments in hopes of attracting American expatriates and rich Europeans. The article questions why those systems, which don’t pay taxes, are allowed to pursue such aggressive international business moves.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Growth Partners advised Medullan on its sale to ZS.
• University of Texas as San Antonio joins Optimum Healthcare IT’s healthcare IT apprenticeship program.
• Premier announces the 2021 winners of its Breakthrough Awards.
• Goliath Technologies offers a free Citrix Health Check.
• KLAS recognizes Arcadia as a leader in market energy and customer experience in its “2021 Population Health Management Overview” report.
• TeleConsult Europe selects enterprise imaging from Agfa HealthCare.
• Azara Healthcare names George McGovern (MedTouch) VP of finance and Charlene Grasso (Cambridge Consultants) director of HR.
• The local news profiles CareSignal’s partnership with Americares and the Greater Hickory Cooperative Christina Ministry to serve vulnerable populations.
• Cerner shares a new client achievement, “South Miami-Dade hospital reaches HIMSS Stage 6, 7 and wins Enterprise Davies Award in same year.”
• Ellkay will exhibit at the virtual AHIP Institute & Expo June 22-24.

The following HIStalk sponsors have been recognized in Black Book’s latest customer satisfaction ranking of financial software solutions:

• Enterprise patient identifier solutions – Experian Health
• Patient payment technology – Waystar
• Revenue recovery & accounts receivables solutions – Change Healthcare
• Enterprise resource planning – Symplr API Healthcare
• Hospital claims management systems – Experian Health

Blog Posts

• Scoring well in quality measures has just become more difficult (AdvancedMD)
• KLAS Research: Arcadia Stands Out Among Peers in Delivering Comprehensive Population Health Management Out-Of-The-Box Functionality (Arcadia)
• Glassdoor Names Jeremy Schwach a Top CEO (Bluetree)
• Leading Through Change in Healthcare Technology Management (CereCore)
• Want to Succeed at Value-Based Care? Launch a Chronic Care Management Program (ChartSpan)
• The Key to Denial Management in Healthcare: Intervene on the Front End (RCxRules)
• Childbirth: A Mother’s Joy and Too Many Others’ Nightmare (Obix Perinatal Data System, developed by Clinical Computer Systems)
• Campus Update: Immersing Ourselves in Local Art (CoverMyMeds)
• Learn How Analytics Can Help Pinpoint Length of Stay Opportunities (Dimensional Insight)
• Improving Patient Safety Series: Data Truncation and Special Characters (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
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Monday Morning Update 6/21/21

Top News

Physician network operator Doximity files documents for an IPO that will value the company at $4 billion.

The company reported $207 million in revenue in its most recent year, with $50 million in net income.

CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Tangney, MBA, who also co-founded Epocrates, controls 60% of company shares, a stake that will likely be valued at over $2 billion.

Reader Comments

From Joel Klein: “Re: University of Maryland Capital Region Medical Center. It opened on June 12, relocating all patients who were at Prince George’s Hospital Center, which will close. Essentially, this was an Epic go live plus a simultaneous hospital move. A week in, things are fairly stable. Thanks as always for doing this blog. Super helpful.” Congratulations to the team there and to Joel, who is SVP/CIO at University of Maryland Medical System and a practicing ED physician. UM Capital Regional Medical Center is in Largo, MD and replaces the 75-year-old Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly, MD, which I believe was running Cerner.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Many poll respondents think technology has improved healthcare mostly in the areas of consumer convenience, accessibility, and safety, but don’t think it has helped in important outcomes areas.

New poll to your right or here: Which action was most responsible for your getting the job you hold now? Poll choices are limited by practicality, so feel free to add a poll comment if your hiring was by other means.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Sales

• Post-acute care services provider Charter Healthcare chooses Netsmart’s MyUnity EHR along with its solutions for electronic visit verification and referrals. 

People

San Joaquin County, VA promotes Mark Thomas, MBA (San Joaquin General Hospital) to county CIO.

Julie Bastien, MBA (Press Ganey) joins EVideon Health as VP of marketing.

Industry long-timer Mike Ruotolo (Office Practicum) joins prescribing technology vendor TroyRx as VP of sales.

Lisa Wild, MA (Kaiser Permanent) joins Ellkay as VP of payer market sales.

Primary care doctor and physician informatician Kennedy Ganti, MD is installed as president of the Medical Society of New Jersey. He is also president-elect of New Jersey HIMSS.

Announcements and Implementations

California launches its digital COVID-19 vaccination record system, built on the open source SMART Health Card Framework of VCI, whose members include Cerner, Epic, Meditech, Allscripts, HIMSS, and The Sequoia Project.

Sweden’s Region Västernorrland goes live on Sectra imaging.

Government and Politics

A VA OIG report finds that VA’s use of community care staff to scan patient records that are created by non-VA providers introduces errors due to a lack of standardized procedures, insufficient training, and lack of quality checks. The small review of records from seven VA facilities found that 44% of scanned mental health records contained errors that were caused by inaccurate document titles, indexing records to the wrong referral or veteran, and duplicate record entry.

ONC invites colleges and universities to apply for its public health IT workforce program, supported by $80 million in American Rescue Plan funds. ONC expects the program to train 4,000 people from underserved communities over four years.

Delegates at the American Medical Association Special Meeting call for doctors to be given more flexibility if they believe that the release of a patient’s health information – under ONC’s Cures Act information blocking requirements – would cause physical, mental, or emotional harm. They are especially concerned about doctors releasing the reproductive health, mental health, or substance abuse information of adolescents to parents or proxies as the regulation requires.

Privacy and Security

ED doctors at Humber River Hospital in Toronto, Canada urge hospital leadership to close the ED until IT systems are restored from a June 13 ransomware attack. The ED has gone to paper records and patients are experiencing long delays. The hospital opened in 2015 as North America’s first all-digital hospital and upgraded to Meditech Expanse in 2019.

St. Joseph’s / Candler (GA) is hit by a ransomware attack Thursday, with systems not yet recovered.

Other

The local paper profiles Peoria, IL-based OSF OnCall Digital Health, whose 800 employees operate a “hospital without walls” for OSF HealthCare and offer services to other organizations.

Sponsor Updates

• Hillrom posts an interview with SVP and Patient Support Systems President Paul Johnson, MBA on the company’s digital health vision.
• Wolters Kluwer Health offers Ovid users access to OrthoEvidence, an evidence-based summary provider for orthopedic specialists, surgeons, nurses, medical residents, and students.
• OptimizeRx discusses its 2021 strategic operating plan, which has been aligned with the pharma industry’s market-sizing opportunity across fast-growing specialty therapeutic areas.
• Well Health names Marissa Morrison (Foursquare) VP of people.
• PatientPing publishes a new use case spotlight, “How Eleanor Health utilizes PatientPing’s real-time ADT notifications to proactively and promptly engage members and coordinate care.”
• Premier honors with Community Enhancement Collaboration, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting food insecurity, with its annual Monroe E. Trout Premier Cares Award and a $100,000 cash prize.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “Crashing Primary Care and Dialysis with Dr. Andrew Schutzbank.”
• Spirion expands its Sensitive Data Platform portfolio with new SaaS solution offerings that simplify the protection of sensitive data across the enterprise.

Blog Posts

• Decoding Digital Health: Leverage Digital Health to Drive Improved Patient Outcomes and Commercial Success (OptimizeRx)
• Achieving Improved Patient Care Through Adversity: Hospice of Washington County and Care Synergy Discuss Challenge and Solution (Netsmart)
• Primary care is an essential part of a usable healthcare system (Nordic)
• Enhancing Your Find-a-Doc Solution to Increase Patient Volume and Loyalty (PatientBond)
• What are Comparative Billing Reports? (PMD)
• How to Solve Gaps in Care and Recover Patient Volume (Relatient)
• Informed and Unburdened: A Future System That Centers Patients on a Budget (Surescripts)
• How chatbots are changing – and improving – customer service (Talkdesk)
• Lessons from ISPOR 2021: The Increasing Acceptance of Real-World Data and Real-World Evidence in Regulatory Decision Making (TriNetX)
• 3 Top Benefits of Defining ROI for Patient Engagement (Twistle)
• How Video Conferencing is Improving Patient and Family Communication (Vocera)
• What Role Do Key Performance Indicators Play in a Practice, and Which Ones Should PTs Care About? (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 6/18/21

Top News

Digital health developer platform vendor Zus Health, founded by former Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, raises $34 million in a Series A funding round.

The company apparently abruptly changed its name from Zeus Health, which I noted a couple of weeks ago is already in use by a medical device investment company.

The press release explains that Zus is “pronounced Zoos like the father of Athena” although it declines to use the actual word “Zeus.”

Six of the company’s eight executives spent time at Athenahealth.

A lengthy Zus testimonial is provided by the CTO of Firefly Health, whose executive chairman is Jonathan Bush.

Reader Comments

From End Gamer: “Re: Cerner. I think we ex-Cerner executives have a fair bit of insight due to our deep network and rapid information exchange. The company’s first failure was the drag on leadership when Neal was sick – an interim CEO should have been named within six months. In the subsequent CEO search, at least two candidates turned the job down before Brent arrived. The Board absolutely dropped the ball here. As to the future, I don’t think it matters who gets the job. The ship has taken on too much water and Epic is beating the daylights out of Cerner in the US (and soon overseas). The all-in bet on Federal programs has committed Cerner’s IP org to the detriment of the client base. I would expect that someone that wants to get big in healthcare could buy the company, but regardless, the Cerner that we were part of is gone, as are its traditions, its passion, and its potential.” I would opine that one thing that Cerner did right with Brent’s hiring was attempting to diversify into new areas – such as data sales and new federal business – in recognizing that the Epic juggernaut was going to be hard to stop, especially as Cerner was losing clients because of its revenue cycle fumbling. I haven’t seen product line revenue and contribution breakouts, so I don’t know if Cerner is still mostly an EHR vendor or its growth has significantly shifted to areas where Epic doesn’t compete.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors who are exhibiting at or attending HIMSS21 – tell me about your participation by July 23 and I’ll include your company in my HIMSS guide.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Wall Street Journal says that Apple’s health ambitions mostly haven’t panned out, although the article’s sources don’t seem solid. Apple planned to develop its own primary care service that would be powered by wearables data, but has since returned to its focus on selling hardware, particularly the Apple Watch. Insiders question the quality of the data generated by its clinics to guide product development, including the HealthHabit health coaching app, which has delivered poor user engagement among Apple employer testers. Company executives say data shows that HealthHabit improves blood pressure in 91% of its hypertensive users, while competing programs Hello Heart and Livongo deliver in the 30% improvement range, leading insiders to worry that Apple’s results are being overstated based on faulty data.

Google Health reportedly reduces headcount by at least 20% in a reorganization in which 170 employees have been moved to the Fitbit and Search product teams.

KHN reports that publicly traded hospital chain HCA is turning many of its hospitals into trauma centers, taking advantage of the ability to bill ED patients an “activation fees” of up to $50,000 each time the trauma team is assembled, sometimes when a routine ED visit is all that was needed. One man’s arm gash was billed at $52,000 instead of a reasonable $3,500. HCA’s activation fee in Idaho is $29,000 versus the state average non-HCA activation charge of $2,500.

Sales

• Aspen Valley Hospital will implement Epic as the board approves the $15.4 million expense to replace Meditech. The 25-bed hospital’s previous agreement with University of Colorado Health for a Community Connect fell through, but it says that Epic no longer requires rural hospitals to partner with a larger health system.
• Community Health Network will implement advance care planning document sharing from Vynca.

People

Virtual reality clinical training vendor Health Scholars hires Scott Johnson (CirrusMD) as CEO.

Gregg Shibata (Echo Health Ventures) joins Quil as VP of payer market development.

IdentifyIOT hires Jeff Powell as VP of healthcare sales.

Shannon Freiermuth (DrFirst) joins Change Healthcare as VP of strategic clients.

Industry long-timer John Goodrow, MBA (S&P Consultants) died Monday at 51.

Announcements and Implementations

Vyne Medical launches the cloud-based Refyne platform, whose initial capability is electronically transmitting supporting provider documentation in CMS’s Electronic Submission of Medical Documentation and Electronic Medical Documentation Request initiatives.

People who received COVID-19 vaccine from Walmart or Sam’s Club will be provided with a digital copy of their record using Health Pass by Clear.

Major Health Partners (IN) goes live with Meditech Expanse Patient Care as an early adopter.

Government and Politics

ONC publishes the Version 1.0 draft of the Project US@ Technical Specification, which hopes to create a unified specification for patient addresses that can also support patient record matching. The comment period will open soon. It is a surprisingly complex issue given the country’s language diversity, the imprecision of some addresses outside of urban areas, and the need to accommodate the different standards of Puerto Rico and the military.

A Defense Department MHS Genesis roundtable lists care improvements enabled by its Cerner implementation – real-time clinical decision support for newborns, improved tracking of service member health between duty station transfers, a reduction in visits for prescription management, and enhancing recruit readiness. The military says that the system improves care by standardizing workflows and processes.

Other

A Mayo Clinic study finds no association between COVID-19 vaccination and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis. Researchers used Nference’s AI software to review real-world evidence from several hundred thousand vaccinated patients, including lab results, unstructured clinical notes, and structured health records. Mayo and Nference launched Anumana in April 2021 to commercialize ECG analysis algorithms.

As just about everybody predicted, hospitals are declining to publish their insurer-negotiated prices as required by a federal law that took effect January 1, instead opting to pay the paltry $300 per day fine for failing to do so. Whoever came up with that fine amount must not have ever looked at a health system’s revenue.

An AMA Board of Trustees report finds that the top five EHRs don’t display drug ads, but it warns that such advertising should not be allowed at all in EHRs and electronic prescribing systems, citing abuses by Allscripts-owned Practice Fusion. The AMA House of Delegates changed its policy to require direct-to-prescriber EHR advertising to comply wiith AMA’s direct-to-consumer advertising guidelines. The policy also prohibits displaying brand name products first in drug lookups and encourages displaying the generic product first.

Sponsor Updates

• Premier recognizes Atrium Health with its Alliance Excellence Award for saving $100 million in supply chain costs and $140 million in clinical optimization savings using the PremierConnect cloud-based performance improvement platform.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new video, “EClinicalMessenger: Improving Healthcare Through Better Communications.”
• Arcadia announces that its Arcadia Analytics platform earned the highest ratings in the inaugural Cybersecurity Preparedness Evaluation from KLAS and Censinet.
• West Monroe expands its leadership team and promotes eight employees to partners.
• First Databank will exhibit at the NCPDP Annual Technology & Business Conference June 29-30 in Scottsdale.
• Halo Health publishes a new case study, “Improving Efficiency, Secure Communication at Thomas Hospital, Infirmary Health.”
• Imprivata receives a 2021 Fortress Cyber Security Award in the authentication and identity category from Business Intelligence Group.
• Infor will host its Inforum customer even November 9-11 in Las Vegas.

Blog Posts

• Why Patient Engagement Is Failing Us — and What You Should Do (Lumeon)
• How Regulatory Compliance Supports Optimal Patient Care and Higher Earnings (Health Catalyst)
• Attract More Patients with Health Education – 4 Ways to Up Your Online Game (Healthwise)
• Epic UGM 2021 Planning Guide: UGM is In-Person (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Preference cards 101: The key to maximizing OR utilization (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Optimizing Rural and Community Hospital IT Implementations During Times of Uncertainty (Medhost)
• Harnessing Healthcare’s Data Explosion with AI-based Natural Language Processing (Medicomp Systems)
• What to expect at Meditech’s 2021 Nurse Forum (Meditech)
• Measuring Employee Performance in Your Physical Therapy Practice (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 6/16/21

Top News

Ambulatory surgery center software vendor HST Pathways acquires patient price transparency vendor Clariti Health.

Reader Comments

From Forensic Bean Enumerator: “Re: the just-announced $200 million accelerated share repurchase of Allscripts. Remind me again what their PPP loan was and how many employees have been let go of late?” I’m too old school to be an investor today — where stock price is like a baseball card’s “value” in reflecting investor supply and demand rather than company profit, competitive position, and future prospects – but I’ll note that MDRX shares that were at $6 a year ago are now at $18, although longer-term holders haven’t fared nearly as well. I’m also not contemporary enough in my investment knowledge to see share buybacks as having anything to do with the company’s actual business or to link customer happiness with that of stock traders. That’s why Paul Black holds shares worth $30 million and I hold zero shares worth $0, raising the “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich” argument.

From End Gamer: “Re: Cerner. The most recent layoffs feel more final than earlier rounds, as long-time leaders in sales and IP have left. The company needed to make some changes post-Neal Patterson, but not this kind. Perhaps you could get some anonymous views from former Cerner leaders about what they see as the company’s best steps and outcomes.” I’m certainly willing to receive anonymous submissions, but I don’t know how much useful insight a former executive would have. Cerner certainly lost its Neal swagger and competitive fire under company man Brent, whose droning “new operating model” mantra resulted in CERN shares rising just 8% from the day he started until the day he announced he was leaving, eating the dust of the boring old Nasdaq index that jumped 92% in the same period. Let’s also not forget that the Cerner board chose Brent, who had never run a publicly traded company, and approved everything he did, showing little backbone in capitulating to an activist investor whose minor share ownership would have generated an appropriately colorful response from Neal. Former executives might have interesting ideas about what Cerner should do strategically, but really the company’s most important decision is choosing its third-ever CEO. As a large, publicly traded company, I would guess they will hire a boring corporate leader, maybe a retread from a different industry who knows how to make the numbers look good. Brent will become Cerner’s John Sculley, the forgotten guy who got Steve Jobs fired and then nearly ran the company into the ground as his dismal CEO replacement before he himself got the axe, although Brent’s problem was doing too little instead of doing actual harm and Neal Patterson won’t be returning to save the day like Steve did. The board made a big mistake in not promoting President Zane Burke to CEO, which seemed obvious even at the time. But to be fair, we cheap-seaters with 20-20 hindsight don’t know what Brent has been dealing with or whether anyone else would have done any better.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m not a big user of my old Google Assistant and Echo Dot smart speakers, but I wanted to play Spotify playlists at low volume in a couple of rooms where my Sonos speakers aren’t needed. My search was timely since Amazon just opened a sale on the Echo Dot at $50 for two units. The sound and capabilities are decent for a $25 device, although now I have to figure out what else it can do.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Private equity firm Berenson Capital acquires Interactive Digital Solutions, a video collaboration and telehealth software vendor known for its MedSitter patient-monitoring technology.

Release-of-information and clinical data interoperability vendor MRO acquires Figmd, a health data aggregation, analytics, and registry company based in Illinois. MRO acquired Cobius Healthcare Solutions, a reimbursement and compliance risk management technology company, earlier this year.

Bright Health, which sells Medicare Advantage insurance in 13 states with claims of technical capabilities, targets its IPO at a $14 billion valuation.

Sales

• Hartford HealthCare (CT) selects Upfront Healthcare’s Care Traffic Control patient engagement and communication software.
• Ozarks Healthcare (MO) will deploy patient e-signature technology from Access.
• Orthopedic Care Physician Network implements Emerge’s ChartScout and uses its EHR data conversion tools as it migrates to Athenahealth.

People

Tim Quigley (Baptist Health Care) joins CloudWave as chief client officer.

Former consultant David Sand, MD joins ZeOmega as chief medical officer.

Nordic names Paul Slaughter (Leidos) EVP of enterprise support services and promotes Ian Mamminga to EVP of managed services.

Behavioral health EHR vendor Kipu names Paul Joiner (Availity) CEO and Rick Pharr (WebPT) COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthcare Triangle announces GA of its new CloudEz software-as-a-service, giving organizations the ability to set up their own cloud work environments.

Medcare Hospitals & Medical Centres in the United Arab Emirates has implemented Capsule’s Medical Device Information Platform to connect its medical device ecosystem to its clinical information systems.

Talkdesk announces the launch of Healthcare Experience Cloud for Providers, contact center technology for the enterprise that coordinates and personalizes patient communications.

Beacon Health System (IN) adopts ProviderMatch software from Kyruus to better enable patients to find providers and schedule appointments.

Sponsor Updates

• Agfa HealthCare will present during the virtual UK Imaging & Oncology Congress Online through June 25.
• CarePort will exhibit at ACMA 2021 June 22-25 in Orlando.
• CareSignal shares the assessment of a post-operative opioid stewardship program using its electronic-based automated text and phone messaging platform in which over 80% of patients engaged with more than half of all messages.
• Experian Health VP Karly Rowe will present on SDOH at Reuters Digital Health 2021 June 16.
• The local news covers International Medical Center’s implementation of the InterSystems TrakCare EHR.
• Women’s Health Connecticut connects to the Connecticut Medical Society’s CTHealthLink, part of the Konza Health Network.
• Sectra expands its AI marketplace to include digital pathology apps.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Making the Most of EClinicalWorks Billing and RCM.”

Blog Posts

• How to optimize your clinical data for SNF surveys and PDPM reimbursement (Ability Network)
• Why EHRs Alone Cannot Improve Coordination of Care (Central Logic)
• “I still get flashes of that same excitement as when I was a kid creating my own stuff.” (ConnectiveRx)
• Finding Prescription Affordability Options Amid a Flood of Cards (CoverMyMeds)
• The ‘Last Mile’ in Education and Training (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Leveraging Data to Reduce Financial Impact from Provider Burnout (Divurgent)
• Epic UGM 2021 Planning Guide: UGM is In-Person (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• An Authoritative Voice for Healthcare Documentation (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/14/21

Top News

A federal court indicts the COO of Atlanta-area Internet of Things security vendor Securolytics, claiming that he launched a 2018 cyberattack against Gwinnett Medical Center (now Northside Hospital Gwinnett) for personal financial gain.

Vikas Singla allegedly disrupted the hospital’s phone service, obtained information from a digitizing device, and disrupted network printing for unspecified purposes.

Singla pleaded not guilty to 18 charges, was released on $20,000 bond, and will return to court June 23.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents are nearly universally in favor of implementing a national patient identifier, with the majority of those believing that its use should be mandatory.

New poll to your right or here, as suggested by a reader: Looking back five years, which aspects of healthcare have been significantly improved by technology?

Reminder: I’ll include HIStalk sponsors who are exhibiting at and/or attending HIMSS21 in my HIMSS guide if you submit your details. Meanwhile, It’s not even summer yet and Las Vegas will have daily highs in the 117-degree range for most of this week, to the point that motivational speakers could convene one of their BS firewalking rituals by just having participants take their shoes off and walk 20 feet on a Strip sidewalk.

It feels as though the industry is taking an actual summer break, as opposed to the never-ending virtual connections of 2020, given the absence of significant news over the weekend. Shockingly, I saw no new announcements of money-losing companies that I’ve never heard of being valued at billions of dollars, no eye-rollingly fawning articles describing how AI will disrupt healthcare, or non-experts seeking attention by claiming that Cerner or Meditech or some other company might be acquired by someone someday. It may be that everybody is saving their energy for HIMSS21, but I suspect that isn’t the case and instead we’re just enjoying a return to pre-pandemic summer life. At any rate, enjoy today’s minimal reading time since I have no incentive to dishonestly pad things out just to hold your attention.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Sales

• SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium goes live on Nuance Dragon Ambient Experience.

Announcements and Implementations

California will implement an electronic vaccination verification system “very shortly.” The state emphasizes that the unspecified system is not a vaccine passport because it will be offered only to private businesses who can decide for themselves how to use it, if at all.

Government and Politics

Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center (IL), a joint facility used by both the VA and DoD, will be the first test of interoperability between their respective Cerner implementations.

Sponsor Updates

• Waystar partners with career development nonprofit Inroads to launch a health IT internship program for local students.
• Healthwise has received seven Digital Health Awards for its patient education videos and content in the Health Information Resource Center’s 2021 spring competition.
• Netsmart VP & GM of CareGuidance AJ Peterson is included in the Kansas City Business Journal’s list of 2021 NextGen Leaders.
• Protenus publishes a new report, “2021 Diversion Digest: COVID-19 Conceals True Scope of Clinical Drug Diversion in 2020 as Incidents Left Undiscovered.”
• Talkdesk names Laura Butler (Workfront) chief human resources officer.
• Tegria publishes a new white paper, “Cloud-Based Managed Services Allow Healthcare Organizations to Do What They Do Best: Focus on Patient Care.”

Blog Posts

• Worrying About Being Sued – A Call to Action (Nuance)
• Polishing your portal to empower patients (Nordic)
• How Wearable Technologies are Creating New Clinical Trial Endpoints (PatientBond)
• Billions of $ in Funding for Public Health: 3 Strategies to Make the Most of It (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How Cyber Insurance Fits Into Your Cyber Security Posture (Fortified Health Security)
• How Can We Make Healthcare Billing Easier for Nephrologists? (PMD)
• How Updated Star Ratings Impact Your Hospital (Premier)
• 4 Ways to Improve Your Patient Communication Outreach (Twistle)
• Stretched to Their Limit, Doctors and Nurses Account for 67% of Drug Diversion in 2020 (Protenus)
• A Tale of Two Ransomware Attacks: Which Company Are You? (Pure Storage)
• How to Use HCC Analytics to Improve Provider Education and Point-of-Care HCC Capture (RCxRules)
• 6 Ways to Influence HCAHPS with Interactive Technology (Sonifi Health)
• PCI Data Discovery Tools: Is Your Organization Protecting Its Data? (Spirion)
• 6 things to know when purchasing on-call scheduling software (Spok)
• Enhancing the member experience with help plan fulfillment services (Krames)
• What is customer experience and why it matters in your contact center (Talkdesk)
• How Video Conferencing is Improving Patient and Family Communication (Vocera)
• 4 steps to getting the most out of your analytics (Waystar)
• 3 Reasons to Adopt a Team Treatment Systems in Your PT Clinic (WebPT)
• Are Self-Signed Certificates Hiding in Your Interface Engine? (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 6/11/21

Top News

Healthcare AI vendor Iodine Software acquires clinical data improvement software and services company ChartWise Medical Systems, which is the #1 ranked CDI vendor in “Best in KLAS.”

Iodine acquired physician query platform vendor Artifact Health on May 25

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Tegria. Tegria helps healthcare organizations of all sizes accelerate technological, clinical, and operational advances that enable people to live their healthiest lives. Based in Seattle with teams throughout the United States and internationally, Tegria is comprised of more than 3,000 strategists, technologists, service providers, and scientists dedicated to delivering value for customers. Founded by Providence, Tegria is committed to creating health for a better world. Thanks to Tegria for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a Tegria intro video I found on YouTube.

HIStalk sponsors: it’s time to collect information for my HIMSS21 guide, which is a viewable / downloadable summary of sponsor booth location, conference activities, and contact information  (example here). I will also list your company even if you aren’t exhibiting but will have someone available for onsite meetings. Submit your information to be included. Non-sponsors still have time to participate by signing up in the next few weeks.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner lays off what it says is “hundreds” of employees. Unverified workers posted on Reddit:

• Speculation of the total number let go ranges from 1,000 to 4,000. UPDATE: A Cerner spokesperson says the actual number is 500 employees of its 26,000.
• Some of those involved say they worked on the company’s DoD and VA projects, and at least one employee who claims to have been affected says their developer jobs are being sent offshore.
• One says that shared services engineering had a 22% workforce reduction, while another said that 15% of Healthe are gone.
• Others said that several VPs were let go.
• Several say that Cerner fired new hires in its development and technical academies.
• Some speculate that the layoffs are intended to boost profit to make a rumored acquisition of the company more attractive.

Population health management software vendor TCS Healthcare Technologies acquires DataSmart Solutions, which sells predictive risk analytics software.

Transcarent raises $58 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $98 million. Its CEO is former Livongo founder, chairman, and CEO Glen Tullman.

Patient privacy technology vendor Datavant will merge with Ciox Health, creating a patient data exchange business operating under the Datavant name that the companies say will generate $700 million in revenue and a valuation of $7 billion. Ciox CEO Pete McCabe will lead the business as CEO.

Healthcare business intelligence vendor Definitive Healthcare files IPO documents with the SEC.

Amazon has signed up several companies as customers of its Amazon Care telehealth service. The company is expanding the virtual portion of the service to all 50 states this summer, eventually followed by national availability of its mobile medic visits and two-hour prescription delivery.

Several insurers, Cleveland Clinic, IBM, and Sentara Healthcare invest in newly launched Avaneer Health, with JPMorgan health executive Stuart Hanson, MBA joining as CEO. The announcement describes the company with little detail:

Driven by its vision for a more productive and people-centered industry, Avaneer Health is building an inclusive network, breakthrough infrastructure and solutions to unlock healthcare’s potential. The groundbreaking company enters the market with an expert team of change agents; investment from top industry players; and a technology backbone designed to support a vast array of platforms for greater applicability and use in reducing administrative costs, accelerating care and improving the experience for people and their families.

Sales

• The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense will use InterSystems HealthShare to normalize, aggregate, and de-duplicate data into a longitudinal unified care record for the Defense Medical Services.

People

Rodrigo Martinez, MD (ENT and Sleep Specialists) joins PerfectServe in the newly created position of chief medical officer.

FOLX Health hires Dana Clayton (Optum) as VP of operations.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthcare consumer insight vendor Carrot Health will incorporate social determinants of health data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions into its predictive models.

UK-based Nuffield Health uses Lumeon’s Care Journey Orchestration Platform to scale its COVID-19 rehabilitation program across 40 regional centers.

Meditech announces its upcoming integration with IOS 15’s enhancements to Apple Health, in which providers can launch a web-based dashboard within Expanse to view the information that a patient has shared with them.

Other

This is a savagely witty comparison of the real law (HIPAA) versus the imaginary one (HIPPA) that clueless folks use as justification for not doing something. The graphic is making its way around the Internet, although I don’t know the original source.

Sponsor Updates

• First Databank joins the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs Elite Partner Program.
• CTHealthLink, part of the Konza National Network, will explore opportunities to incorporate technologies developed by the UConn School of Nursing’s Analytics and Information Management Solutions.

Blog Posts

• Making the Complex Simple with a Data Analytics Solution for Investigating Real-time Medical Device Data (Part 2 of 2) (Capsule)
• A Year in Review for Healthcare – A Fireside Chat with Microsoft Health’s Chief Nursing Information Officer, Kathleen McGrow (Get-to-Market Health)
• Consumer Devices Are Rapidly Improving. What Does It Mean for Healthcare? (Twistle)
• Building a Smart Room: What Hospitals Should Consider (GetWellNetwork)
• Enhancing Diabetes Care with Technology: Key Strategies from Emory University and Grady Health System (Glytec)
• Technology to Reduce Nursing Burnout (Halo Health)
• How to Use HCC Analytics to Improve Provider Education and Point-of-Care HCC Capture (RCxRules)
• Three Keys to a Successful Data Governance Strategy (Health Catalyst)
• The role of reference data in your telehealth initiatives (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Remote Work: Three Ways to Be More Present (Impact Advisors)
• 4 key differences between consumer and enterprise biometrics (Part 2) (Imprivata)
• Virtual Support for Virtual Implementations (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Beyond Skin Deep: How Anatomic Pathology Software Providers Better Data to Save Lives (InterSystems)
• Getting Patients Back on Track: Wellness Visits & Preventative Care (Intrado)
• The evolving EHR: Workflow improvements for today’s clinician (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Healthcare & SEO: Best Practices for 2021 (Kyruus)
• Beware of Regulations Strengthening Consumer Access to Personal Health Information (Medhost)
• Don’t Get Lost in the Numbers: Making Home Health Data Actionable (Meditech)
• Physical Therapy Marketing Advice: What Are the Pros Saying? (MWTherapy)
• Reimagining Consumer Empowerment in Healthcare Starts with Digital Identity (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 6/9/21

Top News

Scotland-based RCM vendor Craneware will acquire Sentry Data Systems, a Florida-based hospital pharmacy procurement, revenue cycle, and compliance solutions business, for $400 million.

Sentry offers software and services that support health system 340B drug purchasing programs.

Reader Comments

From Little Wing: “Re: software. I’m looking for a company that develops AI-based applications that a local government could use to track and report on the treatment and care for abused children in the social services program.” Readers, suggest a company from your experience and I’ll forward the information.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Azara Healthcare. The Burlington, MA-based company is the leading provider of data-driven analytics, quality measurement, and reporting for the Community Health and physician practice market. Azara solutions empower more than 1,000 Community Health Centers, physician practices, Primary Care Associations, Health Center Controlled Networks, and clinically integrated networks in 36 states to improve the quality and efficiency of care for more than 25 million Americans through actionable data. Specific products include data reporting and analytics; care management; patient outreach; MIPS and APMs management and reporting; patient registry and population health; and the FHIRstation interoperability platform. Recent company news includes its merger with the population health division of SPH Analytics and its #1 Black Book ranking in end-to-end population health vendors, best-of-breed provider technology. Thanks to Azara Healthcare for supporting HIStalk. 

I’m required to occasionally purge inactive email subscribers from the HIStalk Updates list. You might want to enter your email address again just to make sure you didn’t fall off the list inappropriately (you won’t get duplicate emails regardless). Signing up for no-spam email updates is the secret weapon of more than a few industry leaders who are driven to be the first to know.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

At-home testing company LetsGetChecked raises $150 million in a Series D funding round, increasing its total to $260 million.

San Francisco-based primary and urgent care company Carbon Health marks its first foray into chronic condition management with the acquisition of digital diabetes clinic Steady Health. Carbon Health hopes to have 1,500 clinics across the country within the next four years. It operates 70 clinics in 13 states and offers virtual care in select locations.

Membership-based primary care company One Medical will acquire Iora Health, which offers similar services for seniors, for $2.1 billion. Iora Health co-founder and CEO Rushika Fernandopulle, MD will become One Medical’s chief innovation officer.

Mendel will use an $18 million Series A funding round to further scale technology that uses AI to make sense of unstructured health data from health records and medical literature. The startup markets its services to healthcare organizations that are looking for analytics-ready data.

Sales

• Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare (MN) will implement Infor’s CloudSuite Healthcare software with assistance from Bails & Associates.
• Twin County Regional Healthcare (VA) will offer telecardiology services from Access Physicians, a division of SOC Telemed.
• Together Women’s Health (MI) selects Emerge’s ChartGenie, ChartScout, and ChartPop data conversion and integration tools to help two of its member practices transition to Athenahealth.
• UMass Memorial Health will power its new Hospital at Home program with Current Health’s remote care management technology.
• South Texas Physician Alliance selects LeadingReach for referral management and care coordination.

People

Erich Huang MD, PhD (Duke Health) joins Onduo as chief scientific and innovation officer.

HealthTrust promotes Michael Seestedt to CIO.

CitiusTech names Bhaskar Sambasivan (Eversana) president.

Hospital supply chain, analytics, and interoperability solutions vendor SCWorx promotes Tim Hannibal to CEO.

Conversational AI vendor Orbita hires Patty Riskind, MBA (Qualtrics) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Apple adds new health-related functionality to IOS 15, including the ability to share health and wellness data from its Health app, new trending tools for health measures and goals, a Walking Steadiness measure, improved lab results display, and the option to store immunization and test results directly in the Health app. Apple Watch adds a measure of respiratory rate during sleep and a new Mindfulness app. Cerner announced that it will support the enhancements in the fall.

Wolters Kluwer Health releases telehealth-specific Health Language value sets for use in claims processing, care coordination, and benefits systems.

Jvion develops a Behavioral Health Vulnerability Map to help providers better address conditions that contribute to mental illness.

Augusta Health works with care and social services coordination software vendor Unite Us to develop Unite Virginia, a tech-enabled care coordination network for healthcare and social services providers.

Seven hospitals in Ontario will go live on a shared Epic system in December.

MUSC Health (SC) implements Etiometry’s clinical decision support software in its cardiovascular ICU, with an eye to also installing it in the OR.

KLAS distills its information on each of the four major health system EHR vendors into individual “Complete Look” reports, which conclude:

• Allscripts — C- in product, C- in loyalty, 18% of customers report deep interoperability as adoption of DbMotion wanes. Sunrise has 4% of US hospital beds. Sunrise is an integrated, highly customizable platform, but Sunrise Ambulatory Care and Sunrise Financial Manager are not widely used. For transformational technology, significant interface maintenance is required since each system has its own database.
• Cerner — C in product, C+ in loyalty, 28% of customers report deep interoperability as customers benefit from its CommonWell connection. Millennium has 25% of US hospital beds. Cerner offers a broad Millennium suite that reduces third-party integration and is proven in both large and small organizations, but patient accounting is a weakness and the company’s less-prescriptive implementations lead to variability in customer success.
• Epic — B+ in product, A in loyalty, 63% of customers report deep interoperability with Care Everywhere and its connection to Carequality. Epic has 42% of US hospital beds. The company’s fully integrated suite has topped all software suites for 11 years running, is proven in big health systems, and offers a widely used patient portal and population health management solution, although it has a high upfront cost and some modules require in-house expertise to build.
• Meditech — B+ in product, A- in loyalty, 10% of customers report deep interoperability as most customers use point-to-point interfaces or HIEs, although its CommonWell connection is used by some early adopters. Expanse has 4% of US hospital beds. Meditech offers consistent development on Expanse, integrated offerings, and affordability that has made it the leading product for community hospitals, but Expanse costs more than the company’s legacy solutions and larger health systems have been historically hesitant to choose it.

Other

Teladoc sues Avail – which offers an audio-visual platform that supports surgery collaboration, consultation, and education – for infringing on three of its patents.

Amazon offers Prime customers a six-month supply of some common prescription medications for $6 with free two-day delivery.

Two universities – one a non-profit, the other a for-profit – are vying to give Montana its first medical school. Colorado-based Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine wants to open a satellite college in Billings, while Benefis Health System (MT) CMIO Paul Dolan, MD, MMM is leading an effort to bring a non-profit medical school operated by Touro College and University to Great Falls. The US has eight for-profit medical schools opened or announced, all of which are in the West and all but one of which offer osteopathic rather than allopathic training.

Sponsor Updates

• CHIME releases a new episode of its Leader to Leader podcast featuring Dr. First President Cameron Deemer.
• CarePort develops Quality Score, a scoring system that summarizes the quality of care delivered by skilled nursing facilities for short-stay patients.

Blog Posts

• “What About My Ovaries?” Part 3 – Outside Facility & Disconnected EMR (Access)
• AI in medical imaging – Interoperability will unleash the power (Agfa HealthCare)
• Hurricane Season 2021 Forecast Calls for a New Kind of Emergency Response (Audacious Inquiry)
• Real-time insights to optimize patient outcomes in home health (CarePort)
• Epic Hyperspace Printing Tips that Reduce Cost and Maintenance (CereCore)
• PDMP Changes 2021 – The Requirements Shaping Healthcare Today and Tomorrow (ChartLogic)
• Is There a Perfect Workflow for Medicare Annual Wellness Visits (ChartSpan)
• Time to Overhaul the Cumbersome Prior Authorization Process (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• Improving Patient Safety Series: Reducing Reportable Safety Events (EClinicalWorks)
• Healthcare Transparency: Pandemic cool down turns up regulatory heat (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/7/21

Top News

SAIC will acquire government health IT contractor Halfaker and Associates for $250 million in cash.

Former Army Captain and West Point graduate Dawn Halfaker started the company in 2006 after she retired as a combat-wounded amputee from injuries she sustained from a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Baghdad in 2004. She was commander of a military police platoon in the 3rd Infantry Division during Operation Iraqi Freedom. She is the company’s president and CEO.

Halfaker and Associates brought in $166 million in revenue last year from contracts with the VA, HHS, and CMS. 

SAIC says the acquisition will help it increase its digital transformation presence.

Reader Comments

From Stout Lad: “Re: HIMSS21. No keynote speakers named yet?” All are marked “TBD” except for a couple of former governors and Alex Rodriguez providing his healthcare viewpoint from between second and third base. Exhibitor count is at 535, about the same as at the 1998 conference. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents who sneak looks at their phones during work meetings are most often checking email or text messages. I’m happy that HIStalk finished OK in the list, but mystified at the appeal of LinkedIn unless the meeting is going so poorly that job-hunting is the obvious alternative.

New poll to your right or here: Should the federal government issue a national patient identifier?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Intrado Healthcare. The company helps health systems leverage communications technology to improve care coordination, increase patient volumes, and reduce operational burdens—all while delighting patients through meaningful digital engagement. Deep EHR integration means clients manage even the most complex engagement workflows with ease. Offerings include patient engagement, appointment management, care management, on-demand messaging, patient digital experience, and vaccination solutions. Intrado, formerly known as West Corporation, delivers 40 million patient engagements each year to its 10,000 provider customers, with a 25-year history of supporting leading healthcare providers. Thanks to Intrado Healthcare for supporting HIStalk. 

Thanks to these companies for recently supporting HIStalk. Click a logo to learn more.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “6 Recommendations to Create a Better Patient & Member Experience.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

Here’s the recording of week’s webinar “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions For Your Success.”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health exchange-traded fund dropped 3.9% in the past month versus the Nasdaq’s unchanged value. It’s up 12% in its 10-month existence versus the Nasdaq’s 27% rise. Its biggest holdings are Nuance, Guardant Health, Omnicell, Agilent, LabCorp, Insulet, Illumina, and Change Healthcare.

Sales

• Mayo Clinic will implement Visage Imaging’s AI Accelerator and collaborate with the company to commercialize the product.

People

Joi Smith, MBA (Bodhi Lane) joins Protenus as VP of people operations.

Announcements and Implementations

McLaren Bay Region (MI) goes live on Cerner.

Other

UF Health Central Florida’s two hospitals go back to paper following a May 31 ransomware attack.

Sally Sliger, a clinical data analyst at non-profit hospice TRU Community Care (CO), wins the first of five $1 million lottery prizes that the state of Colorado is randomly drawing from those who have been vaccinated for COVID-19. People who are dying of COVID-19 in vaccine-deprived countries must have interesting thoughts about Americans who refuse free shots that could save themselves or others until someone ups the ante with a free lottery ticket, beer, or doughnut.

Sponsor Updates

• The following HIStalk sponsors have achieved “Cybersecurity Transparent” designations from KLAS and Censinet: Agfa HealthCare, AGS Health, Arcadia.io, Cerner, Divurgent, Health Catalyst, PerfectServe, and Twistle.
• OptimizeRx will be inducted into LD Micro’s “Hall of Fame” for best-performing companies that have attended prior LD Micro conferences.
• KLAS rates Nordic a top performer in the expansive firms category in its latest “Application Management & Help Desk Services” report.
• PatientPing will present during the DirectTrust Summit June 10.
• Audacious Inquiry publishes a new e-book, “Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Planning: How to Improve Care Coordination During Natural Disasters.”
• PerfectServe’s Nurses of Note program honors Hampton Roads Community Health Center COO Erica Johnson and the COVID-19 vaccination nursing team.
• Pure Storage is recognized by TrustRadius as a leader in enterprise flash array storage and object storage for the second year in a row.
• WebPT co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer Heidi Jannenga joins the Flinn Foundation’s Board of Directors.
• SOC Telemed will host the Telemed IQ Summit October 20-21 in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
• Spirion earns a “Major Player” position in the IDC Marketscape: Worldwide Data Privacy Management Software 2021 Vendor Assessment.”
• Summit Healthcare publishes a new client use case, “Ste. Genevieve County Memorial Hospital Selects Summit Exchange Interface Engine for Affordable, Power Integration.”
• Revive Health’s podcast features SymphonyRM VP of Applied AI & Growth Chris Hemphill.
• Talkdesk announces the agenda for Opentalk 2021: Making every moment matter.

Blog Posts

• How Technology is Positively Impacting Green Initiatives in Healthcare (Vyne Medical)
• Remote Work: Three Ways to be More Present (Impact Advisors)
• Why Self-Care Matters (Netsmart)
• The good stuff is rarely learned in meetings (Nordic)
• Post COVID-19: How Providers Can Invest in Health Outcomes (PatientBond)
• Overcoming Vaccine Hesitancy: Andy Brailo with St. Luke’s University Health Network (Premier)
• Finally, A Decision Healthcare Leaders Can Make Without Losing Sleep (Protenus)
• The (Rx) Price is Right! (RxRevu)
• Nursing perspective: Cognitive overload and burnout in healthcare (Spok)
• Strategies to reduce out-of-network physician referrals (Krames)
• Helping the Nation Weather the Storm (Surescripts)
• How technology is improving patients’ experiences for leading endocrinologist (Twistle)
• Three Tips for Maintaining Active Engagement with Patients and Families (Vocera)
• Top 3 Ways to Speed Up Your Physical Therapy Documentation (WebPT)
• Overcoming the Challenges of Balancing Patient Care and Administrative Functions (Vyne Medical)
• Evidence-Based Clinical Decision Support to Improve Care in Skilled Nursing Facilities (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 6/4/21

Top News

Ascension begins its layoff of 651 remote IT employees with 92 Ascension Technologies workers in Indiana. Their jobs will be moved to an offshore outsourcer.

Reader Comments

From Spam in the Can: “Re: heading back to work. Let’s see photos of readers returning to their offices!” Above is a posted photo of Jonathan Teich’s work group back in the office at InterSystems. Send me your team-in-office photo to celebrate another step toward a new, vaccine-enabled normal.

From IANAL: “Re: Jonathan Bush. Zeus Health lists him as CEO in its job listings, but his LinkedIn says he is still executive chairman at Firefly Health.” Zeus Health is in Watertown, MA and has several former Athenahealth executives on its team, but I’ve seen no confirmation of Bush’s employment. I assume it won’t conflict with his Firefly board responsibilities. Zeus Health seems to be doing healthcare API work in stealth mode.

From Shingle Hanger: “Re: striking out on my own. What success have you seen with people who leave a health system or vendor job to work for themselves?” Not much. Most of the folks I know who have done it realized pretty quickly that they had overestimated their marketability, sending them back into corporate arms at first opportunity. That’s especially true of those who ventured out mid-career or beyond, often after they were let go or realized that their streak of upward career mobility had ended, but failing to realize the significant differences involved in working for themselves instead of someone else. I assume it’s not easy to give up a predictable income and benefits, corporate trappings such as an assistant and sweet office, and the reliable ego-stroking of aspirational underlings. It must be jarring to just sit at home with ever-increasing desperation waiting for the phone to ring while trying to remain upbeat. I would personally omit from LinkedIn those 1-2 year self-employment stints as solo consultants, executive coaches, and freelancing that are squeezed in between corporate jobs since their presence signals failure of either planning or execution.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor KONZA. The Topeka, KS-based company operates health information exchanges in multiple states, including Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It is deeply committed to connecting healthcare providers, patients, health plans, and its technology partners together to organize healthcare data into information that will drive healthcare transformation. Patients, health plans, physicians, healthcare facilities, and other healthcare providers from across the country benefit from KONZA’s delivery of unequaled actionable intelligence. Thanks to KONZA for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CareCloud acquires Santa Rosa Staffing, which was formerly part of Santa Rosa Consulting, from MedMatica Consulting Associates for $10 million in cash.

Revenue cycle solutions vendor Ensemble Health Partners acquires Odeza, which offers an EHR-integrated consumer communications platform.

Behavioral EHR vendor CentralReach acquires Behaviorsoft, which offers EHR/PM solutions for small applied behavior analysis therapy practices.

Social care marketplace vendor Aunt Bertha raises $27 million in funding.

Emme, which offers a birth control pill reminder app and tracking case, launches a birth control prescription delivery and telemedicine service that covers 16 states.

Cerner is named to the Fortune 500.

London-based “hospital at home” and decentralized clinical trials platform vendor Huma makes an unspecified investment in Pluto Health, a Duke University spinout that assembles patient data from multiple sources for review by researchers, providers, and patients themselves.

Sales

• Mongolia’s Ministry of Health licenses the UpToDate clinical decision support from Wolters Kluwer, Health for all of the remote country’s healthcare professionals, who can download the content to mobile devices to use in areas that have no internet connectivity.
• Canada’s Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre implements Everbridge’s digital wayfinding solution for indoor turn-by-turn navigation, which became more important as COVID-19 forced closing some entrances and eliminated volunteer access.
• Antelope Valley Hospital selects Goliath Technologies to troubleshoot Citrix and Cerner issues for faster resolution.
• Baptist Health of Northeast Florida chooses Gozio Health’s mobile wayfinding system.
• Geisinger is implementing Certify Health’s facial biometrics positive patient ID system.

People

Alphabet-owned Verily names Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD (FDA) as president of its clinical research business, which is expanding to offer a clinical evidence generation platform that will support clinical trials and real-world evidence studies.

Relatient hires David Klasnick, MBA (StayWell) as COO.

GAO appoints Caravan Health founder and executive chair Lynn Barr, MPH to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Her career includes time spent as a health IT consultant and hospital CIO.

Tod Thompson, MBA (Optum) joins Central Logic as COO.

Stanford Health Care CIO Eric Yablonka, MBA retires.

England’s NHS Digital hires informatics nurse Jo Dickson, MS (Nuffield Health) as chief nursing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Galesburg Cottage Hospital goes live on Medsphere’s CareVue Cloud EHR and RCM Cloud.

A new KLAS report on patient privacy monitoring finds that Maize Analytics and Protenus are the standouts, offering strong service and deploying AI-powered monitoring that reduces manual work. Managed privacy services customers of Imprivata’s recently acquired FairWarning report high satisfaction, although non-MPS users of the product are less optimistic about its functionality and development path. Cerner customers often use its low-satisfaction P2 Sentinel but have Imprivata, Maize, and Protenus as alternatives; Epic sites fare best with Maize and Protenus; and Harris-owned Iatric Systems performs best for Meditech sites.

Aigilx Health will integrate NextGate’s EMPI with its HIE data aggregation platform to support identity matching, expanding on work that was done for Rochester RHIO.

UPMC and its commercialization arm launch Realyze Intelligence, which mines structured and unstructured EHR data to identify patients who could benefit from interventions.

Change Healthcare expands its self-service API resources for developers, which include an API marketplace, technical documentation and tutorials, a testing sandbox, and a developer community.

Other

A Stat article says that while healthcare AI interest is strong, a review of 400 studies that were related to using it for COVID-19 shows that all were flawed, mostly due to lack of large-scale training and validation against external datasets. The authors found that just 73 of 161 FDA-approved AI products have disclosed the amount of data that was used to validate their product and only seven reported the racial makeup of their study populations. It notes a high-profit Icahn School of Medicine study that touted a COVID-19 detection algorithm for chest CT scans that equaled the performance of senior radiologists, but the system was actually trained, tuned, and tested on a tiny sample of unknown completeness from hospitals in China and was then not retested against an independent dataset of known provenance.

Scripps Health begins notifying 147,000 people that hackers downloaded their information during a ransomware attacked that left the health system offline for four weeks. Scripps says the patient information was obtained from documents and the hackers did not penetrate Epic.

Systems at UF Health – The Villages (FL) are taken offline due to a ransomware attack.

Sponsor Updates

• Get-to-Market Health founder Steve Shihadeh and Microsoft CNIO Kathleen McGrow, DNP, MS participate in a fireside chat that looks back at the accuracy of their healthcare predictions for 2020 and what they expect in the next 12 months.
• The Chartis Group will collaborate with HFMA on a four-part research series about the future of the healthcare industry.
• KLAS names InterSystems a top leader in EHR market share in Italy and the Middle East, according to a new report on “Global (Non-US) EMR Market Share 2021.”
• Jvion Chief Marketing Officer Lizzie Feliciano contributes to STAT, “The US mental health care system failed my brother – and millions like him.”
• Meditech releases a new podcast, “How The Valley Hospital used surveillance technology to move nurses from the computer to the bedside.”

Blog Posts

• Threat Hunting in Healthcare: What It Is & Why It Matters (Fortified Health Security)
• Mental Health: A Key Element of a Patient’s Well-Being (GetWellNetwork)
• FDA Regulation of Insulin Dosing Software: What You Should Know (Glytec)
• Hurricane Season is Upon Us (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Optimized Staff Communication in Long Term Care Can Improve Mental Health of Residents (Halo Health)
• Choosing a Managed Services Partner for EHR Support (HCTec)
• Four Elements that Bridge the Gap Between Using Data and Becoming Data-Driven (Health Catalyst)
• Risk adjustment challenges brought on by COVID-19 (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Cybersecurity Executive Order (Imprivata)
• Addressing the Challenge of Increasing Mental Health Concerns Following the Global COVID-19 Pandemic (Avtex)
• Supporting strong clinical documentation through terminology (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Spinning your wheels with data integrations? Lyniate Envoy can get you moving (Lyniate)
• Microsoft Monkey Wrench (Medhost)

Contacts

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