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.

News 6/2/21

Top News

Physician networking site Doximity, which introduced a telemedicine service last year, hopes to raise $100 million in an IPO that would allocate up to 15% of its shares to qualifying physician members.

Doximity’s filing notes that it is used by 1.8 million medical professionals working in the nation’s top 20 hospitals and health systems.

The company’s revenue, which is largely subscription-based, jumped nearly 80% last year to $207 million.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Happy 18th birthday to HIStalk, which I started spontaneously on a Memorial Day weekend back in 2003 when I didn’t have anything interesting to do. I apparently still don’t.  

Slicing and dicing last week’s poll results shows that 29% of those who were planning to attend HIMSS21 won’t go because of the conference’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccination requirements, while 7% of whose who weren’t planning to attend now will. Announcement of the new policy failed to change the intentions of 86% of respondents, most of whom weren’t going to attend anyway.

New poll to your right or here: Which do you surreptitiously check three or more times daily during live or video work meetings? I edited the poll after posting it to include HIStalk just for fun although I doubt many folks (other than me) are pulling it up three times per work day.

Webinars

June 3 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions for Your Success.” Sponsor: Secure Exchange Solutions. Presenters: William E. Golden, MD, MACP, medical director, Arkansas Medicaid; Anne Santifer, executive director, Arkansas Department of Health – Office of Health Information Technology; Kyle Meadors, principal, Chart Lux Consulting. A panel of leading experts will provide practical guidance on how to prepare for the Cures Act. Will it upend your business model? What is information blocking? How can standardized technologies be applied to meet Cures Act requirements? What must I do now as well as in the next five years?

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CompuGroup Medical acquires Germany-based PACS and healthcare content management vendor Visus Health IT.

Virtual care company Babylon Health may go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company that has lined up $270 million in funding in valuing the company at $3.5 billion. London-based Babylon’s first attempt at going public via an SPAC fell apart earlier this year.

Epic will require employees to return to work at its Wisconsin headquarters in part-time capacities beginning July 19. The company had attempted a similar return-to-work scheme last August, but dropped the plan after facing pushback from employees.

Clarity Informatics, whose back office software is used by 80% of GPs in England, is acquired by medical practice software vendor Agilio Software.

People

Industry long-timer David Madaffri (Philips) joins Mach7 Technologies as SVP of global sales.

Cone Health (NC) promotes CMIO Valerie Leschber, MD to SVP / chief medical officer.

Loyal hires Angela Jones, MS (Meazure Learning) as VP of customer success.

UofL Health promotes Debbie Mullins, MBA to VP/CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Epic announces that its UGM 2021 – Stories of Legend and Lore – will be held as an on-campus event in Verona, WI August 23-25, 2021 for fully vaccinated attendees. Registration and hotel reservations open June 17.

Hampton Regional Medical Center (SC) opens a tele-ICU that connects ICU patients virtually with clinicians from telemedicine company Hicuity Health and Medical University of South Carolina, which provided grant money for the unit.

Syracuse Area Health (NE) will convert to Cerner this fall.

Surveyor Health develops SurveyorAI, technology that combines patient data with drug knowledge from First Databank to offer clinicians medication management tools for remote care, including risk stratification, clinical decision support, and educational resources.

Other

Doctors in England warn the public about NHS Digital’s plan to extract the medical data of 55 million people – everyone who has been registered in a GP clinic – in de-identified form to a database that will be made available for third-party research and planning. The Doctors’ Association UK says NHS DIgital has not done enough to explain to patients how their data will be used and how they can opt out. A medical confidentiality group cautions, “They’re trying to sneak it out. They are giving you six weeks nominally, and if you do not act based on web pages on the NHS Digital site and some YouTube videos and a few tweets, your entire GP history could have been scraped, never to be deleted.”

Insurer Lemonade, which portrays itself as a AI-savvy technology company, apologizes for suggesting in a since-deleted tweet that its AI analyzes non-verbal cues (physical or personal features) to automatically reject claims. The company – which sells homeowner’s, renter’s pet, and life insurance – clarifies that it uses facial recognition technology to detect claims that are submitted under more than one identity, but then sends those claims to human reviewers for a final decision. The company’s IPO filing says that its AI Jim chatbot system “handles the entire claim through resolution in approximately a third of cases … without human intervention,” but Lemonade admits that while it calls the system “AI Jim,” it uses plain old programming rules rather than the sexier-sounding AI do much of the work.

Sturdy Memorial Hospital (MA) reveals that it paid hackers an undisclosed amount of ransom after some of its systems were held hostage in February.

University of Washington researchers review several AI models that have claimed to be able to diagnose COVID-19 from chest X-rays and find that they rely on irrelevant data, such as patient position or age. They caution that such models therefore may not be generalizable outside the original setting, also noting that that most providers don’t use X-rays to diagnose COVID-19 anyway. At least one of the models has been deployed in multiple hospitals. 

The New Yorker posts a sad, enraging article called “The Death of Hahnemann Hospital,” which describes how selling a historic hospital that served vulnerable patients to a private equity firm turned out to be a predictably bad idea.

Sponsor Updates

• Kyruus appoints Tina Brown-Stevenson (UnitedHealth Group) and Rob Coppedge (Echo Health Ventures) to its Board of Directors.
• Health Catalyst will present during the William Blair Growth Stock Conference June 2.
• SOC Telemed will present during the William Blair Growth Stock Conference and Jefferies Virtual Healthcare Conference June 2.
• Agfa HealthCare publishes a new white paper, “What is Enterprise Imaging, Really?”
• AGS Health meets KLAS/Censinet Cybersecurity Transparent Initiative requirements.
• Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise receives a 2021 Silver Medal rating by sustainability assessor EcoVadis.
• Ascom signs a six-year contract with a German hospital group for mobile IP-DECT communications and alarm solutions.
• CareSignal joins the Population Health Alliance.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “Geisinger’s innovative approach to wellness and addressing healthcare inequities.”
• EnterpriseTalk features Change Healthcare VP of Platform and Marketplace Gautam Shah.
• CHIME will host its Summer Forum June 16-17 across three cities featuring eight past and present ONC leaders.
• PM360 features ConnectiveRx Product Manager of Enterprise Analytics Kylie Hall as part of its Elite 2021 Leader of the Future program.
• CloudWave is included on Modern Healthcare’s list of “Best Places to Work in Healthcare.”
• Divurgent VP of Technology Emily Carlson has been named one of Consulting Magazine’s “2021 Women Leaders of Technology” in the category of Innovation.
• Elsevier Clinical Solutions supports the State of California in expanding its COVID-19 online learning program for registered nurses.
• PatientPing announces that Innovaccer will become a reseller of its Pings real-time notification solution, embedding it within the Innovaccer Health Cloud.

Blog Posts

• Long-term care facilities now required to report COVID-19 vaccinations under new CMS rule (Ability Network)
• Blueleaf Banter: Improving Outcomes by Aligning Workflows with Technology (Bluetree)
• Measuring SNF Quality with the CarePort Quality Score (CarePort)
• Overcoming the Challenges of Balancing Patient Care and Administrative Functions (Vyne Medical)
• How to Maximize Patient Enrollment in Your Chronic Care Management Program (ChartSpan)
• Supporting the Breastfeeding Dyad During the Pandemic (Obix Perinatal Data Systems, developed by Clinical Computer Systems)
• Our journey to do bigger things – together (CoverMyMeds)
• A Prescription for Safety, Legibility, and Ease of Use (EClinicalWorks)
• Beyond the pandemic: digital patient intake is here to stay (Experian Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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News 5/28/21

Top News

McKesson will combine four of its business units – RelayHealth, McKesson Prescription Automation, CoverMyMeds, and RxCrossroads by McKesson – under a single business operating as CoverMyMeds. The business segment was previously known as Prescription Technology Solutions, but each company operated under its own name.

The president of the 5,000-employee unit is McKesson long-timer Nathan Mott, MBA.

Reader Comments

From Mario: “Re: Nuance Escription. New owners DeliverHealth Solutions just experienced a multi-day outage during a routine maintenance window. Very little mention of this on news or social media.” Unverified, but Mario forwarded an email that DeliverHealth sent to customers indicating that the system was down from Sunday night until Tuesday evening. Nuance is a minority shareholder in the company, which bought Nuance’s HIM transcription and EHR go-live services businesses in November 2020.

From MC: “Re: PHS Frontline episode on safety net hospitals. I would love your thoughts.” I was going to take just a quick look at the 53-minute program that’s free to watch on YouTube, but it was too compelling to turn off. It describes how big hospitals use their marketing clout and cash to skim off profitable patients, leaving safety net hospitals with low-paying Medicaid, Medicare, and charity care. The section toward the end about how private equity firms are looting the healthcare system will make your blood boil – they buy safety net hospitals on the cheap and then cut staffing and supplies to allow paying themselves huge bonuses. Example: PE-backed Prospect loaded its Rhode Island hospitals with $1 billion in debt, immediately paid itself and its investors $457 million, has a huge debt payment due in 2022 with no obvious way to pay it, and the PE company owner (Leonard Green) is now threatening to shut down the hospitals because the state wants it to escrow $120 million to make sure the hospitals can survive.

From Mark: “Re: Base. Unnecessary testing?” Looks like it. Base is following the vanity prescription drug model in offering continuous tests and tracking to medical system-averse 30-somethings (based on the fake sample patients pictured) without concern for value received or how they will use the results, using a slick website, Apple-like physical packaging, and a coaching app with subscription-based pricing. Labs are grouped into sleep, stress, energy, sex drive, and diet, all the areas that are bothersome, hard to measure, and even harder to address. The disclaimer makes it clear that they aren’t offering medical advice, which is good since the founder quit medical school to work as an Amazon engineer, and I saw no mention of a physician’s order. It’s the usual lessons learned: (a) companies can make money selling unnecessary but desirable medical services; and (b) young folks are so turned off by the healthcare system that they will impulse-buy lab tests and drugs from websites like they would sneakers from Amazon, failing to see the value of a medical home or foreseeing their eventual need to address chronic conditions with something more than a cute app that pushes navel-gazing analytics masquerading as health management. I actually think this is good since nobody has managed to disrupt an entrenched, unhealthy healthcare non-system so far, so this kind of “buy whatever you want and see what happens” approach may open some eyes about access, skepticism, and unimpressive outcomes despite horrendous cost. I doubt anyone’s health will be improved much over the life of a subscription (which I would guess will be short), but it probably won’t hurt anything, so caveat emptor.

Webinars

June 3 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions for Your Success.” Sponsor: Secure Exchange Solutions. Presenters: William E. Golden, MD, MACP, medical director, Arkansas Medicaid; Anne Santifer, executive director, Arkansas Department of Health – Office of Health Information Technology; Kyle Meadors, principal, Chart Lux Consulting. A panel of leading experts will provide practical guidance on how to prepare for the Cures Act. Will it upend your business model? What is information blocking? How can standardized technologies be applied to meet Cures Act requirements? What must I do now as well as in the next five years?

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Press Ganey acquires health insurance member experience measurement firm SPH Analytics.

Change Healthcare reports Q4 results as it prepares to be acquired by OptumInsight: revenue flat, adjusted EPS $0.42 versus $0.42.

Sales

• HCA Healthcare chooses Google Cloud for workflow tools and analytics.
• EHR vendor Oasis will deploy Canada-based Think Research’s clinical decision support tools to its 41 hospital customers in Saudi Arabia.
• UCSF will use Philips HealthSuite for interoperability and to develop navigation tools.
• Bassett Healthcare Network (NY) outsources revenue cycle management, analytics, and IT to Optum, which will take on 500 of the health system’s employees.

People

Brian Norris, RN, MBA (Marathon Health) joins Indiana University Health as CNIO.

Optum expands the role of Kristi Henderson, DNP, RN – who is SVP of its Center for Digital Health – to include CEO of its MedExpress urgent care center business.

Industry long-timer Chuck Duncan (CJD Healthcare IT Enterprises) joins consulting firm CPeople as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Six hospitals in Ontario, Canada go live on Cerner Millennium, which will provide a common patient chart across the four groups involved. Some of the hospitals went live without onsite help last fall since Cerner’s US employees were not allowed to enter Canada because of COVID-19.

Imprivata announces a mobile facial recognition solution that will initially allow clinicians to electronically prescribe controlled substances.

Blue Shield of California has saved $20 million over two years by using Gemini Health’s medication cost transparency system for prescribers and pharmacists.

Microsoft opens up the Teams APIs, store, and tools to allow third-party app developers to create apps that integrate with the meeting canvas, offer in-app purchases or subscriptions, and access Teams real-time video and audio.

A new KLAS report on payer care management finds that ZeOmega leads the category, 60% of interviewed Medecision customers are dissatisfied, and Casenet has struggled with a painful HTML5 rewrite.

Another new KLAs report on application management and help desk services says that Nordic, Tegria-owned Cumberland, and HCTec execute strongly and communicate well in the “expansive” offerings category. NTT Data is transitioning to larger customers with a sharp drop in satisfaction due to staff quality and low executive involvement, while Cerner satisfaction has improved. Strong performers in the “broad” category include Ettain Health, GuideIT, and Pivot Point Consulting, while in the “niche” category, the top performers are Talon Healthy IT Services (Epic help desk), ROI Healthcare Solutions (ERP), Tegria-owned Bluetree Network, and Avaap (Infor). 

Government and Politics

A VA OIG review says the VA underestimated the $16 billion budget for its Cerner implementation by $1 billion to $2.6 billion by failing to account for physical infrastructure costs, such as for electrical work and cabling. OIG also noted that the VA did not obtain the required independent cost estimate that would have allowed the omission to be identified.

Other

The CEO of Children’s Hospital Colorado declares a state of emergency in youth mental health, saying that it is overwhelmed with children who have attempted suicide or show symptoms of mental illness. The hospital’s chief medical officer says that in many weeks of 2021, the #1 reason for ED visits has been attempted suicide.

Ireland’s health service asks employees to turn on their 80,000 computers to automatically install a ransomware decryption key that a cyberattacker reportedly provided at no cost, but says it will still take weeks to return systems to normal. The May 14 attack has limited lab capacity to 20% and forced some cancer patients to travel to other cities for treatment.

Sponsor Updates

• Redox co-founder and CTO James Lloyd joins Vericred’s board.
• PatientBond announces several accolades, including an A grade from KLAS for customer peer recommendations and executive involvement with 95% overall customer satisfaction, high-performer status on the G2 vendor review website, and inclusion in the top 20% of the Financial Times’ 2021 list of the fastest-growing companies in the Americas.
• Newfire Global Partners publishes a digital cookbook to celebrate its five-year anniversary.
• Change Health publishes an e-book titled “Wired for Transformation: The State of Healthcare APIs.”
• EClinicalWorks posts a video case study titled “Neuro2Go + healow: Expertise Is Just a Click Away.”
• OptimizeRx CEO Will Febbo will present at the William Blair Annual Growth Stock Conference June 2.
• Spirion wins four Global InfoSec Awards from Cyber Defense Magazine for privacy management software, digital footprint security, compliance, and cybersecurity analytics.
• Talkdesk makes its CX Cloud available in Epic’s App Orchard.
• Vocera announces a distribution agreement with Wavelink in Australia.

Blog Posts

• Making the Complex Simple with a Data Analytics Solution for Investigating Real-time Medical Device Data (Part 1 of 2) (Capsule)
• A Clinical Perspective on Large-Scale Healthcare IT Implementations (Medhost)
• How one physician’s experience helped define Cambridge Memorial’s approach to COVID-19 (Meditech)
• Creating a Financial Forecast for Your Practice 101 (MWTherapy)
• Gartner Innovation Case Study Spotlight: A Look Inside NTT Data’s Commitment to Disruption (NTT Data)
• OptimizeRx Specialty Solutions: Technology That Optimizes Your Access Support Ecosystem (OptimizeRx)
• What Job Will Providers Do Today? (PatientKeeper)
• 5 Steps to Guard Patient Data When Using Virtual Care (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Is Your Revenue Cycle Vendor a True Strategic Partner? They Should Be … (PMD)
• Premier Data: Gap Analysis of Annual Patient Contact Hours in Primary Care (Premier)
• Insider-Related Breaches Spike After 4-Year Decline, Potentially Costing Hospitals Millions (Protenus)
• Lessons Learned from a Cerner TIP Beta Project (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Everyone’s Looking Toward the Future, but What Does Virtual Care Need Right Now? (Redox)
• 5 Health Campaign Ideas That Really Work (Relatient)
• Positive Distraction: Pediatric entertainment ideas to ease anxiety (Sonifi Health)
• Bringing Patient Insights into Focus (Surescripts)
• PatientBond Recognized by KLAS & G2 for High Customer Satisfaction (PatientBond)
• Integrating EHRs with your healthcare contact center platform for seamless patient experiences (Talkdesk)
• Remove Barriers to Medication Adherence with Step-by-Step Support (Twistle)
• 4 Things Every PT Must Do to Deliver an Excellent Patient Experience (WebPT)
• Helping Rehabilitation Facilities Succeed in 2021 (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 5/26/21

Top News

AI-powered revenue cycle company Iodine Software acquires Artifact Health, which offers a physician engagement and patient documentation query technology platform.

Artifact CEO Marisa MacClary, MBA will join Iodine as EVP of the Artifact team.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A generous donation from reader Deborah, with matching funds applied from my Anonymous Vendor Executive, allowed me to fully fund the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Ms. H in Los Angeles, who asked for 3D geometry kits for her middle school class.

Webinars

June 3 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions for Your Success.” Sponsor: Secure Exchange Solutions. Presenters: William E. Golden, MD, MACP, medical director, Arkansas Medicaid; Anne Santifer, executive director, Arkansas Department of Health – Office of Health Information Technology; Kyle Meadors, principal, Chart Lux Consulting. A panel of leading experts will provide practical guidance on how to prepare for the Cures Act. Will it upend your business model? What is information blocking? How can standardized technologies be applied to meet Cures Act requirements? What must I do now as well as in the next five years?

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Baptist Health South Florida severs ties with Health System Solutions, which had been handling the hospital’s revenue cycle management since 2018. BHSF created the RCM company as a joint venture with Navigant, transitioning nearly 600 hospital staff to the new business. The hospital will bring those employees back in-house.

The private equity arm of Adu Dhabi Investment Authority acquires a minority stake in health IT provider Dedalus Holding.

Weight loss coaching app vendor Noom raises $540 million in new funding, valuing the company at $3.7 billion as it expands into stress management, sleep, diabetes, and hypertension. The company hopes to expand from individual subscribers, who pay $60 per month, to employers and insurers. 

Sales

• MSU Health Care (MI) will implement Epion Health’s patient Check-In and Digital Screeners software.
• McLaren Health Care contracts with India-based HCL Technologies to deliver IT services to its 15 hospitals in Michigan and Ohio and create a global EMR Center of Excellence.
• Clinical management company SCP Health will expand its use of SOC Telemed’s Telemed IQ acute care telemedicine platform as it extends its telemedicine practice so it can offer both on-site and virtual care.
• US Orthopedic Alliance selects 2bPrecise’s precision medicine platform to identify drug-gene interactions.
• Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine will make the de-identified data of 7.3 million patients available to UK-based Sensyne Health, which will mine it and sell insights to drug companies, with revenue shared with CCPM. The company signed a similar deal with St. Luke’s University Health Network last week.

People

Tidelands Health (SC) family physician and Air Force veteran Gerald Harmon, MD will become AMA president next month.

Shelagh Fraser, MD (Priority Physicians) joins LifeOmic as its first CMO.

Jackson Hospital (AL) names Mark Lauteren (El Centro Regional Medical Center) AVP/CIO.

Tania Schade (Slalom Consulting) joins The Greeley Company, a division of The Chartis Group, as VP of business development.

Connect America hires Rosemary Kennedy (ECare Informatics) as chief health informatics officer.

Babylon names Darshak Sanghavi, MD (UnitedHealthcare) as global chief medical officer.

NextGen Healthcare hires Srinivas Velamoor, MBA (McKinsey) as EVP / chief growth officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Qardio implements Redox’s health data exchange API to enhance the interoperability of its remote patient monitoring solution.

Geisinger Health System (PA) launches ConnectedCare365, a remote patient monitoring program for people with chronic conditions. The program’s technology comes from virtual care delivery startup Noteworth.

CareAlign offers free access to its task management system through the rest of 2021 for clinicians who sign up as beta testers.

Queen Anne County, MD will equip paramedics and EMTs with DrFirst’s Backline for EMS, which will allow them to scan a driver license barcode to confirm identity and retrieve a six-month medication history. It also allows them to exchange messages with local hospitals.

Other

Appointment-booking website Zocdoc fixes a software glitch that improperly allowed current and former employees of doctor and dental offices to access the patient data of 7,600 people via its provider portal. The company revealed similar programming errors in 2016.

St. Luke’s Health System in Idaho expands virtual emergency services to all nine of its EDs across the state. Patients will have access to virtual neurologists, behavioral health providers, pediatricians, social workers, critical care and nursing support specialists, plus emergency physicians and nursing teams through the system’s Virtual Care Center in Boise.

Cleveland Clinic seeks a digital health venture partner for its commercialization arm.

Scripps Health CEO Chris Van Gorder says the May 1 attack on the hospital’s computer systems was ransomware, and that its EHR and patient portal systems should be back up by the end of the week. He said the organization has kept quiet about the specifics of the attack to avoid copycat hackers: “Other attackers are already using what is being reported in the media to send scam communications to our organization.”

Sponsor Updates

• SCP Health expands its use of SOC Telemed’s technologies to include its Telemed IQ software for acute care.
• Ascom publishes a new whitepaper, “The high-reliability ICU.”
• Cerner’s Charitable Foundation honors 39 employees with Volunteer Impact Awards.
• The local paper profiles CoverMyMeds’ new $240 million headquarters, set to open in the coming weeks as the company begins bringing back its 1,500 workers.
• Diameter Health Software Architect Sam Schifman will present at the 2021 HL7 FHIR DevDays on June 9.
• Avtex publishes “Omnichannel Healthcare Experience Report 2021.”
• Meditech will convene its virtual “2021 Nurse Forum: Setting the Pace” June 16-18.
• KLAS recognizes Engage as a leader for its response to the COVID-19 crisis with a perfect score within the All Services Firms category.
• Ellkay recognizes Nuance EVP and GM Diana Nole as part of its Women in Health IT program.
• WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus will speak at the Everbridge COVID-19: Road to Recovery Executive Summit May 26-27.
• First Databank is included on Modern Healthcare’s “Best Places to Work in Healthcare” list.
• Glytec releases a new video, “An Update in Glycemic Management in the Hospital: Impact and Lessons from COVID-19.”
• WebPT CEO Nancy Ham joins the HST Pathways Board of Directors.
• Georgia Hospital Health Services, a subsidiary of the Georgia Hospital Association, will promote Jvion’s All-Cause Readmissions product to member hospitals across Georgia.

Blog Posts

• How a SaaS-based scheduling system can help overcome the healthcare staffing crisis (Ability Network)
• “What About My Ovaries?” Part 2: The Paper Scanning Conundrum (Access)
• How to Bring Non-DICOM Imaging into Your Enterprise Imaging Strategy (Agfa HealthCare)
• Wildfire and Hurricane Preparedness: New PULSE Enterprise Features to Increase Flexibility and Scalability in Disaster Responses (Audacious Inquiry)
• OMOP Common Data Model: Build, Deployment, and Limitations (Bluetree)
• The Truth About Advanced Analytics: What Healthcare Leaders to Know (CereCore)
• Uber-izing the COVID Vaccination Experience (Change Healthcare)
• Role of the Healthcare CIO in Driving Digital Transformation (Divurgent)
• It’s Always Time to Switch for Value and Performance (EClinicalWorks)
• New Changes and Updates to Medical Decision-Making Guidelines from the AMA (Experity)
• “What About My Ovaries?”A Case Study Series Where It All Went Wrong – Part 1, Part 2 (Access)
• Back to Basics: HIPAA-Compliant Texting (Halo Health)
• Robotic Process Automation: An Essential Co-worker for the Digital Age (The HCI Group)
• Drive Better Outcomes with Four Data-Informed Patient Engagement Tactics (Health Catalyst)
• A Bite Size Update on Digestive and Metabolic Health IT (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• New Forrester study reveals COVID-driven Digital Identity issues and solutions (Imprivata)
• COVID-19 and the Biden administration jump-start policy focus on social determinants of health (Intelligent Medical Objects)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 5/24/21

Top News

An FBI advisory says that at least 16 US healthcare and first responder networks were attacked by Conti ransomware in the past year.

Reader Comments

From Pat Hand: “Re: CEO selling. Can you ask your readers at what stage of a company’s growth it become detrimental for the CEO to lead pitch meetings with the prospect hospital’s C-suite? My startup employer has hired tremendous HCIT leaders, but our CEO (who is also a co-founder) struggles to relinquish control of the initial discovery and pitch process. He isn’t great at reading a room, asking discovery questions, giving succinct answers, and simplifying the pitch based on need. When our sales execs ask him to let the salespeople do their jobs, he says that the first meeting should be C-suite to C-suite and they can take over afterward. Do prospects see this negatively and do they question a premium price tag when the CEO is the de facto sales rep?” I’ll invite readers to weigh in. My experience from being on the health system receiving end of pitches is that I would find it puzzling and perhaps a bit desperate to have a vendor CEO show up in the first meeting. I would rather meet with the sales folks, decide mutually what happens next, and hold back the CEO’s participation until either (a) the first meeting on the vendor’s campus, and even then just for a short meet and greet; or (b) as a final reassurance during contract negotiations. The company folks will defer silently when their CEO is in the room, which is the same reason that I as the health system person wouldn’t invite our high-ranking folks to those first meetings. I think the company should stop sending the CEO out on sales calls as soon as it can afford to hire experienced salespeople.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents are generally upbeat about the hiring practices of their employers through the end of the year.

New poll to your right or here: How does the HIMSS21 “vaccinated attendees only” policy change your plans to attend?

It’s a shorter post and no Weekender since Mrs. H and I took a great 12-hour drive in the splendor of late spring to a family event, a road trip that I enjoyed immensely. She probably needed some “Lonesome Dove” backstory to understand my enthusiastically blurted quote: “Ain’t nothing better than riding a fine horse in new territory.”

Webinars

June 3 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions for Your Success.” Sponsor: Secure Exchange Solutions. Presenters: William E. Golden, MD, MACP, medical director, Arkansas Medicaid; Anne Santifer, executive director, Arkansas Department of Health – Office of Health Information Technology; Kyle Meadors, principal, Chart Lux Consulting. A panel of leading experts will provide practical guidance on how to prepare for the Cures Act. Will it upend your business model? What is information blocking? How can standardized technologies be applied to meet Cures Act requirements? What must I do now as well as in the next five years?

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

Sales

• France’s Institut Curie will implement digital pathology from Sectra.

People

Jeff Webber (Healthcare Triangle) joins Tegria-owned Navin Haffty as VP of operations.

JoRel Nye (Aledade) is named chief product officer at Stellar Health.

Announcements and Implementations

Change Healthcare launches a vaccination record solution that is based on the open standards of the  Vaccination Credential Initiative. Vaccination and testing providers, state registries, pharmacies, and labs can send their vaccination records at no cost, allowing pharmacies, testing labs, and government agencies to develop API-powered digital vaccine proof apps. The company notes that this approach puts consumers in control of how their vaccination information is selectively shared.

Bose launches an $850, no-prescription hearing aid – the first that FDA has approved for direct-to-consumer sale — for people with mild to moderate hearing loss, which includes an app that wearers use to tune them to their preference or to their immediate surroundings.

Other

This is an interesting concept: robotic process automation vendor UIPath offers StudioX, a no-code builder that allows employees to automate their own tasks that also includes corporate governance tools, such as permissions control and logging. I’ve used Macro Scheduler for many years to automate desktop and browser tasks and to tie applications together like the examples above.

Two ED doctors in Ireland, whose national health IT systems remain down from a ransomware attack, say that a big problem is that the country never developed a universal identifier that would allow accessing a patient’s records from multiple hospitals.

Advocate Aurora Health will change 12,000 non-clinical positions to remote-first, eliminating their physical offices in departments such as finance, accounting, administration, and consumer experience in allowing employees to work from wherever they want.

Sponsor Updates

• LexisNexis Risk Solutions releases the “2021 COVID-19 Mental Health Impact Report,” validating that mental health telehealth claims have increased significantly during the pandemic.
• Nordic, Pivot Point Consulting, Protenus, and Surescripts are included on Modern Healthcare’s “Best Places to Work in Healthcare” list.
• The Business of Pharmacy Podcast features RxRevu CEO Carm Huntress in its episode on improving prescribing decisions.
• Innovaccer will integrate the Healthwise Knowledgebase patient education solution into its Health Cloud
• Spirion wins four Global InfoSec Awards from Cyber Defense Magazine, including for next-gen in privacy management software.
• Visage Imaging will sponsor the virtual SiiM21 Annual Meeting May 24-27.

Blog Posts

• Celebrating Skilled Nursing Clinicians with Strategies for Self-Care Success (Netsmart)
• Pharma-HCP Interactions Go Virtual During the Pandemic (PatientBond)
• How Outdated On-Call Scheduling is Hurting Your Hospital (PerfectServe)
• When It Comes to Your Patients, Good Communication is Key (PMD)
• Five Ways Predictive Analytics are Driving Proactive Clinical Care (Premier)
• A $25B Health System’s Investment Arm is Banking on Protenus – Your Hospital Should, Too (Protenus)
• What are Custom Claim Edits and Why are They Important? (RCxRules)
• Guide to Phone Appointment Reminders with Free Call Scripts (Relatient)
• Dramatic Telehealth Growth During COVID Driven by Mental Health Surge (SOC Telemed)
• Working with Spok just became even easier (Spok)
• Broward Health expands print pub to digital to drive patient traffic (Krames)
• Scaling Up Your Workflows (Summit Healthcare)
• Three Tips for Maintaining Active Engagement with Patients and Families (Vocera)
• 4 Steps to Take Now if You Dream of Opening Your Own Practice Someday (WebPT)
• Enhancing Home Healthcare Delivery with Evidence-Based Care Plans (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 5/21/21

Top News

A new KLAS report on EHR market share in US hospitals finds that Epic gained the most in 2020, adding 101 hospitals representing 19,000 beds.

Cerner saw its second consecutive year of net market decrease in losing 19 hospitals and 10,000 beds, which KLAS attributes to big-hospital concerns about its revenue cycle functionality.

Epic’s market share is 31% of all hospitals and 42% of all beds, while Cerner has 25% and 27%, respectively.

All the hospitals that Meditech added in 2020 were under 100 beds and 62% of its legacy customers that made EHR decisions in 2020 moved to other vendors, Epic in almost all cases.

Reader Comments

From HIPAA To Be Square: “Re: vaccination record for conference attendance. Isn’t this a HIPAA violation involving PHI?” Of course not. HIPAA does not prevent an individual from voluntarily disclosing their own information to whoever they want. PHI is a concept that applies only to covered entities and business associates, otherwise you couldn’t tell anyone your name or email address since they are among the 18 PHI identifiers. You aren’t required to disclose your vaccination status, but conferences are not legally required to let you in if you don’t. I trust the vaccine and don’t worry about what everybody else is doing, such as presenters wearing face shields and exhibitors wiping down booth surfaces, but I’m curious why HIMSS is insistent on distancing when CDC says it isn’t necessary (HIMSS hasn’t decided on masks yet, but there’s zero chance they will voluntarily enter that minefield). More interesting to me is how conferences will use mostly untested technology to efficiently check vaccination status at scale, HIMSS21 being particularly at risk given that we’re just 80 days out. My guess is that proof will involve waving dog-eared (and easily faked) paper vaccination cards, which is ironic for a healthcare technology conference. HIMSS hasn’t said if it will allow vaccination exceptions, but its virtual version of HIMSS21 should protect it from any legal challenge by prospective attendees who can’t or won’t be vaccinated since it will be offering “reasonable accommodation.” Companies should be careful about requiring employee attendance, however, since that means asking about vaccination status and deciding how to respond to those who refuse to be vaccinated.

Webinars

June 3 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions for Your Success.” Sponsor: Secure Exchange Solutions. Presenters: William E. Golden, MD, MACP, medical director, Arkansas Medicaid; Anne Santifer, executive director, Arkansas Department of Health – Office of Health Information Technology; Kyle Meadors, principal, Chart Lux Consulting. A panel of leading experts will provide practical guidance on how to prepare for the Cures Act. Will it upend your business model? What is information blocking? How can standardized technologies be applied to meet Cures Act requirements? What must I do now as well as in the next five years?

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

JPMorgan, fresh off its failed Haven healthcare joint venture with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway, launches Morgan Health to improve the medical care of its 165,000 US employees and family members. The business will partner with leading healthcare organizations to develop models for other employers and will be given $250 million to invest in companies that offer promising healthcare solutions. Named as Morgan Health CEO is Dan Mendelson, MPP, who spent 21 years as CEO and founder of consulting firm Avalere Health, which was acquired by Inovalon for $140 million in 2015.

UK-based chatbot and virtual visit vendor Babylon acquires 700-physician Meritage Medical Network (CA). The company has raised $631 million in funding through a Series C round and is considering whether to launch an IPO or merge with a SPAC at a valuation of over $4 billion. 

White-labeled virtual care technology and clinician network vendor Wheel raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

Harris acquires ER Express, which offers EDs and urgent care facilities software for online check-in, patient intake, and online referral. It will be placed within Harris’s PulseCheck business.

Providence-founded Tegria acquires RCM robotic process automation vendor Colburn Hill Group.

Allscripts files a federal trade secrets and non-solicitation complaint against its former senior VP Raj Toleti, who was CEO of mobile patient engagement platform vendor Health Grid when Allscripts acquired that company in 2018. Allscripts made Toleti an executive and he stayed until March 2020. Allscripts claims that Toleti’s other companies, Andor and India-based Mahathi, offer staff augmentation for the implementation of Allscripts FollowMyHealth and used Allscripts intellectual property in their products.

Israel-based healthcare Internet of Things cybersecurity vendor Cynerio raises $30 million in Series B funding.

Money-losing Medicare Advantage insurer Bright Health, which offers plans in 13 states, files for an IPO, having raised $1.6 billion in funding and booked a five-fold revenue increase in 2020 from its several acquisitions. The company’s S-1 form says it has developed analytics to provide care advice and is “in the process of making it fully operational.” 

Sales

• Banner Health will enable “digital health prescriptions” using the deployment platform of Xealth.
• Geisinger Health Plan will use the cost and quality transparency platform of HealthSparq as integrated with the provider search and scheduling solutions of Kyruus, which acquired HealthSparq in April 2021.

People

PeraHealth promotes Joe Beals, PhD, MBA to CEO.

Edwin Miller, MBA joins telehealth vendor Sitka as chief product officer.

ArborMetrix names Maria Siambekos, MBA (Champion Healthcare Technologies) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Anthem signs an agreement with Epic to support bi-directional health information exchange between Anthem’s affiliated health plans and providers using Epic’s Payer Platform. Anthem says it will use patient information to identify care gaps, streamline prior authorization, and to notify providers when their patients are discharged.

Six hospitals in Ottawa, Canada develop a version of Meditech’s patient portal for French speakers.

KLAS looks at the telehealth ecosystem, concluding that Amwell and Teladoc offer feature-rich virtual care platforms, Health Recovery Solutions has broad capabilities in remote patient monitoring, Doxy.me stands out among videoconferencing platforms, Epic customers report deep adoption, and NextGen Healthcare’s EHR-agnostic product is strong in ambulatory practices and specialties.

Mitre publishes a draft national strategy for digital health that includes:

• Universal broadband access.
• A sustainable, tech-prepared workforce.
• Digital technologies that empower people to manage their health.
• Data exchange architectures, APIs, and standards.
• A digital health ecosystem that provides information for public health decision-making.
• Integrated governance.

TransformativeMed brings its Core Work Manager App to Epic as University of Washington / UW Medicine – which originally developed the specialty-specific workflow and handoff coordination tool as a Cerner-embedded MPages tool – migrates to Epic and continues its use of Core Work Manager. The original developers, trauma surgeon Erik Van Eaton, MD and lead EHR architect David Stone, founded TransformativeMed and have implemented the product in 130 hospitals.

Microsoft will retire Internet Explorer next year in favor of its Edge browser, which holds a 3% browser market share. IE is still present on Windows 10 PCs, accessible from the Search window for those looking to take a trip back in time with a browser that was slow and clunky even in its heyday.

Other

Ransomware hackers post sample information from Ireland’s health service online after the government declines to pay their demanded $20 million. The information includes patient medical files, meeting minutes, contracts, and correspondence with patients.

New Zealand’s Waikato District Health Board is experiencing “absolute chaos” after a ransomware attack Tuesday, going back to paper records and trying to properly identify patients.

Wyoming’s health director and the state’s CIO resign after COVID-19 test results ended up on GitHub due to an apparent mistake by a health department employee. Scammers have used the exposed data to call people they hope will be convinced to disclose their financial and insurance information.

A Minnesota doctor is charged with sexual assault after a female patient complained that he performed a rectal exam on her during an unrelated visit, then afterward had one hand on the computer keyboard and the other down his pants.

Sponsor Updates

• The Healthcare Technology Report includes Wolters Kluwer Health Business Unit GM Karen Kobelski and Central Logic CEO Angie Franks on its list of “The Top 25 Women Leaders in Healthcare Software of 2021.”
• Carrot Health will add social determinants of health data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions to its SDOH data and analytics software for providers and payers.
• Everbridge achieves its 16th Authority to Operate on the FedRAMP Marketplace.
• Experity, formed in 2019 in the merger of DocuTAP and Practice Velocity, says its urgent care clinic customer base – 50% of the US total – experienced a 58% increase in visit volume in 2020.
• Lumeon, Fortified Health Security, Impact Advisors, and First Databank are included on Modern Healthcare’s “Best Places to Work in Healthcare” list.
• Jvion publishes the “AI Champions Connect Quarterly Report: Artificial Intelligence & Population Health.”
• Meditech congratulates customers Avera Health and HCA Continental Division/HealthONE on being named among the Watson Health 15 Top Health Systems for 2021.
• CHIME’s Opioid Action Center Podcast features Meditech Associate VP Janet Desroche.
• NTT Data and its affiliates donate $10 million to help India through its COVID-19 surge.

Blog Posts

• The Difference Between SIEM and EDR/MDR, and Why You Need Both (Fortified Health Security)
• Active Shooter Preparedness: Best Practices and Recommendations (Everbridge)
• Partnering with The Daisy Foundation to Recognize Nurses (GetWellNetwork)
• What Are Custom Claim Edits and Why Are They Important? (RCxRules)
• Celebrating National Nurses Month and International Nurses Day: Part Two – Lorraine (Laurie) Porcaro, and Part Three – Christina Averbeck (Glytec)
• Select a Partner, Not a Clinical Communication Vendor (Halo Health)
• Consider the Benefits of ServiceNow (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Robotic Process Automation: An Essential Co-worker for the Digital Age (The HCI Group)
• The Rebound: Healthcare IT/EHR Staffing in a Post-Pandemic World (HCTec)
• Return of the RACs – What You Need to Know About Recovery Audit Contractors (Vyne Medical)
• Six Steps Towards Meaningful, Ongoing Healthcare Performance Improvement (Health Catalyst)
• 15 Tips for RCM Leaders Implementing a New Patient Accounting System (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Nurses Week Blog Series: A conversation with Donna Houlne, RN, BSN, MHA, MHRM (Infor)
• The Eyes of a Cicada: Healthcare Analytics Architectures of the Future (InterSystems)
• Making the medical problem list problem-oriented (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Warning Letters Are in the Mail After CMS Price Transparency Audits (Medhost)
• Creating a Financial Forecast for Your Practice 101 (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 5/19/21

Top News

The 2021 HIMSS and HLTH conferences will require in-person attendees to show proof that they have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19.

HLTH attendees will need to present vaccination proof via Clear’s Health Pass app, which is not yet available for COVID-19. HIMSS hasn’t decided how attendees will prove their vaccination status, but suggests that it will choose a digital solution.

Other announced items related to HIMSS21:

• Attendees, exhibitors, and HIMSS staff who have not received the full regimen of vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, J&J, or AstraZeneca will not be allowed to enter conference areas.
• Exhibit hall booths will be spaced, as will the layout within individual booths.
• Presenters will be required to wear face shields.
• HIMSS has not yet decided whether attendees will be required to wear masks.
• Seating in educational sessions will be spaced with reduced capacity guidelines, with overflow seating and live stream simulcast offered for some sessions.
• HIMSS is still reviewing rules for networking events, but may require them to be conducted outdoors, to serve only individually portioned food and beverage items, and to employ distancing.

In other conference news, RSNA confirms that it will return to an in-person conference this year, starting on its usual Thanksgiving weekend at McCormick Place. RSNA  work with the convention center and the city to determine health and safety requirements.

Reader Comments

From Eadric: “Re: Meditech surgical case data. Do you know of any experts who can help point my company in the right direction to get it for our shared clients?” I don’t, but I will forward any contacts that readers suggest.

From Co-Vegas: “Re: HIMSS21. The HIMSS conference precautions won’t mean much in Las Vegas, which is anything-goes when it comes to coronavirus.” Read down the page for the just-announced HIMSS21 precautions. Las Vegas is the probably the worst US city for trying to seal off a conference to control viral spread given the mask-free intermingling of domestic and international tourists along with conference attendees in hotels, casinos, and restaurants. Convention centers are usually freestanding entities that control access to their entire footprint with their own security, but that’s not possible in Las Vegas, which intentionally makes it impossible to get from Point A to Point B without passing through crowded casinos, packed elevators, and throngs of sketchy Strip occupants.

Webinars

June 3 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions for Your Success.” Sponsor: Secure Exchange Solutions. Presenters: William E. Golden, MD, MACP, medical director, Arkansas Medicaid; Anne Santifer, executive director, Arkansas Department of Health – Office of Health Information Technology; Kyle Meadors, principal, Chart Lux Consulting. A panel of leading experts will provide practical guidance on how to prepare for the Cures Act. Will it upend your business model? What is information blocking? How can standardized technologies be applied to meet Cures Act requirements? What must I do now as well as in the next five years?

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare staffing, resource, and telemedicine company AMN Healthcare acquires virtual care startup Synzi from Kinderhook Industries for $42.5 million.

Provider management and credentialing software vendor Symplr acquires HealthcareSource, which specializes in healthcare employee recruitment, retention, and development. Symplr acquired competitor Phynd Technologies in January.

Employer-focused mental health tech company Lyra Health raises $200 million just four months after securing $187 million, bringing its estimated value to $4.6 billion.

Sales

• National medical group Mednax selects R1 RCM.

People

Darren Dworkin (Cedars-Sinai Health System) joins Press Ganey as chief strategy officer and managing partner of PG Ventures. He has been at Cedars for 16 years as SVP/CIO, managing director of its venture organization, and executive managing director of its accelerator.

Culbert Healthcare Solutions names David Francis (Steward Medical Group) SVP of management consulting services and Charlie Brown (Tower Health) VP of Epic revenue cycle consulting services.

Luyuan Fang (Change Healthcare) joins Prescryptive Health as chief AI and data officer.

Advanced Medical Strategies names David Cardelle (Change Healthcare) chief strategy officer.

Patient Discovery Solutions hires Theresa West (Signify Health) for the new role of chief commercial officer.

Dina hires Bob Maluso, MBA (Woundtech) as chief growth officer.

Announcements and Implementations

The American Medical Association announces Return on Health, which will develop a framework for assessing the value of digitally enabled care, such as telehealth.

The Minnesota Board of Pharmacy will give prescribers access to the state’s prescription monitoring program data through Appriss Health’s PMP Gateway interface.

Sutter Health (CA) implements Docent Health’s patient engagement technology as part of its new virtual mental healthcare program. GetWellNetwork acquired the company in January.

Blessing Health System (IL) deploys Allscripts Sunrise at Blessing Health Keokuk, Hannibal Clinic, and Scotland County Hospital. It has also signed on for the company’s managed services.

Medhost chairman and CEO Bill Anderson describes in an Amazon Web Services blog post how its multi-tenant, cloud-based EHR benefits customers and supports innovation such as machine learning, analytics, telehealth, ambient listening, mobile-friendly apps, and Alexa-based services.

Cleveland Clinic expands its virtual second opinion program for employers and health plans, offered with Amwell, to brain and prostate cancer.

Other

Scripps Health remains offline more than two weeks after it was hit by a ransomware attack.

A survey by mental health vendor Woebot Health finds that users of its therapy encounter app develop a bond — similar to that between human therapists and patients — within 3-5 days of use without diminishing over time. The “relational agent” app simulates a supportive conversation using AI and NLP that monitors and manages symptoms of stress, depression, and anxiety. I started a free trial to check it out and am not all that impressed so far – it led me through a heavily scripted “chat” that was mostly me clicking on canned responses, went through a “lesson,” insisted on a daily session (no more, no less), and then didn’t have anything useful to offer when I revisited for the second time today and said I was feeling anxious to see what would happen. Maybe it will perform better over time or as it learns.

Kaiser Health News calls out dentists who recommend unneeded or more-expensive procedures to boost their bottom lines, quoting an insurance fraud journal that concludes, “Medicaid fraud is the most lucrative business model in US dentistry today.” Corporations and private equity firms who acquire small practices sometimes order their employed dentists to push profitable procedures and fire them if they don’t. One dentist was charged with fraud after billing for $2 million in crown procedures in 18 months, which authorities say he made possible by intentionally breaking the teeth of patients with his drill while filling their cavities.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health announces that the global customer support teams for Ovid, Lippincott, and Audio Digest have received the CRMI’s NorthFace ScoreBoard Award for the 10^th consecutive year.
• SOC Telemed will present during the virtual 2021 RBC Capital Markets Global Healthcare Conference May 18.
• Athenahealth integrates Nuance’s Dragon Medical speech and virtual assistant technology into its AthenaOne EHR and mobile app.
• Patient engagement vendor Sonifi Health announces a partnership with CipherHealth.
• Capsule Technologies publishes a new white paper, “Remote Monitoring Assessment of COVID-19 Patients.”
• Epocrates becomes the exclusive reseller of ConnectiveRx’s ScriptGuide patient savings messages.
• Netsmart earns its seventh consecutive top post-acute technology solutions vendor ranking from Black Book Market Research.

Blog Posts

• What About My Ovaries? A Case Study Series Where It All Went Wrong (Access)
• Is Requesting Proof of a COVID-19 Vaccine a HIPAA Violation? (AdvancedMD)
• Enrich your collaboration: XERO Universal Viewer and Microsoft Teams (Agfa HealthCare)
• Bridging the Gap Between Ambulatory Providers and Home or Community Resources (CarePort)
• Epic Appointment Reminders: 4 Tips to Standardize Patient Notifications (CereCore)
• Collaborating on Technical Standards to Build Better Healthcare (CoverMyMeds)
• Making the Case for Enterprise Clinical Data Integration (Diameter Health)
• Why Upgrading Your Software Matters (EClinicalWorks)
• Healthcare Marketing to New Residents (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 5/17/21

Top News

Ireland’s health service shuts down its IT systems due to ransomware, with several hospitals cancelling appointments and elective surgeries.

The government says it will not pay the demanded ransom, which some sources say is $150,000 but others report seeing locked screens that gave the amount at $20 million.

The attack involved Conti ransomware, in which attackers send an employee an email that looks like it came from a trusted colleague and contains a link to a Google Drive document that contains the payload.

Reader Comments

From Pipeline Fretter: “Re: ransomware. Can you ask readers what they have done lately in response to healthcare ransomware threats?” Here’s a one-question survey. Please complete and I’ll compile the results.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Brent Shafer gets a weighted average grade of C- from respondents for his time at Cerner.

New poll to your right or here: How do you expect your employer’s headcount to change between now and 12/31/21?

Webinars

June 3 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions for Your Success.” Sponsor: Secure Exchange Solutions. Presenters: William E. Golden, MD, MACP, medical director, Arkansas Medicaid; Anne Santifer, executive director, Arkansas Department of Health – Office of Health Information Technology; Kyle Meadors, principal, Chart Lux Consulting. A panel of leading experts will provide practical guidance on how to prepare for the Cures Act. Will it upend your business model? What is information blocking? How can standardized technologies be applied to meet Cures Act requirements? What must I do now as well as in the next five years?

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

SOC Telemed reports Q1 results: revenue flat, with an adjusted loss of $4.6 million versus $2.7 million, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings. Shares in the acute care telemedicine vendor are down 26% since they began trading in November 2020 in a SPAC merger, valuing the company at $700 million.

Bloomberg Businessweek says that billionaire “SPAC king” Chamath Palihapitiya is raking in the cash even as the SPAC market is cooling off and investors are losing big chunks of money. The article describes his involvement with Clover Health, a small, money-losing insurance company that tries to dazzle investors with its technology:

• Unlike traditional IPOs, SPAC companies can make whatever wild business projections they want.
• The SPAC’s sponsor keeps 20% of shares as their fee.
• Palihapitiya uses his huge social media following to hype his SPACs. He and his partners doubled their money, much of it borrowed, to $320 million as Clover Health’s investors watched their shares drop in value.
• Clover wasn’t a startup. It had been flailing along on technology hype since 2012, but has burned through hundreds of millions of investor dollars while missing growth targets and replacing executives.
• Clover Health’s plans are rated in the bottom 15% of the government’s star rating system.
• The company’s efforts to expand outside of New Jersey have not been successful and it still sells only Medicare Advantage plans, but it has changed its story to position itself as a software business because of its Clover Assistant physician advice software.
• The reporter contacted four doctors who the company had recognized as being dedicated Clover Assistant users, of which only one confirmed that he had actually used it and even then that doctor said it wasn’t useful. The company claims that they have analytics showing regular use even though doctors may not recognize the product name.
• The company did not disclose Department of Justice inquiries about its sales practices or that its co-founder ran a hospital chain that had been accused of price gouging.
• CLOV shares are down 50% since their first day of trading in early January, the same average percentage loss as all of Palihapitiya’s SPACs.

Sales

• University of Vermont Health Network will deploy Visage Imaging’ s enterprise imaging platform via a public cloud.

COVID-19

CDC reports that 56% of eligible Americans have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine and 44% are fully vaccinated. An astonishing 158 million people have been given at least one shot.

Here’s what a vaccine can accomplish in four months.

Experts say the eight-player COVID-19 outbreak among the New York Yankees is evidence that the vaccine works since seven of them had no symptoms and nobody got sick. They remind the public that while vaccines aren’t quite 100% protective against infection, they are nearly 100% effective against hospitalization and death. The article notes that most or all of the players would likely not have known they were infected except for the regular testing that pro sports requires.

Sponsor Updates

• Clinical Architecture will present during the virtual AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference May 18.
• OptimizeRx will present at the RBC Capital Markets Global Virtual Healthcare Conference May 19.
• PatientPing releases a new e-book, “CMS’ E-Notifications CoP: The Route to Compliance – Part 3.”
• Relatient publishes a case study, “The Power of a Platform: How This Medical Group Improved Patient Satisfaction, Reduced No-Shows and Increased Revenue with a Comprehensive Patient Messaging Strategy.”
• Premier will host a tweet chat (#PremierChat) with President and CEO Michael Alkire May 19 at 6pm ET.
• Providence Ventures’ Funding the Future of Healthcare Podcast features Protenus CEO Nick Culbertson.
• Pure Storage recognizes six customers driving innovation in its inaugural Breakthrough Awards program.
• RCxRules publishes “Best Practices Guide to HCC Coding: 9 Ways Top-Performing Organizations Improve RAF Scores.”
• CRN includes Spirion Senior Director of Business Development Melissa Murillo on its “Women of the Channel” list for 2021.
• AI Tech Park interviews Wolters Kluwers Health VP & GM Frank Jackson.

Blog Posts

• How Telemedicine Can Help Prepare for the Next Pandemic (SOC Telemed)
• Birmingham Radiological Group-GV achieves increased efficiency and quality with PowerScribe One (Nuance)
• 4 Strategies for Building a Solid Foundation of Integration (Netsmart)
• An enterprise roadmap to data conversions (Nordic)
• Prioritize Providers This Mental Health Awareness Month (PatientKeeper)
• Honoring Nurses of Note 2021: Vera Hall, SVP/Chief Nursing Executive, St. Elizabeth Healthcare (PerfectServe)
• Be the Superhero: Create Breakthroughs with Pure (Pure Storage)
• Why cloud computing in healthcare is more important than ever (Spok)
• HIT: An overlooked key to improving CAHPS survey scores and HCAHPS star ratings (Krames)
• Breaking Down Silos in Specialty Medication Prescribing and Fulfillment (Surescripts)
• Why Healthcare is Ripe for Disruption and How it Can Respond (Twistle)
• Effective Communication: Foundation for Nurse Safety (Vocera)
• Why Cash-Pay Physical Therapy is the Best Way to Diversify Clinic Revenue in 2021 (WebPT)
• Healthcare Providers Ought to Deliver Patient Satisfaction Survey Through Text (Well Health)
• Transforming the healthcare supply chain: Better processes, better outcomes (West Monroe)
• 8 Key Areas Representing $13.3 Billion in Cost Saving Opportunities for Healthcare Administration (Vyne Medical)
• Making the Case for Evidence-Based Chronic Condition Management Clinical Decision Support (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 5/14/21

Top News

Patient payments platform vendor Cedar will acquire competitor OODA Health for $425 million.

OODA’s co-founder, chairman, and co-CEO is Giovanni Colella, MD, who also co-founded Castlight Health and founded RelayHealth.

Colella founded OODA with two other former Castlight executives in 2017.

Reader Comments

From Notinda House: “Re: Salesforce. Sad to see them let go another leader of their healthcare vertical, Ashwini Zenooz. Like a few of her predecessors, she was only there two years. Not sure her VA experience is a good fit for a sales focused organization. Do you think SF has a hiring problem in that they hire the wrong leader consistently? Or maybe they do a good job because they are consistent?” The LinkedIn of radiologist Ash Zenooz, MD says she left her Salesforce job as chief medical officer / GM in April and is now president and chief medical officer of Commure.

From Gladhander: “Re: HIMSS21. Predictions on attendance? Time to run another poll about who’s going?” No and no. All I can say is that I’ll be there to recap whatever happens. I won’t have a booth, but I’ll do my usual guide to what HIStalk sponsors will be doing there, cover everything I hear in the exhibit hall and hallways, run photos of what it looks like, and share any big announcements (if indeed companies are holding any back for the conference’s first day). As I wrote the other day, unlike previous years, many registrants are just carrying over their use-it-or-lose-it HIMSS20 registration, plus hotels can be cancelled up until right before the conference starts with minimal penalty (zero if by July 12, one night’s stay after that), so no amount of data will predict who will actually show up. The good news is that COVID-19, as it relates to both infection risk and hospital workload, should not be a factor. I don’t have any sage wisdom for companies that are trying to decide whether paying full price to participate in a potentially scaled-back conference is worth it, although perhaps the potential competitive penalty for sitting out is light since the full, normal HIMSS22 will be just six months later.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Reader Lloyd’s generous donation, with matching funds applied from my Anonymous Vendor Executive and other sources, fully funded these Donors Choose teacher requests:

• A document camera for Ms. C’s sixth grade class in Provo, UT.
• Science kits for Mr. C’s elementary school class in Westminster, CA.
• Science mystery kits for Ms. L’s eight grade class in El Paso, TX.

Listening: Who bass player John Entwistle, in this remarkable video that isolates his work on “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in a live performance. He looks entirely bored while flawlessly and apparently effortlessly playing the most complex and musically rich bass lines imaginable, surely later inspiring Rush’s Geddy Lee to forget just laying down root notes and instead rip it like a lead guitarist. The song is simple and I would not have suspected that so much bass artistry was happening underneath, especially since I don’t particularly like the song. He died in 2002 at 57.

Webinars

June 3 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions for Your Success.” Sponsor: Secure Exchange Solutions. Presenters: William E. Golden, MD, MACP, medical director, Arkansas Medicaid; Anne Santifer, executive director, Arkansas Department of Health – Office of Health Information Technology; Kyle Meadors, principal, Chart Lux Consulting. A panel of leading experts will provide practical guidance on how to prepare for the Cures Act. Will it upend your business model? What is information blocking? How can standardized technologies be applied to meet Cures Act requirements? What must I do now as well as in the next five years?

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

“Hospital at home” and decentralized clinical trials platform vendor Huma raises $130 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $200 million. The London-based company, which changed its name from Medopad a year ago, will use the money to expand its platform to the US, Asia, and Middle East.

Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente make an unspecified investment in Medically Home, which offers technology and services to support delivering acute care and recovery services at home. The company had previously raised $65 million.

Regulators in England block Imprivata’s planned acquisition of Manchester-based digital identity vendor Isosec, which has 120 NHS customers. The Competitions and Markets Authority said that the companies are rivals in the digital identity verification business and removal of a competitive threat to Imprivata would negatively impact taxpayer value.

New York City-based digital cancer care organization platform vendor Jasper Health launches with $7 million in seed funding, naming as its top executives two veteran leaders of CVS Health and Walgreens.

Amwell reports Q1 results: revenue up 7%, EPS –$0.16 versus –$0.58, beating earnings estimates but falling short on revenue. Shares dropped nearly 25% Thursday following the report and have shed nearly 60% of their value in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $2.4 billion.

DrFirst closes a $50 million equity investment that increases its total raised to $118 million.

CPSI acquires encoder solutions provider TruCode.

Sales

• Penn Highlands Healthcare (PA) selects Infor CloudSuite Healthcare and Cloverleaf Cloud.

Announcements and Implementations

In the UK, Cognetivity will use InterSystems IRIS for Health to integrate its IPad-based early detection questionnaire for early dementia detection, which it Cognetivity says can identify the condition up to 15 years earlier than conventional methods.

A new KLAS report on revenue cycle outsourcing finds that the mostly mid-sized clients of Ensemble Health Partners are highly satisfied, while R1’s clients tend to be larger and are happy with the company’s direction and technology. Those companies top the “most likely to buy again” list. More than 80% of NThrive’s clients are dissatisfied and the company trails competitors in every segment in which the company is rated by KLAS, while 43% of Conifer Health Solutions clients report dissatisfaction because they say the company is not proactive or innovative.

Government and Politics

ONC will spend $80 million to train public health professionals to modernize the public health data infrastructure, part of the White House’s $7.4 billion in spending under the American Rescue Plan to expand the public health workforce.

ONC invites submissions for outcome statements related to its Health Interoperability Outcomes 2030 project.

COVID-19

New CDC guidance says that fully vaccinated Americans don’t need to wear masks or distance from others under any circumstances, including while indoors or outdoors and in gatherings of any size, except where local regulations or a business’s rule require it or when using public transportation. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH announced, “If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic. We have all longed for this moment when we can get back to some sense of normalcy.”

The seven-day rolling average of US COVID-19 deaths was at 629 Wednesday, the lowest since last July. That’s down more than 80% since the peak in mid-January. US deaths are at 580,000.

Other

A security researcher discovers an unprotected online database that contained the records of 200,000 patients of a national disability evaluation services company based in Jacksonville, NC. United Valor Solutions responded quickly to have its (unnamed) contractors shut down public access, although the researcher also found ransomware-related files on the server.

Ocean City, MD first responders celebrate the heroism of Atlantic General Hospital (MD) CIO Jonathan Bauer, who saw that a two-year-old girl had been ejected – still in her car seat — into the Assawoman Bay during a five-car crash. He dove off the bridge, which was 30 feet above water that is five feet deep, and kept the girl’s head above water until both were rescued by boat. He asked to remain anonymous, but the city wanted to recognize him. The toddler is fine.

Forbes is right – I have never heard of Judy “Falkner.” The accompanying video is as lame as the headline writer’s spelling skills (also botched was writing “women” instead of “woman”).  Was there a time when Forbes had credibility?

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks posts a new episode of its podcast titled “How Software Updates Promote Usability and Patient Safety.”
• Critical event management company Everbridge completes its acquisition of XMatters to accelerate digital transformation for enterprise IT and cyber resilience.
• Healthwise partners with the City of Boise, Idaho to develop and open the Hillside to Hollow Reserve and trailhead.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a white paper titled “Governance: What’s the Big Deal?”
• Fast Company recognizes Jvion’s COVID Community Vulnerability Map with an honorable mention in its 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards.
• St. Luke’s Health System uses Meditech’s self-scheduling for COVID-19 vaccination.

Blog Posts

• 5 Focus Areas for Cyber Resilience (Everbridge)
• The 7 Worst Urgent Care Billing Mistakes That Could Cost You (Experity)
• Hidden Signs of a Healthcare Data Breach (and How to Detect Them) (Fortified Health Security)
• Honoring Moms Through Personalized Patient Engagement (GetWellNetwork)
• Celebrating National Nurses Month and International Nurses Day Part One: Christine Digan (Glytec)
• Why Googling Symptoms is a Bad Idea (Gyant)
• Nurses Week 2021: Nursing & Clinical Collaboration (Halo Health)
• How Data Can Reduce Length of Stay and Keep the Revenue Stream Flowing (Health Catalyst)
• How Home-Based Care is Helping Health Systems Engage More Patients at Scale (Dina)
• Nurses Week Blog Series: The pandemic, technology, and the enduring need to connect (Infor)
• Big data and interoperability: The keys to better healthcare interactions (Nordic)
• There’s an ICD-10 code for that (somewhat) irrational childhood fear (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• The buck stops here: why providers must take the initiative with patient scheduling (Lumeon)
• Using Rhapsody as a FHIR Façade (Part One) (Lyniate)
• 2021 Hospital National Patient Safety Goal Series: Reducing Anticoagulant-Associated Patient Safety Risks (Medhost)
• How data brought ‘new life and new hope’ amid COVID-19 (Meditech)
• Getting Your Patient Engagement Messaging Right (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 5/12/21

Top News

Aetion, which offers a real-world evidence platform for drug companies and payers, raises $110 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $212 million.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD serves on the company’s board.

Reader Comments

From Mr. F: “Re: HIMSS. I am a long-time member, speaker, and volunteer for HIMSS, but for the first time ever I find myself on the vendor side. We are about to pull the trigger on investing in exhibiting so I asked HIMSS to share as of today (91 days prior to the conference) how is registration looking compared to 91 days prior to the start of the 2019 conference. I was provided the following from HIMSS — approximately 2,800 registered in-person attendees for HIMSS21 (made sure they removed the digital-only participants) compared to 2,000 registered attendees this time in advance of the 2019 conference. The HIMSS employee also commented that it is a significantly larger proportion of C-Suite attendees and extremely high engagement on the conference website.” It seems odd that a conference with 42,000 attendees in 2019 had less than 5% of them registered 90 days out since it’s hardly an impulse item and you lose out on early bird pricing. That makes me wonder how many of the total headcount were full-paying registrants versus exhibitors, students, etc. I suppose those exhibitors who rent the HIMSS21 attendee list will get an early idea of attendance and job breakout. There’s also the question whether the many folks who rolled over their HIMSS20 registrations for free will actually show up to HIMSS21 given their unprecedented lack of skin in the game. Exhibitor count is at 462. I assume Mr. F’s pseudonym identifies them as a fellow fan of “Arrested Development,” to which I extend them a belated Happy Cinco de Cuatro.

From Job Hopper: “Re: employment. The near end of the pandemic seems like a good time to start job-hunting, so I am.” I expect a heightened level of employee churn over the next several months as folks start to feel free to move around after a long hibernation, companies are likely to be hiring, and remote work policies become a bargaining chip. That will be magnified by the recruiting efforts of new companies that are flush with investor cash and need more bodies to chase the pitch deck promises of hockey stick growth.

From Bama Jelly: “Re: Ro and other telehealth prescription companies. What standards do you suppose they use in evaluating a ‘patient’ who will become a ‘customer’ only if the doctor clears them?” Probably the same as my thankfully short-term vendor days in which I was tasked with filling out zillion-page RFPs — the answer is always “yes” unless (a) all possibilities have been exhausted, including custom programming and manual intervention; and (b) even then, someone in sales will probably twist your arm into semi-agreeing so that they can override your “no” to “yes” given the lack of a “sort of” as an option. I would be shocked if the hired gun doctors aren’t retained based on their percentage of evaluations that result in prescriptions, which they can probably justify by the minimal vetting that happens in the office anyway and that they can save time and thus make more money by going straight to yes. I would also wager that the forms that patients fill out nudge them into saying whatever it takes to get what they’ve already decided they want. Billions of dollars of investment has been poured into companies whose business model is based on hiring rubber-stamp doctors to bypass the good-intentioned by often bureaucratic prescribing process. I’ve known doctors over the years who just did this on their own and kept the proceeds for themselves, so mass corporatization is the only new feature.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Twistle. The Albuquerque, NM-based company uses secure, patient-centric communication to drive care plan and protocol adherence, improve outcomes, lower costs, and build brand loyalty. A library of multi-disciplinary clinical communication pathways and best practices, combined with remote physiologic monitoring capabilities, generates clinical, financial, and operational ROI, such as 90% patient engagement rates, 20% improvement in medication / device adherence, 32% fewer readmissions, and more. Care teams realize productivity gains through the automatic initiation of personalized, HIPAA-compliant message pathways, and alerts and dashboards that focus attention on patients that require early intervention. Twistle enhances virtual healthcare initiatives by keeping patients on track as they navigate care journeys. The company offers case studies from Virginia Mason, Providence, AdventHealth, ChristianaCare, Swedish, and others. Check out the video, “The Narrated Patient Experience with Twistle.” Thanks to Twistle for supporting HIStalk.

Today I learned a fun saying from the Internet: “the plural of anecdote is not data.” I will pair that with the Twitter bio of my favorite COVID-19 information source Ashish Jha, MD, MPH, which says “an ounce of data is worth a thousand pounds of opinion.”

Dear companies and PR firms, I genuinely appreciate that you are often now including a LinkedIn bio link to your company new executive hire announcements since that’s where I look for what I need for my “People” section (advanced degrees, previous job, and headshot).

Webinars

June 3 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions for Your Success.” Sponsor: Secure Exchange Solutions. Presenters: William E. Golden, MD, MACP, medical director, Arkansas Medicaid; Anne Santifer, executive director, Arkansas Department of Health – Office of Health Information Technology; Kyle Meadors, principal, Chart Lux Consulting. A panel of leading experts will provide practical guidance on how to prepare for the Cures Act. Will it upend your business model? What is information blocking? How can standardized technologies be applied to meet Cures Act requirements? What must I do now as well as in the next five years?

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CPSI reports Q1 results: revenue down 3%, EPS $0.28 versus $0.28, beating estimates for both. CPSI shares are up 33% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 47% gain, valuing the company at $444 million.

Nuance announces Q2 results: revenue up 10%, adjusted EPS $0.20 versus $0.16. The company’s acquisition by Microsoft remains on track, to be closed by the end of the year.

Heartbeat Health raises $20 million in a Series B funding round. The New York City-based company offers a cardiovascular care management platform that includes telemedicine, remote diagnostics, and digital health programs. I interviewed CEO Jeffrey Wessler, MD last year.

Automated care workflow company Memora Health raises $10.5 million. The company, which launched out of Y Combinator in 2018 with its proprietary “Felix” software and six employees, now serves patients at 55 healthcare facilities with a staff of 22.

Sales

• The Oklahoma Health Care Authority selects Orion Health’s Amadeus data-sharing software to power its statewide HIE, set to go live this fall. Consulting firms HealthTech Solutions and Cureous Innovations will also assist with HIE development.
• Jackson Hospital (FL) will implement Emerge’s ChartScout and ChartPop medical record data search, visualization, and reporting software.
• Tandigm Health (PA) selects NextGate’s Enterprise Master Patient Index and Provider Registry.
• Temple University Health System chooses ElectrifAi’s machine learning models for contracting and financial accounting.

People

Vish Anantraman, MD, MS (Northwell Health) joins Mayo Clinic as CTO.

Digital voice assistant company Suki promotes Erin Palm, MD to VP of clinical.

Wes Cronkite (Bright Spring Health Services) joins CPSI in the new role of chief innovation officer.

Edifecs names Sundar Shenbagam (Oracle) SVP of engineering and Scott Davis (MedeAnalytics) associate VP of product marketing and demand generation.

AMIA hires Tanya Tolpegin, MBA (American Academy of Audiology) as CEO, returning to pre-Don Detmer separation of the CEO (hired) and president (elected) jobs in which the former manages the organization and the latter handles the science and policy.

Loyal hires Tyler Bennett, MS  (Icebreaker) as VP of operations and analytics.

GetWellNetwork hires Todd Strickler, MBA (Marriott International) as SVP of product.

Announcements and Implementations

Olive establishes an AI command center at TriHealth’s offices in Cincinnati to help the six-hospital system automate tasks, initially starting with its revenue cycle. Olive, which has raised nearly $500 million since launching in 2013, has established 22 such sites across the country and plans to develop over 40 more by year’s end.

In an effort to help hospitals reduce call wait times, Well Health’s communication software now gives patients the option to switch their calls to text messaging and automatically receive texts when their calls are dropped or abandoned.

Surescripts will sunset v10.6 of its E-Prescribing and Medication History services in accordance with the CMS-mandated shift to the National Council of Prescription Drug Programs SCRIPT Standard v2017071 on September 1.

COVID-19

FDA extends its emergency use authorization to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to those aged 12-15.

California will allow pediatricians to administer COVID-19 vaccine to children without using its cumbersome, Accenture-developed MyTurn vaccine management system that cost $50 million.

Other

A ransomware attack on pharmacy administrative services business CaptureRx has exposed the PHI of patients at health systems in Pennsylvania, New York, and Vermont; plus the customers of Thrifty Drug Stores.

Australia’s SA Health determines that Microsoft’s RemoteApp feature caused the glitch in its Allscripts Sunrise system that duplicated the last digit of medication doses, mistakenly displaying a 10 mg dose as 100 mg.

A survey of mental health professionals finds that while 50% of them would rather conduct virtual sessions instead of in-person ones, 39% admit that they are distracted by social media and email during those virtual sessions. A similar percentage say their attention wanders because of other people around them, Internet browsing, and noise from outside their home. One-third of those responding say they deliver a lower level of care in virtual sessions, with the #1 problem being distracted clients and the challenge of assessing and engaging them online. Half of the therapists say they were dealing with their own symptoms of anxiety and depression in the past year and 38% were already in therapy themselves before the pandemic.

Reflect on your larger-than-life legacy with this humorous obituary of 48-year-old plastic and reconstructive surgeon Thomas Flanigan, MD, which sounds jarringly self-written but as actually cobbled together by friends after his death from unstated causes using snippets of his annual New Year’s Eve letters. The “Ginger God of Surgery and Shenanigans” expresses pride in his role as “a beacon of light shining upon those who couldn’t scan the internet for their own hilarious and entertaining comic relief.”

Sponsor Updates

• Dutch hospital Alriine Zorggroep expands its enterprise imaging contract with Sectra to include cardiology.
• SOC Telemed names Gyasi Chisley (Cancer Treatment Centers of America Global) and Chris Gallagher, MD (Access Physicians) to its board.
• Agfa HealthCare announces its first enterprise imaging installation in Colombia, at the Fundación Valle del Lili.
• Cerner publishes a new customer story, “Truman Medical Centers/University Health offers community-based vaccine clinics to vaccinate underserved community.”
• The local business paper profiles ChartSpan’s journey to a hybrid work-from-home model.
• CHIME releases a new edition of its Leader to Leader Podcast featuring GAVS Technologies CEO Sumit Ganguli.
• Ellkay features Tivity Health SVP and CIO Sarah Richardson in its Women in Health IT series.
• Ohio’s Hospice expands its relationship with Netsmart to include a 10-year innovation partnership that will focus on enhancing value-based care leveraging the CareFabric platform.

Blog Posts

• With permanent Medicare coverage, telehealth is here to stay (Ability Network)
• MyChart Activation and Utilization (Bluetree)
• 5 Ways We Celebrate Nurses and Improve Healthcare Technology, Today and Everyday (CereCore)
• How Virtual Reality is Helping to Make Surgery Training Safer and More Efficient (Dimensional Insight)
• Smart Alert: A Harbinger of Adverse Events in Critical Care Settings (Capsule)
• PCMH: Putting Patients at the Forefront of Healthcare (EClinicalWorks)
• Enriching patient identity management with social determinants of health (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 5/11/21

Heartbeat Health Raises $20M Series B Funding to Expand Virtual Heart Care

Telehealth company Heartbeat Health raises $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Echo Health Ventures.

Ransomware attack on healthcare admin company CaptureRx exposes multiple providers across United States

A ransomware attack on pharmacy administrative services business CaptureRx has exposed the PHI of patients at several health systems and customers of Thrifty Drug Stores.

Medicus IT Acquires Managed Services Provider HITCare

Atlanta-based IT and managed services provider Medicus IT acquires California-based HITCare, a health IT services and consulting firm focused on nonprofit community health centers and human services organizations.