Harris acquires physician practice and hospital software vendor Ingenious Med.
Webinars
June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Providence Ventures invests in RxRevu one year after its affiliated health system in Seattle deployed the company’s SwiftRx real-time prescription benefit software.
Stone Point Capital acquires and combines Verisys and Aperture Health, creating a company focused on credentialing, enrollment, and provider data management. Aperture Health CEO Charlie Falcone will lead the new company.
Utilization management software and physician services company Xsolis secures a $75 million investment from Brighton Park Capital. The company recently hired Mandy Cruz (Sunquest) as VP of customer delivery and Tim Mueller (Optum) as VP of client success.
Healthcare governance, risk, and compliance solutions vendor RLDatix acquires UK-based Allocate Software,. which offers human capital management solutions.
Hospital IQ, an operational management software vendor based in Massachusetts, raises $25 million in a Series C funding round.
Nearly 500 One Medical employees (excluding physicians and other clinicians) announce their intent to unionize to address the mistreatment they say they’ve suffered during the pandemic. Their complaints include:
The company’s mismanaged COVID-19 vaccine program, which wound up making national news after company whistleblowers alerted the media to the fact that ineligible patients – some with ties to leadership – received the vaccine ahead of eligible patients, resulting in a congressional investigation.
Sub-par care for community members who couldn’t afford One Medical’s typical membership fees.
One Medical went public earlier this year, and acquired senior-focused primary care company Iora Health several weeks ago for $2 billion.
Sales
CyncHealth, an HIE that serves seven Midwestern states, selects Lyniate’s Rhapsody software to improve participant onboarding, privacy, and security.
Marshfield Clinic Health System (WI) will implement NowPow’s community services referral software.
USMD Health System and WellMed (TX) select Leading Reach’s referral communication and care coordination software.
The North Estonia Medical Centre joins the TriNetX network to increase its engagement with the international healthcare research community.
UBC will use Surescripts Specialty Enrollment service in its biopharma support services that include REMS enrollment, clinical studies and registries, and patient support services.
In Canada, six Ontario hospitals will implement a shared regional instance of Cerner Millennium.
People
Chuck Podesta (UConn Health) joins Renown Health as CIO.
Eron Kelly (Amazon Web Services) joins Inovalon as president.
Announcements and Implementations
The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation will use data normalization services from Intelligent Medical Objects to improve clinical data from its CureCloud and CoMMpass clinical trial programs.
A new KLAS report on security and privacy consulting services finds that Meditology, Clearwater, and CynergisTek top the list of companies that are most often viewed as partners by customers. The report notes that Impact Advisors has the highest overall performance score at 99.1 on a 100-point scale even though its security offering is less widely known. Clients of audit-focused firms such as Deloitte, EY, and PwC are more likely to seek less-prominent companies in search of higher value or staff quality, with Deloitte customers in particular reporting problems with executive involvement, quality, delays, and its perceived use of a B-team of inexperienced employees
Other
Ireland’s health service facilities continue to operate under downtime procedures after a ransomware attack took out their computer systems six weeks ago. The health service estimates that recovery costs will exceed $600 million.
Sponsor Updates
Cerner employees assemble 300 hygiene kits, prepare 100 dental bags, and stuff 2,000 envelopes for its Care Kits and Healthe Kids Screenings programs.
Dina CEO Ashish Shah will speak at the Home Care 100 Leadership Conference June 30.
Lumeon publishes “The Future of Digital Transformation in Healthcare Report 2021.”
Surescripts announces that last year more than 745,000 individuals and organizations used its Clinical Direct Messaging to improve transitions of care, send immunization notifications, coordinate medication management efforts and achieve federal incentives requiring the use of secure electronic messaging.
Health Catalyst will acquire patient engagement technology vendor Twistle, which it says will allow it to offer a comprehensive population health management solution to healthcare providers and life sciences companies.
SEC filings indicate that Health Catalyst will pay up to $170 million for Twistle, which has $8 million in annual revenue and will lose an expected $3 million in 2022.
Reader Comments
From William Pay: “Re: Doxo. Our hospital is getting complaints from patients about Doxo. The consumer bill pay network is paying for Google search results for specific hospital names.” Doxo came up in the top handful of my Google results for some randomly chosen hospital names plus “online bill pay.” The link leads to specific webpages that Doxo has created for those hospitals. Each hospital’s Doxo page clearly says that Doxo has no connection to that hospital. Doxo has generated 185 complaints on the Better Business Bureau website, quite a few of them from people who had problems with fees or delayed payment resulting from their use of Doxo to pay their hospital bills. Several business and city government websites have warned their customers against using Doxo, with some of them directly calling Doxo a scam.
From Informatics MD: “Re: Epic Sepsis Model. The published work is important and highlights the need for internal validation, but their experience is not shared by our institution or others we’ve interfaced with since. The implication is that health systems implemented the model without validation or careful oversight. We validated it in a unique, limited setting (the ED) and found its performance to be acceptable enough to proceed with cautious implementation through a controlled quality improvement intervention. Our results are forthcoming, although we can’t discuss them yet due to standard journal embargo policy.”
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Personal connections enabled half of poll respondents to get their present jobs.
New poll to your right or here: Should companies pay remote workers based on their local cost of living?
Webinars
June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Shares of Doximity closed at $55.98 on Friday, valuing the physician social network platform vendor at $10 billion. The company booked $207 million in revenue and $50 million in net income in the latest fiscal year. CEO Jeff Tangney has beneficial ownership of $3 billion worth of shares.
Announcements and Implementations
HIMSS announces that Dwight Schrute from “The Office” (actor Rainn Wilson) will keynote at HIMSS21. HIMSS says he will deliver a hilarious, insightful talk full of anecdotes and warmth.
Government and Politics
Britain’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock resigns after a tabloid publishes photos of him kissing a health advisor-lobbyist in early May before indoor cross-household contact was allowed under national COVID-19 restrictions. He and the advisor, who he appointed, are married to others. The government is investigating whether the photos were intentionally leaked. Hancock’s replacement will be former Chancellor and Home Secretary Sajid David.
Other
UF Health (FL) restores its EHR at its Leesburg and The Villages campuses after nearly a month of ransomware-caused downtime.
Sponsor Updates
Divurgent launches a Customer Experience Program focused on creating additional value for its clients before, during, and after an engagement.
Vocera announces that its solutions are used in six out of 10 children’s hospitals included in the latest US News & World Report honor roll.
EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Record Retrieval Made Easy with Prisma.”
Optimum Healthcare IT adds The University of Texas at San Antonio Alumni Association to its Optimum CareerPath apprenticeship program.
Summit Healthcare publishes a new client use case, “Cody Regional Health Enlists Summit Healthcare’s Integration Services to Support Epic Migration.”
EY announces that Protenus co-founder and CEO Nick Culbertson is an Entrepreneur of the Year 2021 Mid-Atlanta Award finalist.
Parity.org includes Quil Health on its 2021 Best Companies for Women to Advance list.
Ascom expands its Unite software ecosystem with the addition of the new Unite Collaborate communication application.
Twistle publishes a new case study, “ChristianaCare: Improving Detection and Management of Postpartum Hypertension.
Well Health receives a Rising Star Award as part of the 2020-2021 South Coast Business & Technology Awards.
Vyne Medical releases a new podcast, “The New Era of Patient Access and Revenue Cycle.”
Shares in Doximity, which set an IPO share price of $26 versus the expected range of $20 to 23, close at $53.00 on their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, valuing the physician network vendor at $7 billion.
Reader Comments
From Muumuu Summer: “Re: Epic. Are you hearing that they seem to be losing more employees than usual? It seems like they are bringing back a previous break-the-glass strategy by having senior people cover open positions until they can be filled, which can leave clients without a permanent person for months.” Epic clients are welcome to report their experience.
From Watcher of the Data: “Re: Avaneer and blockchain. You are dead right about this. The most amusing part of this is that blockchain won’t ‘solve’ the interoperability problem – it can become useful only once the problem has been solved.”
From Percolator: “Re: Epic’s sepsis model. Cerner has a free one that gets little use, and the company has had trouble selling models for other conditions. Every condition needs to be mapped to hospital work flow – who do you alert and how, and what is the recipient supposed to do? These models add little incremental value because (a) doctors are already very good at detecting sepsis and starting antibiotics, and (b) 90% of sepsis is community acquired before the patient is admitted. ‘Watch this patient more closely’ is not worth much, especially if doctors and nurses already suspect sepsis.” Thanks. I’ve removed identifying information since I wasn’t sure this comment was intended for public display.
From Ossify: “Re: Epic’s sepsis model. Why should anyone care what the algorithm does as long as it works?” You wouldn’t want to harm someone, either by overtreating or undertreating, because a software model was trained on a bunch of data and “learned” from facts that are clearly irrelevant or not universally applicable. Example: Epic developed a patient no-show model awhile back that incorporated the patient’s religion and body mass index in predicting whether they would show up for appointments, and researchers found that removing those features didn’t reduce the model’s predictive powers but eliminated some inequity issues. Did Epic really think those factors were relevant, or was their data science knowledge insufficient? Then there’s the “what do we do with this” issue – should appointments be double-booked in case those patients really do skip their appointments (and what happens if they don’t?) or perhaps could the information be less invasively and more constructively used to send reminders or to understand that particular patient’s possible issues with venue location, transportation, or available hours that could be resolved by suggesting a different location? AI is amazing for being able to detect data patterns that humans haven’t, but if pitched to replace or even enhance expert judgment, it’s the customer’s job to make sure that the algorithms work in their particular situation. I’m not sure the average health system has the expertise to make those evaluations, so that’s why outside review is a reasonable recommendation.
From Bagna Cauda: “Re: mental health apps. Which ones are best?” I’m skeptical that any of them accomplish much given the lack of peer-reviewed studies on their outcomes. FDA seems to lack interest in holding their developers accountable even when they are clearly being pitched for use in medical or psychological situations. It doesn’t help that psychological counseling itself may have outcomes that are hard to prove. Lastly, the nature of these behavioral health app companies is that they are pandering to investors who demand fast growth Silicon Valley style, which means their customers will have minimal human involvement and instead will interact with scalable, cookie cutter technology that offers the opposite of the human interaction that many people crave. It also seems that some vendors expect users to stop paying once the limited value of the app becomes clear, so they refocus on selling to employers and insurers (healthcare excels at separating the people who consume a service from those who pay for it).
Webinars
June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Providence-owned Tegria acquires healthcare AI vendor KenSci.
Subscription-based opioid use disorder virtual care vendor Bicycle Health raises $27 million in a Series A funding round.
National emergency medical services provider Priority Ambulance acquires software vendor Randseco, which offers the StatCall digital patient logistics solution that supports information exchange among ambulances, hospitals, payers, and non-medical transportation services.
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston engages ReMedi Health Solutions to offer personalization training for 2,000 clinicians in 18 specialties as it implements Epic. The company also provided an AI-powered virtual assistant for workflow help and tipsheets.
People
Healthcare IT Leaders hires Patrick Dougherty (Allscripts) as CTO.
Pallav Sharda, MBBS, MBA, MMI (Google) joins employer bundled health services platform vendor Carrum Health as chief product officer.
Well Health hires John Knotwell, MBA (Get Bridge) as chief revenue officer and Marissa Morrison (Foursquare) as VP of people.
RCM services vendor Kemberton names Deanna Gray (Millennia) as SVP of customer success.
Peter Arduini (Integra LifeSciences) is named president and CEO of GE Healthcare, effective January 3, 2022.
Virtual-first urgent care and primary care clinic HealthTap promotes co-founder and COO Sean Mehra, MBA to CEO.
Announcements and Implementations
Healthcare Triangle releases DataEZ, a cloud-based analytics service that that can manage large quantities of data, including real-world data from remote monitoring, digital health services, and clinical trials.
Medical imaging software vendor Novarad announces GA of a software-only version of its CryptoChart image sharing product that uses a QR code to access the cloud-based information.
Rehabilitation therapy platform vendor WebPT recaps its recent accomplishments – 20,000 clinic customers and a 40% market share, release of its Digital Patient Intake tool, key leadership appointments, and launch of an integrated virtual visit solution.
WellSky-owned CarePort announces a care coordination solution for ambulatory providers, which will allow them to connect patients to home- and community-based organizations directly from their EHR and to maintain two-way communication during the referral process.
3M will establish a Digital Science Community in Dublin, Ireland, employing 100 people to do R&D work for its HIS division.
MGMA and WhiteSpace Health release MGMA DataDiscovery, a physician practice performance analytics tool for medical groups.
Allscripts-owned Veradigm and pharma contract research organization PRA Health Sciences develop an EHR-based clinical research network that uses Veradigm’s StudySource platform.
Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women launches PeriWatch Vigilance in Malawi, with the fetal monitoring system being provided at no charge by PeriGen.
Omny Health develops a de-identified EHR data repository for dermatologic pharma research, offering the data of 7.5 million patients that was collected from 1,000 dermatology providers. The company announced GA of its anonymized data research platform in early May. Co-founder and CEO Mitesh Rao, MD, MS was Stanford Health Care’s chief patient safety officer through 2017 and remains an emergency medicine professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Other
England’s NHS publishes a draft data strategy that outlines NHSX’s use of data to give patients better access and control, to allow systems to share records, and to support research. It calls for the NHS app to allow patients to review test results, medication lists, procedures, and care plans and to be able to manage appointments, refill prescriptions and contact health and care staff. NHS also responded to concerns about its data-sharing plans by committing to publish a health data transparency statement by 2022.
Epic spokesperson Barbara Hernandez responds to the study in which Michigan Medicine researchers found that its sepsis alerting tool performed poorly, leading the authors to urge health systems to review the inner workings and past performance of such algorithms before using them in patient care. Epic’s points:
Customers have access to the full model, its formulas, and its accuracy measurements, all of which are published on Epic’s UserWeb.
The authors used a hypothetical approach that did not consider the analysis and tuning that is required before real-world deployment.
The tool has helped clinicians provide life-saving interventions to thousands of patients that might have been missed otherwise.
Michigan Medicine provided a positive review of the system in a UGM presentation in describing how pediatric patients are screened within two minutes of developing symptoms.
Meanwhile, one of the authors of the Epic Sepsis Model article that was published in JAMA Internal Medicine – nephrologist, assistant professor, and machine learning lab director Karandeep Singh, MD, MMSc of University of Michigan Medical School – provides further information via Twitter:
The authors ruled out configuration and mapping errors that often create low data AUCs (area under the curve). Epic’s AUCs were much higher in its own sensitivity analysis.
Singh notes that AUC is driven by two factors – the method of calculation (which was not a factor in their study) and the outcomes being considered (which was significantly different). Epic defines sepsis as presence of an ICD-10 code whose usage varies so much among hospitals that nearly nobody trusts it, including CDC and CMS, which don’t rely on the code to track sepsis or measure sepsis outcomes, respectively. The authors used the criteria that UM sepsis committee developed for quality measures tracking, which is a composite of the CDC and CMS definitions.
Singh raises the possibility that Epic’s model may infer sepsis from the ordering of sepsis-related medications, with the model’s data “leakage” making it look better than it really is.
Epic’s model identified only a tiny percentage of patients that clinicians would have otherwise missed.
Singh concludes that UM is using the model as part of a broader sepsis intervention that includes frequent nursing checks, but will be revisiting the model’s usage.
Singh’s recommendations to Epic, which he presented to its data science team in April, include releasing its models publicly for independent review as Cerner has done, increasing the transparency of the model’s coefficients and modeling code, and making it easier for Epic customers to run competing open models instead of limiting them to those offered by the company as “a walled-garden app store.”
Vanderbilt University Medical Center informatics professor and department chair Kevin Johnson, MD, MS posts “Living Through Going Live,” a video recap of VUMC’s 2017 go-live on Epic.
Sponsor Updates
Newfire Global Partners offers its team members an interoffice exchange program, such as employees from its Ukraine office working and culture-exploring on Croatia.
Users rate Halo Health the top clinical communication and collaboration platform in G2’s latest “Clinical Communication and Collaboration Grid Report.”
Health Data Movers publishes a new client story, “Data Conversion for Oncology EHR to Epic.”
InterSystems announces the latest release of its Iris data platform, which includes adaptive analytics capabilities and additional SQL extensions for analytics to improve the process of implementing an enterprise data fabric architecture.
Jvion will present at the Home Care 100 Leadership Conference June 27-30 in Marco Island, FL.
The Epic Sepsis Model predicts sepsis poorly while flooding clinicians with inappropriate alerts, a Michigan Medicine study concludes.
The authors note that while hundreds of hospitals are using the Epic-distributed model, the company has divulged little about its methods or its real-world performance.
They also note that at UM, clinicians would have needed to investigate 109 Epic-flagged patients to find one that required sepsis intervention.
The article warns of “an underbelly of confidential, non-peer-reviewed model performance documents that may not accurately reflect real-world model performance.”
An accompanying JAMA Internal Medicine editorial warns that Epic’s model was developed in just three US health systems six years ago and health systems should validate and recalibrate such models before implementing them. They draw the parallel that just as clinician decision support rules are reviewed by local clinicians before they are offered for use in patient care, local data scientists should evaluate any algorithms that were developed elsewhere.
Reader Comments
From Map Bucks: “Re: pay for remote work. My health IT employer is considering adjusting pay to local conditions for those who work remotely (the company is in an expensive metro area). Does this seem OK?” It’s a complex issue. The black-and-white side of me says that companies should pay based on the job, not where the worker sits while performing it. A Dallas company might not be able to hire someone from the Bay area for what it pays locally, but that candidate always has the option to move to Texas. Companies shouldn’t pay more just because an employee chooses a long commute, a more expensive house, or to live across the state line where it costs more – that seems to be a slight creep toward socialism, as in “you need to give me a raise to perform the same work because our new child is costing us more.” I would also not put it past some employees to fake their residence to earn more, such as borrowing a relative’s New York City address. Perhaps the stickiest issue is reducing compensation for someone who leaves an expensive metro, although that doesn’t make sense to me. My hot take is that the job is worth what it’s worth and the employee is free to live wherever they want but also with the expectation that their voluntary choice doesn’t affect their paycheck.
From D.V. Wormer: “Re: Avaneer. Which problem of interoperability can blockchain really solve?” Dean Wormer, instead of being a downer who undermines the work of roomfuls of vendor marketing people, just mindlessly accept that the US healthcare system lags the civilized world in accessibility, outcomes, and cost only because we don’t use enough AI, blockchain, and robotic process automation (try not to notice that those many countries who outperform us also don’t use it and that the folks touting those technologies are the same ones who sell it). IBM is involved in Avaneer, which isn’t a strong indicator of commitment, and so far the only customers I’ve seen mentioned are also Avaneer investors. Blockchain is a hammer looking for nails that never seem to get pounded, and while healthcare has a ton of inefficiency and lack of interoperability (weren’t government-subsidized EHRs and HIEs supposed to fix those problems?), the historic safe bet is to be skeptical of companies that pre-profess their technology’s ability make it better. I’ve been in health IT enough to skew cynical, so I’ll invite more glass-half-fullers to weigh in. I’ll be as interested as the next person to see hard data from an Avaneer-using health system that saves a ton of money and passes those savings along to patients (if for no other reason, because that has never happened in our profit-motivated system).
Webinars
June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.
June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
NextGen Healthcare announces that President and CEO Rusty Frantz will leave under a “mutual separation” agreement that is effective immediately. He has also left the company’s board. Frantz did not indicate the reason for his departure, but he said in a statement that leaving the company will allow him to “put 100% of my focus on my most important priority – my family.” The company has launched a search for his replacement. Frantz took the role in June 2015, with NXGN share price increasing 5% in that time versus the Nasdaq’s 181% gain.
Cleerly, which applies AI to coronary imaging to predict heart attacks, launches itself with a $43 million Series B funding round. Founder and CEO James Min, MD was a professor of radiology and medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, where the company’s technology was developed.
RCM services vendor Services Solutions Group, formerly the services division of NThrive, renames itself to Savista.
Sales
Arkansas Pediatric Clinic chooses Emerge data conversion and integration solutions for its migration to Athenahealth.
FirstLight Home care joins Dina’s digital home care coordination network.
The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center will offer Type 2 diabetes patients access to Teladoc Health’s Livongo for Diabetes Program.
People
Industry long-timer Tim Knoll, MBA (PatientSafe Solutions) joins healthcare staff safety technology vendor Strongline as VP of sales.
Glytec hires Nausheen Moulana, MBA, MSEE (Kyruus) as CTO.
Ascend Medical hires Michael Justice, MBA (Trinisys) as CTO.
Meera Kanhouwa, MD, MHA (Deloitte) joins Ernst & Young Global Consulting Services as executive director in digital health. Her experience includes 10 years as a US Army ED physician with deployment during Operation Desert Storm.
Announcements and Implementations
Amazon launches AWS Healthcare Accelerator, a four-week virtual program for 10 startups that will learn about using AWS to develop healthcare solutions.
A new KLAS report on population health management technology vendors finds that Arcadia, Epic, and Innovaccer stand out.
Government and Politics
A federal appeals court rejects Stanford Healthcare’s argument in a $500 million Medicare billing fraud case involving records Epic-enabled upcoding and unbundling of charges.The complaint says that Stanford doubled its Medicare revenues without increasing its expenses, which the complaint says could only be done by creative coding.
In Australia’s New South Wales, NSW Health will receive $105 million from the state’s digital services initiative for the first phase of its EHR replacement project, with additional funds budgeted from its COVID-19 relief package to expand telehealth and to improve integration between ambulance services and hospital EDs.
Other
KHN notes that big US health systems are opening medical facilities in other countries, such as Cleveland Clinic spending $1 billion to open a clinic across the street from London’s Buckingham Palace Garden that will offer only profitable elective surgeries and treatments in hopes of attracting American expatriates and rich Europeans. The article questions why those systems, which don’t pay taxes, are allowed to pursue such aggressive international business moves.
Sponsor Updates
Healthcare Growth Partners advised Medullan on its sale to ZS.
University of Texas as San Antonio joins Optimum Healthcare IT’s healthcare IT apprenticeship program.
Premier announces the 2021 winners of its Breakthrough Awards.
Goliath Technologies offers a free Citrix Health Check.
KLAS recognizes Arcadia as a leader in market energy and customer experience in its “2021 Population Health Management Overview” report.
TeleConsult Europe selects enterprise imaging from Agfa HealthCare.
Azara Healthcare names George McGovern (MedTouch) VP of finance and Charlene Grasso (Cambridge Consultants) director of HR.
The local news profiles CareSignal’s partnership with Americares and the Greater Hickory Cooperative Christina Ministry to serve vulnerable populations.
Cerner shares a new client achievement, “South Miami-Dade hospital reaches HIMSS Stage 6, 7 and wins Enterprise Davies Award in same year.”
Ellkay will exhibit at the virtual AHIP Institute & Expo June 22-24.
The following HIStalk sponsors have been recognized in Black Book’s latest customer satisfaction ranking of financial software solutions:
Enterprise patient identifier solutions – Experian Health
Physician network operator Doximity files documents for an IPO that will value the company at $4 billion.
The company reported $207 million in revenue in its most recent year, with $50 million in net income.
CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Tangney, MBA, who also co-founded Epocrates, controls 60% of company shares, a stake that will likely be valued at over $2 billion.
Reader Comments
From Joel Klein: “Re: University of Maryland Capital Region Medical Center. It opened on June 12, relocating all patients who were at Prince George’s Hospital Center, which will close. Essentially, this was an Epic go live plus a simultaneous hospital move. A week in, things are fairly stable. Thanks as always for doing this blog. Super helpful.” Congratulations to the team there and to Joel, who is SVP/CIO at University of Maryland Medical System and a practicing ED physician. UM Capital Regional Medical Center is in Largo, MD and replaces the 75-year-old Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly, MD, which I believe was running Cerner.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Many poll respondents think technology has improved healthcare mostly in the areas of consumer convenience, accessibility, and safety, but don’t think it has helped in important outcomes areas.
New poll to your right or here: Which action was most responsible for your getting the job you hold now? Poll choices are limited by practicality, so feel free to add a poll comment if your hiring was by other means.
Webinars
June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.
June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Sales
Post-acute care services provider Charter Healthcare chooses Netsmart’s MyUnity EHR along with its solutions for electronic visit verification and referrals.
People
San Joaquin County, VA promotes Mark Thomas, MBA (San Joaquin General Hospital) to county CIO.
Julie Bastien, MBA (Press Ganey) joins EVideon Health as VP of marketing.
Industry long-timer Mike Ruotolo (Office Practicum) joins prescribing technology vendor TroyRx as VP of sales.
Lisa Wild, MA (Kaiser Permanent) joins Ellkay as VP of payer market sales.
Primary care doctor and physician informatician Kennedy Ganti, MD is installed as president of the Medical Society of New Jersey. He is also president-elect of New Jersey HIMSS.
Announcements and Implementations
California launches its digital COVID-19 vaccination record system, built on the open source SMART Health Card Framework of VCI, whose members include Cerner, Epic, Meditech, Allscripts, HIMSS, and The Sequoia Project.
Sweden’s Region Västernorrland goes live on Sectra imaging.
Government and Politics
A VA OIG report finds that VA’s use of community care staff to scan patient records that are created by non-VA providers introduces errors due to a lack of standardized procedures, insufficient training, and lack of quality checks. The small review of records from seven VA facilities found that 44% of scanned mental health records contained errors that were caused by inaccurate document titles, indexing records to the wrong referral or veteran, and duplicate record entry.
ONC invites colleges and universities to apply for its public health IT workforce program, supported by $80 million in American Rescue Plan funds. ONC expects the program to train 4,000 people from underserved communities over four years.
Delegates at the American Medical Association Special Meeting call for doctors to be given more flexibility if they believe that the release of a patient’s health information – under ONC’s Cures Act information blocking requirements – would cause physical, mental, or emotional harm. They are especially concerned about doctors releasing the reproductive health, mental health, or substance abuse information of adolescents to parents or proxies as the regulation requires.
Privacy and Security
ED doctors at Humber River Hospital in Toronto, Canada urge hospital leadership to close the ED until IT systems are restored from a June 13 ransomware attack. The ED has gone to paper records and patients are experiencing long delays. The hospital opened in 2015 as North America’s first all-digital hospital and upgraded to Meditech Expanse in 2019.
St. Joseph’s / Candler (GA) is hit by a ransomware attack Thursday, with systems not yet recovered.
Other
The local paper profiles Peoria, IL-based OSF OnCall Digital Health, whose 800 employees operate a “hospital without walls” for OSF HealthCare and offer services to other organizations.
Sponsor Updates
Hillrom posts an interview with SVP and Patient Support Systems President Paul Johnson, MBA on the company’s digital health vision.
Wolters Kluwer Health offers Ovid users access to OrthoEvidence, an evidence-based summary provider for orthopedic specialists, surgeons, nurses, medical residents, and students.
OptimizeRx discusses its 2021 strategic operating plan, which has been aligned with the pharma industry’s market-sizing opportunity across fast-growing specialty therapeutic areas.
Well Health names Marissa Morrison (Foursquare) VP of people.
PatientPing publishes a new use case spotlight, “How Eleanor Health utilizes PatientPing’s real-time ADT notifications to proactively and promptly engage members and coordinate care.”
Premier honors with Community Enhancement Collaboration, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting food insecurity, with its annual Monroe E. Trout Premier Cares Award and a $100,000 cash prize.
Redox releases a new podcast, “Crashing Primary Care and Dialysis with Dr. Andrew Schutzbank.”
Spirion expands its Sensitive Data Platform portfolio with new SaaS solution offerings that simplify the protection of sensitive data across the enterprise.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Hard agree with "actionless figure" - I realize that LinkedIn is the only mostly-non political form of social media we…