Monday Morning Update 12/20/21

Top News

Kaiser Health News call out Yale New Haven Health System, which for telehealth visits sends a separate bill for a $50 to $350 facility fee even though telehealth patients never set foot in any of the health system’s buildings.

The health system, warned by the Connecticut Office of the Healthcare Advocate that the state explicitly bans charging facility fees for telehealth visits, blamed a coding mistake.

Despite attributing an error, the health system still argued that the charges are justifiable because they cover the cost of the telehealth software, adding that “we do still have to keep the lights on.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Hard-to-change company attributes are most important to poll respondents who are seeking new opportunities, but otherwise, throwing down cash doesn’t hurt.

New poll to your right or here: How would an Oracle acquisition of Cerner change healthcare?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Online mental healthcare startup Cerebral, which was recently valued at nearly $5 billion after its latest funding round and hired Olympic gymnast Simone Biles as chief impact officer, recently changed hundreds of therapists from salaried workers to hourly and made benefits eligibility contingent on hitting quotas. Patients choose company therapists from its web directory, so the new structure means that therapists have no control over the company’s minimum billed hours threshold.

UK’s business secretary will investigate complaints that Microsoft pushed British companies out of contention for NHS contracts by giving NHS free use of its Teams remote meeting software, which small competitors say is a way to gain overall IT leverage posting as a charitable act. Also complaining is Salesforce, which owns Teams competitor Slack.

Cerner shares closed at Friday $89.77, up 13% on the rumor that Oracle will acquire the company in a $30 billion deal. ORCL shares dropped 6% on the Wall Street Journal report.

Axios reports that the two founders of PillPack, acquired by Amazon in mid-2018 for $1 billion, have been demoted to consultants to the online pharmacy. Employees who reported to T.J. Parker now report to John Love, an Amazon VP who oversees Alexa shopping.

Announcements and Implementations

KLAS finds that Epic had the largest net gain in US hospitals in 2020 with 101, which gave it 19,000 new beds. Cerner lost a net of 19 hospitals and 10,000 beds. KLAS concludes that while Epic’s biggest-gaining year was 2015 when it added 144 new hospitals, “their growth has never so decisively outpaced the competition’s.” The company lost three hospitals in 2020, all due to M&A. Meditech lost 62% of the decisions made by legacy customers in 2020, with all of its new hospitals being under 100 beds. Most of those that decided not to move to forward to Meditech Expanse chose Epic instead. UPDATE: I’ve corrected the dates – KLAS’s “US Hospital Market Share 2021” report reflects data from 2020, not 2021.

Government and Politics

The Massachusetts Supreme Court rules in favor of a former Meditech employee who claims he was fired for exercising his right to file a rebuttal in his personnel file. Terence Meehan says Meditech reorganized its 12-person regional sales department in demoting three sales reps – including Meehan – to the newly created position of “sales specialists,” who sales reps rarely used because they don’t want to share commissions. Meehan says he and the other demoted employees were placed on performance improvement plans in July 2018, and when he sent his supervisor a rebuttal, the president and CEO of Meditech immediately terminated him. He filed a complaint of wrongful discharge and the court agreed with him.

Sponsor Updates

• Two member agencies of The Arc New York collaborative will implement Netsmart’s CareFabric platform.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “Extracting paternalism from the patient experience with B.well CEO Kristen Valdes.”
• The Pharmacy, IT & Me Podcast features RxRevu CEO Carm Huntress.
• Talkdesk wins the cloud-based CX solution of the year award at Customer Contact Week.
• Vocera releases a new podcast, “The Evidence for Team Member Safety and Well-being – Kedar Mate, MD.”
• Well Health has helped providers facilitate nearly 10 million vaccine appointments and send over 63 million messages related to COVID-19.

Blog Posts

• Innovate4Outcomes: Patient Advocates Come to the Table (OptimizeRx)
• 4 Ways to Improve Patient Outcomes through Health Literacy in 2022 (PatientBond)
• What Does the No Surprises Act Mean for Providers? (Symplr)
• What Role Does Good Communication Play in Your Revenue Cycle? (PMD)
• Accounts Payable Fraud and Theft: Automation to the Rescue (Premier)
• Year in Review: Top 2021 Trends in Digital Health and What They Mean for 2022 (Quil Health)
• 10 Insider Tips to Ensure Your Product Lands on a Health System’s Shortlist (Redox)
• Crack the (OR) Code to Patient Engagement (Sonifi Health)
• Can closed-loop communication help mitigate clinical lab burnout? (A closer look) (Spok)
• The Future of Health, Fireside Chat Recap (Tegria)
• Why Patient Engagement is Critical for Chronic Disease Management (Twistle)
• Where Does Telehealth Go From Here? (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 12/17/21

Top News

Innovaccer raises $150 million in a Series E funding round that values the company at $3.2 billion.

Reader Comments

From Marc: “Re: Scarborough Heath Network. The first client in the world to put Epic DR on AWS. Great collaboration with Deloitte, AWS, and Epic.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m interested in hearing about turnover experience – yours and your employer’s — via this short, anonymous survey, whose results I’ll aggregate in the next few days.

The JP Morgan healthcare conference, which just moved to a virtual-only format because of attendee concerns about COVID-19, will start 55 days before the first-ever ViVE conference and 63 days before HIMSS22. It’s not a great time to be in the conference business, especially when those two upcoming conferences are in Florida, which bans vaccine mandates (such as for workers at the convention center, hotels, and restaurants) and doesn’t allow requiring customers to provide proof of vaccination. HIMSS says it is reviewing its Right of Entry Protocols for HIMSS22 to determine which ones “comply with prevailing local regulations in Florida,” which is basically what ViVE is doing in simply saying that it will let people know later what it will be allowed to require (we’re just 80 days out). Would you be comfortable attending a conference where attendee vaccination cannot be verified under state law? JPM would have required attendees to prove vaccination and to wear masks indoors.

Webinars

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

Here’s the recording of Wednesday’s webinar titled “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications,” presented by Spok.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Physician performance analytics vendor Embold Health raises $20 million in a Series B funding round. CEO Daniel Stein, MD, MBA founded the company in 2017 after serving as chief medical officer for Walmart’s Care Clinics.

Ophelia, which connects opioid users in 11 states to moonlighting providers who prescribe Suboxone via video visits for $195 per month, raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

Optum sets the date for completing its $13 billion acquisition of Change Healthcare as April 5, 2022.

UK-based secure communications platform vendor Hospify will shut down its flagship service on January 31, 2022. The app, which was launched in February 2018, was the first to be approved for general provider and patient use by the NHS Apps Library. The company blames its demise on the government’s early-pandemic waiver of the Data Protection Act, which continues in allowing providers to use non-GDPR compliant consumer messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The company also questions the post-Brexit uncertainties around the UK-EU data agreements. Hospify’s movingly honest and sometimes humorous explanation of its circumstances says that the company will remain in business at it seeks new markets where “data protection is taken more seriously by the relevant governments.”

Sales

• Low-code app development vendor Appian will use Redox for healthcare data integration.
• Sage Memorial Hospital goes live on Meditech-as-a-Service with the assistance of Healthcare Triangle.
• Community Care Cooperative will implement Epic at 12 of its FQHCs.
• Medicare primary care center operator Oak Street Health will expand its use of real-time patient event notifications from Bamboo Health.

People

Optimum Healthcare IT promotes Larry Kaiser to chief marketing officer.

Commure hires Abhijit Mitra, MS, MBA (ServiceNow) as chief product and engineering officer, Manisha Shetty Gulati, MPA, MBA (Clarify Health Solutions) as chief growth officer, and Christine Tibbits, MA (Google Health) as chief people officer.

St. Luke’s (MN) names Chris Sorenson, MBA (Ascension) to the newly created position of CIO.

Integris Health hires industry long-timer Bill Hudson, MBA (John Muir Health) as VP/CIO.

NextGen Healthcare promotes Bob Murry, PhD, MD to chief medical officer. He replaces Betty Rabinowitz, MD, who is retiring.

Personalized care solutions vendor Happify Health hires Megan Callahan, MPH (Lyft Healthcare) as COO.

K Health, which offers “people like me” compiled health insights and telehealth, hires Jennifer Pena, MD (Nurx) to the newly created position of chief medical officer. She previously served as White House physician and spent 10 years as a US Army doctor.

Industry long-timer Thomas “TR” Rush – VP of business development at MedAssist and veteran of a long career at Siemens Healthcare — died unexpectedly last week, two days before the birth of his first grandchild. He was 51.

Announcements and Implementations

A study of Arcadia’s de-identified health history of 150 million patients finds that unvaccinated people were six times less likely to report multiple symptoms of long COVID if they were given their first COVID-19 vaccination in the four weeks after becoming infected. Even those who didn’t get the shot until 4-8 weeks after diagnosis were three times less likely to report multiple long COVID symptoms.

KONZA, the Kansas Health Information Network, releases Translate, which automatically sends ambulatory COVID-19 test results to public health departments without manual entry.

Epic will add mapping, navigation, and location-aware analytics via System1’s MapQuest Business-to-Business service.

Midwest grocery chain Hy-Vee launches RedBox Rx, a national, low-cost telehealth and online pharmacy service that includes free prescription shipping. The service, which offers telehealth visits for prices ranging from zero to $39, does not accept insurance. It is offered by partner MDBox, the telehealth business of Reliant Immune Diagnostics that also offers testing and monitoring.

Cigna-owned health services vendor Evernorth chooses Omada Health as its preferred vendor for digital chronic care programs for diabetes, hypertension, and prevention. It apparently displaces Livongo, which was acquired in October 2020 for $18.5 billion by Teladoc Health, whose shares dropped on the latest news in valuing the company at $14 billion. TDOC’s market cap has dropped by two-thirds – $28 billion — since February 2021.

A new KLAS report that covers EHR vendors that offer a wide range of comprehensive solutions for ambulatory practices finds that Epic, NextGen Healthcare, and Cerner earn high user satisfaction with offering technologies that meet most or all of an ambulatory practice’s needs, although the virtual care offerings of those vendors are sometimes passed over in favor of best-of-breed tools. Cerner customers remain concerned about Cerner’s revenue cycle track record and don’t always choose its practice management solution, while all interviewed customers of NextGen Healthcare and Epic report lowered costs and/or increased revenue after implementation.

Government and Politics

Two Republication US senators introduce a bipartisan bill that requires the VA secretary to report the cost, performance metrics, and outcomes of its Cerner project quarterly to Congress.

The Tampa paper notes that while Tampa General Hospital can’t legally donate money to political candidates, its for-profit, outsourced coffee shops have contributed $226,000 to mostly Republican state candidates. The coffee shop corporation’s three directors are Tampa General executives, including EVP/CIO Scott Arnold.

Privacy and Security

AMA calls for app developers to practice “privacy by design” to gain the trust of physicians who have involvement in patient app use. It notes that many people mistakenly believe that direct-to-consumer health apps are regulated by HIPAA. It also notes that developers who use software development kits from companies such as Facebook, Zoom, and Google may knowingly or unknowingly be exposing user data to third party advertisers and data aggregators, including apps that address addiction and recovery. AMA calls for apps to identify the data they are accessing, using, disclosing, and processing before collecting it and to give users control over how their information is used. AMA also calls for apps to get user approval before their data is used to develop and/or train machines or algorithms and to allow them to opt out.

Other

Among the health systems that have said publicly that they are being affected by the Ultimate Kronos Group ransomware attack are Shannon Medical Center (TX), Ascension, Baptist Health (FL), UF Health (FL), Allegheny Health Network (PA), and Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System (LA). Some UKG time clocks can store punches locally until their memory is full, but the data can’t be collected since Workforce Central connectivity is unavailable. The company recommends re-posting the previous payroll, then working with UKG to reconcile differences after systems are restored (because it’s always fun to ask overpaid employees to give the extra money back right after Christmas). UKG says the attack has left it unable to access customer environments or to provide historical reports or files.

The president and CEO of Stamford Health (CT) says that virtual health plans “should worry us all” as insurers are using them like 1990s HMO gatekeepers in their virtual-first plans to limit access to physicians, tests, and in-person visits. Kathleen Silard, RN, MS also notes that the virtual health plans often involve third-party companies whose doctors don’t know their patients and whose EHRs make data-sharing harder. She also worries about equity issues due to digital illiteracy and lack of access to computing devices and broadband. She concludes, “I know that technology is a tremendous clinical tool for lowering barriers to care. I hope it becomes a regular site of care for many patients. But don’t confuse virtual care with a virtual health insurance plan. Technology builds walls as easily as it tears them down.”

JP Morgan Chase cancels its in-person 2022 healthcare conference, bowing to pressure to hold the event online instead of in San Francisco January 10-13. The company says it is concerned about COVID-19, which had already resulted in the pullout of vaccine makers Moderna and Amgen, but big-company attendees had already called for the conference to be cancelled due to their safety concerns related to San Francisco crime and homelessness around the conference site. Some experts predict that JPM will resume in a different city in 2023 to skirt San Francisco’s overcharging vendors, but others say those who are buying $1,000 hotel rooms and $200 hourly coffee shop table rental are often conference hangers-on who don’t join the small number of invited attendees inside the Westin St. Francis anyway.

Sponsor Updates

• Availity team members decorate 18 Christmas trees at Sulzbacher’s campuses in Jacksonville, FL.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new “Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast” featuring National Coordinator Micky Tripathi.
• Bamboo Health expands its care coordination partnership with Oak Street Health for real-time patient event notifications.
• IT Central Station has ranked Everbridge’s Digital Operations Platform the top IT alerting and incident management solution.
• Get Well publishes a new white paper, “How CIOs can lead strategic patient engagement.”
• According to KLAS, early data on the performance of Meditech’s Professional Services indicate the company is performing above average for its EHR implementation support.
• Nordic Consulting is ranked #69 of 100 US companies with the best cultures by Comparably. It also ranked #74 of the top 100 companies that are best for women.
• Healthcare IT Leaders will integrate the IBM Digital Health Pass with its Health Returns enterprise COVID-19 services.

Blog Posts

• Cerner is on FHIR; Let’s Hope it Spreads (Medicomp Systems)
• Data Breach Response: 8 Steps to Take for Your Organization’s Needs (Fortified Health Security)
• 5 Tips for Chief Quality Officers to Prepare for CMS’ New Measures on Glycemic Management (Glytec)
• Transforming Your Physician Enterprise – 5 Key Drivers (Impact Advisors)
• Breaking Down Barriers to the Move to the Cloud in Healthcare (Healthcare Triangle)
• 16 Practical Steps to Advance Your Career as a Healthcare CIO (HCI Group)
• Your Guide to Augmented Intelligence in Healthcare: Three Hows for AI Success (Health Catalyst)
• 4 Ways to Educate Through Health Awareness Events (Healthwise)
• Stay vigilant: What we can learn from the Kronos hack (Imprivata)
• What’s in store for healthcare data in 2022? (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• 6 Criteria When Selecting a Health IT Data Partner (LexisNexis)
• Addressing the Capacity Crunch in Perioperative Care (Lumeon)
• A Road Paved with Good Intentions: Looking Back at the Opioid Epidemic and Finding a Path Forward (MedAware)
• Five Steps to a Successful Clinical IT Implementation – Pt 2 (Medhost)
• 5 blogs our readers loved in 2021 (Meditech)
• 8 Tips & Tricks to Accelerate Your Physical Therapy Documentation (MWTherapy)
• The future of healthcare: 4 trends to watch in 2022 (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 12/15/21

Top News

Shannon Medical Center (TX) reverts to downtime payroll procedures after payroll and workforce management software vendor Kronos experiences a ransomware attack Saturday.

Kronos said in an announcement that it expects the outage to last several weeks. It suggests using “alternate business continuity protocols,” which will no doubt put Christmas payrolls at risk.

Kronos says the attack affects Kronos Private Cloud, which includes UKG Workforce Central, UKG TeleStaff, Healthcare Extensions, and Banking Scheduling Solutions. Applications outside Kronos Private Cloud are unaffected.

Reader Comments

From Morty: “Re: Edifecs. Purchased Health Fidelity on the heels of its acquisition of Talix. Interesting moves being made in the risk adjustment space.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I set up a short survey that covers expected turnover at your company, what your employer is doing about it, and your own job changes. I appreciate your taking a couple of minutes to complete the form. A reader expressed alarm at the high amount of turnover that was reported in my most recent poll and hopes to learn more.

Webinars

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the technologies that most often contribute to clinician burnout, then explain how improving common clinical workflows can help care teams collaborate better and focus on what they do best—taking care of patients. They will describe how a clinical communication and collaboration platform can automate clinical consults and code calls to alleviate burnout.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cloud, managed services, and analytics company Healthcare Triangle acquires EHR and managed services company DevCool. Healthcare Triangle went public in October, raising $13 million at $4 per share.

Centauri Health Solutions, a Medicare and Medicaid technology vendor, has acquired health data exchange software company Secure Exchange Solutions.

Patient intake technology company Phreesia acquires Insignia Health, co-developer of the Patient Activation Measure program. Results from a PAM assessment, co-developed by researchers at former Insignia Health stakeholder the University of Oregon, are used to improve risk identification, better support patients, and evaluate impact as a patient-reported outcome measure.

Health IT and RCM vendor Xifin acquires retail pharmacy software company OmniSys for an undisclosed amount. OmniSys CEO John King will become president of the new OmniSys division.

Workforce management software vendor Prolucent Health raises $11.5 million in new funding.

People

Gil Kaminski (DaVita Kidney Care) joins Laguna Health as VP of clinical product.

Care Continuity names Steven Mason, Jr. (Iodine Software) CEO.

David Mulligan (PhyzData Healthcare Solutions) joins Carenet Health as EVP of technology.

OneOncology hires Andy Corts (SignalPath) as CTO.

Tissue and implant tracking software vendor TrackCore names John Weller (University of Michigan Health – West) as CISO.

Sales

• Virtua Health (NJ) chooses Kyruus for provider directory, website provider search, and online scheduling.

Announcements and Implementations

Scarborough Health Network implements Epic across its three campuses in Ontario.

Healthcare IT Leaders will enable multilingual support for its COVID-19 contract tracing services in partnership with Voyce.

Other

Announced as a HIMSS22 keynote presenter is Ben Sherwood, which HIMSS describes as “one of Disney’s greatest innovators” who will talk about leading and succeeding during disruption. He left Disney-ABC three years ago after a short three years on the job as president, passed over in favor of executives of Disney-acquired 21st Century Fox. He was the subject of a scathingly funny 1988 article that ridiculed the then-Rhodes Scholar (like his sister) as “the ultimate in a long line of centerless resume featherers” who was raised rich and shallowly ambitious and deemed by his Harvard classmates as “one of the most hated people alive.” Finally they get someone interesting.

Sponsor Updates

• Bamboo Health publishes a new e-book, “CMS’ E-Notifications CoP: The Route to Compliance: Part 4.”
• Change Healthcare releases a new podcast, “Let’s Talk Interop: Moving Toward Electronic HEDIS Measures.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a case study titled “Optimum CareerPath Accelerates Cutting Edge Software Company Clearsense.”

Blog Posts

• With cloud, the sky’s the limit for image management (Agfa HealthCare)
• Help! One Year of the New Improved DRVS Help Section Part 2: Details & Data (Azara Healthcare)
• Most Read Posts for Epic EHR Optimization (CereCore)
• 2030 Interoperability Projections – EHR Software, Physicians & Patients (ChartLogic)
• Securing Healthcare’s Digital Transformation for Providers, Vendors, and Patients (Clearwater)
• Impact of technology on the future of healthcare post COVID-19 (OBIX Perinatal Data System, developed by Clinical Computer Systems)
• (Part 3) Reaching Patients Along the Specialty Medication Journey: Persistent Patients (ConnectiveRx)
• ‘Ask Your Doctor If:’ How to Talk to Patients About Popular Drug Ads (CoverMyMeds)
• Let’s Celebrate National Influenza Vaccination Week #fightflu (EClinicalWorks)
• Streamlining prior authorizations for faster patient collections (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/13/21

Top News

CVS Health says in its yearly investor meeting that the company will add primary care centers to several hundred of its locations and open more HealthHubs.

The primary care centers will employ doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who will offer both in-person and telehealth services.

CVS says it will expand its nurse practitioner-staffed MinuteClinic model by acquiring physician practices and clinics.

“We are closer to the consumer than anyone else,” the CEO said.

CVS owns the country’s biggest pharmacy benefit manager, Caremark, and Aetna, the country’s third-largest health insurer.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Over 40% of poll respondents either changed employers in 2021 or plan to do so in 2022.

New poll to your right or here, piggybacking on last week’s poll: Which factor would most influence your decision to take a new job? Most or all of them are important to a given person, but few folks would change jobs unless their #1 factor was satisfied.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor MedAware. The Avon, CT-based company’s medication safety monitoring platform lives within existing technology systems, EHRs, and devices to identify dangerous medication-related risks throughout the entire patient journey. Built using longitudinal and real-time patient data, advanced machine learning algorithms identify medication errors, opioid dependency risk, evolving adverse drug events, and more. Due to the high clinical relevancy of its medication alerts, providers have been shown to change their prescribing behavior significantly more often than with traditional systems alone. Founded in 2012, MedAware has offices in the United States and Israel. Thanks to MedAware for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the technologies that most often contribute to clinician burnout, then explain how improving common clinical workflows can help care teams collaborate better and focus on what they do best—taking care of patients. They will describe how a clinical communication and collaboration platform can automate clinical consults and code calls to alleviate burnout.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health plan member and provider analytics vendor Reveleer raises $65 million in a venture funding round. 

Patient prescription support and access platform vendor ConnectiveRx acquires Rx Savings Assistant from Medicom Digital, which finds prescriptions savings offers and embeds them into the EHR, including Epic.

Payments vendor Bottomline Technologies hires an investment bank to review strategic options, including a potential sale of some or all of the company. Its healthcare offerings include user surveillance for privacy visibility, signature capture, electronic forms, and print automation.

Sales

Lehigh Valley Health Network implements Sonifi Health’s in-room technology for service recovery, entertainment, and patient education.

Announcements and Implementations

TriNetX adds Diversity Lens to its real-world research platform to improve clinical trials access for underrepresented patient populations.

Petersburg Medical Center goes live with Cerner, with the Cares Act for COVID-19 relief helping cover the $1.3 million cost of CommunityWorks. The hospital vowed to replace its EHR in March 2021 following discovery that an employee had viewed patient records inappropriately.

Baxter International studies the use of MedAware’s AI-powered medication safety monitoring platform for smart infusion pump programming, concluding that the system can help build and maintain smart infusion drug libraries that can issue real-time warning of possible infusion errors to improve patient safety and reduce clinician alert fatigue. Such warnings are traditionally driven by hospital-developed rules that cover drug dose and rate, unusual concentrations, and uncommon patient weights. 

A new KLAS report looks at how enterprise EHR vendors meet patient access requirements (address verification, cost estimates, coverage discovery, eligibility verification, medical necessity, prior authorizations, propensity to pay, registration QA, and scheduling). Epic customers reported the highest satisfaction, those of Cerner expressed dissatisfaction with use of integrated third-party partner tools, and Meditech’s customers are very satisfied with what they call a workhorse product.

Government and Politics

AHA and AMA sue the federal government over the method that will be used by arbitrators to decide how much insurers will pay for disputed out-of-network bills under the No Surprises Act.

Other

Analysis finds that Ireland’s national health service was unprepared for a May ransomware attack that crippled its services after an employee clicked a malicious Excel email attachment. The HSE was warned about suspicious activity by two of its hospitals and its antivirus software vendor, but did not take action. The report observed that HSE does not have an official in charge of cybersecurity, relies on a team of 15 inexperienced IT employees (two of whom are students), backs up irregularly to offline tape, and hadn’t set up antivirus software correctly on most of its 70,000 devices. The analysis concluded that HSE was lucky that the hackers didn’t target medical devices, didn’t destroy data, didn’t go after HSE’s cloud-based systems, and provided a ransomware decryption key six days after the attack without requiring a ransom to be paid.

A New York Times article says that telehealth has become a widely used lifeline and enables clinicians to observe patients in their normal surroundings, but it has limits to overcome: (a) patients may still need hands-on care or lab work and some prefer in-person visits for that reason; (b) older Americans are less likely to have and/or actively use computers or mobile devices; (c) Medicare beneficiaries who are black, live in rural areas, are less educated, and who live alone use telehealth less often; and (d) telehealth platforms may need to be designed for simpler use and the mandatory use of a provider’s patient portal may limit telehealth uptake.

Sponsor Updates

• Vocera staff volunteer with Second Harvest of Silicon Valley.
• Austin Health in Melbourne will be the first health service in the Asia Pacific region to implement Cerner’s FHIR service.
• OptimizeRx earns a silver Digital Health Award for its COVID-19 consumer health communications campaign and a merit award for its TelaRep clinical decision support tool.
• The Digital Workplace Group honors Nordic Consulting Senior Director Dawn Hancock with its Digital Workplace Leader of the Year Award.
• Premier releases a new episode of its InsideOut Podcast, “The hidden challenge of the pandemic. Managing surging demand and record-setting staffing shortages.”
• Redox releases a new podcast episode, “Olive’s Journey to AI through Robotic Process Automation.”
• Spirion publishes a case study featuring AmerisourceBergen, “Fulfilling healthcare privacy mandates and data protection laws.”
• Business Intelligence Group honors Talkdesk CEO Tiago Paiva with its 2021 Big Awards for Business Entrepreneurship Award.

Blog Posts

• Psychographics in Effective COVID-19 Vaccination Messaging (PatientBond)
• Using Technology to Become a High-Reliability Healthcare Organization (Symplr)
• The Trouble with Payer Policies (PMD)
• How to deliver on-time, on-budget, and on-value health IT projects (Spok)
• A Specialty Medication Insights from a Prescriber and Patient Assistance Program (Surescripts)
• Value-Based Care Advances Access, Quality, Equity and Affordability (Twistle)
• What PTs Need to Know About Medicare Administrative Contractors (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 12/10/21

Top News

Ambient clinical documentation vendor Robin raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

The company says its physician users save 90 minutes per day. It guarantees its work in defending any audits that result.

Co-founder Emilio Galan, MD, MS founded healthcare transparency vendor HonestHealth, while co-founder Noah Auerhahn started and sold shopping portal Extrabux.

Reader Comments

From HisTalk Fan: “Re: Cerner. Sharp HealthCare and Shriners are leaving for Epic.” Verified for Sharp, not yet verified for Shriners (but likely), according to my contacts. Sharp is now an Epic enterprise customer for both the health system and its managed care business. It had been a Cerner user since 1995 and extended its Cerner contract in early 2019 for another eight years. 

From Dr. J: “Re: AirStrip and Nant forming Adjuvare. Patrick Soon-Shiong owns AirStrip since recapitalizing it when Sequoia Capital dumped its holdings.” Thanks. The SEC filing is here.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

From Patti: “Re: No Surprises Act. Seems to place a heavy burden on provider administrative staff.” CMS hasn’t posted the transcript of Wednesday’s call as I write this, but some of the elements of the act – which takes effect January 1, 2022 – require providers to: (a) not balance-bill for out-of-network emergency services or non-emergency services unless notice and consent is given; (b) provide uninsured or self-pay patients with good-faith cost estimates in advance; (c) accept plan payments for 90 days after a payer-provider contract ends; and (d) submit provider directory information to health plans at the beginning and end of the agreement and when changes are made and reimburse patients who are billed out-of-network rates because of a directory error. The act also establishes an arbitration procedure for provider-plan disputes (taking patients out of the back-and-forth arguing) and authorizes HHS to establish or improve an all-payer claims database. Providers also need to understand their state-specific billing rules and how they overlap with the No Surprises Act. Perhaps someone can elaborate on the practical impact to providers since the act takes effect in just three weeks.

Webinars

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the technologies that most often contribute to clinician burnout, then explain how improving common clinical workflows can help care teams collaborate better and focus on what they do best—taking care of patients. They will describe how a clinical communication and collaboration platform can automate clinical consults and code calls to alleviate burnout.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Online mental health services vendor Cerebral raises $300 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $462 million. The company focuses on medications, referring to its providers as “prescribers” and mailing medications to patient homes. Founder Kyle Robertson was an Accenture consultant and founded a college startup website.

Bloomberg reports that the private equity owner of healthcare analytics vendor Cotiviti is considering selling the company for over $15 billion. Veritas Capital acquired the company in a $4.9 billion take-private deal in 2018. The private equity firm also acquired GE Healthcare’s value-based care business and invested in Truven Health Analytics.

Israel will fund a $18 million digital health innovation program that will help providers implement anonymized data-sharing with healthcare startups for research, hoping to develop an international data sharing standard such as the US-based SEER for cancer statistics.

Industrial IoT security platform vendor Claroty will use $400 million in new Series E funding to acquire healthcare IoT vendor Medigate. Medigate co-founder and CEO Jonathan Langer served in the Israel Defense Forces through 2016.

Included Health, formerly Grand Rounds and Doctor on Demand, is reportedly planning an IPO for the first half of 2022.

Sales

• Creative Solutions in Healthcare, the largest skill nursing operator in Texas, deploys the CareSafely quality, safety, and compliance software platform in its 91 facilities.

People

Anne Donovan, MBA (Zelis) joins Wolters Kluwer Health as VP/GM of its Health Language business.

Verisys hires Joe Alberta (Optum) as chief revenue officer.

PatientBond hires Jeff Bohmer, MD (Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital) as chief medical officer and Mark Spranca, PhD (Mathematica) as chief strategy officer.

Industry long-timer Brian Graves (Optum) joins surgical care team coordination solutions provider RelayOne as chief revenue officer.

Vu Van, MBA (Livongo) joins Transcarent as VP of health systems.

Orchestrate Healthcare hires Eric Boone (InfoBionic) as VP of sales, southeast.

Announcements and Implementations

Google is working with WHO to develop an open source software developer kit for developing FHIR-powered mobile solutions for Android. One of the apps is EmCare, a clinical decision support system that is based on WHO SMART Guidelines.

Amazon’s Comprehend Medical natural language processing service adds support for SNOMED-CT and reduces the charge for using its API by up to 90%.

Goliath Technologies launches Multi-Cloud Monitoring, which provides a unified view of AWS EC2 and Workspaces, Microsoft Azure, Citrix Cloud, and Google Cloud for troubleshooting performance, availability, and end-user experience.

Asynchronous telehealth platform vendor Bright.md announces Navigate, in which patients enter their primary symptom and the app presents the appropriate next step – on-demand asynchronous visit, appointment scheduling, or urgent care — based on health system configuration.

Government and Politics

CDC says its questionably accurate vaccination rates among US seniors – which at times has showed more people in a given age group vaccinated than exist – overestimates first doses and underestimates follow-up doses because it can’t always identify people who get their shots from different providers or states. CDC says that providers are required to de-identify their data, which limits the organization’s ability to match vaccinations to recipients. 

Other

Memorial Sloan Kettering paid $1.4 million in severance to three former executives in 2020, with the largest payment of $700,000 going to former CIO Pat Skarulis.

A study of Epic-using ambulatory care clinicians finds that EHR clinician time and after-hours work dropped early in the pandemic, but had recovered by July 2020. Patient messages increased 157% of the pre-pandemic average, with each message requiring more than two minutes of additional clinician EHR time. The authors speculate that increased messaging was caused by the increased use of patient portals, leading them to conclude that higher message volume will persist.

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner says in a “Hey Judy” EpicShare story that she decided to build an Epic campus when the company hit 300 employees, estimating that a safe bet was a capacity of 10 times the headcount then (3,000 employees). She and Carl Dvorak visited the Microsoft campus where her son worked and then found a Verona corn field that she thought was about the same size, only to find later that the Microsoft campus was 29 acres and the Verona property was 350 acres because “we had no ability whatsoever to correctly judge land mass.” The campus has since expanded to 1,200 acres for its 10,000 employees.

Sponsor Updates

• Meditech celebrates 30 years of supporting healthcare in the UK.
• Healthcare IT Leaders adds multilingual support from Voyce to its COVID-19 contact tracing capabilities.
• The Meditech Podcast, “How genomics will revolutionize healthcare in the next decade,” features First Databank Director of Product Management Anna Dover.
• LexisNexis publishes a case study, “Lehigh Valley Health Network Innovates Strategic Planning in Healthcare with LexisNexis MarketView.”
• Lumeon’s COVID-19 remote home monitoring solution wins a Silver Best in Biz Award in the Best New Product of the Year category.
• DCH Health System (AL), which recently went live with Meditech Expanse, has been named to CHIME’s Digital Health Most Wired list.

Blog Posts

• How a Continuous SOC Can Help Healthcare Facilities Avoid Data Loss (Fortified Health Security)
• The Year of Employee Burnout & How to Address It (Halo Health)
• 5 Things to Consider When Evaluating a Community Connect Host (Healthcare Triangle)
• Three Crucial Mindset Shifts to Reach Peak Financial Healthcare Management (Health Catalyst)
• What Value Does an Epic Service Desk Bring? (Impact Advisors)
• The complexity of COVID-19 variant data (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Five Steps to a Successful Clinical IT Implementation – Pt 1 (Medhost)
• How to Attract New Talent at Your PT Practice (MWTherapy)
• Vaccine Administration – a year later and still inefficient (NextGate)
• Combining the advantages of close-talk and far-talk speech recognition (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 12/8/21

Top News

The Spokane, WA newspaper talks to local patients and employees about the VA’s implementation of Cerner at the city’s Mann-Grandstaff Medical Center, reporting these issues:

• Two former senior VA officials who were involved in the project say it was misguided and is unlikely to improve on the existing VistA system.
• One hour after VA Deputy Secretary Donald Remy assured a House subcommittee that “The Cerner system works,” the system went down for 80 minutes and had at least some downtime 10 times in September and October. The system has gone fully down four times since it went live in October 2020.
• Former VA deputy CIO and CTO Ed Meagher said it is “absolute malpractice” that the VA did not anticipate performance problems by modeling workload against infrastructure, adding that otherwise, “you’re working off of Cerner marketing material.”
• Several veterans said they were unable to navigate the patient portal and it sometimes locks up and fails to deliver messages.
• Prescriptions were not transferred to Cerner, requiring mistake-prone manual re-entry that left some veterans without psychiatric and other chronic care medications.
• Employees sometimes have to fax medication lists when patients are sent to other facilities for emergency treatment that isn’t offered 24×7 at Mann-Grandstaff..
• The VA, which was the subject of a national wait-time scandal in 2014, has removed Mann-Grandstaff from the wait time web page because it hasn’t figured out how to measure wait times on Cerner.
• The VA’s training did not include the referral management module and one veteran whose urology referral was lost was found to have an untreated, aggressive form of prostate cancer when finally seen nine months later.
• A chief of anesthesiology said EHRs are billing systems with text editors tacked on while VistA was written by clinicians whose goal was to provide the best care possible. He says that Cerner told him that one online form requires 90 minutes to complete, and when doctors told the company that the nurse had under five minutes to examine the patient and document the visit, Cerner said they should hire more people.
• Meagher concluded, “What Cerner does best is capture billable events via exhaustive questions and back-and-forth as you input things. That’s what ties them up. They’re answering questions that are meaningless to them. They’re very meaningful to a commercial organization, because that’s how they get paid, but they’re meaningless to the VA.”

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the technologies that most often contribute to clinician burnout, then explain how improving common clinical workflows can help care teams collaborate better and focus on what they do best—taking care of patients. They will describe how a clinical communication and collaboration platform can automate clinical consults and code calls to alleviate burnout.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Accounting and advisory firm BDO USA acquires 90-employee Culbert Healthcare Solutions.

Healthcare voice AI vendor Suki raises $55 million in a Series C funding round that values the business at $400 million.

Change Healthcare will permanently lay off 170 employees in Pittsburgh in February.

Sales

• The Christ Hospital Health Network in Ohio will offer IncludeHealth’s virtual physical therapy service to its pre- and post-operative patients.
• Kidney care company Strive Health selects Bamboo Health’s Pings real-time admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) e-notifications; and interactive, real-time Spotlights performance metrics dashboards.

People

Valerie Simon (Rise Consulting) joins Lumeris as SVP and chief of marketing and communications.

Lee Taylor, MBA (Relatient) joins Health Catalyst as VP of sales. 

Geoff Gibson (Teladoc Health) joins Mend as VP of sales.

Wolters Kluwer Health promotes Greg Samios, MSE, MBA to president and CEO of the clinical effectiveness business unit.

Zach Wood, MBA (Surescripts) joins Well Health as head of corporate development.

Announcements and Implementations

Ochsner Health (LA) has implemented provider data management and API technologies from Kyruus to improve patient-provider matching on its website and apps.

Mach7 Technologies incorporates ImageMover’s EHR-integrated medical imaging capture technology into its vendor neutral archive and enterprise diagnostic viewer.

Surescripts leverages Diameter Health’s data optimization capabilities to ensure specialty pharmacies can easily access accurate patient data through the Surescripts Specialty Medications Gateway.

Holy Cross Health (FL) implements online patient appointment scheduling capabilities from DocASAP.

HCA Healthcare will go live on Meditech Expanse at three hospitals in New Hampshire by the end of 2022, with the assistance of CereCore.

A survey performed by the Center for Connected Medicine and KLAS finds that health system executives expect patient access to be the top area that will be improved by digital health. Respondents name telehealth as the greatest area of technology-driven improvement in the past two years, while 38% expect AI to be the most exciting emerging technology in the next two years but acknowledge that it hasn’t yet met expectations for improving patient outcomes. Nearly all of the respondents say their health systems are placing a high priority on improving access and most of those say they will invest in technology accordingly (most commonly used are telehealth, patient reminders, an online provider directory, and online bill pay). Just over half of responding health systems are using some form of a digital front door, but expect to continue improving and optimizing it while recognizing that not all patients want to connect digitally. Only 17% of respondents are using patient financial financial experience vendors such as Flywire, Patientco, and RevSpring. Health systems  like the idea of price transparency, but recognize that it’s hard to show a given patient their actual cost.

Other

A study using Epic Health Research Network finds that 91% of sore throat patients whose encounter was via telehealth are prescribed antibiotics without having a strep test performed (down from 98% pre-pandemic), while the test was done before prescribing (per AAFP recommendations) for in-office visits about half the time, raising concerns about future antimicrobial resistance.

An imaging magazine says that even though the just-concluded RSNA 2021 conference had two-thirds fewer professional attendees compared to pre-pandemic numbers, vendors were happier because the interactions they had were more serious in the absence of “tire-kickers.” It says that HIMSS21 similarly delighted exhibitors with one-third the usual attendance because only non-buyers stayed home (color me skeptical in a “make lemons into lemonade” sort of way now that brag-worthy record attendee numbers aren’t happening).

Sponsor Updates

• Availity rebrands its suite of provider products to Availity Essentials, and will soon give its customers the ability to gain access to additional payers throughout its network.
• The State of Delaware’s Treatment and Referral Network, built on Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds software, has in its first year seen a 45% increase in treatment referral requests and a 25% increase in the rapid acknowledgment of referrals.
• CHIME names University of Missouri Health Care CEO Jonathan Curtright and CIO Bryan Bliven winners of the 2021 CHIME-AHA Transformational Leadership Award.
• CloudWave congratulates 14 of its hospital partners for being recognized as part of CHIME’s Digital Health Most Wired program.
• Gartner includes Dimensional Insight in its 2021 “Hype Cycle for Healthcare Providers” report as a sample vendor in the Digital Analytics Architecture category.

Blog Posts

• Why Resilience is Not Enough for Today’s Healthcare Cybersecurity and Privacy Programs (Clearwater)
• Introducing: True remote diagnostic imaging workflow (Agfa HealthCare)
• Improve healthcare cybersecurity through Zero Trust (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise)
• Azara Mourns Loss of Cherished Colleague (Azara Healthcare)
• How the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule Creates a Vision for Interoperability and the Delivery of Whole Person Care (Bamboo Health)
• From EHR to Health IT Operations: 10 Ways to Lower Costs and Save Time (CereCore)
• HEDIS 2022 is Here: Everything Payers Must Know (Collective Medical)
• (Part 2) Reaching Patients Along the Specialty Medication Journey: Trusting Patients (ConnectiveRx)
• UMass Memorial Health: In-Home Hospital Care Focused on Equity (Current Health)
• Toward the Liberation of Medical Data (EClinicalWorks)
• Better estimates, faster payments: using automation for a better patient financial experience (Experian Health)
• Driving Value: Taking the Healthcare Revenue Cycle to the Next Level (EZDI)
• Sorting Through ServiceNow Opportunities (Optimum Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/6/21

Top News

Fortive will acquire specialty EHR vendor Provation from its private equity owner for $1.425 billion.

Seller Clearlake Capital acquired the company from Wolters Kluwer in early 2018 for $180 million. Provation then acquired Pentax Medical’s EndoPro endoscopy platform and documentation procedure vendor IProcedures, both in 2021, and EPreop in 2020.

Provation reports annual revenue of $110 million. It has 5,000 health system customers.

Reader Comments

From Sporacide: “Re: Adjuvare. I didn’t see you mention its formation.” I didn’t see it, but added it below. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s NantHealth is involved with the company, which uses technology from one-time high-flyer AirStrip, whose apex was sharing an Apple stage with Tim Cook way back in 2015 after raising $65 million (and another $22 million in 2019). NantHealth has seen its own struggles, with shares down 95% since its IPO and the company’s valuation down to around $100 million, while NantKwest died quietly in being merged with another Soon-Shiong company, immunotherapy developer ImmunityBio, whose shares have dropped 85% in the past 10 months.

From Roman Board: “Re: Boardsi. I was exploring potential board positions post-retirement. They are a pay-to-play setup like ExecRank and spam me with lots of opportunities that require paying to be considered. Do companies really pay them to recruit board members?” I hadn’t heard of the company, which charges candidates $200 upfront and $195 per month (auto-renewing) and in return guarantees nothing. Anonymous complainers claim the company posts fake LinkedIn board position postings and refuses to answer basic questions about percentage of people placed or its user satisfaction rate, while I would characterize quite a few of the glowing online reviews as questionable (no verifiable user or company names, bot-sounding reviews that refer more to job recruiting than board placement). BBB shows 18 complaints, mostly involving being ignored when requesting cancellation, not having emails and calls returned, and having zero companies make contact. Some observe that the few positions the were offered involve informal advisory boards, which pay nothing and aren’t much of a resume builder. Please share your experience with Boardsi.

From Lindy: “Re: VCU Health. The CIO is leaving abruptly in the middle of an Epic rollout, 10 days post go-live, four years into her first CIO job.” Verified. Susan Steagall, MBA will leave VCU on December 16 after its December 4 go-live on Epic.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents expect their employers to struggle with staffing over the next few years. Commenters brought up good points: (a) senior people are leaving, both because they have more opportunity with competitors but also because they have lost trust in their employers due to layoffs and poor corporate culture; and (b) work-from-home has created endless opportunities that devalue geographic loyalty and break through local compensation practices,

New poll to your right or here, following up on last week’s question: Did you change employers in 2021 or do you expect to do so in 2022?

We offer tiny startups a first-year, one-time sponsorship discount. Lorre says she will make that same deal available for companies of any size that have never sponsored HIStalk through December 31. Contact her.

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

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the technologies that most often contribute to clinician burnout, then explain how improving common clinical workflows can help care teams collaborate better and focus on what they do best—taking care of patients. They will describe how a clinical communication and collaboration platform can automate clinical consults and code calls to alleviate burnout.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Netsmart acquires Remarkable Health, which offers AI solutions – including an EHR and virtual clinical documentation — for behavioral health, substance use, and human services.

NantWorks forms Adjuvare, which is built on AirStrip’s patient monitoring solution for remote patient monitoring.

UK-based Vinehealth, whose app collects oncology patient-reported outcomes, raises $5.5 million in funding for a planned expansion to the US. Co-founder and CEO Rayna Patel, MBBS, MPhil is an NHS England National Innovation Fellow.

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF dropped 16% in the past month versus the Nasdaq’s 4% loss. They’re down 15% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 23% gain.

People

The Wall Street Journal profiles recently named Mass General Brigham CIO/Chief Digital Officer Jane Moran, MBA (Unilever). She says the health system is working to extend its EHR with CRM capabilities and is working on remote patient monitoring.

Announcements and Implementations

United Arab Emirates launches Riayati, a national medical record that will be linked to the Wareed and Nabidh EHRs and Dubai Health Authority’s HIE. UAE intends to create an integrated medical record for every UAE resident.

Google adds languages spoken to its medical office search results, although of course it’s up to the office staff to update the information by claiming their Google Business Profile (and making sure that the person who speaks the claimed language is working on any given day). Google previously added the insurances accepted by practices, which is almost certainly wildly inaccurate since even insurers can’t keep track of that.

Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services, Velatura Public Benefit Corporation, and Findhelp will establish a national HIE portal that will offer interoperable social services referrals.

VCU Health (VA) was scheduled to go live with Epic over the weekend, replacing Cerner.

Other

US COVID-19 deaths are at 777,000.

Google will reportedly launch the Pixel Watch smart watch in 2022, which will offer a heart rate monitor and activity tracking. It will not bear the Fitbit name even though Google acquired that company for $2.1 billion in January. Google killed off its first Google-labeled watch before it was scheduled to be announced in 2016, choosing to license its software to other companies instead. Business Insider quotes company sourcea as saying that Google’s offering will be “a pretty direct mirror” of Apple Health.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx names Brandon Feldmeier BI engineer.
• Olive extends its Hack for Health 2021 virtual hackathon submission deadline to December 17.
• VitalTech integrates Bright.md’s asynchronous telehealth solution with its remote patient monitoring technology.

Blog Posts

• Reducing Hospital Readmission Rates Through Discharge Interventions (PatientBond)
• How to Choose the Right Healthcare Predictive Analytics Software (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How to Improve Nursing Communication and Collaboration (PerfectServe)
• Provider Data, Remote Care Management and Telehealth (Symplr)
• Breast Cancer Diagnosis in 36 Hours or Less? (Premier)
• Evaluating AI-driven analytics for radiology: What “good” looks like (Nuance)
• Digital Patient Engagement: What It Does for Patients and Providers (Sphere)
• 3 ways to leverage your hospital contact center to improve clinical communication (Spok)
• Why you should be archiving your legacy EHR data (Summit Healthcare)
• Helping Care Managers Bring Members and Providers Closer Together (Surescripts)
• Be grateful. Count your blessings (Talkdesk)
• Tegria Unites in Second Annual Giving Together Campaign (Tegria)
• Founder Letter: A Year in Retrospect: What Rehab Therapists Learned in 2021 (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 12/3/21

Top News

The VA revises its Cerner implementation timeline to restart the project in early 2022 and complete the rollout in 2024 (click graphic to enlarge).

The VA will also create two new positions to oversee the project, a program executive director for EHR integration and a deputy CIO for EHR.

It named VA executive Terry Adirim, MD, MPH, MBA to the PED position.

A VA update on lessons learned includes:

• Creating an EHR sandbox for clinician training.
• Optimizing the rollout schedule within VISNs.
• Assessing the capability of Cerner’s patient portal.
• Convening a safety summit this month to review how the VA will collaborate with local clinical stakeholders on informatics issues.
• Addressing issues raised at Mann-Grandstaff.
• Implementing a new management and governance structure.
• Finalizing a data strategy between VA and DoD.

Reader Comments

From Long-Timer: “Re: Fruit Street. You blasted them back in 2014 for their tactics. I have health IT people asking me almost weekly if this guy is legit. Google his or the company’s name to see some history.” LT is referring to a reader who said they received an unsolicited LinkedIn invitation to become an advisor to a telehealth company that I didn’t name (Fruit Street Health) in return for being allowed to buy shares and to earn a percentage of sales they facilitate. Fruit Street CEO Laurence Girard, 29, previously ran telehealth company Prevently until they fired him and then went out of business, after which he offered its investors free shares in Fruit Street, which offers digital diabetes prevention, weight loss, and general telehealth. All of Girard’s ventures focus on getting doctors to invest. He quickly put up COVIDMD.com early in the pandemic, offering Salesforce-powered telemedicine visits only for Medicare and cash-paying patients, but that web address now forwards to Fruit Street Clinic. He wrote an article in late 2019 declaring “shame on these investors” who accuse startup founders of being fraudulent or running a Ponzi scheme (he had a few of those), suggesting that the company add a non-disparagement and non-disclosure clause to its stock purchase agreement that call for immediate payment of $10,000 in liquidated damages. His attorney wrote in 2014 that the primary business strategy of three companies he founded (Nutritas, Prevently, and Welliko) was to sign on physician investors, make them his key advisors, and then make money from patient software use and physician software licensing. His now-deleted website provides fascinating reading  — he was involved romantically with the CTO who then tried to take over the company, he accused one physician investor of destroying Prevently by calling Girard’s mother a terrible parent and sending investors his baby pictures, he didn’t have enough money to pay student loans and buy groceries after being fired, and he called one investor a “loan shark” whose Mexican billionaire investors were only interested in tax benefits. The “physicians as investors” strategy isn’t illegal or necessarily unethical, so my takeaway here is that his gripes against just about everybody he worked with is a rare insight into what it’s like trying desperately to save a struggling startup. I imagine that quite a few physician software company investors have discovered that it’s not quite as glamorous or as satisfying as they expected to try to demonstrate knowledge and insight outside of their own field. 

From Promotional Consideration: “Re: job changes and promotions. Some of those you mention don’t include links to the announcement.” I see many of them in my LinkedIn feed, where 3,000 nice industry folks have connected with me and thus I’m able see their otherwise unannounced job changes and news. You can do the same – I accept all connection requests from health IT people. LinkedIn’s news feed is increasingly junked up as it attempts to turn into a business-focused Facebook Junior, but I still find it useful, although I really wish it would allow me to suppress seeing items that my connections have liked or commented on since that’s where the irrelevant noise originates (but of course that’s how Facebook Senior does it in getting users addicted via their baser emotions). 

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the technologies that most often contribute to clinician burnout, then explain how improving common clinical workflows can help care teams collaborate better and focus on what they do best—taking care of patients. They will describe how a clinical communication and collaboration platform can automate clinical consults and code calls to alleviate burnout.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nordic acquires S&P Consultants, whose 90-person team focuses on providing Cerner-related services. The business will continue to operate under its existing name. S&P co-founder and COO Steve Pratt died in 2020.

HealthStream acquires Rievent Technologies, which offers a continuing medical education management  platform.

Omnicell will acquire specialty pharmacy management services vendor ReCept Holdings for $100 million in cash.

A private equity firm takes an unspecified “significant stake” in clinical documentation technology vendor Iodine Software that the company says values it at over $1 billion. Iodine acquired ChartWise Medical Systems and Artifact Health this year.

Private equity firm Carlyle Group will acquire government health IT vendor CNSI from its private equity owner.

Digital consulting firm West Monroe acquires Carbon Five, which offers product management, digital design, and software engineering. West Monroe’s health system offerings include building data-driven operations, developing patient access centers, creating digital products, assisting in M&A, and developing cybersecurity plans.

Wall Street executives urge JPMorgan to cancel its annual healthcare conference that is scheduled for January 10-13, expressing concerns that San Francisco is unsafe for attendees and questioning whether in-person attendance is necessary. The 2021 version of the conference, which usually draws 20,000 attendees plus thousands more who conduct business in neighboring restaurants where captains of industry rent tables rent for hundreds of dollars per hour and sleep in hotels that charge up to 10 times their usual rates, was moved online because of COVID-19.

Sales

• Northwell Health will implement Playback Health’s patient engagement system, which allows patients to receive, replay, and share information from their visits. A co-founder is Lenox Hill Hospital neurosurgery chair David Langer, MD, who was featured in the Netflix documentary “Lenox Hill.”
• Remote care automation vendor Datos Health will integrate its system with provider EHRs using technology from Redox.

People

Jeremy Warner, MD, MS (Vanderbilt University) will join Brown University’s Center for Cancer Bioinformatics and Data Science.

Massachusetts-based health plan Health New England hires Casey Hossa, MBA (Cardinal Innovations Healthcare) as CIO.

Graphite Health hires Ryan Smith, MBA (Intermountain Healthcare) as COO. Intermountain was one of three health system founding members of the company.

Shaun Priest (Clearwave) joins ReportingMD as chief revenue officer.

Rob Lazerow (Advisory Board) joins Health Evolution as SVP.

Clinical data repository vendor Smile CDR hires Shane McNamee, MD (Peraton) as CMIO.

Jessie Minton, MS (University of Oregon) joins Washington University in St. Louis as vice chancellor for technology and CIO. She succeeds interim Stephanie Reel.

Nursing informatics pioneer Virginia Saba, EdD, MS, MA, RN died November 20. She developed the Clinical Care Classification System of standardized nursing terminology for electronic documentation.  

Announcements and Implementations

An ISMP Medication Safety Alert further explains the previously described problem in which three pharmacy data sources sent Surescripts incorrectly formatted medication history instructions, which caused problems such as “take 1 1/2 tablets daily” being sent to the network as “take 112 tablets daily.” Surescripts helped the three data sources fix their problem, removed their medication history response messages until they implement a permanent fix, and offers health systems and technology vendors a report of their impacted patients.

The International Medical Informatics Association publishes a history of informatics.

IT critical event management platform vendor Everbridge launches a Digital Operations Platform that offers analytics-driven decision-making, alert suppression, cross-functional communication, and out-of-the-box integration.

Intelligent Medical Objects collaborates with Amazon Web Services to offer AWS customers migration of their clinical data using IMO’s terminology technology, regulatory code mapping, and semantic normalization.

Zoom is accepting beta customers for its integration with Cerner, which includes notification of patient arrival in PowerChart, clinician sharing of test results and documentation, sending links to additional attendees, and placing patients in the Waiting Room for continuity between multiple caregivers in a visit.

UK-based digital triage and remote consultation solutions provider EConsultHealth will expand its capabilities by using InterSystems IRIS for Health.

CVS Health will work with Microsoft on consumer tools, use of Teams and Office, task automation using Azure cognitive services, expanded use of cloud solutions, and working with technologies such as HoloLens.

Sponsor Updates

• Meditech launches a podcast series in which AVO Christine Parent interviews experts and leaders on the subjects of digital transformation, cloud technology, quality, and care delivery.
• InterSystems announces the availability of HealthShare 2021.2, the latest version of its HealthShare suite of connected health solutions.
• Lumeon publishes a new report, “The New Productivity Era for Perioperative Care.”
• Divurgent publishes a new white paper, “Choosing an Activation Partner: Key factors in selecting a high-performing at-the-elbow support partner for your EHR implementation.”
• Fortified Health Security names Eamon Mulholland incident response specialist.
• Citrix’s Tech Fusion Podcast features Goliath Technologies Director of Product Marketing John Grant.
• Lyniate publishes a new case study featuring MedUSA, “Driving 600% annual growth with Lyniate Rhapsody.”
• Butler Health System (PA) improves access and relationships using Meditech’s Expanse Virtual On Demand Care.

Blog Posts

• Workflow Assessments Offer Insights for Productivity Improvement (Vyne Medical)
• Butler Health System improves access, relationships with Expanse Virtual On Demand Care (Meditech)
• If you try sometimes, you get what you need (Nordic)
• Department Managers Key to Implementation Success (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Taking on Healthcare Consumerism with Digital Health (Get Well)
• Nurse Leader Strategies to Address Alarm and Alert Fatigue (Halo Health)
• 12 leadership tips for a post-modern healthcare CIO (HCI Group)
• Predicting the Future of Healthcare IT: A surge in demand for IT support services (HCTec)
• The Four Pillars of Successful Self-Service Analytics in Healthcare (Health Catalyst)
• 3 Tips for Writing Mental and Behavioral Health Content (Healthwise)
• 5 Top Reasons Employees Stop Sharing Ideas (Ideawake)
• TEFCA: Update for 2022 (Impact Advisors)
• Losing sleep over cyber security insurance? How to get the coverage your HDO needs. (Imprivata)
• Infor shines in hackathon showcasing interoperability (Infor)
• Measuring healthcare quality in a post-pandemic world (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Top 3 Strategy Priorities in Digital Identity Management (LexisNexis)
• Is Staffing in Perioperative Care at a Crisis Point? (Lumeon)
• Medhost Hackathon 2021 Recap (Medhost)
• Evaluating AI-driven analytics for radiology: Understanding the lingo and the landscape (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 12/1/21

Top News

Greenway Health promotes President Pratap Sarker, MBA to CEO, effective January 1.

Sarker replaces Richard Atkin, who will take on the role of executive chairman.

Reader Comments

From Orion’s Roar: “Re: LinkedIn. A telehealth company sent me an invitation to become a strategic advisor, based purely on my profile. They offered the chance to buy shares, get stock options, and earn a percentage of revenue from B2B sales that I would help them earn. I’m sure they could find better advisors and this is just clever bait for investing in their company.” I see nothing impressive about the company (I’m omitting its name), which seems to be selling shares rather than product and recruiting sales affiliates rather than advisors. 

From DeeDee Centralized: “Re: closing the IT department. Is WSJ right?” The IT pendulum is always swinging from “let departments do their own IT work with their own people and budgets” to “we have to regain control of rogue departments whose mini-IT fiefdoms are spending even more money with less accountability and measurable corporate benefit.” Everybody is an IT expert until their cool tech stuff breaks or screws up a downstream department that they failed to consider in their on-the-fly design. The answer is always a less-dramatic compromise that won’t make management professors famous – centralize the technology rule-making to avoid an unreliable hodgepodge of faddish technologies, oversee the IT spend both centralized and decentralized so it can be understood and optimally deployed (in hospitals, failure to do this means the well-connected finance and patient accounting departments get about 70% of the total budget), and embed IT people on the front lines and vice versa to make sure everybody understands the current and desired future state. People who write “first kill all the IT people” articles are no different than those who can’t decide if outsourcing is brilliant or stupid — they just take the opposite position every few years to get press as contrarians despite having no experience running the organizations they advise.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thanks to ConnectiveRx for upgrading their HIStalk sponsorship to Platinum. They have supported HIStalk since 2012.

My Bitdefender Total Security 5-Device subscription was set to auto-renew at $90 for one year. As always, I cancelled the auto-renewal and found a better deal, in this case $30 for two years from Best Buy, saving me 83%. All I had to do was enter the new code into Bitdefender Central to pop the expiration date out 24 months.

I’ve decided that I’ll attend HIMSS22 after months of waffling about whether to go or not, motivated more by habit than desire or high ROI expectations. I compromised by choosing a short stay in which I’ll just go Tuesday and Wednesday.

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the most common clinical technology contributors to alarm fatigue and clinician burnout. They will describe how improving three clinical workflows can increase care team collaboration and reduce non-patient care workload and explain how a clinical communication platform simplifies finding care team members and pulling actionable information from the EHR.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Elsevier acquires digital healthcare educational content company Osmosis, which it will add to its Global Medical Education portfolio.

Analytics and data integration vendor Innovar Healthcare is among several companies that are purchasing the liquidated assets of Bridge Connector, a Nashville-based data migration startup that closed last year. The company, which had raised over $25 million several months before going out of business, and owes its creditors $5.4 million.

Babyscripts increases its previously announced Series B funding round with an additional $7.5 million investment. The virtual maternity care company has raised $37 million since launching in 2013.

Clinical task management software vendor CareAlign raises $2.3 million in seed funding. Former Penn Medicine associate CMIO Subha Airan-Javia, MD created the company in 2014, spinning it out of Penn five years later.

Sales

• UAB Medicine selects specialty pharmacy-focused analytics and data integration services from Loopback Analytics.
• Elsevier integrates Nuance’s PowerScribe radiology reporting software with its STATDx diagnostic decision support tool for radiologists.
• Phoebe Putney Health System (GA) will implement Wolters Kluwer Health’s POC Advisor for sepsis detection and patient management at three hospitals.

Announcements and Implementations

Nuance announces GA of its new Precision Imaging Network, cloud-based technology that transmits AI-generated data and analytics from diagnostic imaging systems to existing clinical and administrative workflows.

UC Davis Health (CA) and Amazon Web Services launch a Cloud Innovation Center that will focus on developing digital health solutions that are accessible and equitable.

Teleradiology service StatRad implements Change Healthcare’s cloud-based Stratus Imaging PACS.

Edifecs announces implementation of a work model that allows most of its employees to work from wherever they think they are the most productive – home, office, or a combination – while allowing them to reduce commuting stress and run personal errands.

Per-diem nurse staffing platform vendor IntelyCare launches a credentialing passport for uploading and providing licenses, screening test results, certifications, and employment eligibility verification.

NextGen Healthcare launches a benchmarking and analytics service for Community Health Centers.

Government and Politics

FDA forces Owlet to stop selling its smart baby monitoring socks that track vital signs and sleep patterns until it earns FDA approval. FDA did not require the company to recall the 1 million sock it has sold over the past six years. Owlet says it will soon launch a new sleep monitoring solution. 

The VA awards a five-year, $65 million contract to Caregility, ThunderCat Technology, Sterling Heritage, and Iron Bow Healthcare for remote patient monitoring software and services that it will roll out through its TeleCare Companion Patient Observation Support and Services Program.

The Pharmacy HIT Collaborative meets with ONC and pharmacy system vendors about pharmacy interoperability, including integrating the information in the Pharmacists ECare Plan with provider EHRs and payer systems, as required by the Cures Act.

HHS OCR settles with five providers that failed to give patients timely access to their records at a reasonable cost under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, with settlement costs ranging from $10,000 to $160,000. A cardiovascular disease doctor who ignored a patient’s request for a copy of their medical record and then ignored OCR investigators waived his right to a hearing in paying $100,000.

Other

Business Insider asks eight big health systems to describe the most interesting tech project they are testing (and in some cases, also investing in):

• Northwell Health: AI analysis of EHR data to identify pregnant women who are at risk for pre-eclampsia.
• New York – Presbyterian: EHR triggers to make sure orders are completed that would otherwise prevent a patient from being discharged as planned.
• Cleveland Clinic: optimize use of unnecessary lab tests and supplies based on historical patient data.
• Providence: allow behavioral health referrals to be ordered during primary care visits.
• LifePoint Health: remote patient monitoring.
• CommonSpirit: open a bricks-and-mortar women’s and reproductive clinic with telehealth startup Tia.
• Universal Health Services: notify providers of patient health or admission status using EHR data sent to a homegrown app.
• UPMC: remote patient monitoring.

Sponsor Updates

• The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust and Agfa HealthCare celebrate Enterprise Imaging’s 34^th UK go-live.
• PRWeek highlights Actium Health’s role in helping Virtua’s marketing team launch a campaign that successfully encouraged patients to come in for missed screenings.
• Intelerad launches a cloud-native disaster recovery solution.
• Cerner staff assemble 200 meal baskets for veterans and families supported by Veterans Community Project and Jackson County Family Court Services.
• Netsmart partners with the National Council for Mental Wellbeing to improve care coordination and use data to drive outcomes for certified community behavioral health clinics.
• A public regional hospital group in Italy will implement Ascom’s Digistat software in several of its facilities.

Blog Posts

• Vendor HIPAA Breach Affects 319K Patients & Their Providers (AdvancedMD)
• The Glidepath to Downside Risk: Future-Proof You Healthcare Business Through Value-Based Care (Arcadia)
• Embracing Interoperability with FHIR (Availity)
• Interoperability is Key to Care Coordination (Bamboo Health)
• The Path to Meditech Expanse: Where Should You Begin? (CereCore)
• Optimize Star Ratings in the Medicare Advantage Market: 3 Strategies for Payers (Collective Medical)
• Five powerful COVID-related shifts in patient care (ConnectiveRx)
• Driving Health Care 4.0 (Diameter Health)
• The Shift to Care-at-Home: Are You Ready? Why You Need to Be (Dina)
• The Future is Online Appointment Scheduling (EClinicalWorks)
• What does the connected generation (Gen C) expect from providers? (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/29/21

Top News

Best Buy discloses in its quarterly earnings call that its cost to acquire remote patient monitoring technology vendor Current Health in October was $400 million in cash.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents feel pretty good about how their employers will fare in 2022.To what degree will resignations and hiring challenges affect your employer’s prospects in the next few years?

New poll to your right or here: To what degree will resignations and hiring challenges affect your employer’s prospects over the next few years? This in response to a comment on last week’s poll in which a reader predicted significant long-term impact of organizations losing experienced health IT employees.

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

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

People

Alexander Scarlat, MD (Codixim) joins Mitre as principal data scientist of its health IT group. He wrote the “Machine Learning Primer for Clinicians” series for HIStalk a while back.

Matt Lungren, MD, MPH (Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare) joins Amazon Web Services as principal for clinical AI and machine learning for worldwide public health.

Announcements and Implementations

Konica Minolta adds Appropriate Use Criteria for advanced diagnostic imaging to its Exa Platform, in which orders placed through its physician portal will be validated electronically against CMS criteria using logic from LogicNets. 

Government and Politics

The MIT Catalyst program announces a new group of VHA Innovation Ecosystem Fellows, who will work to improve veteran care through need-driven biomedical research and innovation.

Medical University of South Carolina sues six of its oncologists and HCA Healthcare, alleging that the doctors – who will leave MUSC on December 1 to take jobs at HCA-owned Trident Medical Center — stole confidential information such as case logs and patient lists to help their new employer create a competing head and neck oncology program. MUSC said the doctors used its email servers to send confidential preference card information to Trident officials.

Other

Several NFL and college football teams are collecting impact data from sensor-embedded player mouthpieces, pairing the force, speed, direction, and location information with video to test helmet effectiveness and to influence future rule-making to reduce concussions.

In Canada, Peterborough Regional Health Centre lays off 84 employees as part of its Epic implementation. The hospital says it is eliminating a “limited number of clerical roles.” The hospital is one of seven Central East Ontario health systems, representing 14 hospitals, that will go live on Epic on December 3.

A Wall Street Journal article titled “It’s Time to Get Rid of the IT Department” says that the typical IT department is a bureaucratic island that hinders innovation, digital transformation, and customer focus, making these points:

• Separating the IT department – both organizationally and physically – from the core business doesn’t make sense, even if the group is given a sexy new name like “global digital solutions.” Technology is no longer optional.
• Treating IT as a partner to the business encourages it to be judged using metrics that are often irrelevant to long-term business outcomes, such as budget, uptime, and project completion. “Meeting specs” doesn’t correlate with success, and businesses isn’t driven by owning, building, and managing IT systems.
• Business units can’t predict their technology needs months or years in advance as required by IT budgeting, making it impossible for siloed IT departments to meet expectations for being faster and more flexible.
• Most IT employees work there because they love technology rather than the company’s core business, creating a culture gap that ignores the fact that the business is the technology and vice versa.
• Some companies are moving toward focusing on realizing value from IT within business units instead of rewarding the IT department for centrally managing it. This makes more sense as cloud computing relieves IT from managing physical assets such as data centers and servers and low-code software development reduces the need for programming talent.
• Companies are organizing their missions around groups that include embedded technical experts, which encourages innovative thinking, deeper subject matter expertise, and fewer handoffs.
• IT decentralization comes with “freedom within a framework,” such as requiring use of standardized development tools, architecture, and security protocols.

RSNA expects 19,000 attendees to attend this week’s in-person conference at Chicago’s McCormick Place, with another 4,000 participating virtually. The exhibit hall will showcase 500 vendors. The last in-person meeting, RSNA 2019, drew 52,000 registrants, with exhibitor personnel making up nearly half of the total.

Sponsor Updates

• In England, North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust implements TrakCare electronic prescribing and medication administration technology from InterSystems.
• CHIME honors HCA Healthcare and Meditech with its Collaboration Award.
• OptimizeRx wins two Digital Health Awards.

Blog Posts

• Why a security component is as critical to your FHIR ecosystem (Infor)
• Is Your Digital Front Door Strategy Welcoming to All? (InterSystems)
• FHIR 101: Solving healthcare’s interoperability problem (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Infographic: Key Patient Access Journey Insights (Kyruus)
• The Evolution of SDOH and Health Data Exchange (LexisNexis)
• Is Staffing in Perioperative Care at a Crisis Point? (Lumeon)
• The unspoken courage of modern nursing (Meditech)
• How to Perform an Analysis on Competitor PT Practices (MWTherapy)
• RSNA 2021: Reconnecting, redefining, and recognizing the challenges and opportunities ahead (Nuance)
• These technologies stand to change healthcare forever, and they already exist (Olive)
• Understanding Psychographics: AJMC (PatientBond)
• Using Analytics to Unlock the Value of Social Determinants of Health Data (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How Nurse Leaders Drive Change and Affect Strategic Goals (Symplr)
• Physician burnout: a history of the not-so-recent phenomenon plaguing clinicians (Spok)
• Amazon and Vocera Elevate the Power of the Patient Voice (Vocera)
• 23 Patient Stories That Show Just How Amazing PTs Are (WebPT)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/22/21

Top News

The Wall Street Journal reports that two private equity firms are close to a deal to acquire Athenahealth for $17 billion, including debt.

Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman LLC are reported to be the high bidders in an auction of the company, which its owners planned to have completed in early 2022.

A private equity firm and hedge fund took Athenahealth private four years ago after they forced the ouster of CEO Jonathan Bush, combining the company with a GE Healthcare unit it had acquired and renamed to Virence Health. Their  total acquisition cost was $6.8 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The significant concern poll respondents have about remote patient monitoring is that they will need services that aren’t readily available, which explains why investor-backed companies are springing up to provide paramedics and other licensed people to visit patient homes for the hands-on component that would otherwise require a trip to a provider’s location. IANAL questions why a patient would choose care at home when it is perceived as inferior and may not save the patient money, while Paula says triaging will be important since not all recoveries or home situations support at-home care. I agree with both comments – it may be that at-home care isn’t appropriate for many or most patients and will never deliver on “hospital at home” expectations, but could provide a way to reduce the length of hospital stays and make some patients happier. Payment will likely drive adoption as it always does in healthcare, so the ball is in the hands of CMS and insurers.

New poll to your right or here: How are your employer’s 2022 business prospects looking compared to 2021?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

I was curious about the stock performance of digital health companies that have gone public in the last couple of years, so I asked Chris McCord of Healthcare Growth Partners – which is my go-to source for brilliant market analysis – if he could save me some legwork with a list of companies. I excluded those that I consider marginally tech related, such as Medicare Advantage insurers and primary care operators, which left me with this list:

• About half of the companies are trading at below their initial offering price.
• Companies that went public via a SPAC merger performed much worse than those that did an IPO. SPAC popularity as a mechanism to go public has plummeted in the last few months, with some of the shell companies failing to find acquisition targets within the required timeframe.
• Buying an equal number of shares of each company at their IPO price would have increased the investment by about 37%, but obviously over various time periods.
• While Phreesia is the big winner in price change, Doximity has earned the highest market cap at nearly $13 billion after just five months of public trading.
• Livongo fell off the list since it was acquired by Teladoc Health, whose share price has increased 516% since its July 2015 IPO even though share price is down 56% from its January 2021 high.

Nuance announces Q4 results: revenue up 8%, adjusted EPS $0.09 versus $0.14. The company’s acquisition by Microsoft is expected to close in early 2022.

People

Population health management platform vendor AssureCare hires Ankit Rohatgi, MD, MBA (Medpulse) as chief clinical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Vocera releases a skill for Amazon Alexa that allows patients to reach the right care team member and obtain stay information using voice requests made to an in-room Echo device.

Spok launches GenA, a one-way alphanumeric pager that includes a high-resolution display, advanced encryption, and over-the-air remote programming to provide reliable, survivable, and affordable critical communications capability regardless of cell coverage.

Sponsor Updates

• Clearwater publishes a new report, “Connecting the Dots Between Cyber Risk and Patient Safety.”
• PMD celebrates its 23rd anniversary.
• Sonifi Health publishes a new case study, “How technology can improve HCAHPS Scores: A 5-year impact case study.”
• Sphere releases the results of a consumer survey focused on the use of online payment tools for medical bills.
• HIStalk Sponsors exhibiting at RSNA November 28-December 1 in Chicago include Agfa HealthCare, Change Healthcare, Elsevier, Lyniate, Mach7 Technologies, Nuance, OneMedNet, Sectra, Visage Imaging, and Wolters Kluwer Health.

Blog Posts

• Be there when your ideal patient and provider meet (OptimizeRx)
• You can’t always get what you want (Nordic)
• 7 reasons payers should adopt AI and join the Internet of Healthcare (Olive)
• Just Say No to Drug(s) Discount Cards (OmniSys)
• How COVID-19 Impacted Timeliness of Care (PatientBond)
• 6 Questions an EHR Consultant Can Help You Answer (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Leveraging Supplemental Benefits: Moving from Extras to Essentials (Dina)
• Accelerating Speed to Care with Unified Healthcare Communication (PerfectServe)
• Benefits of Physician Peer Review (Symplr)
• Advancing Clinical Research with the PINC AI Research and Innovation Collaborative (Premier)
• 3 Steps to Elevated Diversion Monitoring: Takeaways from the 2021 NADDI conference (Protenus)
• How Leading NextGen Users Leverage Our Revenue Cycle Engine (RCxRules)
• ‘Tis the season. Reflections on 2021 and the storm brewing for health plans in 2022. (Redox)
• 7 Tips to Address Medical Practice Burnout (Relatient)
• Let Doctors Be Doctors with Better Patient Data (RxRevu)
• Sky’s the Limit! Two Nuance Managers Share Their Advice (Nuance)
• Why Pagers Still Matter: The History of Pagers (1921-2021) (Spok)
• Magic at the Hospital (Summit Healthcare)
• Nurses are Uniquely Positioned to Bridge Gaps in Care (Twistle)
• Breaking News: CMS Greenlights Automatic MIPS Flexibilities for 2021 (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 11/19/21

Top News

Healthcare payment options platform vendor PayZen raises $15 million in a Series A round.

Reader Comments

From Clicker: “Re: clicks. You have said you track certain clicks on the site. I’m wondering which had the highest numbers.” I usually count clicks for announcement of a new sponsor, a webinar, or anything for which I’m trying to gauge reader interest for future coverage. The most-clicked items (3,000 to 4,000 clicks each) were new sponsor announcements (which make up the top five spots), webinars (six), top-of-page banner clicks (two), and an interview (one). The question made me wonder about our webinar recordings, where I found that the one Frank Poggio and the late Vince Ciotti did in 2014 about Cerner acquiring Siemens Health Services has drawn 8,700 views, including one from me today as I enjoyed hearing Vince’s voice again.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIMSS22 starts in 116 days. Early bird in-person pricing of $895 is good until January 10. I’m still waffling on whether it’s worth my time and money to attend, so I haven’t registered or booked a place to stay. You?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Aptihealth, which matches health plan and health system customers with behavioral health providers, raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

MedArrive, which offers at-home care from licensed professionals such as paramedics as an adjunct to virtual visits, raises $25 million in Series A funding. Co-founder and CEO Dan Trigub spent short stints at Uber Health and Lyft before starting the company last year.

Precision medicine vendor Tempus announces that eight institutions are live on integration with Epic’s genomics module, which embeds Tempus test ordering and genomic data delivery into existing clinical workflows. The companies say that integration timelines will be reduced from months to weeks in 2022.

CVS will close 900 of its stores over the next three years, nearly 10% of its total, as online shopping has reduced customer demand for near-home convenience and the additional of in-store health services creates new demands for layout and location.

Teladoc’s investor day presentation predicts that consumers will expect virtual-first encounters whose quality equals in-person ones and that offer them a variety of coordinated care services. The company says it has evolved from fee-for-service video visits and will become a partner with its customers in offering whole-person care at under value- and risk-based arrangements. It says it will be “the first place consumers turn to for all healthcare needs” for “whole-person care that is personalized, convenient, and connected.” TDOC shares dropped 8% on the day and have shed 25% in the past 12 months, with the company’s market value being $20 billion versus the $18.5 billion in cash it paid to acquire Livongo in late October 2020.

Sales

• Northeastern Center (IN) chooses the SmartCare EHR of Streamline Healthcare Solutions.
• Luminis Health (MD) will implement Cedar’s post-visit patient engagement and payment platform, integrated with Epic.

People

Ochsner Health hires Denise Basow, MD (Wolters Kluwer)  as its first chief digital officer. She has been president and CEO of Wolters Kluwer’s clinical effectiveness business unit for six years and was previously with UpToDate, which was acquired by Wolters Kluwer Health in 2008, since 1996.

Announcements and Implementations

The UK’s NHS chooses 46 companies to provide digital document services and related hardware and software. Among those named for the nearly $7 billion program are Nuance, Conduent, Hyland, and 3M MModal.

A HIMSS report estimates that the federal government will need to spend $30 billion to modernize federal, state, local, and tribal public health reporting and data systems, recommending that Congress provide a minimum of $1.57 billion per year for technology and workforce development. The funding would support electronic case reporting and contact tracing, laboratory information management systems, syndromic surveillance, electronic vital records (births and deaths), a national notifiable disease surveillance system, analytics and visualization staffing, creating incentives for provider data exchange.

HIMSS creates a certification program in digital health transformation strategy, with CPDHTS joining its existing offerings CPHIMS and CAHIMS. Cost ranges from $1,099 to $1,399, while the two-year renewal requires 45 clock hours of continuing education and a payment of $299 or $399.

A review of the de-identified Cerner EHR records of 490,000 COVID-19 patients finds that the use of SSRI antidepressants was associated with a 28% lower relative risk of death.

Three entrepreneurs, including Ricky Caplin (The HCI Group), form The Aurora Forge, which will grow seed-state healthcare and government technology companies and donate the majority of its profits to charity. Several health system CIOs are among its advisors.

Government and Politics

The US Coast Guard finishes its deployment of Cerner as part of the DoD’s MHS Genesis project.

Other

A retiree from Vietnam who was stranded in the US for 18 months because of the pandemic is stuck with a $38,000 emergency glaucoma surgery bill even though the daughter he was visiting had bought him traveler’s medical insurance that had preauthorized the procedure. The insurer declined to pay, saying that his condition was pre-existing even though it hadn’t been previously diagnosed. His only income is a $260 per month pension. The man’s daughter, who had bought him plane tickets home on 14 flights that were eventually cancelled, may be on the hook to pay his bill even though he was finally able to return home because of California’s filial responsibility laws.

In Canada, Halifax family physician Ajantha Jayabarathan, MD wins a family medicine “Big Ideas” contest for her GIS-powered Health Geo-View, which allows virtual visit doctors to visualize the patient’s neighborhood for socioeconomic information, proximity to health services, and environmental risk factors.

Sponsor Updates

• Olive offers its customers the ability to leverage DARVIS solutions including rapid hygiene check, bed logistics, medical inventory, and sterile equipment completeness.
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions will work with secure data collaboration company Karlsgate to develop a secure identity resolution platform for the healthcare market.
• Everbridge introduces the next generation of its Travel Risk Management Solution for business, healthcare, and government customers.
• Lumeon’s Remote Home Monitoring solution earns Gold in the 2021 EHealthcare Leadership Awards in the Best Business Process Improvement Products category.
• Magnolia Regional Health Center (MS) adds Prelude Software’s PayPilot to its Meditech Expanse EHR to save time and increase revenue.
• CareSignal publishes a case study titled “Utilizing Deviceless Remote Monitoring Within a Medicaid Managed Care Plan to Identify Rising Risk for Early Intervention with Promising Results.”

Blog Posts

• Improving Veterans’ Care through Digital Health Technology (Get Well)
• Taking a Deep Dive into Cloud Data Lake Performance: Making Sure Your Gold is Counted (Healthcare Triangle)
• Deliver Better Population Health by Avoiding 3 Mistakes (Health Catalyst)
• 5 Signs you Need a Managed Services Partner (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Innovating With Health Plans: Focus on Outcomes (Dina)
• Veterans Day Reflection: Beyond Thank You (Health Data Movers)
• Flexible, Fast, and First: How UC Davis Health Opened Its Digital Front Door (InterSystems)
• How Leading NextGen Users Leverage our Revenue Cycle Engine (RCxRules)
• Preserving privacy while promoting interoperability in healthcare (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Inside the Lifecycle of a Healthcare Claim with Medhost (Medhost)
• How to Perform an Analysis on Competitor PT Practices (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 11/17/21

Top News

Population health management company Lightbeam Health Solutions will acquire CareSignal, which offers more than 30 condition-specific remote patient monitoring programs, for an undisclosed sum.

I interviewed CareSignal CEO Blake Marggraff last year. He launched the company coming out of pre-med in 2015 at the age of 22.

Webinars

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

Here’s the recording of our recent webinar titled “Increasing OR Profitability: It May Be Easier than you Think,” sponsored by Copient Health.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Ribbon Health raises $43.5 million in a Series B funding round. The company has developed an API that enables health IT developers to access data on doctors, insurance plans, and costs and quality of care.

Workforce management software vendor QGenda acquires Schedule360, which offers Best in KLAS nurse and staff scheduling software.

H1, which offers drug companies a platform to identify opinion leaders and to monitor the drug trials of competitors, raises $100 million in a Series C funding round.

Sales

• The Maryland Department of Health will use NTT Data’s consulting services to enhance its Medicaid Enterprise Systems Modular Transformation program with tech-enabled solutions.
• MetroHealth in Cleveland enters into a managed services agreement with Pivot Point Consulting for its Epic EHR.
• Ergotron will integrate Imprivata’s Confirm ID technology with its CareFit Pro Medical Cart, giving hospital staff password-free access to cart drawer contents.
• Premier’s PINC AI will conduct a hospital-acquired infections clinical trial with medical solutions company Mölnlycke using Premier’s anonymized clinical data and provider network to test interventions, including its TheraDoc clinical surveillance technology.

People

Nasim Afsar, MD, MBA (UCI Health) will join Cerner as its first chief health officer in January.

Oscar Callejas, MSE (Hillrom) joins Olive as SVP of customer programs.

Carrum Health hires Randy Hawkins, MD (ConsumerMedical) as chief medical officer.

Tony Burke (Pivot Health Advisors) joins Teladoc Health as SVP of partnerships and innovation.

Care transitions software vendor ReferWell hires Chad Baugh, MBA (Teladoc Health) as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

PerfectServe brings together its clinical collaboration, physician scheduling, patient engagement, and practice communication technologies under the Unite platform.

Elevate Holistics launches a medical marijuana card platform that includes patient scheduling, an EHR that supports telehealth, an online store for selling nutraceuticals and CBD, and a partner marketing integration system with custom landing pages.

Big news from HIMSS22: Michael Phelps, who used to swim fast, will keynote. Maybe healthcare experts Dana Carvey, A-Rod, and that mountain climber who sawed his own arm off weren’t available to reprise.

Other

Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston develop the Epilepsy Tracking and Optimized Management Engine, an informatics tool designed to help physicians better manage the care of epileptic patients. Neurologist Katherine Harris, MD says the software has helped cut her billing documentation time down from 20 clicks in her EHR to just three clicks using EpiToMe, which also includes modules for reports, statistics, and scheduling.

A Stat investigative report says that Ascension, the country’s largest Catholic health system at 140 hospitals, is running a $1 billion private equity operation like a Wall Street firm rather than as a passive investor.  The article notes that the tax-exempt health system isn’t required to disclose how its investment profits are used to benefit vulnerable patients.

Analysis finds that private equity-owned air ambulance services bill higher rates and generate surprise patient bills more frequently, charging 60% more than other carriers.

Former Sanford Health (SD) CEO Kelby Krabbenhoft, who left the system in late 2020 after making controversial remarks about his refusal to wear a mask, received a payout of nearly $50 million. The health system says he would have been contractually owed the money regardless of his departure circumstances, which involved $15 million in severance, $29 million in retirement payout, and $5 million in salary. Sanford Health ended its planned merger with Intermountain Healthcare because of the leadership change.

Sponsor Updates

• ConnectiveRx team members support Operation Gratitude with a financial donation and cards of support for veterans.
• Netsmart will integrate the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s Continuum and Co-Triage assessment tools with its EHR.
• Al Kindi Hospital in Jordan selects Wolters Kluwer Health’s UpToDate and Medi-Span Clinical solutions.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “PDMP Software for Safe Prescribing of Controlled Substances.”
• The Behavioral Healthcare Executive Podcast features AdvancedMD President Amanda Hansen.
• Actium Health releases a new Hello Healthcare Podcast, “Physician Relations: A Love Letter.”
• Change Healthcare helps measure and reduce carbon emissions from the healthcare industry.
• Optimum Healthcare IT wins the CHIME Foundation Partner of the Year Award.
• Ellkay will exhibit at Modernizing Medicine’s Momentum Conference November 19-21 in Orlando.
• Waystar achieves top rankings in Black Book’s latest customer experience RCM technology and outsourcing report in the categories of end-to-end RCM software & technology, hospital chains, systems, corporations, IDNs & corporation; and end-to-end RCM software & technology, community hospitals & medical centers.
• OptimizeRx will host the second annual Innovate4Outcomes event virtually December 9.
• Health Catalyst partners with Datavant, enabling healthcare and life sciences organizations to exchange tokenized, de-identified data within Health Catalyst’s Research Network and Touchstone Match.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare 2030: Trends That Will Impact Healthcare in the Text Decade (Arcadia)
• Ascom Recognizes Veterans Amongst Our Ranks (Ascom)
• America’s Opioid Epidemic is Getting Worse (Bamboo Health)
• Virtual Consultations in Healthcare are Here to Stay (Bluestream)
• PPCP and CarePort: post-acute care workflows (CarePort)
• Value-Based Care Revenue – Which Programs Actually Deliver (ChartSpan)
• How Trust in Technology Affects Adoption Among Care Teams (CoverMyMeds)
• How to Engage Providers with Healthcare at Home (Current Health)
• Innovating with Health Plans: Focus on Outcomes (Dina)
• A Better Billing Solution for Modern Healthcare (EClinicalWorks)
• Alleviate the healthcare staffing crisis with automation (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/15/21

Top News

Glen de Vries, who rode a Blue Origin rocket into space with William Shatner and others last month, died in a plane crash Thursday along with a flight instructor. He was 49.

De Vries, who was also known as Captain Clinical, was co-founder of life sciences research platform vendor Medidata Solutions, which was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in October 2019 for $6 billion.

De Vries later wrote a book titled “The Patient Equation: The Precision Medicine Revolution in the Age of COVID-19 and Beyond.”

Reader Comments

From Bon Ivermectin: “Re: VPN Solutions in Richmond. I’ve heard from three practices that the hosting company was hit by ransomware on October 31 and their Allscripts clients have been unable to access charts since. Rumor is that the hackers demanded a $5.4 million ransom that was due Friday that won’t be paid.” I’ve emailed VPN Solutions and Allscripts but haven’t heard back so far. One of the practices mentioned — Piedmont Pediatrics in Charlottesville, VA — posted a notice on November 1 that its computers were down, but hasn’t updated since.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Video calls with cameras on are used more than any other one-to-one work meetings, poll respondents say. Some employers or teams mandate the use of video, commenters mentioned.

New poll to your right or here: What would worry you most about being remotely monitored at home while recovering instead of being hospitalized? I didn’t specify a condition, but use your own experience and assume that use cases will be actively developed by organizations that offer these services.

A word that I just realized is odd as I created the new poll: “hospitalized,” given the uncommon usage of “hotelized” since etymologists say that “hospital” and “hotel” share the same Latin root that refers to guests or visitors. It’s also odd in that a hospital can be about as inhospitable as it gets.

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A correction to last week’s post – Surescripts CEO Tom Skelton will retire on December 31, 2022 (not at the end of this year), leading the company through next year, participating with the company’s board to choose his successor, and working with the new CEO through the transition period.

OptimizeRx reports Q3 results: revenue up 53%, adjusted EPS $0.09 versus $0.07.

Sales

• Essen Health Care (NY) chooses Verustat for remote patient monitoring, offering its underserved community patients take-home kits for tracking blood pressure, blood sugar, weight, and oxygen levels.
• Woman’s Hospital (LA) chooses Spok Go for environmental services communication and real-time critical lab result notification.
• Home health services vendor Sholom Home Care (MN) chooses VitalTech’s VitalCare for telehealth and patient-care manager interaction. 

People

David Harse (Cerner) joins HealthMark Group as SVP/GM of patient engagement.

Culbert Healthcare Solutions promotes Julie McGuire, RN, MSN to VP of Epic IT consulting services.

Announcements and Implementations

NYU Langone’s Predictive Analytics Unit in the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science will host the Symposium for Machine Learning Implementation and Evaluation (SMILE) to discuss the latest advances in mobilizing machine learning to practice and evaluating and bringing machine learning to patients. The free, non-sponsored virtual event will be Thursday, November 18 from 12:30 to 5:00 ET.

A group of AMIA members asks folks who are developing FHIR-based software to complete their short survey by November 30. The results will be used to create a worldwide catalog of FHIR applications.

Other

A ProPublica report looks at the money machine that is St. Jude Children’s Research Center, which despite being ranked behind nine other children’s cancer hospitals, raises more many than all of them combined. Its reserves are $5 billion as it has spent only half of its $7 billion in contributions over the past five years on research and care. The hospital doesn’t bill the families of children for their care, but 90% have insurance that it bills. St. Jude has 5,700 employees and just 73 beds, while its fundraising organization has 2,200 employees working from Memphis and 36 regional offices, with 400 of the fundraising employees making more than $100,000. The former pediatrics chair at Albany Medical Center (NY) says St. Jude raises money from its nearby office, but almost all children with cancer are treated locally instead of in Memphis, to which he concludes, “They think of every way they can to make money and the least amount of ways to spend it. They deceive people into supporting something that is totally dishonest.”

Sponsor Updates

• Sectra publishes a new e-book, “Radiology post-pandemic game plan.”
• Talkdesk wins the 2021 Public Relations and Marketing Excellence Award from the Business Intelligence Group.
• Visage Imaging contributes to a new report, “First PACS-integrated artificial intelligence-based software tool for rapid and fully automatic analysis of body composition from CT in clinical routine.”
• Waystar will sponsor Bounce Back Kit family care packages for the Bounce Children’s Foundation.

Blog Posts

• A Salute to Those Who Served (Netsmart)
• Is automation the future of 340B compliance? (Olive)
• The Cost of Patient Engagement: What Is Your ROI? (PatientBond)
• How and Why to Incorporate Veteran Talent into Your Supply Chain Hiring (Premier)
• Challenging and Critical, Compliance Takes Great Commitment (Protenus)
• HCC Coding Automation: NLP Technology vs HCC Coding Software (RCxRules)
• Creating a Personalized Prescribing Experience for Each Patient (RxRevu)
• 4 Factors Healthcare ISVs Should Consider When Choosing a Payments Platform (Sphere)
• Will Teamwork Deliver on the Promise of Value-Based Care? (Surescripts)
• How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are Rapidly Changing Patient Engagement (Twistle)
• New Year, New Regulations: 2022 Final Rule Highlights (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 11/12/21

Top News

LifeScience Technologies sues Mercy, which it claims disclosed trade secrets about LST’s M.Care virtual care platform to telehealth competitor Myia Health.

The lawsuit claims that LST customer Mercy shared its system log-in credentials to Myia Health’s developers, allowing the company to develop a “derivative product” that Mercy then implemented to replace LST.

LST also says that Mercy invested $5 million in Myia Health. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Current Health. The Boston-based company, which was acquired by Best Buy in November 2021, offers an enterprise care-at-home platform that enables healthcare organizations to deliver high-quality, patient-centric care at a lower cost. It integrates patient-reported data with data from biosensors – including its own continuous monitoring wearable device – to provide healthcare organizations with actionable, real-time insights into the patient’s condition. Leveraging clinical algorithms that can be tailored to the individual patient, it identifies when a patient needs clinical attention, allowing organizations to manage patient care remotely or to coordinate in-home care via the company’s integrated service partners. Its platform brings together telehealth capabilities, patient engagement tools, and cellular connectivity to provide a single solution to manage all care in the home. It has designed evidence-based care pathways that can be tailored to the needs of the individual patient, supporting a wide range of clinical conditions and acuity levels. To help its partners scale their care-at-home delivery, it also provides comprehensive logistics management, a Clinical Command Center, and integrations with in-home ancillary service providers, all serving as an extension of your team to help transform how healthcare is delivered at home. Thanks to Current Health 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

Definitive Healthcare, which went public in mid-September and finished its first week of trading with shares up 81%, announces Q3 results: revenue up 43%, adjusted EBITDA flat. The company’s market value is just under $4 billion. Founder and CEO Jason Krantz described the company’s business in the earnings call: “I founded Definitive Healthcare to help companies analyze, navigate, and sell into the complex healthcare ecosystem. We bring clarity and in-depth knowledge of the entire market that we have a deep understanding of the interconnected relationships between physicians, hospitals, providers, insurance companies, government regulators, and the patients themselves.”

Remote patient monitoring startup HealthSnap raises $5 million.

Sales

• SoftWriters will integrate First Databank’s Meducation medication adherence solution with its FrameworkLTC pharmacy management platform.
• Flagler Health+ (FL) will implement Halo Health’s clinical collaboration technology.

People

Surescripts CEO Tom Skelton will leave his role at the end of 2022 in a planned transition.

Former National Coordinator Don Rucker, MD joins interoperability startup 1upHealth as chief strategy officer.

Virtual nurse assistant software vendor Care Angel names Nick Martin (DuPage Medical Group) CIO.

Brad Rennick (Modernizing Medicine) joins NThrive as chief client officer.

Wolters Kluwer Health promotes Gregory Samios to president and CEO of Clinical Effectiveness and Peter Bonis, MD to chief medical officer of Clinical Effectiveness.

Announcements and Implementations

PeriGen announces GA of Vigilance Mobile, giving end users remote access to its AI-based early warning system and clinical decision support tools.

Government and Politics

Representative Kim Schrier, MD (D-WA), a former pediatrician and Cerner end user, shares her concerns with VA Secretary Denis McDonough about EHR usability and its impact on patient care after she toured a clinic that is connected to the VA’s first live Cerner site of Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center (WA). She notes that employees have told her the system frequently crashes, forcing them to re-type lost notes; and that its self-scheduling and prescription management features are so buggy that patients have resorted to calling the clinic, resulting in overwhelmed phone lines. “If they have to scrap this version of Cerner,” she says, “it’s probably better to do that and use something that’s tried and true than to try to fix a system that is just broken from within.”

A VA OIG review of its implementation of Cerner’s patient scheduling system finds that while many schedulers prefer the more user-friendly Cerner system over that of the replaced Vista system, they didn’t receive adequate training on complex scheduling scenarios and weren’t given enough time for practice. The VA also went live without resolving significant lapses in functionality, such as Cerner’s inability to automatically mail appointment reminder letters and to switch a scheduled visit between telehealth and in-person. Scheduling supervisors also reported confusion over measuring wait times, a nationally critical problem that the Cerner scheduling system was supposed to help resolve. After going live, care was delayed as permissions issues limited the ability of schedulers to book certain types of appointments, data migration problems required some information to be manually deleted, and reminder calls had to be turned off because patients were being told to check in at the front desk for visits in which on-site care was not available.

Privacy & Security

Southern Ohio Medical Center reverts to downtime procedures and diverts ambulances as it deals with a cyberattack that occurred early Thursday morning.

Sponsor Updates

• DirectTrust recognizes Cerner Director Greg Meyer as an Interoperability Hero during the third quarter.
• Vocera Communications signs a reseller agreement with MDI Medical in Ireland.
• Vyne Medical releases a new podcast, “How Patient Experience is Leading Hospitals Toward Digital Transformation.”
• Olive adds ClosedLoop to its marketplace for healthcare solutions.
• Fortified Health Security hires Joe Anderson (Geodis) as solutions architect.
• Goliath Technologies rolls out enhancements to Goliath Performance Monitor.
• For World Diabetes Day, Meditech shares stories of access to care.

Blog Posts

• Halo Health acquisition highlights benefits for customers (Halo Health)
• Get Your Head in the Cloud: Managed Cloud Services Help Healthcare Organizations Attain Digital Transformation (Healthcare Triangle)
• The Healthcare Research Network: 5 Modernizing Features (Health Catalyst)
• Engaging Our Community with Event-Based Vaccine Information and Advocacy (Healthwise)
• Why You Should Plan Your EHR Post Go Live Support Before You Go Live (Impact Advisors)
• Talent & the IT Skills Gap – Opportunities to Change the Way we Hire (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Clinicians on the move: Is there more to the healthcare exodus than COVID-19? (Imprivata)
• Infor Cloverleaf continues to outperform the competition in the latest Black Book survey (Infor)
• The Right Tools for the Job: Here’s What Health IT Developers are Telling Us (InterSystems)
• Meds 101: Challenges for interoperability in healthcare (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• The Evolution of SDOH and Health Data Exchange (LexisNexis Health)
• Autonomous Care Journeys – Who Is Driving Your Care? (Lumeon)
• Best Practices for Reducing Supply and Inventory Waste in Your OR (Medhost)
• Anderson Hospital’s strategy to remain independent affords better community care (Meditech)
• What Could the SMART Act Mean for PT Practices? (MWTherapy)
• From Fragmented to Frictionless: The Next Stage of the Health Tech Revolution (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 11/10/21

Top News

General Electric shares jump on the news that the company will spin off GE Healthcare, GE Aviation, and several other segments into public companies within the next two years.

Former GE Healthcare manager Peter Arduini (Integra LifeSciences) will become president and CEO of GE Healthcare in January. The business is expected to become independent in 2023, focusing on equipment, diagnostics, imaging, therapy planning, life care, and digital.

Readers may remember that Veritas Capital acquired GE Healthcare’s software (financial, ambulatory, and workforce management) business in 2018 for $1 billion, rebranding those assets to Virence Health several months later.

Veritas acquired Athenahealth around that same time for $5.7 billion with help from Evergreen Coast Capital, the private equity subsidiary of Elliott Management Corporation, which was the activist investor that targeted Athenahealth and forced out its co-founder and CEO Jonathan Bush earlier that year.

Virence Health wound up merging the former GE Healthcare’s Centricity business with Athenahealth. Veritas dropped the little-known Virence Health brand in favor of Athenahealth’s branding shortly thereafter.

Webinars

November 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Too Important to Fail: How to Bring Better AI to Healthcare.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; Marc d. Paradis, VP of data strategy, Northwell Health. It’s relatively easy to obtain healthcare data and build an AI demo, but getting AI to perform reliably and with meaningful impact is much harder. However, strategies exist for delivering AI products to commercial markets. This fireside chat will review the status of AI in healthcare; discuss the vital importance of data quality, methodological rigor, and product focus; and explore what this means to the startup and investor world.

November 11 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Increasing OR Profitability: It May Be Easier than you Think.” Sponsor: Copient Health. Presenters: Michael Burke, co-founder and CEO, Copient Health; David Berger, MD, MHCM, CEO, University Hospital of Brooklyn at State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University. The OR is a hospital’s biggest source of revenue and its costliest resource, yet it often sits idle because of unfilled block time even as providers with cases ready to book lack access. AI-powered emerging technologies can help fill unused OR time and provide decision support to structure workflows and optimize block allocation. This webinar explores the biggest challenges to profitability faced in the OR and the fastest, most impactful changes a hospital can make to address them.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Sirona Medical, a cloud-based radiology operating system software vendor, raises $40 million in a Series B funding round.

Ambulatory health IT vendor CareCloud reports record Q3 revenue of $38.3 million, a 21% increase over Q3 2020. The company attributes the numbers to organic growth and the June acquisitions of Santa Rosa Staffing and MedMatica Consulting – now known as MedSR. MTBC acquired CareCloud in January 2020 for $17 million in cash and $41 million in total consideration.

Sales

• Family Health Centers will transition to EClinicalWorks at its eight facilities in Louisville, KY.
• NorthShore University HealthSystem (IL) selects Carevive’s Patient Reported Outcomes Mobile Platform.
• Baptist Health South Florida will implement Rx Capture software from Loopback Analytics.

People

Protenus names Michelle Del Guercio (Sunquest Information Systems) chief marketing officer.

Doug Duskin (Equality Health) joins Avel ECare as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

GenieMD announces GA of Continuum, a virtual care platform encompassing telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and chronic care management capabilities; as well as consumer and medical device integration.

Rochelle Community Hospital (IL) will go live on Epic next May.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions develops a Patient Centric Token to more effectively match de-identified patient records used for clinical research and patient care.

Truveta launches its flagship clinical insights platform, giving researchers access to real-time, de-identified clinical data from care sites across 42 states. The Seattle-based startup was launched in February by numerous health systems to provide its hospital owners, drug companies, and researchers with anonymized patient data for approved research projects.

Privacy and Security

Philips alerts end users to two vulnerabilities within its Tasy EHR that could allow hackers to extract data and potentially launch denial-of-service attacks. Upgrading the EHR software, according to the company, will remove the vulnerabilities.

Health officials in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador say health IT systems, including its Meditech EHR, are slowly being brought back online after last week’s cyberattack.

Other

This is interesting: Bluestream Health co-founder and CEO Matthew Davidge sells Med School Tutors to Blueprint Test Prep for an undisclosed amount. Davidge and business partner Joe Covey purchased the company in 2019. It is one of six they’ve acquired since 2008, including patient instructions and teaching systems vendor Logicare and several in-hospital television channels.

Sponsor Updates

• Bamboo Health applauds its ACO partners for generating over $1 billion in the Medicare Shared Savings Program.
• Cerner shares a new client achievement, “Children’s Mercy Kansas City Project HOPE training helps streamline provider documentation efficiency.”
• Divurgent celebrates its membership with the KLAS Arch Collaborative with a newly released badge.
• EVisit will exhibit and present at the virtual HealthImpact Live Fall Forum November 10-12.

HIStalk Sponsors exhibiting at HFMA include Ability Network, AGS Health, Cerner, Change Healthcare, Experian Health, Health Catalyst, Intrado, InterSystems, Nuance, Olive, and Waystar.

Blog Posts

• Understanding Business Processes and Critical Capabilities: A Closer Look at Business Impact Analysis with US Anesthesia Partners (Clearwater)
• Open enrollment and beyond – how to keep revenue on track all year (Ability Network)
• How to Optimize Texting with Your Patients (AdvancedMD)
• #IDoR2021 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Talent and the IT Skill Gap: Opportunities to Change the Way We Hire (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• CPaaS brings healthcare continuity to the Cantabrian region (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise)
• What payers and providers need to know about the No Surprises Act (Availity)
• Azara Patient Outreach – Messaging, Metrics, and Milestones (Azara Healthcare)
• Increase Productivity and Improve Outcomes with Adaptive Learning (Bluetree)
• IT Leadership: The Human Side of Disruption (CereCore)
• An Inspiring Leader of Healthcare: Chasm Talks with Angie Franks, CEO of About (About)
• Streamline Acute Transitions of Care: 3 Strategies for Success (Collective Medical)
• Navigating Changes Along the Patient Journey (ConnectiveRx)
• What Providers Want from Biopharma Field Reps Amid COVID-19 Pandemic (CoverMyMeds)
• Why Improving the Quality of Clinical Data is Imperative to Avoid Public Health Reporting Breakdowns (Diameter Health)
• What We can Learn from Healthcare Collaboration During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Dimensional Insight)
• Evolve At-Home Services to Maximize Value-Based Care (Dina)
• Innova Primary Care: The Upside to Downside Risk (EClinicalWorks)
• 3 data-driven denial management strategies for faster claims processing (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/8/21

Top News

From the Allscripts earnings call, following the announcement of quarterly results that beat earnings expectations but fell short on revenue:

• CEO Paul Black says that NIH has extended its contract for Sunrise for another five years.
• Veradigm revenue grew 10% year over year.
• The company admits being frustrated that Allscripts “stock is cheap” compared to companies that enjoy high multiples while operating businesses similar to Veradigm.
• The core clinical and financial solutions business has seen some shrinking, part of that intentional in focusing on higher-quality clients, but also because of the tail end of a bolus of larger academic medical centers and clients going in a different direction.
• Allscripts believes that non-US opportunities are “a more level playing field” even though those wins are hard to predict because they are mostly public sector clients with inconsistent deal times.
• The company sold 2bPrecise at a small gain in August, taking a non-controlling stake in the combined entity instead of cash.
• Allscripts expects to see managed services opportunities as clients deal with wage inflation and sending teams such as revenue cycle management to work from home, where they could just as easily be someone else’s employee.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

An overall 85% of poll respondents seek ongoing engagement with a PCP, with a slightly higher percentage of over-35s looking for that kind of relationship. David says he wants ongoing engagement, but not ongoing disengagement where he sees the same doctor who never remembers much about him, while Kathy fears the “too many cooks” problem because whatever doctor was available to see her changed her treatment plan.

New poll to your right or here: How do you most often communicate in one-to-one work-related meetings? I’m curious because I do interviews via a conference line where I can record the call, and sometimes surprises people who have learned to spend their entire workday on video calls with cameras on. I say use video for one-on-one calls only if the value it adds exceeds the mental strain of being on camera, and I don’t know of many examples where that’s the case unless documents are being reviewed.

Webinars

November 9 (Tuesday) noon ET. “The Next Generation of Identity Resolution in Healthcare.” Sponsor: Verato. Presenters: J.P. Lugo, solution architect, Verato; Nick Orser, solution architect, Verato. This webinar will provide an overview of person-matching in healthcare, how challenges can be overcome with Verato Referential Matching, and how person-matching technology can support Customer 360, marketing, analytics, IT, and more.

November 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Too Important to Fail: How to Bring Better AI to Healthcare.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; Marc d. Paradis, VP of data strategy, Northwell Health. It’s relatively easy to obtain healthcare data and build an AI demo, but getting AI to perform reliably and with meaningful impact is much harder. However, strategies exist for delivering AI products to commercial markets. This fireside chat will review the status of AI in healthcare; discuss the vital importance of data quality, methodological rigor, and product focus; and explore what this means to the startup and investor world.

November 11 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Increasing OR Profitability: It May Be Easier than you Think.” Sponsor: Copient Health. Presenters: Michael Burke, co-founder and CEO, Copient Health; David Berger, MD, MHCM, CEO, University Hospital of Brooklyn at State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University. The OR is a hospital’s biggest source of revenue and its costliest resource, yet it often sits idle because of unfilled block time even as providers with cases ready to book lack access. AI-powered emerging technologies can help fill unused OR time and provide decision support to structure workflows and optimize block allocation. This webinar explores the biggest challenges to profitability faced in the OR and the fastest, most impactful changes a hospital can make to address them.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Spok reports Q3 results: revenue down 5%, EPS –$0.13 versus $0.16

Early-stage investor Colin Keeley provides a fascinating analysis of Canada-based software giant Constellation Software and its reclusive billionaire founder Mark Leonard. The company’s Harris unit contains a long list of acquired health IT vendors, such as Amazing Charts, QuadraMed, IMDSoft, Iatric Systems, Obix Perinatal Data System, and Picis. Interesting observations:

• The company has acquired more than 500 vertical market software companies and has sold only one of those (in the early days, which Leonard regrets).
• The company was launched in 1995 with the equivalent of $33 million 2021 US dollars. Its has grown at 30% per year to a publicly traded market cap of $31 billion.
• Leonard started the company as a former venture capital operator who was frustrated that VCs were interested only in companies that have a large addressable market. He saw many businesses that were in niche spaces that generated high margins from recurring sales of mission-critical software. Constellation bought many of its companies directly from their founders.
• Acquisition criteria include a mid- to large-sized vertical market software company with consistent earnings and growth, committed management, and an offering price that has already been determined. The average acquisition price ranges from $2 to $5 million, although the company has done bigger deals and says it will continue to do so. They also prefer companies that have low capital investment requirements just in case they need to weather a business downturn.
• The company reportedly made 90 small acquisitions in 2020 alone.
• One analyst estimates that Constellation acquires at a price of just 0.8 times annual sales, which is far below market.
• Constellation leaves the management team of its acquisitions in place, supporting them with best practices and company-wide performance data.
• The company says it offers its business unit managers autonomy, the ability to scale, and an environment in which rules are few and the focus is making the pie bigger, not fighting over how to divide it.
• Constellation believes that growing companies create inefficiency by adding layers of management. They prefer that the original manager keep most of the business but then spin off a new business unit under a groomed protégé who can start with a blank slate and focus on customers.
• All employees are given an explicit career path in which they first learn their particular vertical market, then transition into a leader of people who can run their own business unit. Leonard says, “Become a master Craftsman in the art of managing your VMS business. It is the most satisfying job in Constellation and will generate more than enough wealth for you to live very comfortably and provide for your family. For those whose ambition exceeds their good sense, we have a role that we call a Player/Coach. A Player/Coach continues to run their BU, but ambition drives them to acquire a sizable business, usually in another geography or another vertical “
• The company’s bonus plan requires long-term investment in its shares, which has created several hundred employee millionaires.

Sales

• CyncHealth selects Nuance PowerShare for accessing and sharing diagnostic imaging and reports and to alert ED physicians of prior studies.
• Advanced Pain Care (TX) chooses Athenahealth.

People

The White House nominates Kurt DelBene, MS, MBA (Microsoft) as VA assistant secretary and CIO.

Jeffrey Brown, PhD (Harvard Medical School) joins TriNetX as chief science officer.

Walmart reportedly hires David Carmouche, MD (Ochsner Health) as SVP of its Omnichannel Care Solutions business that includes services that range from primary care to digital medicine and telehealth.

Announcements and Implementations

Nuance collaborates with Collective Medical to launch Nuance PowerShare Image Aware, which alerts ED physicians of prior radiology studies.

Redox announces a solution that enables payers to meet the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule requirements.

Other

The Physician Network Advantage files a lawsuit against Santé Health Systems (CA) and related entities, which the EHR support company says failed to pay $1.5 million for Epic support. Santé says its agreement with PNA called for payment only as funded by grant funding and it notified PNA in September 2020 that the funding would be ending.

The National Nurses Union says its members are “horrified” at Kaiser Permanente’s pilot project for remote patient monitoring, saying it undermines the role of nurses, places the burden of work on family members, leaves patients far away from other services they usually need, and is intended to boost Kaiser’s profits by lowering costs while being paid by CMS at in-hospital rates under COVID-19 waivers for telemedicine.

Sponsor Updates

• The highest-rated HIStalk Sponsor vendors according to the FeaturedCustomers Fall 2021 Hospital Communications Software Customer Success Report include Market Leaders Change Healthcare, Imprivata, Spok, and Vocera; and Top Performers Halo Health and PerfectServe.
• Wolters Kluwer Health VP & GM Vikram Savkar joins The International Association for Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers’ Board of Directors.
• HCI Group publishes a new remote patient monitoring case study featuring Integris Health.
• RCxRules partners with AAPC to deliver an end-to-end physician risk adjustment coding managed service.
• OptimizeRx publishes a new report, “Multiple Sclerosis: Understanding Treatment Barriers and Market Fragmentation.”
• PerfectServe publishes a new customer success story, “Ridgeview Rehab Specialties department reduces no-show rate by 12.6% with automated text messages to patients.”
• Surescripts announces that its Real-Time Prescription Benefit has 550,000 prescriber users and processed 300 million real-time prescription benefit checks in the first nine months of 2021.
• Premier wins an NC Tech Awards winner for the innovative use of technology in the Analytics and Big Data category.
• The Outcomes Rocket Podcast features RxRevu CEO Kyle Kiser, “Enabling Lower-Cost Prescribing at the Point-of-Care.”
• TransformativeMed names Jason Larson (Care.ai) VP of sales.

Blog Posts

• Integris Health’s Rapid Response Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) Program Built on ‘HealthNxt’ Recognized at CHIME21 (HCI Group)
• ICYMI: Elements of Effective Crisis Management (Netsmart)
• Unpopular opinion: Social distancing is the best thing to happen to EHR training (Nordic)
• Can AI Improve Patient Safety? (Symplr)
• How Providers Are Using Data to Determine Drugs’ Appropriate Use (Premier)
• Celebrating 10k PowerShare sites: 10 ways patients and providers are sharing without boundaries (Nuance)
• Fifteen Years: Guarding Data then, now, always (Spirion)
• Healthcare organizations must reimagine the patient experience to thrive (Talkdesk)
• System Change is at the Heart of Well-Being (Vocera)
• Post-Discharge Programs Vital to Good Patient Outcomes (Well Health)
• How to Overcome the Challenges of Integrating EMS Systems (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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