Monday Morning Update 4/12/21

Top News

US News & World Report highlights the legal efforts of Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian to leave the 51-hospital Providence system, saying the chain’s use of Epic to standardize treatments for cost effectiveness often conflicts with the judgment of Hoag’s clinicians.

A Hoag cardiologist says the hospital can’t set its own treatment choices and instead is “bogged down by a bureaucracy that requires 51 hospitals to vote on it.”

Providence says the hospital knew that collaborative standardization was part of the affiliation deal.

Hoag also says that Providence illegally imposes restrictions on reproductive care by adhering to tenets set by the Catholic church, which controls four of the country’s 10 largest health systems.

Providence doesn’t own the hospital, but appoints a legal majority of its governing body. It says it will allow Hoag to disaffiliate if it pays an undisclosed amount that Hoag says is unreasonable.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Eighty percent of poll respondents have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, while 95% plan to be vaccinated by HIMSS21.

New poll to your right or here: Which has contributed most to your overall health? Readers who resent the “one best answer from the list” form of a poll (as opposed to a survey or personal interview) will wail about not being able to choose more than one answer, that health factors are inextricable, or that the provided answer choices are subjective, but work with me.

Webinars

April 20 (Tuesday) noon ET. “The Modern Healthcare CIO: Digital Transformation in a Post-COVID World.” Sponsors: RingCentral, Net Health. Presenters: Dwight Raum, CIO, Johns Hopkins Medicine; Jeff Buda, VP/CIO, Floyd Medical Center. A panel of CIOs from large health systems will discuss how the digital health landscape is changing and what organizations can do now to meet future patient needs. Moderator Jason James, CIO of Net Health, will guide the panelists through topics that include continuum of care and telemedicine, employer-provided care delivery, consumerization of healthcare, and sustainability and workforce management.

April 21 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Is Gig Work For You?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank L. Poggio, retired health IT executive and active job search workshop presenter.  This workshop will cover both the advantages and disadvantages of being a gig worker. Attendees will learn how to how to decide if gig work is a good personal fit, find the right company, and protect themselves from unethical ones.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Reuters reports that Microsoft is in advanced discussions to acquire Nuance for $16 billion, with an agreement possibly being announced on Monday. The reported offer is $56 per NUAN share, a 23% premium to Friday’s close.

A private equity publication sets the value of KKR’s acquisition of a majority position in Therapy Brands, which sells 19 behavioral health EHR/PM systems, at $1.25 billion.

Sales

• HHS extends TeleTracking’s COVID-19 hospital operating data collection and reporting for a third six-month term, presumably for another $10 million.

Announcements and Implementations

Varian and Google Cloud will develop a diagnostic platform for organ segmentation for radiation therapy, training Google’s NAS technology on Varian’s treatment planning image data.

FDA approves GI Genius, an AI-powered tool that highlights possible lesions in real time during colonoscopies.

MIT highlights the work of its Data to AI Lab on Cardea, an open source framework that uses FHIR to connect to EHR data to answer on-the-fly questions, for now focusing on resource allocation. The team notes that hospital decisions are too critical to simply present a black box answer, so Cardea will show the strengths and weaknesses if the model, then allow the user to start over.

COVID-19

CDC reports that 45% of American adults have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, along with 78% of senior citizens. Slightly interesting is that the three states with the lowest vaccination rates per capita are contiguous and are often challenged in other public health areas – Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, with Mississippi in particular being flooded with available vaccine doses that few residents want.

Hospitals in COVID-overwhelmed Michigan are banning visitors, cancelling elective procedures, and re-implementing pandemic surge plans, as two dozen hospitals have reached 90% capacity and 15% of the state’s hospital beds are housing COVID-19 patients. Six counties in metro Detroit are reporting their highest numbers of COVID-19 patients since the first weeks of the pandemic last year. State health officials received 58 outbreak reports from restaurants and stores in the past week, warning bluntly that “indoor dining is one of the riskiest things you can do.”

Meanwhile, the White House says it won’t surge COVID-19 vaccine supplies to Michigan because population-based distribution is the only fair way to allocate supply, especially since new outbreaks could occur elsewhere.

Pfizer requests that FDA expand the Emergency Use Authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine to those who are 12-15 years old, citing Phase 3 clinical trials data of its effectiveness.

A large study finds that people who have had COVID are 84% less likely to be re-infected over at least seven months.

Early reports showed that few people with chronic respiratory disease were being admitted with COVID-19, leading to speculation that inhaled glucocorticoids might be an effective treatment. A small randomized trial concludes that early administration of inhaled budesonide to COVID-19 patients reduced the need for urgent interventions and reduced recovery time.

The New York Times profiles 66-year-old Kati Kariko, PhD, whose early messenger RNA work at Penn failed to draw research dollars and resulted in her moving from lab to lab and never earning more than $60,000 as a low-level, untenured PhD whose job was always at risk. Moderna and Pfizer finally took notice and used her technology to develop their COVID-19 vaccines.

Other

In Canada, a man has struggled since January to remove an incorrectly entered drug overdose from his electronic medical record after the real OD patient, who didn’t have ID, gave paramedics a name and birthdate similar to his own. The health authority says it has removed the entry, but Kevin Robinson says that while the overdose no longer appears on his patient portal display, his doctor says they can still see it.

Cape Cod Healthcare (MA) goes through the technical and legal steps that were necessary to accept donations in bitcoin, as requested by a donor who has transferred $800,000 to the hospital in two transactions. The hospital converts the bitcoin to dollars that it banks immediately, concerned that unlike other forms of donations, its value could swing dramatically.

Sponsor Updates

• PatientBond completes its study on COVID-19 vaccinations.
• PatientPing publishes a new white paper, “Real-time, Right Partner: How One SNF Chain Uses Real-Time Alerts to Succeed in Value-Based Care.”
• PerfectServe publishes the complete guide to “Clinical Collaboration Systems for Hospitals.”
• Pure Storage is a 2021 Customers’ Choice in the “Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer: Distributed File Systems and Object Storage” report.
• Spirion wins three gold wards in the 2021 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards and four Globee Business Awards in the 2021 Cyber Security Global Excellence Awards.
• The Chartis Group names Michael Brown (MD Anderson Cancer Center) director in its Oncology Solutions Practice.
• Vocera earns Cyber Essentials Plus Certification in the United Kingdom.
• Waystar earns HITRUST CSF Certified status.
• Wolters Kluwer Health launches the open access journal Otology & Neurotology Open as part of its publishing collaboration with Otology & Neurotology Inc.

Blog Posts

• How provider orgs need to respond to 2021’s cybersecurity threats (Capsule)
• Leveraging AI to improve patient safety in the emergency department (Nuance)
• ONC 2021 Annual Meeting: Moving towards meaningful communication (Nordic)
• 5 Steps to Take Now: FCC Released 7 Day Application Window for $250M COVID-19 Telehealth Funding (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Reduce Claim Denials with Real-Time Eligibility (PMD)
• After COVID-19, Many Challenges Will Remain (Medsphere)
• Switch to Value-Based Model Saves California Hospital $7 Million (Premier)
• How Smart Rules Can Help Close the Gap Between Clinical Documentation and Coding (RCxRules)
• How New Rules Enable Informed Decision-Making and Patient-Centered Care (RxRevu)
• HIPAA-Compliant Messaging in the Age of COVID-19 (Spok)
• How COVID-19 is Changing Search Marketing (Krames)
• A Health IT Expert on Navigating the System to Find the Best Drug Cost (Surescripts)
• Niagra Health Reduces Number of Injuries in Code White Emergencies by 20% – Staff Feel Safer While They Work (Vocera)
• 5 Fast and Cheap Ways to Fix Your Clinic’s Marketing (WebPT)
• Time Consuming Administrative Processes Cost Healthcare $39 Billion Annually (Vyne Medical)
• Making the Case for Evidence-Based Chronic Condition Management Clinical Decision Support (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 4/9/21

Top News

Investment firm KKR acquires a majority interest in Therapy Brands, which sells behavioral health EHR/PM systems under 19 nameplates.

Thanks to reader Inchoate, whose tip allowed me to run a rumor of the acquisition a couple of days ago before the deal was announced.

Reader Comments

From Crass Credential: “Re: listing job changes. Why don’t you include fellowship credentials, such as FACHE?” I’m not a bit interested in (and thus don’t list) someone’s fellowship activities, certifications, or expensive weekends spent at a big-name school’s non-degree executive program. I always include an earned master’s or doctorate and, depending on what I’m writing about, I will generally mention past military service, but the rest tells me more about someone’s check-writing experience than their intellectual capability or perseverance.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I use LinkedIn mostly just to look up credentials, but top of increasingly irrelevant (and sometimes political or personal) posts, now I’m gritting my teeth at user writing that tries to humble-brag using this overly dramatic format:

Dramatic emphasis is being attempted.

With one sentence per line.

We hear about their setbacks and how they bravely overcame them.

To become simultaneously wonderful and humble, and you can do it, too.

Imitative marketing haiku writing for dummies. #lame.

Webinars

April 20 (Tuesday) noon ET. “The Modern Healthcare CIO: Digital Transformation in a Post-COVID World.” Sponsors: RingCentral, Net Health. Presenters: Dwight Raum, CIO, Johns Hopkins Medicine; Jeff Buda, VP/CIO, Floyd Medical Center. A panel of CIOs from large health systems will discuss how the digital health landscape is changing and what organizations can do now to meet future patient needs. Moderator Jason James, CIO of Net Health, will guide the panelists through topics that include continuum of care and telemedicine, employer-provided care delivery, consumerization of healthcare, and sustainability and workforce management.

April 21 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Is Gig Work For You?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank L. Poggio, retired health IT executive and active job search workshop presenter.  This workshop will cover both the advantages and disadvantages of being a gig worker. Attendees will learn how to how to decide if gig work is a good personal fit, find the right company, and protect themselves from unethical ones.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual-first, employer-focused primary care provider Firefly Health raises $40 million in a Series B funding round. The company says it can save employers 30% of their healthcare costs by directing employees to less-expensive settings, reducing their use of specialists, and controlling unnecessary referrals. It operates in four northeastern states. The company’s executive chair is Athenahealth co-founder Jonathan Bush.

Vesta Healthcare, which offers clinical services and a digital health platform to support high-needs members and their home caregivers, raises $65 million in growth capital.

Privia Health, which offers medical practices administrative services, technology, and its own medical group, files SEC documents to launch an IPO.

Signify Research examines the just-completed acquisition of DXC’s provider business by Dedalus for $450 million. It notes:

• DXC was created in 2017 by the merger of CSC (which had previously acquired ISoft following its NPfIT struggles) and the enterprise services business of HPE.
• Dedalus had previously acquired a majority position in France-based Medasys and the EHR and integrated care business of Agfa Health.
• The combined entity is the largest EHR vendor in Europe, with annual revenue of $600 million. It offers legacy EHRs such as Lorenzo, I.CM, I.P.M., MedChart, Swift, Patient Care, and others.
• The analysis says that Dedalus needs to retire its legacy solutions quickly and move customers to newer platforms without upsetting them, which it notes is not easy.

Fierce Healthcare covers the new Advocate Aurora Enterprises investment arm of the Advocate Aurora health system (the health system reported $558 million in profit for 2020, boosted by $786 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds, so this your taxpayer dollars at work.) Points:

• AAE acquired in-home senior care franchisee Senior Helpers for a reported $180 million last week.
• It recently led a $25 million funding round in Foodsmart, which offers telenutrition visits, meal planning, and online meal ordering and grocery lists.
• Its investments will focus on established companies that address independent aging, parenthood, and quackery-rich “personal performance” (integration of mind, body, and nutrition.)
• AAE will explore investments in digital health since its health system revenue is limited by Medicare and Medicaid payments.

Emids acquires software design and development vendor Quovantis Technologies.

Harris subsidiary MediSolution acquires Quebec-based, MIRTH-focused healthcare integration services vendor Intégration Santé.

Sales

• National post-acute care services provider AccentCare will implement Jvion’s clinical AI CORE to reduce avoidable readmissions that are related to social determinants of health.
• Springfield Clinic (IL) will implement RCxRules HCC Coding Rule Set to identify HCC coding gaps in value-based contracts.
• Tucson Gastroenterology and Midland Cardiac Clinic choose Greenway Health for revenue cycle management.
• Health First (FL) will use the ThinkAndor Vaccine Management Toolkit for vaccine distribution.
• University Hospitals of Cleveland chooses VisuWell’s browser-deployed telehealth platform. VisuWell CEO Sam Johnson is an industry long-timer with experience at Misys, Greenway, and Relatient.
• Stanford Health Care will implement real world evidence-based guidelines from Atropos Health. The company was incubated through last October at the health system’s innovation program, uses Stanford-licensed technology, and was based on Stanford’s Clinical Informatics Consult service. The company’s product uses aggregated, anonymized EHR data to provide personalized evidence for decision-making in individual patients.

People

Nick van Terheyden, MBBS (Incremental Healthcare) joins ECG Management Consultants as digital health leader and principal.

Ken Boyett, MBA (TeleTracking) rejoins Healthcare IT Leaders as managing director of provider solutions.

AGS Health appoints Eileen Voynick as board chair.

Diameter Health names James Bradley, MS, MBA as its board chair.

Lumeris hires Jean-Claude Saghbini, MS (Wolters Kluwer Health) as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

Meditech announces Expanse Patient Connect, which uses Well Health’s text, phone, email, and chat messaging solution to send patients reminders, instructions, and follow-up instructions that can be accessed from Meditech’s patient portal and app.

COVID-19

University of Michigan begins cancelling surgeries to make room for accelerating COVID-19 admissions.

A study finds that 34% of COVID-19 survivors were diagnosed with neurological or psychiatric illness within six months, most commonly anxiety and mood disorders. They also found that 7% of patients went home after being admitted to the ICU with COVID-19 had a stroke within six months and 2% were diagnosed with dementia.

CDC reports that 42% of US adults and 76% of senior citizens have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

The Washington Post tests New York State’s IBM-developed Excelsior Pass “vaccine passport” that allows those who have been vaccinated or who recently tested negative to gain admission to public spaces by voluntarily presenting their phone-based green checkmark. It notes challenges:

• Account setup via a website takes a fair amount of time, technical know-how, and a decent Internet connection.
• It’s easy to set up a fake pass.
• Users still have to present an ID along with the phone pass, which some will be reluctant to do.
• Test results aren’t always uploaded to the state database quickly, especially by private providers, so users may still need to present their paper results to attend events that occur shortly after being tested.
• The system is a voluntary alternative to simply showing a vaccination card or test result.

People are selling forged COVID-19 vaccination cards on sites such as Etsy, Ebay, and Facebook, potentially violating trademark and identity theft laws while raking in cash from unvaccinated people who want to travel or attend events. It’s not just anti-vaxxers – some buyers are writing in phony first-dose dates in hopes of fooling pharmacies into giving them priority access to their “second” dose of the vaccine. I can’t imagine that the folks who are charged with checking the plain-looking cards will have the ability or time to weed out the fake ones – it’s not like currency or a driver’s license that contains a lot of counterfeit-detecting features.

Other

Forbes profiles Epic in a click-baity article titled “The Billionaire Who Controls Your Medical Records.” The article opines, not very convincingly, that the company’s “build it alone” approach could become its biggest liability after the pandemic as people may continue to avoid hospitals. It also says, equally unconvincingly, that new federal rules giving patients some control of their medical records could erode the “health-data oligopoly” of Epic and Cerner. Then it was off to a rehash of easily Googled information cobbled into a non-story with a few harmless quotes thrown in. The writer apparently interviewed Judy Faulkner, but either didn’t ask the right questions or didn’t get the right answers since it’s the same-old, including the obligatory wonderment at its campus.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers find that non-profit hospitals spend even less on providing charity care than their for-profit counterparts, averaging $2.30 for each $100 in expenses, but in some cases less than $1.00. The authors conclude that non-profit hospitals, which are subsidized by tax revenues and are exempt from paying most taxes, “have their cake and eat it, too.” They also note that IRS doesn’t have specific requirements for the amount of care or community benefit that tax-exempt hospitals provide, they have no incentive to increase it. They suggest that hospitals be competitively ranked by the amount of charity care the provide and a reworking of the tax exemption rules to align charity care with tax status.

Radiation treatment appointments at four Rhode Island hospitals are rescheduled when radiation oncology cloud vendor Elekta is hit by a ransomware attack. The hospitals said the company restored its systems within a day.

New York Magazine examines “the therapy app fantasy,” in which the large number of mentally ill and suicidal Americans have drawn investors to “slickly marketed companies promising a service they cannot possibly provide.” The author notes that most apps don’t really offer therapy at all, but instead tout the benefits of relaxation games, journal-keeping, mood trackers, and chatbots. She says that actual therapy apps are unlike healthcare in general because the patient is the customer, but those customers don’t know what they need. She also observes that companies like Ginger and Lyra sell their services to employers, which allows those companies to address employee unhappiness while continuing to treat them poorly. Users report overloaded therapists, messaging therapists who don’t respond, and claimed 24/7 therapist availability that really means you can send a text message any time that may not get answered anytime soon. Therapists complain that the companies don’t set clear expectations, don’t have enough therapists to handle the workload, and pay them below-market rates based on factors other than time, which mostly attracts less-discriminating therapists who are moving, working multiple jobs, or caring for their children. .

Sponsor Updates

• SOC Telemed earns The Joint Commission’s Gold Seal of Approval for Ambulatory Health Care Accreditation.
• Wolters Kluwer Health adds two new payer solutions to Health Language’s reference data management capabilities.
• Experity publishes a new case study, “Experity Meets CRH Healthcare Where Consumers, Retail, and Healthcare Intersect.”
• Gyant publishes a new case study, “Hackensack Meridian Health Achieves 89% Screening Completion Rate with Virtual Assistant.”
• HCTec and Impact Advisors will exhibit at the virtual CHIME Spring Forum April 15-17.
• Optimum Healthcare IT joins the ServiceNow Partner Program.
• East Alabama Medical Center goes live on the enhanced physician documentation system of Crossings Healthcare Solutions, decreasing transcription expense by 95%.
• Cardinal Health will offer oncology practices Jvion’s CORE population health decision support system as part of its Navista Tech Solutions suite.
• Health Data Movers appoints Monica Gupta and Alyssa Rapp to its Board of Directors.
• InterSystems has joined the Gartner Peer Insights Customer First program for its adherence to transparency and integrity in managing the Gartner Peer Insights review process for customers.

Blog Posts

• Quarterly Pivot: What’s Ahead for Healthcare IT Trends in Q2 2021 (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Six ways your CDI technology should be working with you (Nuance)
• What It Takes to Improve IT Alerting and Incident Management (Everbridge)
• ECRI Publishes New Guidance to Reduce Alerts in CPOE Systems (First Databank)
• Why the Pandemic Sparked Improvement in Real-time Patient Dashboards (Glytec)
• Addressing the Impact of COVID-19 on Nurses (Halo Health)
• “Constant Onslaught of Data:” The Tricky Balance Clinicians Face in Sorting Through Noise (Healthcare Triangle)
• CIO Success and Failure (The HCI Group)
• Deliver Data to Decision Makers: Two Important Strategies for Success (Health Catalyst)
• Information blocking: Ensuring patients’ secure and convenient access to health information (Imprivata)
• How Smart Rules Can Help Close the Gap Between Clinical Documentation and Coding (RCxRules)
• How to Deliver an Experience Your Patients Want and Expect (Avtex)
• Go beyond ‘thinking outside the box’ to completely ignoring it (Infor)
• Why Do Hospitals Transfer Patients? (Central Logic)
• Four symptoms of an unhealthy medical dictionary (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• What is HL7? (Lyniate)
• How Medhost Helps Reduce Physician Burnout (Medhost)
• How to Hire the Best Marketer for Your Practice (MWTherapy)
• Digital Identity, the Next Frontier in Healthcare (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 4/7/21

Top News

The Indian Health Service seeks help from industry stakeholders with drafting a strategic plan to guide its IT efforts over the next three to five years.

The agency is in the midst of upgrading its IT infrastructure. It will use $140 million of COVID relief funds to bolster its telemedicine and EHR systems.

Reader Comments

From Inchoate: “Re: Therapy Brands. Just acquired by KKR. It is the parent of TenEleven and 18 other behavioral health-focused companies.” Unverified. The 19 companies owned by Therapy Brands sell behavioral health EHRs and systems for practice management, data collection, and electronic prescribing. CEO Kimberly O’Loughlin, MS joined the company in February 2020 after serving as president of Greenway Health.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Someone tweeted — and then apparently deleted —that they were annoyed by meeting organizers who omit time zones in assuming “EST” (their term). If you’re going to get preachy about time zone assumptions, be aware that it’s “EDT” rather than “EST,” implied or otherwise, for nearly eight months of the year unless you’re in Arizona or Hawaii. My annual public service announcement for the time zone impaired — just write “ET” and those of us who have a handle on it will translate for you, which is much nicer for you than appearing to be incapable of basic communication. The most entertaining aspect of social media is when people try to show off how smart they are, but create the opposite result.

Webinars

April 21 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Is Gig Work For You?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank L. Poggio, retired health IT executive and active job search workshop presenter.  This workshop will cover both the advantages and disadvantages of being a gig worker. Attendees will learn how to how to decide if gig work is a good personal fit, find the right company, and protect themselves from unethical ones.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Medical billing and patient communications startup Inbox Health raises $15 million in a Series A funding round.

Minnesota insurance and managed care startup Bright Health acquires Zipnosis, which offers telemedicine services to health systems.

People

Craig Miller, MBA (Culbert Healthcare Solutions) joins Newfire Global Partners as chief of staff.

PatientBond hires Todd Helmink (QliqSoft) as SVP of business development.

Brian Roy, MBA (HMS) joins ZeOmega as RVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

3M Health Information Systems announces GA of Social Determinants of Health Analytics, which enhances its Clinical Risk Groups with social risk intelligence from social risk analytics vendor Socially Determined.

Verizon Business launches telehealth software for providers as part of its BlueJeans secure video conferencing service.

A KLAS Arch Collaborative report finds that the manner in which health systems implement and support EHRs is a bigger driver of physician and nurse EHR perception than the vendor’s own delivery of functionality and support for quality care. It cites OrthoVirginia, whose efforts to improve the EHR experience of orthopedic physicians increased their “Epic is a high-quality EHR” opinion from 49% to 81% over three years.

Massachusetts General Hospital will collaborate with drug manufacturer AstraZeneca to develop and validate digital health solutions using AstraZeneca’s Amaze disease management platform, starting with heart failure and asthma management. Amaze, which was launched last month, is built on BrightInsight’s regulated digital health product development platform.

The HCI Group launches StrategyNxt, which delivers a customized digital strategy in 12 weeks for a fixed price of $250,000.

Government and Politics

ONC officials remind healthcare stakeholders that the Cures Act’s information blocking provision has taken effect. EHR transparency is also required as of Monday, in which providers are required to give patients all of the information stored in their EHR in electronic format, including provider notes of all types as well as imaging, lab, and pathology report narratives.

COVID-19

The number of American adults who have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose is up to 42%, while 76% of those 65 and over have been at least partially vaccinated.

A New York Times analysis finds that COVID-19 cases are increasing, deaths are decreasing (although as a lagging indicator), and eight of the top 10 metro areas with the highest new case count per 100K population are in Michigan. Michigan’s case count is approaching its all-time high, hospitalizations are moving toward record levels, and deaths have taken an upturn after a long decline.

California will fully reopen activities and businesses on June 15, as long as vaccine remains available and hospitalization rates remain low.

The White House announces that every US adult will be eligible to be vaccinated by April 19, eliminating individual state phases.

CDC finally confirms that “deep cleaning” businesses is pointless since infections are spread by air, recommending instead that employees wash their hands regularly and use hand sanitizer only when soap an water aren’t available. This is a significant change as businesses reopen their indoor services and many people are still phobic about getting COVID-19 from items they touch.

A new COVID-19 vaccine is being tested in Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam that stimulates more potent antibodies while also being cheaply manufactured using chicken eggs, same as flu vaccine. Phase 1 trials will be completed in July. The developer of the vaccine platform is structural biologist Jason McLellan, PhD of University of Texas at Austin, of whom a Gates Foundation officer says, “He should be proud of this huge thing he’s done for humanity.

Northwell Health will expand a program to place Amazon Echo Show two-way video devices in COVID-19 patient rooms to allow providers to communicate with them without using PPE. Physicians can initiate a conversation from their own device and patients can just start talking without pushing buttons using Alexa’s “drop in” option. Northwell said a year ago that it would add 4,000 of the devices to the 2,800 it had already deployed.

Other

A study of EHR usage at Yale-New Haven and MedStar Health systems finds that ambulatory physicians spend five hours on the EHR (Epic and Cerner, respectively) for every eight hours of scheduled clinical time, with 33% spent on documentation, 13% in inbox management, and 12% on orders. The authors warn that the use of system audit logs to compare the proposed seven EHR use metrics across vendors and provider organizations in a normalized manner will be challenging.

A former IT security support coordinator of Trillium Health pleads guilty to computer fraud, charged with using his administrative access to read employee emails and social media accounts. Trillium says it spent $150,000 to determine the extent of his hacking, also noting that his computer contained thousands of photos of employees, their credit cards, and their driver licenses. He could be sentenced to up to five years in prison and fined $250,000.

Sponsor Updates

• Elsevier adds MIPS measures validated by MDinteractive to its STATdx radiology diagnostic decision support solution.
• The Canisius Wilhelmina Ziekenhuis Hospital in the Netherlands goes live on Agfa HealthCare enterprise imaging.
• Premier signs an agreement with Ascom, giving its members special, pre-negotiated pricing and terms on the company’s nurse call systems.
• Vocera Chief Marketing Officer Kathy English is selected as a Hall of Femme honoree for 2021.
• Cerner publishes a new client achievement story, “Cancer center improves chemotherapy infusion efficiency after transition from paper records to EHR.”
• Change Healthcare wins a 2021 Cloud Computing Product of the Year Award from Cloud Computing Magazine for its Enterprise Imaging Network.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare 2.0: How to Compete in ‘The Patient Experience Economy’ (Avtex)
• Three ways to simplify denial management and achieve cleaner claims (Ability Network)
• Change Management & 5 Common-Sense Lessons Learned (Access)
• An Introduction to Direct Contracting, One of CMMI’s New Programs (CarePort)
• Health Literacy’s Effect on Adherence Throughout the Patient Journey (CoverMyMeds)
• Honoring All Our Doctors (EClinicalWorks)
• Q&A: Optimize reimbursements by submitting cleaner claims (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/5/21

Top News

Bank of America acquires patient payments technology vendor AxiaMed for undisclosed terms.

AxiaMed’s Payment Fusion offers software vendors the ability to integrate the company’s patient payment solutions with their applications.

Bank of America is developing proprietary merchant services for its clients after dissolving its decades-old joint venture with First Data last year following that company’s $22 billion acquisition by financial services technology vendor Fiserv.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Here’s your top five finishers for US capital of healthcare technology, which I intentionally left undefined.

New poll to your right or here: What is your COVID-19 vaccination status? I ask specifically about timing since HIMSS21 is in August, so that’s the next in-person event data for many of us. I’m double Pfizered, so I’m good to go.

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

Webinars

April 21 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Is Gig Work For You?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank L. Poggio, retired health IT executive and active job search workshop presenter.  This workshop will cover both the advantages and disadvantages of being a gig worker. Attendees will learn how to how to decide if gig work is a good personal fit, find the right company, and protect themselves from unethical ones.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

SOC Telemed announces Q4 results: revenue down 13%, adjusted earnings –$3.9 million versus $0.2 million (the company did not release per-share earnings). The company went public in a SPAC merger on November 2, 2020, with share price dropping 32% since then versus the Nasdaq’s 21% gain, valuing the company at $469 million.

The Global X Telemedicine & Digital Health exchange-traded fund was down 3.4% in the past month versus the Nasdaq’s 1% drop. The fund is up 26% since its July 30, 2020 inception versus the Nasdaq’s 23% rise. Its top holdings are Guardant Health, Nuance, Omnicell, Agilent Technologies, Illumina, and Labcorp.

Sales

• Plexus Research joins the TriNetX global health research network.

COVID-19

Daily US vaccinations exceeded 4 million for the first time Friday, pushing the total of Americans vaccinated to over 100 million. CDC says that 23% of adults and 55% of senior citizens have been fully vaccinated, while 40% of adults have received at least one shot.

I noticed this cool patch on the arm of a female airman whose Air Force unit was participating in FEMA-operated mass vaccination clinic and asked if I could take a photo. She was deployed from the 335th Air Expeditionary Group, Medical Operations Squadron, which has also provided COVID-19 support to hospitals.

Brazil digs up old graves to make room for the soaring number of bodies from new COVID-19 deaths, 67,000 in March 2021, as the country has vaccinated just 2% of its population and its hospitals are running out of oxygen and ICU beds. President Jair Bolsonaro replaced one-third of his cabinet and all of the country’s military commanders last week, raising concerns that he is preparing for a military coup to remain in office as opponents urge impeaching him for mismanaging the pandemic.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issues an executive order that bans the use of COVID-19 vaccination passports in the state, blocking government offices from issuing them and businesses from requiring them. He cites freedom and privacy concerns, saying that “individual COVID-19 vaccination records are private health information and should not be shared by a mandate.” He also notes that some citizens may have infection-acquired immunity and that some may decline to be vaccinated for health or religious reasons.

Google creates a memorable public service announcement that urges people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Other

Aspirus joins other health systems in notifying patients that its vendor MedData exposed their protected health information on a public-facing website. The revenue cycle services vendor was notified by DataBreaches.net in early December that claims data had been found in an open source data repository, although the company did not remove the files immediately and patient letters weren’t sent until last Wednesday. MedData says that a former employee, a developer, saved files to their personal folders on the website. The other health systems involved so far include Memorial Hermann, OSF Healthcare, SCL Health, and University of Chicago.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Market Research names Spok a top-performing behavioral health and mental healthcare industry vendor in the secure provider communications platform category.
• Kyruus completes its acquisition of HealthSparq, paving the way for seamless, cross-channel care navigation.
• Netsmart shifts one of its divisions to permanently working from home while it transitions the rest of its 2,400-member workforce back to the office.
• Pivot Point Consulting celebrates its 10th anniversary.
• Health Data Movers appoints Monica Gupta and Alyssa Rapp to its board.
• PMD releases a new video, “Meet our CEO – Philippe d’Offay.”
• CRN gives Pure Storage a five-star rating in its “2021 Partner Program Guide.”
• Relatient publishes a new e-book, “The Expert Guide to Patient Engagement Software.”
• Vocera receives FIPS 140-2 certification for its Smartbadge, required to support secure wireless communication in VA and DoD healthcare facilities.

Blog Posts

• Spok Summit: 4 sessions to help solve communication challenges across your health system (Spok)
• How AI technologies improve the patient experience (Nuance)
• Growing from strong foundations (Nordic)
• BPCI-Advanced: Unpacking the Model Year 4 Changes (PatientPing)
• Premier Data: The State of PPE Supply One Year into COVID-19 (Premier)
• Vaccination Data Integration 101: What Healthcare Products Need to Know (Redox)
• 4 questions health care marketers should ask about emerging social platforms (Krames)
• Medication Adherence Takes an Information-Sharing Village (Surescripts)
• Chronic COVID: The New Long-Haul Patient Market (WebPT)
• How to Improve Health Literacy Through Communication Technology (Well Health)

Contacts

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

News 4/2/21

Top News

HIMSS acquires SCAN Health, which offers healthcare supply chain traceability events, a supply chain maturity scale, business case competitions, and design competitions.

The company, which is funded by the Canadian government, is hosted by the University of Windsor’s business school.

SCAN Health was launched in 2017 with a four-year, $1.6 million government grant that ended this year.

HIMSS Analytics was one of SCAN Health’s partners and financial supporters.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Today’s best Internet meme — April 1 is the only day on which Americans will question whether something they read on the Internet might be untrue.

I took advantage of some special Donors Choose matching funds and those of my Anonymous Vendor Executive to fully fund these teacher requests:

• A financial literacy kit for Ms. P’s fifth grade class in Fayetteville, NC.
• Mice and headphones for Ms. G’s elementary school class in Sharon, WI.
• Science and math materials for Ms. H’s elementary school class in Houston, TX.
• Hands-on math tools for Ms. M’s elementary school class in Houston, TX.

I took a short, solo, family-related trip this week, the first time I’ve been on an airplane in quite a while. Every person I saw was appropriately masked, all flights were full (one was even oversold with a $900 offer to take a flight three hours later), and the airports were jammed with restaurant lines that looked 100 people long. It was like before COVID, which actually felt pretty good. People-watching yielded two instances where teen passengers showed up in pajamas, which reminded me of that years-ago fad where college students would head out to restaurants at 2:00 on a weekend afternoon in their PJs for breakfast. I have a feeling that the pent-up demand for travel, restaurants, and entertainment and sports events is about to explode as more people get vaccinated. Here’s a tip for Southwest passengers with Group C boarding who are doomed to a middle seat – take the seat between two folks who are conversing, or where one of them is a child. It’s almost always two family members, one of whom will move to the middle so they can sit together and leave you with the aisle.

Webinars

April 21 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Is Gig Work For You?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank L. Poggio, retired health IT executive and active job search workshop presenter.  This workshop will cover both the advantages and disadvantages of being a gig worker. Attendees will learn how to how to decide if gig work is a good personal fit, find the right company, and protect themselves from unethical ones.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Center for Health Affairs sells its CHAMPS Oncology business, which helps providers with cancer registry participation, to clinical data solutions vendor Q-Centrix.

Acute telemedicine technology and solutions vendor SOC Telemed completes its $194 million acquisition of competitor Access Physicians. 

Sales

• University Hospitals of Cleveland will implement Epic, according to a reader-forwarded internal email. It will replace Allscripts Sunrise.
• Southwest Medical Center (KS) chooses Healthcare Triangle for cloud disaster recovery services.

People

Matthew Smith (Ensocare) joins Kno2 as VP of sales and strategic partner alignment.

Sharecare hires David Guthrie (PatientPoint) as CIO/CISO.

Walmart Chief Medical Officer Tom Van Gilder, MD, JD, MPH will leave the company next month.

Announcements and Implementations

Samsung integrates GetWellNetwork’s solution with its healthcare-grade smart HTVs, eliminating the need for external hardware.

Netsmart is named the highest-satisfaction behavioral health ambulatory EHR vendor by Black Book Research, which also found that only 18% of respondents feel they are technically ready to engage electronically for care coordination, patient record exchange, and population health. 

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will use Google’s Care Studio EHR search tool, expanding a pilot project that started at Ascension.

Audacious Inquiry publishes a guide to the new CMS Conditions of Participation requirement for hospitals to send ADT notifications to the community providers of those patients.

COVID-19

Results from the ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine indicate that protection lasts for at least six months and it works against the South African variant. It was also found to be 100% effective in the small number of trial participants that were 12 to 15 years years old. The study has raised no safety concerns, clearing the way for eventual full FDA approval beyond the vaccine’s Emergency Use Authorization.

CDC reports that 21% of US adults have been fully vaccinated, as have 51% of those 65 and over, as 100 million people have received at least one dose.

Nursing homes report that COVID-19 cases are down 98% and deaths down 95% from their peak on December 20. The CMS data does not break out totals by vaccination status.

FDA issues Emergency Use Authorization two at-home, antigen-based COVID-19 rapid tests that don’t require a prescription, Quidel’s QuickVue At-Home and Abbot BinaxNOW. The tests are intended for serial screening, where an individual who does not have COVID-19 symptoms needs to be tested several times. FDA’s decision took nearly a year, keeping the tests from being sold when they could have had a major impact. Availability and price have not been announced and it’s not clear how self-test results can be used to prove COVID-19 status.

The Washington Post reports that despite dire predictions, some of the country’s richest health systems boosted their incomes in 2020, reporting big surpluses that were increased even more by federal COVID-19 bailouts. Baylor Scott & White Health reported its biggest-ever operating margin as it booked $815 million in profit for 2020, aided by $454 million in taxpayer-funded relief. UPMC tripled its 2019 margin with an $836 million profit that includes $460 million in bailout funds, while Mayo Clinic’s predicted $3 billion revenue loss ended up being increased revenue and a $728 million profit, including $338 million in bailout funds. Big health systems are either lousy at forecasting or good at manipulating politicians.

People who have had COVID-19 need just a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine to reach maximum immunity, researchers find.

A Baltimore company that manufactures both J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines as a subcontractor ruins 15 million doses of the one-shot J&J product when its workers confuse the two products and mix them together. The company, Emergent BioSolutions, was called out last year for selling the federal government $626 million worth of COVID-unrelated national stockpile items, such as anthrax vaccine, that consumed more than half of the stockpile’s budget during high demand for PPE. The most recent US anthrax attack was 20 years ago, when five people died, and the stockpile contains enough doses for 10 million people. The company bought the vaccine patent from the State of Michigan, then raised prices to the federal government six-fold, as that product plus smallpox vaccine increased its revenue to $1.5 billion as it used its clout to halt the development of better and cheaper vaccines by competitors. President Trump had appointed one of the company’s former consultants to run the office that oversees the stockpile. The company’s market value is over $4 billion. 

In England, a study of discharged COVID-19 patients finds that they were admitted four times as often and died eight times more frequently compared to the control group. The rates of respiratory disease, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease were higher and not limited to elderly patients. Nearly 30% of the discharged patients were readmitted and 12% of them died.

Houston Methodist will give its 26,000 employees until mid-April to either get at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine have their religious or medical exemption approved. The health system says 83% of employees have been vaccinated and it is mandatory for new employees. The American Hospital Association says it expects most hospitals to hold off from making vaccination mandatory until FDA gives them its full approval instead of Emergency Use Authorization.

Sponsor Updates

• Vyne Medical launches a podcast series, with the first episode covering “The Future of Healthcare IT in a Post-COVID Era.”
• Utah Business names Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton “CEO of the Year 2021.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health is named publisher of the American College of Medical Quality’s “American Journal of Medical Quality.”
• InterSystems joins the Vulcan FHIR Accelerator Program to expand interoperability in life sciences.
• Black Book Research
• PerfectServe’s Optimized Provider Scheduling powered by Lightning Bolt achieves top customer satisfaction rankings in the latest Enterprise Physician Scheduling report from KLAS.
• President Bill Clinton will keynote the Everbridge COVID-19: Road to Recovery Executive Summit May 26-27.
• Azalea Health Innovations integrates its AzaleaONE EHR with PatientPing for event notification.
• G2 names Halo Health a leader in its “Clinical Communication and Collaboration Grid Report for Spring 2021.”
• The HCI Group releases a new “DGTL Voices with Ed Marx” podcast, “How IT Saves Lives.”
• Imprivata and Emerging Global Technologies partner to bring innovative digital identity technology to healthcare providers in the Middle East.
• Kyruus publishes a new case study, “How Baystate Health Increased Online Accuracy and Access with a Comprehensive Provider Data Foundation.”
• LexisNexis publishes a new white paper, “Knowledge-Based Authentication Simplifies MyChart Patient Portal Enrollment.”
• Meditech publishes a new case study, “Princeton Community Hospital improves response time and physician efficiency with Meditech Expanse and Teknicor.”
• Medicomp Systems releases the first episode of its “Tell Me Where It Hurts” podcast with Jay Anders, MD.

Blog Posts

• Premier Data: The State of PPE Supply One Year into COVID-19 (Premier)
• Ask the Experts: What is Auto-indexing and how does it work? (Vyne Medical)
• Will Oregon’s Prescription Labeling Law Start a National Trend? (First Databank)
• Prove User Behavior is Root Cause of Citrix Latency Using ICA/HDX Channels (Goliath Technologies)
• Increase Profitability for Healthcare Organizations: Four Top Tips (Halo Health)
• Integrating Hyperledger Fabric and SAP to Blockchain Your Supply Chain (Healthcare Triangle)
• The Right Way to Build Predictive Models for the Most Vulnerable Patient Population (Health Catalyst)
• Cooking and Consulting with Joe – Week 3 – Shakshuka (Health Data Movers)
• How a problem-centric view of clinical data promotes a patient-centric healthcare system (Wolters Kluwer Health Language)
• The Healthcare IT Travel Life: How It Started vs. How It’s Going (Impact Advisors)
• Truly Unique (Infor)
• What can established healthtech companies learn from startups? (InterSystems)
• Enhancing data quality initiatives across the health IT ecosystem (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• How to Improve Clinical Workflow: 30 Expert Tips (Lyniate)
• Improve Operations and Clinical Care with E-Learning (Medhost)
• One physician’s reflection on National Doctors’ Day (Meditech)

Contacts

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

News 3/31/21

Top News

Specialty-focused software and analytics vendor Net Health acquires Casamba, an EHR developer that focuses on home health, hospice, and outpatient therapy providers.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening, and continuing my 1960s psychedelia fascination: Vanilla Fudge, in a bizarre, grainy TV appearance that captures the era perfectly. The tuxedo-wearing, white-bread TV host gamely turns it over to the annoyingly trippy and somewhat pretentious Fudge, who having enrobed themselves in trendy Nehru jackets, dashikis, and scarves, employ the wildest flourishes imaginable while go-go dancers in tunics and knee-high white boots gyrate freeform to the band’s cover of “You Keep Me Hanging On.” The Fudge could have lip-synced like most bands did in these crappy TV variety shows that catered to senior citizen viewers downing shots of Geritol, but they instead laid down a museum piece of their divisive talent in which every member achieved maximal punchability but sounded great doing it. The over-the-top yet consummately skilled bass player is Tim Bogert, who died in January at 76. The go-go dancers are now great-grandmas with wild memories.

Webinars

April 21 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Is Gig Work For You?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank L. Poggio, retired health IT executive and active job search workshop presenter.  This workshop will cover both the advantages and disadvantages of being a gig worker. Attendees will learn how to how to decide if gig work is a good personal fit, find the right company, and protect themselves from unethical ones.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Crossover Health, an online and in-person primary care company that serves payers and employers, raises $162 million in a Series D funding round, bringing its total raised to $282 million. Earlier this month, the company expanded its territory for Amazon employees from its pilot site of Dallas to four more states. The founder and CEO is Scott Shreeve, MD, who founded Medsphere with his brother Steve in 2002.

Cardiac remote patient monitoring and data management company PaceMate raises $8 million.

Telehealth provider SteadyMD raises $25 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $35 million.

Optimum Healthcare IT acquires TrustPoint Solutions, which offers technology planning and implementation solutions. 

Sales

• Carilion Clinic (VA) will work with MetiStream to develop AI-enabled Surgical Clinical Review software to improve case reviews and decision-making.
• Tampa General Hospital (FL) will add TytoCare’s home medical exam kit to its virtual TGH Urgent Care services.
• Millennium Physicians (TX) goes live with RCxRules to automate charge review and charge correction, integrated with their NextGen PM/EHR.

People

Kristen Hagerman, MS, RN-BC (Connected Care Consulting) joins Kaleida Health (NY) as CNIO and VP of clinical informatics.

Censinet hires Cormac Miller (Optum) as president and chief commercial officer.

Divurgent names Stephanie Evans (Accenture) security and privacy principal.

Flatiron Health promotes Carolyn Starrett to CEO. She succeeds Nat Turner, who will remain chairman of the board.

Announcements and Implementations

In West Virginia, Cabell-Huntington Health Department will implement Epic through a partnership with Mountain Health Network.

Sharp HealthCare (CA) implements patient review and feedback capabilities from Podium.

Healthcare Triangle develops Readabl.ai, automated document capture, processing, and data-routing software.

A Brigham and Women’s study finds that Epic-using medication prescribers would receive 94% fewer alerts by using Seegnal, a commercial clinical decision support product that was developed by Israel-based Seegnal EHealth. Seegnal’s platform uses patient EHR data, algorithms, drug interaction references, and pharmacokinetic and pharmacogenetic databases to present only relevant alerts and then suggest alternatives. The company says its system offers 98% accuracy versus the 6% provided by commercial EHRs, then allows clinicians to detect, prioritize, and resolve problems in 5-10 seconds.

Health plan support company NeuGen implements real-time care alerts from PatientPing.

Pivot Point Consulting expands its virtual care services practice to include telehealth selection and implementation, integration, revenue cycle, patient experience, and app development.

A new KLAS report looks at social determinants of health referral networks, with Aunt Bertha leading the small pack. Unite Us – which just announced a funding round that values the company at nearly $2 billion — scored well, though with fewer healthcare customers.

Government and Politics

VA Secretary Denis McDonough says in a House hearing that he is concerned about user productivity at its first live Cerner site, Mann-Grandstaff Medical Center (WA), raising the issue that the project’s cost could run over its $16 billion budget.

Tulsa-based MyHealth Access Network withdraws its protest of the state’s selection of Orion Health to provide a statewide HIE platform for $49.8 million, which is nearly $30 million more than its own bid. MyHealth founder and CEO David Kendrick, MD says it’s time now to focus on partnering with the new HIE to improve care for patients across the state.

COVID-19

Federal health researchers report that the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines prevent 80% of infections two weeks after the first injection, then 90% two weeks after the second shot. The CDC study also found that the vaccines seem to offer protection against coronavirus variants. It also noted that while more than 50% of people weren’t having symptoms when they were diagnosed, 90% eventually developed them.

CDC reports that 50% of all US seniors have been fully vaccinated.

The White House assigns HHS to standardize the development and management of vaccine passports to support business reopening and travel, encouraging solutions that are free, open source, secure, and able to create both electronic and paper documentation similar to an airline boarding pass. The government has identified at least 17 initiatives that are underway. An unnamed official says such credentialing will take time because “this has a high likelihood of either being built wrong, used wrong, or a bureaucratic mess” since developers need to consider how to address variants, track booster shots, and account for yet-unknown immunity duration.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal suggests that people keep their vaccine card because it is often their only record of being vaccinated, although the card design is not consistent and would not be hard to fake.

HHS will investigate a three-location, surgeon-owned California outpatient clinic that has been paid $146 million from the federal government’s COVID-19 patient assistance program. The practices are owned by Anthony Dinh, DO, an ENT and plastic surgeon.

The New York Times examines COVID-19 testing bills from Lenox Hill Hospital (NY), which advertises its testing services on a banner outside its ED but doesn’t mention that the hospital charges $3,000 per test, multiples of the typical cost. One family needed 12 tests last year to return to work and school and was billed $39,000. The paper also found that owner Northwell Health has charged similarly high prices for drive-through tests by tacking on ED fees. Federal law requires insurers to fully pay for COVID-19 testing with no cost to patients, so patients don’t actually have to pay, but as a medical billing expert told the paper, “This is such a gold mine for hospitals because now they can charge emergency fees for completely healthy people that just want to be tested. This is what you’d expect from a market-oriented approach to health care. It’s the behavior our laws have incentivized.” Northwell says patients who present a doctor’s order are sent to a service center that does not charge ED fees, but those who just show up – many from seeing the banner urging them to do so — are evaluated in the ED with the facility fee added on. Lenox Hill has also been criticized for opening a freestanding ED and charging patients, who sometimes confuse it with an urgent care center, many multiples of the usual cost, such as $3,000 to treat a sprained ankle. Northwell’s closest urgent care center down the street performs the same COVID-19 test with a doctor visit for just $350, so choosing the wrong of two doors will cost an extra 700%.

Pfizer will begin US studies in April of a version of its COVID-19 vaccine that can be stored under normal refrigeration.

Other

Wisconsin’s UW Health OB-GYN department requires patients to sign surgical consent forms the day of surgery instead the day before, as noted in a newly issued medical board order against Jay Lick, DO. A patient told Lick in an office visit that she did not want her ovaries removed as part of a hysterectomy, then called his office back later to say that she had changed her mind. The nurse added an EHR note that Lick didn’t see, so the ovaries weren’t removed and she had to undergo a second surgery later the same day. The state’s review noted that the clinic’s EHR does not share information with the hospital’s EHR, so the information that the surgery team reviewed during surgery timeouts did not indicate ovary removal. The board also found that the OR team used medical procedure terminology that the patient would not have understood, so she didn’t catch their mistake. The clinic’s consent forms wasn’t scanned into the hospital EHR until after the patient had been discharged.

Sponsor Updates

• King Abdulla Medical City in Saudi Arabia goes live on Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging.
• The Chartis Group names Mike Brown (MD Anderson) director.
• HST Pathways will incorporate RCM software from Waystar with its software for outpatient surgical centers.
• Frost & Sullivan recognizes Wolters Kluwer Health with a 2021 New Product Innovation Award for its suite of clinical surveillance solutions.
• Glytec releases the newest version of its EGlycemic Management System, including enhancements and new integrations to improve workflow and patient safety.
• Hills Health Solutions incorporates GetWellNetwork’s patient engagement solutions with its technologies already in use in hospitals Australia and New Zealand.

Blog Posts

• Hospitals’ Second Chance Loophole to Recoup Lost 2020 Funds with ERISA Appeals (Access)
• 5 steps to creating a 5-star online reputation (AdvancedMD)
• Rise Above Your Digital Competitors and Increase Market Share (Bluetree)
• Addressing Social Determinants of Health with CM Neighborhood (CarePort)
• The Healthcare IT Travel Life: How It Started vs. How It’s Going (Impact Advisors)
• How to Decrease Length of Stay in Hospitals (Central Logic)
• Understanding information blocking exceptions and compliance (Cerner)
• Perspective: Where have all the visitors gone? (Obix Perinatal Data Systems, developed by Clinical Computer Systems)
• How Collective Medical Helps Health Plans Close the Care Gap for Follow-Up After Emergency Department Measures (Collective Medical)
• Specialty Medications: Hope for Patients, Hurdle for Healthcare (CoverMyMeds)
• Using Artificial Intelligence for Patient Engagement (Dimensional Insight)
• Better Ways to Hear Patients’ Stories (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/29/21

Top News

A Change Healthcare SEC filing indicates that the company has received a Department of Justice request for additional information about its proposed $13 billion acquisition by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum.

The American Hospital Association asked DoJ for an antitrust review on March 17, expressing concerns about reduced health IT market competition and moving control of healthcare data from the independent Change Health to the insurer-owned Optum.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The most popular poll respondent options for improving the privacy of patient data involve restricting the sale or sharing of identifiable data without the patient’s permission.

New poll to your right or here: Which city or region has the strongest claim to call itself the US capital of healthcare technology? I’m sure I didn’t think of every contender, so add a comment after voting if I missed an important one. I’ll compare these results to those of a similar poll I ran many years ago.

Webinars

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

Sales

• Summit Healthcare announces several sales of its Provider Alert ADT notification and care coordination solution, including Lincoln Surgical Hospital, Bartlett Regional Hospital, and Madera Community Hospital.

People

Jillian Wood, MBA joins Pivot Point Consulting as VP of marketing and operations.

Sphere promotes Ryne Natzke, MBA to SVP of growth and strategy.

COVID-19

The remarkable pace of COVID-19 vaccination in the US continues with daily doses exceeding 3 million, as CDC reports that nearly 20% of adults are fully vaccinated and 72% of those 65 and over have had at least one shot.

Case counts are surging again in Michigan, Massachusetts, and the New York tri-state area , with much of the increase in the 10-19 age group. Overall US case counts are also rising again, with increases in 34 states, and hospitalization numbers are up in 20 states. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD urges surging vaccine supplies to the hardest-hit areas.

In Canada, a physician and past president of the Ontario Medical Association says that COVID-19 has exposed the weaknesses of non-integrated EHRs. He says it’s getting better, but in the mean time, “There’s no way of tracking who’s ill and no way of sharing information electronically from say Collingwood hospital to Toronto General and there’s no way of sharing information from the hospital to public health if someone’s really sick with COVID so they can start the contact tracing process. It’s all done by paper and fax and that sort of thing.”

Other

The updated HIMSS21 schedule shows that some of the keynote speakers that were scheduled for HIMSS20 will be back —Alex Rodriguez, former governors Terry McAuliffe and Chris Christie, and Arianna Huffington. I assume that former President Trump won’t be kicking things off this time around. I made my keynoter suggestions last November.

KHN describes a patient whose $30 yearly arthritis injection was suddenly billed at $1,400, of which she owed $355. The hospital-employed doctor had been moved up one floor in the same building to be classified as a “hospital setting” that supports a $1,260 “operating room services” fee even though the woman didn’t have a procedure or infusion. The hospital threatened to take her to collections, so her family chipped in to cover the cost. As someone pointed out on Twitter, it would be like a Starbuck’s $2 coffee that costs $20 if you buy it from a stand inside a grocery store.

Sponsor Updates

• Nuance announces that independent ambulatory clinics are accelerating the adoption of its Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX) ambient clinical intelligent solution and reporting significant gains in satisfaction.
• Pure Storage’s FlashBlade nears $1 billion in sales and is used by more than 25% pf the Fortune 100.
• GHU Paris selects Sectra’s digital pathology solution.
• Vocera is partnering with Status Solutions to enhance and expand alert management solutions in long-term care facilities.
• The Modern CTO podcast features Waystar CTO Chris Schremser.

Blog Posts

• Medical Coding Software: 3 Things to Look for When Choosing a Vendor (RCxRules)
• Harnessing Social Media to Create Authentic Patient Engagement Experiences That Improve Health Outcomes (OptimizeRx)
• How COVID-19 Accelerated Integrated Care – And How to Keep it Moving (Netsmart)
• Transparency and Healthcare (Nordic)
• How to Use Patient Engagement Trends to Elevate Market Share (PatientBond)
• What We Know Now: 4 Things FCC Released About Its COVID-19 Telehealth Funding (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How to Manage Complex Radiology Scheduling (PerfectServe)
• Biller’s Corner: Coding Updates You Need to Know for 2021 (PMD)
• How to Bridge Your CHNA and Value-Based Care Strategy (Premier)
• Why Medicare Advantage Organizations Do Retrospective Chart Reviews (and What Medical Groups Can Learn from Them) (RCxRules)
• What We Learned in 2020 & What We’re Expecting This Year: Facilitate Telehealth Through Infrastructure (Redox)
• Why Payers and PBMs Should Deliver Patient Data to the Point-of-Care (RxRevu)
• Telemedicine Cybersecurity: Lessons from HITRUST Certification (SOC Telemed)
• Nursing Perspective: Informatics in Nursing (Spok)
• Understanding the Viral Vector COVID-19 Vaccine HealthSheet (Krames)
• How COVID-19 is Intensifying Healthcare Disruption, Acceleration and Innovation (Surescripts)
• 5 Signs Your Clinic Culture is Toxic for Employees (WebPT)
• Using Automation to Optimize Patient Access Workflow (Vyne Medical)

Contacts

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

News 3/26/21

Top News

Telehealth vendor Amwell reports Q4 results: revenue up 34% with a net loss of $50.6 million versus $22.7 million. The company did not provide per-share numbers.

Amwell saw increases of several hundred percent in providers and visits for the year, but revenue increased only 65%.

AMWL shares, which closed on their first day of trading in September 2020 at $23.07, are at $17, valuing the company at $4 billion.

Amwell expects $265 million in revenue for 2021, nearly flat over 2020, and a loss in the $150 million range.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Reminder: several folks have said they no longer get my email updates. There’s a cure: sign up again. Hyperactive spam filters have driven email deliverability way down, especially for those that are sent to a group, so it can’t hurt to re-enter your email address (you won’t get duplicate email).

Jenn came up with a “Beat the Heat” HIStalk sponsorship idea for companies that won’t be exhibiting at HIMSS21. Sign up as a new Platinum sponsor and Jenn will include a promoted webinar and an email announcement just because she’s nice. For the cost of a HIMSS21 exhibit hall power strip, (OK, I’m exaggerating slightly), you’ll get exposure that lasts a year rather than three frantic days, and you’ll be running long before the conference starts. The crazy market valuations of health technology companies these days suggest that it’s a good time to get your company name out there among actual decision-makers, especially with all these SPACs desperately looking for dance partners to acquire. Tell Lorre that Jenn sent you.

Listening: After All, an obscure 1960s Tallahassee, FL band of Florida State graduates whose “heavy on the Hammond” British-sounding psychedelic prog sound at times resembled their contemporaries ELP, the Doors, or even Blood, Sweat & Tears. Their experimental album tracks were all over the place and the singer was trying to figure out whether to croon or growl, but they gave it their best shot for the band’s only album and its weeks-long existence– they hired a local 19-year-old Tallahassee poet (who later co-wrote “Tennessee Whiskey”) to write lyrics for songs in several popular styles, recorded the album with stunning production quality in two days as a producer friend’s freebie, then immediately went back to their day jobs having taken and missed their one shot. The band’s singer-songwriter, Mark Ellerbee — an FSU music grad who had served in Vietnam as an Army medic — enjoyed several years of minor fame as the drummer of the Oak Ridge Boys and worked for the state until he died in 2013 at 71, with his obituary video including the back jacket of the After All album. I hope Mark Ellerbee’s grandson knows how much his grandpa and his buds rocked it back in 1969 even though the world paid no attention. I think a movie is in order, complete with a psychedelic soundtrack. Rock in peace, Mark.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

At-home lab test vendor Everlywell acquires testing company PWNHealth and self-collected lab test processor Home Access Health Corporation, valuing the company at a reported $3 billion. Founder and CEO Julia Cheek, MBA is an investor and previously worked as an executive of money transfer company MoneyGram.

Ginger, which offers mental health and coaching services via text chat and video, raises $100 million in a Series E funding round.

Sales

• MiraVista Behavioral Health Center (MA) will implement Medsphere’s EHR and revenue cycle platform.
• Government IT provider FEI Systems will add NextGate’s EMPI to its data warehouse platform for patient matching and identification.

People

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare hires Ron Fuschillo, MBA (Renown Health) as SVP/CIO.

MTBC – which will soon be renamed to CareCloud after acquiring that EHR vendor in January 2020 – promotes A. Hadi Chaudhry to CEO. He replaces Stephen Snyder, JD, who will move to chief strategy officer and continue as a director.

C. Pat Heyman joins Health Systems Informatics as VP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Wolters Kluwer, Health announces Chart Review Accelerator, part of its Health Language platform, which helps clinicians by scanning medical records using clinical natural language processing for medical necessity reviews, HEDIS quality reporting, and risk adjustment.

Humana and Epic will add support for electronic prior authorizations and member insights, expanding their original project that developed Humana’s Real-Time Benefits Check tool. They will also add decision support for specialist referrals.

Cerner will enable EHR data retrieval to New York Life to reduce life insurance application processing time.

A new KLAS report looks at the patient engagement ecosystem, which it defines well in the above graphic. Vendors that are increasing their capabilities the most, often through acquisitions, are GetWellNetwork, Vocera, Salesforce, and CipherHealth. The broadest capability hospital-centric vendors are Epic, Allscripts, and R1, while on the ambulatory side, it’s Athenahealth, NextGen Healthcare, Luma Health, and Mend. The most commonly offered capabilities are pre- and post-visit communication and education. Providers are increasingly interested in white-labeled products that allow them to create their own branded digital front door.

Government and Politics

HHS OCR announces its 17th HIPAA RIght of Access settlement, as Arbour Hospital agrees to pay $65,000 for failing to provide a patient with medical records copies within 30 days despite a previous OCR warning involving the same patient.

COVID-19

CDC reports that 130 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered, with 18% of US adults being fully vaccinated as well as 44% of those 65 and over. The White House doubled its vaccination goal Thursday in aiming for 200 million vaccine shots in President Biden’s first 100 days.

US deaths are at 541,000.

Michigan’s COVID-19 case rate has jumped to the country’s second-highest, with big increases in younger populations who aren’t eligible for vaccination yet, and hospitals are again filling with COVID-19 patients. Health officials think the increase is due to more infectious strains and spread via youth sports among parents of school-aged children. The state’s vaccination program started slowly, but rollout is accelerating and experts say it’s a race against the variants, which may be a challenge that other states experience.

AstraZeneca insists in an update that despite the concerns of US government scientists, its COVID-19 vaccine is 76% effective at reducing symptomatic infection and 100% effective against severe cases.

The COO of Chicago’s 122-bed Loretto Hospital resigns following reports that he used COVID-19 vaccine that was intended for low-income West Side residents and used it to vaccinate employees of his luxury wristwatch dealer, his favorite steakhouse, and Trump Tower, where he owns a $3 million condo. Anosh Ahmed, MD also posted a photo of himself posing with Eric Trump with a claim that he vaccinated him as well, but later said he was joking. The hospital admits that 200 people at the CEO’s church were also given hospital vaccine early and it reportedly also offered shots to county judges. The hospital has been cut off from further vaccine shipments.

The LA Times estimates that venture-backed startup Curative, led by a 25-year-old founder, has earned at least $1 billion in revenue from sales of largely unproven self-administered mouth swab tests for COVID-19. The city of Los Angeles paid the company at least $82 million to run mass testing sites, for which the city is seeking federal reimbursement, and the company is billing health insurers — who are forced by law to pay for the tests — $325 each versus an actual cost of a few dollars. A Colorado health system retested some of the company’s results and found them to be wrong, while FDA says its self-testing is not reliable.  

Other

Astria Health (WA) blames Cerner for its bankruptcy and the closure of Astria Regional Medical center in bankruptcy court, contending that Cerner fraudulently misrepresented that Millennium would integrate seamlessly with its revenue cycle offerings. Astria Health says its collections went from 97% of net revenue to 54% after Cerner’s billing system went live and the Medicare and Medicaid claims of its clinics were frequently rejected. Cerner denies the allegations. Cerner previously objected to the health system’s planned bankruptcy because Astria Health had $10.7 million in unpaid bills that it did not plan to pay because it said Cerner problems had cost it $150 million, but the parties resolved that issue in December 2020 and the bankruptcy proceeded. 

Sponsor Updates

• Medicomp Systems launches a new healthcare podcast spotlighting ways to improve health IT.
• Black Book Research names Netsmart as having the highest customer satisfaction among post-acute ambulatory health technology platforms.
• IT Central Station ranks Everbridge the top IT alerting solution for 2020 based on peer product reviews.
• Long-term care alert management system vendor Status Solutions and Vocera will integrate their offerings to route notifications via the Vocera Badge, smartphone app, or workstation.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new podcast, “Reimagining Public Health Surveillance and Reporting with Dr. Donald Rucker.”
• The Chartis Group has been honored by Forbes as one of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms for the third consecutive year.
• Ingenious Med publishes a new white paper, “How to Minimize Physician Burnout and Optimize Revenues: Lessons learned from the pandemic.”
• Lyniate publishes a new white paper, “Integration Strategies for Healthcare IT Vendors.”
• Medhost offers its customers role-based Medhost Learning Essentials from Medhost University.

Blog Posts

• Yes, A Label Can Help Save Lives from Opioid Overdose (First Databank)
• What is Health Equity and Why Does It Matter? (GetWellNetwork)
• HIPAA-Compliant Texting is Not Enough to Drive Tech Adoption (Halo Health)
• Increased Adoption of Nuance DAX by Independent Ambulatory Clinics Leads to Improved Physician Satisfaction and Patient Experience (Nuance)
• Reimagining the Patient & Member Experience (The HCI Group)
• Charge Capture Optimization: Target Five Hotspots to Boost the Bottom Line (Health Catalyst)
• How COVID-19 Changed the Healthwise Model – and the Future of Health Care (Healthwise)
• COVID-19 Testing at Work: Seven Lessons from Leading Employers (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• ERP System Cutovers: Lessons Learned (Impact Advisors)
• Reevaluating the hospital and health big picture (Infor)
• How Automated Self-Scheduling Benefits Patients (Lumeon)
• Do Not Be Surprised by the No Surprise Act (Medhost)
• How Meditech and Google deliver frustration-free access to the cloud (Meditech)
• 4 Affordable Ways to Market Your PT Practice (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 3/24/21

Top News

Providence Digital Innovation Group alum DexCare raises $20 million in a Series A financing round.

DexCare, which originally developed software for Providence’s ambulatory care sites, offers a platform to allow patients to self-schedule across multiple locations in dynamically routing them to the most appropriate care access point.

Co-founders Derek Streat and Sean O’Connor, who will run the company, came from University of Washington spinout C-SATS, which sold technology to make OR recordings of surgeries to allow outside experts to evaluate the skill of surgeons. That company was sold to Johnson & Johnson in 2019.

DexCare’s customers include Providence, Community Health Network, Houston Methodist, and Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Reader Comments

From Bedazzled: “Re: HIMSS21. I’m wondering if you will repeat your 1/29 poll about attendee plans? I’m sure many organizations are thinking through what their level of involvement will be.” I probably won’t run another poll for a while since I expect little has changed in less than two months, and at some point, everybody needs to just decide to either go or not instead of worrying until the last minute who else will be there. Two-thirds of HIMSS20 registrants said in that last poll I ran that they won’t attend HIMSS21, although I might be skeptical about generalizability. I figure I should be on hand to write it up whether it’s a success or a bust (maybe even more importantly if it’s the latter), so I booked the Palazzo at a great rate of $229 with no resort fee through HIMSS / OnPeak after wasting a ton of time trying to decipher their refund policy, which I think is that your card gets charged one night’s stay three weeks before the August 9 start date, then if HIMSS21 is cancelled afterward, that’s all you lose. I ordinarily would Airbnb a condo or house, but I’m not bringing a crew this time since there’s no HIStalkaplaooza or booth, so I’ll just Lyft from the airport and then everything will be just an elevator ride away.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Appriss, known in healthcare for its prescription drug monitoring program interface capabilities, acquires patient event notification vendor PatientPing for a reported $500 million.

After raising $44 million in January, health data and analytics company Komodo Health announces a $220 million Series E funding round.

Ro raises $500 million in a Series D funding round that brings its total to $876 million, and valuation to $5 billion. The company, which now markets itself as a digital health clinic, offers telemedicine, online prescription delivery, in-home lab and nursing services, and smoking cessation programs. Hemant Taneja, managing partner at Ro investor General Catalyst, has also invested in the new Glen Tullman-led Transcarent, which helps self-insured employers guide employees to more cost-effective care.

Data aggregation and analytics company Evidation Health will use a Series E funding round of $153 million to offer more virtual health programs as part of its digital health research network.

AppliedVR, which offers virtual reality-based chronic pain treatments, raises $29 million in a Series A funding round.

Sales

• Mercy Iowa City (IA) will implement Allscripts Sunrise, delivered by Microsoft Azure.

People

Patty Lavely, MBA (CIO Consulting, LLC) joins Health Care District of Palm Beach County as VP/CIO/CDO.

Jennifer Anderson (North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance) joins Intellect Resources as VP of client services delivery.

Divurgent names Bob Farrar (Cognizant) as principal of payer services.

Announcements and Implementations

Meditech works with Code, Dryrain Technologies, and ACS MediHealth to develop a mobile barcode scanning app that is compatible with its Expanse EHR.

Cone Health (NC) implements the Loopback Analytics platform to improve value-based care and specialty pharmacy initiatives.

Hinchingbrooke Hospital in England goes live on enterprise imaging and Xero universal viewer technology from Agfa HealthCare.

Lumeon adds patient self-scheduling to its care journey orchestration platform.

Government and Politics

Hospitals that have published their confidential prices to comply with the new CMS requirement have some cases intentionally coded their websites to hide those pages from web searches.

FDA’s second-highest ranking official — Principal Deputy Commissioner and acting CIO Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD — will leave the agency next month. Abernethy, a hematologist-oncologist who was formerly a professor at Duke University School of Medicine and chief medical and scientific officer with Flatiron Health, said in a tweet, “If COVID has taught us anything, it’s that we need to rethink US digital health infrastructure. This transformation will require new ways of working across traditional silos in government & business/tech, ensuring we always put patients first.”

COVID-19

AstraZeneca issues a press release saying that US trials of its COVID-19 vaccine that is being used in Europe show a 79% efficacy against symptomatic infection and 100% protection against hospitalization and severe disease, but the independent review board that advises NIH says the company may have used outdated information from its trials and should enlist that board’s help to review the findings. The AstraZeneca vaccine is important globally because it costs just $4 per dose to manufacture and can be stored for up to six months under normal refrigeration. Observers say the vaccine is fine, but the drug company is not inspiring much confidence with its questionable communication and coordination with US regulators.

China’s efforts to enhance its global influence by offering countries its domestically produced COVID-19 vaccines are being hindered because the manufacturers of the two products — Sinovac and state-owned Sinopharm – still haven’t published data from their clinical trials from early 2020, raising questions about whether the efficacy of the vaccine is competitive with those made elsewhere. Sinopharm’s UAE distributor has suggested that some recipients take a third shot due to insufficient antibody response, while Sinovac’s studied efficacy rate has varied from 50% to 80%. The vaccines have been approved for use by 60 countries, many of which are unable to get the Pfizer and Moderna products that wealthier countries have bought up.

Texas Roadhouse founder and CEO Kent Taylor dies by suicide at 65 after experience debilitating long-term COVID symptoms that included severe tinnitus. 

Sponsor Updates

• PatientPing achieves full certification status under the state of Massachusetts’ Mass HIway Event Notification Service initiative.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “A tale of two crises and the value of health data interoperability.”
• Change Healthcare will exhibit and sponsor at Rise National 2021 March 26, 29, and 30.
• CloudWave’s OpSus Live cloud hosting for healthcare service achieves a “Best Practice” rating after successful completion of the Meditech Infrastructure and Supporting IT Process Audit with Securance Consulting.
• Wolters Kluwer Health releases Lippincott TelemedInsights to help providers implement sustainable virtual care models.

Blog Posts

• The Pandemic Fallout of Buying Multiple Patient E-Signature Vendors (Access)
• Discharge Planning During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Year in Review (CarePort)
• Will Remote Implementations be the New Normal? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Strategic IT Alignment for Health System CIOs: Tools and Takeaways (CereCore)
• 7 Factors Extending Patient Length of Stay at Your Hospital (Central Logic)
• Benefits of a CCM Service Provider Versus CCM Software (ChartSpan)
• A Look at Grassroots Sustainability at CoverMyMeds (CoverMyMeds)
• Creating a FHIR MVP: Lessons Learned (Diameter Health)
• 5 Data Trends that Will Make an Impact in 2021 (Dimensional Insight)
• How Automated Self-Scheduling Benefits Patients (Lumeon)
• HAFNIUM Targeting Exchange Servers with 0-Day Exploits (Divurgent)
• Looking Back at a Year of COVID-19 (Cerner)
• 5 Reasons Why You Should Move Your EHR to the Cloud (Engage)
• A Partner for Reinventing Your Practice (EClinicalWorks)
• 3 ways to improve the patient experience with online scheduling (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/22/21

Top News

VA Secretary Denis McDonough orders a strategic review of the VA’s Cerner EHR implementation. He said in an announcement that while the VA is committed to Cerner Millennium, problems with its use at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center make “a strategic review necessary.”

The VA says its ongoing post-deployment analysis at Mann-Grandstaff has necessitated a rollout schedule change, although Columbus remains as the next go-live site.

The VA’s 12-week review will include optimizing productivity and clinical workflow and looking into patient-facing functions such as the patient portal, data syndication, and revenue cycle.

Rep. Cathy Rodgers (R-WA) asked McDonough last Wednesday to launch an inquiry following reports of problems with prescription ordering, the patient portal, and user training. She calls the system “broken” and suggested a review of Mann-Grandstaff staffing, productivity, staff morale, training resources, and remaining infrastructure improvements.

The GAO recommended in a report last month that the VA delay going live at additional sites until it resolves call critical problems at Mann-Grandstaff, which was its first center to go live in October. The VA responded that it agreed in principle, but would not delay further rollouts.

Cerner provided a statement in response to the VA’s review announcement, saying that it supports the decision, that the company’s priority remains veterans and delivering solutions that drive care transformation in the VA, and that it is proud of its successes that include one of the largest health data migrations in history and deployment of a joint HIE between the DoD, VA, and community partners.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents handily choose insurance companies over hospitals as offering the worst customer service in healthcare. It’s interesting to me how huge, profitable companies of the recurring revenue type nearly always offer embarrassingly bad service to their paying customers – cable companies, broadband providers, cell service providers, streaming subscription companies, and banks. Shouldn’t customer service be able to scale along with other  parts of the business, and don’t these companies deploy enough analytics to understand the net present value of a customer who only needs to be occasionally helped – often because of the company’s mistake — to keep writing those monthly checks?

New poll to your right or here: Which should be done to better protect patient data? I’m sure I didn’t think of all possibilities, but I did include a “no changes needed” option and you can always vote and then click the poll’s “comments” link to add your own thoughts. I’m always surprised by how many people – some of them in healthcare – forget that the 25-year-old HIPAA, which is a HHS/CMS rule, applies only to covered entities and their business associates, and even then only if those providers submit electronic claims. Maybe a legal expert can weigh on what privacy protections the general legal system offers to the medical records of individuals – if my neighbor steals a printout of my medical records from my car seat and posts them on Facebook, do I have legal recourse?

I’m at the “go or no go” HIMSS21 decision point since it’s probably time to book travel arrangements. I’m leaning toward “go” because I should write about it regardless of how it turns out, but only if I can get a refundable lodging reservation in case the conference is cancelled. A flight on Southwest would be ideal since they would give a refund or credit if the conference isn’t held. I always get my north-south orientation of the Strip mixed up, but Google Maps tells me that the Wynn (where some sessions will be held ) is 0.8 miles from the Palazzo, meaning either queuing up for a shuttle or talking a long walk through sidewalks that are steaming with the urine of panhandlers and trying to convince yourself that 110 degrees isn’t all that bad because it’s a dry heat.

Listening: The Bengsons, an award-winning indie-folk husband and wife who debuted their latest work in a self-filmed, commissioned documentary film that was recorded in their house. It’s a refreshing counterpoint to the usual glitzy celebrity musicians (who sometimes make millions even though they don’t write songs, weren’t committed enough to learn to play an instrument, and can’t read music) in which we see them just singing and playing unadorned, with a gut-punching, powerful personal narrative from Abigail midway through that also explains her joy. This kind of performance art should be the future, even when we are once again allowed to wildly overpay for seats in which we watch a huge monitor of someone lip-synching and prancing impersonally on stage a hundred yards away. If you need something more smoothly soulful, Xavier Omär’s NPR Tiny Desk concert from last week is excellent.

Webinars

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

Announcements and Implementations

Meditech adds vaccine eligibility checking to the self-scheduling component of its patient portal.

Government and Politics

The American Hospital Association asks the Department of Justice to review the proposed $13 billion acquisition of Change Healthcare by Optum. AHA says that the deal would reduce competition in health IT sales and would give Optum’s parent company, insurer UnitedHealth Group, access to claims data that would “further increase UGH’s already massive market power.”

COVID-19

CDC reports that 31% of American adults have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose and 17% have been fully vaccinated, as 121 million doses have been administered. A record 3.1 million vaccinations were given Saturday.

Some areas of the country are experiencing a COVID-19 case resurgence, which experts think is due to variants that can’t be verified because less testing is being done. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says we need better ways to link clinical outcomes with each identified variant.

The New York Times observes that the US government will soon be issued a patent for the invention that made at least five versions of COVID-19 vaccine possible, providing one last chance to pressure drug companies to expand access to poorer countries. Some countries are asking the World Trade Organization to waive patent restrictions so they can produce their own, while Russia and China are taking advantage of “vaccine diplomacy.”

A review of 62 papers that examined the use of AI for detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray and CT images finds that every model was unsuitable for clinical use because of methodological flaws or underlying biases. The authors found that use of publicly available datasets is problematic because they often exclude groups such as children and don’t include demographic information, systems are sometimes trained on low-resolution images, timing of tests and the view chosen can affect conclusions, and doctors would rarely diagnose or differentiate COVID-19 from images alone.

Other

The commissioners of Rowan County, NC give Atrium Health 30 days to establish EHR sharing with the county’s emergency medical services department, which ended in later 2019 and left first responders with no ability to review the hospital records of transported patients for EMS quality assurance review.

Billionaire Denny Sanford, who made his fortune providing high-interest credit cards to people with poor credit scores, donates $300 million to Sanford Health for projects that include creating a virtual hospital. He has donated more than $1 billion to the health system that changed its name from Sioux Valley Hospitals and Health Systems in return.

Taiwan-based Cloudmed raises $275,000 in an IndieGoGo campaign for its ICare cardiovascular tester, which it says is the world’s smallest. The phone-paired device includes real-time reporting, data sharing, lifestyle and dietary recommendations, and on-call clinical experts. Sensors include EKG, oxygen saturation, heart rate, blood pressure, and fatigue. Campaign supporters can get the device in May for $99, two for $159, or four for $269. Its $2 per month subscription offers SOS calling, medication reminders, summary reports, measurement journals, and advanced measurements. Thanks to reader AnotherDave for sending the link.

Kaiser Heath News says that COVID-related telehealth rules for out-of-state providers could have unintended consequences if made permanent – increased provider fraud, loss of profitable patients by local providers who may stop accepting money-losing Medicaid patients, and reduced access for patients who have limited technology literacy or internet access.

Sponsor Updates

• COVID-19 Testing at Work: Seven Lessons from Leading Employers (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• The Impact of Health IT Interoperability in 2021 and Beyond (ChartLogic)
• Capnography: Key Measure for Proper Airway Placement, Return of Spontaneous Circulation, and Advanced Airway Displacement (Capsule)

Contacts

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

News 3/19/21

Top News

Social services referral platform vendor Unite Us raises $150 million in Series C financing, increasing its total to $195 million and valuing the company at $1.6 billion.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Amazon will expand its employee-only Amazon Care virtual health pilot project to its workers in all 50 states, then will offer the program to other companies later this year. The company says in its explainer video that it will bring care to the person instead of vice versa in “reimagining the practice of medicine” and “we’re rebuilding the whole delivery system around the human at the center.” The full program includes 24×7 virtual visits, at-home tests and treatments, prescription delivery, and a dedicated care team.

Healthcare analytics vendor Clarify Health raises $115 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $178 million. The company says its database of claims, EHR information, prescription records, and behavioral health data spans 300 million unique patient lives.

Data management and analytics vendor Clearsense raises $30 million in funding.

Sales

• Kuwait’s Health Assurance Hospitals Company chooses the InterSystems TrakCare EHR.
• Citizens Memorial Healthcare will use cloud disaster recovery services from Healthcare Triangle.
• Ochsner Health chooses CarePort’s care transition solution.
• Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health will deploy Netsmart’s My Avatar EHR and CareFabric platform.
• Muscogee (Creek) Nation Health System of Oklahoma will use Everbridge’s vaccine distribution system to manage registration, scheduling, administration, tracking, and reporting.
• Speare Memorial Hospital (NH) will implement Meditech’s Expanse EHR using Meditech as a Service. 
• Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health will implement digital fingerprinting health information protection from Terbium Labs and will invest in the company.

People

Glen Tullman (Livongo) joins Transcarent as CEO, expanding on his role as executive chair. The company helps self-insured employers guide employees to more cost effective care and takes a percentage of their savings. Tullman and Hemant Taneja are investors in the company as they were in Livongo, which they sold to Teladoc Health for $18.5 billion last fall.

AGS Health announces several executive hires: Proneet Sharma, MBA (Sutherland) as COO; Cheryl Cruver, MPA (Sonifi Health) as chief revenue officer; Ashish Mohan as CFO; Ekta Singh. MBA as chief human resources officer; and Phillip Park, MBA as VP of corporate development and finance.

Announcements and Implementations

Sphere launches an expanded patient payment platform that includes a mobile check-in, intake, and payment experience and the ability for patients to leave a card-on-file token for automatic payment of billing plan balances.

Remote patient monitoring solution vendor CareSimple incorporates health education material from Healthwise.

InterSystems offers its IRIS data platform as a managed service via Amazon Web Services.

Medhost announces YourCare Continuum, an enhanced care coordination solution.

IllumiCare will add the Epic-integrated WHIRL user customization app that was developed by Wake Forest Baptist Health to its Smart Ribbon. WHIRL compresses the Epic information of 10 patients per printed page to create a customizable rounding list.

Greenway Health launches GRS Select, a customizable RCM offering.

Government and Politics

The Senate confirms Xavier Becerra, JD – who served as California’s attorney general and as a member of Congress — as HHS secretary.

COVID-19

CDC reports that 113 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered in the US, with 28.5% of adults having had at least one shot and 12% being fully immunized.

Epic will offer its 10,000 employees COVID-19 vaccination on its still-closed Verona campus as approved by Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services, which has deemed the company’s software and its employees as critical. The program will be run by Mequon, WI-based flu shot clinic provider VaxPro.

Researchers will study the effects of COVID-19 vaccination on people with long COVID following anecdotal reports that their symptoms improved or disappeared shortly after injection.

Other

A Vanderbilt University Medical Center study finds that an EHR-based, real-time suicide risk model performed well in non-psychiatric clinical settings, using EHR demographics, diagnoses, medications, previous healthcare utilization, and Area Deprivation Indices that are driven by ZIP code. The authors note, however, that the model can’t capture potentially important information that is stored in free text or outside the institution’s EHR.

A review of the 100 largest US hospitals by bed count finds that two-thirds are not in compliance with CMS’s price transparency rule, either by failing to post the files at all or not included payer-specific negotiated rates.

Sponsor Updates

• The local paper profiles Redox’s recent growth, including new funding; and expansion plans.
• OptimizeRx’s recurring revenue grows as it secures 19 new enterprise-level engagements in Q1 2021.
• PatientPing publishes a new white paper, “The COVID Rebound: How Real-Time Alerts Can Help SNFs Solve Three Key Challenges.”
• Diameter Health summarizes the research it published with KONZA that demonstrates that quality score calculation is more accurate when using data from an HIE rather than a single EHR.
• Pure Storage announces the GA of its Pure Cloud Block Store on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
• Spirion publishes a new report, “Deliver Effective Sensitive Data Protection with 3 Must-Have Standards.”
• Hospital Alemao Oswaldo Cruz joins the TriNetX network to expand its clinical research capabilities in Brazil and Latin America.
• Zen Healthcare IT publishes a new case study, “Zen Healthcare IT Fast Tracks EHealth Exchange Onboarding for AdVault.”
• WEDI features Fortified Health Security CEO Dan Dodson on its podcast.
• Forbes includes Impact Advisors on its annual list of “America’s Best Management Consulting Firms” for the fifth consecutive year.

Blog Posts

• Top 3 Unexpected Benefits of Managed Healthcare Reporting (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Radiology Productivity: Beyond the RVU (PerfectServe)
• Why Medicare Advantage Organizations Do Retrospective Chart Reviews (and What Medical Groups Can Learn from Them) (RCxRules)
• Physician’s Corner: Answering Common Billing & Documentation Questions (PMD)
• How Health Systems are Navigating Rollout of the J&J COVID-19 Vaccine (Premier)
• Patient Safety Awareness Week: Annual Reminder to Advance Quality Healthcare Initiatives (Capsule)
• How Crozer Health Improved Efficiency and Reduced Denials (RCxRules)
• The Secret to Winning the Battle Against Claim Denials (Vyne Medical)
• II: What We Learned in 2020 & What We’re Expecting This Year (Redox)
• Successful Proning via teleICU: Coaching a Care Team Requires Communication (SOC Telemed)
• Automating COVID-19 Vaccine Reporting (Summit Healthcare)
• Minimizing the Barriers Between Pharmacists and Patients (Surescripts)
• Optimum Healthcare IT & University of Rhode Island Partner for Optimum CareerPath Program (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Preserving Quick Access to Communication During COVID-19 (Vocera)
• 6 Simple Rules for Advertising Your PT Clinic Online (WebPT)
• Ensuring Patient Safety Through Care Plans (Zynx Health)
• Administering Medications by Wrong Route Impacts Patient Safety (First Databank)
• CNOs, Role-Based Communication Critical for Clinical Teamwork (Halo Health)
• Interoperability – Building a Roadmap (Healthcare Triangle)
• The unprecedented acceleration of health innovation (The HCI Group)
• Five Steps for Better Patient Access to Healthcare (Health Catalyst)
• Top Challenges Facing the New CMS Administrator (Wolters Kluwer Health Language)
• The SPAC Boom: A Look at Health IT SPACs and their Sponsors (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• Health Education: The Golden Key to Successful Care Transitions (Healthwise)
• Using data to drive down cost and support consumer-centric care: A thought leadership roundtable (Lumeon)
• Innovation in times of crisis: Delivering healthcare at home to your acute patients (Meditech)
• PT Website: 7 Things You Should Have (MWTherapy)
• Immediate Steps to Strengthen Your Data Security (Newfire Global Partners)

Contacts

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

News 3/17/21

Top News

Tegria, Providence’s recently formed rollup of its nine health IT acquisitions, acquires health IT consulting firm Cumberland.

Cumberland, which was founded in 2004, will operate as an independent Tegria business unit. It will add to the company’s capabilities in claims and benefit administration systems, care management systems, managed services, and technology optimization.

Tegria’s other consulting and technology brands include Bluetree, Community Technologies, Engage, and Navin Haffty.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare development platform vendor Commure acquires Karuna Health, a digital patient communication startup based in San Francisco.

Employer-focused care navigation company Grand Rounds merges with Doctor on Demand. Grand Rounds CEO Owen Tripp will lead the new company, which will retain the Grand Rounds name. Doctor on Demand CEO Hill Ferguson will remain head of that brand.

Sales

• UC Davis Medical Center (CA) will implement adverse event tracking and disease management software from Qview Health across all of its departments and services.
• Emory Healthcare in Atlanta selects enterprise imaging technology from Sectra, which it will link with neighboring Grady Health System.
• Kidney Disease Medical Group in Los Angeles will use Emerge’s platform to enhance its Athenahealth EHR.
• The Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers will leverage PatientPing’s real-time admission, discharge, and transfer alerts to monitor patient events across its network of 52 centers.

People

Cone Health (NC) interim CTO Doug McMillian takes on the additional role of CISO.

Bright.md names Steve Giannini (Opal) as CEO. He takes over from co-founder Ray Costantini, who remains on the board.

Announcements and Implementations

Vyne Medical adds auto-indexing to its Trace integrated communication exchange engine, which allows health systems to transform documents and unstructured patient information into structured, shareable data without hand-keying information.

Spectrum Health (MI) incorporates TytoCare’s home medical exam kit into its virtual care services.

Newport Hospital and Health Services (WA) implements Epic through the software vendor’s Community Connect program.

Kingman Regional Medical Center (AZ) works with Meditech Professional Services to redesign workflows based on key performance indicators.

Digital health engagement platform vendor Quil launches Caregiving Circle, which allows a patient’s family and friends to join them for addressing health events or navigating day-to-day activities. The initial user is Penn Medicine’s orthopedic department, which will use the product for geriatric hip events.

Government and Politics

The Defense Health Agency works with Cerner to develop MassVax, a COVID-19 vaccine management system the DoD is incorporating into MHS Genesis.

The Texas Health Services Authority receives additional funding from ONC’s STAR HIE Program to expand its work with the SANER Project, a collaboration led by Audacious Inquiry that is working to develop better COVID-19-related data-sharing processes.

COVID-19

CDC reports that 28% of US adults have been given at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. Total administered doses are at 111 million. US deaths are at 533,000.

Several EU countries suspend their use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine after reports of abnormal blood clotting from Norway. WHO advises that no proven link exists for the 37 cases in 17 million vaccinations and thus recommends the product’s continued use. AstraZeneca notes that the occurrence of thrombotic events among vaccinated people is actually lower than in the general public and no such events were observed in 60,000 clinical trials participants.

WHO’s chief scientist says that better COVID-19 vaccines could be released later this year or next year, possibly products that don’t require needles and that can be stored at room temperature.

Zocdoc founder Cyrus Massoumi, MBA launches Dr. B, a website that helps eligible people locate COVID-19 vaccines in danger of going to waste. The service, largely a volunteer effort so far, is sending out availability alerts for two providers in New York and is working to onboard 200 more across the country.

The Atlantic writers who founded the just-completed COVID Tracking Project — which for all of 2020 was the most-reliable, best-vetted source of US coronavirus testing, infection, and hospitalization, even including the CDC’s failed dashboard — say US data reporting systems failed because they were working as (poorly) designed:

• Pandemic preparation plans emphasized data-driven decision-making without considering that the required information might be unavailable or unreliable.
• States inconsistently rolled up their detailed data into simple federal feeds that appeared to be standardized, but really weren’t, leading to errors in the epidemiological models that were created from that information.
• Data “travel at different speeds,” so coronavirus testing and case data is always a snapshot in time of information that can’t just be combined, such as with fast-reported case counts and slow-reported negative test results.
• Reports of deaths are delayed from a handful of days to months, meaning that an outbreak’s death toll can’t be accurately reported until weeks after it is already over.
• The federal government says that 4 million antigen tests are being performed daily, but state records show a small percentage of that number, and nobody has been able to explain the difference or whether the unreported results are significant.
• The data the authors trust most is HHS’s hospital-reported data.
• Data-driven thinking isn’t necessarily better than other forms of reasoning, and could even be worse if the underlying data deficiencies aren’t understood. A recent example was CDC’s March 1 warning about an uptick in case and death counts caused by variants, which the authors knew wasn’t accurate since case counts had been falling sharply for the previous month. Those numbers jumped because states were processing a backlog of death certificates, especially in storm-crippled Texas.
• At least five states regularly submit incomplete data, yet that flawed information is being used by CDC to advise those states on school reopening.

Other

A study finds that quality measures that are calculated from a  single provider organization’s EHR data differ from those calculated from aggregated HIE data in 19% of patients, which the authors attribute to patients who see multiple providers. Pneumonia vaccination of older adults, for example, was 7% better when looking at the data of all participants than when calculated from a single provider’s data. The authors conclude that information exchange is essential for accurately calculating quality measures that drive provider payment.

Kaiser Health News says that even though millions of Americans are wearing prescribed, expensive continuous glucose monitoring patches, little evidence exists that the extra cost over cheap daily finger sticks provide better outcomes for people with Type 2 diabetes who don’t use insulin. The manufacturers are aggressively pushing them for Type 2 use because of the large potential customer base as compared to Type 1 diabetics.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas Senior Product Mobility Manager Jack Langsam raises $5,000 for Susan G. Komen.
• CarePort CEO and founder Lissy Hu, MD will speak at the Whole Person Care Summit March 23.
• Central Logic welcomes back Jodi Hubler to its board.
• Impact Advisors is named to the Forbes list of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms for 2021.
• KLAS ranks Cumberland’s payer IT consulting services number two in the “2021 Best in KLAS: Software & Services Report.”
• EClinicalWorks publishes a guide to choosing a vaccine administration management system.
• Lyniate names Christy Evans (Surescripts) director of strategic partners, and announces new partnerships with Sensato and Secure Exchange Solutions.

Blog Posts

• 3 Actionable Tips for Reducing Claim Rejections (AdvancedMD)
• How to shape a blueprint for progress, with Business Intelligence (Agfa HealthCare)
• Ending isolation when your workforce is dispersed (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise)
• Patient Safety Awareness Week: Annual Reminder to Advance Quality Healthcare Initiatives (Capsule)
• Why is Length of Stay Important? Five Key Reasons (Central Logic)
• What the pandemic taught me about patient safety (Meditech)
• The Benefits of Robust Immunization Information Within EHRs (ChartLogic)
• Policy Updates Can Pave the Way to Interoperable Healthcare IT in 2021 (CoverMyMeds)
• What You Need to Know About the Data on COVID-19 Vaccinations (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/15/21

Top News

HIMSS opens registration for HIMSS21.

The full in-person conference costs $895 at the early bird rate, which includes the digital program, while digital-only registration costs $395.

HIMSS says the digital program will not be a duplication or live stream of on-site activities. It will contain “keynote-level conversations,” company announcements, education sessions, and networking opportunities.

Those who registered for HIMSS20 and intend to apply their credit to HIMSS21 need to click an individually emailed link to roll over their registration instead of registering again. The rollover email also interestingly notes that registrants must upload a headshot that will be printed on their badge, which I’m guessing is related to HIMSS20 registrations, which are not transferrable to another attendee.

The HIMSS21 exhibitor list shows 416 companies, 69 of them first-time exhibitors.

Meanwhile, HIMSS pays $2.8 million to settle class action charges brought by HatchMed and other HIMSS20 exhibitors who complained that they received no refund when the conference was cancelled. Lawsuit class members have two options: (a) apply a 50% credit of their HIMSS20 exhibitor fees to HIMSS21 and another 10% for HIMSS22; or (b) take a 20% cash refund of HIMSS20 fees along with a 30% credit of those fees applied toward HIMSS21 and 10% applied toward HIMSS22.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Vendors, you know what you should be doing to create better webinars and presentations: (a) focus on the value to attendees instead of pitching product; and (b) get a credible presenter who can demonstrate enthusiasm and knowledge. I feel sorry for marketing people who are tasked with checking the “we did a webinar” box, then have to strong-arm any available presenter to develop a program, create slides and notes, and then deliver a decent presentation. I think that’s why webinars often feature company salespeople as the key presenters, which is convenient but not exactly compelling to prospective attendees.

New poll to your right or here, in a repeat from several years ago: Which organization most often provides poor customer service in your personal experience?

Listening: Sandy Denny, the lead singer of British folk rock band Fairport Convention in the late 1960s. Her voice was angelic and her phrasing immaculate, but her life was tragic – her many self-harm injuries that resulted from a lifetime of behavioral health problems caused her physical pain and substance abuse that led to her death in 1978 at 31 years of age. She had little commercial success despite boundless talent, and while her song “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” (which she wrote at 19) is often played at funerals, most people think it was written by Judy Collins because Collins covered it (her version is also excellent). Trivia: Denny sang “The Battle of Evermore” with Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin IV as the only guest artist the band ever recorded. Along similar musical lines falls Australia’s The Seekers, best known for their peppy movie song “Georgy Girl,” but better represented by “I’ll Never Find Another You,” in which I imagine Judith Durham and the band still elicit occasional listener tears 57 years later with a deceptively simple but strongly arranged song that was flawlessly executed without ego or technical assistance. It is a jarring but satisfying reality to hear the same youthfully exuberant foursome recreate their performance identically in their 70s.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares of insurer Clover Health, which went public via a SPAC merger on January 8, have dropped 46% since then versus the Nasdaq’s 1% gain, valuing the company at $3.6 billion.

India-based healthcare AI vendor Zasti will open its US headquarters in Loudoun County, VA.

PatientBond launches Insights Accelerator, which provides health systems and other providers with healthcare consumer market research and psychographic data for marketing.

Musculoskeletal exercise and health coaching app vendor Hinge Health acquires Enso, which offers an electrical nerve stimulation wearable for pain relief. Enso says 56% of its users experience immediate pain relief and 36% report improved physical function.

Announcements and Implementations

UCM Digital Health adds clinical content from UpToDate and Emmi to its virtual health platform using the Content-as-a-Service cloud model of Wolters Kluwer Health.

Crossover Health expands its health centers and virtual care for Amazon employees and their dependents to five regions in TX, AZ, KY, MI, and CA. The company was founded in 2010 by Medsphere co-founder Scott Shreeve, MD, who I interviewed about his long-ago career change in October 2019.

COVID-19

CDC reports that 106 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 136 million distributed, with 21% of Americans having had at least one dose and a remarkable 63% of those over 65 having taken their first shot. Over 14% of US adults have been fully vaccinated. High penetration of nursing home vaccination has pushed cases, hospitalizations, and deaths hugely down.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says that the US’s aggressive vaccination program has greatly reduced the risk of variants that are causing big case upticks in Eastern Europe and Italy that have brought back lockdowns. He agrees with President Biden that July 4 gatherings will be safe to organize since vaccine supplies should be ample for everyone in April.

The New York Times looks at how buggy self-scheduling systems are slowing down COVID-19 vaccinations due to being used in ways that were not foreseen in their design, errors caused by the demand for frequent updates, lack of interoperability, the challenges of tracking two-shot administration, crashes caused by high demand, and lack of security in allowing appointment links to be shared and re-used. 

An NPR survey finds that the highest percentage of vaccine hesitancy is in Republican men and supporters of former President Donald Trump, while hesitancy among blacks is now even lower than that of whites. The idea that black Americans are unusually vaccine hesitant and thus will require extra convincing was disproven by this survey.

Two Johns Hopkins epidemiologists warn in a New York Times opinion piece that COVID-19 testing should not be scaled back in diverting resources from surveillance to vaccination. They say the volume of rapid antigen tests needs to be increased and the price reduced to support routine use in testing students, employees, and families considering a gathering.

Other

HIMSS will move from its 33 W. Monroe headquarters in Chicago to a 30,000-square-foot space that it has subleased from Gartner Research at the 24-story River North Point building at 350 N. Orleans Street, the former Apparel Center that is connected by skywalk to the Merchandise Mart.

In Canada, CBC picks up the story of a military veteran who killed family members and then took his own life after a patchwork of EHRs failed to alert his new doctor about his psychiatric treatment in the military for proper follow-up. It notes that Nova Scotia is trying to move to a one patient, one record system, but is years away, as family practices use a single ER but hospitals run SHARE, Meditech, and One Concept systems that can’t communicate with each other. Experts note that even if the ideal system is implemented in Nova Scotia, providers still won’t be able to see a patient’s records from other provinces. 

UCHealth CMIO CT Lin, MD provides a fascinating look at how workers at a drive-through vaccination site optimized their processes (UCHealth wrote a playbook on how to do mass vaccinations). He describes using Epic’s Rover smartphone app for mobile documentation, but EHR use also created problems – other Epic-using facilities sometimes charted vaccine administration on the wrong patient, so their shared data incorrectly said they had already received shots when they showed up. I can heartily endorse the “problem line” approach he describes since I used it at the final HIStalkapalooza – we moved people who were having problems (like showing up without being invited) to a dedicated table to keep the main line moving. We can only wish that airlines (remember them?) took this approach instead of allowing all available ticket counter or gate staff to frown together in puzzlement over a single monitor while everybody in line scowls.

Sponsor Updates

• The local paper profiles the experience of four InterSystems interns.
• The McBee CareThreads Podcast features Kim Elsberry, senior director of population health at Netsmart.
• Spirion joins the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association.

Blog Posts

• From Intern to Full Time: Four Unique Stories at Nuance (Nuance)
• The brilliance of GROSS (Nordic)
• One Year Later: What Healthcare Learned from COVID-19 (PatientBond)
• Revisiting Electronic Medication Reconciliation during Patient Safety Awareness Week (PatientKeeper)
• 3 Ways to Succeed in the CMS Kidney Care Choices Model (PatientPing)
• COVID-19 Vaccine Administration Program: The Challenges & Opportunities for Positive, Long-Term Change in Healthcare (Pivot Point Consulting)
• When Work Gets Personal: A New Father’s Motivation to Help Providers (PMD)
• Solving Hospital Workforce Shortages with Predictive Analytics (Premier)
• What We Learned in 2020 & What We’re Expecting This Year (Redox)
• 7 Reasons Why Physician Personalization is the Key to EHR Success (ReMedi Health Solutions)
• 5 Important Aspects of Acute Care Telemedicine (SOC Telemed)
• Nurse perspective on secure messaging in healthcare: Why it’s key to clinical communication in healthcare (Spok)
• Remapping the Specialty Medication Journey (Surescripts)
• Pricing Cash-Pay Physical Therapy Services (WebPT)
• Lessons Learned: Managing COVID-19 Vaccine Patient Communication (Well Health)
• The Secret to Winning the Battle Against Claim Denials (Vyne Medical)

Contacts

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

News 3/12/21

Top News

Sponsored point-of-care patient education vendor PatientPoint acquires one-time high flyer Outcome Health to form PatientPoint Health Technologies.

The acquisition was rumored in October 2020, when the value of the combined companies was estimated at $600 million.

Outcome Health was valued at $5 billion until November 2019, when its two founders and two of its executives were charged with $1 billion in fraud for overstating revenue and inflating ad performance to overcharge drug company advertising clients.

Outcome Health’s founders, former CEO Rishi Shah and former president Shradha Agarwal, along with the two other executives, have pleaded not guilty to fraud and are scheduled to stand trial in February 2022.

Reader Comments

From Digital Dragoon: “Re: technology and insurers. Some of these tools will be threats to individual hospitals and practices, probably the smaller ones.” Maybe, but the bigger threat is those providers staying relatively small, which means they can’t compete effectively in many areas. Small banks were a good example of limited-scale operations that may or may not have jumped on ATMs and online services, but they were going to be toast regardless because they were being circled by competitors who were committed to change – not just semi-accepting of it – in a quest to gain economy of scale. Also note that those small banks didn’t usually fail and instead sold out profitably to the better-funded and more intense regional chains that were rapidly on their way to becoming national powerhouses, courtesy of altered anti-competitive laws (changing regulations is another thing that big companies can do that smaller ones can’t). Most of those small banks were probably not unhappy about being bought out and may have conducted themselves all along knowing that they were likely to enjoy a financially successful outcome. Takeaway: technology doesn’t necessarily drive success, but it is often competitively used by successful companies who pair it with ambition and skilled execution.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Dear PR people: I almost never read a press release that starts with the word “today” given that (a) every announcement pertains to “today” (it being an announcement and all); and (b) the date of the announcement’s already defines “today” better than the word, which won’t be “today” when someone reads it tomorrow.

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

• Headphones for virtual learners of Ms. B’s elementary school class in Houston, TX.
• A mobile whiteboard for math lessons for Ms. C’s first grade class in Fresno, CA.
• A document camera for Ms. M’s kindergarten class in Sharon, WI.
• Mobile carts and storage bins for simultaneous in-person and virtual class of Ms. A in Dallas, TX.
• Math manipulatives for Ms. M’s elementary school class in Detroit, MI.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Germany-based imaging workflow vendor Brainlab acquires Mint Medical, which provides a structured workflow for analyzing medical images.

Forward Health, which offers direct primary care at a flat fee of $149 per month in eight US cities, raises $225 million in a Series D funding round. 

Vancouver-based Well Health will acquire Intrahealth, a New Zealand EHR vendor, for $15 million.

Sales

• Walgreens uses Nuance’s Intelligent Engagement conversational chatbot to help customers schedule their COVID-19 vaccinations by telephone.
• Northeast Georgia Health System chooses Kyruus ProviderMatch to create a system-wide provider directory and power patient-provider matching for consumer search.
• CareMount Medical will deploy RCxRules Revenue Cycle Rules Engine for claims scrubbing and submission.
• Northeast Ohio Medical University licenses VisualDx to teach observational clinical reasoning and differential diagnosis, especially in patients with dark skin, which represent 28% of the VisualDx images versus 19.5% in common medical education resources.
• Michigan Medicine contracts for 3M’s speech recognition, coding, and clinical documentation products. 3M acquired MModal’s technology business, which included most of the products involved in this sale, in early 2019 for $1 billion.
• Healthcare Outcomes Performance Company selects Emerge to convert data from its legacy EHRs to Athenahealth, normalize the data sets, and create a searchable database.
• Leon Medical Centers (FL) will implement Bluestream Health’s telehealth platform.

People

Lauren Verdery (EY) joins Nordic as SVP of brand, marketing, and communications.

Health Data Movers hires Monte Hess (Quest Diagnostics) as VP of sales and recruiting.

Industry long-timer Jeff Litterst, who was most recently director of enterprise sales at NThrive, died Monday at 57.

Announcements and Implementations

PeriGen’s Vigilance continuous labor monitoring system goes live in Area 25 Health Centre in Malawi in a project with Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. Facebook posts about the center by Mr. Omar of Child Legacy International show a patient meal (all products were harvested from the health center’s own garden except the rice) and a local artisan teaching expectant mothers how to weave.

Health Catalyst launches an updated Healthcare.AI suite of products and services.

Healthcare Growth Partners advised Bizmatics on its acquisition by Harris Healthcare.

Censinet announces RiskOps, which consolidates enterprise risk management and operations across clinical, regulatory, cybersecurity, research, and supply chain.

Metro Health – University of Michigan Health reports that hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia were reduced by 54% and 40%, respectively, since its implementation of Glytec’s EGlycemic Management System. Metro Health implemented the cloud-based system remotely last year as COVID-19 interrupted its planned rollout.

Google Cloud announces GA of an API that collects and stores the privacy choices of an app’s users, then validates individual data requests to determine if they should be allowed based on those stored user preferences.

COVID-19

WHO declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic on March 11, 2020. I ran reader poll results that day in which 75% of respondents said that cancelling HIMSS20 was the right thing to do. That day’s HIStalk also included warnings about ICU demand and a shortage of ventilators and staff in hospitals in Italy, as well as comments from former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD (just before the pandemic was officially declared) warning that the US was already overrun with coronavirus, public gatherings would need to be curtailed, and businesses should plan to offer teleworking.

One year after the pandemic was declared, CDC reports that 96 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 128 million distributed, with the US on track to have 100 million citizens vaccinated by early April. The US has contracted for more than enough supply to vaccinate everyone.

COVID-19 was the US’s third-leading cause of death in 2020 as overall deaths jumped 15%.

Other

In Canada, a doctor who treated a veteran who later committed a triple murder and then killed himself says that a better connection between provincial and military EHRs “would certainly be beneficial.” He said that accessing the patient’s Halifax records required using that province’s buggy SHARE web viewer, but even then, some of the doctors who saw the patient kept only paper notes that weren’t being scanned into Meditech and SHARE, so he didn’t know the patient’s history. The man had been home from residential psychiatric treatment for two months and the doctor still didn’t have access to his chart, leading to confusion over who was supposed to be coordinating his care.

A study of clinical decision support rules in nine Epic-using sites finds that 0.5% of the statements contained errors in Boolean logic, whose nested true-false statements can be hard for people to intuitively understand. The authors recommend that EHR vendors consider adding the open source error-checking tool that they developed for the study. They also note that their method can detect only logic statement errors, not cases in which a statement won’t work as expected, such as a rule that attempts to identify patients outside of normal weight range by selecting BMI < 25 and BMI > 25, where “and” should be “or” since both conditions will never be simultaneously true and thus no patient will ever be selected.

Sponsor Updates

• Everbridge receives a new patent related to its Public Warning system, pertaining to technology focused on hybrid population alerting systems and intelligent sending of messages in public mobile networks.
• Authority Magazine features “Kelly Maggiore of Impact Advisors on The 5 Leadership Lessons She Learned From Her Experience.”
• The Chartis Center for Rural Health honors Mercy Health Lakeshore as a 2021 Top 100 Critical Access Hospital.

Blog Posts

• How IHE HL7 Integration Profiles Take the Drudgery Out of Connecting Medical Devices (Capsule)
• What is PSIM? (Everbridge)
• Smart Applications and Digital Health Interoperability in Healthcare (GetWellNetwork)
• Glytec’s COVID-19 Research Shows 48-72 Hour Opportunity Window to Manage Hospitalized Patient Blood Glucose Levels (Glytec)
• We Listened. Then We Built a Better Website. (Gyant)
• Barriers to Clinical Communication: COVID-19 Drives Increased Connectedness (Halo Health)
• 97 Percent of Vyne Medical Clients Would Invest in the Trace Platform Again (Vyne Medical)
• The Voice of the Patient (The HCI Group)
• Solving Hospital Workforce Shortages with Predictive Analytics (Premier)
• Three Strategies to Deliver Patient-Centered Care in the Next Normal (Health Catalyst)
• In the world of claims processing and COVID-19, reference data management is king (Wolters Kluwer Health Language)
• Hiring Globally in a Zoom World (Imprivata)
• COVID-19 a “Crucible” for Healthcare Innovation in New Zealand (InterSystems)
• What Is Possible When You Bridge the Gap Between Payer and Provider Data (Lyniate)
• Revenue Cycle Practices – Part three: Best Practices in Resolving Denials (Medhost)
• Tips for successfully participating in CHIME’s ‘Digital Health Most Wired’ survey (Meditech)
• Safe Rollout of COVID-19 Immunizations Depends on Patient Identification (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 3/10/21

Top News

Former Practice Fusion Director of National Accounts Steven Mack pleads guilty to attempting to obstruct the federal investigation into the relationship between Practice Fusion and Purdue Pharma after admitting he deleted hundreds of relevant computer files from his work-issued laptop.

Practice Fusion paid a $145 million settlement in January 2020 to resolve federal allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by configuring its EHR software to influence the prescribing practices of its end users for the benefit of opioid manufacturers like Purdue.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor GetWellNetwork. The Bethesda, MD-based company’s interactive solutions engage patients and families, empower clinicians, and deliver outcomes that matter. It has been helping to unite providers and patients as partners in the healthcare journey for 20 years. From inpatient to outpatient, its comprehensive cross-continuum platform bridges care settings to create a seamless experience for patients and their families. Recent big news for the company was its acquisition of Docent Health, which offers AI-enabled outreach technology for consumer engagement and “next best step” in their care across episodes. Thanks to GetWellNetwork for supporting HIStalk.

I took a look at the technology being touted by some of the insurance companies and for-profit primary care chains that claim that their “full tech stack” differentiates them from stodgier but infinitely larger and more profitable competitors. That seems to be especially common in companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans. Consumer-facing apps usually had some combination of these capabilities:

• Appointment scheduling.
• Messaging, either directly with clinicians or with a “concierge team.”
• Telehealth visits.
• Plan details and benefits management.
• Status of claims, payments, prescriptions, and lab results.
• Doctor and urgent care finder.
• Cost comparisons, either drug or procedure.
• Smart watch or fitness tracker connectivity for health prompts, activity goals, synchronization.
• Prescription renewal requests.
• Home prescription delivery.
• Lifestyle assessment (sleep, diet, stress, exercise).
• Alerts and reminders.
• Collaborative sharing of EHR data and clinician notes (this was one specific national primary care practice).

These services alone don’t offer much competitive advantage since they are commonly offered. I expect that back-end systems contribute more to how companies market themselves, upsell to members, and create efficiency that may or may not translate into efficiency that can boost margins, so these seem a lot more important. Some of those I thought of:

• Anything that can help an insurer get to the scale needed to reduce per-member costs, improve provider negotiating position, and improve actuarial forecasts. Predicting and controlling costs is the bread and butter of insurance companies, which are not, despite their self-assigned labels, technology firms.
• Sales tools, especially for insurers and their broker network.
• Automated onboarding systems.
• Any kind of self-service capabilities that can reduce administrative costs.
• Enrollment for clinical trials, selling data to drug companies.
• Supporting paperless communications.
• Efficiently serving employers, who are the actual customer for most US-sold health insurance.
• Analytics to nudge members into behaviors that reduce short- or medium-term costs (companies aren’t likely to worry about long-term costs since members come and go and these public traded companies worry quarter to quarter).
• Customer relationship management to help overcome impersonal relationships at scale and to sell additional services, either those offered by the company or co-marketed through a third party.
• Chatbots to support members with administrative needs at scale.
• Patient education.
• Chronic condition monitoring and at-home monitoring to reduce the need for provider services.
• Customer segmentation and analytics to support variable pricing.
• Tools for clinicians to help ensure evidence-based practice, reduce documentation burden, increase payment efficiency.
• Fraud detection.
• Trying to integrate the web of third-party services that is the US healthcare system (labs, specialists, out-of-network providers, pharmacies, medical devices, home care, etc.) to provide a single experience that customers value.

My admittedly superficial conclusion is that most of the consumer-facing technology that insurers are rolling out is limited, focusing mostly on administrative tasks, upselling and cross-selling, and giving customers an alternative to long phone wait times for questions or complaints. A significant reason for this limited technology arsenal is that pure insurers have a mostly intrusive administrative role between the provider and the patient. It’s a different and much more interesting story when the insurer has vertically integrated itself to offer its own services in competing with providers who accept its insurance (as in the Kaiser Permanente model). 

For me, then, companies that have a small insurance footprint (in terms of enrollees, markets served, revenue, etc.) seem to be highly at risk to big competitors who can outspend them, replicate their innovative tech tools, and just buy those companies if they get too sassy. US healthcare is almost always dominated by big companies that kept getting bigger, and late starters who hope that tech-powered disruption can upend the market (whether the insurance market or the stock market) may find that to be harder than it sounds.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Canadian telecommunications company Telus will acquire Babylon Health’s Canadian operations. The deal includes a $70 million licensing fee for virtual care technology already used by Canadians in the Babylon by Telus Health app. Babylon Health is reportedly exploring IPO options via merger with an SPAC.

Patient payment vendor Cedar raises $200 million in a Series D investment round led by Tiger Global Management, giving it a $3.2 billion valuation.

Rural hospital operator Rennova Health cancels plans to sell its software and genetic testing interpretation divisions to InnovaQor, which would also include telehealth technology that Rennova had licensed from TPT Global Tech. Rennova says the companies could not agree on terms, but it will still pursue separating its software assets.

AI-powered cancer pathology diagnostics vendor Ibex Medical Analytics raises $38 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $52 million.

Sales

• USA Health (AL) selects Twistle’s COVID-19 vaccine management technology, including automated patient outreach and adverse effect reporting.
• Wellstar Health System (GA) will offer its employees digital health and wellness resources from Sharecare, and will work with the Atlanta-based company to develop similar tools for patients.
• Hartford HealthCare (CT) will implement Cedar’s patient billing software.
• The Christ Hospital Health Network (OH) selects Omnicell’s automated Central Pharmacy Dispensing Service.
• Mountain Health Network (WV) will work with Infor, The Chartis Group, and Avaap to implement Infor’s CloudSuite ERP technology.

People

Kevin Johnson, MD, MS (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) joins University of Pennsylvania as professor, VP of applied informatics at University of Pennsylvania Health System, director of a new informatics center, and senior scientist in science communication.

Southwestern Health Resources hires Donghui Wu, PhD, MBA (Texas Health Resources) as VP of data science and analytics officer.

Investor and advisor Scott Vertrees joins Heal as CEO, replacing co-founder Nick Desai, who remains a shareholder.

H1 names Julie Stern (HealthReveal) CISO and VP of engineering.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise promotes Lisa Simpson to head of North American sales.

Provider analytics vendor Trilliant Health hires Sanjula Jain, PhD (The Health Management Academy) as SVP of market strategy / chief research officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Fifteen VA health systems and medical centers in 11 states join Medicom’s health information network.

Change Healthcare announces GA of Data Science as a Service, which assists customers in using de-identified claims and social determinants of health data for analytics projects.

Philips will add OpenDoctor’s radiology patient self-scheduling technology to its new Patient Management Solution of its Radiology Workflow Suite. The system will also offer contactless registration, automated communication, and intake questionnaires.

Meditech launches a genomics solution for its Expanse EHR, which includes the ability to collect and store patient genetic information, connect to reference labs, and enable personalized treatment. Its embedded pharmacogenomic alerts are provided by First Databank.

PVerify launches a real-time and batch Medicare Beneficiary Identifier lookup solution that can be accessed via API, Excel file batch processing, or individual patient lookup on the company’s portal.

COVID-19

CDC says it’s OK for people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to gather indoors without masks and distancing, as long as the group is made up of either all people who have been fully vaccinated or those from the same household who are not at increased risk. Masks and distancing are still recommended while in public, while visiting with unvaccinated people who are at increased risk, or when assembling in groups that involve multiple households. Domestic and international travel are still not recommended, advice that CDC defends by citing a lack of information about the impact of variants. 

A study finds that the relationship between obesity and negative COVID-19 outcomes is nearly linear, as increased BMI is associated with higher rates of hospitalization and death. Severely obese patients were 33% more likely to be hospitalized and 61% more likely to die of COVID-19 than non-obese people.

A study that was performed using University of California EHR data finds that 27% of people who tested positive for COVID-19 experienced symptoms that lasted 60 or more days afterward, including shortness of breath, chest pain, cough, or abdominal pain. Many of those people did not originally experience any symptoms when they tested positive, and the severity of any initial symptoms didn’t always line up with eventual post-COVID problems. Patients in all age groups had long COVID effects, including 11 of the 34 children in the study. The study was limited in that (a) it was not able to review people who were asymptomatic but didn’t get tested; and (b) the static 60-day snapshot would have missed an unknown of people who don’t develop problems until after two months.

Other

A long-time hospital IT technologist friend of HIStalk and supporter of my Donors Choose projects sent a CIO job opening my way for Denver Health. You can read all about its clinical and community services (the latter are extensive), and on the IT side, Denver Health is in the 91st percentile of Epic’s gold stars program and recently migrated its self-hosted data centers to colocation centers (the new CIO will lead development of a full-blown cloud strategy). US News & World Report ranks Denver and nearby Colorado cities as four of the best five places to live in the US (Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Fort Collins). What better candidate can you get, my reader asks, than someone who routinely reads HIStalk? I appreciated that thought so much that I decided to mention the job opening here, which I usually wouldn’t do.

University of Washington researchers develop an Alexa skill that can detect heart rhythm problems in people who sit within two feet of a smart speaker during a telehealth visit. They are also looking at whether the same technology could detect sleep apnea in the home.

Sponsor Updates

• Clinical Architecture staff volunteer at the Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana.
• Capsule receives the 2021 New Product Innovation Award in the North American remote ventilator surveillance industry.
• Humber River Hospital in Canada deploys Ascom’s transformative tech ecosystem for improved patient safety.
• CarePort announces that more than 130 hospitals and health systems selected CarePort Care Management in 2020.
• CereCore publishes an overview of Meditech reporting and regulatory submission.
• The Cerner Charitable Foundation approves medical grants for 66 children.
• SOC Telemed earns full URAC accreditation in telemedicine.
• Frost & Sullivan features Change Healthcare in its Executive Brief, “Empowering Healthcare with a Cloud-based Enterprise Imaging Strategy.”
• ChartSpan will market its services to members of the Kentucky Hospital Association.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, releases a new Clinical Concepts in Obstetrics podcast, “Cardiac Disease in Pregnancy.”
• Divurgent releases a new episode of The Vurge podcast, “Using AI to Identify and Correct Issues with Claims.”
• Waystar adds text statements to its line of payment tools, and announces that nearly 300 healthcare facilities now use its Price Transparency solution.

Blog Posts

• How Rosetta Terminology Mapping Translates to More Efficient Research and Device Integration (Capsule)
• 3 Actionable Tips for Reducing Claim Rejections (AdvancedMD)
• Improving Tools and Documentation to Meet New CMS Level of Service Guidelines (Bluetree)
• Ask the Expert: How do you integrate with my EHR? (Vyne Medical)
• For Clicks Sake! Streamlining EHR Nursing Documentation (CereCore)
• Why is Length of Stay Important? Five Key Reasons (CentralLogic)
• Why Supply Chain Security Matters (Impact Advisors)
• Revenue cycle optimization lowers A/R days by more than 50% (Cerner)
• The Paradox of Women’s Equality – It Starts with Giving Men more Benefits at Work (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How Technology Affects Medication Access, Affordability and Adherence (CoverMyMeds)
• How to Find Success with Business Intelligence (Dimensional Insight)
• A Critical Moment in the COVID-19 Fight (EClinicalWorks)
• Q&A: Segmenting your patient population for the COVID-19 vaccine (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/8/21

Top News

Harris acquires Bizmatics, which offers the PrognoCIS EHR/PM.

Recent acquisitions have given Canada-based Harris, which is owned by Constellation Software, a long list of health IT brands that includes Amazing Charts, GEMMS, QuadraMed, Iatric Systems, IMDSoft, Just Associates, Picis, Obix, DigiChart, Uniphy Health, and MediSolution.

Reader Comments

From ML Ratio: “Re: tech-powered insurers. Several are going public and touting their technology. Will you be covering them?” Probably not since I think they are blowing smoke in trying to convince investors that they are sexy tech companies instead of boring old insurers whose profitability is based on stealing someone else’s insurance customers, negotiating provider contracts, and managing their medical loss ratio. You’re still an insurance company if most of your income is generated by premiums rather than a cute app or quickly launched telehealth program whose main end product is buzz. That’s especially true of recent startups whose website and pitch deck tries to make you think they are the next Facebook. Ignore the self-assigned labels and focus on their tiny market share, handful of coverage areas, and big competitors to whom they provide little threat. You don’t want to go toe-to-toe with UnitedHealth Group, Anthem, or Centene armed only with a clever idea for making Medicare Advantage primary care seem more interesting

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Culbert Healthcare Solutions. The Woburn, MA-based company’s patient access, clinical workflow, and revenue cycle operations experience, combined with its deep IT strategy and deployment experience, uniquely qualifies it to select, implement, and optimize healthcare technologies. Its health IT consulting team includes former CIOs and vendor-focused analysts who design and deliver high-value services that advance the delivery of care, enhance the patient experience, and improve financial performance. Thanks to Culbert Healthcare Solutions for supporting HIStalk.

About 60% of poll respondents say their company’s work culture is the same or better now as it was a year ago, results I didn’t expect given a tough year of pandemic challenges, remote work, and uncertainty. I’m interested to see how both company culture and internal job opportunities are affected when some but not all employees continue working remotely as a permanent arrangement. Remote workers were out of sight, out of mind in the places I’ve worked, with those jobs (other than consulting or sales) best suited for folks who weren’t looking to gain responsibility, get promoted, or boost their resumes with challenging new assignments. Those rewards were given to the familiar faces of people who spend their days around conference room tables, in unplanned hallway conversations, and at lunch with those who have some control over their occupational destiny.

Thanks to the following companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo for more information and to thank them for keeping my keyboard clacking.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Real estate investment trust Omega Healthcare Investors acquires Connected Living, which provides smart devices, apps, and wearables to senior housing and care companies.

Ascension Ventures raises $285 million for its fifth strategic venture capital fund, increasing its assets under management to more than $1 billion.

The one-month performance of the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health EFT is a loss of 18% versus the Nasdaq’s 9% loss. EDOC shares are up 15% since their July 30, 2020 listing, trailing the Nasdaq’s 19% gain in the same period.

Announcements and Implementations

Walmart heir Alice Walton, who is one of the world’s richest women at a reported net worth of $60 billion, announces that her non-profit will create a new medical school, Whole Health School of Medicine and Health Sciences, in Walmart’s home town of Bentonville, AR.

COVID-19

Nearly one-fourth of Americans have received at least their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine, including 59% of those 65-75 and 69% of those over 75.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD predicts that meetings and widespread travel will return to the US in July through September, but that will slow again to some degree as cooler weather drives people back indoors.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic welcomes Saran Sonaisamy (Cognizant) as director of cloud transformation and cybersecurity.
• PerfectServe publishes a new case study featuring the University of Tennessee Medical Center, “EMR Embedded Communication Improves Efficiency.”
• Pure Storage and Equinix develop a Bare Metal as a Service storage offering that delivers a unified, connected platform for any stage of an organization’s cloud journey.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “Withings’ Journey from Consumer to Remote Patient Monitoring.”
• SOC Telemed achieves full URAC accreditation.
• Summit Healthcare publishes a new use case, “Lincoln Surgical Selects Summit Healthcare to Improve Care Continuity with the All Access Platform.”
• Louisville Business First recognizes Waystar CTO Chris Schremser as a 2021 Health Care Hero.

Blog Posts

• Why use medical scribes when you don’t have to? (Nuance)
• Innovate4Outcomes: Empowering Clinicians to Ensure Successful Patient Outcomes (OptimizeRx)
• 3 Reasons Why Efficiency Can Help Your Health Outcomes and Market Share (PatientBond)
• Don’t Forget the IV Pump: 4 Steps to Successfully Rationalize Biomedical Equipment & Infrastructure During M&A (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Accuracy and Efficiency Should Not Cost Extra (PMD)
• How University of Louisville Physicians Grew Visits by 10% and Saved Millions (Premier)
• 3 Ways to Prioritize HCC Coding Review Opportunities in the New Year (RcXRules)
• How a Powerful Digital Front Door Pays Off for Patients & Healthcare Providers (Relatient)
• Infographic: What EHR Vendors Need to Know About Real-Time Prescription Benefit (RxRevu)
• Why Telemedicine Careers for Physicians are Becoming More Popular (SOC Telemed)
• Is your texting app HIPAA compliant? Understanding HIPAA-compliant texting (Spok)
• Infographic: Power up your patient portal (Krames)
• You Can’t Just Say: “Tomorrow, we’re going to be a High Reliability Organization” (TransformativeMed)
• 5 Fast and Cheap Ways to Fix Your Clinic’s Marketing (WebPT)
• Reducing Hospital Readmissions Through Patient Education (Well Health)

Contacts

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

News 3/5/21

Top News

Several health systems and home-based care companies – including Amazon Care, Intermountain Healthcare, Ascension, and Landmark Care – form Moving Health Home.

The coalition will try to convince the federal government to permanently pay for telehealth, remote patient monitoring, virtual disease prevention and management, caregiver support, and medical record sharing as an alternative to in-hospital care.

The group says that the pandemic has shown that clinical services can be safely and effectively provided at home. Many Americans, they say, would prefer receiving services at home instead of in hospitals.

The announcement says that home health services have been focused on delivering short-term services to primarily seniors who are recovering from an illness, injury, or hospital stay. They believe that home care should be a regular option for primary care, behavioral health, chronic disease management, and hospital-level care.

Reader Comments

From HIMSS Venues: “Re: post-COVID events. My hope is that they will combine in-person and virtual sessions, which will open up those smaller venues like San Diego, New Orleans, and Atlanta. HIMSS in San Diego was always my favorite.” San Diego was my favorite HIMSS city by far, which places it on the opposite end of the spectrum from Las Vegas. My recent mention of San Diego was with the same thought you had – conferences are likely to be smaller, so perhaps San Diego could be added back into the HIMSS rotation. My HIMSS experience in Atlanta and Dallas was big-box bland, while New Orleans was heavy on personality and great food that was more than cancelled out by infrastructure that bordered on third world at HIMSS13 (cramped airport, decrepit hotels, lack of service personnel, and boil water advisories) I’m on the bubble with Chicago because weather can be iffy and hotels are expensive, although I had fun staying in a VRBO house in Bridgeport last time. The San Diego downside to me is its limited number of business class hotels and its landlocked, often fogged-in airport that provides a white-knuckle, steep descent thrill ride with each landing. It’s hard for HIMSS to be nimble since big conferences require infinitely complicated planning and contract negotiations, so if they interrupt the Las Vegas-Orlando back-and-forth, I would expect them to push Chicago yet again to keep their own costs down. I’ll take it over Las Vegas any day.

From Spinout: “Re: partnership. What do marketing people think that word means when they use it in announcements?” They think it means free PR. I’m slowly moving to a policy of not mentioning any announcement that references a “partnership” since:

• I can’t tell 90% of the time exactly what the business arrangement is under which the companies will work together, which I suspect is intentional obfuscation. 
• If it’s some kind of marketing or sales agreement (i.e. “we’ll both try to sell our customers each other’s stuff”), then nobody cares.
• If one “partner” is writing a check to the other, then the agreement should be clearly labeled as a sale, not a partnership, which would then earn my mention.
• I get a lot more interested in “collaboration” and “partnership” when they result in something that will be useful to the industry at large, which is rare. It’s mostly a concept that would only interest a salesperson.

From Unicornrows: “Re: billion-dollar valuation companies. We have a lot in healthcare.” We have a lot of companies with a billion-dollar valuation but a lot fewer that are actually worth a billion dollars, with the difference being irrational exuberance in a frothy market. I’ve heard the theories that SPACs and various forms of corporate financial shell games haven’t caused companies to be excessively valued, but I’m a fundamentals guy and most of these companies seem to be struggling to sell much of anything except their own shares. The unicorns and SPACs are floating all health IT boats at the moment, but at some point the telehealth, RPA, tech-heavy health insurance, and employee wellness music will stop due to lack of ROI and financial performance and that’s when sitting on a big position in a “story stock” becomes less fun. However, people who have more money than I could earn in 10 lifetimes are placing their bets, so follow their lead if you want but recognize that it’s a zero-sum game and many of those gung-ho traders weren’t in the market during the dot-com boom and bust that taught many of us lessons. Buy shares early and you are dealing with an insider who, by definition, knows the value of both their shares and your money and chooses the latter.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Lyniate. The Boston-based company partners with healthcare organizations around the globe, delivering cutting-edge solutions to address interoperability challenges. The company’s industry-leading products, Corepoint and Rhapsody, are used by thousands of customers to send hundreds of millions of messages every day. Lyniate is committed to delivering the best interoperability solutions for healthcare organizations, from specialty clinics to large networks, from payers to vendors, and everything in between to build the future of interoperability. Thanks to Lyniate for supporting HIStalk.

I found this explainer video about Lyniate on YouTube. Should you be of the barbeque persuasion as I am, study this video recap by Lyniate UK employee James Hardacre, who has embraced his inner Texas pitmaster by creating a fire-enabled (pun intended) Rhapsody engine connection to his collection of smokers to write temperatures to a database for graphing to monitor low-and-slow progress, which is fascinating to hear him describe with a British accent.

I continue to hear from readers who have stopped getting my email updates. I’ve described before how overaggressive email server settings on their end keep recipients from receiving emails that they signed up for. My suggestion is to simply sign up again, which will either fix the problem or do nothing (you won’t get duplicate emails no matter what). I use the emails only to send notices that I’ve published something new, which means just a handful of emails each week and no spam.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Premier acquires Canada-based Invoice Delivery Services — which offers a system that converts paper and PDF invoices to electronic form to reduce the costs of invoicing, tracking, and payments — for $80 million. Premier will operate the business under the Remitra name.

Publicly traded hospital operator Universal Health Services says in its Q4 earnings report that its fall cyberattack cost it $67 million in labor costs and delayed billing, but it expects to get most of that back from cyberinsurance.

New Duke University personalized chronic care spinout ZealCare will launch later this month, co-founded by former Duke University Health System CEO Ralph Snyderman, MD and personalized healthcare research fellow Connor Drake, PhD. President, CEO, and investor Maureen O’Connor comes from BCBS North Carolina and breast cancer screening AI technology vendor Whiterabbit.

Medical technology vendor BD acquires 20-employee GSL Solutions, which offers RFID-powered will-call prescription cabinets and drug dispensing systems. The original developers and founders are Oregon State graduates in pharmacy and computer engineering, respectively.

Sales

• In Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador choose Change Healthcare Canada to develop staff scheduling software for its hospitals and long-term care facilities, also giving the company up to $28 million in incentives for cost savings it identifies.
• Axiom Healthcare Services will implement a customized version of Azalea Health’s EHR for its two behavioral health hospitals.

People

Industry long-timer Mike Raymer (AngelMD) joins clinical trials training and compliance solutions vendor Pro-ficiency as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Health system staffing and services vendor HCTec launches a vaccine administration support service.

A new KLAS report on EHR best practices for hospitals of under 200 beds finds that while their vendors provide technology and support, the hospitals need to get IT teams involved with frontline clinicians, set realistic expectations, invest in IT resources, deploy skilled trainers with required clinician engagement, and create a collaborative relationship with their vendor that has regular touch points. Meditech’s updated technology and more prescriptive implementation approach have elevated Expanse to the top spot in satisfaction.

Black Book’s annual survey of ambulatory practices find that specialty-driven EHRs earn the top satisfaction, although most specialists regret their hurried EHR choice and implementation that failed to consider connectivity with other providers. Nearly all specialty practices that expect to change EHRs will be looking only at cloud-based systems because of cost.

Medical and safety technology vendor Dräger will work with several healthcare organizations to develop medical device interoperability standards in a US Army-funded project that will use IEEE’s service-oriented device connectivity (SDC) standard.

Walgreens expands its Find Care digital health marketplace, which is part of the Walgreens app, with 11 new providers.

Government and Politics

A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study finds that Medicare would have saved $1.7 billion in 2017 if prescribers and/or patients had not insisted on using a brand name drug for which a generic equivalent was available.

COVID-19

CDC reports 83 million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered versus 110 million distributed (76%). Hospital inpatient count continues to trend down, at 42,000 this week versus the peak of 125,000 in early January.

Italy invokes its European Union powers to block the export of 251,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to Australia. EU countries are frustrated that they can’t meet their stated vaccination goals because AstraZeneca is tens of millions of doses behind its agreed-on delivery schedule. Italy’s foreign ministry flagged the shipment from AstraZeneca’s factory in Rome, noting that Australia is not considered by the EU to be a vulnerable country.

California’s switch to Blue Shield to distribute coronavirus vaccine will require consumers to use MyTurn to sign up and V-Save to report adverse events, while providers will be required to use MyCAVax for enrollment and vaccine management; MyTurn for clinic management; MyTurn, EHR, or CAIR2 to report daily doses administered; VAERS, FDA, or V-Safe to report adverse events; and VaccineFinder to report daily inventory. I learned this from the Twitter of Christopher Longhurst, MD, MS, CIO/associate chief medical officer of UC San Diego Health.

New York State continues testing IBM and Salesforce-developed Excelsior Pass for attendees of professional sports events, which allows people who have recently tested negative for COVID-19 or been vaccinated to present an on-screen or printed QR code “boarding pass” that will give them entry into the venue. The system is based on IBM Watson Works Digital Health Pass digital wallet. I haven’t seen an whether the system actually tries to import vaccination and testing records (it seems like patient identification and the wide variety of testing sites and systems would make that hard) or if it just allows users to self-report their COVID-19 status – each venue sets its own requirements.

Other

The Las Vegas Sands company sells the Venetian, Palazzo, and the Sands Expo and Convention Center for $6.25 billion as it exits the US to focus on running casinos in Asia and venturing into online gambling. The company lost $300 million in the most recent quarter because of the pandemic and its founder and CEO Sheldon Adelson died in January. The sale will close in Q4, after HIMSS21 has concluded in whatever form it eventually takes. I admit that while I like nearly nothing about Las Vegas, I prefer naturally occurring tackiness (like the off-Strip liquor stores that offer inebriates thousands of kinds of airline-sized bottles to guzzle down on the sidewalk) over upscale but even tackier gondoliers, fake sky ceilings, and celebrity-licensed generic restaurants.

A Kentucky woman sues a hospital that performed a mammogram that detected signs of cancer, but then mistakenly sent her an all-clear letter. Digital forensics experts say the radiology tech chose the wrong software drop-down option, triggering the “no cancer detected” letter, after which radiology department employees tried to hide her mistake by changing the entries. The hospital refused to turn over system audit logs until it was served with a court order, then claimed that the logs can’t track changes accurately because the hospital’s software was buggy and is no longer sold. Experts say that EHR audit logs are seldom useful for malpractice cases because they are hard to interpret and require hiring expensive experts to review them. The digital forensics expert in this case is Andy Garrett, who started Garrett Discovery in 2007 after leaving his Navy IT job. His small company offers EDiscovery, cell phone forensics, social media evidence collection, audio and video forensics, cell phone analysis, and a service in which attorneys who are questioning potential jurors are provided with their real-time social media histories and background checks.

Sponsor Updates

• Everbridge announces the newest enhancements to its ManageBridge critical event management mobile app.
• The HCI Group releases a new Digital Voices with Ed Marx podcast, “How I Made My First Million at Age 25!”
• ChartSpan will offer its Chronic Care Management program to members of the Kentucky Hospital Association.
• Health Data Movers publishes a new white paper, “How We Make it Happen: Transplant Data Conversion.”
• EHR/PM vendor ISalus will integrate electronic prior authorization from CoverMyMeds .
• KLAS recognizes Impact Advisors as a high performer in its latest “ERP Implementation Report.”
• Infor makes new courses available for Infor CloudSuite Healthcare.

Blog Posts

• Will Oregon’s Prescription Labeling Law Start a National Trend? (First Databank)
• Healthcare Technology Consolidation Key for Organization COVID-19 Recovery (Halo Health)
• 3 Ways to Prioritize HCC Coding Review Opportunities in the New Year (RCxRules)
• 2021 Healthcare Trends: What Leaders Need to Know from COVID-19 to New Administration Policies (Health Catalyst)
• Post-Implementation Staffing Needs for Revenue Cycle Applications (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• ERP System Cutovers: Preparation Considerations (Impact Advisors)
• Improving Medical Errors Through Technology (Imprivata)
• Connecting Consumers with the COVID-19 Vaccine: A Q&A with Health First’s VP of IT Operations & Service Delivery (Kyruus)
• Revenue Cycle Practices – Part two: Managing Billing Flow (Medhost)
• Tips for using your EHR to manage staff immunizations for COVID-19 (Meditech)
• Healthcare Marketing Tips in 2021 (Newfire Global Partners)

Contacts

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