News 1/12/22

Top News

Revenue cycle technology and services company R1 RCM will acquire competitor Cloudmed for $4.1 billion.

R1 has made a handful of acquisitions over the last several years, including VisitPay for $300 million, Cerner’s RevWorks business for $30 million, Intermedix for $460 million, and SCI Solutions for $190 million.

The company made a comeback after several widely reported missteps under its former name Accretive Health – settlement payouts for aggressive patient collection tactics and lapses in data security, followed by delisting of its shares from the New York Stock Exchange – and was renamed to R1 RCM in 2017.

RCM shares trade on the Nasdaq, with a market capitalization of $6.5 billion.

CloudMed Solutions – sold to Revint, then named Cloudmed — was founded by Jason Merck, now EVP of Cloudmed, in 2015.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ve long wished for IOS-type capability in Chrome to be able to send a web page’s link (nearly always to myself) via Gmail, but somehow I never thought to Google a solution until today, when I found an ancient Chrome extension called Send from Gmail (by Google). It hasn’t been updated since 2013, but it seems to work fine, much easier than copying the web address and composing a new email and pasting it in.

Discuss: a physical line of people waiting for something indicates a failure of technology to meet a need.

Webinars

January 13 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Cultivating gender equity in STEM.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Laura Miller, CEO, TempDev; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC; Deidra Jackson, VP of IFP customer success, Bright Health; Sunita Tendulkar, VP of agile portfolio management, IMO. Despites strides that are being made, women make up only 27% of the STEM workforce. This panel discussion will cover mentorship, STEM education, pay gaps, and debunking stereotypes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Clinical communications, collaboration, and scheduling technology company PerfectServe acquires AnesthesiaGo, a developer of automated daily case assignment software for anesthesia staff.

Multi-vertical analytics and data services company Qlik files for an IPO, with date, number of shares, and pricing yet to be determined. Thoma Bravo acquired Qlik in 2016 in a $3 billion deal, taking it private after facing pressure from activist hedge fund Elliott Management.

Healthcare collaboration software vendor TigerConnect secures $300 million in funding from Vista Equity Partners, bringing its total raised to $400 million. Competitors Voalte and Vocera were acquired by medical technology vendors in 2019 and 2022, respectively, for $180 million and $3 billion.

Transcarent, the employer health insurance cost management software company led by Glen Tullman, raises $200 million in a Series C funding round that values the company at a reported $1.6 billion. It has raised $300 million in just over a year. Transcarent inked a deal with Walmart last October to offer the retailer’s pharmacy services to its self-insured employer customers.

OR block time management technology vendor Copient Health raises $3.2 million in a Series A funding round. The co-founder and CEO of the Atlanta-based company is industry long-timer Mike Burke, who previously founded Dialog Medical and Clockwise.MD.

ASC revenue cycle management company National Medical Billing Services acquires MdStrategies, which offers medical coding services to ASCs.

Primary care enablement company Aledade acquires Iris Healthcare, which offers advance care planning solutions. It is the first acquisition for Aledade, which was co-founded in 2014 by former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD, MSc, who serves as the company’s CEO.

Sales

• Baptist Health (KY) and Prisma Health (SC) select Well Health’s patient communication software.
• Pullman Regional Hospital (WA) will partner with Providence to replace its Meditech Magic system with Epic by March 2023.
• Grail will use Premier’s PINC AI clinical decision support technology to better identify patients eligible for its Galleri multi-cancer early detection test.
• Meditech will integrate SecureLink’s critical vendor access management software with its systems.

People

Availity hires Bobbi Coluni (IBM Watson Health) as chief product officer.

Niall Brennan (Health Care Cost Institute), a former CMS chief data officer, joins Clarify Health as chief analytics and privacy officer.

Revenue cycle technology vendor MedEvolve hires Branden Barkema, MBA (North Florida Surgeons) as chief revenue cycle officer.

Kerri-Lynn Morris (Microsoft) joins The SSI Group as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

Wolters Kluwer Health announces GA of its Ovid Synthesis application suite, which includes Clinical Evidence Manager, its first cloud-based workflow management module.

Pivot Point Consulting’s “Healthcare IT Directions Report” highlights four trends for 2022:

1. Healthcare and health IT will be challenged in unknown ways by job resignations.
2. Telehealth and remote patient monitoring will cover a wide scope based on patient demand, patient population characteristics, and access enablers / limiters.
3. Spending on public health infrastructure will ease data access and reporting while creating career opportunities.
4. Deployment of interoperable EHRs to retail sites – such as Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart rolling out Epic – will allow retailers to compete with traditional healthcare providers, with the latter needing to embrace a digital strategy to offer a frictionless patient experience as a differentiator to offset the convenience of retail healthcare.

Other

Healthcare visionary and cardiac surgeon Devi Shetty, MBBS, MS — chairman and executive director of India-based hospital operator Narayana Health — says that 95% of illnesses will soon be treated via telemedicine since healthcare requires only data, with few patients needing hands-on services such as surgery. He also predicts that EHRs will diagnose conditions better than doctors within five years, and that shortly after, doctors will be required to obtain a second opinion from software before initiating treatment.

A non-profit consumer group publishes Upsolve, a free app that allows consumers to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy – often necessitated in the US by medical debt — without an attorney, paying only a $338 federal court filing fee (which the app also applies to have waived). The company’s mission is to destigmatize bankruptcy for consumers as has already happened with businesses, for which it is just a smart financial strategy to avoid paying debt. The group warns, however, that people can file Chapter 7 only once every eight years, so they should consider when to file if they are undergoing long, expensive cycles of chemotherapy.

Sponsor Updates

• Meditech will offer Expanse users access to role-based, interactive online training courses from MedPower.
• Clearwater publishes a new white paper, “Technical Testing and the HIPAA Security Rule: What’s Needed to Protect Your Healthcare Organization.”
• Appriss names Annie Edwards (Luma) chief people officer of its Bamboo Health and Appriss Retail businesses.
• Azara Healthcare will host its annual user conference May 2-4 in Boston.
• Fortified Health Security CEO Dan L. Dodson is elected to the AEHIS Board of Trustees.
• Delaware’s DHSS Division of Substance Use and Mental Health surpasses a milestone of 100,000 referrals through the Delaware Treatment and Referral Network, which is built on Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds platform.
• Frost & Sullivan recognizes About as a patient access and orchestration leader with its 2021 Best Practices Customer Value Leadership Award.
• Divurgent publishes its “2022 IT Trends & Insights Report.”
• Elsevier adds its most advanced 3D full female model to its Complete Anatomy 3D platform.

The following HIStalk sponsors have achieved top rankings in Black Book Market Research’s latest population health tools and solutions report:

• Population health AI tools: Olive AI
• Population health/value-based care consultants: hospitals & health systems: Change Healthcare

Blog Posts

• If Vulnerabilities Could Talk: The Year in Risk Analysis (Clearwater)
• A Modern Approach to Patient Activation and Engagement (Actium Health)
• Healthcare Industry Trends 2022 (CereCore)
• A New Approach to Ongoing EHR Training (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 2021: A Year in Review (ConnectiveRx)
• 6 Trends Shaping Pharmacy Growth and Automation in 2022 (CoverMyMeds)
• Top Healthcare BI Trends of 2021 (Dimensional Insight)
• The Shift to Care-at-Home: Are You Ready? Why You Need to Be (Dina)
• Using personalized healthcare marketing strategies to boost patient retention (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 1/10/22

Top News

Medical technology vendor Stryker will acquire clinical communication and workflow platform company Vocera Communications for $3 billion.

Stryker says the acquisition will help it “significantly accelerate our digital aspirations to improve the lives of caregivers and patients.”

Stryker got its start as a manufacturer of hospital beds like its competitor Hillrom, as both companies expanded into technology. Hillrom, which acquired Vocera competitor Voalte in early 2019 for $180 million, was acquired by Baxter International last month for $10.5 billion.

Shares of Vocera, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in early 2012, had risen 55% in the year prior to the acquisition announcement. The company has 1,900 hospitals and healthcare facilities as customers. Its Smartbadge was named to Time’s list of the “100 Best Inventions of 2020.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Only a small percentage of poll respondents believe they are less effective when working from home. I would expect that some jobs that involve heads-down individual work (programming, writing, etc.) or remote contact (customer service and support) can be performed as well or better at home. I wonder, though, whether companies are being damaged in ways that aren’t yet obvious with the lack of culture-building personal contact, reduction of serendipitous hallway interactions, and having managers in charge whose forte is visually monitoring piecework production.

New poll to your right or here: What is your personal experience with COVID-19? I’m not sure it’s a relevant question since I’m pretty sure we will all have tested positive soon, but I’m curious.

Meanwhile, HIMSS still hasn’t announced any changes to its Right of Entry Protocols for HIMSS22 that may be required by Florida laws. The conference is just over 60 days away. Exhibitor count is at 603, lower than HIMSS21 although the number will likely increase as the conference draws closer. HIMSS21 had 14 booths of 2,000 or more square feet while the HIMSS22 floor plan is showing 32, so that’s a positive sign of increased exhibitor interest. The big question now, assuming that the conference won’t be cancelled because HIMSS can’t afford a skipped year, is whether COVID-drowning hospitals will allow their employees to attend a conference.

The number of friends and family members who have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past few days is getting too hard for me to track, especially since it’s not the first go-round for some of them. Mrs. H went to a tiny-town Walgreens Thursday for hairspray or something and the clerk said they had already sold out of the 4,000 antigen tests they received that same morning, even with a purchase limit of four. PCR testing lines are impossibly long and results are taking 4-5 days to come back in many cases, rendering testing somewhere close to pointless. Home testing, no-testing, and other under-reporting probably means that we’re at 3 million or more cases per day, and many of those folks who will be sick and/or isolating (and/or spreading infection because they can’t afford to miss work) are critical workers and healthcare staff. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD estimates that up to 40% of Americans may end up becoming infected with Omicron, spreading the virus widely because their mild symptoms aren’t obviously COVID-19 and tests are too hard to get to verify. Let’s hope, probably unreasonably, that the supply chain for prescription drugs and medical supplies holds up since hospital beds and physician appointments are going to be scarce for a while.

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

Webinars

January 13 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Cultivating gender equity in STEM.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Laura Miller, CEO, TempDev; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC; Deidra Jackson, VP of IFP customer success, Bright Health; Sunita Tendulkar, VP of agile portfolio management, IMO. Despites strides that are being made, women make up only 27% of the STEM workforce. This panel discussion will cover mentorship, STEM education, pay gaps, and debunking stereotypes.

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

People

Divurgent hires Joe Grinstead, MBA (Healthcare Triangle) as principal.

Industry long-timer Amy Fuller-Heffernan (Verinovum) joins Interbit Data as VP of client strategy.

Chris Apgar, president and CEO of security and privacy consulting firm Apgar & Associates, died last month at 60.

Announcements and Implementations

TriNetX announces Bring Your Own Model for applying machine learning capabilities to real-world research data.

HIMSS launches a new certification to its stable, Certified Professional in Digital Health Transformation Strategy. The cost is $1,299 plus a renewal fee. I would question whether someone passing the exam will suddenly find themselves more employable or whether the market really needs HIMSS to sort out the lesser-competent players in it, but I always underestimate the yearning of insecure industry folks to add new letters to their walls, business cards, and LinkedIn profiles. For them, HIMSS also offers CAHIMS (associate in healthcare information and management systems) and CPHIMS (professional in healthcare information and management systems). All require healthcare IT experience, so candidates must have been boldly working without certification for employers who didn’t seem to mind.

A study finds that in-hospital mortality at the former Lutheran Medical Center (NY) declined from 2.6% to 1.9% after it was acquired by NYU Langone Health and the hospital saw improvements in central line infections, catheter-associated UTIs, and patient recommendations. Three of the five post-acquisition focus areas were related to IT – implementing Epic, using real-time analytics and dashboards, and implementing EHR-embedded clinical decision support.

Government and Politics

ONC releases final technical specifications for Project USA, which hopes to standardize the representation of patient addresses to support identity matching.

Other

A.O. Fox Hospital (NY) becomes the latest hospital to make local news for failing to pay its employees accurately because of the Kronos payroll system ransomware downtime. Most affected hospitals are paying hourly employees the same amounts as on their last system-issued paycheck in early December, meaning they aren’t being paid accurately for overtime, holiday pay, or COVID-19 coverage and instead are being promised that their money will be sent retroactively once Kronos comes back up (or, even less positively, that employees whose early December hours exceeded those afterward will need to return the overpayment).

HHS reports that 18% of available US hospital beds were being occupied by COVID-19 patients this weekend as the COVID curve resists flattening (thank goodness for our US profit-driven overbedding). Brown School of Public Health Dean Ashish Jha, MD, MPH warns that the US healthcare system is in even more trouble than is obvious, as 1 million Americans could need hospitalization for COVID-19 over the next 4-6 weeks, far exceeding aggregate hospital capacity (note also that average length of stay times a million admissions is an unfathomable number of patient days, not to mention that hospital beds don’t sit on a grid so that total supply can meet local needs). The New York Times says that hospitals are being bombarded with punishing patient loads as they operate short-staffed because of employees who have quit or who have COVID-19 themselves.

Sponsor Updates

• Availity partners with PriorAuthNow to deliver timely prior authorization services.
• The Consulting Report includes Nordic CEO Jim Costanzo on its list of “Top 50 Consulting Firm CEOs of 2021.”
• Olive appoints Credit Karma executive Nichole Mustard to its board.

Blog Posts

• Bringing Quality and Financial Viability to Long-Term Care (Netsmart)
• Marketing Your Hospital Services: How to Attract Loyal Patients (PatientBond)
• How can we make billers’ and coders’ hard jobs easier? (PatientKeeper)
• Support Nurses’ Ability to Easily Communicate with Providers and Patients (PerfectServe)
• Most Important Metrics for a Healthcare Quality Management Dashboard (Symplr)
• All Fun and Games: Gamification and Its Application to Health Care (PMD)
• Healthcare Innovation for New Year: Andy Brailo with Premier members (Premier)
• Year in Review: Top 2021 Trends in Digital Health and What They Mean for 2022 (Quil)
• How Leading NextGen Users Leverage our Revenue Cycle Engine (RCxRules)
• Infographic: The ongoing power of paging (Spok)
• Always Striving to Be Better Than We Were (Surescripts)
• For healthcare organizations, the patient experience is paramount (Talkdesk)
• Improving Patient Use of At-Home Testing and Medical Device Management (Twistle)
• RSNA 2021 / Visage’s Top Five (Visage Imaging)
• MIPS and the 2022 Final Rule: Key Takeaways (WebPT)
• Evidence-based Clinical Decision Support to Improve Care in Skilled Nursing Facilities (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 1/7/22

Top News

Vera Whole Health, which offers healthcare navigation, care coordination and coaching to its members, will acquire navigation technology vendor Castlight Health for $370 million in cash, representing a 25% premium to Castlight’s share price.

Castlight customer Anthem will make an investment in the combined company.

Vera Whole Health’s president and CEO is Ryan Schmid, MBA, who founded the company in 2007 while operating a non-profit fitness center.

CSLT went public in March 2014 with a first-day trading pop of 149% as shares closed at $38.85. They were at $1.63 prior to the acquisition announcement.

Reader Comments

From Optum Employee 1160: “Re: Optum-owned remote patient monitoring vendor VivifyHealth. CEO, chairman, and founder Eric Rock is out, replaced by Optum Technology CMIO Alejandro Reti, MD, MBA. The CTO and COO have also left.” Unverified. I’ve reached out to the company.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I mention below the deaths of two health IT pioneers who were also pathologists, reminding me of the outsized contributions of experts in laboratory medicine, pharmacy, and radiology in the history of clinical IT. Those folks who worked in the relative solitude of hospital basements far from patients, especially pathologists, were involved in more patient-benefitting technology projects than anyone, often running rogue operations involving under-desk servers to avoid being shut down by old-school, command-and-control MIS/DP departments who focused on the care and feeding of billing mainframes. It is interesting that companies like Cerner and Meditech got their start with laboratory information systems, while Epic didn’t roll out Beaker until late in the game (presumably to avoid the heavily-regulated environment of labs, Elizabeth Holmes notwithstanding).

I took advantage of holiday slack time to upgrade my laptop to Windows 11, with no problems or noteworthy improvements to report.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Employer healthcare payment vendor Nomi Health acquires employer benefits analytics platform vendor Artemis Health for $200 million. Both companies are headquartered in the Salt Lake City area.

Digital health technology vendor Babylon acquires health kiosk vendor Higi. Higi has raised $91 million, most recently in a May 2020 Series B round that was led by Babylon. London-based Babylon went public on the Nasdaq via a SPAC merger in November 2021. Share have since dropped 42%, valuing the company at $2.6 billion.

Life sciences real-world evidence vendor Aetion acquires Replica Analytics, which generates privacy-protected copies of real world data. Price was not disclosed, but Replica has raised just $1 million and reports just a handful of employees. CEO Khaled El Emam, PhD is a scientist Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and director of its laboratory that studies the identifiability of health information and how to measure it.

Axios reports that IBM is once again trying to find a buyer for IBM Watson Health at a rumored price of more than $1 billion.

Federal IT contractor Octo acquires B3 Group, which offers low code/no-code software development and holds a $686 million contract to develop the VA’s Digital Transformation Center.

Sales

• Seattle Children’s will implement AdaptX’s EHR-powered Mission Control Center for care management.

People

Healthcare information distribution and business continuity vendor Interbit Data hires industry long-timer Steve McDonald, MBA (Impact Advisors) as president.

Oncology systems vendor Flatiron Health hires Stephanie Reisinger (Allscripts Veradigm) as SVP/GM of real-world evidence.

Ronald Weinstein, MD, a hospital pathologist who developed the concept of telepathology in the 1980s and led the Arizona Telemedicine Program at the University of Arizona in Tucson for 25 years, dies at 83.

Industry pioneer Sidney Goldblatt, MD died Monday at 87 in Johnstown, PA. The hospital pathologist and entrepreneur founded Sunquest Information Systems in Tucson, AZ in 1979, took it public, and sold the company to Misys in 2001. He then founded precision medicine company Goldblatt Systems, genomics testing firm MolecularDx, and forensic science center ForensicDx.

Announcements and Implementations

PointClickCare and Sound Physicians will offer a long-term and post-acute care virtual health solution.

Alternate site infusion vendor Option Care Health will provide connectivity via the CommonWell Health Alliance in partnership with WellSky.

A surgeon’s letter to the editor of the BMJ notes that while Theranos news stories are focusing on Elizabeth Holmes being found guilty of investor fraud, some of the company ‘s hundreds of employees must have known that its technology was issuing erroneous patient lab results, and those complicit folks have likely found related jobs elsewhere.

A report reviews the telehealth regulations of individual states, evaluating best practices such as:

• Not requiring an initial in-person visit.
• Recognizing all remote care and monitoring modalities.
• Allowing providers to serve patients in other states.
• Allowing licensed, non-physician providers to provide services via telehealth.
• Allowing nurse practitioners to practice without physician supervision.
• Not imposing mandates that all services be covered since outcomes vary by service type.
• Not requiring telehealth services to be paid at the same rate as in-person visits.
• Supporting licensure compacts that allow providers to provide services in multiple states without high cost and laborious application requirements.
• Not allowing health systems to charge facility fees for telehealth.

Massachusetts Health Quality Partners President and CEO Barbra Rabson, MPH observes that surveys show that patients are a lot happier with their telehealth visits than their providers. Patients save the sometimes full-day effort that is required to show up for a 10-minute provider visit, but providers are less enthused because it’s a different experience from their training, they were thrown into telehealth with no transition in the pandemic’s early days, and telehealth quality varies based on organizational practices. An MHQP group recommends creating mode-appropriate triaging guidelines, measuring and comparing physician satisfaction across modalities, asking providers about their technical support needs, promoting community and workplace sites for patients to have telehealth visits, and studying barriers to patient use.

Former White House health advisors say in a JAMA Viewpoint article that the “zero COVID” vaccine-centric strategy is not valid and a new US strategy is needed to move from crisis to control in exiting “a perpetual state of emergency” to recognition that the virus is likely to remain endemic. They recommend recognizing that COVID-19 is one of several respiratory viruses whose risk should be aggregated (instead of ignoring older ones like flu and RSV) with a focus on hospitalizations and deaths. They also call out the need to develop a real-time, digital public health infrastructure that links respiratory viral infections to hospitalization, deaths, outcomes, and immunizations from local, state, and national public health units, health systems, laboratories, and universities. In this and two other JAMA articles, the six former White House health advisors also call on universal access to low-cost testing, N95 masks, and oral COVID treatments; next-generation vaccines that address variants or are delivered nasally or via skin patch; and continued research to develop of a universal coronavirus vaccine. They also express support for an electronic vaccine certification platform. One of the physicians says that the White House has not invested enough in tests, treatments, and public health protections, concluding that, “No one wants to face up to the reality. You can pay for it with prevention, as we’ve outlined, or you can pay for it on the back end, which is the American way.”

Government and Politics

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issues an RFI that seeks information about how digital health technologies are being used, or could be used, to transform community health, individual wellness, and health equity. The request is part of OSTP’s Community Connected Health initiative.

Privacy and Security

Ciox Health notifies 32 health systems that an unauthorized person accessed the email account of one of its employees last summer and may have downloaded emails and attachments that contained limited patient information. The company says the attack appears to have been intended to collect email addresses to launch phishing attacks unrelated to Ciox.

Patient portal vendor QRS is accused in a class action lawsuit of failing to adequately secure its systems in an August cyberattack that involved 320,000 patients. One lawsuit participant says he believes that his information was sold on the dark web since his bank account and credit card were hit with unauthorized charges and he was targeted by robocall scams.

Other

Cerner co-founder Cliff Illig is interviewed by former Cerner President Donald Trigg in a new episode of the latter’s podcast that covers health IT entrepreneurship (it was recorded before the Oracle acquisition announcement, so perhaps a follow-up is indicated). All three Cerner founders grew up in families of kitchen-table businesspeople and saw in the early 1970s how computers were starting to be used by businesses, then started selling custom built problem-solving software in a half-dozen industries, with healthcare being on the list of industries they knew nothing about until a medical lab engaged them. Illig says Cerner sought venture capital because they needed credibility, not money, then were reasonably pushed by the VCs into going public as a liquidity event. He says that entrepreneurs shouldn’t be scared of complexity, which is common in healthcare, because you can figure it out by breaking it down into pieces. He says Neal Patterson was the most biased toward action of any of Cerner’s leaders and had an intolerance for things taking too long, spending too much time on analysis, and studying market surveys to decide what to do. The Cerner founders said that rather than studying every possible course of action, they just picked one by “shooting real bullets” and learned from the results.

The labor union of Ontario-based London Health Sciences Centre will file a grievance against Sodexo on Friday if the contractor can’t resolve payroll problems that have been caused by the Kronos ransomware attack. The union says more than 50 of its employees haven’t received their full paycheck for a month. In a related item, the Montana Nurses Association accuses Missoula’s for-profit Community Medical Center of illegally underpaying its nurses an average of $1,000 for work hours that they recorded manually during the Kronos downtime. Kronos has not been able to provide a resolution date for the the December 11 ransomware attack on its private cloud solutions.

Another quirk in the quirky US healthcare non-system: a man whose injury from being hit by another driver requires major surgery learns the hard way that an auto policy’s personal injury protection is the primary medical payer in auto accidents. The hospital and surgeon billed $700,000 (Medicare would have paid $29,500) and his auto insurance’s PIP coverage was limited to $250,000. Not only that, auto insurers often have no network or negotiated discounts, so patients end up being out-of-network and are subject to paying full list price. He owes $89,000 despite having bought the maximum PIP coverage and carrying health insurance.

A defibrillator delivered by drone helps save the life of a 71-year-old man in Sweden who went into cardiac arrest while shoveling snow in his driveway. A physician who was driving to the hospital saw the collapsed man, started CPR, and called Sweden’s equivalent of 911, which dispatched an Everdrone-delivered defibrillator that the doctor used to resuscitate him. The drones can also be used to deliver naloxone, EpiPens, and other medical devices.

Sponsor Updates

• Cerner associates donate 646 toys to local charities during its virtual toy drive.
• A recent Meditech podcast features First Databank Director of Product Management Anna Dover, “How Genomics will Revolutionize Healthcare in the Next Decade.”
• Konza has earned the Validated Data Stream designation in the NCQA’s new Data Aggregator Validation program.
• Meditech publishes a new case study, “KDMC gives back 100+ hours to nurses with Meditech Expanse Patient Care.”
• PM360 recognizes OptimizeRx’s evidence-based physician engagement solution as one of the most innovate life sciences products of 2021.

The following HIStalk sponsors have achieved top rankings in Black Book Market Research’s latest cybersecurity survey:

• Security advisors & consultants: Clearwater
• Compliance & risk management solution: Clearwater
• Outsourcing & security network managed services: Fortified Health Security
• Secure communications platforms: physician practices: PerfectServe
• Secure communications platforms: hospitals & health systems: Spok

Blog Posts

• A Historic Year for Enterprise Resilience (Everbridge)
• Healthcare Trends in 2021: Moving from Headlines into Practice (Get Well)
• Stories of a Post-Modern Healthcare CIO (feat. Ed Marx) (HCI Group)
• Reflecting on the Past, Anticipating the Future (HCTec)
• Here’s How Personalization Increases Patient Engagement (Healthwise)
• 4 Health IT Employment Trends for 2022 (Health IT Leaders)
• How athenahealth Users Leverage the Revenue Cycle Engine for Increased Efficiency (RCx Rules)
• Electronic Health Information (EHI) Made Simple (Impact Advisors)
• Save the dates: 2022’s standardized code system updates (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Thought Leaders: Simplicity, Flexibility to Shape the Future of Patient Access (Kyruus)
• 9 Healthcare Predictions for 2022 (LexisNexis)
• Optimum Healthcare IT Top 5 Posts of 2021 (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How to Use the CMS H&P Exception to Improve Surgical Pre-Assessment Caseload by +60% (Lumeon)
• 3 Dangerous Medication Errors Missed by Legacy CDS Tools (MedAware)
• Memos from the Medhost CISO: Stop Zero-Day Attacks with a Team Effort (Medhost)
• 7 healthcare IT leaders to follow in 2022 (Meditech)
• 6 New Technology Trends in Physical Therapy in 2022 (MWTherapy)
• Open System Imaging empowers next-generation radiology reporting with PowerScribe One (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 1/5/22

Top News

After seven days of deliberation, a jury finds Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty of four out of 11 counts in her criminal fraud trial.

She had raised nearly $1 billion during the life of her blood testing startup, earning the company a valuation of $9 billion before it closed in 2018 after civil and criminal inquiries.

Jurors decided that those investments were raised using false claims about the technology’s effectiveness, including doctored reports, exaggerated capabilities, and concealment of the use of third-party devices and faked demonstrations. She was found not guilty on charges of defrauding patients.

Holmes, who will be sentenced at a later date, faces up to 20 years in prison.

Reader Comments

From Orlando: “Re: HIMSS. HIMSS and its Accelerate solution group — created by Hal Wolf and McKinsey — started layoffs this week.” Unverified, because the HIMSS press contact quit and I don’t see her replacement listed on the HIMSS site. I signed on to Accelerate and my reaction was the same as months ago — all I see is HIMSS hawking its vendor-paid webinars, a bunch of lame promotional stories with the obligatory stock photos from Healthcare IT News, and Accelerate people trying unsuccessfully to get users to interact. The default group lists 6,700 members, but searching for users named “Smith” and “Jones” turned up just 10 names each. None of the people Accelerate recommended that I follow have completed their profiles or posted anything to the site. LinkedIn shows 27 employees and 348 followers, with the HIMSS VP in charge appearing to be Barry Edelman (who lists “himms.org” on his lightly used Twitter profile). I will say from experience that readership and interaction happens quickly or not at all. Accelerate aspires to be the “digital platform that drives 365 healthcare transformation,” but like a lot of health IT websites, its “curated content” from its first five months of existence doesn’t strike me as being even slightly useful. I invite Accelerate users to correct me in explaining the value that rewards their participation.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents say they will beef up their COVID-19 precautions by avoiding unnecessary gatherings, upgrading cloth masks, and getting a booster shot. Most will follow the nearly universal trend of ignoring the one technical solution of contact tracing apps, whose minimal acceptance and low value demonstrate what happens when big tech companies barge into healthcare convinced that cool apps are disruptive.

New poll to your right or here: How does your work-from-home job effectiveness compare to working in the office?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Jacob Reider, MD announces in a blog post that Circulo acquired his company, social determinants of health-focused Huddle Health, last October. Olive CEO Sean Lane launched Medicaid-focused managed care company Circulo nearly a year ago alongside a $50 million funding round. Reider, a former deputy national coordinator for health IT, has taken on the role of general manager of health solutions at Circulo Health.

Symplr will acquire Midas Health Analytics Solutions from Conduent for $340 million in cash. The deal marks the twelfth acquisition for Symplr, a healthcare governance, risk, and compliance technology vendor.

Waymark, which supports Medicaid primary care providers with technology-enabled community care teams, raises $45 million in a Series A funding round. The co-founders are MD-PhDs who care for Medicaid patients.

Healthcare market intelligence vendor Trella Health acquires PlayMaker Health, which offers a post-acute CRM and EMR referral management system.

Consumer engagement and telehealth solutions vendor Carenet Health acquires healthcare collaboration platform vendor OpenMed.

Share price of the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health Fund was flat in December, up 7% since their first day of trading in July 2020.

Sales

• Priority Health, the country’s third-largest provider-sponsored health plan, will use Epic’s Payer Platform.

People

Harris promotes Mihir Shah, MBA to EVP of its Clinical Computer Systems business, developer of the OBIX Perinatal Data System.

Bamboo Health promotes Rob Cohen, MCIT, MBA to CEO.

Marcus Gordon, MBA (Lumeris) joins Sharecare as SVP of growth marketing.

Jvion hires Curt Thornton (Medicom Health) as chief growth officer; Jim Stansell (TeleHealth Solution) as CTO; and Leah Ray (Zelis) as chief customer officer.

Kimberly Lynch, MPH (Aledade) joins Stellar Health as COO.

Marcus Osborne, MBA, SVP of Walmart Health & Wellness, announces on LinkedIn that he has left the company. Walmart removed Osborne from running its clinics reassigned in September 21, the same day it removed the SVP/COO over Health & Wellness.

Kieran Murphy, MSc, president and CEO of GE Healthcare, leaves the company as previously announced after 4 1/2 years in that role. He will be replaced by Peter Arduini, formerly president and CEO of Integra LifeSciences.

Announcements and Implementations

The Bermuda Hospitals Board will go live on Cerner Millennium across its two hospitals and urgent care center later this year.

Mary Washington Hospital (VA) will launch an e-ICU using remote patient monitoring technology from Hicuity Health later this month.

CES, the Consumer Electronic Show, will end a day early due to COVID-19 concerns. Several major exhibitors have cancelled their participation in the Las Vegas show, which will now run for three days.

At CES, Withings announces the Body Scan Connected Health Station, which measures weight, body composition, heart rate, and vascular age. It also includes a six-lead ECG function and nerve assessment. The $300 scale, which is awaiting FDA clearance, will be sold with a health monitoring service that includes coaching, clinical services, and health goals planning.

Amazon’s at-home COVID-19 PCR test earns FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization. Users register their $40 kits online, drop off their nasal swab sample at a UPS location with prepaid label attached, then have their results posted on the website within 24 hours of receipt. Amazon says it built its own CAP-accredited, CLIA-certified lab for its own employees in April 2020 and is now extending its services to Amazon customers.

Privacy and Security

Broward Health (FL) reports that the medical and personal information of 1.4 million patients was exposed in an October breach in which someone penetrated its network via the office of an unnamed third-party medical provider.

MU Health Care says it will implement a new time-keeping system after some employees report not being paid in full as a result of the Kronos ransomware attack last month. Hospital representatives say pay discrepancies will be resolved this week. Meanwhile, some UF Health (FL) employees say they are looking for new jobs after the Kronos problem left them underpaid for actual hours worked since the health system can’t track overtime with the system down.

Other

Fast Company says “the telehealth bubble has burst” as pandemic lockdowns have ended, proving wrong the technology experts who declared that most healthcare services will be delivered online. Soaring telehealth company share prices have crashed hard — Teladoc Health shares have tanked 70% in less than a year, Amwell is down 86%, and Hims has shed 75%. Telehealth companies are trying to figure out how to pivot, with behavioral health being the only service that has earned a permanent spot. Key issues are payments by CMS and insurers; the possible incorporation of telehealth into other areas such as retail clinics; and the possible future of individual tools and services being rolled up into an Amazon-like patient experience.

A NEJM perspective piece says that the US public health system is a patchwork of policies and technologies that the pandemic has exposed as being expensive while delivering poor population health outcomes. Notes:

• The federal government has 21 major agencies that are involved with pandemic preparedness.
• State health departments are sometimes independent but more commonly parts of other organizations, and top state health officials are governor-appointed.
• Local health departments often perform fewer than half of the services HHS has deemed core to public health, with many of them offering nothing in tobacco prevention, opioid addiction, chronic disease management, and injury surveillance.
• Much state and local public health work is conducted on paper, with limited ability to obtain, analyze, and share information. Just 3% of local health departments say their IT systems are interoperable.
• Health officials who support evidence-based public health measures are often harassed and threatened and 32 states have passed new laws that limit the authority of public health departments during emergencies.

Sponsor Updates

• Availity employees volunteer at the Jacksonville Humane Society.
• Bluestream Health adds PCare’s patient engagement software to its virtual care platform.
• Change Healthcare AVP Edward Hafner has received WEDI’s 2021 Andrew H. Melczer Leadership in Volunteerism Award.
• Pivot Point Consulting has been honored for the eighth consecutive year as a winner in The Best and Brightest Companies to Work for in the Nation program, as well as the new 2021 regional program.
• Cerner Director of Interoperability Strategy Hans Buitendijk joins the GAO’s National Health IT Advisory Committee.
• Healthcare Triangle reports developing tech solutions to help the post-COVID healthcare industry use big data to deliver better care.
• OptimizeRx CEO Will Febbo will moderate a panel on virtual care at the LifeSci Partners Corporate Access Event January 6.
• AGS Health’s learning and development team has won an award from TISS Leap Vault CLO in the Best Induction Program category for new hires in healthcare.
• Arcadia publishes a new study, “Reduced Incidence of Long-COVID Symptoms Related to Administration of COVID-19 Vaccines Both Before COVID-19 Diagnosis and Up to 12 Weeks After.”
• CHIME releases a new podcast, “A Conversation with John Kravitz, 2020/21 CHIME Board Chair – The Year in Review.”
• Emerge has improved revenue and quality for a multi-specialty group using natural-language processing.
• Glytec’s EGlycemic Management System has achieved HITRUST CSF certification for information security.

Blog Posts

• 2021 Year in Review – Looking Toward 2022 (Azara Healthcare)
• Coordinating Behavioral Healthcare for a Healthier America (Bamboo Health)
• Behind the IT Support Desk: Why It Matters for Your Patients (CereCore)
• A dramatic change in CCM reimbursement rates kicked into effect January 1st (ChartSpan)
• The Future of HEDIS is Digital: How Plans Can Prepare (Collective Medical)
• Supporting Patients to Help Them Get and Stay on Specialty Therapies (CoverMyMeds)
• Meeting Staffing Needs: Looking Beyond COVID-19 (EClinicalWorks)
• Four Major Takeaways from the ATA EDGE2021 Conference (EVisit)
• Preparing for Omicron: streamlining care with digital scheduling tools (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

News 12/31/21

Top News

Rhode Island’s attorney general is investigating a breach of the state’s Public Transport Authority after thousands of people who have never worked for RIPTA were told that their health information had been compromised in the incident.

RIPTA says a previous insurer had sent it files that contained the information of people who had no connection to RIPTA. It did not name the insurer or explain why the information was not deleted.

RIPTA’s HHS breach filing says that 5,000 people were affected, but the letters it sent said that the information of 17,000 people was involved.

Webinars

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

People

Juli Stover (Envision Healthcare) joins EVisit as chief strategy officer.

Industry long-timer Miriam Paramore retires as president and chief strategy officer of OptimizeRx.

Hannah Luetke-Stahlman, MPA (Cerner) joins WellSky as VP of its personal care solutions business.

Dan Ferris, MBA (Hillrom) joins Iris Telehealth as chief marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

HealthStream CEO Robert A. Frist, Jr. donates $2.25 million worth of his personally held company shares that will be distributed to 1,000 employees who don’t receive executive-level equity grants.

Privacy and Security

The president of Capital Region Medical Center (MO) warns of long ED wait times and overloaded phone lines as the health system recovers from a December 17 cybersecurity incident.

A surgeon in Spain is sentenced to a year in jail for illegally accessing the medical records of his housekeeper of 23 years to verify that she was sick enough to justify missing work.

Other

Computerworld interviews Mark Eimer, SVP, associate CIO, and CTO of 17-hospital Hackensack Meridian Health (NJ), about his department’s IT accomplishments in 2021:

• Rolled out 3,000 Chromebooks to employees who were being shifted to remote work, increasing its Chromebook count to 5,000 with Citrix Workspace providing access to Epic.
• Replaced Office 365 with Google Workspace for 40,000 employees who now use Docs, Meet, Chat, and Spaces. He observes that Office 365 applications don’t work well together, while Google offers a seamless experience in providing 80% of Office’s functionality. He also notes that Microsoft’s pricing was “exorbitant” in an environment where hospital payments are being reduced.
• Moved ahead with a goal “to move off as many Microsoft platforms as we can” because  Windows is always targeted by ransomware attacks.
• The health system is expanding its use of Google Cloud and is talking with Google executives about developing Workspace apps that support healthcare-specific workflows.

A NEJM Catalyst commentary piece says that telemedicine’s value can be maximized through sustaining innovation (improving what is already being done) and disruptive innovation (providing simpler solutions for simpler needs or for patients whose needs are not being met). It says that both in-person and virtual physician visits give patients “more than what they need and less of what they want,” with an example being people who use virtual solutions for hair loss, obesity, and contraception who haven’t seen a doctor for years. The authors tout the potential value of remote patient monitoring and coaching for chronic conditions. The graphic above shows the complexity of patient needs (and eventual profitability of the solution) at the top of the pyramid that is occupied by Firefly Health, which has expanded its virtual primary care platform by starting a health plan (the company’s executive chair is former Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush).

An anonymous physician describes how their telehealth work ruined their career:

• Their work as an independent telehealth contractor turned into an “antibiotic dispensary service.” Physicians had to keep patients happy at all costs since they were being graded on customer service scores.
• They were placed on a performance plan for using templated notes, with the alternative being that the telehealth company would report them to the National Practitioner Data Bank.
• The terms of the performance plan limited them to 10 consults per day for one month, after which the company told them they failed the plan because they  didn’t work 30 consecutive days. The company reported the physician to the NPDB.
• NPDB allows any health entity to report a physician. The reported physician cannot challenge the claim.
• The physician says their professional reputation was damaged, they lost income, and they are having a hard time finding work, leading them to question whether they should leave medicine.

Physicians at Durham, NC-based private, for-profit Private Diagnostic Clinic — whose doctors work at Duke University and its health system – sue Duke for requiring 400 of PDC’s 1,850 physicians to take jobs instead with the recently formed Duke Faculty Practice to be able to continue their research. The lawsuit claims that Duke’s previous attempts to acquire PDC fell through because of its estimated value of $1 billion, so Duke is trying to take it over for free.

A virtual meeting of the Beverly, MA board of health is taken over by masking opponents who used the meeting software to hand off speaking to those with similar beliefs, including one who urged someone to burn down the house of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. A participant declared that a proposed mask mandate would violate her HIPAA rights.

Contacts

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

Health IT Turnover Survey Results

This is a recap of the responses received over the past couple of weeks.

Vendor executive

• Significant turnover expected. Have lost 25% of staff, with marketing and sales most affected.
• Considering leaving because of an impending merger.
• Service levels have decreased at times.

Consulting contractor assigned to a single client for several years

• Significant turnover due to retirement, vaccine mandates, and junior staff who leave for better pay and less work.
• No special employer consideration except bonuses for clinical staff referrals.
• Long waits for implementation and some projects have been cancelled.

Software vendor

• Technical turnover, maybe 1%.
• Considering retiring in 2022.

Independent family practice office

• Saw 40% turnover in 2021, mostly MAs and front office. Were able to stabilize and hope turnover will decline in 2022.
• Salaries are up for existing and new employees.
• Patients haven’t been affected since staff pulled together.

Software vendor

• Turnover of 15-20%, heavier in developer roles.
• Have raised wages to closer match inflation, added monthly and annual incentive, boosted health insurance and 401K contributions.
• No impact on customers, but global sniping of roles creates musical chairs with insane pay jumps.

Academic medical center physician

• Lost 15% of faculty and added only 1-2 full-time replacements. Had to close some beds for months due to loss of nursing staff. One person left due to vaccination requirements, but the others left because they were disrespected by administrators, given inadequate protection against COVID, and were being subjected to an increased amount of physical violence and injury from patients. The IT people who left did so to retire – most could have kept working, but their pension had vested and they didn’t want to return to in-person work.
• I will probably stay where I am or retire.
• The hospital claims they are trying to enhance salaries and recruit nurses internationally. We’ve never been good at recruiting in my specialty, which has a shortage, so we’re just begging our residents to stay on July without real success. The bleak recruitment picture is fueling more departures from being forced to cover more patients.
• We aren’t able to see as many patients. Outpatient appointment waits can be 4-6 months. Inpatients get less attentive care even though we try our best.

Clinically integrated network plus insurance plan plus ACO

• Large loss of analytics headcount, not turnover, due to outsourcing. Outsourced staff left the new companies. Turnover among retained employees because of the mess.
• Would consider leaving due to leadership and management instability, lack of strategy, growing workload, and lack of morale. Seeking happy workers, remote option, sense of purpose, peer-to-peer support, professional development, and interesting not-rote work where I can think and be more than a cog in the machine.
• Employer is paying big dollars for some clinical positions such as CRNA. Bonuses in others, such as RN. Some retention bonuses around outsourcing, but not life-changing.
• Analytics and IT are seeing a loss of institutional knowledge and the good people are leaving. Service levels and response time are getting worse. We struggle to deliver analytics as other teams we rely on suffer.

Vendor executive

• We saw very high turnover in entry-level positions in Q3 2021, but this seems to have leveled out. These were mostly onsite support IT technician roles.
• Divisions have been given flexibility to offer work from home for suitable positions. HR and exec teams formed a committee that meets bi-weekly to analyze turnover data, most of which is collected in exit interviews, to develop strategy. I budgeted above-normal salary increases for 2022, anticipating that employees facing inflation will need more than the typical 3% increase to remain satisfied.
• No customer impact so far.

Consulting firm

• Turnover was 25-40%.
• Would consider leaving because of leadership response to COVID, pay discrepancies, and company culture. Will look for a more honest culture with a mission that more closely aligns with my personality. Executives with honor.
• Customers have seen slow work delivery, decrease work quality, lack of integrity.

Clinical analyst in a multi-state health system

• Heavy analyst and desktop support turnover. Long-term employees have been rebadged to contractors over the last 18 months and all of desktop are contractors now. Contracted analysts are offshore, are trained by a rebadged employee, and then the rebadged person disappears.
• I dislike physician training and that is being dumped on me, so I will look aroundfor a challenging and diverse role in a company that values loyal employees who work hard.
• The health system offers free lunch once a week, mostly for clinical and hospital staff retention, but I am remote, so nothing. We strongly feel that leaving or staying makes no difference to upper management.
• We have work not being done. One program broke and none of the replacements knows about it, so doctors just don’t get that information any more and no one cares. Tickets sit around for months because nobody knows what the product is or who handles it. Poor customer service from the help desk, especially Level 1.

Vendor technology director

• Engineering was the most affected turnover area, but it leveled off recently. I expect normal attrition next year, maybe 10-15%.
• Changed jobs for work-life balance, an opportunity to work for a more technically sound team and manager, a deeper focus on more complex clinical integrations, mission around the product, and a 65% pay raise for an equivalent role.
• We are using external recruiters and more focused sourcing. We do quarterly surveys for retention adjustments. We will start reviewing market level salaries quarterly and make adjustments.
• No impact on customers. We have grown, even with periods of significant turnover this summer. Our company is small but has strong processes and good release and monitoring capabilities, so new folks can ramp up quickly.

Health system VP/CIO

• Nursing has seen large turnover as staff leave to make more money as traveling nurses. It’s an unprecedented number. I’ve had a 20% resignation rate in IS versus a decade averaging 3%. COVID is encouraging people to reconsider their careers and either get out of IS or work remotely for more money.
• Sign-on bonuses have been critical for nursing. For IS, we are regrading all of our positions and evaluating salaries to make sure we are competitive.
• The hospitals have been full and cost is up due to the need to hire travelers and contractors. We are maintaining patient care, but not always able to staff beds, and have had to go on diversion at times. IS customers are seeing long lead times in service delivery and I have a long line of people contacting me with complaints.

Consulting firm

• My firm was acquired and we’ve seen a reduction in “material benefits,” such as FMLA at 60% after four weeks instead of full pay. I expected to see a lot of folks leave after 2021 bonuses are paid and this will likely hit us most at at the senior level.
• We are having to backfill from a contractor pool, which is fraught and limited.

Medical device vendor

• Turnover at all job categories and levels.
• Are offering referral bonuses, signing bonuses, and hiring less experienced staff so they have runway to grow.
• Customers are seeing slow delivery of new value and innovation and slower response times for services.

IT in FQHC of ambulatory clinics

• High turnover in MAs, nurses, and providers.
• Would look at offers with good compensation.
• Employer is offering more prizes in the Christmas raffle, better 401k matching, and one-time bonuses.
• No patient impact except a longer wait for appointments.

Software vendor

• I left my old job due to lack of advancement opportunities.
• Company offers flexible schedules and extensive work-from-home options.
• Customers have seen project timeline delays.

Vendor executive

• Turnover is highest in customer support, then developers.
• I would be looking for an employer with remote work and no vaccine mandates.
• The company updated the employee experience intranet, implement 360 reviews of leadership, increased referral bonus amounts, and made salary market adjustments.
• Customers have seen that we increased hiring, improved automation, upgraded our self-help knowledge base and portal, and adding chat bots for commonly asked questions.

Vendor executive

• We have seen a 15-20% turnover in sales and developers.
• I changed jobs to join a great team that offered better compensation, now hoping to stay put.
• The company pays well and treats people with respect and appreciation.
• I have seen no customer impact.

Vendor sales executive

• We have seen 35% turnover in trainers and customer support.
• My company’s new model is not sustainable and the future looks grim. I would like to work for a larger employer whose products and serves are geared for future technology.
• When we were going in to the office, the company stocked our kitchen with snacks and food for employees and offered five half-day summer Fridays on top of PTO. Now that we are remote, nothing.
• Customer support is suffering as we have lost experienced workers.

Vendor executive

• Turnover is at 15-20% and is in all areas – sales, technology, operations, legal.
• I have uncertainty about the long-term viability of the company and money.
• The company is increasing salaries, offering retention bonuses, and making a concerted effort around culture.
• Things are taking longer to get done and that cascades to our customers.

Vendor analyst

• Turnover is at 35% and I don’t expect those numbers to go down. Mid-level leadership, senior development, senior implementation, and a few VPs.
• I changed jobs because of leadership failings and layoffs that put too many good people out for no good reason. The pandemic layoff and pay cuts were particularly hard. I moved to a company that wanted to grow, needed my skill, and offered a 30% raise.
• If I leave, and I’m only thinking about it, it would be to hang out my own shingle and consult internationally.
• The company just eliminated PTO with the “take whatever you need” concept.
• Customers are struggling not only on the clinical side due to the pandemic, they don’t have the people to keep up with upgrades, new releases, and support. They need to align with a lot of new initiatives that will be available only in future releases.

Software and benchmarking vendor VP

• I anticipate very high turnover in software development, product management, high-aptitude analysts, data science and BI/data visualization, and any high performer who wants to make the jump to management.
• I plan to stay in 2022 as long as they’ll have me. I’m satisfied with my personal comp and the company mission still resonates with me.
• Employer is increasing pay bands, starting salaries, and annual merit raise percentages. However, it is also stressing a return to office and downplaying virtual work, which is hurting both recruiting and retention.
• Customers have seen no impact, but recruiting for 2022 remains a major risk point. We have plenty of revenue to invest in software development and business development, but recruiting challenges mean it’s difficult to execute with those dollars. Resignations haven’t hit us badly, but annual bonuses for 2021 are paid in Q1 2022 and we anticipate a wave of resignations.

Health insurer

• Turnover is higher than normal. We always have high turnover in our bilingual call center and it will probably get worse. Until we converted a number of jobs to full-time remote, we expected high turnover in IT.
• Full-time remote and hybrid jobs is the company’s biggest innovation in recruitment and retention. My employer was old-school about telecommuting despite being in downtown Los Angeles, where almost everyone has a lousy commute. Now that we’ve been getting the work done successfully for 18 months, they have generally accepted that it can work. We lost some staff to a competitor that advertised full-time remote jobs sooner than we did.
• Turnover has slowed a number of enterprise programs to roll out new services many of which are enabled by technology. We are a highly regulated entity and we’ve been struggling to meet all regulatory deadlines, in part because of a lack of people to do the work and make important decisions in these programs.

Health system

• 10-15% turnover in nursing and IT.
• Would consider leaving for flexibility and career advancement opportunities.
• The company is adjusting salaries.

Software vendor sales

• 10% turnover. Lots of engineering folks with a shift to cloud, on-prem resources will go. Lots of GTM changes due to poor company culture.
• Left due to company culture.

Software vendor sales

• Voluntary turnover has been low, but seems like it is ticking up. R&D has seen record turnover and I expect that to continue along with our implementation team.
• I’m concerned about the company direction. New product announcements talk about functionality we should have had years ago. I don’t see full digitization happening in the next 10 years, but shouldn’t we be working towards that assumption? We aren’t able to quickly produce new code and updates. Pay isn’t so great and there’s no indication it will improve.
• The company has had some sort of HR listening session with some teams, but it seems to have focused on soft things like culture rather than pay and product focus.
• Our customers are certainly impacted by loss of experience in the implementation team, which is directly visible to them. The R&D team is not visible to them.

Multi-hospital health system IT senior solutions architect

• We lost some folks earlier due to work-from-home policies, which have since been loosened up.
• Work-from-home is 100% and work in multiple states.

News 12/29/21

Top News

Politico notes that even though the Senate has, for the first time, removed the prohibition of spending HHS money on a national patient identifier for 2022, nothing is guaranteed because of the way HHS appropriations work.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) have filed bills that oppose the development national patient identifiers.

ONC was supposed to create a report describing how such identification would work and the benefits and risk of implementing it. That report is is overdue and is holding up the process.

Reader Comments

From IANAL: “Re: Cerner. I suspect the voice assistant statement in Oracles press release was aimed at buyers or holders of Oracle stock. Many see Oracle’s main competitor as Microsoft, which acquired Nuance/Dragon. The press releases of big, boring companies are often aimed at shareholders since shareholders are interested enough to read company press releases and usually need calming after big company decisions. I wouldn’t take it as an indication of Oracle’s actual intentions for Cerner.” Excellent point. Companies often say things in acquisition press releases that don’t match their actual intentions, instead using the limelight opportunity to improve their image with investors. The claim that Oracle will make its little-known voice assistant the primary clinician interface for Millennium may well have been smoke-blowing to make Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance seem less significant. It seems obvious that the biggest benefit to Oracle is buying a company that in essence resells a lot of its high-margin products (like the Oracle database) and to stave off the company’s move to AWS and force customers onto Oracle’s less-competitive offering. I doubt that the worksheet analysis used by Oracle’s acquisition team contained a lot of columns that predict the acquisition’s positive impact on patients and clinicians, healthcare costs, and outcomes.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Few poll respondents expect Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner to improve healthcare. Mike thinks a new focus on infrastructure will slow down the rollout of more-important product features, turning Cerner into another McKesson Horizon that will be sold for parts. Multiple commenters say that both companies are focused on sales rather than products, which is tough in healthcare where sales cycles are long and complicated. Khyber Pass makes an eloquent comparison of US healthcare to Afghanistan, where outside powers waltzed unknowingly into the “Graveyard of Empires” and were undone by fractiousness, complexity, and problems that the locals couldn’t solve. IANAL makes several interesting predictions:

• Meditech, once Neil Pappalardo is no longer involved, will sell to Oracle or private equity, will be acquired by a consortium of customers led by HCA, or will become irrelevant due to customer attrition.
• Oracle will wait for Northwell to leave Allscripts and will then buy the Allscripts hospital division on the cheap.
• Epic seems to be growing concerned about anti-trust issues as evidenced by its no longer using slogans involving world domination or market share. Oracle is tighter with the federal government, is a preferred bidder for government work, and is willing to outsource to India. Epic will move its focus outside of hospitals once it has run out of health systems to convert and the profits no longer outweigh the anti-trust risk.
• Hospital software improvement and innovation will stop unless US healthcare undergoes major paradigm changes.

New poll to your right or here: Which COVID activities will you practice to a greater degree in the first several months of 2022 compared to mid-2021? I’m trying not to fall victim to the “I’ll get it no matter what I do, so I might as well just live my life” symptom of COVID fatigue, but I’ll at least switch from cloth to KN95 masks in some or all situations. Omicron has changed the dynamic to where all of us probably know someone personally who has had it recently. Post-holiday case numbers will be crazy, although only a small percentage of those will likely result in hospitalization (but a small percentage of a huge number is still a big number of occupied beds that will be unavailable for medical needs of all kinds).

Webinars

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

Announcements and Implementations

In India, Indian Railways – the government-owned railway system that is the world’s eighth-largest employer with 1.3 million employees —  goes live on the Hospital Management Information System at its 695 hospitals and healthcare units, linked to the patient identifier of employees, family members, and employees. 

Mid-Columbia Medical Center (OR) and OHSU Health end most aspects of their longstanding collaboration agreement, which will require MCMC to move away from OHSU’s Epic system.

Other

Dr. Jayne is annoyed that the CES show denied her request for a media pass with a curt “insufficient credentials” response, but the January 5-8 conference might wish they had let her come given high-profile pullouts of dozens of companies from the in-person conference due to COVID-19 concerns – Lenovo, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Intel, Meta (Facebook), and Omron Healthcare. Several tech reporting sites have decided not to send reporters to Las Vegas for live coverage of the conference, which drew 180,000 attendees the last time it was held in person in January 2020. CES declares that it won’t cancel the in-person show, saying that while 10% of exhibit hall space will now feature chairs and potted plants in being repurposed into impromptu lounges, smaller companies rely on the conference to do business. Some people still expect CES to either give up and cancel the show or try to put good spin (a la HIMSS and RSNA) on drawing 75% fewer attendees, many of whom had already decided to participate virtually or not at all even before emergence of the Omicron variant. According to one tech publisher, “You know something’s different on the Central Hall floor when you see the US Postal Service has really great booth position.”

A researcher says that nursing shortages, accelerated by pandemic-related retirements and reduced nursing school enrollment, will shift health system budgets away from expansion and acquisition of new technology. One travel nurse says the hospital she works at is so short staffed that she is paid more than surgeons, but many travel nurses say the money is only a short-term reason to continue practicing in a high-stress setting where hospitals don’t seem to value their mental health.

The coroner of an 80,000-resident county in Missouri – who, like many of his national peers, had no medical training or experience before he was elected to the low-paying job — tells a reporter that his office “doesn’t do COVID deaths,” having recorded COVID-19 as a cause of death zero times in 2021. Wavis Jordan, who is also a lay preacher, says families would need to provide proof of a positive test to have it included on the death certificate, which goes against CDC’s recommendation of taking symptoms and medical history into account. Many death certificates feature “garbage codes” such as “heart failure, unspecified” that are inappropriate as an underlying cause of death. A county coroner in Mississippi, where deaths labeled as “heart attacks” doubled in 2020, says family members often refuse to allow COVID-19 on death certificates until they learn that the federal government pays for the funerals of people who die of COVID-19.

HuffPost covers private equity’s heavy acquisition of hospice chains, with the number of PE-owned hospices tripling from 2012 to 2019 in a quest to cash in on dying baby boomers in a lightly regulated industry for which Medicare pays generously. Their formula involves slashing costs and staffing and pushing marketing teams to sign up people who might not actually need hospice services. One hospice company that says it is one of the fastest-growing companies in the US declines to name its owner, even after its private equity owner paid $200 million to buy a British Formula One racing team (racing reporters believe the owner is a low-key Hong Kong billionaire). Profits are high because Medicare pays the same per-day rate regardless of complexity, so an aide who feeds a patient lunch is billed at the same rate as a nurse who runs an IV. The acquired hospice market heavily to assisted living facilities since servicing patients who live under one roof increases efficiency.

Contacts

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

News 12/24/21

Top News

Medical software vendor CompuGroup Medical was hit by a ransomware attack on Saturday that has affected its network and telephone support systems. The company is setting up emergency telephone numbers and email addresses for customers.

Reader Comments

From Historian: “Re: Oracle acquiring Cerner. Acquisitions like this don’t usually work out well for health IT customers.” Very true, especially if the acquirer is new to healthcare and states upfront that its primary motivation of the acquisition is to increase growth. Extra negative points since Oracle seems to think that what Cerner needs to finisher higher than #2 in a three-horse race is bolted-on, market-lagging technologies such as its voice assistant. Oracle also may underestimate the challenges that lurk underneath its glib statement that it will magically increase non-US sales of Cerner products. The clinking of milkshake toasts must be echoing throughout the Verona cornfields, with the only other delighted parties being Cerner shareholders and the heirs of Neal Patterson, who are stacking their cash with fingers stuck in ears to avoid hearing him rolling over in his grave.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The EU’s regulator approves Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance, which it says raises no anti-competitive concerns.

Sales

• MUSC Health will implement Sectra’s enterprise imaging solution in a subscription model that covers its main campus, several satellite locations, and all affiliated regional hospitals in South Carolina.

Announcements and Implementations

Vyne Dental announces enhancements to its Trellis revenue cycle and communications platform.

Government and Politics

FDA issues draft guidance on using digital health technologies for remote data acquisition in clinical studies.

Other

The co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project says in The Atlantic that the US is about go temporarily blind in the Omicron variant fight because the folks who collect and report testing results take holiday periods off. Cases will appear to be dropping sharply over the next several days due to underreporting, then will skyrocket in the first several weeks of 2022 as the data backlog is cleared (or as infection rages, or both – it won’t be possible to tell). The only data that is likely to be accurate is HHS’s hospitalization figures, which are more of a record of interventions gone wrong than an early warning system. I think hospital admissions and deaths will become the only relevant numbers since case counts and positivity mean little when nearly everybody is going to become infected and the tools that can blunt the infection’s damage become more important.

An interesting aspect of the ransomware downtime of Ultimate Kronos Group’s cloud-based payroll system. Health systems that can’t access hourly pay records are being forced to issue employee paychecks in the same amount as a weeks-ago pay period. That means that not only will they have to claw back any overpayment right after Christmas (assuming the system is restored soon); they have to deal with newly hired employees, people who received bonuses or overtime in the pay period that is used; and W-2s will potentially be affected by paycheck adjustments.

The New York Times says Pediatrix and its parent company Mednax are earning millions of dollars each year by showing up at the bedside of a newborn’s mother and offering to administer expensive hearing tests, which the mother assumes is covered by the hospital stay. Pediatrix – which also offers pediatric intensive care, pediatric surgery, and obstetric services – is administering the hearing tests to nearly 1 million babies per year. Aetna sued the companies three years ago for inflating charges by more than $50 million but eventually settled, although Mednax admitted in court that it destroyed emails in which it pestered its doctors to upcode procedures. Pediatrix sponsored a successful campaign to pass state laws requiring hearing tests for newborns, then started doing a test that costs several hundred dollars instead of the previous $50. Patients have complained about the surprise bills, with at least one hospital warning expectant parents that the company may not be an approved provider under their insurance and that the company balance-bills patients for what insurance doesn’t cover.

Contacts

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

News 12/22/21

Top News

Several investment firms and bond raters downgraded Oracle’s shares and debt Tuesday following its announced intention to acquire Cerner. They worry that the cash payout is large and Cerner’s offerings aren’t strategic to those areas where Oracle should focus.

Oracle has $23 billion in cash and will likely need financing to complete the Cerner acquisition for its offer of $28 billion in cash.

ORCL shares dropped 5% on the announcement Monday and were flat Tuesday.

Oracle’s biggest previous acquisition was PeopleSoft, which it acquired for $10 billion in 2004.

Reader Comments

From Change of Control: “Re: Cerner. Could CEO David Feinberg really have been key to the Oracle acquisition given that he’s been on the job for less than three months?” That was my immediate question as some seemed to give him credit for the deal. Either way, he’s even more fabulously wealthy than when he started on October 1 – shares in his $35 million compensation package have jumped in price. He is also protected by a change-of-control employment clause if Oracle fires him within 12 months of closing the deal (two years of base salary, 24 months of benefits, immediate vesting of shares, and his initial $1.35 million cash bonus). It seems from the cheap seats that Oracle would have pursued its long-rumored acquisition regardless of who was sitting in the CEO chair, and the fact that it was the new guy Feinberg is very good for him. I doubt Oracle based its plans on his ongoing involvement or found Cerner to be a more attractive target because the CEO spent less than three years working for Google. It may well be that 77-year-old Larry Ellison’s testosterone kicked in (a common tech punch line: “God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison”) at the chance to steal an AWS client and to match Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance by rather wildly claiming that Oracle will make its voice assistant the primary clinician interface to Millennium.

From On-Demand: “Re: Cerner. Oracle is buying into healthcare, not buying into a sexy acquisition.” I agree. CERN revenue and shares haven’t budged much in years, the company lost a lot of its executive talent (to the benefit of other health IT vendors) while Brent Shafer kept the CEO chair warm for his short and generally forgettable three years, and Cerner is #2 and losing ground in its primary business. Oracle’s history involves milking database customers hard while missing trends such as cloud, AI, and voice assistants, but revenue from the former lets them belatedly buy their way in. Tech analysts raised interesting questions: are more Oracle acquisitions imminent since the company historically plays aggressive catch-up, and will Salesforce be pushed into broadening its modest healthcare presence?

From Bob Loblaw Law Blog: “Re: Cerner. Oracle triggers more customer complaints than any software vendor I’ve seen.” A class action suit that was filed in early 2020 claims that Oracle’s shares were tanking because it failed to predict cloud-based competitive threats, so the company boosted its numbers by forcing customers to buy its flawed cloud offerings by using a strategy called “Audit, Bargain, and Close.” The lawsuit claims that Oracle intentionally installed on-premises software that boosted the customer’s license usage without their knowledge, then threatened to impose large license agreement penalties unless the customer accepted a cloud subscription that they didn’t want and wouldn’t use. The lawsuit quotes a company executive who said that up to 95% of the company’s cloud sales involved these “financially engineered deals” that were designed to mislead investors into thinking that Oracle’s cloud strategy was working.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m curious about what you think about Oracle’s planned acquisition of Cerner. Let me know. I’m thinking of these themes:

• How does Oracle perform as a health system vendor (database, HR, ERP, EMPI, etc.)
• How well does Oracle’s Voice Digital Assistant work? Could it really be suitable as Millennium’s primary user interface for clinicians?
• What is the customer impact of Cerner moving from AWS, which is already complete for some systems and in process for others, to do an about-face move to Oracle’s Gen2 cloud services?
• How will Cerner’s VA and DoD business be affected?
• How many on-the-fence Cerner customers and prospects will be spooked by uncertainty and will instead make a quick Epic decision?
• What will Oracle’s strategy be given that much of healthcare, including Epic, uses InterSystems Cache’ rather than relational databases like Oracle’s?

Speaking of the acquisition, let’s give credit to some HIStalk readers who called it early (July 25, 2021). Eddie T. Head stated confidently that Oracle will be the top general technology firm in healthcare “after they buy Cerner,” which he expected because Cerner is a heavy Oracle user (databases and Java), Oracle is desperately late to the cloud, and Cerner seemed primed for sale. IANAL added that Oracle has acquired other sector-specific application vendors such as NetSuite and predicted accurately that it would be a $30 billion acquisition.

I’m always happy to see December 21 even though it’s the first day of winter (and another COVID one at that) because at least daylight hours start increasing.

An Anonymous Health System CIO’s Initial Thoughts About Oracle Acquiring Cerner

We’ve been a Cerner customer on the acute EHR side for quite a while and have further implemented both ambulatory and rev cycle. On the acute side, we’ve been generally pleased with the product, services, and support. However, we saw Cerner challenges with the ambulatory and rev cycle implementations. From my viewpoint, Cerner’s biggest problems today are:

• Revenue cycle functionality. Millennium still has challenges to get it to work well. I’m hoping the RevElate strategy pans out.
• Ambulatory functionality. We’re seeing improvements made, but they lack the product maturity other vendors have. Generally, we are able to make it work.
• People and process. This is actually their biggest problem. Cerner has struggled to maintain competent staff that understand healthcare and individual customer workflows. Throughout our implementations, we had major challenges with project management, availability of experienced staff, and the ability to help us make informed decisions.

Here are my thoughts on Oracle acquiring them:

• If Oracle is going to help reduce the cost of healthcare, they also need to help find savings for their customers.
• One of the things mentioned in their announcement was the use of Oracle’s voice assistant product. Our Physicians use Dragon and are very pleased with it. I don’t believe Oracle understands how difficult it is going to be to get physicians to give up something they like and benefit from.
• Oracle should be able to bring more technical resources to bear to help with Cerner’s products. However, I hope Oracle isn’t going to distract Cerner to move from their AWS strategy to an Oracle cloud strategy immediately. While this would be favorable to Oracle, I fail to find any immediate value to customers.
• Oracle is not going to be able to help bring additional healthcare resources initially.
• I hope Oracle can help improve Cerner’s service delivery through more mature processes. However, not knowing the healthcare space or Cerner products, I’m not sure what they can do initially to bring value for customers.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Bloomberg reports that activist investor Elliott Investment Management and Vista Equity Partners are considering making a joint bid for Citrix Systems, whose shares are down 36% this year and the company has been exploring its options.

Huron will acquire healthcare analytics vendor Perception Health.

Patient financial solutions vendor AccessOne acquires CueSquared, which offers a mobile payment platform for patient self-pay balances.

The executive director of the World Privacy Forum is concerned that the acquisition of Cerner will give Oracle – which runs the world’s largest third-party data marketplace – access to Cerner-stored patient data. She says that business associate rules might allow Oracle to use Cerner’s EHR patient data to train AI systems.

People

ZeOmega hires Andy Arends, MBA, MSc (NTT Data) as chief growth officer.

Other

KHN finds that small-town pharmacists are opening independent drugstores to replace big-box chains that pull out and leave those areas without pharmacy services. The article notes that the number of pharmacists employed by big-box stores peaked at 31,800 in 2012, but online and mail-order sales dropped that number to 18,000 by 2019. Experts say that people do less “roaming shopping” now, meaning that running a loss-leading pharmacy in the back of a retail or grocery store is not necessarily the most profitable use of the square footage. Rite Aid announced Tuesday that it will close another 63 stories, which follows CVS Health’s announcement that it will close 900 stores in the next three years.

The BMJ complains to Facebook that its peer-reviewed COVID-19 articles are being flagged as “false information” by Facebook’s fact-checking contractor Lead Stories. Lead Stories responds by saying that BMJ’s article “COVID-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial” and its “scare headline” were adopted by anti-vaxxers to prove that the clinical trial was fraudulent. Lead Stories says the allegation actually involves just three of 153 research sites, the whistleblower Brook Jackson is an EHR auditor rather than a scientist and had worked in the lab for just two weeks, and her Twitter account shows her support for misinformation spreader Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It also notes that it flagged the article only as being potentially misleading without additional context. Jackson filed an FDA complaint about the clinical trial and was fired by her research contractor employer the same day.

HIMSS announces featured HIMSS22 speakers, none of whom I’ve heard of other than former Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps — the CEO of a children’s education organization, the guy who ran Disney’s ABC Television group for a short time, a couple of former Air Force pilots turned consultants (they sound pretty interesting), an audit firm’s economist, the CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management, and a “60 Minutes” correspondent (those last three are co-presenting a single session on workforce). Exhibitor count is at 550 and Oracle isn’t among them.

Oracle says it will expand non-US sales of Cerner software. The above from KLAS’s “Global (Non-US) EMR Market Share 2021” report shows where Cerner stands.

Weird News Andy, this is my holiday gift for you. In England, the bomb squad is called to a hospital ED when a patient presents with “munition in his rectum.” The patient showed little originality in claiming that he fell on the World War II-era armor-piercing projectile.

Contacts

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

Oracle Acquires Cerner

Oracle will acquire Cerner for $28.3 billion in equity value in an all-cash deal, the companies announced this morning.

Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said in a statement, “Working together, Cerner and Oracle have the capacity to transform healthcare delivery by providing medical professionals with better information—enabling them to make better treatment decisions resulting in better patient outcomes. With this acquisition, Oracle’s corporate mission expands to assume the responsibility to provide our overworked medical professionals with a new generation of easier-to-use digital tools that enable access to information via a hands-free voice interface to secure cloud applications. This new generation of medical information systems promises to lower the administrative workload burdening our medical professionals, improve patient privacy and outcomes, and lower overall healthcare costs.”

Oracle vertical industries EVP Mike Sicilia said that Oracle will make Cerner’s systems easier to learn by making Oracle’s hands-free Voice Digital Assistant the primary interface to Millennium.

The transaction is expected to close in 2022. Cerner will operate as an industry business unit within Oracle.

The acquisition, at $95 per Cerner share, represents Oracle’s largest acquisition. Oracle says Cerner will be “a huge additional revenue growth engine for years to come” as Oracle expands its business to additional countries.

Monday Morning Update 12/20/21

Top News

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Government and Politics

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 12/17/21

Top News

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

Optimum Healthcare IT promotes Larry Kaiser to chief marketing officer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

Privacy and Security

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

Other

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 12/15/21

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

Webinars

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

People

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

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

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

OneOncology hires Andy Corts (SignalPath) as CTO.

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

Sales

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Other

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/13/21

Top News

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

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 12/10/21

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Other

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

News 12/8/21

Top News

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/6/21

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

People

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Other

US COVID-19 deaths are at 777,000.

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

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

Contacts

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