Monday Morning Update 9/27/21

Top News

Clinical research network vendor Elligo Health Research raises $135 million in a Series E funding round.

The company recently acquired research practice management organization ClinEdge.

Existing investor Cerner, which returned for this round, also acquired life sciences analytics vendor Kantar Health for $375 million early this year and created the Cerner Learning Health Network EHR-powered clinical trials service for participating health systems in 2019.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents expect remote patient monitoring and telehealth to affect healthcare more than any other technologies.

New poll to your right or here: Should physicians and other healthcare providers be licensed nationally rather than state by state?

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “A New, Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

I was curious about the performance of Teladoc Health stock since announced its acquisition of Livongo for $18.5 billion in August 2020. Shares are down 30% versus the Dow’s 27% increase, with the company’s market capitalization now being barely more than the acquisition price of what was touted to be a $37 billion merger (the company is now worth $21 billion). TDOC shares are 56% off their 52-week high. The company lost $134 million in Q2.

Definitive Healthcare’s IPO performance and its resulting multi-billion dollar valuation has piqued curiosity about what the company does. Check out an analysis of its IPO filings by Redpoint Ventures principal Jacob Effron, MBA, who describes how the company has succeeded in offering prospect analytics to support healthcare sales for life sciences and healthcare IT companies as well as provider analytics for health systems.

People

Insurer technology vendor HealthEdge hires Anshul Pande, MS (Stanford Children’s Health) as SVP of R&D and Angelo Devita, MPH (Avalon Healthcare Solutions) as VP of enterprise account management.

Dennis Sutterfield, MS (Temple Health) joins SUNY Downstate Medical Center as VP/CIO.

RCM services vendor Savista (formerly NThrive’s Services Division)  hires Jan Grimm (Butterfly Network) as CEO and board member. He replaces Brenda Cline, who has retired and joined the company’s board.

COVID-19

US COVID-19 numbers continue to improve, with cases, test positivity rate, and hospitalizations all down significantly in the past week, although deaths remain at nearly 2,000 per day.

CDC recommends boosters for some people who have received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine – those over 65, people who live in institutional settings, those with underlying medical conditions, and frontline workers. CDC did not follow its vaccine advisory’s recommendation to exclude at-risk workers. The advisory panel has not yet been tasked with reviewing the need for boosters for the Moderna and J&J vaccines, but some panel members urged a mix-and-match strategy in which those recipients could receive a Pfizer-BioNTech booster.

Anti-vaccine Facebook groups are urging people to remove their relatives with COVID-19 out of hospital ICUs, which they say are blocking the use of “miracle cures” such as ivermectin. Groups whose members have realized that ivermectin is not effective are now touting a “protocol” that includes gargling with iodine and inhaling hydrogen peroxide. A Harvard professor calls it “vigilante medicine” that is “being practiced by laypeople who are reading groups created by other laypeople in echo chambers and silos that, likely, someone in the anti-vax movement is profiting from.” Meanwhile, horse owners can’t get ivermectin paste for de-worming because it is being bought up from feed stores for human use.

A startup launched in October 2020 that runs a dozen COVID-19 testing sites is charging $380 for the same at-home rapid test that drugstores sell over the counter for $20 and for which Medicare pays $41. Omaha-based GS Labs, which has performed 500,000 of the tests, is using a CARES Act requirement that insurers pay a provider’s cash price. The company says it prices are high because it offers premium service, such as fast appointments and a nursing hotline. It is owned by a real estate and investment firm. UPMC Health Plan noticed that 91% of patient claims that included both an antigen and an antibody test came from GS Labs, insurance payment for which is also guaranteed by CARES Act.

Other

I don’t usually post job openings, but this one sounds good. CVS Health is recruiting for a physician to serve as senior medical director of health informatics.

Sponsor Updates

• Nuance announces that it has again ranked highest in customer satisfaction by Black Book Research for AI-powered CDI, speech recognition, and clinical intelligence solutions.
• The HCI Group releases a new DGTL Voices Podcast, “Future of Music in this DGTL Age.”
• The Stevie Awards names Quil Health CEO Carina Edwards a Gold Winner for Most Innovative Woman of the Year in Healthcare.
• RCxRules partners with Athenahealth’s Marketplace Program.
• Spirion marks its 15th anniversary with a Great Place to Work Certification.
• The Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare Podcast features Talkdesk VP of Strategy Greg Miller, “The Digital Front Door of Healthcare.”
• Vyne Medical releases a new podcast, “Connecting with Today’s Consumer: A Closer Look into the State of Healthcare Consumerism.”

Blog Posts

• Access and Affordability Trends in Rare and Orphan Disease (OptimizeRx)
• Keeping Us Productive, Safe, and Supported: Netsmart Facilities Team (Netsmart)
• Everything old is new again (Nordic)
• CRO Recruitment: 3 Steps to Attracting Patients to Clinical Trials (PatientBond)
• Biller’s Corner: Top 5 Avoidable Denials in Medical Billing (PMD)
• Reducing Alert Fatigue in Healthcare (Premier)
• Medical Coding Automation: A Coding Team’s Secret Weapon (RCxRules)
• Meet Dina at NAACOS! (Dina)
• Staying True to Your Values Through Massive Growth (RxRevu)
• Scans in vans, 5G, AI, COVID … are we set for a quantum leap in taking diagnostics to patients? (Sectra)
• Credentialing by Proxy for Telemedicine: 7 Things to Know (SOC Telemed)
• HL7: What it is and why it’s important to understand (Spok)
• Improve Patient Care and Check the CMS “Box” with Tailored Clinical Intelligence (Surescripts)
• 5 Ways Telehealth is Transforming the Patient Experience (Twistle)
• Is It Time to Update Your PT Clinic’s Software System? (WebPT)
• Multilingual Patient Communication Serves Kheir’s Diverse Community (Well Health)
• Finding the keys to your digital front door and building better patient experiences (West Monroe)
• What can $2.1 billion do for infection control in the wake of COVID-19? (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 9/24/21

Top News

Bloomberg reports that Veritas Capital and Elliott Management are considering a sale or IPO of Athenahealth at a $20 billion valuation.

Veritas and Evergreen Coast Capital – a subsidiary of hedge fund operator Elliott — acquired the company for $5.7 billion in cash in late 2018, Veritas had previously acquired GE Healthcare’s value-based care solutions group for $1 billion and named it Virence Health, which was then merged with newly acquired Athenahealth, retiring the Virence Health name.  

Former Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush is among several CEOs who have lost their jobs following campaigns by activist investor Elliott. He reportedly received $142 million when the company was acquired five months after his departure.

Reader Comments

From Adjudicator: “Re: conference poll. Was it a surprise that HIMSS was the preferred conference of readers over HLTH by a two-to-one margin?” Not really. My thoughts:

• Limited sample size (353 respondents) and a self-selected HIStalk poll audience probably favors the longstanding HIMSS conference, particularly among HIMSS exhibitors who have not attended HLTH.
• HLTH is the venture-funded new kid on the block, but it has convened only a few conferences (I think it has offered just two in-person events). It made a shockingly ill-advised mistake in convening its first conference right after HIMSS18 in the same city (Las Vegas), then skipped to the fall of 2019 in hopes of avoiding the competition. It draws big-name presenters outside the usual HIMSS focus on health systems.
• The direct competitor to HIMSS will be the VIVE conference, which is being co-developed by HLTH and CHIME. Its first conference will be in March 2022. Its model is a bit different, however, in offering a “Hosted Buyer Program” that corrals suppliers and prospects together in a matchmaking program in which buyers attend free if they agree to attend at least eight assigned vendor meetings. HIMSS is an unabashedly commercial boat show, but VIVE takes it to the next level in a way that I’ve seen work fairly well in other healthcare-focused conferences. The question there is scalability – how many health IT decision-makers will attend and buy product to draw exhibitor dollars? Does it really need to be a national, big-attendee blowout to support that format? CIOs switching their allegiance from HIMSS to VIVE and the CHIME Fall Forum would be tough on the HIMSS conference.
• Nobody knows how the forced trend of virtual conferences will affect in-person attendance. Will those formerly large in-person audiences seek to reconnect in person, or will they reconsider the value of spending time and money to attend an in-person conference to sit in front of speakers who un-ironically extol the virtues of virtual healthcare?
• We also don’t know how the cancellation of HIMSS20 and the underwhelming HIMSS21 will affect future HIMSS conferences. I can’t say I have a lot of enthusiasm for doing it all over again in March, I get zero value from being a HIMSS member, and their high executive salaries and purely revenue-seeking actions seem a bit tone deaf (although to be fair, I feel the same way about most healthcare systems). I wouldn’t attend if I weren’t covering it for HIStalk.
• It’s not hard to see the appeal or value of user group meetings. All they are missing is the opportunity for broader networking with users of other systems.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The HIMSS22 exhibit hall floor plan shows just over 500 vendors signed up so far, with the big-booth exhibitors being Optum, Epic, and Cerner. I’ll probably ask companies about their HIMSS22 plans in the next few weeks since the conference kicks off in 171 days.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “A New, Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Analytics platform vendor Clearsense acquires Compellon, which offers a plug-and-play AI predictive modeling solution.

Users of Apple mobile devices can download and store their COVID-19 immunization and test results in Wallet with the just-released IOS 15.1 update.

Verily, the life sciences unit of Alphabet, is reportedly planning to separate from Google’s technology in preparation for an eventual IPO.

Ascension Technologies will outsource the jobs of 330 remote tech support employees in the areas of application and platforms, collaboration and end-user engineering, network and telecom, and field services.

Sales

• TransformativeMed and partner Red One Medical will provide the VA Puget Sound Health System – Seattle Division with the CORES Work Manager suite of clinical decision support tools and the CORES Diabetes Module.
• Cancer Treatment Centers of America connects to the MedAllies HISP platform to develop technology to meet CMS requirements to send patient event notifications to primary and post-acute care providers.
• UC San Diego Health chooses the Unifier platform of Dicom Systems for imaging interoperability.

People

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital hires Shannon Dean, MD (UW Health) as CMIO.

Medical imaging AI vendor Mirada names Mark Crockett, MD (Verge Health) as chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Renown Health announces that it has answered 57,000 questions and completed 700 COVID-19 risk assessments via its rollout of Loyal’s AI healthcare chatbot and live chat solution on its website.

Researchers at MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center develop MedKnowts, a problem-oriented EHR side panel that displays a patient information card and offers a note-taking editor with auto-complete for clinical terms.

Salesforce launches Health Cloud 2.0, which includes a COVID-19 management platform for in-person events, contact tracing, vaccine management, and virtual visits. The product is not specific to healthcare organizations and will be available to all businesses. I’m confused by the product name since Salesforce Health Cloud offers solutions for providers and other healthcare organizations. The announcement’s link to Health Cloud 2.0 refers to a Health Cloud page that doesn’t mention anything new. UPDATE: I reached out to the company, which explained that Health Cloud hasn’t changed, while Health Cloud 2.0 is a bundle that includes Health Cloud plus the new COVID-related functionality. My confusion remains.

Intrado adds SMS-based referral management, along with integration with Cerner and Meditech, to its HouseCalls Pro digital patient engagement platform.

Children’s Health of Orange County joins Cerner’s Learning Health Network research consortium.

Meditech will hold its Physician and CIO Forum September 29-30 as both an in-person and virtual event.

Canada-based Well Health Technologies will acquire specialty EHR vendor Aware MD for up to $8 million.

Bizmatics enhances its PrognoCIS EHR to support the correct scheduling of virtual visits based on the individual time zones of patient and provider.

Prescription discounter GoodRx rolls out GoodRx Health, which will answer the most commonly Googled questions about health. The company says the new site is a cross between NerdWallet and Wirecutter for healthcare.

A new KLAS report on data and analytics platforms finds that Cerner, Epic, and Health Catalyst have the deepest adoption among established analytics solutions, while Innovaccer has high adoption as a newcomer. Dimensional Insight customers report high satisfaction and see the company as a partner, while Cerner has a 40% overall dissatisfaction rate mostly due to overpromising. Click the graphic above to see KLAS’s data and analytics platform framework and the underlying components.

Government and Politics

A GAO review of the DoD’s Cerner implementation finds that the system is live in six of 24 planned waves, system performance has improved, and early issues have been addressed. However, testing and resolution of the issues it raises remain unresolved, users say the training system doesn’t match production, and system change information isn’t being disseminated well.

COVID-19

FDA approves booster shots of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for those 65 and over who received their second dose at least six months earlier and for high-risk people. CDC’s advisory committee is meeting this week to determine those high-risk criteria and to discuss how the new recommendation affects people who received the Moderna or J&J vaccines.

Other

University of Toledo Medical Center will use its $4 million fiscal year surplus to create a $21 million capital reserve that will help pay for its Epic implementation, among other projects.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health will combine its Medi-Span Clinical drug-screening solution with Ecaresoft’s Cirrus EHR to offer a fully integrated NPHIES-compliant solution to providers in the Middle East.
• The HCI Group will sponsor the CHIME Innovation Summit September 23-24 in Chicago.
• Everbridge CEO David Meredith wins the 2021 Globee CEO World Award in the visionary category.
• Health Catalyst CFO Bryan Hunt and SVP of Investor Relations Adam Brown will present during the Cantor Global Healthcare Conference September 30.
• Healthwise celebrates its staff in a new video, “Celebrating Healthwise Yesterday & Today.”
• Intrado offers new capabilities within its HouseCalls Pro digital patient engagement platform, including automated referral management.
• Kyruus opens registration for its Annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium November 9-10.
• National Coordinator Micky Tripathi will keynote Meditech’s 2021 Physician and CIO Forum September 29-30.

Blog Posts

• Vaccine Hesitancy: Understanding Fears and Addressing Barriers to Access (GetWellNetwork)
• Improving Glycemic Management in the ICU with a Pharmacy-Led Initiative: Critical Insights from Texas Health Huguley Hospital (Glytec)
• Why You Need a Mobile Collaboration Strategy (Halo Health)
• Wheels Up on Healthcare Analytics Summit 2021 Virtual! Day One Recap (Health Catalyst)
• What is sepsis and how can clinical data help save lives? (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• What is Patient Experience? (Avtex)
• VA PDMP: Using the Power of Data to Improve Care for Our Nation’s Veterans (InterSystems)
• The Importance of Testing Technology (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Improve Your Pre-Procedure Patient Communication (Intrado)
• Nordic Consulting ranked No. 37 of Best Places to Work in Healthcare in 2021 (Nordic)
• What’s in a variant? Part III – Linking sequence and patient data for clinical research (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• This Time, Interoperability is Real: Part 3 – Patient Access API (LexisNexis)
• Four Ways E-Prescribing Helps to Improve Medication Adherence and Reduce Errors (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 9/22/21

Top News

Former Teladoc executive David Sides joins NextGen Healthcare as president and CEO. Sides spent 17 years as SVP of worldwide consulting at Cerner, and had a shorter, more recent stint as president and CEO of Streamline Health.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET.  “A New, Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

RCM vendor AGS Health acquires EZDI, a clinical documentation improvement, computer-assisted coding, and auditing business based in Louisville, KY.

Xealth raises $24 million in a Series B funding round led by Advocate Aurora Enterprises, bringing its total raised to $53 million. The Providence Health & Services spin-off has developed software to help providers find and prescribe digital health apps and programs.

Clearlake Capital Group launches the Vive Collective, a program to help foster and potentially invest in digital health companies. Clearlake’s portfolio includes Bamboo Health (the newly merged and rebranded PatientPing/Appriss Health), NThrive, and Symplr.

Pager secures $70 million in financing. The company has developed virtual care navigation and collaboration software that it markets to providers, payers, and employers.

Surgical data analytics vendor Caresyntax adds $30 million to its $100 million Series C investment round, bringing the company’s total funding to $208 million.

Flywheel, a medical research data management company, raises $22 million in a Series C funding round led by 8VC. It has also acquired Radiologics, an imaging research data management and analytics business based in St. Louis.

Enterprise virtual care vendor EVisit raises $45 million in a Series B funding round. The Arizona-based company plans to nearly double its workforce in the coming months.

People

Jeff Gartland (Anthem) joins Relatient as CEO. He takes over from Michele Perry, who will become vice chairwoman.

Sales

• The VA Puget Sound Health System’s Seattle Division will implement TransformativeMed’s Core Work Manager clinical decision support tools and diabetes module.
• Dignity Health’s Yavapai Regional Medical Center (AZ) selects digital front door technology from Phunware.
• Nicklaus Children’s Health System (FL) will deploy wayfinding technology from Gozio Health.

Announcements and Implementations

InterSystems announces GA of its Iris FHIR Accelerator Service for storing and retrieving FHIR data.

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (TN) develops a remote patient monitoring program for COVID-19 patients using MD Revolution’s clinical experts and RevUp technology.

SCL Health implements Nuance Dragon Ambient Experience automated clinical documentation software for its telehealth and in-person exams for cardiology, orthopedics, and primary care across its facilities in Colorado and Montana.

COVID-19

Ellkay resolves a software programming glitch that mistakenly inflated the state of Vermont’s COVID-19 case count by 109 and delayed the reporting of positive test results to 237 patients. Ellkay’s analysis also determined that the slow-down may have impacted reporting in several other states.

COVID-19 has overtaken the 1918 Spanish flu as the deadliest disease event in US history, with 675,400 Americans succumbing to the disease.

Pfizer reports favorable results in its trial of a COVID-19 vaccine for 5 to 11 year-old children.

Other

Apple’s latest operating system gives Health app users the ability to share health data with their providers through EHRs. Six vendors are participating in the initial launch of the feature, first announced this summer, including Cerner and Allscripts. Pilots with several provider groups have shown the data-sharing feature to be well received by patients monitoring their blood pressure from home. 

Sponsor Updates

• Arcadia CMO Rich Park, MD and VP of Enterprise Partnerships Anna Basevich will present at the NAACOS Fall 2021 Conference October 1.
• CereCore has been recognized by Securance Consulting as a Best Practice Meditech Infrastructure as a Service provider for more than five years running.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “Moving from data connectivity to real provider usability.”
• CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast, “A Conversation with William Hudson, SVP and CIO, John Muir Health.”
• Bluetree, Cerner, Clearwater, Divurgent, Optimum Healthcare IT, Imprivata, Clearsense, and the HCI Group will sponsor CHIME Fall Forum October 27-30 in San Diego.
• CloudWave Director of Sales Engineering Mike Donahue will present at the Meditech Users Network Conference September 23.
• CEO Magazine features Meditech International CEO Charlotte Jackson.
• Chris O’Brien Lifehouse has become the first hospital in Australia to upgrade to Meditech Expanse.
• CarePort parent company WellSky announces that former CMS administrator Seema Verma has joined its Board of Directors.

Blog Posts

• Enterprise Imaging supports connected care in Moscow (AdvancedMD)
• Top Telemedicine Problems to Avoid (Bluestream)
• Ambulatory providers: Achieving TCM success (CarePort)
• 5 Ways to Use Epic Flowsheet SmartForms to Capture Regulatory Data (CereCore)
• Navigating Today’s Rapidly Evolving Cyber Insurance Market (Clearwater)
• Where Are They Now? An Update On 2020’s CoverMyQuest Winners (CoverMyMeds)
• What Healthcare C-Suite Leaders Need to Know About Analytics (Dimensional Insight)
• Innovating with Health Plans: Working Together to Drive Outcomes (Dina)
• The Power of Search in Healthcare and Beyond (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 9/21/21

NextGen Healthcare Appoints David Sides President and Chief Executive Officer

NextGen Healthcare names David Sides (Teladoc Health) president and CEO.

Oncology Analytics Announces Rebrand to OncoHealth

Oncology analytics and benefits management vendor Oncology Analytics changes its name to OncoHealth.

iOS 15 will give doctors a window into Apple Health app data

Apple’s latest operating system gives Iphone users the ability to share health data with their providers via EHRs.

Monday Morning Update 9/20/21

Top News

Definitive Healthcare shares end the week at $48.99, up 81% from their IPO price Wednesday. The company’s valuation is $7 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents value their vendor’s user group meeting more than any other conference, while HIMSS has twice the interest as HLTH. A couple of folks mentioned that they would have chosen CHIME Fall Forum if I had included it as a choice.

New poll to your right or here: Which technology will have the most impact on healthcare in the next five years? My list isn’t exhaustive, but it would have been a long poll otherwise.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET.  “A New, Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Sales

• US Dermatology Partners chooses the RCxRules Revenue Cycle Engine to automate charge import and review.

People

Aaron Miri, MD (Dell Medical School, UT Health Austin) joins Baptist Health (FL) as SVP / chief digital officer / CIO.

Wellbe hires Darcey Nett (DotCom Therapy) as chief growth officer.

David Finn, MA (CynergisTek) joins CHIME as VP of affiliated professional groups.

Christopher Logan (VMware) joins Censinet as SVP / chief security officer.

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare hires Patrick Woodard, MD, MHA (Renown Health) as VP/ chief digital officer.

Announcements and Implementations

In England, Royal Stoke University Hospital goes live with Vocera Badge in its ED.

Government and Politics

The Department of Justice files criminal charges against 138 defendants, 42 of them licensed medical professionals, for their alleged participation in healthcare fraud schemes that generated $1.4 billion. Telemedicine fraud contributed $1.1 billion of the total.

COVID-19

FDA’s vaccine advisory panel rejects the broad rollout of Pfizer vaccine booster shots, recommending their use only in patients who are over 65 or at high risk for infection. The panel said that despite White House plans to encourage booster shots for most people and Pfizer’s recommendation that they be approved, evidence shows that two shots protect people from hospitalization and death and that the goal should instead be to get more people vaccinated. FDA is not required to follow the committee’s recommendation and will announce its decision this week. The issue has raised opposing public viewpoints among FDA scientists who reviewed contradictory data from CDC, Pfizer, the government of Israel, and independent experts on whether a booster dose is needed.

St. Luke’s Health System (ID) won’t enforce its employee vaccination mandate because the state is under crisis standards of care and the health system can’t afford to lose employees.

The New York Times reports that the “nervous affluent” who can afford concierge medical services are having their COVID-19 antibody levels tested regularly even though experts warn that the number is mostly meaningless and the tests don’t measure the important T cell response. FDA doesn’t recommend such testing because the results may encourage some people to take fewer precautions. The article notes that concierge medicine providers are paid to do whatever the customer wants, even in the absence of medical evidence, while poor people have the opposite incentive in avoiding testing for fear that undesirable results could get them fired.

Other

Guardians accessed more than half the patient portal accounts of patients aged 13-18 years in an study of three children’s hospitals. Natural language processing was used to determine how many outboard portal messages were sent by guardians, as evidenced by referring to the child in the third person or containing phrases such as “my daughter.” The authors note that federal and state regulations require that a mechanism be provided to share information with adolescents without the knowledge of their guardians, but effectiveness is limited by these challenges: (a) institutions may not always configure the portal account correctly; (b) adolescents and their parents may not understand the portal’s design; (c) adolescents may voluntarily share their log-in with guardians; and (d) guardians may coerce the adolescent to provide portal access or may use their credentials without permission. They also note that limitations of NLP analysis, as well as inability to detect access in which guardians didn’t send messages, means that actual numbers are probably higher. They suggest that the perspectives of adolescents and guardians be studied to determine how they impact confidentiality.

A UCSF review of national Epic data finds that patient-to-physician messages jumped as the pandemic began and remained at high levels through the January 2021 review period. Twitter comments pondered whether forced use of MyChart to participate in virtual visits drove the increase or whether virtual visits themselves result in more patient messages. It seems that quite a few interesting studies could be performed – the number of messages that were sent just before virtual visits, the number sent immediately after (suggesting that some need was unmet by the virtual visit), the number sent by first-time portal users, message count compared to the number of active portal users, the number of messages sent by patients of varying acuity or chronic condition levels, and message time of day that might indicate access problems.

Sponsor Updates

• ChartSpan publishes a new white paper, “Follow the Money: Medicare’s New Gold Mine is Chronic Care Management.”
• Nuance launches its AI-powered, cloud-based PowerScribe One radiology reporting platform and MPower Clinical Analytics in Australia and New Zealand.
• OptimizeRx names Andy D’Silva SVP of corporate finance.
• Netsmart has been inducted into the Kansas City Business Journal’s Hall of Champions after being recognized as a Champion of Business for three consecutive years.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Caring is Sharing (Data) at Innova Primary Care.”
• CHIME applauds the FTC’s actions to secure consumer health data.
• Pure Storage appoints Operator Collective founder Mallun Yen to its Board of Directors.
• RxRevu founder Carm Huntress will present “Staying True to Your Values During Massive Growth” on October 6 as part of Den Startup Week.
• SOC Telemed announces that David Fletcher will become interim CFO upon the departure of Chris Knibb at the end of the year.
• Spok Holdings postpones its Investor Day Program due to an ongoing strategic alternatives review process.
• Summit Healthcare publishes a new client success story, “Doctors Community Hospital Continues Partnership with Summit Healthcare Post-Epic Migration.”
• University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers feature their use of the TriNetX Research Network in “Advancing clinical research and population health with real-world data.”
• West Monroe will invest $250 million in the expansion of its digital consulting services.
• Zynx Health celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Blog Posts

• Improving financial performance with the Dragon Ambient EXperience (Nuance)
• Compassion, Community, Caring: National Assisted Living Week 2021 (Netsmart)
• Connecting operational and clinical data for optimum performance (Nordic)
• 4 Reasons Why Providers Struggle to Reduce Readmissions (PatientBond)
• Supply Chain in Post-Pandemic Healthcare (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Why World Patient Safety Day is More Important Than Ever (Symplr)
• 3 More Ways to Increase Medical Practice Revenue (PMD)
• Why One Health System Traded Its Legacy Tool for Advanced Privacy Monitoring (Protenus)
• Healthcare is broken. Electronic prior authorization might be the first step in fixing it. (Redox)
• What COVID-19 Revealed About Optimizing Patient Payments (Sphere)
• Strengthening Our Foundation with Eligibility, Formulary and Benefit Data (Surescripts)
• Actium Health – A Clear Plan for Every Patient (Actium Health)
• How workplace culture affects, and is affected by, all aspects of the patient experience (Talkdesk)
• Why Providence is Making the Switch to Cloud-Based Data Management for EHR (Tegria)
• Developing a More Inclusive Clinical Trial Ecosystem (Twistle)
• Vocera Ease Application vs. NICU Camera System (Vocera)
• Three benefits of switching to electronic claim attachments (Waystar)
• Top 3 Drawbacks to Cash-Based Practice, and How PTs Can Address Them (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 9/17/21

Top News

Shares of healthcare commercial data and analytics vendor Definitive Healthcare open at 38% above its IPO price on Wednesday and close for the day up 59%, valuing the company at $4 billion. DH shares rose another 9% Thursday.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET.  “A New, Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health system digital marketing and CRM vendor Cured raises $10 million in a Series A funding round. The company’s founding team members all spent time at Epic.

Biopharma solutions vendor Syneos Health acquires StudyKIK, which offers tech-enabled clinical trials recruitment and operation tools.

Healthcare data exchange technology vendor Commure has reportedly raised $500 million in funding through a Series D round, valuing the company at $3.5 billion. 

Sales

• Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust selects Hyland Healthcare’s OnBase content services platform.

People

Healthcare benefits navigation and care coordination platform vendor Quantum Health hires Zane Burke (Livongo) as CEO and board member.

Peter Embí, MD, MS (Regenstrief Institute) joins Vanderbilt University Medical Center as chair of its biomedical informatics department. He will also hold the title of senior VP for research and innovation.

AdaptX hires Lisa Counsell, RN (Imprivata) as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Intermountain Healthcare and SCL Health sign a letter of intent to merge into a 33-hospital, $14 billion system.

Penn Presbyterian Medical Center goes live on the PCare Ambulatory digital health and patient engagement system that was jointly developed by PCare and Quil. The system suggests next best action with personalized videos, articles, check-ins, and reminders for therapy, also supporting the participation of family and friends.

The first hospital goes live on a service from Ob Hospitalist Group  and SOC Telemed in which patients receive 24/7 onsite care from OBHG’s physicians and have access to SOC Telemed’s maternal-fetal medicine physicians.

The ProMedica health system launches its Healthcare Redefined Initiative, which includes social determinants of health, senior care, programs specific to its individual markets, and an innovation program.

Government and Politics

The Federal Trade Commission issues a notification that health app vendors must notify consumers if their health information is exposed. FTC, clarifying its Breach Notification Rule, says companies that aren’t covered entities under HIPAA are still accountable when sensitive health information is exposed. It also notes that sharing covered information without the individual’s permission constitutes a breach. FTC says the apps that are mostly likely to be affected by the update are those that track diseases, diagnoses, treatment, medications, fitness, fertility, sleep, mental health, and diet.

The Department of Justice files a fraud complaint against a New York health insurance plan and its analytics company for overcharging Medicare Advantage. The now-closed data mining company DxID, owned by Independent Health Association of Buffalo, analyzed electronic medical records to find missed diagnoses to boost the insurer’s risk score. Another health plan that hired DxID to increase revenue billed $30 million new claims, many of which were not valid or supported by the medical record, such as depression and renal failure. The company pitched its services by requiring no upfront payments and instead taking 20% of paid claims worth tens of millions of dollars, which the whistleblower’s lawsuit described as “trolling patient medical records to gin up, in many cases, new diagnoses exclusively from information derived from impermissible sources.” Independent Health closed the company in June 2021.

A 55-year old Louisiana doctor who has claimed to have been a hired assassin and Medellin Cartel leader at 16 is charged with writing opioid prescriptions totaling 1 million doses for cash, resulting in $5 million in fraudulent insurance billings. Adrian Talbot, MD, JD operated a clinic but didn’t work there because he had a full-time VA job, so he left pre-filled, pre-signed prescriptions for employees to sell without examining the recipient. He self-published a bizarre book a few months back in which he says he’s working on a cure for Alzheimer’s.

FDA reorganizes its IT functions into the Office of Digital Transformation, with newly promoted Vid Desai serving as CEO with a budget of $750 million and staff of 2,500.

COVID-19

FDA meets this week to decide whether to approve the use of COVID-19 booster doses even as two of its top vaccine officials join a group of global scientists who say in a Lancet article that boosters aren’t needed. FDA is also facing pressure to approve doses for children.

The US hits a grim milestone as one of every 500 residents has died of COVID-19.

A KHN review finds that 26 states have permanently curtailed public health authority since the pandemic began. The most common actions were to prohibit mandate masks or quarantines and to ban COVID-19 vaccine mandates or proof of vaccination.

The New York Times finds that India’s government forced its scientists to downplay the possibility of a COVID-19 outbreak that eventually killed hundreds of thousands of people, suppressing and even falsifying data to support the re-election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A scientist who was reprimanded for his less-rosy predictions says, “Science is being used as a political weapon to forward the government narrative rather than help people.” A recent study estimates India’s COVID-deaths at 3 million, 10 times the official government number.

Idaho, which has one of the lowest rates for COVID-19 vaccination, implements Crisis Standards of Care statewide as hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.

Other

Financial Times reports that Houston Methodist hospitals are using Alexa-type voice assistant commands from Amazon Web Services in a prototype OR of the future. The system announces steps that need to be completed and records the results in the EHR. It also records audio of the procedure, with the patient’s permission, that it analyzes to present treatment options.

Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center and its director Adam Wright, PhD publish an annual report covering its first year. A key project was its burnout reduction project Clickbusters, which evaluates Epic Best Practice Advisories to remove those that clinicians find unhelpful.

Sponsor Updates

• LexisNexis human resources employees volunteer with Trees Atlanta.
• First Databank publishes research led by two of their pharmacists that further refutes the concept of iodine allergies.
• Gyant publishes a new case study, “Christus Health Launched Virtual Assistant Supporting Vaccinations Across Four States.”
• Health Data Movers names Marissa Lewis (Invo HealthCare) and Peter Squire (Centauri Health Solutions) account managers.
• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Symplr in its acquisition of Halo Health.
• InterSystems will exhibit at the Hack MIT event September 18-19 in Cambridge, MA.
• Jvion drives adoption of prescriptive intelligence and clinical intelligence with peer-reviewed results, platform integrations, and SDOH solutions.

Blog Posts

• HIMSS’21: Moving Care Home: 5 Takeaways for Success (Dina)
• How Proposed 2021 HIPAA Changes Will Affect Your Healthcare IT (Fortified Health Security)
• Vaccine Hesitancy: Understanding Fears and Addressing Barriers to Access (GetWellNetwork)
• Ensuring Implementation Success with Proven Best Practices (Halo Health)
• World Patient Safety Day 2021 Focuses on Safer Childbirth (Health Catalyst)
• Lessons Learned from a Fully Remote Services Model (Capsule)
• Taming the data tsunami: Leverage the clinical terminology for high-value use cases (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Microsoft Power Apps breach exposes third party security vulnerabilities (Imprivata)
• Optimum Healthcare IT Achieves Premier Status in ServiceNow Partner Program (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• The clinical terminology behind the health IT curtain (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• 7 Things to Look for When Rethinking Patient Engagement (Lumeon)
• Top 10 Features to Look for in an Enterprise Imaging Solution (Mach7 Technologies)
• Impact Advisors Ranked No. 3 on Consulting Magazine’s Best Large Firms to Work For List (Impact Advisors)
• How Medhost’s Cardiac Risk Prediction Successfully Leveraged AWS Analytics Services (Medhost)
• How a modern EHR will help The Aga Khan University Hospitals improve care throughout the developing world (Meditech)
• Why Healthcare Can No Longer Ignore Identity Theft (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 9/15/21

Top News

Healthcare governance systems vendor Symplr will acquire clinician digital communications vendor Halo Health.

Previous Symplr acquisitions include HealthcareSource HR, SpinFusion, The Patient Safety Company, Vistar Technologies, Hayes, TractManager, IntelliSoft, API Healthcare, CBR Associates, Cactus Software, and Phynd.

Clearlake Capital acquired Symplr in late 2018.

Reader Comments

From Inquiring CIO: “Re: HIMSS attendee lists. I’m tired of companies using them to mine sales leads. I’ve emailed HIMSS, but haven’t received a reply. I’m not sure where companies are getting the contact info of conference registrants, but it’s a deterrent to attending.” Inquiring CIO forwarded two emails, both of which contain scammy elements. Email #1 is from someone offering to sell a list of 45,678 HIMSS20 attendees (an oddly linear number series which technically should  be zero given that the conference was cancelled) for $1,999. Email #2 is from a business development guy in India-based company who used “HIMSS conference” in their subject line and content to make a technology sales pitch. The company was not a HIMSS exhibitor. I emailed the originator, but as I expected, received no reply. I contacted HIMSS, which reiterated that (a) it doesn’t sell attendee lists, and anyone who offers one is lying and probably is just dumping a bunch of old, inaccurate industry lists together and claiming they came from an official source; and (b) while HIMSS rents attendee lists to exhibitors for short-term use immediately before and after a conference, the company in Email #2 was not an exhibitor (I pondered the irony that perhaps Company #2 bought their list from Company #1). HIMSS says its legal team would love to have a conversation with Company #2 about its use of the HIMSS name if Inquiring CIO approves.

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET.  “A New, Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient engagement and activation company SymphonyRM rebrands to Actium Health.

App-based house call and telemedicine company Remedy pivots and rebrands as CareHive, which offers telemedicine, digital front door services, analytics, and clinical navigation. Remedy laid off 82 employees last November, many of whom were hired during the previous summer’s peak of COVID-19 patients. Remedy Chief Medical Officer Ronald Dixon, MD has been promoted to CEO of the new company.

Edifecs acquires Talix, which has developed a natural language processing-enabled risk adjustment coding, retrieval, and analytics platform for providers and payers.

Digital maternity care software vendor Babyscripts raises $12 million in a Series B funding round.

Healthcare payments platform vendor Zelis will acquire provider search and transparency website Sapphire Digital.

HC1 founder, chairman, and CEO Brad Bostic launches a $200 million SPAC that hopes to merge with a healthcare data science company.

Sales

• Legacy Health (OR) selects Simplifi 797 automated cleanroom compliance technology from Wolters Kluwer Health.
• Oroville Hospital (CA) will implement CliniComp’s fetal surveillance and fetal mobile technologies.
• Saina Health integrates Sphere’s healthcare payments and security software with its InstaHealth medical record portal for multiple family members.
• Health Choice Network chooses Epic for its 44 safety net organizations in 16 states in a $400 million deal.

People

CitiusTech names Atul Soneja (Infosys) president of operations.

UC San Diego Health promotes CIO Christopher Longhurst, MD to chief medical officer and chief digital officer.

Verato promotes Arti Pandit to chief customer experience officer and names Mark Erwich (Imprivata) chief marketing officer.

B. Well Connected Health hires Gary Johnson (Atlas Health) as VP of marketing and Romy Carlson, MBA (League Inc.) as VP of partnerships.

Announcements and Implementations

Divurgent develops a Concierge Scheduling Application that gives end users the ability to schedule one-on-one personalization sessions as part of their EHR training.

Powell Valley Healthcare (WY) goes live on Cerner.

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center develops real-time data-sharing software for medical teams and case workers that will be commercialized by Cordata Healthcare Innovations.

EHealth Exchange will award up to $550,000 in grants and incentives to its participants or eligible applicants that are innovating in the exchange of health information or establishing new technical advancements in connectivity.

Leidos will use Nuance’s Mix conversational AI development platform to create digital patient engagement solutions for health systems and federal healthcare agencies. Nuance Mix allows organizations to create conversational experiences for interactive voice response and chatbot systems.

Government and Politics

Bloomberg reports that the VA has issued an RFP for a $1 billion remote patient monitoring – home telehealth contract.

Privacy and Security

In Canada, The Ottawa Hospital apologizes to 391 employees for a software error that caused their names to be visible on an email that was sent to unvaccinated employees ahead of the October 5 mandatory vaccination date.

Children’s Hospital & Medical Center (NE) will pay $80,000 and take corrective actions to settle potential HIPAA violations related to its failure to provide timely access to all of a patient’s medical records despite multiple requests.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore sponsors the American College of Healthcare Executives – Middle Tennessee Chapter’s annual golf outing benefitting Mercy Community Healthcare.
• The Tech Trek Podcast features Well Health CTO Thor Clark.
• Impact Advisors publishes a white paper titled “Achieving Sustainable Value from ERP.”
• Agfa HealthCare achieves the new European Medical Device Regulation certification of its Class IIa Enterprise Imaging and Xero Viewer solutions.
• The Data Masters Podcast features Arcadia Chief Product Officer Nick Stepro, “The Role Empathy Plays in Data Visualization.”
• Clearwater founder and Executive Chairman Bob Chaput publishes a new book, “Stop the Cyber Bleeding: What Healthcare Executives and Board Members Must Know About Enterprise Cyber Risk Management.”
• CoverMyMeds Pod Lead Eda Erkal and Kitchen Manager, Campus Operations Shey Jin join the Leadership Columbus Signature Program Class of 2022.
• Kyruus expands its ProviderMatch online scheduling platform to allow consumers to self-book diagnostic and preventive care appointments, and customers to offer online booking for COVID-19 booster shots.
• OptimizeRx adds a Therapy Initiation Workflow to its point-of-care medication prescription platform.

Blog Posts

• Overcoming quarantine to serve patients in a mental health crisis with telehealth (Ability Network)
• Agfa HealthCare earns #1 customer experience for VNA (Agfa HealthCare)
• Women’s Health: Reporting on a Continuum to Reduce Inequalities and Improve Outcomes (Azara Healthcare)
• Different Types of Virtual Care (Bluestream)
• Shared Care Records bringing health and care closer together (Cerner)
• Medication Management & Patient-Centered Care Coordination Across the Continuum: A Thought Leadership Roundtable (CHIME)
• Reduced to the Essentials – AI/ML Can Wait (Cloudwave)
• Navigating the Wild West of Clinical Data – RISE West 2021 (Diameter Health)
• Covid Care-at-Home: Respond to Surging Cases & Limited Beds (Dina)
• Preparing for the 2021 Virtual National Conference (EClinicalWorks)
• 4 ways to strengthen digital patient access (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/13/21

Top News

Researchers Dean Sittig, PhD and Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH call for additional EHR safety actions beyond CMS’s recent mandate that hospitals self-assess annually using the SAFER Guides framework. Their JAMA Network piece recommends that hospitals and EHR developers share the responsibility for EHR safety since hospitals can’t develop EHR features themselves to meet the SAFER Guides standards:

• EHR developer teams, including clinicians, should self-assess their EHRs annually and report their results as part of the federal government’s certification process. They should ensure that their product can be configured to meet SAFER recommendations and deploy it with the appropriate default settings.
• ONC should convene an expert panel each year to develop any SAFER updates that are needed. That panel would also publish a list of developer non-conformity with an analysis of appropriateness.
• EHR developers should create EHR configuration guides for their product and share them with customers and their certification body. This would ensure that customers understand how to configure the EHR to meet SAFER recommendations and emphasize the safety consequences of failing to do so.

The SAFER Guides for EHR safety were developed in early 2014 by Sittig, Singh, and Joan Ash, PhD, MLS, MS, MBA. CMS requires hospitals to self-assess their compliance with the guides annually, starting with the EHR reporting period in CY 2022.

CMS is planning to require that Eligible Professionals annually attest that they have reviewed the “High Priority Practices” elements of the SAFER Guides, although their involvement would likely be limited to pressing their EHR vendors to comply.

ONC submitted much-publicized plans for an EHR safety center in its 2015 budget request, but funding was not provided.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Many poll respondents have been laid off in their career and quite a few were forced into a job they didn’t want or were fired, but demotions and forced relocation were uncommon.

New poll to your right or here: Which annual conference would you attend if limited to one?

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Spok’s board is reviewing strategic alternatives for the company, including a potential sale, following unsolicited interest in acquiring some or all of its shares.  The company notes that more than 5% of its shares have been recently acquired by Acacia Research, which licenses company patents to pursue litigation, and its partner, activist hedge fund Starboard Value. Cerner gave in to pressure from Starboard in early 2019, adding four board seats with two of those new members being nominated by Starboard. Starboard sold Cerner shares quickly afterward as it usually does with its corporate targets, taking advantage of the short-term price jump to reduce its 1.2% position in Cerner. CERN shares have since risen 19% versus the Nasdaq’s 91% gain. Spok Holdings share price has been flat in the past year, valuing the company at less than $200 million.

Sales

• The VA awards Cerner an 18-month, $134 million task order for its EHR rollout.

People

Medecision promotes Terri Steinberg, MD, MBA to EVP / chief portfolio officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Upfront Healthcare creates the Bartosch Institute for Patient Activation Research.

Health Catalyst launches a research network to allow health systems to establish relationships with drug companies and pharma-related research organizations.

The VA has migrated to Nuance Dragon Medical One.

A new KLAS report on EHRs in the Middle East and Africa finds that Cerner leads in performance and has improved relationships and services quality, Health Insights has improved satisfaction by migrating all customers to its web-based platform but hasn’t made a sale since 2019, and the sales success of InterSystems has caused some growing pains as customers report challenges in reaching its experts.

COVID-19

A CDC review of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths in 13 US jurisdictions from April through July 2021 finds that while the vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing infection has dropped with the delta variant, its protection against hospitalization and death has not changed. However, the underlying numbers suggested that hospital and death percentages aren’t drastically different among infected people regardless of vaccination status.

A Minnesota family physician who is running as a Republican candidate for governor calls for creating a “health freedom sanctuary state” where state residents would be free to ignore federal masking and vaccination requirements. The campaign of Scott Jensen, MD, who says he has not been vaccinated and doesn’t plan to be, has been banned from advertising on Facebook for posting COVID-19 misinformation. Another state Republican candidate and physician, dermatologist Neil Shah, MD, is campaigning against federally mandated vaccination, saying that asymptomatic spread is rare and that the government is working with the medical industry to “destroy science.” 

California releases its digital vaccine record system source code into the public domain. It uses the SMART Health Card framework, which can connect to a state immunization registry, CVS, Walmart, Sam’s Club, and hospitals that use Epic or Cerner.

Eric Topol, MD summarizes the White House’s new vaccine-centric COVID-19 plan versus a more comprehensive one. He has tweeted most frequently about the need for better CDC data and analysis, the need for a Green Pass system for air and train travel, and making at-home rapid tests free to help keep schools open.

Other

Executives and employees of DeepMind, the AI company that Google acquired in 2014, worked on secret plans to break away from Google over several years because they don’t trust the search engine giant. Insiders say they were worried about placing their work within the Google bureaucracy and started hiding their research for fear that Google’s internal AI group was using it without giving credit.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx welcomes Andrew D’Silva as SVP of corporate finance.
• The Edinburg Center expands its use of NetSmart’s CareFabric platform with additional features that include new financial functionalities, integrated reporting tools, and navigation features.
• Olive appoints Eileen Naughton (Google) to its Board of Directors.
• Jvion drives adoption of prescriptive intelligence and clinical AI with new peer-reviewed results, platform integrations, and SDOH solutions.
• Premier and 11 leading health systems have acquired a minority stake in Exela Pharma Sciences to secure supply of pharmaceutical products and support domestic production.
• Pure Storage offers a case study, “Hong Kong Cancer Fund Expands Services and Enhances the Digital Experience for Patients.”
• Talkdesk has earned the number-one spot in 11 G2 Fall Reports for 2021, and has earned G2 accolades in categories related to telecom services for call centers, contact center workforce, auto dialer, speech analytics, and contact center quality assurance.
• Upfront Healthcare, Relatient, and Well Health join Panda Health’s digital health marketplace in the new category of Unified Patient Messaging.
• Vocera releases a new Caring Greatly Podcast, “Streamlining EHR Work to Improve Clinician Well-Being – Annie Ideker, MD.”
• West Monroe Senior Managers Kirsten Lentz and Ken Goebel win M&A Advisor’s Emerging Leaders Award.
• VitalTech EVP of Sales & Marketing Ernie Iance will present at the Virtual Ziegler Link Age Fund Symposium September 9 in Chicago.

Blog Posts

• Length of stay declines persist following the initial COVID surge (Olive)
• PatientBond Insights Accelerator Driving Healthcare Revenue & Market Share (PatientBond)
• Better Learning and Development Habits Build Better Healthcare Teams (Symplr)
• How Can Natural Language Processing Improve Healthcare? (PMD)
• Gear Up for the Mandatory Radiation Oncology Model with Three Key Activities (Premier)
• The Challenge of Ensuring Compliance at Scale as Resources Shrink, Violations Rise (Protenus)
• Let’s Get Personal – How Healthcare Organizations Can Build Personalized and Innovative Solutions at Scale (Quil)
• Overcoming Common HCC Coding Challenges Part 2: Understanding Payer Feedback and Turning it Into Action (RCxRules)
• Texting in Healthcare: The Benefits, Best Practices & HIPAA Rules (Relatient)
• Bringing Better Data to the Room Where It Happens (RxRevu)
• Who is responsible for data security management and compliance? (Spirion)
• Contact Centers are Growth Centers (Talkdesk)
• How Remote Patient Monitoring Can Reduce Healthcare Inequities (Twistle)
• Tools of the Trade: Decoding Common Front Office Puzzles Through Tech (WebPT)
• Frequently Asked Questions About Healthcare Integration Platforms, Interfaces, & Zen (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 9/10/21

Top News

Canada-based Intelerad acquires enterprise imaging provider Insignia Medical Systems.

Insignia, whose offices are in the UK, has 250 UK customer sites.

Reader Comments

From Beeswax: “Re: interviews. It is amazing how many companies are acquired shortly after you interview their CEO. Too bad you aren’t getting a finder’s fee from the buyers!” The #1 reason I lose sponsors is that they get acquired. However, I assume that (a) the acquirer wasn’t just watching my interviews to decide who to buy instead of doing their own market research; and (b) companies may seek exposure to signal their acquisition interest in a robust investment market. Still, it’s like being a HIMSS conference exhibitor who knows that three positive outcomes can result — sales, creating partnerships, and making connections that can result in acquiring or being acquired.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Bluestream Health. The New York City-based company offers a simple yet powerful virtual-first care platform that works the way you work. Through a best-in-market connectivity, integrated interpreting, and a full range of clinical workflows, the platform delivers expert patient care through the virtual care experience. With Bluestream Health, customers get 10 times the visits at one-third the cost. That’s no exaggeration. It is helping major healthcare customers like NY H+H and Medstar boost visits and improve the bottom line. What sets Bluestream Health apart is how easy is to tailor the solution to how your organization works. APIs make it easy to configure to your clinical workflows and integrate with your systems. Add live interpretation services to address the needs of non-native speakers An intuitive user interface and no downloads mean that it’s incredibly easy to use for patients and physicians alike. Download the company’s white paper to learn how upgrading from telehealth to a virtual care solution can simplify the tech stack and increase profits. Thanks to Bluestream Health for supporting HIStalk.

Reader Bill send me a generous donation to support Donors Choose, to which I applied various matching funds, including those of my Anonymous Vendor Executive, to fully fund these classroom projects:

• Hands-on math lessons for Ms. B’s middle school class in Center, TX.
• A financial literacy kit for Ms. S’s middle school class in Baltimore, MD.
• A financial literacy kit for Ms. R’s pre-school special needs class in Indianapolis, IN.
• STEM kits for Ms. A’s elementary school STEM classes in Lithonia, GA.
• An Apple TV to support virtual and in-person instruction for Ms. D’s elementary school class in Pharr, TX.

I’m no longer shocked that many Facebook users aren’t technically bright enough (or ambitious enough) to use Google. Postings in Facebook groups are always full of shameless demands that someone else do their web work for them, such as (a) business postings that elicit indignant “Where is this place?” comments that one click would have resolved, (b) “anybody know” type group posts where someone can’t figure out how to Google to find a lunch restaurant or check a store’s business hours, and (c) users who complain about how Facebook works when it’s obviously a user issue (i.e., you can’t share a “lost dog” post from a private group). It’s a testament to the appeal of Facebook that it attracts loyal users / customers / addicts who can’t or won’t navigate the web or can’t use a keyboard to correct obvious speech recognition errors.

Wondering: have Patrick Dempsey or A-Rod inspired anyone to improve healthcare quality or cost since HIMSS21?

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health information exchange platform vendor Vyne acquires Ahana Health, which offers a connected care solution that allows providers to collaborate with each other and their patients. Vyne will incorporate the solution into its cloud-based Refyne product, which streamlines the exchange of medical documentation between providers and CMS.

Credit reporting agency TransUnion is reportedly seeking a buyer for its TransUnion Healthcare business for up to $2 billion.

Teladoc will integrate Proximie’s surgical and diagnostic procedure recording technology into its Solo hospital platform to support virtual surgical mentoring, proctoring, and support.

Dermatology diagnosis app vendor LuminDx changes its name to Piction Health.

Denmark-based Corti.ai, which offers AI analysis of patient encounters for guidance, documentation and quality improvement, raises $27 million in a Series A funding round.

Provider collaboration platform vendor CareMesh announces Transitions for EHR-integrated referral management.

Sales

• The Verland Foundation chooses the SmartCare EHR of Streamline Health Solutions.
• Temple Health chooses Gozio Health’s mobile platform for patients.

People

WellSky hires Andy Eilert, MBA (Evernorth) as president of emerging markets.

Clinical communications platform vendor Diagnotes promotes Sherry Henricks, MBA to CEO. She replaces founder Dave Wortman, who will remain on the board.

Remote patient monitoring system vendor Optimize Health hires Todd Haedrick (Covetrus) as CEO. He replaces Jeff LeBrun, who will move to chief strategy officer and retain his board chair position.

Altruista Health hires Dan Vnuk, MS (Cotiviti) as CTO.

Woebot Health names Sheetal Shah (SymphonyRM) as SVP of commercial.

Long-time Meditech executive Roberta Grigg, who retired in 2001, died last month at 79.

Announcements and Implementations

MarinHealth goes live on PatientKeeper’s physician charge capture.

Sanford Health (SD) will develop a virtual care center using a $350 million gift from donor Denny Sanford.

In Canada, Bayshore HealthCare launches an after-hours symptoms management app that allows cancer and palliative care patients to connect with a nurse instead of visiting the ED. The CareChart app offers online and telephone triage, self-assessment ahead of virtual visits, and real-time information submission to the patient’s care team.

UK-based real-world data analytics platform vendor Sensyne Health launches Sensight, which provides AI research capability using de-identified data from hospitals in the US and UK for $35,000 per user per year.

Government and Politics

The fraud trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes began Wednesday. A traffic ticket issued that same day to her husband – who is a 27-year-old heir to a hotel chain fortune — revealed that she is commuting to court from an estate that is listed for sale at $135 million.

COVID-19

The US COVID-19 death count has reached 650,000, about the same number of American deaths as in the Civil War or in the 1918 influenza epidemic. The US fully vaccinated rate is #52 among the world’s countries at just over 52%.

More than 50 Georgia hospitals, including Grady Memorial, are postponing elective surgeries and turning away ambulances because of COVID-19 patient loads. Governor Brian Kemp rejected calls to halt elective surgeries in all state hospitals and to extend licensure waivers, adding that he will issue no new mandates and instead asks the federal government to limit the hourly rates of staffing companies as “states are forced to outbid one another using federal coronavirus relief dollars in order to obtain adequate hospital staffing.”

Idaho’s state government activates “crisis standards of care” that allow hospitals to ration their services. Patients whose likelihood of survival is lower will be denied ICU beds and hospitals can admit patients to classrooms and conference rooms. Less than 40% of the state’s residents are fully vaccinated, trailing only Alabama, Mississippi, and Wyoming.

FDA notes that it has authorized more than 400 COVID-19 tests, including 13 rapid at-home ones. It would be helpful to see FDA issue plain-language advice on those 13 – cost, where to get them, advantages and disadvantages, etc. I got a text message while writing this that my latest four-pack of $10 BinaxNow tests was dropped off at my door from Walmart.com, but they are sold out of them again. I’m all for the free market, but I would rather see a single manufacturer’s test sold for $1 and available everywhere rather than making it confusing and expensive to the point that nobody bothers. Other countries are doing this far better.

A randomized controlled trial of hospitalized COVID-19 patients finds that using convalescent plasma did not improve outcomes and may have worsened them. FDA issued its Emergency Use Authorization in the pandemic’s early days, with HHS Secretary Alex Azar touting it as a “very historic breakthrough” as evidenced by a single retrospective study that was published as a pre-print.

Microsoft indefinitely postpones a return to in-person work in the US, providing no date to replace its original October 4 target. Amazon, Facebook, and Google had already delayed in-person work until 2022, meaning that many of their employees will not have worked in company offices for two years.

Texas, Missouri, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Wyoming are submitting detailed COVID-19 health equity data for less than one-tenth of their total cases, with erratic reporting causing data to be missing for 20% of US cases. Two-thirds of the submitted information is also unusable because of fields left blank or filled in as “unknown.” CDC collects where patients live, whether they were hospitalized or died, and demographic information. The most commonly missing information includes race / ethnicity and symptoms experienced.

Other

Pune, India’s efforts to connect hospitals for real-time COVID-19 data sharing via HL7 hits a bump when the the pilot project hospitals decide not to share their information.

Illinois-based Edward-Elmhurst Health and NorthShore University HealthSystem announce plans to merge.

Providence Chief Digital Officer Aaron Martin, MBA – who worked 10 years ago for Amazon’s on-demand publishing group – says Amazon and other tech companies aren’t exiting healthcare for good, but instead are changing their approach. He makes these points:

• Amazon’s failures often turn into successful pivots, such as an auction platform that turned into its third-party sales platform and the Fire phone that died quickly but created Alexa.
• Healthcare is decades behind other industries as it continues to use technologies that create data silos.
• Amazon will probably succeed in mail-order pharmacy and eventually pharmacy benefits management, although Amazon Care is a less-sure undertaking because of the complexity involved.
• Walmart may use its large pharmacy footprint to expand into care delivery.
• Microsoft is sticking to its technology offerings in selling cloud services, competing with Google and Amazon.
• Google still has fitness trackers and other projects, but de-centralizing its healthcare efforts into individual operating units may de-emphasize its focus.
• Apple has the Watch that could be used for remote patient monitoring, although it is IOS-only and expensive.
• The big change could occur with acquisitions like Microsoft buying Nuance.
• Health systems should not assume that disruption is no longer needed now that the big tech threat has diminished. They will always come back and they are learning from their failures.

Sponsor Updates

• LexisNexis Risk Solutions will sponsor the Whole Person Care Virtual Summit September 21-22.
• The Bulls ‘n Bears Podcast features Mach7 Technologies CEO Mike Lampron.
• Meditech shares preparatory guidance for COVID-19 vaccine booster shots.

Blog Posts

• The Most Essential HIT Partnership in a Health System Portfolio (Halo Health)
• Get a Better Night’s Sleep: What Healthcare Leaders Should Know About Blockchain (Healthcare Triangle)
• COVID Boosters & Beyond – Automated Patient Engagement (Intrado)
• What’s in a variant? Part II – Making sense of data through harmonization (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• New Study Shows How Clinical AI Can Improve End-of-Life Care for Cancer Patients (Jvion)
• Best Practices for Managing Seconds-to-Minutes Emergencies (Medhost)
• Must EHRs become platforms? (Nordic)
• 5 ways Expanse addresses the next big challenges in healthcare (Meditech)
• Mentorship 101: How Newfire’s Culture of Support Leads to Career Growth & Success (Newfire Global Partners)

Contacts

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

News 9/8/21

Top News

Invitae will acquire Ciitizen, a consumer-focused health data startup, for $325 million.

The genetics company will integrate Ciitizen’s technology as a health data collection and organization service for its patients.

Ciitizen has raised $20 million since launching four years ago. It acquired HIE vendor Stella Technology in May.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Olive. The Columbus, OH-based automation company is creating the Internet of Healthcare. It is addressing healthcare’s most burdensome issues through automation, delivering hospitals, health systems, and payers increased revenue, reduced costs, and improved efficiency. People feel lost in the system today and healthcare employees are essentially working in the dark due to outdated technology that creates a lack of shared knowledge and siloed data. Olive is driving connections to shine new light on healthcare processes, improving operations today so everyone can benefit from a healthier industry tomorrow. Thanks to Olive for supporting HIStalk.

I found this YouTube demo of using Olive to automate prescription refill requests.

We had a family get-together last week, with a dozen of us traveling to a place we had rented. All of us who are eligible have been fully vaccinated and we all tested negative before arrival with the BinaxNow rapid COVID-19 test. A four-year-old whose family stayed only through the first weekend became symptomatic and tested positive last Monday. Her infection almost certainly came from close contact the week before with an unvaccinated preschool teacher (the school was waffling on its mandatory vaccination plans and was not forthcoming with parents about staff vaccinations). Luckily everybody else in our group tested negative. Testing is once again a US problem as drive-through sites have shut down and not all stores have the $10 BinaxNow tests (CVS had the complicated, expensive, and reportedly less-reliable Ellume tests in limited supply). Not to mention that not all families can afford to buy and keep boxes of tests at home. Other countries are providing the many brands of tests their governments have approved (versus a handful here) at no charge, even mailing them to homes, so that infected people can avoid exposing others, but of course here even people with positive tests can’t be trusted to be responsible. Abbott must be making a fortune even at $10 per test since it looks like maybe 75 cents worth of product and packaging whose fixed cost component has long since been covered. Coronavirus capitalism is interesting.

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Urgent care appointment-booking software vendor Solv raises $45 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $95 million.

Medication management software vendor Omnicell opens a software development center in India.

A new KLAS report on ambulatory surgery center EHRs finds that HST Pathways and Surgical Information Systems lead in adoption with high usability although falling short on anesthesia documentation, while Provation performs highly for specialties.

Sales

• Virginia Hospital Center selects Phunware’s digital front door technology.
• Athenahealth makes ConnectiveRx’s ScriptGuide point-of-care prescription savings messages available through its EHR.

People

Former EMT and health IT long-timer John Danahey joins Picis Clinical Solutions as EVP.

CipherHealth names Mandana Varahrami (RapidDeploy) chief product officer.

Industry long-timer Scott Lenz, who retired from NetApp in 2016, died Friday at 59.

Announcements and Implementations

Mount Sinai Health System’s IT department develops the patient-facing MyMountSinai app.

Government and Politics

Ireland’s national health service has almost totally recovered from the May ransomware attack that severely impacted services across the country for several weeks. Some facilities are still dealing with cancelled appointments, and employee email access has yet to be restored. The hackers ended up giving the HSE the encryption key for “free” after it refused to pay the $20 million ransom.

COVID-19

Hawaii’s COVID-19 case counts are being reported incorrectly as its systems are stressed by volumes as well as inconsistency in how reporting systems – including more than 100 labs – send their data. Not all systems support HL7 and those that do may apply different rules to individual data elements. Another issue that in the absences of a national patient identifier, a misspelled name can cause one person’s multiple test results to be counted as multiple cases. State epidemiologists suggest using seven-day case averages to smooth out one- or two-day swings caused by inconsistent reporting times.

Scripps hospitals in California report that they experienced their highest-ever single day deaths this past weekend, all 19 of them involving patients who were not fully vaccinated. Its employees say they are being called liars by some patients who don’t believe they are infected.

Other

Amazon will reportedly offer in-home medical visits in 20 US cities later this year via its Amazon Care business.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom hires Lori Lyons as director of marketing engagement.
• CareSignal wins the HIMSS 2021 Global Maternal Health Tech Challenge.
• CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast featuring MedStar health SVP and CIO Scott MacLean.
• Dimensional Insight receives a high overall rating in the 2021 “Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer: Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms” report.
• Divurgent celebrates its 14^th anniversary.
• Spok offers a new e-book, “Solving the critical test result workflow challenge with closed loop communication.”

Blog Posts

• Ten steps SNFs must take for stronger infection protection and control (Ability Network)
• Is your phone being spied on? (AdvancedMD)
• Agfa HealthCare’s 2021 Summer Interns (Agfa HealthCare)
• Care transitions: 3 major challenges for post-acute providers (CarePort)
• 3 Problem Areas an IT Asset Inventory Can Uncover in Healthcare Facilities (CereCore)
• Previewing What’s in Store for AAOS 2021 (ChartLogic)
• Why Do So Many Providers Fail to Capture Annual Wellness Visits? (ChartSpan)
• Lessons in cybersecurity from Clearwater Compliance’s Bob Chaput: Part 1 of 2 (Clearwater)
• What’s New in the Cloud? (Cloudwave)
• How to Help Your Patients with Manufacturer Copay Cards (CoverMyMeds)
• Seven Tips for a Successful ERP Implementation (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Top Healthcare IT Challenges in the Aftermath of COVID-19 (Dimensional Insight)
• Why Usability is Critical to Healthcare IT (EClinicalWorks)
• 4 data-driven healthcare marketing strategies to re-engage patients after COVID-19 (Experian Health)
• The Era of Claim Denials and How to Avoid Coding Errors that Cause Them (EZDI)

Contacts

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

HIStalk Polls 2007-2012

A reader asked if the results of my weekly reader polls are available as an archive. They aren’t because of limitations of the tool I use, but I went back and recapped some of the more interesting ones from the earliest of those years. These are listed in order of oldest (2007) to newest (2012). Sorry for the somewhat fuzzy screenshots, but the tool doesn’t have good bulk export tools.

Monday Morning Update 9/6/21

Top News

A BMJ-published review of using AI for breast cancer screening finds that 34 of 36 reviewed systems were less accurate than a single radiologist and all performed more poorly than two radiologists.

Excluded from the review were studies that used the same data for training and validation, which likely perform worse in analyzing new data.

The authors conclude that AI is “a long way from having the quality and quantity required” to use in clinical practice, especially without further radiologist review, such as in screening “normal” mammograms.

Reader Comments

From New Vince Fan: “Re: Vince Ciotti’s HIS-tory. Will be continue to be available on HIStalk?” Yes. Vince and I had agreed two years ago that his HIS-tory was in danger of being lost when stored as individual PowerPoints that he had created over several years, so I spent a day assembling them all into a single PDF that is permanently available from the top menu under Navigation / Information (or directly here). Vince cheerfully admitted that his memory of events from 40-50 years ago wasn’t perfect and someone who worked within one of the companies he wrote about would be more knowledgeable of specific details that he speculated about, but Vince had a rare broad view of the industry having worked in much of it, known most of its pioneers, and seen with clarity what went right or went wrong with corporate decisions. It was touching when he told me that he considered his HIS-tory series to be his legacy after a 50-year career.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I just couldn’t find a sensible way to word the question I asked last week about who companies might hire for a CEO position – triggered by Cerner’s two-for-two in hiring people in their first-time CEO job – so I’ll allow the answers to speak for themselves. My poorly worded question even confounded the issue at hand – David Feinberg had CEO experience before Cerner named him to that job, but it was for a non-profit health system.

New poll to your right or here: Which of these HR actions have happened to you?

Listening: the first new music from ABBA since 1982, accompanied by a sweetly reminiscent look back at their history via photos and video from when the then-married couples donned spacey costumes and eyeliner to sing with Swedish accents the best Europop of that era and perhaps any other. They don’t look quite like the members you remember since they’re in their mid-70s now, but they sound fine. The band had refused the richest contracts in history to reunite over fears that fans would be disappointed, but they have reconciled their personal differences to record a new album and an avatar-powered concert experience that will be backed by live musicians. I will say as a music fan that ABBA’s was fresh more than skilled (though written by Benny and Bjorn with an immensely strong commercial pop ear) and was mostly just a lot of youthful fun with the occasionally darker overtone later in their career, but I still like it (my favorite album: 1981’s “The Visitors,” which was their last, and my favorite song “Slipping Through My Fingers” from that same album). The BB boys have always called the shots, made fortunes in commercial music ventures, and are the active participants in this reunion, while the girls (Frida and Agnetha) provided the most memorable performing component but then chose a quiet, mostly non-musical life and seem to have a background role in the new content. I’ll say that the boys could just write their songs and then stay home and count their money and I would be equally happy watching AA bring them to life without them. BB are making fortunes from songwriting royalties and finding new ways to resell the group’s old music.

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

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF gained 1.7% in the past month versus the Nasdaq’s 3.7% rise. EDOC shares were launched nearly a year ago and have risen 19% since versus the Nasdaq’s 36% gain.

Achieve Partners acquires cybersecurity services vendor Metmox to develop a training and mentorship program, the same reason it acquired Optimum Healthcare IT in July.

Sales

• The VA renews its CliniComp contract for another five years.

People

Adirondac Health (NY) names Aaron Kramer, MS as president and CEO. Most of his career has been spent in IT, including work as an IBM systems administrator, an IT director, and CIO of Adirondac through June 2019.

Susan Salahshoor, RN, MMIS (PatientSafe Solutions) joins TransformativeMed as VP of clinical success.

Announcements and Implementations

McLaren Northern Michigan goes live on Vocera, deploying its Vina smartphone app and Smartbadge voice-controlled wearable.

COVID-19

HHS reports that most states have 25% or more of their ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients (dark red above), requiring 25,000 beds nationally of 85,000 available. Seven-day deaths per 100,000 population are highest in Louisiana, Nevada, Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Eric Topol wonders why we have to base US decisions on data from Israel (reason: they collect it, we don’t). Another challenge here is that vaccine records are not reliably centralized and tied to a national patient identifier, which is not surprising when the main proof of vaccination is an easily counterfeited paper card with scrawled handwriting that focused on product information rather than the recipient.

Texas has only 81 pediatric and 200 adult ICU beds available for its 29 million residents, as schools have reported 50,000 new student cases in two weeks and a dozen school districts have closed temporarily. Eight counties are using refrigerated trucks to store the bodies of COVID-19 patients.

Other

TechRepublic profiles Rush University Medical Center’s use of Amazon HealthLake to track COVID-19 cases. HealthLake, which became generally available in July, includes FHIR connectivity.

University of Connecticut profiles UConn Health interim CIO Adam Buckley, MD, MBA (University of Vermont Health Network) who joined the health system in July in replacing interim Chuck Podesta, who is now CIO at Renown Health (NV).

Four of six traveling ICU nurses that were contracted by Providence St. Joseph Hospital Eureka (CA) to care for COVID-19 patients quit the next day, which CEO Roberta Luskin-Hawk, MD says is due to their unfamiliarity with its EHR even though it is “used by many hospitals.” Still, she says, “We are excited to be transitioning to a more widely used electronic medical record system in the coming weeks.”

Atlanta-area telehealth nurses tell a local TV station that they lack clinical training and are telling patients “hold while I review your records” and then are frantically Googling their symptoms. Nurses report that hold times are up to one hour as high numbers of callers are turned away in EDs and urgent care centers. One nurse says, “We have no knowledge of childhood illnesses, diseases, or parameters of vital signs and I just felt that that’s a very dangerous situation” as better trained nurses haven left for higher-paying jobs.

Sponsor Updates

• Clearwater publishes a new case study, “Digital Health Company CaringWays Partners with Clearwater for Cybersecurity and HIPAA Compliance.”
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Using EClinicalWorks Tools to Measure Quality for Shared Savings at Innova Primary.”
• Change Healthcare offers a new Supporting Accurate Claims content hub.
• OptimizeRx CEO Will Febbo will present at the Lake Street Capital Markets’ The Best Ideas Growth Conference September 14-15, and at the Piper and Sandler 2021 Heartland Summit September 29-30.
• Symplr publishes a new case study, “Baystate Health’s New Digital Peer Referencing Integration is a Dream Come True.”
• Protenus publishes a new case study, “Seattle Children’s Hospital Uses AI to Protect Pediatric Patients’ Privacy.”
• Seniors at Douglas County Health Center stay connected using technology from Sonifi Health.
• Data-protection vendor Spirion announces its inclusion in seven 2021 Gartner Hype Cycle reports.
• WebPT becomes The Alliance for Physical Therapy Quality and Innovation’s first at-large member and strategic partner.

Blog Posts

• Effective Network Segmentation Strategies to Fend Off Cyberattacks (Clearwater)
• Embracing AI-enabled technologies as a strategic asset (Nuance)
• Overdose Awareness: Featuring Ashley Addiction Treatment (Netsmart)
• How Healthcare Providers Can Attract Medicare Consumers (PatientBond)
• Driving Domestic Gloves Production: Andy Brailo with Henry Ford Health System (Premier)
• The ROI of the Spok Go clinical communication and collaboration platform (Spok)
• 3 ways to make billing and payments part of a great patient journey (Talkdesk)
• Skip the Phone Calls. Engage Your Members in a New Way. (Twistle)
• Celebrate to Motivate: The Best Staff Appreciation Ideas for Rehab Therapy Clinics (WebPT)
• Burnout a ‘growing problem’ for physician assistants, reports JAAPA (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 9/3/21

Top News

Baxter International will acquire Hillrom for $10.5 billion in cash plus assumption of debt that values the transaction at $12.4 billion.

The announcement emphasizes Hillrom’s recent refocus from manufacturing hospital beds to remote patient monitoring and connected care solutions.

Hillrom previously acquired cardiac monitoring company Bardy Diagnostics for $375 million, patient monitoring vendor EarlySense for $30 million, and clinical communications vendor Voalte for $180 million.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I was saddened to learn from Bill Bogutski that Vince Ciotti has died. Vince retired in 2019 after a 50-year health IT career, much of it spent working with Bill and other principals of the HIS Professionals consulting firm. The photo of Vince above is from a reunion of former employees of Shared Medical Systems in 2019. Vince spent considerable time over several years, starting in 2011, documenting health IT’s first decades for HIStalk readers in his engrossing HIS-tory series. I interviewed him two years ago and it’s still an entertaining read that will give you a feel for Vince’s filter-less, cynical humor. I asked him then what he wanted his epitaph to say:

If I could be remembered for anything, it would probably be my HIS-tory files, which I thank you for posting over such a long time, two and a half years. I hope some of the future CIOs read them and learn from them. I hope that’s what they remember me by, the guy that warned them about not repeating these mistakes of the past.

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare Triangle files for an IPO that will raise up to $50 million.

Provation acquires Pentax Medical’s EndoPro endoscopy software. 

Accenture acquires Canada-based healthcare technology consulting firm Gevity. 

Sales

• Coalition of Asian-American IPA chooses CarePort Connect for care coordination.

People

SOC Telemed promotes Chris Gallagher, MD to CEO. He replaces John Kalix, who resigned his CEO and board positions.

Transcarent hires Snezana Mahon, PharmD (Evernorth) as COO.

Stephanie Solich (Zipari) joins VisiQuate as VP of client development.

Patient payment and engagement platform vendor Millennia names Dave Dyell as chief strategy officer and Doug Sundlof (Cloudmed) as SVP of sales.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions promotes Jeff Diamond, JD to president and GM of its healthcare business.

Announcements and Implementations

UC San Diego Health launches the Center for Health Innovation to develop, test, and commercialize technologies.

COVID-19

A University of California San Diego Health review of employee health records finds that COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection dropped from 90% in June to 66% in July, which the authors attribute to emergence of the delta variant, waning immunity suggesting the need for booster doses, and the ending of masking mandates. Adding to the argument for booster doses is that those healthcare workers who were vaccinated earlier were infected at a higher rate.

A New York attorney is suing hospitals that refuse to administer ivermectin to ventilated COVID-19 patients whose families insist.

Sponsor Updates

• Glytec will host “Time to Target: Uniting Around Patient Safety,” its inaugural conference on glycemic innovation and collaboration October 26-27.
• Everbridge wins two Silver 2021 Stevie Awards in the categories of customer service department of the year and customer service team of the year.
• The HCI Group releases a new DGTL Voices with Ed Marx podcast, “Soul-Stirring Kilimanjaro Clinic.”
• Healthcare IT Leaders publishes a new guide, “15 Tips for Patient Accounting System Project Success.”
• Ideawake releases a new video, “3 Health Systems Transforming Patient Care via Bottom-Up Innovation Programs.”
• Imprivata makes its digital identity solutions One Sign and Confirm ID available on Microsoft Azure.
• Infor publishes a new case study, “Bozeman Health raises quality of care and reduces waste with Infor.”
• InterSystems releases a new podcast, “How Can Healthy Data Save Healthcare?”
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring CPSI CMO William Hayes, MD.
• NextGate names Minakshi Tikoo, PhD (NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene) director of product management.

Blog Posts

• Balancing Healthcare Resilience with the Patient Experience (Everbridge)
• Five Actions to Help Prevent Opioid Overdose (First Databank)
• Digital Health Technology Deployed for Veteran Suicide Prevention (GetWellNetwork)
• Clinical Technology Disparities and Opportunities for Improvement (Halo Health)
• Six Tactics to Restore the Healthcare Revenue Cycle (Health Catalyst)
• The Value of ServiceNow IT Business Management (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Telehealth Needs Your Help (Healthwise)
• T-Mobile breach exposed data of 40 million: How safe is your customers’ personal information? (Imprivata)
• What’s in a variant? Clinical documentation, epidemiology, and genomic sequencing (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Healthcare Must Engage Patients and Clinicians as They Manage the Rest of Their Life (Medhost)
• How Meditech customers are supporting patients this Recovery Month (Meditech)
• 7 Tips for Leveling Up Your PT Practice Before 2022 (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 9/1/21

Top News

Sources report for the second time in as many months that Baxter will acquire medical equipment company Hillrom for nearly $10 billion. Last month’s initial offer put Hillrom shares at $144 apiece, while this more recent bid inches closer to $150. The deal may be announced before the holiday weekend.

Hillrom has in the last several years ventured beyond its hospital bed roots into health IT, acquiring cardiac monitoring company Bardy Diagnostics for $375 million, patient monitoring vendor EarlySense for $30 million, and clinical communications vendor Voalte for $180 million.

I interviewed Hillrom SVP Mary Kay Ladone, a nearly 30-year Baxter veteran, in March.

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Tele-genetics testing and counseling company Genome Medical raises $60 million and acquires GeneMatters, which offers genetic counseling via video visit, as well as care delivery and patient engagement software.

Summit Healthcare reports that revenue and sales have exceeded expectations for the first half of the year, with 18 health systems recently signing on for the company’s data integration and exchange, automation, and business continuity services.

The tit for tat between NextGen Healthcare’s board members continues, with the company publishing an email from the chair of its nominating committee to board member Lance Rosenzweig to further demonstrate that Rosenzweig and company founder and board member Sheldon “Shelly” Razin are in fact trying to obstruct board operations.

DirectTrust acquires the assets of Safe Identity, an industry consortium and certification body for digital healthcare credentials.

Ellipsis Health raises $26 million in a Series A funding round. The startup has developed AI-based voice recognition technology that detects signs of depression and anxiety.

Appriss Health rebrands to Bamboo Health following its acquisition of PatientPing.

Sales

• Vizient signs a two-year contract with Ascom, giving its members access to pre-negotiated pricing and terms for the Ascom nurse call and monitoring system.
• Lee Health (FL), LifeBridge Health (MD), MedStar Health (MD), MercyOne (IA), Moffitt Cancer Center (FL), and MultiCare (WA) sign on for Avia’s membership-based, digital healthcare transformation consulting services.

People

LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Healthcare CEO Josh Schoeller takes on the additional role of Elsevier Clinical Solutions president.

The VA promotes Neil Evans, MD to acting CIO.

Twistle President and COO Matt Revis also joins the Health Catalyst leadership team. Health Catalyst acquired Twistle in June.

Announcements and Implementations

Spok announces GA of its ReadyCall Text waiting room pager, alongside enhancements to its Spok Go clinical communications platform.

Government and Politics

The FBI issues an alert about Hive ransomware, which has attacked nearly 30 healthcare organizations since first detected in June. The alert may have been spurred by the mid-August attack on Memorial Health System (OH), which ended up paying the hackers to regain access to internal systems that include 800 servers and 3,000 personal devices used by physicians.

COVID-19

A pre-print analysis of 24 statewide COVID-19 vaccine incentive programs finds no significant change in vaccination rates within those states, and no significant difference in vaccination trends between states that did and did not offer incentives.

A church youth camp and concurrent (though separately located) men’s conference held by the same organization in June has been linked to 180 confirmed and probable COVID-19 cases, most of whom were unvaccinated. Those cases ultimately led to 1,000 people in four states being exposed through attendance or close contact. The host organization did not require testing or vaccination for either event.

Other

Southern Louisiana hospitals in the path of Hurricane Ida have reported extensive roof damage, inoperable phone systems, power failures, and the need to enact staffing emergency staffing protocols. Hospital operations teams were especially concerned about the storm’s impact coupled with a surge in COVID-19 patients. More than 2,400 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized across the state as of Sunday.

Jury selection has begun in the trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Set to start on September 8, the trial has been postponed several times since she was charged with multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud in 2018. This article offers a quick refresher on what led up to the legal proceedings.

A study published in Contraception looks at the growing trend in at-home IUD removal and the corresponding uptick in DIY videos on Youtube and TikTok. Top motivators for the at-home option include the expense of an in-office procedure, side effects, a desire to get pregnant, and even unwillingness on the part of some providers.

Sponsor Updates

• Ellkay has sponsored the Cerner Foundation’s Westport Bounce, which provides funding for equipment, medicine, surgeries, travel, and wellness screenings to students.
• Spok publishes a new e-book, “The ROI of the Spok Go clinical communication and collaboration platform.”
• CereCore wins ClearlyRated’s 2021 Best of Staffing client and talent awards for service excellence.
• Cerner CIO Bill Graff wins CIO of the Year in the Orbie Awards’ large enterprise category.
• CHIME’s Digital Health Leaders Podcast features Monument Health CIO and CMO Stephanie Lahr.
• Clearwater publishes a new case study, “A Clear Success: Strong Cybersecurity & HIPAA Compliance Program Positions CaringWays for Growth.”
• Clinical Architecture celebrates its 14^th anniversary.
• Dimensional Insight’s Smarter Healthcare Podcast features Mass General Brigham Chief Digital Health Officer Alistair Erskine, MD.
• Cooper University Health Care (NJ) expands its use to Nuance’s Dragon Ambient Experience to 475 physicians and APPs.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Improving Patient Safety by Reducing Uncoded Allergies.”

Blog Posts

• Is the Value-Based Purchasing program on its way out? What SNFs need to know. (Ability Network)
• Interpol’s Latest on COVID-19 Cyberthreats (AdvancedMD)
• Riding for a Cure: Diameter Health’s Pan-Mass Challenge Team (Diameter Health)
• The Infinity Gauntlet of Healthcare Interoperability (EClinicalWorks)
• How data standardization can improve patient outcomes (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/30/21

Top News

Google shuts down its DeepMind-developed Streams app that displays patient information to UK clinicians.

Streams was the only DeepMind app that didn’t use AI, and plans to incorporate the technology were never acted on. It uses algorithms that were developed by the UK’s NHS.

The UK’s data protection office objected to The Royal Free Hospital providing DeepMind with patient data without their consent or knowledge during its development of Streams. Royal Free is the only NHS Trust that is still using Streams.

Google acquired AI startup DeepMind in early 2014 for a reported $500 million. Most of the company’s work involves teaching computers to play games such as Go and Pong. Its DeepMind Health business was moved within Google Health in late 2018, raising privacy objections that DeepMind had promised repeatedly that its data “will never be linked or associated with Google accounts, products, or services.”

Google says it will focus instead on Care Studio, which is being piloted at Ascension and Beth Israel Deaconess.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Cerner’s new CEO hire draws about a two-to-one negative among those who care.

New poll to your right or here: What background would you favor if you were hiring a CEO for your current employer? It’s an awkwardly constructed question, but my interest was piqued by IANAL’s comment last week that growing software companies usually hire CEOs whose background is strong either in sales or technology, and Cerner’s incoming CEO David Feinberg doesn’t fit that mold. I didn’t do a great job of incorporating what probably should have been a separate poll – at what point should a company’s hiring favor comparable CEO experience?

I was thinking about the prediction years ago and digital stethoscopes would replace their low-tech acoustic counterparts for a myriad of logical reasons. I get the feeling that it’s still mostly old-school instruments being used, but maybe someone has stats.

I’m taking a semi-break this week while still doing most of my usual HIStalk work, just from elsewhere and hopefully spending less time.

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Olive launches an in-house venture studio for startups that are developing solutions for its automation platform.

Sales

• Wolters Kluwer, Health adds six UK customers of UpToDate and Lexicomp.
• Whatley Health Services chooses RCxRules for revenue cycle automation.

People

VitalTech hires Steven Scott (PointRight) as president and CEO.

Clearsense promotes Kimberly Dickason, RN, MBA to COO and hires Pamela Fowler, MBA (University of Washington) as chief marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Mayo Clinic and Verily will collaborate to develop an evidence-based decision support solution, starting with cardiovascular and cardiometabolic conditions. The tool will be driven by Mayo-developed content and de-identified health data and will use open standards to allow integration with commercial EHRs.

Government and Politics

Ascension pays $85,000 to settle Justice Department charges that it violated federal immigration laws because of a software programming error. The error caused Ascension’s custom employee eligibility verification software to send automated emails to all of its non-citizen employees whose documents were set to expire, requesting them to submit proof of continued work authorization. Some of the recipients had presented documents that did not require re-verification, such as permanent residents and refugees. The Justice Department concludes, “Employers are reminded that while software programs may seem efficient, there is still a responsibility to ensure that programming decisions do not result in discrimination.”

COVID-19

China delays its approval of the BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine because of concerns that availability of a more modern, more effective vaccine will undermine confidence in its old-school, made-in-China products that are key to its national vaccination program.

Texas reports that nearly 14,000 people are hospitalized with confirmed coronavirus infection, occupying 21% all all hospital beds, and 300 people died of COVID-19 on Friday. The entire state has 303 ICU beds available versus the nearly 2,500 that were free pre-pandemic. A 46-year-old Houston-area Army combat veteran died of gallstone pancreatitis last week because lack of ICU beds. An ED doctor who treated him says treatment is a 30-minute procedure that is nearly always successful. The doctor says, “We are playing musical chairs with 100 people and 10 chairs. When the music stops, what happens? People from all over the world come to Houston to get medical care and, right now, Houston can’t take care of patients from the next town over.”

CDC describes how an unvaccinated teacher who kept working while experiencing congestion and fatigue and later tested positive for COVID-19 infected 12 of her 22 students after removing her mask to read to the class. The attack rate of the students seated in the front rows of the classroom was 80% versus 28% in the back rows.

Other

A Wisconsin advocacy group for raising taxes on the wealthy says that the net worth of Epic CEO Judy Faulkner rose from $2.5 billion in March 2020 to $6.7 billion in August 2021. Its data source was a web page from Forbes, which has no way of knowing the net worth of anyone beyond their publicly reported stock holdings, but that earns click bait traffic by making its made-up numbers look authoritative.

It seems obvious that the Internet’s robust supply of mean people seek health information online like everybody else, but it turns out that the headline writer misspelled “men.”

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Saving Summer with Kiosk, the Patient Portal, and More at MedRite.”
• Symplr publishes a new whitepaper, “Workforce Management Strategies in Times of Uncertainty.”
• Pure Storage’s FlashArray helps to improve the performance of Korea’s COVID-19 vaccine reservation system operated by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency.
• Quil Chief Customer Officer Roelf Kuitse will speak at the American Cancer Society’s Changemakers virtual series, Achieving Equity in the Telehealth Age September 21.
• The MatrixCare podcast features Surescripts Manager of Product Innovation Rachel Petersen and Surescripts Key Account Executive Jill Lytwyn.
• Visage Imaging parent company ProMedicus names Alice Williams a director.
• Azara Healthcare and Luma Health form a technology partnership for their population health data reporting and patient journey platform, respectively.
• Vocera will present at the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference September 9, the Baird Healthcare Conference September 14, and the Morgan Stanley Healthcare Conference September 15.
• West Monroe publishes a new report, “What’s Driving the Current Wave of Healthcare M&A and Investment?”

Blog Posts

• Five reasons why chatbots fail. (And how to make yours a runaway success.) (Nuance)
• How Health Plans Can Reduce Readmissions (PatientBond)
• 3 Ways to Increase Medical Practice Revenue (PMD)
• Data Delivered: Collaborating with Pharma to Study Anticoagulant Use in COVID-19 Patients (Premier)
• Get the Support You Need: Privacy Professional Services Elevate Resource-Strapped Teams (Protenus)
• How to Realize Revenue Earlier by Offering Patients More Flexible Payment Options (Sphere)
• The guide to pagers for hospitals (Spok)
• Talkdesk integration with Zoom unifies contact center collaboration (Talkdesk)
• Why Providence is Making the Switch to Cloud-Based Data Management for EHR (Tegria)
• Unlocking the Value of Genotypic and Phenotypic Data for Translational Research (TriNetX)
• Can Postpartum Contraceptive Care be Enhanced with Technology? (Twistle)
• Revenue cycle 101: charity care screening (Waystar)
• FAQ: The 2022 Medicare Proposed Rule and Other Perplexing Payer Regulations (WebPT)
• Well Health HIMSS 2021 Recap (Well Health)

The following HIStalk sponsors have achieved top client satisfaction and user experience rankings in Black Book’s latest survey on coding, transcription, CDI, and clinical information management software and services vendors:

• Nuance – comprehensive mid-RCM coding, CDI, and compliance solutions; CDI software; medical speech recognition and AI solutions.
• Infor – clinical data interoperability solutions.
• Symplr – provider credentialing.
• Agfa Healthcare – vendor neutral archive.

Contacts

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

News 8/27/21

Top News

Allscripts sells its precision medicine software subsidiary 2bPrecise to laboratory diagnostics software company AccessDX. Terms were not disclosed.

The sale comes nearly a year after Allscripts sold CarePort Health to WellSky for $1.35 billion.

Readers pointed out at the time that 2bPrecise and Veradigm might be next in line to sell.

Reader Comments

From Legerdemain: “Re: job question. I get great reviews, but they say there’s no budget for a decent raise and promises of promotions never pan out. Is it time to look elsewhere?” Of course. In fact, it’s always time to be looking elsewhere, especially if your potential new job is one that can be performed remotely so you don’t have to uproot yourself and your family. Employers have no incentive to voluntarily offer higher pay to employees who otherwise seem content to stick around without it. Somehow the money magically appears only when you threaten to quit and they realize how hard or expensive it will be to replace you. But I’ll add this — don’t let your employer buy you back once you’ve received another job offer. Why would you want to keep working for a company that treats you fairly only when there’s a gun to their head and that will likely remember your perceived disloyalty unfavorably in future HR decisions?

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

ManpowerGroup will acquire IT staffing and services provider Ettain Group for $925 million in cash. Ettain Group acquired Leidos Health, the commercial EHR consulting business of Leidos, in October 2019. Leidos Health was formed when Leidos acquired Vitalize Consulting Solutions and MaxIT Healthcare.

Mental health app company Ginger will merge with meditation app startup Headspace. The newly combined company will be known as Headspace Health, a division originally created by Headspace in 2018 to develop FDA-approved, prescription-strength meditation apps. Ginger CEO Russell Glass will take on the same role with the new company, while Headspace CEO CeCe Morken will retain that title and become president of the new business. Ginger raised $100 million in a Series E round earlier this year. The combined companies have a reported valuation of $3 billion.

Antidote Health, a virtual primary and urgent care company serving patients in five states, will use $12 million in seed funding to establish a health maintenance organization for its customers.

Not directly health IT related, but they cover the industry: Robert Albritton, the 52-year-old founder and owner of Politico, will sell the 14-year-old digital publishing group for more than $1 billion to a Germany-based media conglomerate.

Dollar General says in its earnings call that its healthcare push will take several years and involve services that aren’t readily available to its rural customers, such as eye care, telemedicine, and prescription drug delivery. The company has already partnered with GeniusRx, Higi, and telehealth provider Babylon.

NextGen Healthcare’s board says in a surprisingly blunt public statement that two of its members – one of them company’s founder, Shelly Razin – are “obstructing the Board’s effort to drive Board refreshment” with their proxy campaign to add their own slate of board members. The board says that members Razin and Lance Rosenzweig don’t want their candidates interviewed. The other board members also accused Razin of previously presiding as board chair over “a deteriorating business” and pushed a capital allocation plan that would have prioritized paying $400 million in dividends that would have mostly benefited him personally, with the company turning itself around only after he stepped down as president and CEO in 2000 as board chair in 2015.

Sales

• Axis Community Health and Tiburcio Vasquez Health Center choose CareSignal’s Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring.

People

Holon Solutions promotes Scott Tatro to chief customer officer.

Albany Medical Center (NY) has hired Suryakant Kale as its first CTO and VP of information services, technology, and infrastructure.

Nikolas Green (Amazon) joins Mercury Healthcare (formerly Healthgrades) as chief data officer.

ResMed promotes CTO Bobby Ghoshal to president of its SaaS business.

Announcements and Implementations

The Rural OB Access & Maternal Services network deploys Twistle’s text-based patient engagement technology to its network of providers in New Mexico.

Upstate Medical University in New York will use $2 million in funding from the FCC to upgrade its telehealth services, including improved integration with its Epic system. Nearly 70% of Upstate’s clinics have offered telemedicine services since the pandemic began; the health system has sometimes averaged 6,000 virtual visits a week.

UT Health East Texas offers patients telemedicine services and remote physical therapy and rehabilitation treatment from TheraNow.

COVID-19

COVID-19 hospitalizations have hit 100,000 for the first time since January, when vaccines weren’t widely available, and ICU patient count has exceeded 25,000 for the first time in the pandemic. Pediatric hospitalizations topped 2,000 for the first time in a year. Florida has 17,000 COVID-19 hospital inpatients, while Texas has 14,000. CDC reports 154,000 new cases and 1,138 new COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday.

COVID-19 cases in Meade County, SD, home to the Sturgis motorcycle rally, have risen 1,500% in the past two weeks. South Dakota has the largest percentage case increase of all states. Neighboring states had a big jump in documented infections after last year’s scaled-back event.

A music and surf festival in England with 50,000 attendees has been linked to nearly 5,000 COVID-19 cases, most of them in people aged 16 to 21. The festival required attendees to prove their COVID-19 vaccination status using the NHS Covid app and for festival campers to take a second test during the event and log the result.

Montana’s schools struggle to comply with a recently passed state law that prohibits treating vaccinated and unvaccinated people differently, which means that schools can’t follow CDC guidelines to quarantine only unvaccinated employees and students after COVID-19 exposure. Some schools say they will ignore the law when they reopen this week or next, some say they will make quarantine optional, and others will force vaccinated students to quarantine unnecessarily. Montana is also the only state that prohibits public and private employers from requiring employees to be vaccinated, which it says is discrimination and a violation of human rights.

Four states with low vaccination rates and high COVID case counts – Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama – are using half of the shipped supplies of the Regeneron antibody treatment that is given early in COVID infection to reduce the chance of hospitalization. Federal taxpayers are paying $1,250 per dose, plus an administration fee of several hundred dollars for Medicare patients, versus the $20 that vaccine would have cost. The governors of Texas and Florida are touting the treatment and opening government-run centers to administer it. One Florida hospital has administered the antibody treatment to 2,000 patients, at least 90% of them unvaccinated. According to the hospital’s chief nursing officer, “What’s amazing to me is that a vaccine we’ve been working on for 10 years, they are deathly afraid of. But this highly experimental cocktail? They’re willing to run in there the minute that they’re sick to get this infused into their bodies.”

An important review finds that airborne transmission of aerosolized respiratory viruses over longer distances and for longer time, including coronavirus, may be the dominant method of infection instead of droplets that fall quickly to the ground. Some mitigation measures overlap for both types of particles, such as distancing and masks, but the findings place extra emphasis on ventilation, mask type and fit, air filtration, and UV disinfection. For healthcare workers, medical masks and eye protection were designed for droplets and not aerosols and N95 types are best. The authors recommend using carbon dioxide sensors to monitor and optimize ventilation and the use of HEPA and HVAC aerosol filtration.

Other

University of South Australia researchers design an AI-powered facial digital camera system that can remotely monitor the vital signs of a NICU baby with ECG-level accuracy.

Sponsor Updates

• Experity launches the next generation of its Experity EMR/PM software for urgent care.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success video, “Using Healow Check-In at Utah Orthopedic Spine & Injury Center.”
• Everbridge has won the 2021 Service to the Citizen: Champions of Change Award for the deployment of its Return to Work and vaccine distribution software solutions over the last year.
• First Databank publishes a new study, “Characterization of Pharmacogenetic Information in Food and Drug Administration Drug Labeling and the Table of Pharmocogenetic Associations.”
• Bluestream publishes a digital developer checklist titled “Key Features to Look For in Virtual Care APIs.”
• The Healthcare de Jure Podcast features Halo Health CEO Jose Barreau, MD.
• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Symplr in its acquisition of SpinFusion.
• The American Red Cross of Greater Atlanta names LexisNexis the 2021 Corporate Blood Sponsor of the Year.

Blog Posts

• Delivering on the Promise of Health Equity in Inequitable Times (GetWellNetwork)
• The Clinical Collaboration Investment – Can You Afford Not To? (Halo Health)
• Accelerate Charge Capture Improvement with Health Catalyst VitalIntegrity (Health Catalyst)
• Taming the data tsunami: 5 clinical terminology tactics for success (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• COVID-19 Testing Support (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• In the Age of Chronic Conditions, Patient Education is Crucial (Healthwise)
• This ESPN-Televised Basketball Tournament Used Vaccine Verification to Keep Players and Staff Safe (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• What’s in a variant? Clinical documentation, epidemiology, and genomic sequencing (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• New Study Shows How Clinical AI Can Improve End-of-Life Care for Cancer Patients (Jvion)
• Which apps are best for patients and providers to share medical data? Digital health formularies may help them decide (Lyniate)
• Improve Care by Improving Clinic and Hospital Communication While Preventing Revenue Leakage (Medhost)
• Through the pandemic and beyond, more hospitals are choosing MaaS (Meditech)
• 6 Tips on Implementing a Team Approach to Patient Care (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 8/25/21

Top News

NextGen Healthcare board members Sheldon “Shelly” Razin – who also founded the company — and Lance Rosenzweig nominate their own slate of four new director candidates, blaming “Chairman Jeffrey Margolis and his allies” for impeding shareholder value by “effectively assuming control of the Board.”

Razin stepped down from his president and CEO position in 2000 in a power struggle with activist former shareholder Ahmed Hussein and retired as board chair in 2015 after 41 years. Both Razin and Hussein have been involved in other company lawsuits and proxy fights. Razin owns nearly 10 million NXGN shares worth $150 million.

Margolis assumed the board chair role in November 2015. Share price has increased 8% in that time versus the Nasdaq’s 191% gain.

NextGen President and CEO Rusty Frantz left the company by mutual agreement in June 2021. A search for his replacement is underway.

Reader Comments

From Changemaker; “Re: HIMSS. Why didn’t they share financials at the business meeting? How did they fund Accelerate, from money kept from exhibitors in 2020? Where is the 990 form that was released in July? Members should question Hal Wolf about how is leading, from a lack of transparency to a lack of diverse leadership. All Friends of Hal at the top.” Your comment reminded me to ask HIMSS for its 990 form, which they graciously sent quickly for my summarization. It covers through June 2020, so a lot of interesting information won’t surface until the next filing, which might not be soon since HIMSS is changing its fiscal year to end December 31 instead of June 30. HIMSS pays its executives extraordinarily well (Hal: $1.4 million) and six of nine of its executives are white males.

From EpicCustomer: “Re: UGM. Judy as the tooth fairy. Her outfits get more bizarre every year.” I like that she lets her wacky flag fly instead of being an empty suit who can’t say “good morning” unless reading from a teleprompter for fear of spooking shareholders with spontaneity. Customers understand Epic’s culture and have bought into it (literally).

Webinars

September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Senior connected care vendor ConnectAmerica, whose brands include Lifeline following its acquisition from Philips last month, will acquire 100Plus, which offers remote monitoring technology for seniors. Terms were not disclosed, but 100Plus had raised $40 million in funding. ConnectAmerica’s CEO is former Siemens Healthcare and Nuance executive Janet Dillione, while the founder and CEO of 100Plus is Ryan Howard, formerly chairman and CEO of Practice Fusion.

Acute care telehealth and teleICU service provider Equum Medical raises $20 million in growth equity.

AllStripes, which offers real-world and patient data to support rare disease research, raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

People

Greg Ingino, MBA (Vertafore) joins WebPT as CTO.

Dina hires Maryann Lauletta, MD (Inspira Health Network) as chief medical officer, Bob Maluso, RPh, MBA (Woundtech) as chief growth officer, and Ross Lipenta (Health Catalyst) as VP of platform architecture.

Dina promotions include Brett Poirier, MBA as VP of operations, Jay Riggins as VP of engineering, and Travis Woyner, MBA as VP of product.

Todd Johnson (Avia)  joins SomaLogic as EVP of business development and strategy.

Fertility EHR vendor EIVF hires Nimesh Shah, MPA (Ingenious Med) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

WebMD adds Symplr’s provider search and scheduling to its online health information.

Adventist Health Bakersfield (CA) goes live on IPro Healthcare’s ambulatory order management system.

Government and Politics

Former VA CIO Roger Baker says in a FCW opinion piece that VA should not take risks in trying to hurry its Cerner replacement of the homegrown Vista. He notes:

• Cerner should replace Vista only when its use is associated with improved care quality metrics.
• The VA needs to consider that Vista investment has been frozen several times since 2000 as the VA attempted to replace it, but it will remain in use for at least seven more years, meaning that the last facility to go live on Cerner will have been running Vista without any enhancements for 10 years.
• Cerner is missing about one-third of Vista’s capabilities, including registries, support for government-specific reimbursement and billing requirements, and medical equipment supply and maintenance schedules. Those functions will need to be supported even beyond the 10-year Cerner timeframe.
• Vista is the only backup plan for veteran care if the Cerner project fails, which is concerning as schedules are slipping and given the government’s poor track record of big modernization projects.
• VA and its contractors are losing the expertise needed to maintain and upgrade Vista.

COVID-19

New COVID-19 cases as a seven-day average are trending down slightly, as are deaths. The growth in overall number of COVID-19 hospital inpatients is rising, but a bit less sharply. Unfortunately, all are flattening at high levels. Florida and Georgia hospitals report that more than 25% of their inpatient beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients

Brown University public health school dean Ashish Jha, MD, MPH says that four factors are important in bringing kids back to full-time school: (1) all eligible faculty, staff and students should be vaccinated; (2) testing should be offered weekly to anyone who asks and rapid antigen tests should be offered to those with possible symptoms in a “test and stay” program; (3) masks should be required universally indoors, and (4) ventilation upgrades should be considered. He says distancing isn’t as important and masks alone are only modestly helpful.

FDA issues full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for people 16 and older, triggering some companies to require their employees to be vaccinated now that the product is no longer approved for emergency use only.

A Kaiser Permanente study of its EHR records finds that while the Pfizer vaccine’s efficacy at preventing COVID-19 infection with the delta variant drops off to 53% after four months, its protection against hospitalization remains at around 93%. This suggests that while prevention wanes, the delta variant is not escaping vaccine protection.

A new CDC study finds that unvaccinated people are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and five times more likely to become infected.

Anthony Fauci, MD says that full approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine could increase vaccination rates, which would make it possible to “start to get some good control in the spring of 2022,” signaling his expectation of another bleak COVID-19 winter.

Israel, whose high vaccination rates nearly eliminated new COVID-19 cases and allowed all restrictions to be lifted, is back to near-record new cases, heavy deaths, and hospitals that can’t take new COVID-19 patients. Possible explanations include travelers returning from foreign vacations when restrictive measures were eased, rise in the delta variant, and vaccine efficacy drop-off. The country will aggressively roll out booster doses. Israel has 80% of those over 12 vaccinated versus 60% in the US.

The mayor of Lake Ozark, MO asks his Facebook followers to pray that he is successful in smuggling the livestock de-wormer ivermectin into a hospital for treating a friend who is admitted with COVID-19.

Other

A Tennessee woman and her son sue the University of Tennessee Medical Center and two of its contractors, claiming that leaky sewer pipes overhead in the ICU burst, showering her and her son – who was an ICU patient on a ventilator – with hundreds of gallons of wastewater in a “downpour of human waste.”

Sponsor Updates

• CoverMyMeds employees volunteer during the company’s month-long CoverMyCommunity effort.
• Ascom Director of Product Management Jeff McCormick shares his advice on facilitating relationships with health IT leaders.
• Azara Healthcare publishes a new case study, “Lower Lights Christian Health Center Streamlines Population Health and Care Management with Azara Healthcare.”
• Experian Health publishes a new white paper, “State of Patient Access 2.0: The Pandemic is changing everything from scheduling to collections.”
• CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast, “A Conversation with Craig Richardville, CHCIO, SVP, and Chief Information and Digital Officer, SCL Health.
• In a new report, KLAS rates Clearwater a top-performing security and privacy consulting firm.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of The Informonster Podcast, “Lab Data Interoperability.”
• Divurgent VP of Technology Emily Carlson appears on the first Women Making Innovation Happen in Technology! Podcast.
• Engage publishes a new case study, “From Chaos to Control: How Exeter Hospital Addressed Their Disaster Recovery Challenges.”

Blog Posts

• Yes, Virginia, the government does investigate telemedicine (AdvancedMD)
• Achieving success in skilled nursing after COVID-19 (CarePort)
• Uncovering breakthrough COVID-19 insights using real-world data (Cerner)
• Effective Network Segmentation Strategies to Fend Off Cyberattacks (Clearwater)
• Maternal Oxygen Supplementation: What is Best Practice? (OBIX Perinatal Data System, developed by Clinical Computer Systems)
• Riding for a Cure: Diameter Health’s Pan-Mass Challenge Team (Diameter Health)
• What the Data Shows About the COVID-19 Delta Variant (Dimensional Insight)
• In a World of Apps, Healow Delivers What Patients Most Want (EClinicalWorks)
• The State of Patient Access 2.0: 4 opportunities to strengthen the digital experience (Experian Health)

Contacts

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