News 10/30/20

Top News

HHS and ONC extend compliance dates for the Cures Act information blocking provisions to April 5, 2021, while 2015 Edition health IT certification criteria updates and standard API functionality deadlines are moved out to December 31, 2022.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

My least-favorite term lately is “patient leakage,” which elicits two unsavory visuals: (a) bodily fluids dribbling uncontrollably from health system customers, and (b) millionaire health system executives dragging patients by the scruffs of their necks back to the facilities that they hoped to avoid.

Webinars

November 11 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Beyond the Firewall: Securing Patients, Staff, and the Healthcare Internet of Things.” Sponsor: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Presenter: Daniel Faurlin, head of network solutions for healthcare, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. The biggest cybersecurity risk for healthcare IoT isn’t the objects themselves, but rather the network door they can open. This webinar will address meeting the challenges of security, management, and monitoring using ALE’s Digital Age Networking, a single service platform for the network infrastructure that includes an autonomous network, onboarding and managing IoT, and creating business innovation with automated workflows. Specific use cases will be described, including COVID-19 quarantine management, locating equipment and people, and ensuring the security of patients.

November 12 (Thursday) 5 ET: “Getting Surgical Documentation Right: A Fireside Chat.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alex Dawson, product manager, IMO; Janice Kelly, MS, RN, president, AORN Syntegrity; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO; Lou Ann Montgomery, RN, BSN, nurse informaticist, IMO; Whitney Mannion, RN, clinical terminologist, IMO. The presenters will discuss using checklists, templates, the EHR, and third-party solutions to improve documentation without overburdening clinicians. They will explore the importance of surgical documentation in perioperative patient management, the guidelines and requirements for surgical documentation and operative notes, how refining practices and tools can improve accuracy and efficiency, and the risks and implications of incomplete, inconsistent, and non-compliant documentation.

November 16 (Monday) 1 ET. “COVID-19 and Beyond: A CISO’s Perspective for Staying Ahead of Threats.” Sponsor: Everbridge. Presenter: Sonia Arista, VP and global chief information security officer, Everbridge. While hospitals worldwide work to resume elective care amid COVID-19, they’re quickly adapting and responding to a variety of emerging risks that have tested their resilience, including a surge in cybersecurity and ransomware attacks. This webinar will highlight emerging IT vulnerabilities and best practices designed to help hospitals anticipate and quickly mitigate cybersecurity risks. A former hospital CISO will share her expertise in responding to high-impact IT incidents and mitigating risks during critical events given the “new normal” that COVID-19 has created.

November 18 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Do You Really Have a Telehealth Program, Or Just Videoconferencing?” Sponsor: Mend Family. Presenters: J. D. McFarland, solutions architect, Mend Family; Nick Neral, national account executive, Mend Family.  Healthcare’s new competitive advantage is telehealth, of which a videoconferencing platform is just a small part. This presentation will describe a comprehensive patient journey in which an organization can acquire new patients, reduce check-in time, reduce no-shows, and increase patient satisfaction, all using virtual care. Health systems did a good job in quickly standing up virtual visits in response to COVID, but telehealth and the digital front door are here to stay and now is a good time to re-evaluate tools and processes that support patient scheduling, digital forms, telehealth, and patient engagement as part of a competitive strategy.

November 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Leveraging a Clinical Intelligence Engine to Solve the EHR Usability Crisis.” Sponsor: Medicomp Systems. Presenter: Jay Anders, MD, MS, chief medical officer, Medicomp; David Lareau, CEO, Medicomp. Healthcare is long overdue for a data makeover. Clinician burnout is fueled by inaccurate, inconsistent, and incomplete clinical data, but that can be improved without scrapping existing systems. The presenters will describe the use of tools that work seamlessly with EHR workflows to deliver actionable data, improve interoperability; support the clinician’s thought process; and improve usability for better decision-making and accurate coding.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts reports Q3 results: revenue down 9.6%, adjusted EPS $0.20 versus $0.17, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue.

Cerner reports Q3 results: revenue down 4%, adjusted EPS $0.72 versus $0.62, beating Wall Street expectations for earnings but falling short on revenue. From the earnings call:

• EVP/CFO Marc Naughton will leave the company in 2021 after 29 years.
• An analyst noted that two recent high-level hires came from Leidos, suggesting an interest in getting more federal business, which Cerner hinted is the case. It was mentioned later in the call that Cerner is looking at “adjacencies” to its DoD and VA business, such as Indian Health Service, and “looking at ways that we can use data proactively with different branches of the government.”
• President Don Trigg says the next focus in its relationship with Amazon Web Services will be CareAware, also noting that Amazon’s PillPack pharmacy will play into pharmacy trends.
• Cerner had 22,000 people register for this month’s virtual Cerner Health Conference, with an advantage of the virtual format being able to see which sessions attendees choose and compare that to company focus and investment. Cerner mentioned interest in real-time workforce management, hospital operations, and consumer focus.
• Data opportunities include release-of-information for life insurance, legal, and workmen’s comp; the Learning Health Network; and clinical trials identification and enrollment for non-academic medical centers.
• Cerner will consider making acquisitions, but will also focus on repurchasing shares and paying dividends.

Surgery analytics vendor KelaHealth raises $12.9 million in combined seed and Series A financing. The company says its software improves surgical quality while preventing complications. It was formed by a group of Duke-affiliated surgeon-scientists, including founder and CEO Bora Chang, MD.

Fitness and sleep monitoring membership company Whoop raises $100 million in a Series E funding round that values the company at $1.2 billion. The $30 per month membership includes a simple monitoring strap (heart rate, sleep, and respiratory rate) and access to its analytics and community.

Sales

• Digital therapeutics vendor Voluntis will use the interoperability platform of Redox to offer providers actionable, EHR-integrated insights on how patients experience treatment at home.
• Greater Baltimore Medical Center (MD) will deploy app-based way-finding, appointment reminders, Epic MyChart integration, and mobile bill pay from Phunware.
• Alliance Health (NC) will implement ZeOmega’s CareIntel for population health management.

People

Marshall Health (WV) promotes Shannon Browning, RPh, MD to the newly created position of CMIO.

Greenway Health hires Michael Blackman, MD, MBA (Allscripts) as chief medical officer.

Long-time friend of HIStalk David B. Dillehunt is retiring as VP/CIO from FirstHealth of the Carolinas in Pinehurst, NC at the end of the year. He sent me a nice note about HIStalk that would be vain of me to post (but I appreciate it anyway), and he also mentioned that FirstHealth will do its own VP/CIO search without using a recruiter, so interested folks can apply on its website. An email search finds that Dave and I first exchanged messages in early 2006, so we go back a ways.

Announcements and Implementations

Optum’s annual health executive AI survey finds that 59% of them expect to see a payback period on investments in under three years and 95% think that hiring AI-experienced employees is a priority. The top three use cases identified are wearables monitoring, accelerating research, and assigning billing codes.

Ellkay launches its Women in HIT recognition interview series program, noting that while all of its own departments have more women than men, tech companies in general have just 25% women. Nominations are accepted online.

Epic says in an increasingly common press release that 190 health systems will go live this fall.

Tampa General Hospital says its use of GE’s command center has eliminated $40 million worth of inefficiencies, including decreasing length of stay and ED diversion that equate to 30 additional beds.

Government and Politics

HHS releases its final Transparency in Coverage rule that requires health insurers to disclose their negotiated rates and patient out-of-pocket costs for 500 shoppable services for plan years that begin on or after January 1, 2023. They will also be required to show historical payments from and payments to out-of-network providers as well as negotiated prices for prescription drugs.

Aetna pays $1 million to settle three HIPAA breaches in 2017, one related to an online document display and the other two involving mailing envelope disclosures.

COVID-19

White House advisor Jared Kushner said in a recorded interview in April that President Trump was “getting the country back from doctors” in developing a strategy to push states to reopen for his political benefit, after which the White House would then blame state governors for any resulting coronavirus spread.

Politico reports that HHS spokesperson Michael Caputo, who is on medical leave, privately pitched its $300 million, pre-election  “defeat despair” coronavirus ad campaign as “Helping the President will Help the Country.” HHS declines to say whether the ad campaign will ever run, is accused by House Oversight leaders of not providing documents they requested, and said that HHS Secretary Alex Azar was not aware of Caputo’s direct involvement. The $300 million cost was taken from CDC’s budget.

Atlanta magazine examines the botched rollout of Georgia’s coronavirus dashboard that left public health officials, local governments, businesses, and residents uncertain about how to comply with the governor’s push to reopen or to evaluate his wisdom in doing so. He assigned the dashboard’s development to to the state’s budget office instead of its public health department, where it was then outsourced to private contractor SAS. The state’s epidemiologists took the black eye for its lack of reliability and confusing presentation. National public health experts say it is unusual to let a third party contractor publish unvetted data to a state health department’s website. A much-Tweeted gaffe was a chart that appeared at first glance to show a steady decrease in case counts, but the X-axis case counts were sorted from greatest to least instead of by date.

Chicago’s NPR station looks at the lack of a central agency to coordinate COVID-19 patient transfers, with one small hospital that mostly treats low-income people of color being told by several hospitals that they had no available ICU beds despite having reported them empty to a state database. Some hospitals told the smaller one directly that they wouldn’t take a transfer if the patient had certain public-funded health insurance. The hospital was also rejected by the 3,000-bed field hospital that was built inside McCormick Place, which was mostly empty. The station notes that no state agency or public health official can force a hospital to accept a transfer and they have no incentive to cooperate with each other.

Science says that October was good for remdesivir manufacturer Gilead Sciences, which got an early look at WHO’s Solidarity trial results – which showed that remdesivir doesn’t decrease mortality or recovery time – before it signed a billion-dollar EU distribution deal and earned FDA’s approval even though FDA did not have its information reviewed as usual by its panel of outside experts. Gilead says it won’t renegotiate its $2,400 price following the Solidarity study’s disappointing findings about efficacy. Gilead got a look at the Solidarity study results on September 23, which FDA didn’t see until October 10 prior to its full approval on October 22. Gilead has sold $873 million worth of remdisivir (Veklury) so far this year.

Other

The FBI warns that Russian ransomware hackers are targeting US health systems and have taken down four of them so far. A cybersecurity expert says that hackers are demanding more than $10 million per target and discussing plans to infect 400 hospitals and clinics. Another analyst reports that 59 US providers have been impacted so far in 2020, disrupting care in 510 facilities. St. Lawrence Health System (NY) went on diversion and back to paper documentation in three hospitals Tuesday following a ransomware attack, while University of Vermont Health Network reported a system-wide outage Thursday. Sky Lakes Medical Center (OR) also reported a ransomware attack Tuesday and remains down. The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency has issued an advisory describing how Trickbot-deployed Ryuk ransomware works and offers the usual broad mitigation suggestions, most of them not easily implemented quickly (although applying US updates, reviewing RDP ports, auditing user accounts with administrative privileges, backing up systems and storing the copies offline, and auto-updating antivirus software should be done regularly anyway).

I’m intrigued by posed skeleton displays in yards for Halloween. This Zoom call one best represents 2020, although I also like the cleverly topical ones in which an evil skeleton flings lurid coronavirus balls at others who are desperately fleeing while wearing masks.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthwise volunteers help the Idaho Food Bank deliver food to seniors.
• Experity makes its Virtual User Experience sessions available online.
• Saykara President and Chief Medical Officer Graham Hughes, MD authors a Medical Economics article titled “Can AI Rescue Physicians from their EHR Woes?”
• Fortified Health Security publishes a new white paper, “Using Zoom for Telehealth Visits: How to Maintain an Acceptable Risk Profile.”
• Aspioneer includes Goliath Technologies CEO and chairman Thomas Charlton on its list of revolutionary CEOs of 2020.
• Healthcare Triangle publishes a new case study, “Standardization Across Surgical Areas for ASC to HOPD Conversion at Great Falls Clinic Hospital.”
• IDG Connect profiles Imprivata CTO Wes Wright.
• FeaturedCustomers ranks LiveProcess as a Rising Star in its “Fall 2020 Customer Success Report.”
• Meditech recognizes the role of virtual care during Canadian Patient Safety Week.
• NextGate publishes a new case study, “UHIN Leverages Leading Patient Identification Platform to Drive Quality and Coordination of Care, Support COVID-19 Response.”

Blog Posts

• Insulin Titration Software Combined with CGM Enables Patients with Diabetes to Improve Time in Range (Glytec)
• Three Key Considerations for 2021 Healthcare IT Planning (Healthcare Triangle)
• How to Improve Nurse Efficiency in Acute Settings (Halo Health)
• Jefferson Health: Remote Patient Monitoring Boosts Outreach, Outcomes (Dina)
• The Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer Conundrum (The HCI Group)
• Planning for Community Connect (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Not All Managed Services Providers are Created Equal (HCTec)
• Healthcare Relief Funding: Five Steps to Maximize COVID-19 Dollars (Health Catalyst)
• Digital Health Improves Health Equity (Impact Advisors)
• The Case for Prioritizing Revenue Cycle Optimization (Ingenious Med)
• The haunting of health IT: Ten ICD-10-CM codes for Halloween (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Health Systems, COVID-19 and the Redefined Healthcare Landscape in 2021 and Beyond (Loyale Healthcare)
• A Commitment to Healthcare Software Development Quality (Medhost)
• 5 perspectives on COVID-19 from Meditech customers and partners (Meditech)
• Organization and Management for the Busy PT Private Practice Owner (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 10/28/20

Top News

Blank-check company Health Assurance Acquisition Corp. prepares for an IPO of up to $500 million.

The SPAC is sponsored by General Catalyst and is backed by former Livongo executives who didn’t make the jump to its acquirer Teladoc, including former chairman Glen Tullman and former president Jennifer Schneider, MD; as well as Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health CEO Stephen Klasko, MD, DuPage Medical Group Board Director Anita Pramoda, and several General Catalyst executives.

HAAC is looking for companies that are involved in health assurance, have high growth potential in expanding addressable markets, and are led by mission-driven CEOs who are committed to responsible innovation. Its SEC filings state, “We know that health assurance companies can generate both positive clinical outcomes and outsized shareholder returns because our team built the first one—Livongo Health, Inc.”

It further defines the companies it will consider: “Health assurance companies deliver modern consumer health experiences while decreasing the overall healthcare GDP and are rooted in partnership with existing care providers. In a world built on health assurance, care is continuous, proactive, personalized, and available everywhere. Health assurance companies will be rewarded based on patient outcomes, enabling free-market economics to perform their important role in creating best-in-class solutions.“ It predicts that the digital health sector will eventually command more dollars and time than the physical sector.

HAAC’s chairman and CEO will be Hemant Taneja, a 45-year-old General Catalyst partner and Livongo lead investor who has written books about AI-based innovation and healthcare innovation. His Livongo shares are worth more than $2 billion.

Reader Comments

From Bubonic Relationship: “Re: Teladoc. I’ve never seen so many top execs bail when their company was acquired, especially one as new as Livongo.” The departing Livongo senior suits could spend their days making snow angels in the Teladoc-provided cash avalanche, but instead they’re off on a new venture to create another company to take public. I’m also surprised that Teladoc didn’t make the acquisition contingent on the whole management team signing up for a year of transition while the new owners figure out how their $18.5 billion acquisition works. Still, it’s inevitable that an acquired company’s leadership team won’t last long after the deal is done, even though they are the ones who created the value for which the acquirer paid a big premium, and Teladoc is keeping enough folks to keep the lights on.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Katie, freshly graduated from college with a journalism degree, started working as a paid HIStalk intern this week, earning her the sobriquet “Katie the Intern.” She and I are figuring how to ease her into the industry and put her to productive use given some limitations: (a) neither of us has internship experience; (b) I work alone and am not accustomed to explaining what I do or how I do it; and (c) we’ll be communicating remotely. I’ve given her some assignments to introduce herself in an upcoming HIStalk post, write a weekly column about what she’s learning, and review other health IT sites to see how they approach industry news. She’s also reviewing the comments of readers who suggested what I should have her do. You’ll hear from her shortly, but in the mean time, contact her if you would like to tell her about your job and how HIStalk fits into it because she has no idea. 

Webinars

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

October 29 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Presbyterian Healthcare Services Is Preparing for a Post-Pandemic Future Using Digital Care Tools.” Sponsor: Bright.md. Presenters: Ries Robinson, MD, SVP/chief innovation officer, Presbyterian Healthcare Services; Ray Costantini, MD, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Bright.md. Presbyterian Healthcare Services changed the way New Mexico patients access healthcare with its pres.today digital front door, which has given patients easy access to care during a global crisis. The health system’s digital care strategy goes beyond simply offering virtual visits and instead makes every episode of care — regardless of where it is delivered — better by streamlining clinical workflows and by directing patients to the most appropriate venue of care. The presenters will describe how Presbyterian has continued to meet patient needs during the pandemic, how it is deploying digital tools to tackle the combined COVID-19 and flu seasons, and how the health system is innovating care delivery to prepare for a post-pandemic future.

November 11 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Beyond the Firewall: Securing Patients, Staff, and the Healthcare Internet of Things.” Sponsor: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Presenter: Daniel Faurlin, head of network solutions for healthcare, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. The biggest cybersecurity risk for healthcare IoT isn’t the objects themselves, but rather the network door they can open. This webinar will address meeting the challenges of security, management, and monitoring using ALE’s Digital Age Networking, a single service platform for the network infrastructure that includes an autonomous network, onboarding and managing IoT, and creating business innovation with automated workflows. Specific use cases will be described, including COVID-19 quarantine management, locating equipment and people, and ensuring the security of patients.

November 12 (Thursday) 5 ET: “Getting Surgical Documentation Right: A Fireside Chat.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alex Dawson, product manager, IMO; Janice Kelly, MS, RN, president, AORN Syntegrity; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO; Lou Ann Montgomery, RN, BSN, nurse informaticist, IMO; Whitney Mannion, RN, clinical terminologist, IMO. The presenters will discuss using checklists, templates, the EHR, and third-party solutions to improve documentation without overburdening clinicians. They will explore the importance of surgical documentation in perioperative patient management, the guidelines and requirements for surgical documentation and operative notes, how refining practices and tools can improve accuracy and efficiency, and the risks and implications of incomplete, inconsistent, and non-compliant documentation.

November 16 (Monday) 1 ET. “COVID-19 and Beyond: A CISO’s Perspective for Staying Ahead of Threats.” Sponsor: Everbridge. Presenter: Sonia Arista, VP and global chief information security officer, Everbridge. While hospitals worldwide work to resume elective care amid COVID-19, they’re quickly adapting and responding to a variety of emerging risks that have tested their resilience, including a surge in cybersecurity and ransomware attacks. This webinar will highlight emerging IT vulnerabilities and best practices designed to help hospitals anticipate and quickly mitigate cybersecurity risks. A former hospital CISO will share her expertise in responding to high-impact IT incidents and mitigating risks during critical events given the “new normal” that COVID-19 has created.

November 18 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Do You Really Have a Telehealth Program, Or Just Videoconferencing?” Sponsor: Mend Family. Presenters: J. D. McFarland, solutions architect, Mend Family; Nick Neral, national account executive, Mend Family.  Healthcare’s new competitive advantage is telehealth, of which a videoconferencing platform is just a small part. This presentation will describe a comprehensive patient journey in which an organization can acquire new patients, reduce check-in time, reduce no-shows, and increase patient satisfaction, all using virtual care. Health systems did a good job in quickly standing up virtual visits in response to COVID, but telehealth and the digital front door are here to stay and now is a good time to re-evaluate tools and processes that support patient scheduling, digital forms, telehealth, and patient engagement as part of a competitive strategy.

November 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Leveraging a Clinical Intelligence Engine to Solve the EHR Usability Crisis.” Sponsor: Medicomp Systems. Presenter: Jay Anders, MD, MS, chief medical officer, Medicomp; David Lareau, CEO, Medicomp. Healthcare is long overdue for a data makeover. Clinician burnout is fueled by inaccurate, inconsistent, and incomplete clinical data, but that can be improved without scrapping existing systems. The presenters will describe the use of tools that work seamlessly with EHR workflows to deliver actionable data, improve interoperability; support the clinician’s thought process; and improve usability for better decision-making and accurate coding.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Harris acquires UK-based  maternity ward software vendor K2 Medical Systems.

Lux Capital’s newly formed SPAC, Lux Health Tech Acquisition, launches a $300 million IPO in hopes of eventually merging with or acquiring a health IT company. CEO and Director Josh DeFonzo comes from the Robotics & Digital Solutions division of Johnson & Johnson.

Intermountain Healthcare and Sanford Health will merge, with the combined organization having 89,000 employees, 70 hospitals, 435 clinics, and 1.1 million insurance customers.

Sales

• NCH Healthcare System (FL) will implement EVideon’s Patient Smart Room technology across its two hospitals.
• Baptist Health (KY) selects provider online search and appointment-scheduling software from Kyruus.
• Virginia Health Information chooses Collective Medical to provide hospital ADT notifications to a patient’s provider as required CMS starting May 1, 2021.

People

James Lawson (Verge Health) joins Sectyr as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Freeman Health System (MO) develops a text-based messaging app to update family members on a patient’s surgical status.

WellSpan Health implements Epic at several facilities that were previously part of Summit Health. The two health systems merged in late 2018.

Baptist Health (FL) deploys LifeLink’s chatbot software to expedite ED-to-PCP referrals and COVID-related care.

Population health management vendor Arcadia becomes a reseller of PatientPing’s real-time care notification technology.

A new KLAS report on health system AI purchases finds that that they are seeking specific solutions rather than concentrating on a single AI vendor, with the expected results taking longer than they expected. Jvion has a large client base but declining client satisfaction; Epic Cognitive Computing is growing fast, especially with readmission and sepsis prediction, but organizations need to drive outcomes on their own; and Cerner’s HealtheDataLab is early in its life cycle, with few live sites and little consideration in the market. Among products that allow customers to develop their own models, KenSci has high client satisfaction, DataRobot’s customers express concern about lack of completeness and the company’s lack of healthcare expertise; and Health Catalyst has weak customer satisfaction as its product is slowly maturing. Big tech firm offerings are seen as average, with Microsoft’s healthcare expertise and partnerships taking it to the top of the list, as Google and Amazon are perceived as light on healthcare knowledge and IBM Watson Health is seen as over-promising, under-delivering, and offering low value.

COVID-19

In California, San Francisco and Alameda counties sever ties with Google’s sister company Verily seven months after the state signed a multi-million dollar contract with the company to expand COVID-19 testing sites. They are concerned about racial disparities because Verily requires people to sign up using a Gmail account, uses confusing two-factor authentication, and asks health questions whose answers could be exposed to Google or third parties. A community health center CEO who shut down the Verily-run program after just six days summarized, “From where we sit, this is an old story. Corporations that are not really invested in the community come helicoptering in, bearing gifts, but what they’re taking away [user data] is much more valuable.” 

A New York Times opinion piece written by the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation says that most of the useful COVID-19 data that the federal government collects isn’t being made available to public health researchers. This includes county- and city-level counts of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as well as implementation dates of mandates for testing, distancing, and mask-wearing. It notes that the Times had to sue CDC under the Freedom of Information Act to get a case breakout by race and ethnicity, which revealed major societal implications. HHS also doesn’t release individual hospital data; break out hospitalization totals by age or sex; or indicate how many hospitals reported data on a given day. Unanswered questions that the data could answer include whether transmission is moving to younger people, whether death rates improved because of better treatment, and how local mandates have affected cases and admissions.

HHS data shows that only 60% of hospitals are fully complying with its COVID-19 reporting requirements, potentially exposing them to being banned from billing Medicare and Medicaid.

Other

Fitbit co-founder and CEO James Park hints at the wearables company’s telemedicine plans, saying that adding a virtual visit benefit could be key to bolstering its subscription service. The company was acquired by Google last year for $2.1 billion.

In Finland, hackers who breached a national psychotherapy provider are emailing individual patients and threatening to disclose their personal information publicly unless they send a bitcoin payment. The organization fired its CEO Monday after discovering that he failed to disclose two breaches going back to November 2018 and did not act quickly to fix identified security vulnerabilities.

Sponsor Updates

• Startup.info profiles Saykara founder and CEO Harjinder Sandhu.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new podcast, “A FHIRside Chat.”
• Kettering Health Network expands its use of Nuance’s Dragon Medical One physician documentation software with the addition of emergency department guidance.
• Surescripts VP and CISO Judy Hatchett joins the EHNAC Commission.
• Ingenious Med publishes a white paper titled “Rising to the Challenge: How Leading Healthcare Organizations are Thriving in an Evolving Revenue Environment.”
• Unified Communications Today features Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s efforts to transform healthcare during the pandemic.
• Change Healthcare releases a new podcast, “Capital Connection: 2020 Year-End Outlook.”
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the virtual AWHONN Convention November 1-4.
• InterSystems adds Adaptive Analytics to its IRIS for Health data aggregation and app development platform.
• Allscripts recognizes Healthfinch’s prescription renewal delegation engine Charlie as its App of the Month for October.
• Virginia Health Information adds Collective Medical’s ADT-based care coordination and notification capabilities to its HIE services.

Blog Posts

• The Role of EMPI Services in Data Conversation for Health Information (314e)
• CMS audits have restarted: how skilled nursing facilities can prepare (Ability Network)
• A Prescription for America’s Drug Pricing Problem? (RxRevu)
• The Benefits of E-Prescribing for High-Risk Patients During COVID-19 (AdvancedMD)
• Population Health: Identify and Resolve Gaps in Care (Bluetree)
• Preparing your EHR for 2021 Evaluation and Management Coding Changes (CereCore)
• Cerner and VA Achieve Historic Milestone for Veteran Health Care (Cerner)
• Looking Back at the History of Pharmacies (CoverMyMeds)
• Using Analytics to Get a Pulse on the Health of Your Emergency Department (Dimensional Insight)
• Jefferson Health Answers 3 Questions About Remote Patient Monitoring (Dina)
• Know the Issues on Your NC20 ‘Ballot’! (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/26/20

Top News

Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center (WA) goes live on Cerner as the VA’s first implementation site.

Reader Comments

From Chris Stenrud: “Re: Teladoc Health. Your headline doesn’t reflect reality. Our chief product officer, chief data scientist, and chief medical officer for product and analytics all come from Livongo.” A recap of the SEC filing: (a) five Livongo executives will leave following the acquisition; (b) seven of eight of the CEO’s direct reports will come from Teladoc; (c) two of six R&D executives will come from Teladoc; (d) seven of nine commercial organization executives will come from Teladoc; and (e) one of five executives in the US Group Health segment will come from Teladoc. Chris is Teladoc’s VP of communications. My point is that Teladoc is paying $18.5 billion for Livongo but isn’t bringing over Livongo’s founder and executive chairman, CEO, president, CFO, and SVP of business development as announced so far, while other Livongo execs aren’t mentioned as either coming over or not.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Nearly two-thirds of poll respondents haven’t taken a consumer DNA test, but 50% of those who have done so received surprising results about their known or unknown close relatives. Peter says it has been a pain since he and his wife took a test for fun –his wife started getting hits for half-siblings from all over the world because she was unknowingly fathered by a sperm donor instead of her legal father, which her parents refuse to acknowledge. Peter suggests leaving the test’s “family” features turned off.

New poll to your right or here: As a patient, when have you encountered scribes in the past one year? It occurs to me that I don’t know if it’s legally or ethically OK for a clinician to have a remote scribe listening in without telling the patient – thoughts? I’ve only been in one encounter with a scribe – the doctor introduced her and she didn’t say anything other than quietly responding to the doctor’s questions or instructions as she worked from within the EHR, leaving him free to focus on me. It was a good experience, although it probably wouldn’t work with a PCP who would need look more frequently at the EHR or share its contents.

I listened to the rehearsal for Bright.md’s Thursday webinar, which will be in the form of an interview with Ries Robinson, MD, SVP/chief innovation officer of Albuquerque-based Presbyterian Healthcare Services. It’s a no-BS description of how the health system ramped up technology to respond to COVID needs and what that experience taught them for redesigning care going forward. Interviewer Ray Costantini, MD of Bright.md was so careful to avoid any hint of doing a company pitch that we had to urge him to at least give a one-minute overview of the technologies the company offers and that PHS uses. One thing I learned — Ries talked about how it’s no easier for doctors to stay on schedule with fixed-length telehealth visits than with in-person visits, but patients hate waiting online and are quicker to give up than when they’ve driven into the office and are already sitting in the room, so technologies can help with pre- and post-visit work to keep the physician on schedule. My first question in reviewing a webinar’s content is, will someone whose employer doesn’t own the sponsor’s product still learn something useful? In this case, the answer is yes, and I enjoyed the no-slides conversational format.

Webinars

October 27 (Tuesday) noon ET. “Don’t Waste This Pandemic (From a Former Healthcare CEO).” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Monica Reed, MD, MSc, former CEO, Celebration Health. Some healthcare organizations are trying to get back to the normalcy of 2019, but tomorrow’s leaders are accelerating even faster in 2020. Two- or three-year roadmaps were accomplished in six months, so what’s next? The presenter will describe how technology was changing before COVID-19, how the pandemic accelerated plans, what we can expect to see as a result, how leaders and providers can adapt, and what healthcare’s digital front door looks like going forward and how it can be leveraged.

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

October 29 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Presbyterian Healthcare Services Is Preparing for a Post-Pandemic Future Using Digital Care Tools.” Sponsor: Bright.md. Presenters: Ries Robinson, MD, SVP/chief innovation officer, Presbyterian Healthcare Services; Ray Costantini, MD, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Bright.md. Presbyterian Healthcare Services changed the way New Mexico patients access healthcare with its pres.today digital front door, which has given patients easy access to care during a global crisis. The health system’s digital care strategy goes beyond simply offering virtual visits and instead makes every episode of care — regardless of where it is delivered — better by streamlining clinical workflows and by directing patients to the most appropriate venue of care. The presenters will describe how Presbyterian has continued to meet patient needs during the pandemic, how it is deploying digital tools to tackle the combined COVID-19 and flu seasons, and how the health system is innovating care delivery to prepare for a post-pandemic future.

November 11 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Beyond the Firewall: Securing Patients, Staff, and the Healthcare Internet of Things.” Sponsor: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Presenter: Daniel Faurlin, head of network solutions for healthcare, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. The biggest cybersecurity risk for healthcare IoT isn’t the objects themselves, but rather the network door they can open. This webinar will address meeting the challenges of security, management, and monitoring using ALE’s Digital Age Networking, a single service platform for the network infrastructure that includes an autonomous network, onboarding and managing IoT, and creating business innovation with automated workflows. Specific use cases will be described, including COVID-19 quarantine management, locating equipment and people, and ensuring the security of patients.

November 12 (Thursday) 5 ET: “Getting Surgical Documentation Right: A Fireside Chat.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alex Dawson, product manager, IMO; Janice Kelly, MS, RN, president, AORN Syntegrity; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO; Lou Ann Montgomery, RN, BSN, nurse informaticist, IMO; Whitney Mannion, RN, clinical terminologist, IMO. The presenters will discuss using checklists, templates, the EHR, and third-party solutions to improve documentation without overburdening clinicians. They will explore the importance of surgical documentation in perioperative patient management, the guidelines and requirements for surgical documentation and operative notes, how refining practices and tools can improve accuracy and efficiency, and the risks and implications of incomplete, inconsistent, and non-compliant documentation.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

NextGen Healthcare reports Q2 results: revenue up 4%, EPS $0.30 versus $0.24, beating Wall Street expectations for both. NXGN shares are down 13% in the past one year versus the Nasdaq’s 42% rise. From the earnings call:

• RCM and EDI business volumes are at 93% and 95%, respectively, of their pre-COVID levels.
• 20% of its business came from winning competitive situations.
• Quarterly spend was reduced by $0.04 per share via short-term cost reductions, but those savings won’t be repeated.

Healthcare governance, risk management, and compliance software vendor Symplr acquires TractManager, which offers solutions for contracting, sourcing, and provider management.

BridgeHealth, which guides employees of self-insured companies to cost-effective surgery providers, merges with healthcare consumer information platform vendor Transcarent as part of its $40 million Series A funding round.

Bon Secours Mercy Health will make a private investment in the business combination that will take acute care telemedicine provider SOC Telemed public in early November.

Tech Mahindra’s US subsidiary will acquire a 6% equity position in VitalTech Holdings for $3 million, with an option to invest an additional $5 million through January 2021. VitalTech offers telehealth and remote patient monitoring technology, while Tech Mahindra owns healthcare consulting firm The HCI Group.

Former Microsoft executive Terry Myerson forms Truveta, which he describes vaguely as working with large amounts of health data to extract insights that will improve patient care. The website lists 19 employees so far, including two physicians, and job openings for bioinformatics engineers, software engineers, clinical informatics and data managers, and marketing and communication VPs.

People

Amanda Hundt (WE Communications) joins Health Catalyst in the newly created position of VP of corporate communications.

OptimizeRx promotes Karen Lauer to VP of product development.

Announcements and Implementations

Relatient releases Broadcast Messenger, which allows health systems to send text, email, and voice call messages to many patients and groups at once.

OmniSys announces Encounter-Rx, a cloud-based solution that allows pharmacies to integrate data and services to support expanded pharmacist roles such as point-of-care testing, disease counseling, and immunizations.

Four large Illinois health systems will exchange patient information with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois by joining Epic’s Payer Platform, which will launch later this year. The payer-provider system can exchange information about ED visits, tests, lab results; support priority authorization and claims payment; and apply care management strategies.

COVID-19

The US reported a record-breaking 84,000 new COVID-19 cases on Friday and again Saturday, with experts predicting that daily new case counts will hit six figures soon and deaths will spike over the next 3-4 weeks. State governments say the primary spreader events aren’t reopened schools, but rather social and religious gatherings.

President Trump tells attendees at a Wisconsin rally that “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” in the US if they classify deaths due to other serious conditions and terminal illnesses as being caused by COVID-19, artificially inflating our death counts because “this country and their reporting systems are really not doing it right.”

FDA approves Gilead’s remdisivir for COVID-19 treatment, surprising many experts who note that the drug doesn’t have a long tracked and its only proven effect is to shorten hospital stays rather than improve survival or reduce ventilator use.The drug has been available since May under FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization.

Vice-President Pence, who had five close staff members test positive for COVID-19 over the weekend, will ignore CDC guidelines and continue his campaign travel and public rallies because he is “essential personnel,” according to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Meadows told reporters Sunday that the US is “not going to control the pandemic” and instead will focus developing on vaccines and treatments.

The Wall Street Journal reports that HHS’s controversial $250 million “defeat despair” coronavirus ad campaign has been cancelled. It notes that part of the campaign would have given early COVID-19 vaccine access to performers who portray Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, and their jolly elves as essential workers. The disappointed chairman of the Fraternal order of Real Bearded Santas told WSJ that “this was our greatest hope for Christmas 2020, and now it looks like it won’t happen.”

Other

A genetic counselor sends DNA samples to consumer genetics testing company Orig3n for childhood development analysis, extracting one sample from her dog and the other from her kitchen faucet. The report failed to notice the non-human origins, but advised that the tap water will need longer to develop language skills. The company is also facing CMS sanctions for its COVID-19 tests, which have produced least 383 false positive results this year.

Sponsor Updates

• Change Healthcare offers ICAD’s ProFound AI platform as part of its Mammography Plus solution.
• SOC Telemed announces new board nominations ahead of its merger with Healthcare Merger Corp.
• Pure Storage releases a new podcast, “Tales from the Ransomware Crypt.”
• Spirion wins multiple Globee International and One Planet Awards for its privacy and security product, customer deployments, and its COVID-19 company response.
• Summit Healthcare publishes a new use case featuring Galway Clinic, “Solving Complex Interoperability Needs with the Latest in Integration Technology.”

Blog Posts

• OpenText World 2020 – Are You Ready for the Great Rethink? (OpenText)
• Replenishing Provider Engagement: Hospice of Washington County (Netsmart)
• Battle Resident Burnout with Better Scheduling (PerfectServe)
• PMD: Smoothing the Path of Injury Rehabilitation for Patients and Providers (PMD)
• The COVID-19 Second Wave: Rating States’ Preparedness Efforts (Premier)
• Managing the dual threat of flu and COVID-19 with level of care guidance (Meditech)
• New Regulations Aim to Set Healthcare Data Free – But More Needs to be Done (Redox)
• Why You Need a Broadcast Messaging Solution During Vaccine Season (Relatient)
• A Prescription for America’s Drug Pricing Problem? (RxRevu)
• How Telemedicine Powers Fractionalized Medicine (SOC Telemed)
• How to determine the sensitivity of information (OpenText)
• 3 important things to know about product life-cycle management in health IT (Spok)
• Surescripts Warns CMS That Delaying EPCS Mandate Puts Seniors at Risk of COVID-19 and Undermines Efforts to Address the Opioid Crisis (Surescripts)
• Rounding at Englewood Health: Extending the Patient Engagement Team to Support Patients and Families During Challenging Times (Vocera)
• Understanding the ICD-10 Code Structure (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 10/23/20

Top News

Analytics vendor Tibco Software will acquire competitor Information Builders for an undisclosed price.

The healthcare offerings of Information Builders include Omni-HealthData data analytics.

Reader Comments

From Morris the Cat: “Re: HIMSS IT Exec Community. What do you make of this email? It’s the second one from Hal Wolf in as many weeks and reeks of desperation to keep HIMSS relevant to CIOs.” Hal’s VIP-only invitation to become a free member of the new group pitches year-round programming, thought leadership opportunities, and peer-to-peer exchanges. I bristle when I see that “luminary-level” folks get perks that we underachievers don’t, even though I know they indirectly pay the bills in the “ladies drink free” arbitrage model in which high-paying vendors buy access to low-paying prospects. Still, I pay as much or more in member dues and registration fees, so why am I made to feel less important by HIMSS itself? Meanwhile, if HIMSS21 actually happens, you can find the CIOs and apparently now vendor C-levelers segregated in their luminary-only area whose air is lightly tinged with the intoxicating scent of thought leadership, where attentive service teams keep their onsite meals and snacks refreshed to fuel their higher-level creative energies while we lesser mortals charge down to the food court mosh pits seeking a day-old, $15 Caesar salad to eat sitting on the floor.

From I’m Onedering: “Re: One Brooklyn Health. They named Ron Goldman CIO and I can’t find information about his experience or qualifications. Anyone know where he came from?” His name is on a bid from March, so he must have been there awhile, maybe as interim. I found two dormant, skeletal LinkedIn IT manager / director profiles for that name under Brookdale Hospital and Medical Center and Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, both of which are part of One Brooklyn Health. Neither listed education or job history.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ve had at least three CEO interview subjects miss our scheduled call because Gmail inserted a unhelpfully presumptuous calendar link to its own Google Meet, which my recipient then clicked instead of following the less-pushy conference line dial-in instructions.

Webinars

October 27 (Tuesday) noon ET. “Don’t Waste This Pandemic (From a Former Healthcare CEO).” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Monica Reed, MD, MSc, former CEO, Celebration Health. Some healthcare organizations are trying to get back to the normalcy of 2019, but tomorrow’s leaders are accelerating even faster in 2020. Two- or three-year roadmaps were accomplished in six months, so what’s next? The presenter will describe how technology was changing before COVID-19, how the pandemic accelerated plans, what we can expect to see as a result, how leaders and providers can adapt, and what healthcare’s digital front door looks like going forward and how it can be leveraged.

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

October 29 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Presbyterian Healthcare Services Is Preparing for a Post-Pandemic Future Using Digital Care Tools.” Sponsor: Bright.md. Presenters: Ries Robinson, MD, SVP/chief innovation officer, Presbyterian Healthcare Services; Ray Costantini, MD, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Bright.md. Presbyterian Healthcare Services changed the way New Mexico patients access healthcare with its pres.today digital front door, which has given patients easy access to care during a global crisis. The health system’s digital care strategy goes beyond simply offering virtual visits and instead makes every episode of care — regardless of where it is delivered — better by streamlining clinical workflows and by directing patients to the most appropriate venue of care. The presenters will describe how Presbyterian has continued to meet patient needs during the pandemic, how it is deploying digital tools to tackle the combined COVID-19 and flu seasons, and how the health system is innovating care delivery to prepare for a post-pandemic future.

November 11 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Beyond the Firewall: Securing Patients, Staff, and the Healthcare Internet of Things.” Sponsor: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Presenter: Daniel Faurlin, head of network solutions for healthcare, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. The biggest cybersecurity risk for healthcare IoT isn’t the objects themselves, but rather the network door they can open. This webinar will address meeting the challenges of security, management, and monitoring using ALE’s Digital Age Networking, a single service platform for the network infrastructure that includes an autonomous network, onboarding and managing IoT, and creating business innovation with automated workflows. Specific use cases will be described, including COVID-19 quarantine management, locating equipment and people, and ensuring the security of patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Teladoc Health announces the team that will run the company following the completion of its acquisition of Livongo, all but one of them coming from the Teladoc side of the “merger.” Livongo’s Michelle Bucaria, Zane Burke, Jennifer Schneider, Lee Shapiro, and Steve Schwartz will wriggle happily on their newly acquired mountains of cash instead of joining Teladoc Health, which will be run by this group:

• Jason Gorevic, CEO (Teladoc)
• Arnnon Geshuri, chief human resources officer (Livongo)
• Mala Murthy, CFO (Teladoc)
• David Sides, COO (Teladoc)
• Dan Trencher, SVP of corporate strategy (Teladoc)
• Drew Turitz, SVP of corporate development (Teladoc)
• Adam Vandervoort, chief legal officer (Teladoc)
• Stephany Verstraete, chief marketing and engagement officer (Teladoc)
• Yulan Wang, interim R&D (Teladoc)

Patient safety solutions vendor RLDatix acquires credentialing Verge Health.

Cohere Health raises $10 million in a Series A funding extension, increasing its total to $20 million. Its website is unhelpful in describing exactly what the company does beyond slinging lofty buzzwords like “paradigm shift” and “collaboration,” but it seems to primarily offer prior authorization of treatment plans, peer review, provider quality analytics, and optimizing value-based payment. I truly don’t understand why companies feel that it is limiting or demeaning to just say what they’re selling.

Chatbot and provider search technology vendor Loyal raises $12.5 million in a Series A funding round.

Sales

• Humana chooses Cohere Health’s collaboration platform for managing prior authorization for musculoskeletal treatments.
• Telemedicine platform vendor Bluestream Health will implement EHR integration from Redox.

People

Dan Nigrin, MD, MS (Boston Children’s Hospital) will join MaineHealth as CIO in January. He has been at Boston Children’s for 25 years, including SVP/CIO for 19 of those. His Defective Records electronic music label will survive the relocation, Dan says, and you can check out its latest retrospective release, which to me would make a fine playlist for doing focused work or exercising.

Conversational AI vendor Gyant hires Justin Graham, MD, MS (Anthem) as chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

T-System, a CorroHealth company, launches an app store for solutions that complement its EDIS.

Edwards County Medical Center (KS) goes live on CPSI Evident’s clinical and financial systems and RCM solutions from sister company TruBridge.

A new KLAS report finds that Epic is steadily improving its pharmacy offerings to the point that customers are considering replacing third-party software, although hospitals get less hand-holding from Epic and more of the initiative must be taken by the health system’s Willow analysts. Willow performs well out of the box in medication inventory, but customers report having to do more work to implement wholesaler integration, waste and expiration tracking, and medication shortage management. Basic integration with third-party systems is good, but customers would like to see improvements (both from Epic and from those vendors) for order returns, controlled substance inventories, sizing conversions, purchase tracking, 340B ordering, and drug pricing. Users of IV Dispense Prep for barcode scanning, remote verification, and photo capture verification report above-average satisfaction, but would like to push further with gravimetric verification, guided workflows, hard stops, recommended substitutions, and custom reporting, all of which are challenging because Epic doesn’t manufacture clean room hardware. KLAS concludes that Epic’s pharmacy functionality offers breadth but not depth, as solutions and the customer base’s usage have not yet reached maturity

COVID-19

CDC expands its “close contact” definition of coronavirus exposure, from a continuous 15 minutes within six feet of someone infected to a cumulative 15 minutes over a 24-hour period, which will have a significant impact on schools, workplaces, and other group settings where multiple brief encounters with a COVID-positive individual are more likely.

Politico reports that HHS Secretary Alex Azar is seeking White House permission to fire FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD, angered that his high safety standards for COVID-19 vaccines will prevent President Trump from delivering on his promise to have a vaccine available before Election Day.

Analysis by Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness says 130,000 to 210,000 US deaths from COVID-19 could have been prevented with better leadership and earlier response from the federal government, specifically in lagging the world in testing, reporting of inconsistent state data, inadequate contact tracing, delayed interventions and lockdowns, lack of mask-wearing guidance or mandates, and the White House’s open hostility toward CDC and WHO and mocking of basic mitigation strategies.

Drug companies, public health officials, and hospitals are preparing to hide and secure COVID-19 vaccine shipments to prevent theft, to the point that the manufacturers will track shipments by GPS and will send out dummy trucks to confuse would-be thieves.

Two new studies find that deaths of hospitalized COVID-19 patients have dropped sharply as clinicians have learned how to treat them more effectively and to recognize problems faster. Mortality has dropped from 25.6% of those hospitalized to 7.6% even after adjusting for risk, which is important since older, frailer patients were hard hit early but hospitalization of younger patients has increased since. Authors add that survival rates are higher when hospitals aren’t fighting a surge, making mitigation strategies even more important.

Puerto Rico closes its 911 call centers when employees at both locations test positive for coronavirus.

CDC says the government will issue “vaccine cards” on which people who get the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine will bring the completed card back to make sure they get the correct second dose. It’s low tech, but probably the best anybody can do given urgently short timelines and the need to support people who don’t go back to the same location for their second shot.

The Washington Post looks at the increasing number of nursing home COVID-19 deaths one month after the on-campus return of partying students to the three colleges in La Crosse, WI. City nursing homes went from never having lost a resident to COVID-19 to 19 deaths, aided by successful county-level blocking of state orders that closed bars and required wearing masks. Public health officials can’t say for sure how the virus is spreading since few patient samples have been genetically sequenced, but they suspect that it moves from nursing home employees to residents who otherwise have minimal outside contact.

Other

Southeast Health (MO) went back to paper for two days last week when its network was taken down in response to a high load of external Internet traffic that was apparently caused by a hacking attempt, preventing access to its remotely hosted Cerner system. The hospital also went on ED diversion.

London-based virtual visit provider Vala Health urges competitors to join it in ending their Facebook advertising until the company improves its protections for the mental health of young people. The action was triggered by the late 2017 suicide of a seemingly stable 14-year-old girl who committed suicide after looking at disturbing suicide images and videos on Facebook-owned Instagram.

Doulas are using Facebook to warn each other about people who falsely claim to be pregnant to engage their services, either because they are role-playing a parental fantasy or acting out what one calls “a creepy fetish.”

In England, a patient dies of a raptured aortic aneurysm after being discharged by an ED doctor who was unknowingly looking at another patient’s CT scan. The coroner says doctors at the hospital seem to be confused by its “unwieldy” computer systems, which are scheduled to be replaced next year, Meanwhile, the hospital’s radiology department will now call doctors directly for a discussion when a scan is abnormal instead of just letting them know that a patient’s report is available.

Sponsor Updates

• Everbridge featured President George W. Bush speaking on leadership and critical event management, as well as CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta as keynoters during its COVID-19: Road to Recovery Symposium.
• RxCap’s patient-facing mobile app will feature educational content from First Databank’s Meducation solution.
• Halo Health publishes a new case study, “Mobile Clinical Communication Ecosystem Supports Asante’s Award-Winning Patient Care.”
• Hayes achieves HITRUST CSF Certification to manage risk, improve security posture, and meet compliance requirements.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a case study titled “Leading a Virtual International Epic Go-Live Through a Pandemic.”
• HIStalk sponsors exhibiting at the HIMSS Prioritizing Healthcare Information Technology for an Unpredictable Tomorrow virtual conference November 12 include Dimensional Insight, Healthcare Triangle, InterSystems, 314e, Arcadia, Bluetree, CloudWave, and Nuance.
• Impact Advisors receives high marks in the latest KLAS implementation leadership report.

Blog Posts

• Opioid Overdose: How a Label Can Make a Difference (First Databank)
• How eGMS Improves Dosing & Administration of Subcutaneous Insulin for Inpatients (Glytec)
• Electronic Health Record (EHR) Telehealth Apps Too Slow? There is a Solution. (Goliath Technologies)
• 5 keys to developing a digital strategy (The HCI Group)
• How a US COVID-19 Data Registry Fuels Global Research (Health Catalyst)
• Baptist Health HR department teams up with Cerner AMS PeopleSoft for smoother daily operations (Cerner)
• Privacy and Patient Identification: Do the risks outweigh the benefits? (Imprivata)
• Rallying to mitigate the spread of infection: International Infection Prevention Week (Infor)
• Revolutionizing Genomic Data Reporting with Technology (InterSystems)
• The Future for Virtual Health Care in a Consumer-Driven Marketplace (Loyale Healthcare)
• Caution on Cures! (Medhost)
• How to prepare for Appropriate Use Criteria beyond your technical setup (Meditech)
• Organization and Management for the Busy PT Private Practice Owner (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 10/21/20

Top News

LabCorp will use the capabilities of its recently acquired mobile nursing provider GlobalCare and remote clinical trials software vendor SnapIoT to connect patients with its Covance drug development contract research organization business.

Covance will offering tools that include consents, patient-reported outcomes, clinical outcomes assessments, telehealth, connected devices, and digital mobile nurse visits and sample collection.

LabCorp says its technology platform will reduce administrative tasks, improve trial resiliency, and maintain drug study continuity to improve patient-centric trial experiences. 

LabCorp’s clinical trials design includes direct-to-patient recruitment, telemedicine, and access to its 2,000 patient service centers and its contact center.

Reader Comments

From Slightly Advanced Member: “Re: HIMSS. Looks like they need money — they are selling certificate frames.” HIMSS is offering advanced members expensive frames for their HIMSS certificates. Those with inflated egos must be the target audience since I can’t imagine putting a HIMSS-issued certificate on an “I’m so proud of me” wall, with or without a $150 frame. Selling frames via a partner is common for schools and member organizations, however, and I don’t have a problem with them doing so since the market will validate the idea.

From You Do You: “Re: HIMSS. I’m going to demand that HIMSS refund my three HIMSS2020 registrations since I don’t think they’ll have another conference soon, and even if they do, I’m not sure that my employers or I will want to attend. I’m already out hotel fees (due to the poor communications from HIMSS) and airfare for all of us. I’ve had no luck with anyone at HIMSS, so I’m wondering if other vendors or attendees would be interested in a class action suit?” HatchMed filed a class action lawsuit in June, but that covered only exhibit hall costs. I’m out two HIMSS20 registrations as well (for Dr. Jayne and me), but I guess we’ll need to attend HIMSS21 to cover it even if it looks unpromising.

From HLTHISNOTHIMSS: “Re: HLTH conference. It’s crazy to call HLTH another HIMSS-type of conference. It would be more appropriate to call it another JPMorgan conference or even Health 2.0 (which I guess technically HIMSS owns now, too). There is a slight overlap with the main HIMSS conference, but not really. The comparison is just not there. As to the event, the sessions were fine, but pretty bland. Take for example John Halamka, who could do a great talk, but ended up just announcing the new Mayo partnership. Disappointing. I guess you could set up meetings, but the interface for that was kludgy and the motivation virtually to do so was tough. Otherwise, the meeting lacked any sort of attendee engagement which was sad since that’s where 80% of the conference value lies.”

From CareManagerIT: “Re: HLTH conference. Our sales team saw the most value in the 1:1 meetings, with the caveat that there were some logistical hurdles in terms of coordinating rescheduled meetings. It would have been nice to incorporate some SMS messaging that sends notifications to the meeting requestor’s phone when changes happened rather than having to check the portal continuously and risk missing important scheduling updates. I also think the virtual booth was more of an asset that was helpful in allowing our meeting targets to check us out, but not very useful by itself because there were so many exhibitors and attendees likely prioritized the agenda sessions and meetings over actually taking the time to see who had a booth. Scheduling and rescheduling should have some sort of feature that makes both parties agree on a meeting time. Having an SMS feature sounds like a great idea. There really is no way of knowing when someone reschedules or cancels a meeting without accessing the portal constantly. Meetings ended abruptly, followed by immediately starting another session. Five-minute intermissions between some time blocks for bathroom breaks, water, food, etc.”

From IANAL: “Re: Olive’s use of the term cybernetics. Olive and other operational improvement companies (like SAP) have to market this way. Who is the buyer of Olive? Managers. What does Olive do? Work around bad process or existing implementation at healthcare organizations. Who is responsible for the process or implementations being bad? Managers. Bad managers generate bad process and are susceptible to buzzword-based initiatives, so Olive’s marketing cleanly targets both the people who have the need and are able to buy. It’s like how scammers leave typos in their emails – they only want to catch the dumb ones.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: Miley Cyrus, covering “Zombie” by the Cranberries in a virtual fundraiser for Save Our Stages. I was listening to the original as I occasionally do and ran across this new version by accident, which along with her “Black Mirror” appearance makes me appreciate Cyrus even more. She can definitely belt it out and I appreciate that she didn’t feel the need to personalize the original with her own embellishments (see: the B-list musicians who murder “The Star-Spangled Banner” before sporting events, where its appropriateness was already in question).

Webinars

October 27 (Tuesday) noon ET. “Don’t Waste This Pandemic (From a Former Healthcare CEO).” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Monica Reed, MD, MSc, former CEO, Celebration Health. Some healthcare organizations are trying to get back to the normalcy of 2019, but tomorrow’s leaders are accelerating even faster in 2020. Two- or three-year roadmaps were accomplished in six months, so what’s next? The presenter will describe how technology was changing before COVID-19, how the pandemic accelerated plans, what we can expect to see as a result, how leaders and providers can adapt, and what healthcare’s digital front door looks like going forward and how it can be leveraged.

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

October 29 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Presbyterian Healthcare Services Is Preparing for a Post-Pandemic Future Using Digital Care Tools.” Sponsor: Bright.md. Presenters: Ries Robinson, MD, SVP/chief innovation officer, Presbyterian Healthcare Services; Ray Costantini, MD, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Bright.md. Presbyterian Healthcare Services changed the way New Mexico patients access healthcare with its pres.today digital front door, which has given patients easy access to care during a global crisis. The health system’s digital care strategy goes beyond simply offering virtual visits and instead makes every episode of care — regardless of where it is delivered — better by streamlining clinical workflows and by directing patients to the most appropriate venue of care. The presenters will describe how Presbyterian has continued to meet patient needs during the pandemic, how it is deploying digital tools to tackle the combined COVID-19 and flu seasons, and how the health system is innovating care delivery to prepare for a post-pandemic future.

November 11 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Beyond the Firewall: Securing Patients, Staff, and the Medical Internet of Things.” Sponsor: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Presenter: Daniel Faurlin, head of network solutions for healthcare, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. The biggest cybersecurity risk for healthcare IoT isn’t the objects themselves, but rather the network door they can open. This webinar will address meeting the challenges of security, management, and monitoring using ALE’s Digital Age Networking, a single service platform for the network infrastructure that includes an autonomous network, onboarding and managing IoT, and creating business innovation with automated workflows. Specific use cases will be described, including COVID-19 quarantine management, locating equipment and people, and ensuring the security of patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

I missed this previously: Google Glass-powered remote scribe service Augmedix secures $25 million in private placement financing and completes a reverse merger with Malo Holdings, which will rename itself to Augmedix, Inc. and list shares on the OTCQB market for early-stage companies. The San Francisco-based company has raised $107 million since launching in 2012. Here’s some interesting analysis by Kevin O’Leary:

Augmedix, the startup that uses Google Glass for medical documentation, is going public via a reverse merger that includes a $25 million investment into the company. The Form 8-K filed as part of the detail is full of interesting details on Augmedix’s business and the medical documentation space in general, if it’s your jam. The business overview starts at page 8 of this SEC filing. The filing highlights how hard it is to build digital health companies – Augmedix has been working on this company for eight years and it currently has 510 providers on the platform (as of June 2020). Average revenue per doc currently sits at $30k – they did around $14 million of revenue in 2019. Their gross margin is only at 33% for 2019 as they’re paying other vendors to do the remote documentation services. What started off as a super cool tech story (Google Glass for AI scribing!) has become a very human labor intensive service (remote medical scribes). It appears they’re currently in a precarious financial spot as their debt obligations exceed cash reserves.

Netsmart acquires Tellus, an electronic visit verification and claims processing company that is focused on home health, long-term care, and human and state services. Netsmart will incorporate its EVV capabilities into the CareFabric population health management portfolio.

Clinical services telemedicine provider SOC Telemed, which will be going public in a Special Purpose Acquisition Company merger and begin public trading on November 2, says 2020 bookings will increase 100% year-over-year to $12.5 million. The SPAC transaction values the company at $720 million.

Sales

• Five orthopedic groups choose MedEvolve for revenue cycle management and workflow automation.

People

Stephanie Reel (recently retired from Johns Hopkins University) will serve as interim CIO of Washington University in St. Louis.

Matt Dinger (Central Logic) joins Solutionreach’s SR Health business as VP of professional services.

Zac Jiwa (Zeem Consulting) joins Olive as EVP/GM.

Announcements and Implementations

Cerner is seeking health systems to help test its Nuance-powered Voice Assist technology for clinician EHR interaction, joining St. Joseph’s Health and Indiana University Health. 

A report by the Center for Connected Medicine and KLAS finds that eased regulations and increased reimbursement have made telehealth an increased priority for health systems, jumping from 26% of them pre-pandemic to 49% now. Nearly all respondents say their telehealth ramp-up fully met demand, but also exposed integration weaknesses, especially when their chosen technology was not purpose-built for healthcare. Respondents say they will continue to focus on telehealth in 2021, but post-pandemic regulation and payment remain as obstacles — only 20% of health systems say they will continue doing virtual care if reimbursement returns to pre-COVID levels. Volume of use is the top metric being used to evaluate telehealth programs. The pandemic has also increased interest in AI, with clinical decision support and dictation being the most common use cases. Respondents said that revenue cycle management is the area that is most in need of disruption and innovation, especially in the areas of coding and billing and accounts receivable, and new efforts will revolve around increasing telehealth revenue, allowing more employees to work remotely, and using technology to monitor revenue cycle data.

COVID-19

CDC says that the pandemic has seen 285,000 more deaths than the historical baseline from February 1 to September 16, two-thirds of those caused by COVID-19 and the rest from other causes. The 25-44 age group had the largest excess death rate of any age group at 26.5%.

President Trump said in a campaign call Monday that, “People are tired of hearing from Fauci and all these idiots” and toyed with the idea of firing him. He also told attendees of his political rally that CNN is “dumb bastards” for continuing to cover the pandemic, adding that CNN’s intention is to keep people from voting. Meanwhile, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, MD was almost simultaneously receiving the National Academy of Medicine’s Presidential Citation for Exemplary Leadership, which also issued him its 2020 leadership award for his “deft, scientifically grounded leadership in shaping an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

A Kansas nursing home reports that all of its 62 residents have tested positive for COVID-19, of which 10 have died and one is hospitalized. Some staff members have also tested positive.

Several Southern California health systems refused or delayed COVID-19 patient admissions because of their insurance status, a Wall Street Journal report finds, adding to the strain of the hospitals that were already overrun.

KFF and Epic Health Research Network say that hospital admissions dropped one-third during the peak COVID week in mid-April, with the total decline from March through August representing 6.9% of the total expected admissions for 2020. Admissions for patients under 65 dropped only 10% from the expected number, while those involving patients 65 and older dropped in half during March and April. Hospitalization numbers bounced back to 94% of that expected by mid-July.

The UK government awards pharma contract research organization Open Orphan a contract to develop a model for a COVID-19 human challenge tests, in which people who have received vaccines that are being developed will then be injected with small amounts of coronavirus to see how well the vaccines protect them. Open Orphan’s HVivio operates FluCamp, where paid volunteers are studied in a two-week residential program for cold, flu, COVID-19, and other viral respiratory infections.

Other

The University of Virginia Health System makes news once again for its debt collection practices. The health system, which made headlines last year for suing patients 36,000 times over six years, continues to rely on property liens to collect on old bills. Though liens in the state expire after 20 years, UVA Health often renews them, giving it the ability to seize properties through 2039 for bills dating back to the last century.

Dickinson County Healthcare System in Michigan recovers from a ransomware attack over the weekend that compromised access to some of its computer systems.

Sponsor Updates

• Cerner shares insights from its first virtual healthcare conference.
• Change Healthcare exhibits at MGMA’s virtual Medical Practice Excellence Conference through October 21.
• CloudWave and Neptuno partner to deliver cloud services to hospitals using Meditech in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.
• PatientPing commends its community of MSSP ACOs for generating over $527 million in shared savings – a 20% improvement over last year.

Blog Posts

• How We Can Support Fellow Healthcare IT Professionals During COVID-19 (314e)
• Enhancing Telehealth Offerings with Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring (QliqSoft)
• Are Patient Consent Forms a Vector for Transmitting COVID? Here’s the Science (Access)
• Powerful hardware solutions for storage boost clinician efficiency – An Agfa HealthCare – Dell Technologies partnership (Agfa HealthCare)
• Optimize your Wi-Fi to create a hybrid work environment (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise)
• Tier 1/Tier 2 – Take Your Help Desk Support to the Next Level (Bluetree)
• Patient Event Notification CoP and the Role of HIEs (CarePort Health)
• PCMA 2020 Annual Meeting Pushes Industry Forward Virtually (CoverMyMeds)
• Your Quick Guide to FHIR Resources (Diameter Health)
• COVID-19 in Children and Young Adults Part 2: Teenagers and Young Adults (Dimensional Insight)
• KLAS Study Names Engage and Navin Haffty Distinct Market Leaders in Meditech Implementation (Engage)
• Targeting Behavioral Health, Remote Care & More (EClinicalWorks)
• Edge Computing Part 2: Protecting Medical Devices and the Network from Cyberattack (Capsule)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/19/20

Top News

Allscripts files a trademark lawsuit against telemedicine and urgent care startup CarePortMD over its name. Allscripts says CarePortMD is confusingly similar to the name of CarePort Health, which Allscripts is selling to WellSky, and the healthcare market will be confused.

CarePortMD changed its name from ER at Home in September 2018. CarePort Health earned its trademark in early 2013.

Googling “CarePort” returns Cascade Pacific Action Alliance, whose Community CarePort does basically exactly what CarePort Health’s software enables. That program was launched in late 2018.

Reader Comments

From Mighty Boosh : “Re: HLTH conference. I’m wondering if readers could share their reviews and recaps about how it went virtually? I’ve always thought it was silly to have another HIMSS-type conference, but the speaker lineup this year looked great even though I didn’t muster up the $700 to register.” I would be interested in knowing myself. Any attendees want to jot down their thoughts?

From Hospital CIO: “Re: today was a good day. It was boss day and our administrative team put together a nice spread of goodies. A team member who has struggled with the impact of their behavioral self-awareness send me a note thanking their manager for their patience and guidance through a difficult time. In corporate news, Allscripts told employees they will pay back those who were affected by temporary salary reductions during COVID and HCA said it will return its $6 billion in government COVID funding. Good news should lift the spirits of all of who who are dealing with COVID and its related impact on our jobs and personal lives. It might even influence others to do something for the ground troops.”

From Stretched Spandex: “Re: cybernetics. Olive hired executives for jobs with cybernetics in their title. Does that actually mean anything?” Cybernetics is a fancy term for creating a device or system that controls a process automatically using a feedback loop, like a thermostat or self-driving car. Olive describes its Olive Helps as “using cybernetics to provide real-time intelligence while they’re [human workers] handling their most critical tasks.” Its examples are less lofty that the term used to collectively describe them — checking insurance coverage, pushing work lists to nurses, standardizing OR preference cards, and dynamically adjusting materials inventory and ordering. The bottom line is that if it can do that work as well as humans without the cost that humans bring with them, it should be useful, at least if hospitals are willing to use it and to offset the expense by reducing headcount. But you could say that with most any healthcare software.

From Undulating Wave: “Re: [vendor name omitted]. I resigned to take a higher-paying job. They have offered to match the offer I received. Should I stay where I am, which would result in less family disruption?” I would take the new job. Buy-backs rarely benefit either the employee or the employer. You had reasons to leave a company that has failed to pay you the market value that you command, so why would you want to stick around? And why should they give you more money now when you’ve already proven yourself to be available to the highest bidder? It is true, however, that employers rarely make an effort to compensate people according to their contribution or value, so someone’s paycheck often reflects (a) less than they would get if they shopped their skills elsewhere, thus they will need to move out to move up, or (b) they are overpaid or have low-demand, easily replaceable skills and should do they can to keep the job they have. I’m a Maslow’s Hierarchy guy and would say that money should be a motivator only to the extent you earn enough of it to be comfortable, which then leaves belonging, esteem, and self-actualization, which is asking a lot of the company that is buying your time. You gain skepticism of the employer-employee relationship once you’ve been marched off their property while carrying a shockingly small box of your now-pathetic personal effects.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Presentation style is what keeps webinar attendees engaged, poll respondents say. Don’t be boring or read your slides, don’t rehash material the audience already knows, and don’t present content that fails to deliver what the abstract promises (I usually see that when someone other than the presenter writes the abstract and learning objectives). I’m sure those presenters are torn in making their slides (a) detailed enough for non-attendees to review standalone afterward, versus (b) not so detailed that the speaker’s presence is superfluous because everything they have to say is right there on the slide. I suppose that leads to a more philosophical question – how can a webinar (or a podium presentation, for that matter) add value over just writing an article instead? I think the answer probably involves answering attendee questions, unless the presenter is to enthused and personable that the written word alone can’t do their content justice.

New poll to your right or here: Have you taken a consumer DNA test such as AncestryHealth or 23andMe? I have heard countless stories about people whose test results indicated that a parent or sibling wasn’t genetically connected or that they had brothers or sisters they didn’t know about. Most interesting is that those services invite you to make a connection with those strangers whose DNA you share as a previously unknown parent, child, or sibling. The most common surprise seems to be men who fathered children unknowingly or people who raised someone else’s child as their own. My conclusion: it may not be as useful as we think to ask patients about their family medical history when the social and DNA versions of “family” aren’t the same.

Webinars

October 27 (Tuesday) noon ET. “Don’t Waste This Pandemic (From a Former Healthcare CEO).” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Monica Reed, MD, MSc, former CEO, Celebration Health. Some healthcare organizations are trying to get back to the normalcy of 2019, but tomorrow’s leaders are accelerating even faster in 2020. Two- or three-year roadmaps were accomplished in six months, so what’s next? The presenter will describe how technology was changing before COVID-19, how the pandemic accelerated plans, what we can expect to see as a result, how leaders and providers can adapt, and what healthcare’s digital front door looks like going forward and how it can be leveraged.

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

October 29 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Presbyterian Healthcare Services Is Preparing for a Post-Pandemic Future Using Digital Care Tools.” Sponsor: Bright.md. Presenters: Ries Robinson, MD, SVP/chief innovation officer, Presbyterian Healthcare Services; Ray Costantini, MD, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Bright.md. Presbyterian Healthcare Services changed the way New Mexico patients access healthcare with its pres.today digital front door, which has given patients easy access to care during a global crisis. The health system’s digital care strategy goes beyond simply offering virtual visits and instead makes every episode of care — regardless of where it is delivered — better by streamlining clinical workflows and by directing patients to the most appropriate venue of care. The presenters will describe how Presbyterian has continued to meet patient needs during the pandemic, how it is deploying digital tools to tackle the combined COVID-19 and flu seasons, and how the health system is innovating care delivery to prepare for a post-pandemic future.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Sources report that ambulatory surgery center software vendor HST Pathways is nearing a sale of the company.

The UK Space Agency provides funding for Apian, which was founded by two medical students who are also NHS Entrepreneurs to create a nationwide NHS Air Grid to support COVID-19 related lab sample and supply delivery. The company has created a healthcare drone API to simplify adoption. The company launched its first drone, which can carry 4.4 pounds of cargo for up to 60 miles, on Saturday.

Announcements and Implementations

Blue Shield of California saves $10 million in prescription costs over two years by using Gemini Health’s drug cost transparency tool, which integrates with the EHR to give clinicians prescription cost information and alternatives at the point of prescribing.

PatientKeeper announces GA of Charge Aggregator, which allows central billing offices to reconcile and process charges generated across facilities, specialties, and systems.

COVID-19

The tough COVID-19 winter and third surge are getting an early start, as new US cases top 55,000 per day and hit 69,000 on Friday, 14 states are recording their highest-ever new case counts, and hospitalizations are steadily rising. Some states are warning their residents that hospitals are full. Test positivity exceeds 20% in ID, IA, SD, and WI. IHME projects 181,000 more deaths by February 1, which would take the US death count to 400,000.

The 2020 federal deficit hits a record $3.1 trillion from pandemic spending, more than 2.5 times the previous record from 2009, exceeding the gross domestic product for the first time since World War II. Both presidential candidates have proposed trillions of dollars of additional debt should they win. The total US government debt is at $27 trillion.

ProPublica ponders how the CDC — the agency that defeated smallpox globally and polio in the US – is widely perceived as being ineffective during COVID-19. The publication concluded after speaking to former and current employees that: (a) the White House meddles in its work by emphasizing politics over science; (b) CDC’s top leadership is ineffective and caves under White House pressure; (c) CDC fumbled the early rollout of COVID-19 tests, allowing the pandemic to spread unchecked; (d) CDC’s budget was reduced, which forced it to reduce its global involvement; (e) the White House blames Director Robert Redfield, MD for China’s lack of COVID transparency; (f) CDC has been sidelined as the president publicly rejects science with inaccurate claims and the touting of unproven cures; (g) CDC ceded to White House demands to downplay public health concerns about testing, cruise ships, school re-openings, and religious gatherings, which forced CDC to reverse its publicly announced guidelines; and (h) the White House shut down CDC’s hospital data tracking system and turned it over to TeleTracking.

A New York Times article reminds that no test can determine whether someone who has had coronavirus is still contagious, even as recently recovered politicians and football coaches return to public gatherings claiming that their negative tests prove they can’t infect anyone. A physician commenter also notes that one of the many things that nobody knows about coronavirus is how much viral load is needed to be infectious. Studies are beginning to shore up the argument that higher levels of viral load drive poorer outcomes, but not the level of infectiousness or the severity of symptoms.

Twitter removes a tweet in which White House coronavirus advisor and neuroradiologist Scott Atlas, MD made misleading claims that masks are ineffective for reducing coronavirus spread, citing a libertarian think tank’s article. Atul Gawande, MD, MPH listed studies on Twitter that prove the effectiveness of masks. Atlas also said in a Thursday interview that COVID-19 testing should be used only to protect vulnerable populations, that large-scale testing and isolation programs infringe on civil liberties, that testing people without symptoms is “destroying the workforce,” and that herd immunity will be reached once 20-40% of Americans are infected. He previously said that increased testing is “a fundamental error of the public health people perpetrated on the world.”

In the UK, NHS updates its COVID-19 tracing app following user complaints that it gives them an exposure warning that simply disappears when pressed with no further instructions. NHS says the message is coming from IOS and Android security. The update cause a second message to pop up that says to ignore the first one.

Other

A Texas man who was angry at a surgeon — whose practice charged him $115 for a copy of his medical records after cancelling his surgery because he hadn’t followed pre-op instructions — is indicted for online impersonation for posting the doctor’s cell phone number in Craigslist ads. The man initially admitted only to calling the doctor’s cell phone at odd hours with caller ID blocked, but he later later told detectives that he posted ads that were either sexually suggestive or that offered free Doberman puppies, in both cases specifying that calls and texts would be accepted only after 10 p.m. Craigslist records indicated that he had used the platform to complain about the doctor’s business and to ask female readers to send him nude pictures.

Sponsor Updates

• The VA has used the Nuance Dragon Medical One speech-recognition cloud platform and PowerMic Mobile microphone app since the start of the pandemic to help physicians document care through its expanded telehealth services.
• RxRevu’s SwiftRx Direct real-time prescription benefit solution is now available within Athenahealth’s EHR.
• The Chartis Group names Greg Benton (Grant Thornton) ERP practice leader within its informatics and technology practice.
• Redox releases its latest podcast, “Getting Paid from Medicaid with Rachel Dixon of Prime Health.”
• Relatient adds new partners for print and mailing statements to expand RCM services.
• Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitat in Germany implements Visage Imaging’s Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform across all of its radiology and subspecialty imaging departments.
• Waystar will present and exhibit at MGMA’s virtual Medical Practice Excellence Conference October 19-21.

Blog Posts

• Solving telehealth inefficiencies that exacerbate physician burnout (Nuance)
• Connected Systems Helped This New York Home Health Provider Combat COVID-19 (Netsmart)
• Why fundamentals matter: Three key plays for a winning EHR (Nordic)
• Collaborating over the Next Couple of Months: Take a Breath and Keep the Focus on Caring (PCare)
• Time to Retire the Shadetree Revenue Cycle Management Approach (Pivot Point Consulting)
• What Makes PMD Video Chat HIPAA-Compliant? (PMD)
• Data Analysis: How CMS’s Proposed Reimbursement Changes Could Affect Medical Groups (Premier)
• Three Barriers to Scaling Telemedicine During a Pandemic (and How We Overcame Them) (SOC Telemed)
• How to identify types of sensitive data (Spirion)
• Is modern paging an oxymoron? How pagers work in 2020 (Spok)
• Role of an Integration Engine in Large and Small Enterprises (Summit Healthcare)
• Five Ways COVID-19 Impacts Pharmacists (Surescripts)
• Flu Clinic: 5-Step Patient Engagement Guide During COVID (SymphonyRM)
• Capitalizing on the Mobile PT Model with a Home-Based Concierge Practice (WebPT)
• How the National Trusted Exchange Networks Evolved Over Time (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 10/16/20

Top News

Private equity firm JLL Partners acquires analytics solution vendor MedeAnalytics from Thoma Bravo, which acquired a majority stake in MedeAnalytics in 2015.

Reader Comments

From Chief Complaint: “Re: virtual exhibit halls. Your poll found that companies that paid to participate in a virtual conference’s exhibit hall didn’t find it worth the money or effort. I would be interested to hear from someone who has exhibited and can give their pros and cons, takeaways, what they would do differently, etc.” If you were in charge of a virtual exhibit at HIMSS, HLTH, CHC, etc., how about writing up your experience? I’ll make it anonymous if you’d like. Or if you aren’t motivated to put it in writing, I’ll interview you by phone (again, happily keeping you anonymous if you like). The poll results were interesting as a broad reaction, but it would be fun to get more firsthand insight. I haven’t heard much (any) buzz from Virtual HIMSS, so we’ll see how the even-larger RSNA does in  a few weeks, then attendees can for the first time keep eating Thanksgiving leftovers at home instead of bundling up for Chicago.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor CancerIQ. The Chicago-based company’s precision health platform enables providers to identify, evaluate, and manage entire patient populations based on individual genetic risk factors. By analyzing family history, running predictive risk models, and automating NCCN guidelines, CancerIQ empowers providers with the genetic expertise to prevent cancer, catch it early, and/or create personalized care plans. The platform has been rapidly adopted by some of the top health systems in the country and fully integrates with genetics laboratories, EHRs like Epic and Cerner, and specialty software vendors to streamline workflow, guide clinician decision-making, achieve cost savings, and most importantly, improve patient outcomes. CancerIQ is scaling the use of genetic testing to predict, preempt, and prevent disease. The company offers a toolkit for providers who want to quickly and effectively kick-start a telehealth-powered cancer genetic screening program. Thanks to CancerIQ for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a video from the American Journal of Managed Care in which CancerIQ co-founder and CEO Feyi Olopade Ayodele, MBA describes how the company is making cancer genetic screening practical.

Listening: new from Sir Chloe, indie rockers from Bennington, Vermont. It’s kind of guitar-forward grungy pop with sweet singing, formed by singer Dana Foote two years ago as her senior-year thesis at Bennington College.  

Webinars

October 27 (Tuesday) noon ET. “Don’t Waste This Pandemic (From a Former Healthcare CEO).” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Monica Reed, MD, MSc, former CEO, Celebration Health. Some healthcare organizations are trying to get back to the normalcy of 2019, but tomorrow’s leaders are accelerating even faster in 2020. Two- or three-year roadmaps were accomplished in six months, so what’s next? The presenter will describe how technology was changing before COVID-19, how the pandemic accelerated plans, what we can expect to see as a result, how leaders and providers can adapt, and what healthcare’s digital front door looks like going forward and how it can be leveraged.

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

October 29 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Presbyterian Healthcare Services Is Preparing for a Post-Pandemic Future Using Digital Care Tools.” Sponsor: Bright.md. Presenters: Ries Robinson, MD, SVP/chief innovation officer, Presbyterian Healthcare Services; Ray Costantini, MD, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Bright.md. Presbyterian Healthcare Services changed the way New Mexico patients access healthcare with its pres.today digital front door, which has given patients easy access to care during a global crisis. The health system’s digital care strategy goes beyond simply offering virtual visits and instead makes every episode of care — regardless of where it is delivered — better by streamlining clinical workflows and by directing patients to the most appropriate venue of care. The presenters will describe how Presbyterian has continued to meet patient needs during the pandemic, how it is deploying digital tools to tackle the combined COVID-19 and flu seasons, and how the health system is innovating care delivery to prepare for a post-pandemic future.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Digital check-in vendor Clearwave acquires Odoro, which offers a similar product as well as patient scheduling.

Allscripts shares jumped 30% following news that it will sell CarePort Health to WellSky for $1.35 billion. MDRX shares have increased 2% in the past year versus the Nasdaq’s 46% gain, with the company’s market cap at $1.75 billion, of which CarePort Health and the cash it will generate obviously represent a surprisingly significant portion.

Shared decision-making platform vendor WiserCare raises $3.6 million, increasing its total to $9 million.

Philips is reportedly seeking a buyer for its Lifeline personal emergency response business. Philips acquired Lifeline for $750 million in January 2006, when Lifeline was generating $150 million in revenue with a 15% operating margin. 

Physician search and appointment scheduling platform vendor Zocdoc says that the lawsuit against the company filed by its former CEO for staging a “fraudulent coup” against him is without merit, it has boosted profit by moving from a flat subscription fee to a per-patient charge to providers, and it responded to COVID by launching video visits in April 2020 and a free video service in May. The company admits that it was in big financial trouble in 2015, adding that it couldn’t replace salespeople fast enough because of company culture problems. It hired a new CEO in November 2015 and says it has reinvented the Zocdoc around core values and a rejection of the “growth at all costs” mindset. The company has raised $226 million through a Series D round (almost none of that after 2015), and with this public mea culpa, seems to be looking for more investment action, maybe via one of those blank check SPACs that are suddenly all the rage.

Sales

• HHS’s Office of Women’s Health contracts with Premier for data and performance improvement methodology to address maternal health. Premier will bring at least 200 hospitals together in a Perinatal Collaborative to implement outcomes-proven best practices and care bundles.

People

Jay Colfer (Geniq) joins Medstreaming as CEO.

Quest Analytics hires Barbara Dumery, MS (Imprivata) as chief product officer.

MDLive promotes Mindy Heintskill, MBA to the newly created position of chief growth officer and hires Kristy Kaiser, MBA as chief product officer.

Healthcare automation technology vendor Olive hires Rohan D’Souza (KenSci) as EVP/GM of cybernetics; Mike Biselli, MA (Catalyst HTI) as VP of emerging technology partnerships; and Tony Brancato as VP of products for cybernetics.

Brian Norris, RN, MBA (OurHealth) joins employee health management company Marathon Health as SVP of population health.

NeoGenomics Laboratories hires David Brooks, MBA (Medlio) as VP of its informatics division, where he rejoins his Medlio co-founder Lori Mehen. 

Announcements and Implementations

Epic will use InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, a next-generation system that includes database management, interoperability, and analytics capabilities for data-intensive applications.

CliniComp will incorporate First Databank’s FDB MedKnowledge database into its EHR, where it will be used in ordering, conflict checking, documenting, and dispensing. It will also implement FDB Interoperability Module for medication reconciliation and interoperability with external systems such as automated dispensing cabinets.

Epic lists 314e’s Speki EHR help solution in its App Orchard.

Longtime Meditech user Milford Regional Medical Center (MA) goes live on Expanse. 

AMIA announces its 2021 fellows.

CloudWave expands its Meditech hosting to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean in partnership with IT services and telecommunications provider Neptuno.

Government and Politics

The Department of Defense says that private sector connectivity expanded significantly when DoD, the VA, and the Coast Guard connected to CommonWell last week.

CMS expands the list of telehealth services that Medicare will pay for during the pandemic.

COVID-19

CDC warns that small family gatherings are a growing source of coronavirus spread, reminding everyone that that mitigation is essential, especially with Thanksgiving coming up in which weather forces people indoors and cautious older family members will likely be exposed to younger and less-careful friends and relatives.

An investigative report published in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, finds that White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator and former CDC employee Deborah Birx, MD drove the decision to abandon the CDC’s hospital data collection system and turn it over to private contactor TeleTracking. One CDC employee immediately quite because of the toxic atmosphere, others said the change was unnecessary because experienced staffers could reliably estimate totals even with missing data, and one texted to a colleague, “Birx has been on a months-long rampage against our data. Good f—ing luck getting the hospitals to clean up their data and update daily.” CDC employees told Science that she is largely responsible for the CDC’s credibility crisis because of her desire to please the White House and her lack of listening ability, noting that she had obtained data from every US hospital while running a CDC HIV/AIDS project and failed to understand why weekly data collection during a global crisis was any different. Birx says 98% of hospitals are reporting, but Science obtained an internal document indicating that only 24% are sending all of the data requested. TeleTracking’s system is also updated 3-4 days behind, struggles to report hospitals the share ID numbers, and consistently reports “nonsensical” numbers, such as 1,500 incidents in which it showed that a hospital had more occupied beds than its total beds.

WHO’s much-awaited Solidarity clinical trial finds that remdesivir does not improve survival rates of COVID-19 patients. The study of 11,266 hospitalized patients found that repurposed drugs such as remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir, and interferon had little effect on mortality or the need to ventilate patients. Remdesivir manufacturer Gilead Sciences says the conclusions of the report, which was made public before its publication, are not consistent with several other studies that showed remdesivir’s clinical benefit. A study published last week shows that use of the drug, which costs $2,340 per five-day course, was associated with a hospital stay reduction from 15 to 10 days with no mortality benefit.

Other

I’m fascinated by the bio of Darren Sommer, DO, MBA, MPH that I ran across. He’s founder and CEO of telemedicine hardware vendor Innovator Health, but his backstory is what caught my eye. He dropped out of college, joined the US Coast Guard at 19, completed EMT training, went back to school to earn an undergraduate degree and then a DO/MPH, then on the day after he finished his residency, joined the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, 2nd Brigade Combat Team and spent 15 months serving two tours in Afghanistan, where he also earned a Parachutist Badge and achieved the rank of major. He came home, earned an MBA at Duke and is now an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel along with his CEO job. I like these quotes:

• “The influence of the Airborne’s culture, which is to drop in behind enemy lines and find a way to succeed or expect to die, changes the way you face all challenges in life.I now meet every obstacle in my life with the expectation that failure is not an option.”
• “A hero is someone who does the right thing no matter the consequences. I worked with heroes every day. Some that I worked with received high accolades like the Silver Star or Purple Heart, but most of the heroes I worked with never even received a thank you. These were the soldiers that gave blood when we had a MASCAL [mass casualty], volunteered for patrols so their battle buddy could get rest, or risked their lives to ensure America stayed safe and Afghanistan could be free. This is why when you see a veteran, always thank them for their service. They have been a hero to someone.”
• “I plan to stay in [the Army reserves] another 10 years. I don’t look forward to the day when I can no longer wear the uniform and serve my country.”
• “It was my time in Afghanistan that really shaped my future. I was still a relatively inexperienced physician, and I was taking care of some very sick patients, in some very austere environments. Patients with conditions that I did not get exposed to in my civilian residency. The Army had an excellent communications infrastructure that allowed me to use technology to reach out to other physicians in Afghanistan, the US, and around the world. Their mentorship helped me to make better clinical decisions. It was my first exposure to telemedicine … [upon returning home to practice in a rural hospital] I kept asking myself why telemedicine wasn’t being used here in America like it was being used in Afghanistan.”
• “It took me a long time to realize the difference between failure and success was my effort.”
• “If you hear a horn honk at you while you are driving, it might be your driving, or it just might be them. When you hear a lot of horns honking at you, it is probably you.”

A former British cycling team doctor who has admitted to ordering banned substances claims that a hard drive failure prevents him from providing medical records data to the world governing cycling body. This is the third time he has claimed that a computer problem preventing him from complying with inquiries – he told authorities in 2011 that his laptop had been stolen, then last week said he destroyed his own laptop to prevent “Indian hackers” from accessing its data.

Sponsor Updates

• CentralReach will incorporate Change Healthcare’s RCM software and services into its EHR for autism-focused providers and educators.
• Health Data Movers publishes a new white paper, “Transplant Data Conversion: How We Make It Happen.”
• Healthfinch joins the Health Catalyst family.
• AI Tech Park interviews Saykara founder and CEO Harjinder Sandhu.
• Kyruus publishes the “2020 Patient Access Journey Report.”
• Coffeyville Regional Medical Center (KS) implements Meditech’s depression screening and suicide prevention toolkit.

Blog Posts

• 3 Things to Know About RCM (Experity)
• Introducing Brenda Ashley and Optimum CareerPath (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Evolving the Cybersecurity Landscape (Fortified Health Security)
• You Need More Than a Scripting Engine to Monitor Citrix or VMware Horizon (Goliath Technologies)
• Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Healthcare’s Secret Weapon During Pandemic (Halo Health)
• Four Benefits of Automating Charge Note Reconciliation (Ingenious Med)
• Our Focus at AHIMA20: The Marriage of Prospective and Retrospective Audits (Hayes)
• Embracing Human Centered Design in Healthcare Digital Transformation (The HCI Group)
• Four Strategies Drive High-Value Healthcare Analytics for COVID-19 Recovery (Health Catalyst)
• It’s time to clinically integrate the healthcare supply chain (Infor)
• Four Benefits of Automating Charge Note Reconciliation (Ingenious Med)
• Tales and Tricks of Social Engineering 20 Years Ago and Today (Ingenious Med)
• How to Manage Change in a Dynamic Healthcare Environment (InterSystems)
• The Trends Defining Healthcare’s Next Normal. The Hospital Financial Model They Require (Loyale Healthcare)
• Build Community with Engagement (Medhost)
• Tracking COVID-19 Immunizations Relies on Accurate, Consistent Patient Identification (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 10/14/20

Top News

Providence forms Tegria, a healthcare services business comprised of nine companies that the health system has invested in or acquired. Providence SVP Anders Brown will lead the Seattle-based company’s team of 2,500. The companies involved are:

• Bluetree (Epic consulting)
• Engage (Meditech services)
• Navin, Haffty & Associates (Meditech consulting)
• Community Technologies (Epic Connect and services)
• MediRevv (hospital revenue cycle management)
• Acclara Solutions (hospital revenue cycle management)
• Medical Specialties Managers (ambulatory revenue cycle management)
• QuiviQ (machine learning for optimizing hospital operations)
• Lumedic (information exchange)

An executive of one of the companies says that they will continue to operate under their own names, which the announcement did not specifically say.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thanks to the several folks who suggested ways that hiring a new journalism grad (a friend of a friend) as a paid intern might add value to HIStalk while enhancing her career prospects. I’ll be talking to her soon to learn more about her interests and capabilities and I’ll use the comments I received to give her an idea of the possibilities.

Listening: new from Bob Dylan. I’ve liked a few of his songs over the years and little else from his long career because I find his nasal, country-leaning vocal stylings distracting no matter how profound his lyrics. But at 79 years of age, “Murder Most Foul” sounds great and tells a story that doesn’t require a coffee shop study group to figure out, which might explain why the old, unreleased song became his first #1 pop hit and has earned 4.4 million YouTube views. It is simple yet effective in a Nick Cave meets Steven King poetic kind of way, mixing the Kennedy assassination with a bunch of random song titles. The time around 1963 was important in Dylan’s career as a 22-year-old – he released his first album followed by another that included “Blowin’ in the Wind,” he changed his name from Robert Zimmerman, and he recorded his first protest songs.

Webinars

October 27 (Tuesday) noon ET. “Don’t Waste This Pandemic (From a Former Healthcare CEO).” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Monica Reed, MD, MSc, former CEO, Celebration Health. Some healthcare organizations are trying to get back to the normalcy of 2019, but tomorrow’s leaders are accelerating even faster in 2020. Two- or three-year roadmaps were accomplished in six months, so what’s next? The presenter will describe how technology was changing before COVID-19, how the pandemic accelerated plans, what we can expect to see as a result, how leaders and providers can adapt, and what healthcare’s digital front door looks like going forward and how it can be leveraged.

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

October 29 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Presbyterian Healthcare Services Is Preparing for a Post-Pandemic Future Using Digital Care Tools.” Sponsor: Bright.md. Presenters: Ries Robinson, MD, SVP/chief innovation officer, Presbyterian Healthcare Services; Ray Costantini, MD, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Bright.md. Presbyterian Healthcare Services changed the way New Mexico patients access healthcare with its pres.today digital front door, which has given patients easy access to care during a global crisis. The health system’s digital care strategy goes beyond simply offering virtual visits and instead makes every episode of care — regardless of where it is delivered — better by streamlining clinical workflows and by directing patients to the most appropriate venue of care. The presenters will describe how Presbyterian has continued to meet patient needs during the pandemic, how it is deploying digital tools to tackle the combined COVID-19 and flu seasons, and how the health system is innovating care delivery to prepare for a post-pandemic future.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts will sell its CarePort Health care coordination business to WellSky for $1.35 billion. I interviewed CarePort Health co-founder and CEO Lissy Hu, MD in May 2020.

Training and talent management platform vendor HealthStream acquires ShiftWizard, which offers systems for nurse and staff scheduling, productivity, and forecasting, for $32 million in cash.

In Australia, NSW Health begins accepting bids for a statewide, cloud-based health IT system that it hopes to have in place by 2026. The single system will replace nine EHRs from Cerner and Orion Health; several patient administration systems from Cerner and DXC; and laboratory information systems from Cerner, Citadel, and Integrated Software Solutions.

Israel-based Nym Health raises $16.5 million to expand its automated hospital coding and billing technology beyond the 40 providers it already serves in the US.

I’m a new fan of health IT guy Kevin O’Leary, MBA, JD for his shockingly insightful analysis of the $3.7 billion valuation of Medicare Advantage startup Clover, which emphasizes its PCP contracting tool called Clover Assistant. Clover is going public via a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC), a shell company that is formed to raise capital through an IPO while avoiding some SEC reporting. It’s a fascinating read, with this spoiler offered in the second sentence: “It’s obviously a great exit for everyone associated with Clover, but you’ll have to forgive me if I’m a bit befuddled that a 3-star Medicare Advantage plan with an MLR of 98.8% in 2019 and ~57,000 lives is somehow being valued at $3.7 billion (roughly equaling $65k per life covered).” He also notes that the company has been fined by CMS for misleading marketing, withheld payments to labs in hoping to force them to provide detailed patient data, and laid off 25% of its headcount in admitting that it needed more people who understand healthcare. The CEO previously ran a chain of hospitals best known for going out of network with all insurance and increasing prices to the point that one was the most expensive in the US in 2013, earning him and his investors $150 million in management fees.

Sales

• UAB Medicine will offer tele-ICU services from Advanced ICU Care.

People

Darin Ryder (UF Health) joins Continuum Health IT as EVP of client services.

Announcements and Implementations

Through its Mayo Clinic Platform, Mayo Clinic (MN) and Safe Health Group establish Safe Health Systems to improve access to efficient, affordable virtual treatment for common conditions using the SAFE digital health platform. Initial efforts have focused on enabling COVID-19 testing and app-based health status verification for employees and students, and will expand to testing for STDs and common conditions.

Imprivata develops a touchless version of PatientSecure, a biometric palm scanner healthcare organizations can use to correctly identify patients and match them to their medical records.

Non-profit public trust The Commons Project partners with LabCorp to make test results, including COVID-19 screening, available on the CommonHealth Android app. It makes Apple Health type functionality available to the vast majority of the world’s mobile phone users whose devices run Android rather than IOS. I’m surprised they misspelled “Immunizations” in the app as depicted on the Google Play screen shot.

A new KLAS report on implementation consulting finds that S&P Consultants, Impact Advisors, Cumberland, and Ettain Health (formerly known as Leidos Health) are strong in Cerner projects. Health systems whose Epic implementations are complex give high marks to Impact Advisors, Nordic, and Optimum Healthcare IT. Engage tops the list tops the list of firms that provide strategic and technical expertise for Meditech projects, which also includes its fellow Tegria company of Navin, Haffty & Associates.

Government and Politics

ONC publishes a questionnaire for EHR users that would allow it to publish product comparisons. However, ONC notes that the questionnaire was developed using Cures Act funding, no money was appropriated to do anything with the tool after its development, and ONC has no plans to use it. They also note other potential problems, which would seem to have been obvious before ONC handed taxpayer money over to the contractors who happily did pointless work in designing a survey that no EHR user could ever complete accurately:

• Only the happiest and least-happy customers submit reviews.
• QA methods would need to screen for duplicate responses, incomplete submissions, and outlier responses.
• No method was designed to ensure that users and the EHR they claim they use are valid.
• The user’s evaluation may reflect their own organization’s customization or deployment rather than the design of the base product.
• The more detailed the questions, the harder it is for a single respondent to answer them all since they span everything from clinical usability to contractual terms.
• Voluntary participation is unlikely to generate good results.

COVID-19

Use of masks in New Zealand as a coronavirus mitigation measure reduced its flu case count over its April to August winter to just six, saving an estimated 1,500 lives.

Surgeon, author, and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health professor Martin Makary, MD, MPH says in a USA Today opinion piece that a top national priority should be to support at-home COVID-19 testing using telemedicine to avoid sending potentially infected people out in public. He advocates having trained professionals supervise a patient’s at-home testing in a virtual visit, then having an app send the de-identified information to a national tracking database. The federal government is starting distribution of 100 million Abbott BinaxNow kits this week.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says that antibody treatments for COVID-19 will need to be rationed given the current infection rate that will require up to 400,000 doses per month.

Brown University’s medical school and Lifespan develop MyCOVIDRisk, which allows people to specify their location, describe their plans for the day, and understand how much risk is involved and how they can reduce it. A two-person, 45 minute lunch in my area with no masks creates a small risk, with the site concluding that it’s a good idea for my mental health, while a two-hour hair appointment for Mrs. HIStalk in a salon with eight unmasked people creates a high risk. A subtle point is that the site is optimistic and helpful rather than just doling out gloom and doom that will force users into the false binary choice of doing whatever they want versus locking themselves in their homes.

Public health departments and colleges are struggling to perform contact tracing because students aren’t sure whether to put their home address or their campus address on COVID testing forms. Students are also less likely to answer phone calls from an unknown number to verify their location. The address issue also affects campus outbreak counts since some cases are being sent to their home addresses, especially if the student didn’t specifically identify themselves as attending college, and those addresses may be in a different state.

A New York Times opinion piece says “the medical cavalry is coming” and says that coronavirus optimism is warranted for these reasons:

• Experts say that the pandemic will end here sooner than expected, possibly by mid-2021.
• Americans have been mostly cooperative with shutdowns, distancing, and mask requirements despite high-profile exceptions.
• Every COVID-19 survivor and vaccine recipient  breaks another chain in the transmission.
• The percentage of people who die of the infection has fallen dramatically as older Americans exercise more caution, nursing homes improve their protections, and hospitals use treatment techniques such as proning and ventilator avoidance.
• At least two vaccines will likely be approved by early January, and despite distribution challenges, enough doses should be available vaccinate every American by June.

Other

Stat looks at how population health analytics software inadvertently adds racial bias in identifying patients who should receive more involved care, which happens because those platforms use medical spending data as a proxy for health need. White patients are scored up to four times higher for preventive care that similar marginalized patients because they have had more tests and visits. The article notes that the algorithms deliver the promised benefit — reduced hospitalizations and cost — but don’t consider that the data of black patients includes the effects of racism, lower incomes, less insurance coverage, and fewer provider choices.

UC San Diego Health provides a “how to” model for rapidly deploying telemedicine, which includes roles and responsibilities, user technology support, a provider checklist for video visits, patient support, and billing and credentialing.

In Australia, a health district will review the case of a woman who died of gastrointestinal rupture after arriving by ambulance at Gulgong Multi-Purpose Service, which no longer employs doctors. The hospital decided in June to use telehealth services instead. The family, which didn’t find out until the next day that the woman died without a physician being present, says it is reasonable to expect that ambulance-transported patients will see a doctor in person.

Sponsor Updates

• AGS Health will present during AHIMA’s virtual conference October 15 and 16.
• OptimizeRx expects Q3 revenue to increase 100% to $10 million.
• Ryan Engle (TT Capital Partners) and Navid Farzad (Frist Cressey Ventures) join Audacious Inquiry’s Board of Directors.
• Change Healthcare offers tips for interviewing virtually as part of its new Candidate Corner series.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new Informonster Podcast, “The Architecture of Intolerance: Discussing How Healthcare IT Documents Substance Intolerances and Allergies.”
• HIMSS SoCal features CloudWave President and COO Erik Littlejohn.
• Dimensional Insight congratulates customer Konza on its HHS grant, which the HIE will use to establish better connectivity with local public health agencies.
• Cerner Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer announces new offerings at its virtual Cerner Health Conference: Unite (usability), Discover (intelligence-integrated products), and social disparity dashboards.
• In England, Cerner will work with Induction Healthcare Group to develop patient engagement offerings for NHS facilities.
• Spok welcomes more than 550 attendees this week to its Connect 20 Virtual conference.

Blog Posts

• 314e Corporation launches “Speki” EHR Help (314e)
• Top 5 Concerns Driving Your Contactless Check-In Initiatives (Access)
• Impressive research by Agfa RSNA R&E Grant recipient (Agfa HealthCare)
• US News & World Report Analytics: Showcase Your Successes (Bluetree)
• Patient Event Notification CoPs: Understanding the Regulatory Landscape (CarePort Health)
• A Full Virtual Care Strategy is More Than Telehealth: Achieve Outcomes, Scale, and ROI with Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring (CareSignal)
• ServiceNow Workflows: Best Practices for Maximizing Your Investment (CereCore)
• Improving Healthcare Access and Orchestration by Aligning Providers and Health Systems (Central Logic)
• Cerner’s Commitment to Innovative and Cost-Effective Associate Health Care (Cerner)
• Navigating Cybersecurity Challenges in Healthcare (ChartLogic)
• Recent Spike in Healthcare Breach Reports Due to Blackbaud Ransomware Attack (CI Security)
• 9th Annual Rock Health Summit 2020: Delivering Digital-First Collaborative Care for Vulnerable Populations (Collective Medical)
• Beyond the Coat: CoverMyMeds Pharmacists Share Their “Why” (CoverMyMeds)
• CMS: Home Care-Related MA Benefits are Booming (Dina)
• Online Doctor’s Appointment Booking Made Easy (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/12/20

Top News

Online texting-only mental therapy provider Talkspace, frustrated by state-by-state therapist licensing that has limited therapist availability during pandemic-driven high demand, tells its independent contractor providers that the company will pay any fines that result from their serving patients who are located in states where they aren’t licensed.

Emergency waivers have allowed therapists to serve patients who are located in states where the therapist isn’t licensed, but penalties will be reinstated when the waivers expire.

Legal experts warn that unlicensed practice is a crime in some states. They also note that any licensing board actions will remain on their record permanently regardless of who pays.

Health IT attorney Nathaniel Lacktman summarizes, “This is an enterprise-wide aggressive growth play in lieu of getting licensure. When a company uses the waivers to blitzscale its patient base, it needs a plan for what to do when those waivers end.” Competitors have addressed the issue by creating licensure teams and covering some or all of the cost of obtaining new state licenses.

A recent New York Times report says Talkspace’s startup culture conflicts with mental health concerns, noting its obsession with using patient data for purposes that sometimes lapses into marketing. It gave burner phones to employees and asked them to write five-star app store reviews to improve its lackluster scores. Therapists complained that it added a button to its app that allows clients to demand quick responses and and having their pay reduced if they don’t respond several times daily.

Another licensure issue unrelated to Talkspace is that patients are moving or taking extended vacations during the pandemic without necessarily notifying their virtual therapist, which creates legal exposure if the therapist unknowingly conducts sessions with a regular patient who has temporarily or permanently relocated to a state in which the therapist is not licensed.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The most valued use of LinkedIn among 386 poll respondents is for casually checking credentials or finding out what colleagues are up to, with few using it as a businessperson’s Facebook in reading the news feed, reading or posting articles, or messaging. Some commenters commendably use it to help others make connections, such as passing along recruiter pitches or leaving a recommendation for a former colleague who has lost their job.

New poll to your right or here: What factors have caused you to leave a recently presented webinar or to stop paying attention? Feel free click the poll’s Comments link to explain the factors that make a webinar interesting and valuable to you. We require companies that have us produce their webinar to do a rehearsal that we record and review, but many times they ignore our advice, usually because (a) marketing people are reluctant to coach the presenter; (b) they believe time is too short to make improvements; or (c) the box to be checked is to present a webinar, not necessarily to make it as good as it can be. Still, our experience is that a knowledgeable, qualified presenter who earnestly provides useful information that delivers what the write-up promises will usually do very well regardless of any other issues.

A friend of a friend just graduated college with a journalism degree, which wasn’t exactly a hot employment ticket even before COVID. I’m thinking about hiring her as a paid remote intern in some fashion, assuming she is interested in learning about health IT and thinks she could gain something useful working in my decidedly non-traditional way. Help me out here – how could a fresh journalism graduate best add value to HIStalk while simultaneously becoming better prepared for the job market? Let me know what you think. I would be doing it as a giving back kind of thing, but it would be nice to user her talents wisely and make her more employable in the process.

Prospective new sponsors: read the media kit, contact Lorre, and get the rest of 2020 free and all of 2021, including HIMSS21.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Change Healthcare. The Nashville-based organization is a leading independent healthcare technology company that is focused on insights, innovation, and accelerating the transformation of the US healthcare system through the power of the Change Healthcare Platform. It provides data and analytics-driven solutions to improve clinical, financial, administrative, and patient engagement outcomes, with specific offerings in end-to-end revenue cycle management, enterprise medical imaging, payment accuracy, and patient experience. Thanks to Change Healthcare for supporting HIStalk.

I found this Change Healthcare explainer video on YouTube.

Webinars

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

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

Announcements and Implementations

Canada’s Trillium Health Partners goes live on Epic.

COVID-19

COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have increased significantly in the past few weeks, with the lagging indicator of daily deaths likely to follow. Acceleration is almost certain as cooler weather sends people indoors. Europe is seeing the same trends. Experts have long feared a second wave given the seasonality that is exhibited by most respiratory infections and coronaviruses, such as in flu season where cases pick up in late fall and peak in January and February.

A CDC review of COVID-19 spread in Arizona finds that cases shot up after the state reopened, but stabilized and then decreased sharply when control measures were implemented.

The Wall Street Journal explains the behavioral challenge in which young people have the most COVID-19 infections, but the older people they spread it to make up most of the deaths.

Companies and schools in the UK are reportedly telling employees to turn off the NHS test and trace app or to remove it from their phones, apparently fearing that their workers will receive warnings that tell them to isolate. One of the companies that told employees to shut the app down at work is GlaxoSmithKline, which is working on COVID-19 vaccine.

HHS Assistant Secretary and pediatrician Admiral Brett Giroir, MD orders Nevada to end its recent ban on two rapid coronavirus testing systems that the federal government provides, saying that false positives are to be expected and that the decision “can only be based on a lack of knowledge or bias.” Federal guidance says states can’t block the use of tests that have been approved by the FDA for testing people in congregate settings. The two test manufacturers issued statements saying they were pleased with Giroir’s order.

Other

A study finds that physician organizations that are affiliated with health systems deliver about the same level of quality care to high-need Medicare patients as independent practices. Aldedade CEO Farzad Mostashari, MD, MSc notes that the Rand researchers seem to have tried and failed to find ways to game the results to make higher-cost health system practices look better, even when trying to bolster the “our patients are sicker” argument that the study did not support.

Security experts find that Dr Lal PathLabs, one of India’s largest lab operators, failed to secure its daily testing logs that were stored as Excel worksheets on Amazon Web Services. The company fixed the problem, but did not respond to the researcher who told them about it.

Sponsor Updates

• HIStalk Sponsors exhibiting at the virtual Cerner Health Conference October 13-14 include Access, Elsevier, Ensocare, Fortified Health Security, Healthwise, Intelligent Medical Objects, Imprivata, Kyruus, Nuance, and Surescripts.
• Carroll County Memorial Hospital celebrates 10 years of partnership with Cerner CommunityWorks.
• Netsmart welcomed more than 3,000 providers and professionals to its 13th annual Connections conference earlier this month.
• OpenText makes electronic signature accessible to organizations of every size.
• Dina will sponsor HLTH VRTL 2020 on October 12-16 and will be part of the Matter Startup Showcase on October 16.
• Ernst & Young recognizes TriNetX CEO Gadi Lachman as an Entrepreneur of the Year in its 2020 New England program.

Blog Posts

• Beyond the Digital Front Door: The Digital House (Phynd)
• Going online with your go-live (Nuance)
• Are you at risk of losing customers to a competitor during Medicare annual enrollment? (OmniSys)
• E-Signature: Why offering customers more choice is vital (OpenText)
• A Look at the 2019 Medicare Shared Savings Program: Results, Findings & Changes to Come (PatientPing)
• The Healthcare Cybersecurity Threat Landscape (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Rapid Critical Result Reporting with Clinical Communication Technology (PerfectServe)
• PMD: So Much More Than Secure Messaging (PMD)
• The New Rules of Margin Improvement (Premier)
• Pure is 11 Years Old: Let’s Celebrate the Decade to Come (Pure Storage)
• Public Health Resources for Telehealth Companies: a quick look (Redox)
• Healthcare under attack: How backup systems make or break your response to ransomware (Spirion)
• The state of healthcare communications: 2020 report (Spok)
• A Faxless Future: Dare We Dream? (Surescripts)
• How to Become a Preferred Provider with Payers (WebPT

Contacts

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

News 10/9/20

Top News

Apple makes Health Records available to IPhone users in the UK and Canada in its first expansion outside the US.

Health Records has been integrated with Cerner, Epic, Allscripts, and InterSystems.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: Van Halen, reminding myself how good the band was as the late EVH’s Frankenstrat howled and growled through my favorite tracks like “Ain’t Talking About Love,” “Panama,” and “You Really Got Me.” It’s easy to understand why he disliked the uber-annoying but occasionally entertaining David Lee Roth, who kept me from being a big Van Halen fan, but Eddie’s rationale was at least partly musical – he thought Roth’s vocals distracted from his guitar playing similar to someone singing over a Beethoven symphony.

Webinars

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health coaching app vendor Lark Health raises $55 million in a Series C funding round and $15 million in a venture debt credit facility, increasing its total to $100 million.

Prescription delivery company ScriptDrop raises $15 million in a Series A funding round, increasing its total to $27 million. Founder and CEO Amanda Epp, a veteran of CoverMyMeds, started the Columbus-based company in 2017 and reports a 220% increase in revenue so far in 2020 due to the pandemic. The company charges $8 for same-day delivery of prescriptions to patients who are located within five miles of the participating pharmacy. Drivers are the employees of partner courier companies rather than its own.

Healthcare data de-identification vendor Datavant – whose clients include 70 academic medical centers and 100 health technology and data companies — raises $40 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $83 million.

Mental health telemedicine company Cerebral raises $35 million in Series A funding, proceeds from which will fund an expansion to all 50 states and development of a mobile app.

Avail Medsystems, which offers a surgery telemedicine system that allows OR teams to access external expertise, raises $100 million in Series B funding,

Building sensor vendor Lumenix acquires the prototype of the AI-powered handwashing monitoring system AIMS from Boston Children’s Hospital.

Google renames its G Suite business software package as Google Workspace, also adding video chatting capability to the document editing window and improving integration among Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Calendar to better compete with Microsoft Office 365. The system was called Google Apps for Business until mid-2016. The basic business plan costs $6 per user per month.

Greenway Health announces availability of Greenway Telehealth.

Sales

• Intermountain Healthcare chooses Vynca for Cerner-integrated access to advance care planning documents for clinicians, patients, and caregivers.
• Prevea Health will implement the financial planning and analysis platform of Syntellis Performance Solutions, formerly known as Kaufman Hall Software. 

People

Audacious Inquiry hires Edwin Miller, MBA (Aledade) as chief product officer; Sunil Chandran, MBA (FranConnect) as CTO; and Marie Crump, MsC (Mymee) as chief marketing officer.

American College of Medical Informatics names Harvard Medical School biomedical informatics professor and department chair Isaac “Zak” Kohane, MD, PhD as its Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence winner for 2020.

Announcements and Implementations

314e launches Speki, an EHR-embedded application help product that users invoke with a context-aware hot button that triggers micro-learning videos, tip sheets, and other documents that guide the user through completing the task at hand. The company will offer integration with EHRs such as those offered by Epic, Cerner, and EClinicalWorks.

Nephrology Associates goes live on Saykara’s  mobile AI voice assistant to automate physician charting.

UK patients can access information from providers who use InterSystems TrakCare via the Apple Health app, with integration with HealthShare to follow.

Epic will integrate Lyft ride-hailing into its product, allowing hospital staff to book transportation for patients.

Medicare and Medicaid technology vendor Centauri Health Solutions releases a pricing transparency solution for Epic that allows customers to comply with CMS price list publishing requirements that take effect on January 1, 2021. It offers similar products for non-Epic users.

A Central Logic-commissioned independent survey of health system executives finds that 96% will address patient leakage as one of their priorities this year, but only 31% report having the tools they need to keep patients within their networks.

Government and Politics

Dignity Health’s St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center (AZ) will pay $160,000 to settle federal charges that it violated HIPAA’s right-of-access provision. The hospital ignored a mother’s request for copies of her son’s medical records, finally delivering them 22 months later and only after OCR got involved.

COVID-19

Most states are seeing a rise in coronavirus infection and nine have set seven-day records, with Wisconsin being among the worst in doubling case counts in the past month. The US has seen 212,000 deaths in 7.6 million cases, with both numbers representing about 20% of the world’s total. 

Nevada orders state nursing homes to stop using quick COVID-19 antigen tests from Quidel and Becton Dickinson for routine screening due to a high number of false-positive results. Both companies claimed zero false positives in their application for FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization. Experts note that FDA’s authorization for the tests cover only those people who are in their first five days of showing symptoms – they were not evaluated for screening people who don’t have symptoms. HHS required routine testing of residents and staff in late August, including those who don’t have symptoms. National testing czar Adm. Brett Giroir responded by saying that the use of antigen tests is acceptable for nursing homes despite lack of FDA authorization given the cost, delays, and material shortages in conducting PCR tests, also noting that it isn’t unusual for false positives to outnumber true positives in areas that have low coronavirus activity.

Regeneron applies for FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for the antibody mixture that was administered to President Trump. The company says that initial supplies will be limited to 50,000 patients, but it will produce 300,000 courses of therapy within a few months and 250,000 doses per month sometime next year. Regeneron’s agreement with the federal government calls for the first 300,000 doses to be provided at no cost. Eli Lilly is also seeking authorization for its antibody product.

Moderna won’t enforce its coronavirus vaccine patents while the pandemic is underway and will license them to others afterward, explaining that “we’re not interesting in using that IP to decrease the number of vaccines available in a pandemic.”

NEJM’s editors say in its first-ever editorial involving a political candidate in its 208 years of existence that the Trump administration has “taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy” in being “dangerously incompetent” in its COVID-19 response, urging Americans to vote them out of office.

JAMA Network profiles a clinic whose “plain old phone calls” made up 75% of appointments during the area’s COVID-19 lockdown, with none of them involving video apps such as FaceTime. Lack of technology, comfort with its use, lack of broadband availability, and work or family conflicts leave phone calls remaining as a vital tool for vulnerable populations, for which physicians would like to see temporary reimbursement made permanent.

Other

Epic confirms to a Northwestern University news site that 45% of its employees have returned to on-campus work. (note: the 43,000 employee number is obviously a mistake and should have been 4,300).

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Growth Partners advised Ontellus in its acquisition of Intertel and MasterTrace.
• Wolters Kluwer and Meditech join forces to deliver integrated healthcare solutions across the Middle East and Africa.
• MDLive Institute publishes a new report showing changes in consumer attitudes toward telehealth and corresponding behaviors since the start of the pandemic.
• Elsevier launches Transition to Practice, a virtual learning and support platform for new nurses.
• Ingenious Med adds missing clinical documentation identification functionality to its Charge Note Reconciliation.
• First Databank Health network partner Hearst Health and the Jefferson College of Population Health honor Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Healthy Neighborhoods Health Families program as the winner of the 2020 Hearst Health Prize.
• CHIME’s Digital Health Leaders Podcast features The HCI Group’s CEO Ricky Caplin.
• Health Data Movers publishes a new white paper, “Patient Monitor Deployments: How We Make It Happen.”
• Spirion wins an Outstanding Information Security Company award for securing the information of work-from-home and another for most valuable corporate response for providing meals to restaurant staff during the COVID-19 lockdown.
• Ingenious Med introduces new Charge Note Reconciliation capabilities, including automatically identifying missing clinical documentation and charges.
• Healthcare organizations using InterSystems TrakCare in the UK can now offer patients a secure way to access medical data using Apple’s Health Records app.
• Jvion CMIO John Frownfelter contributes to “Intelligence Based Medicine” by Anthony Chang.

Blog Posts

• The Role of Industry in COVID-19 Pandemic Glycemic Management (Glytec)
• How I Use Goliath to Monitor & Troubleshoot Citrix Daily (Goliath Technologies)
• Three Considerations for 2020 Healthcare IT Planning (Healthcare Triangle)
• Leading Digital Transformation in Health Care Requires Specialized Skills (HCTec)
• Top 5 Concerns Driving Your Contactless Check-In Initiatives (Access)
• The Heatlhcare Analytics Summit: Top Data Discoveries and Insights from HAS 20 Virtual (Health Catalyst)
• Reaching Our “Silent Seniors” During COVID-19 (Healthwise)
• Get digital identity right with the Imprivata Digital Identity Framework for Healthcare (Impact Advisors)
• Connecting people, finances, and supplies with patient care (Infor)
• The Benefits of Virtual EHR Training (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• The Year of the Nurse: In conversation with Whitney Mannion (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Patients Love Virtual Health. Digital Financial Engagement Makes It Better. (Loyale Healthcare)
• Medhost Prepares Community Hospitals for Price Transparency (Medhost)
• A matter of trust: Reflections on Meditech’s 2020 Physician and CIO Forum (Meditech)
• 7 Ways to Increase Your PT Practice’s Social Media Presence (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 10/7/20

Top News

Harris acquires Australia-based Meridian Health Informatics, which offers maternity and clinical solutions.

Harris says its strategic growth plan calls for more acquisitions in Australia.

Canada-based N. Harris Computer Corporation, which operates as Harris under Constellation Software, operates 18 acquired health IT brands that include Amazing Charts, Iatric Systems, IMDSoft, Picis, and QuadraMed.

Reader Comments

From Pointy Skull: “Re: health IT podcasts and video versions of podcasts. Can you review this one?” I could, but I’m a written word, short attention span kind of guy who values conciseness and weeding out pointless fluff and would thus vastly prefer a skimmable transcript or excerpted high points (if, indeed there were any). Podcasts and videos are fine for entertainment or where a picture is worth 1,000 words, but just watching an undisciplined and / or un-insightful presenter rambling away on a screen drives me crazy. But then again, I’m often critical of industry folk whose books, presentations, or writings seem to fall short on either effort or ability.

From Usurious Rates: “Re: Hims and other vanity prescription-writing companies. Are they telehealth?” They don’t seem like it to me. Companies that sell prescription-only products related to hormones, sex, hair, or skincare by hiring doctors as prescription-writing robots are just exploiting human weaknesses — impatience, vanity, and embarrassment — in allowing customers eschew actual medical advice in favor of getting a quick prescription for whatever they’ve decided they want. I bet 98% of people who are “evaluated” by these sites end up with a prescription that creates no harm, raising the question of why the drug is prescription-only in the first place. I’m really skeptical about Hims getting into the anxiety and depression telehealth business.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

RIP rock legend Eddie Van Halen, who died of cancer Tuesday morning at 65.

Webinars

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Rock Health’s latest analysis shows that 2020 is already the largest funding year ever for digital health, with $4 billion invested in startups during Q3, for a total thus far of $9.4 billion. On-demand healthcare services like telemedicine, prescription delivery, and at-home urgent care have seen the most attention, with 48 deals totaling $2 billion.

Medicare insurance plan operator Clover Health will go public through a merger with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings, giving it a valuation of $3.7 billion. The company, which also offers clinical decision support software, inked a deal with Walmart Health last week to offer its Medicare Advantage plans to patients in Georgia.

Sales

• The Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP), Maryland’s statewide HIE, selects patient engagement technology — including secure access to COVID-19 testing results — from Get Real Health.

People

Remote patient monitoring company WithMyDoc hires Frank Astor, MD (Naples Community Hospital Healthcare System) as chief medical officer.

Shandy Guharoy (Evolent Health) joins healthcare and social services referral software vendor Unite Us as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

New Jersey Urology becomes the first large, independent urology group to implement Epic.

San Luis Valley Health (CO) implements Meditech with consulting help from Engage.

Phelps Health (MO) rolls out Epic.

A new KLAS report on team-shared mobile devices for nurses and other care team members finds that hospitals like the IPhone because it is solid and integrates will with Epic, Meditech, and Mobile Heartbeat; the ruggedized Zebra TC51-HC is heavy and expensive but allows hot-swapping batteries and can be used for barcode scanning and taking photos; and the Vocera Smartbadge has very strong software and security that is used primarily for push-to-talk conversations and texting. Spectralink and Ascom have not been able to regain the market share they lost from their early devices that were heavy and featured small screens.

Government and Politics

Defense Health Agency Director Lieutenant General Ron Place congratulates sites in California and Nevada on their MHS Genesis go-lives, part of the DoD’s Wave Nellis launch in late September. The next wave of go-lives – the department’s third – will happen next month.

COVID-19

The White House rejects the FDA’s higher standards for the safety and effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine after it says drug companies complained and the new standards would delay release until after Election Day. FDA says it has not heard those concerns from drug companies and all but one of the companies in the vaccine race have expressed their support for FDA’s guidance in the interest of bolstering public confidence. Pfizer’s CEO went on record Tuesday morning as saying the company has not discussed FDA’s guidelines with the White House. FDA says it will move ahead with the stricter standards. UPDATE: the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday afternoon that the White House has dropped its objections and will sign off on FDA’s toughened guidelines that call for companies to monitor recipients for two months before requesting FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization.

CDC republishes its previously withdrawn warning that coronavirus can spread via airborne droplets at distances greater than six feet and linger in the air for minutes or hours, especially in poorly ventilated areas. It stresses, however, that most spread occurs from close contact with someone who is infected. The information was accidentally published to CDC’s website a few weeks ago before it had been approved and was then removed.

The White House will not perform contact tracing on attendees of the Rose Garden celebration 10 days ago that has infected at least eight people. Meanwhile, New Jersey health officials scramble to perform contact tracing of the 206 people who attended President Trump’s fundraiser at his golf club there on Thursday, for whom the Republican National Committee provided only email addresses without phone numbers or physical addresses. That event was held after White House aide Hope Hicks had tested positive, meaning everyone who had been in close contact with her for more than 15 minutes should have been self-isolating for 14 days.

Public Health England’s use of Microsoft Excel for COVID-19 test results compilation causes 16,000 cases to go unreported. PHE’s developers chose the old .XLS file format (which was replaced by .XLSX in 2007) for converting the CSV files of commercial labs, unaware that its limit of 65,536 rows would allow a single file to truncate rows after hitting around 1,400 cases.

Salesforce announces Work.com for Vaccines, and end-to-end vaccine management system for governments and healthcare organizations that includes a public health command center, inventory management, appointment scheduling, outcome monitoring, and public health notifications.

Other

Universal Health Services confirms it has completed the recovery process for servers at its corporate data center, and that all of its US-based inpatient facilities have been reconnected. The company was the victim of a cyberattack last week that impacted all 250 of its US facilities.

A former New York City hospital IT employee is sentenced to 30 months in prison for installing a keylogger program on the computers of 70 workers, most of them female, to steal the login credentials for password-protected personal accounts, photos, documents, and tax records. The unnamed hospital spent $350,000 to remediate the resulting network damage.

Sponsor Updates

• The local news features CI Security’s Drex Deford’s analysis of the Universal Healthcare Systems breach.
• Frost & Sullivan recognizes CoverMyMeds with its 2020 North American Product Leadership Award for Prior Authorization Solutions.
• TransformativeMed will combine its clinical communication and collaboration software with clinical decision support from Crossings Healthcare Solutions.
• Business Group on Health honors Cerner with its Helen Darling Award for Excellence in Health Care Value and Innovation.
• Elsevier Senior Director for Scientific Services for R&D Solutions Matthew Clark wins bronze in the VHA Innovation Ecosystem and precision FDA COVID-19 Risk Factor Modeling Challenge.
• Everbridge announces the 4^th Annual Critical Event Management Impact Awards recognized the innovative use of its technology for mitigating the impact of COVID-19 and other crises in 2020.
• Registration is now open for Experity’s Virtual User Experience half-day conference on October 15.

Blog Posts

• Interoperability for the 21st Century Cures Act Era (314e)
• All claims management isn’t created equal: what you should know (Ability Network)
• Reflections on the History of the Patient Unified Lookup System for Emergencies (PULSE) (Audacious Inquiry)
• The Impact of COVID-19 on Hospital Readmissions (CarePort Health)
• Meditech Patient Portal: Are you missing out on engagement tools you already own? (CereCore)
• Leveraging Real-Time Data to Reduce Unnecessary ED Utilization (Collective Medical)
• Community Partnerships Enrich Student Learning (CoverMyMeds)
• Reflections on the Virtual St. Jude Walk/Run Boston 2020 (Dimensional Insight)
• Cerner is Advancing the Health Care Data Revolution (Cerner)
• Meet the Dina Team at HLTH! (Dina)
• Surviving COVID-19: Telehealth and Beyond (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/5/20

Top News

Meditech will end its status as an SEC public reporting company by running a reverse stock split that will allow it to de-register its shares.

Shareholders with fewer than 5,000 shares will be paid out at $45 per share to reduce the shareholder count to under 300, which will allow the company to take itself private.

Meditech says that its public reporting status benefits its competitors, incurs costs, and provides little benefit since its shares are not traded on any public market.

More than 1,500 current and former shareholders will receive a cash buy-back that ends their company ownership and will trigger capital gains taxes.

Neil Pappalardo controls 45% of the company‘s shares, both his own $450 million worth as well as another $308 million worth that he votes as the sole trustee of the company’s profit sharing trust.

Shareholders will vote on the proposal, but board members have unanimously approved it and own enough shares to ensure its passage.  

Reader Comments

From Sea Legs: “Re: Allscripts. Another big round of layoffs, restructuring and realigning regions yet again, and rumors that some products will be sold off.“ Unverified, but reported by several people claiming to be employees on TheLayoff.com. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents who have experienced pandemic-driven job changes most often report seeing decreased compensation or benefits, but quite a few have changed jobs and a good number saw their compensation and/or benefits improved or were promoted. I didn’t offer a “no change” option because I was interested in the changes rather than the percentage who have or have not experienced them.

New poll to your right or here: what is your most valued use of LinkedIn? I only use it to verify the job title, job history, and educational credentials of someone I’m writing about or to grab their headshot, but lately Microsoft seems to be attempting to turn it into a businessperson’s Facebook, a place where overly aggressive salespeople are unleashed to pester strangers with boilerplate pitches, and a publishing site for articles of sometimes questionable quality.

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

StayWell, which includes Krames patient education solutions and the StayWell employee health platform, renames itself to Krames. The company was acquired by Internet Brands, which owns WebMD and Medscape, from drug maker Merck in March 2020.

Four health IT companies are acquired by private equity firm The Carlyle Group and will operate under the single brand of CorroHealth – TrustHCS (coding services), Visionary RCM (coding services), T-System (emergency documentation technology), and RevCycle+ (coding solutions). The SEO will be Patrick Leonard, MBA, who spent several years at McKesson before moving into health IT investment.

Virgin Pulse announces Winter ‘20, a program for health plan members and employees of client companies that will provide connections to Apple Health and Google Fit, health incentives, AI-powered member interaction and recommendations, next-best-action wellbeing tools, and a partner ecosystem. It will also help users manage their health benefits, offers evidence-based programs for weight management and pre-diabetes, and provides health content.

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine & Digital Health exchange-traded fund (EDOC) rose 3.3% in the past month versus the Nasdaq’s loss of 1.1% and the S&P 500’s loss of 2.1%.

Government and Politics

The VA tells a House subcommittee that it is considering retiring the My HealtheVet portal in favor of Cerner’s MyVAHealth, but that move would cost $60 to $300 million since it isn’t included in its Cerner contract. The VA will initially run the two portals in parallel, with Spokane-area veterans getting the Cerner portal by default after the Cerner go-live there this month, while all others will continue to access MyHealtheVet. 

Former venture capital executive David Wagner, who received loans and grants from Connecticut’s economic development agency while he was facing fraud allegations in other states, pleads guilty to securities fraud and wire fraud charges in a plea deal. The state’s money was given to CliniFlow, a company that Wagner controlled that he said would move three medical technology startups to a building owned by Hartford Hospital in a $45 million project that would create 195 jobs. Prosecutors say it was a Ponzi-like scheme in which money from new investors was used to pay off previous investors or to pay Wagner’s personal expenses. The startups were SpearFysh, Vox MediData, and 3si Systems.

COVID-19

HHS issues a second $10 million contract to TeleTracking Technologies for its HHS Protect COVID-19 hospital data collection system, even as Congressional committees are investigating the circumstances under which the company was awarded the no-bid first contract. The next $10 million contract extension is due in March.

Regeneron presents the first results from early studies of its monoclonal antibody cocktail three days before the product was administered to President Trump. The placebo-controlled trial of 275 asymptomatic to moderately ill people found that the drug has little effect on those who have measurable coronavirus antibodies, but it reduces viral loads and symptoms in those who don’t. Eli Lilly reported similar results two weeks ago from testing of its single-monoclonal antibody, also reporting since its study is further along that it reduced hospitalizations and ED visits. Regeneron says patients should be screened for virus levels and antibodies to decide whether to use its product, while Lilly thinks theirs should be offered to all patients who are high risk because they are elderly, have diabetes, or are overweight. 

Public health experts question the White House’s sole reliance on Abbott’s quick COVID-19 test as protection, in which event attendees who tested negative are told that masks and distancing are unnecessary. Abbott’s ID Now test has not been approved as a surveillance tool because of limited sensitivity that can give false negative results, with FDA’s emergency use authorization covering only people with symptoms. Quarantining was not done by the President and staffers, who traveled to public events after the known positive test result of Hope Hicks, while Attorney General Bill Barr, Vice-President Pence, and other White House and campaign officials say they won’t quarantine even now despite CDC recommendations. CDC guidelines call for a 14-day isolation period for anyone who has come in contact with someone who is known to be positive, regardless of the results of their own test or lack of symptoms. Minnesota’s three Republican congressmen flew home on a Delta flight Friday night in violation of Delta’s post-exposure policies.

Other

India’s recently announced National Digital Health Mission will provide each citizen with a national health ID card that is tied to an account that will eventually include their complete medical record from all providers and serve as a research database, but experts wonder how many hospitals (especially private ones) will participate in the voluntary information-sharing program. They suggest that the country follow the models of Thailand and India, whose digital platform integrates with private health services but is deployed at the district rather than national level to keep participant counts per system at a reasonable several million.

Clinical trials software vendor EResearch Technology is hit by a ransomware attack, forcing contract research organizations – some of which are managing COVID-19 vaccine trials – to revert to paper. The company says that three-fourths of the drug trials that led to FDA approvals last year were managed using its software.

Sponsor Updates

• Relatient’s patient engagement technology seamlessly supports hybrid care with telehealth integrations.
• WebPT becomes Physical Rehabilitation Network’s platform partner for its Therapy Alliance for rehab therapy clinics in California.
• SOC Telemed names Eunice Kim (Symantec) general counsel.
• OmniSys integrates digital Medicare enrollment capabilities into its suite of software solutions.
• Business Insider’s “AI in Healthcare Administration” report includes Wolters Kluwer among healthcare AI leaders targeting physician burnout.
• OpenText publishes a new report, “COVID-19 Clicks: How Phishing Capitalized on a Global Crisis.”
• In partnership with InterSystems, Ready Computing continues to deliver successful interoperable and scalable solutions for healthcare organizations.
• Redox re-enters the Salesforce/Mulesoft ecosystem.
• FritoLay recognizes the community service of Surescripts executive Ron Tyson through his High Fives organization as part of its Everyday Smiler program benefiting Operation Smile.
• Premier announces that 75% of its Population Health Management Collaborative ACOs participating in the Medicare Shared Savings Program earned savings for the government, with 44% of those qualifying for shared savings payments.

Blog Posts

• Telehealth was a Bright Spot Long Before the COVID-19 Pandemic (Central Logic)
• 4 Ways the 9% Cut Will Harm Medicare Patients (WebPT)
• Five Key Takeaways: The Innovative Use of Data and Technology in Reducing Variation and Improving Margin (Premier)
• The “Other” Telemedicine That’s Changing the Face of Healthcare Delivery (SOC Telemed)
• Ambient clinical intelligence technology addresses priority concerns for physicians (Nuance)
• Looking to Solve the Telehealth Riddle? Consider a Platform Approach (PCare)
• FCC to Offer More Telehealth Funding: 3 Actions You Can Take to Prepare Now (Pivot Point Consulting)
• The Power of Provider Schedule Availability (PerfectServe)
• Seniors See Success with Mobile Telemedicine (PMD)
• Customers Shouldn’t Live with Experience – They Should Love It (Pure Storage)
• Improved Subscription Visualization (Redox)
• Relatient’s Technology Seamlessly Supports Hybrid Care with Telehealth Integrations (Relatient)
• Physician Burnout: Chipping Away at Unnecessary EHR Burden (RxRevu)
• Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Focus on changing perimeter protection (Spirion)
• How Do You Keep Up with the Happenings in Healthcare? (Spok)
• 3 Practices to Perfect the Patient Experience (Krames)
• Preparing for the New CMS Rule: ADT Alerts Now Required for Hospitals (Summit Healthcare)
• Breast Cancer Screening and the Women it Saves (SymphonyRM)
• Three Pearls of Wisdom from the First COVID-19 Surge (Vocera)
• Now is the time to focus on the ‘why’ (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 10/2/20

Top News

A GAO report finds that lack of integration of state prescription drug monitoring program tools with EHRs is the key challenge in PDMP use for patient care, with lookups requiring 3-5 minutes without integration versus 2-15 seconds with.

Physicians said PDMP access helps them detect doctor-shoppers and also helps them avoid prescribing duplicate drugs or ordering doses that are too high when taken with other drugs.

Most of the 31 doctors who were interviewed said their PDMP is not integrated into their EHR.

They also reported that they could not access the PDMPs of other states, that dispensing records from opioid treatment facilities and the VA aren’t always included, and that PDMP searches are hampered by patient matching problems.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A reader asked me to note that Nordic VP Pat Hingley will hit the 50-year mark in her healthcare IT career Friday, going all the way back to her teen job as a full-time “data processing” employee who rigged an IBM 402 accounting machine (a punch card reader with an integrated printer) to produce clinic reports (gifters: the 50th calls for gold). Congratulations to Pat. Is anyone else out there hitting their health IT semicentennial?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nordic acquires Netherlands-based EHR consulting firm Tasman Global, which expands the company’s reach into Europe and Asia. Tasman founder and CEO Adrienne Flatland was a Willow implementer at Epic for seven years, then started the company in 2015.

Walmart will offer Medicare Advantage plans for Georgia seniors that will give them access to its Walmart Health Centers.

Patient intake platform vendor Phreesia acquires two workflow applications that were developed by Geisinger and drug company Merck – Family Caregiver (a SMART on FHIR-integrated patient-provider communication app) and MedTrue (medication reconciliation and adherence).

Israel-based personal health monitoring solutions vendor G Medical Innovations files IPO plans that values the company at $329 million. The early-stage company reports annual revenue of $5 million. The company will de-list its shares from the Australian Securities Exchange, which have a market cap of $33 million, before moving to the Nasdaq. One-year performance on the ASX finds company shares down 65% to $0.04. 

ProPublica looks at a private equity firm’s acquisition and expansion of Prospect Medical Holdings, which it expanded to 17 hospitals and loaded with $400 million in debt, with the PE firm’s CEO and one of his executive peers personally pocketing $222 million. Meanwhile, the hospitals report non-working elevators, ambulances that can’t fill their gas tanks because of unpaid gas card bills, and shortages of medical supplies and PPE because of overdue bills. One of its hospitals had the first COVID-19 death of an ED doctor, who reported being forced to wear a single mask for four days, while another had six COVID patient deaths in a 21-bed locked psychiatric ward due to poor infection control. The chain has been accused of fraudulent Medicare billing and is running out of cash with high debt and a laundry list of hospital quality issues.

People

Medical practice marketing technology vendor PatientPop hires Arman Samani, MBA (AdvancedMD) as chief product officer. He was announced as chief product officer for animal health technology vendor Covetrus on June 1, 2020, but I guess that didn’t work out since it’s not on his LinkedIn.

Announcements and Implementations

FastMed Urgent Care goes live on Epic at its 29 Arizona locations, the first independent urgent care operator to do so. The company’s clinics in North Carolina and Texas are up next in early 2021. FastMed chose Epic in January 2020 and announced last month that it has formed a joint venture with Phoenix-based non-profit health system HonorHealth, which uses Epic, to operate all of its Arizona clinics.

Netsmart integrates its MyUnity hospice EHR with Delta Care’s pharmaceutical care solution, allowing hospice nurses to consult with Delta Care’s pharmacists for medication changes that are then integrated into the EHR.

Amwell will integrate TytoCare’s $250 on-demand medical exam device with its telehealth platform, allowing providers use its stethoscope, thermometer, otoscope, tongue depressor, and camera in virtual visits. 

Banner Health reduces unnecessary medication-related decision support and dosing alerts by one-third, working with Cerner Continuous Improvement Delivery to by studying its own alert history and implementing best practices from other Cerner clients.

Specialty pharmacy operator AllianceRx Walgreens Prime will integrate medical data from the recently announced Inovalon DataStream. I spent several minutes reading the announcement and Inovalon’s website trying to figure out exactly what DataStream, ScriptMed Cloud, and Inovalon One do exactly (beyond spawning buzzwords) but I lost interest.

OSF Healthcare goes live on Kyruus ProviderMatch for Consumers on its website.

Government and Politics

The Department of Justice charges 345 people, including more than 100 medical professionals, with submitting $6 billion in fraudulent medical claims, most of them related to telemedicine. Telemedicine company executives were accused of paying doctors and nurse practitioners to order medically unnecessary medical equipment, genetic counseling services, and pain medications with minimal or no interaction with the patient, then selling the orders to other companies. CMS has revoked the Medicare billing privileges of 256 more medical professionals for their involvement.

Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center (WA) will go live on Cerner on October 24 in the VA’s first activation.

COVID-19

Bloomberg describes the coronavirus precautions used by the University of Arizona, which include installing tents so students can wait for classes outdoors in the shade, sending student health ambassadors around campus in golf carts to hand our masks and to offer distancing reminders, requiring returning students to take a rapid coronavirus test, and performing daily wastewater analysis to quickly identify dorms in which someone is infected. The program was designed by 17th Surgeon General of the United States Richard Carmona, MD, MPH, who is a public health professor at the university. He dropped out of high school to join the US Army Special Forces as a medic and was decorated for combat in Vietnam. He earned a GED, completed a nursing program, then attended UCSF to earn undergraduate and medical school degrees and later University of Arizona for an MPH. Carmona has practiced as a paramedic, RN, surgeon, and deputy sheriff and has held leadership roles in emergency services, hospitals, and the Pima County, AZ health system. He issued the Surgeon General’s report on the effects of second-hand smoke.

Cornell researchers find that President Trump is the single largest driver of coronavirus misinformation that has appeared in major English language news outlets around the world, which they found ran false information – often without the publication’s own commentary or correction — about miracle cures, political conspiracy theories, and Anthony Fauci, MD. Mentions of the President made up 38% of the overall “misinformation conversation.” Just under 3% of articles contained falsehoods.

University of Minnesota researchers develop an Epic-integrated AI algorithm that can diagnose COVID-19 from chest X-rays, which Epic and M Health Fairview will make available to all Epic sites without charge. All 12 M Health Fairview hospitals are using it.

Northwell Health develops a COVID-19 early warning system that analyzes patterns in its website traffic to predict demand for staffing and supplies. It says the two-week prediction has tracked closely to actual caseload so far, adding that it will offer the source code to other health systems who have the expertise to convert it to work with their own websites.

The CEO of Pfizer says in a company memo that he is disappointed that political rhetoric around coronavirus and vaccine development is “undercutting public confidence,” adding that despite the $2 billion the company has risked in not accepting money from any government, it will not succumb to political pressure to release a vaccine either faster or more slowly than “the speed of science” allows.

Two companies that were developing at-home, antigen-based saliva tests for coronavirus have abandoned those plans, as public health experts say it was naive to think that the virus antigen would predictably collect in the mouth. Saliva seems to work for PCR testing, but those tests are subject to testing material shortages and require hours to provide a result.

The US government turns distribution of remdesivir back over to its manufacturer, Gilead Sciences. The drug, which has proven to be modestly useful in shortening COVID-19 hospital stays without reducing deaths and whose development was partly paid for by US taxpayers, costs $3,120 per course of treatment. The company will make at least $9 billion in 2020-21 since its manufacturing cost has been speculated to be less than $1 per vial.  

Other

Kaiser Health News covers the offshore scribe industry, where young, aspiring healthcare professionals in India toil overnight their time to create EHR documentation of US office visits. Augmedix recruits college graduates who can pass tests for English reading, listening comprehension, and writing, then sends them to a three-month training program that covers medical terminology, anatomy, and physiology and then takes them through mock visits. Scribes there earn an average of $500 per month, 20% of what their US counterparts are paid, and their time is billed at $12 to $25 per hour. Companies say remote scribing is a small but growing part of the market. Doctor-owned Physicians Angels offers audio-only services (saying that video is intrusive to patients and scribes should be paying attention only to what the provider verbalizes), says it can’t be breached since scribes enter information only in the client’s EHR, completes charts the same day since anything else is just a transcription service, and offers a no-obligation trial for 30 days at $15 per hour. The company’s founder and CEO is a Toledo-based, US-educated otolaryngologist. 

Canada-based preventive health operator Medisys Health Group pays a ransom to restore the data of 60,000 of its patients. The company is owned by digital health solutions vendor Telus Health, which bought the chain from its private equity owner in August 2018 for $100 million. Parent company Telus, a telecommunications vendor, offers cybersecurity services. 

Mayo Clinic researchers find in a small study that 85% of people who receive an atrial fibrillation warning from their Apple Watch don’t end up with a corresponding diagnosis, leading them to warn that such widespread screening is likely causing overuse of healthcare resources from the “worried well.” They also observe that 8.7% of the patients who reported Watch AF warnings were under 22 years of age and 22% had known atrial fibrillation, meaning that they should not have been using the Apple technology per FDA guidance regarding use cases that have not been studied.

Campbell County Health (WY) receives a $1 million insurance settlement toward an estimated $1.5 million in cost for a September 2019 ransomware attack that wasn’t fully resolved until December 2019.

Sponsor Updates

• Insight Success names Goliath Technologies Chairman and CEO Thomas Charlton a top 10 influential leader in medtech.
• Arcadia extends its free vaccination, preventative screening, and appointment reminder outreach program to additional at-risk patient populations.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “Why you don’t want to miss Cerner Health Conference 2020.”
• Saykara will host a virtual roundtable on using AI to reduce physician burnout on October 28.
• Hayes CTO Ritesh Ramesh wins Silver in the CEO World Awards, Executive Achievement of the Year for IT Services category; and the company wins Bronze for Team of the Year in the inaugural COVID-19 Business Response category.
• Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new report, “Closing the Nursing Education-Practice Readiness Gap.”
• Medhost and Senator Bill Frist discuss improving rural healthcare.

Blog Posts

• Glytec Celebrates World Patient Safety Day by Calling Attention to Glycemic Management Safety (Glytec)
• Payment System Improvements Boost Patient Satisfaction (PMD)
• Mobile Clinical Communication Platforms Streamline Collaboration and Reduce Costs (Halo Health)
• Automating Cloud Services to Meet Security and Compliance (Healthcare Triangle)
• How to Enable Enterprise Digital Transformation (The HCI Group)
• Remaining Focused on the Mission of Excellent Health Care (HCTec)
• Epic to Integrate Microsoft Teams Connector (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• An Effective Financial Response to COVID-19: Three Ways to Leverage Data (Health Catalyst)
• Get digital identity right with the Imprivata Digital Identity Framework for Healthcare (Imprivata)
• Congrats to Christus Health, Infor’s 2020 Customer Excellence Award Winner for healthcare. (Infor)
• How COVID-19 is accelerating digital trends in healthcare payments (InstaMed)
• RxMx: Upgrading the Pharma Industry with Automation and Real-Time Information (InterSystems)
• A helping hand for health information exchanges (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Building AI Champions One Nurse at a Time (Jvion)
• Redeploy and Rebalance Staff for COVID-19 Response and Recovery (LiveProcess)
• Surprise Bills are in the Headlines Again. Let’s Solve the Problem (Loyale Healthcare)
• At the corner of 21st and TEFCA: Preparing for new interoperability rules (Meditech)
• Get a Head Start on Your 2021 Physical Therapy Marketing Plan (MWTherapy)
• 5 Strategies to Increase Cybersecurity at Your Healthcare Organization (Netsmart)
• The risks of EHR theater (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 9/30/20

Top News

Universal Health Services begins recovering from a Sunday morning malware attack that locked computer and phone systems at 250 facilities, forcing some to close departments and divert patients.

An anonymous staffer reported seeing the phrase “shadow universe” on computer screens as the breach commenced, leading cybersecurity experts to assume that Ryuk ransomware was involved.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I had to switch concierge doctors after mine closed his practice to take a drug industry job. Allow me to correct my own convenient but incorrect use of the term “concierge doctor,” which mine was not. A concierge practice still bills your insurance company and/or you personally — you are just snootily buying your way around the velvet rope at a cost of thousands of dollars per year. What I have is “direct primary care,” where you pay an average of $75 per month for anytime access to your family practice doctor via call or text, unlimited office visits or telehealth sessions, wellness exams, physicals, health maintenance, minor in-office treatments and surgical procedures, and often at-cost labs and prescriptions right in the office. Savings on routine lab work alone – paying the heavily discounted doctor’s cash price instead of your insurance’s deductible — can cover much of the entire year’s cost. I feel like a VIP when I have a minor, obvious health issue (pinkeye and a swollen toe being the most recent examples), I text a photo to my doctor on a weekend or holiday, and almost immediately I have a prescription waiting to pick up at the drugstore, with follow-up available if I need it. I keep my regular insurance, with the few hundred dollars per year DPC cost a modest luxury that lets me avoid the usual poor customer service. I expect quite a few physicians fail at DPC due to inadequate business skills (especially marketing), but otherwise small panel size, lack of insurer meddling, and freedom from bureaucracy makes it a great model for both doctor and patient when done right. Plus doctors can choose which patients they want to work with.

Webinars

September 30 (Wednesday) 11 ET. “The Hidden Threat: New Research on Security Vulnerabilities and Privacy Gaps in Healthcare Apps.” Sponsors: Verimatrix, NowSecure. Presenters: Neal Michie, MEng, director of product management, Verimatrix; Brian Lawrence, direction of solution engineering, NowSecure. The presenters will present research on the security risk profile of 1,000 healthcare apps in managing patient privacy, how they compare to those in other industries, and where the biggest vulnerabilities lie. Attendees will learn how to make their healthcare apps more secure in managing protected health information.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Defunct personal health record vendor Medlio notifies users that cancer reference lab NeoGenomics Laboratories has acquired some of its assets, but will sunset the patient-facing mobile app and health records download service. Medlio co-founder Lori Mehen took a full-time product manager job with NeoGenomics Laboratories early this year.

Sales

• Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital (CA) will implement Ensocare’s Transition and Choice automated referral software.
• The US Air Force selects NeuroFlow’s behavioral health integration technology, beginning with deployment to a division of Space Force.
• Provider communications platform vendor Updox will integrate its systems with inpatient EHRs using technology from Redox.
• CareSignal will white-label a conversational AI chatbot from QliqSoft to automate the traditional call center model of remote patient monitoring.

People

The Chartis Group promotes Roger Ray, MD to chief physician executive.

Mount Sinai technology commercialization spin-off Rx.Health names Richard Strobridge (Nextbridge Health) CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

LifeBridge Health implements Artifact Health’s mobile physician query software at Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital and Grace Medical Center in Maryland.

West Tennessee Healthcare deploys Cedar’s patient engagement, messaging, and billing platform.

EMpower Emergency Physicians (AZ) and Integrated Care Physicians (FL) adopt RCM software and services from R1 RCM.

A new KLAS report on  oncology software finds Elekta as the leader in both medical and radiation oncology software, with Varian (slated for acquisition by Siemens Healthineers for $16 billion) coming in second. EHR vendors Cerner and Epic have seen significant adoption of their medical oncology software, but with functionality gaps and click-heavy, multiple ways to complete tasks that hurt usability and training. Medical oncology EHR vendor Flatiron Health, acquired by drug maker Roche for $2 billion in April 2018, placed in the middle of the pack with strong product design and support expertise that is dragged down by poor communication around enhancement requests, upgrades, and delayed support response. Varian leads in the tiny field of radiation therapy treatment planning, as more than half of Philips Pinnacle treatment planning software customers say they’re switching to a different vendor (presumably Varian) due to lack of development effort and failure to keep promises.

Best Buy-owned GreatCall releases the Lively Flip smartphone for seniors, which builds on the previous Jitterbug phone in adding Alexa voice services, a bigger screen and keyboard, a dedicated button for calling an urgent care provider, and 24/7 access to its telehealth service. The phone costs $100 plus a $35 activation fee, while monthly plans run $20 to $35 not counting unlimited text and talk, which adds $20. Best Buy acquired Great Call for $800 million in August 2018.

Government and Politics

HHS and ONC launch a program with the American Board of Family Medicine to measure the use and potential burdens of health IT by office-based physicians.

Premera Blue Cross will pay the HHS Office for Civil Rights $6.85 million to settle potential HIPAA violations stemming from a 2015 data breach that affected 10.4 million members. An OCR investigation found the Pacific Northwest payer failed to implement risk management and audit controls and failed to conduct an enterprise-wide risk analysis.

COVID-19

Health systems are creating “one-stop shop” clinics for patients who have survived COVID but who are experiencing ongoing problems such as lung or heart damage, neurological issues, fatigue, and anxiety. The director of the Center for Post-COVID Care at Mount Sinai says that if even if less than 10% of infected patients experience long-term symptoms, that means 500,000 Americans will require medical care of unknown duration. He says half of the clinic’s patients have test results that show damage, while the other half have symptoms but inconclusive test results.

The White House will send 150 million Abbott BinaxNOW rapid coronavirus tests, purchased for $750 million, to states and other jurisdictions by the end of the year, with several million going out this week to be used for vulnerable populations such as nursing homes. The tests use a shallow nostril swab, require no special equipment, and give results in 15 minutes, so they can be used in medical practices and pharmacies. However, they are approved for use only in symptomatic people, must be administered within the first seven days of symptoms, and cannot be self-administered at home. Experts praised the news, but say 150 million tests is a drop in the bucket given their likely use and they still don’t solve the problem of assessing true prevalence. Public health officials also question how the results of the tests will be reported, particularly if administered outside the health system such as in schools.

The federal government has sent rapid COVID-19 test machines to 14,000 nursing homes since last month, but they come with a catch. The nursing homes must agree to test each employee and resident weekly and pay for their own supplies at $32 per test, meaning that even small facilities could be on the hook for thousands of dollars each week. They also report that manufacturer BD is back-ordered on testing supplies. Health departments haven’t figured out how to collect data from nursing home tests. Some facilities that have become frustrated by the cost and availability challenges of the BD tests are using state labs, but they don’t get results back for several days.

Other

@Cascadia is right – the VaccineFinder website operated by Boston Children’s Hospital, CDC, Harvard Medical School, and HealthMap shows no locations offering flu vaccine anywhere, which I can personally contradict since I got my flu shot yesterday. At least some other vaccine searches seem to work, although the location list seems incomplete when it says no Walgreens in Chicago offers Tdap or shingles vaccine.

UnitedHealthcare and Anthem will end their virtual visit benefit Thursday, after which patients will once again pay co-pays, co-insurance, and deductibles for virtual visits that are not related to COVID-19. Nobody knows how much patients will have to pay or how the cost of a telehealth visit compares to the co-pay for an office visit. Other insurers that had planned to end expanded telehealth coverage on September 30 have extended the program until the end of the year.

A Spok survey of 600 healthcare professionals finds an inability to communicate effectively, remote workers, and lack of or insufficient devices have been the biggest communication problems during COVID-19. H

Amazon announces a palm vein scanner that will let customers of in-person shops check out with a wave of the hand, which hopefully will reinvigorate the healthcare interest in that biometric technology that made perfect sense a few years ago to positively identify patients in a non-threatening way compared to fingerprints and retinal scans. HT Systems (PatientSecure, now owned by Imprivata) and Fujitsu (PalmSecure) were the healthcare players in palm vein scanning 10 years ago and I was a fan of the idea.

Not related to health IT, but fascinating and fun to watch, is this UK paramedic’s test of a 1,000-horsepower jet suit made by Gravity Industries for air ambulance response in the mountains of Cumbria. I pondered how much a private equity-owned ambulance or air flight service would charge for that trip in the US.

Sponsor Updates

• Kyruus will host ATLAS, its Annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium, virtually October 20-22.
• CarePort Health wins the 2020 Tech Cares Award from TrustRadius.
• CareSignal develops AI-powered predictive models to help providers and payers keep patients engaged with digital health programs.
• Datica achieves top marks for interoperability solutions from Chilmark Research.
• Everbridge announces that, in addition to Anthony Fauci, MD and Sanjay Gupta, MD, a former World Head of State will speak at its COVID-19 R2R: The Road to Recovery virtual leadership summit October 14-15.
• Audacious Inquiry founder and CEO Chris Brandt joins University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center’s Board of Operations.
• Arcadia publishes a new case study, “CareMount ACO Uses Arcadia Analytics to Build a Narrow SNF Network and Reduce ALOS by 4 Days.”
• MassChallenge features “A Look at How OSF Health Care Teamed with Startup CareSignal to Help Their COVID-19 Response.”
• Ellkay sponsors the BCBS 2020 Virtual Summit through October 2.
• Experity opens registration for its half-day Virtual User Experience October 15.
• Black Book Market Research publishes, “Top Healthcare Human Resources Outsourcing Solutions Vendors.”

Blog Posts

• Edge Computing: How New Technology Energizes This Old Concept (Capsule)
• The Power of Data Science in Healthcare to Drive Advanced Analytics (314e)
• Avoid postal delays with paperless claims and statements (Ability Network)
• Six Common Mistakes with Informed Consents that Lead to Medical Malpractice (Access)
• Patient Estimates: A Breath of Fresh Air (Bluetree)
• A Guide to the Internship Experience: From a Software Engineering Intern (Bright.md)
• Getting the Most from EHR Virtual Training (CereCore)
• Understanding information blocking exceptions and compliance (Cerner)
• Benefits, Process, and Reimbursement in Remote Patient Monitoring and Chronic Care Management (ChartLogic)
• Ransomware Causes Patient Death (CI Security)
• Compassion, Clinical Effectiveness & Burnout: Essential Strategies for Nurse Leadership (Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System)
• Streamlining Utilization Management Through Care Collaboration (Collective Medical)
• EPA Report Findings: Prospective PA Decreases Time to Therapy (CoverMyMeds)
• Creating Value through Collaboration: HIE-Payer Alliances at Work (Diameter Health)
• COVID-19 in Children and Young Adults Part 1: Infants and Children (Dimensional Insight)
• 3 Important healow TeleVisits Features (EClinicalWorks)
• CMS Quarterly Update Q3 2020 (ESolutions)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/28/20

Top News

Allegheny Health Network (PA) and a Pittsburgh investor create AlphaLab Health, an innovation hub that will provide seed funding to companies that are involved in diagnostics, therapeutics, medical devices, and health IT.

The hub will be housed in the former Suburban General Hospital in Pittsburgh’s Bellevue community, which Allegheny Health Network has mostly closed since acquiring it in 1994, leaving only an urgent care center and outpatient clinics.

A predecessor organization to Allegheny Health Network was AHERF, which went from running just Allegheny General Hospital to Pennsylvania’s largest health system, which include acquisitions of Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann Medical College and their hospitals. AHERF filed bankruptcy in June 1998 in what was then the largest non-profit healthcare system failure with $1.3 billion in debt. West Penn Hospital  was merged with the Pittsburgh assets of AHERF to form West Penn Allegheny Health system, which struggled to compete with UPMC and eventually sold itself to insurer Highmark, which was anxious to strike a deal since its relationship with UPMC was deteriorating. Highmark Health remains AHN’s parent. AHERF’s Philadelphia-area hospitals were bought out of bankruptcy by Tenet in becoming that area’s first for-profit hospital chain.

Reader Comments

From CIO: “Re: HIStalk. Just wanted to let you know that I still make my team read HIStalk and occasionally quiz them to make sure they do.” Thanks. Similarly, a CEO recently told me that a new investor made him promise to read HIStalk daily. I appreciate that even if I can’t really comprehend it since my view of HIStalk is an empty screen that I fill in solitude each day with whatever interests me.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Vendor experience with virtual conference exhibit halls hasn’t been good. Commenters note that the volume of leads is good but the quality is not, while low engagement leaves reps starting alone at a Zoom screen for hours.

New poll to your right or here: How has your job changed since the pandemic began? Click the poll’s comments link after responding to explain further with your anonymous thoughts.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Newfire Global Partners. The Boston-based company partners with healthcare businesses globally to make innovation happen, such as in developing custom digital health solutions, speeding up the drug development cycle, and de-risking growth without compromising interoperability and security to turn the new normal into a durable, competitive advantage. Nearly 90% of the company’s 350 employees hold advanced degrees, working from offices in the US, Ukraine, Croatia, Singapore, and Hong Kong to offer services in advisory (assessments and due diligence, strategic marketing, interim operating roles); talent (blended teams, dedicated teams, specialized expertise); and AI-powered software development management. Healthcare-specific offerings include FHIR integration, data science and analytics, provider and patient adoption, and interoperability. Chairman and CEO Stephen Hau, MS is an industry long-timer who founded PatientKeeper and co-founded Shareable Ink. Thanks to Newfire Global Partners for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

September 30 (Wednesday) 11 ET. “The Hidden Threat: New Research on Security Vulnerabilities and Privacy Gaps in Healthcare Apps.” Sponsors: Verimatrix, NowSecure. Presenters: Neal Michie, MEng, director of product management, Verimatrix; Brian Lawrence, direction of solution engineering, NowSecure. The presenters will present research on the security risk profile of 1,000 healthcare apps in managing patient privacy, how they compare to those in other industries, and where the biggest vulnerabilities lie. Attendees will learn how to make their healthcare apps more secure in managing protected health information.

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

People

Ori Lotan, MD (Universal Health Services) will join MultiCare (WA) as VP / chief health information officer. 

Central Logic hires Maija Costello, MBA (Accenture) as VP of people and culture; Samantha Endres, MBA, CPA (West Acadamic Publishing) as CFO; and Robert Zdon (RAZR) as chief marketing officer.

Government and Politics

UT Southwestern Medical Center Assistant Professor of Radiology Lorraine De Blanche, MD pleads guilty to intentionally misleading federal agents who questioned her in a telemedicine fraud investigation that occurred while she was employed as a radiology professor at University of Arkansas. She admitted that she prescribed durable medical equipment and compounded prescription drugs without talking to the patients involved. She faces five years in prison and will pay $213,000 in telemedicine proceeds and fines. 

COVID-19

HHS takes $300 million from CDC’s budget to run a “defeat despair” advertising blitz that features celebrities and administration officials discussing the pandemic and the White House’s response to it, with airings to begin before Election Day. Interviews have already been recorded with Dennis Quaid (who has publicly praised the administration’s COVID-19 response) and CeCe Winans (who was chosen for improving messaging with black viewers). HHS spokesperson Michael Caputo said before he took medical leave that President Trump demanded personally that he create the campaign, which he says will draw ire from Democrats and “their conjugal media and the leftist scientists that are working for the government” because he’ll be running $250 million worth of taxpayer-funded ads.

A White House aide demands that FDA justify its toughened standards for a COVID-19 vaccine on the same day that the President branded the changes as a “political move.” FDA planned to release the guidance last week, but is instead working on its explanation of extending safety studies to two months after the second injection, which makes a pre-Election Day vaccine release unlikely.

Minnesota stops a door-to-door coronavirus survey after public health workers were intimidated by people who shouted ethnic and racial slurs, followed the workers, videotaped them, and threatened to call police. The mayor of one small town says it is reasonable that residents become concerned when they see a car with California plates.

Just about all infectious disease experts warn that it will be a gloomy US winter as people move back indoors, schools and business return to some degree of normal with increasing contact, and people gather for holidays. The predicted post-Labor Day case jump is already happening. IHME projects 372,000 US COVID-19 deaths by January 1, with daily deaths increasing from today’s 780 to 3,000 (or 6,600 if mandates are eased) and ICU bed demand rising from 8,400 to 31,000. California’s HHS secretary warned Friday afternoon that he expects COVID-19 hospitalizations to double by late October.

ProPublica reports how the CEO of a telemedicine vendor, who was also an ex-convict, convinced two South Texas elected officials to promote local government use of his telemedicine services during the pandemic and to urge other leaders to buy his unapproved COVID-19 tests.

Other

USA Today lists several new consumer gadgets devices can serve – now or down the road — as a dedicated Zoom devices, including Amazon’s Echo Show 10 for $250, a webcam plugged into a Fire TV Cube that can be displayed on large-screen TVs, and Facebook Portal TV. Benefits include freeing up hands and computer screens for taking notes and untethering webcam placement. The Echo Show 10 even auto-frames the user with pan and zoom. It will also connect with Amazon Chime pay-per-use service for business calls and meetings. Amazon sells the Alexa-powered Facebook Portal TV for $149. I suspect remote work and videoconferencing is here to stay, so the modest investment to make it better and easier seems worth it.

Contacts

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

News 9/25/20

Top News

CMS will threaten next week to terminate the Medicare participation of the 76% of US hospitals that aren’t submitting daily COVID information to the new HHS Protect system, according to an NPR review of internal documents.

The pending update will allow hospitals to submit PPE and ventilator data weekly instead of multiple times per week, but it will also add several new data elements that are related to influenza patients.

HHS previously justified the need for the abrupt system switchover from the CDC’s system in July by saying that the 85% of hospitals that were reporting voluntarily was inadequate and that the White House Coronavirus Task Force requires 100% participation. Since then, only 24% of hospitals are complying with the new mandatory data submission requirements.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I wanted to schedule a checkup from a former provider and remembered that I have an associated Epic MyChart account that has been dormant for several years. I logged back in and it was impressive, especially compared to my experience with an academic medical center’s MyChart deployment a few years back in which I concluded that their mediocrity spanned both technical and clinical domains. This provider’s version contained useful health reminders, strong security (such as two-factor authentication), easy appointment scheduling, provider messaging, complete medical records, and the ability to update my own medication and health issues lists subject to provider confirmation. It even let me know of a study I could participate in. I would have given it a perfect score other than my submitted insurance information has yet to be verified by the provider’s office after several weeks, so I still don’t know what to expect when I show up waving my card.

Webinars

September 30 (Wednesday) 11 ET. “The Hidden Threat: New Research on Security Vulnerabilities and Privacy Gaps in Healthcare Apps.” Sponsors: Verimatrix, NowSecure. Presenters: Neal Michie, MEng, director of product management, Verimatrix; Brian Lawrence, direction of solution engineering, NowSecure. The presenters will present research on the security risk profile of 1,000 healthcare apps in managing patient privacy, how they compare to those in other industries, and where the biggest vulnerabilities lie. Attendees will learn how to make their healthcare apps more secure in managing protected health information.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

KKR acquires 1-800 Contacts – which has branched beyond COVID-boosted lens sales with technology that allows consumers to perform at-home eye exams and to scan their glasses to generate prescription details — in a deal worth $3 billion.

People

Nuvance Health promotes interim SVP/CIO Geoff Hook, MBA to the permanent role.

Announcements and Implementations

NYC Health + Hospitals launches a telehealth solution for non-urgent needs, powered by NYC-based Bluestream Health.

Change Healthcare expands its pharmacy claims billing solution to include COVID-19 tests, which pharmacists can order, administer, and bill under recent HHS rules.

CareSignal offers an at-risk pricing option for its Device-less Remote Patient Monitoring, allowing providers and payers who are paid under value-based contracts to maximize their return on investment.

Redox announces new integrations with Salesforce Health Cloud and MuleSoft.

NantHealth releases APIs that will allow provider and revenue cycle organizations to connect to payers via the NaviNet Open Platform.

Government and Politics

HHS and ONC award $2.7 million to four health IT acceleration projects:

• CRISP, which will work on using FHIR for participating in the American College of Cardiology’s disease registries.
• MedStar Health Research Institute, which will demonstrate using bulk FHIR data extraction for research.
• Children’s Hospital Corporation, which will develop tools to allow researchers to annotate data extracted by bulk FHIR for analytics, de-identification, and cohort assignment.
• Missouri Department of Mental Health’s developmental disabilities division, which will implement the integration of standardized data to advance person-centered planning, outcomes, and value-based payment models.

COVID-19

A fourth coronavirus vaccine candidate begins Phase 3 clinical trials as Janssen starts testing of its single-dose regimen with up to 60,000 volunteers.

The presidents of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine issue a statement insisting that pandemic policymaking, especially that involving vaccines, “must be informed by the best available evidence without it being distorted, concealed, or otherwise deliberately miscommunicated.” They add that they find that “the politicization of science, particularly the overriding of evidence and advice from public health officials and derision of government scientists, to be alarming.” 

Helsinki’s airport deploys two coronavirus-sniffing dogs in a pilot program for voluntary passenger testing. Travelers wipe their skin, deposit the wipe in a sample, and the dogs then smell it to detect coronavirus with near-100% accuracy within 10 seconds.

California expands its home address confidentiality program that was designed for victims of violence and abuse to include public health workers, following the resignation of a dozen workers after they were harassed at home or received death threats after enforcing masking and stay-at-home orders.

Missouri Governor Mike Parson, who shunned mask-wearing in saying that most people can figure out how to stay safe without government intervention, tests positive for COVID-19, along with his wife. The state reported its highest-ever COVID-19 death total of 83 on Wednesday, although the state attributes the high number to delayed reporting of death certificates.

President Trump says in a press conference that the White House “may or may not” approve FDA’s just-announced higher standards COVID-19 vaccines, saying that the change is politically motivated and that he “has tremendous trust in these massive companies” that are developing the vaccines. The White House’s authority to override FDA decisions is not clear. White House advisor Scott Atlas, MD said in the same press conference that CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD “misstated something” in reporting that CDC blood sampling indicates that 90% of Americans are still susceptible to infection in the absence of antibodies, saying that T cells and exposure to related viruses “make the antibodies a small fraction of the people who have immunity.”

Google Maps will add a COVID overlay that displays the seven-day confirmed COVID-19 case count per 100,000 people for each state, county, and some cities.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announces that the state will perform its own review of coronavirus vaccines that have been approved by FDA, saying that President Trump’s criticism of FDA’s more rigorous standards as a “political move” has led him to determine that “we can no longer trust the federal government.” The state would have little say in the matter other than determining its own rollout plan.

Other

A US federal court sentences an extradited UK citizen who is a member of The Dark Overlord hacking group to five years in prison. Nathan Wyatt will also pay $1.5 million in restitution for stealing the data of several companies since 2016, several of them hospitals, and threatening to sell their data unless they paid a Bitcoin ransom. Among his big scores is the sale of 9.3 million patient records that he obtained by breaching an unnamed health insurer.

Specialty EHR vendor Net Health moves to a permanent Work From Anywhere model, which it says will improve recruiting, increase retention, and reduce costs. It hopes to encourage community building with virtual team meetings, CEO emails, one-on-one video meetings that include pets and kids, virtual field trips and happy hours, and development of affinity groups.

As noted by @Cascadia: the care plan that Amazon is piloting for its Seattle-area employees posts a job opening for a healthcare-experienced Business Development Manager – Network Strategy, with responsibilities that include defining an executing a strategy for acquiring and managing provider networks; creating the highest-quality, lowest-cost referral network; and driving customer adoption via insurance company partnerships. Amazon Care, whose pilot started in September 2019, offers employees text chat with clinicians, video visits, nurse visits in the home or office, and courier delivery of medications.

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News 9/23/20

Top News

FDA launches the Digital Health Center of Excellence, which will provide expertise and advise FDA on modernizing digital health policies and regulatory approaches.

Bhaku Patel, MSEE, MBA will serve as the first director of the center, which will operate within the Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. The mission of the Colombes, France-based company is to make everything connect to create the customized technology experience customers need. It delivers on-premise, cloud, and hybrid networking and communications solutions that work for your people, processes, and customers. A heritage of innovation and dedication to customer success has made Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise an essential provider of enterprise networking, communications, and services to over 830,000 customers worldwide. The company has a global reach and local focus with more than 2,200 employees and 2,900+ partners who serve over 50 countries. Thanks to Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise for supporting HIStalk.

I’m about to assess time-outs to overly aggressive PR firm people who keep sending me bulk-emailed pitches for their “story ideas” (apparently unaware that I do not run such “stories” on HIStalk) that ask me to respond if I’m interested, then “circle back” or “just pinging you” a couple of days later when I’ve already conveyed my incuriosity precisely as instructed by not responding. Gmail’s filter rules should work nicely to delete their messages automatically, although without some minor hacking it can’t automatically reply that they’ve been squelched.

Webinars

September 30 (Wednesday) 11 ET. “The Hidden Threat: New Research on Security Vulnerabilities and Privacy Gaps in Healthcare Apps.” Sponsors: Verimatrix, NowSecure. Presenters: Neal Michie, MEng, director of product management, Verimatrix; Brian Lawrence, direction of solution engineering, NowSecure. The presenters will present research on the security risk profile of 1,000 healthcare apps in managing patient privacy, how they compare to those in other industries, and where the biggest vulnerabilities lie. Attendees will learn how to make their healthcare apps more secure in managing protected health information.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Carlyle Group will acquire a majority stake in global health research network TriNetX for an unspecific price and valuation.

Teladoc sends a letter to competitor Amwell warning that its digital scope, stethoscope, and some of its telemedicine carts infringe on Teladoc’s patents.

Walmart-owned Sam’s Club offers its members text-based primary care telehealth services through 98point6, expanding a pilot project from last year. Individuals pay $134 per year plus $1 per visit, which is conducted via text messaging through the app of the company, which has 39 doctors.

Sales

• Mount Sinai South Nassau selects Infor Cloud Cloverleaf for interoperability that includes API standards such as FHIR.

People

Behavioral EHR/PM vendor Therapy Brands hires Jessica Kasirsky, DO (NextGen Healthcare) as chief medical officer / VP of regulatory affairs.

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS Arch Collaborative report finds that while 25% of nurses report that they are experiencing burnout, EHR satisfaction isn’t a significant cause, and organizations should instead focus on the work environment, employer-imposed bureaucracy, improved teamwork, shared values, and control over schedules.

Decentralized clinical trials software vendor Medable announces GA of a remote consent and re-consent product that allows patients and clinicians to sign up from any location. The company also offers remote patient and site monitoring, telemedicine, and patient engagement tools for clinical outcome assessment.

Optimum Healthcare IT completes virtual Epic training and a go-live at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Cerner will integrate Vynca’s advance care planning system with Millennium to display end-of-life preferences to clinicians and in the patient portal.

Microsoft announces Cloud for Healthcare, a managed service that includes Dynamics 365, Azure, 365, Teams and its new EHR connector, and Healthcare Bot Service for developing self-assessment tools. GA will be October 30. 

QliqSoft will offer patient self-scheduling in its virtual care platforms in partnership with Blockit. The company offers the Quincy chatbot as well as its Virtual Visit telehealth solution.

COVID-19

CDC publishes guidance Friday acknowledging for the first time that coronavirus spreads by almost exclusively by air, but then pulls the guidance down Monday in saying that it was posted prematurely before full approval. CDC says it will publish revised guidance soon. The recalled guidance – which says the virus can survive for long periods while suspended in the air and can travel more than six feet — would have had an impact on people (avoiding indoor gatherings, restaurants, and bars), businesses (improved ventilation and and filtration systems), and hospitals (increased use of negative-pressure rooms for infected patients). It would de-emphasize the importance of handwashing and physical cleaning given the low incidence of spread.

Scotland-based infections disease and virology professor Muge Cevik, MD, MSc, MRCP summarizes what we know about coronavirus spread:

• Risk is related to contact pattern (duration, proximity, activity), individual factors, environment, and socioeconomic factors (housing, job security).
• Sustained close contact drives the majority of infections and clusters. Contact with family and friends as well as gatherings create higher risk than brief contact while shopping or in the community.
• Non-household contacts dining together involves especially high risk.
• Transmission is 20 times higher indoors than outdoors, making those beach-shaming media photos pointless.
• Attack rates are highly correlated to symptom severity. Asymptomatic spread is less important.
• Susceptibility increases with age.
• Much of the world’s outbreaks involve nursing homes, homeless shelters, prisons, and meat-packing plants where people share communal spaces for long periods. The largest US clusters have been associated with prisons and jails.
• Lower-paid essential workers are at risk because they cannot isolate, often use public transportation, and are exposed to more people.
• Residents of urban area are at higher risk due to lower incomes, denser living conditions, and a higher proportion of immigrants. Social distancing worked best in more affluent households during the H1N1 pandemic of 2009.
• Viral load peaks require immediate self-isolation as soon as symptoms appear, which will require policies to support that isolation.

Rural hospitals that received federal pandemic aid are afraid to spend the money on COVID-related improvements since the funds were officially in the form of a loan that is due to be repaid this month, with those that aren’t able to repay then having their Medicare payments withheld.

Only 51% of polled Americans would get a COVID-19 vaccine if it were available today, down from 72% in May as people worry that a vaccine will be distributed without adequate testing or with unknown side effects.

CDC tells a federal advisory group that the first people who receive COVID-19 vaccines will be monitored by daily text messages and emails. The 20 million essential workers who are expected to be among the first recipients will be sent daily text messages asking about side effects for the first week afterward, then weekly messages over six weeks.

Sanford Health (SD) is sponsoring a 5,000-attendee, masks-optional October country music concert along with the state’s governor, who previously endorsed the Sturgis motorcycle rally of 500,000 people who have spread infection to an estimated 260,000 new COVID-19 cases. Ticketmaster shows mostly packed spectator sections with no distancing, with the 50% capacity limit being technically accomplished by closing the upper deck while crowding attendees into the lower level. The health system itself – which has 46 medical centers, 210 clinic locations, 233 senior living centers, 158 skilled nursing and rehab facilities, and 48,000 employees — is limiting patient visitors, screening employee and visitor temperatures, mandating social distancing, and requires clinic employees to wear masks at all times.

FDA is reportedly preparing tougher standards for Emergency Use Authorization of COVID-19 vaccines that will require manufacturers to follow participants for at least two months after they receive their second dose, which is likely to push back release until at least December. The requirements will also include having at least five severe cases of COVID-19 in the placebo group, as well as some cases involving older people. 

Other

A JAMIA article calls for creating a sub-field of informatics called social informatics, which would drive research on the data, interoperability, and ethical challenges that are involved in integrating social and medical care.

Madison magazine ponders what will happen to the Wisconsin area’s “Epiconomy” when Judy Faulkner leaves Epic. It questions how the foundation to which she will donate her shares will operate within IRS guidelines that require it to distribute 5% of its endowment each year, says the company’s planned return to on-campus work was a “spectacularly bad decision” that may have tarnished the brands of both Epic and Madison in the eyes of the new college graduates Epic hires, and observes that Faulkner does little mentoring and the company doesn’t invest in Madison companies even though its former employees formed several of them. It also notes that Faulkner and her husband donate heavily to liberal political candidates, but Epic has engaged in several legal battles to limit worker rights, such as forcing its employees in its employee agreements to accept binding arbitration instead of filing class action lawsuits. A business professor says that founders who try to “control the [company’s] future from the grave” often mess it up in limiting how much it can think and adjust on its own without them.

Real-time website privacy inspector Blacklight went live today. HIStalk did well with only a couple of traffic counters that I’ve installed but rarely use, but boy is HIMSS.org loaded with questionable stuff, including the Hotjar keystroke tracker. AHIMA’s site, in contrast, is about the same as HIStalk, while CHIME’s gets a perfect score.

Count me out. Airlines are filling seats for “flights to nowhere,” in which people who miss flying so much are buying expensive tickets to board a plane that circles around for a few hours, then lands back at the same airport. I’m personally thrilled to avoid the ever-increasing indignities of American Airlines, including one memorable flight in which my first class upgrade (to avoid AA’s industry-leading cramming of an extra seat in every row of steerage) got me a “lunch” of a few stale triangles of pita orbiting around a sad puddle of hummus. People for whom flying is a fond memory need to get out less.

Sponsor Updates

• InterSystems releases HealthShare CMS Solution Pack to help customers meet the interoperability and patient access final rule that takes effect on January 1.

Contacts

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