News 9/4/20

Top News

Boston-based Biofourmis raises $100 million to further develop its predictive analytics-based remote patient monitoring technology.

The company sells data and intervention opportunities to drug companies and offers hospitals a platform for monitoring their newly discharged patients remotely.

The company’s products have earned FDA 510(k) clearance for heart failure and arrhythmia detection.

Biofourmis uses Biovotion’s Everion armband sensor, which monitors 22 parameters, including heart rate, temperature, respiratory rate, blood oxygenation, motion intensity and steps, energy expenditure, sleep quality, and heart rate variability. Biofourmis acquired Biovotion in November 2019.

Reader Comments

From Significant Brother: “Re: remotely hosted EHRs. A practice asked their hosting vendor why the information of 50,000 of their patients was missing. The vendor told them that someone in the practice had deleted multiple directories. Should a vendor’s security practices allow records to be deleted by the thousands, especially in light of MU and HIPAA requirements for protecting patient records?” Readers, please weigh in. We’re missing an important piece of the story here — did the vendor identify the employee, were that user’s credentials maintained properly by the customer, and were backups or logical (rather than physical) deletes not available for restoring the missing records? Healthcare has seen a few instances where a fired employee trashed company data, and cloud configuration might allow limiting the extent of their destruction. But if the practice fired someone without turning off their access, or if they are sloppy in giving users more privileges than their jobs require, then that’s the age-old issue of running a business like something other than a business.

From Transmaniacon: “Re: COVID testing technology. I’m interested in a cloud-based patient registration system – basically a lightweight EHR – that can be installed quickly and easily to send results back to the person. Maybe you know of something.” I’ll enlist reader help here.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Jenn is continuing to update the Cerner-specific news page for: (a) those who care mostly about only Cerner news, and (b) those who want to see a longitudinal view of previous, significant news from the company. These items have already been vetted and summarized by appearing in HIStalk, so it’s not just regurgitated fluff. I also added a menu item called “Company News History” that lets you jump to that page, and maybe later to similar news summary pages for Epic, Meditech, and Allscripts. Somebody who asked for this years ago expressed interest in sponsoring this particular page and of course I didn’t retain that information because I lack discipline, so let me know if that was you.

Webinars

September 9 (Wednesday) 1 ET: “APIs for Data Liquidity in Pandemic Times.” Sponsor: Chilmark Research. Presenters: Brian Murphy, research director, Chilmark Research; Gautam “G” Shah, VP of platform and marketplace, Change Healthcare; Drew Ivan, chief product and strategy officer, Lyniate; and Dave Levine, MD, co-founder and chief medical officer, Datica. This webinar will present the findings from a recently published research report on the state of the healthcare API market. The presenters will describe their work in deploying APIs to enable new functionality to address COVID-19. They will cover the use cases that have been most reliable for enabling effective data liquidity, how developers are using APIs to respond to the pandemic, and how different parts of the healthcare system are making APIs more widely available.

September 17 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2021 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.“ Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP of global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will review additions, deletions, and other revisions to the 2020 ICD-10-CM code set that will be critical in coding accurately for proper reimbursement.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nordic lays off 72 of its 1,000 US-based employees due to the pandemic-induced financial disruptions its customers have faced.

Publicly traded Medicare primary care center operator Oak Street Health will open clinics in three former Walmart Care Clinic locations in Texas. Shares of the Chicago-based company, which operates 55 locations, jumped 90% on their first day of trading in early August, with the company now valued at $12 billion.

Sales

• Bayless Integrated Healthcare (AZ) will implement Saykara’s app-based, automated clinical documentation software across its eight locations in Phoenix.
• Prime Therapeutics selects RxRevu’s Real Time Benefit Check, giving prescribers on-demand information about drug options and pricing, and pre-authorization requirements.

People

William Mintz (Leidos) joins Cerner as chief strategy officer.

Announcements and Implementations

DeWitt Hospital (AR) implements Azalea Health’s EHR.

Arkansas Surgical Hospital adopts Medhost’s cloud-based EHR.

KLAS finds that the risk adjustment and analytics space is dominated by Change Healthcare, Cotiviti, Inovalon, and Optum, although of that group, only Optum was willing to share its customer list. Apixio and SCIO Health Analytics stand out in customer satisfaction, while Advantasure has the least-satisfied users.

AHRQ names Premier as the winner of its predictive analytics challenge, in which its PremierConnect most closely predicted admissions and length of stay.

Government and Politics

The US Coast Guard goes live on the DoD’s Cerner-powered MHS Genesis EHR at four facilities in California, with facility-wide deployment expected by 2024. The Coast Guard join the DoD’s EHR program two years ago after spending $60 million over seven years to unsuccessfully develop its own software.

The DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit will work with Google Cloud to develop a digital pathology solution that will include augmented reality microscopes and AI models for more accurate and timely cancer detection.

COVID-19

CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD sends an urgent letter to state governors asking them to clear the way for getting McKesson-operated COVID-19 vaccine distribution sites up and running by November 1. That presents challenges — the leading vaccine candidates require storage and delivery at below-freezing temperatures and people who get the shot must return for a second injection 3-4 weeks later. States will need to create immunization registries to track those who have received the initial dose, remind them to come back for the second dose, and ensure that the doses are distributed to the right locations in adequate supply. Hospitals will need to arrange delivery logistics and freezer capacity for a large amount of product, while rural clinics and health centers will be especially challenged.

The US, EU, Japan, and UK have contracted with drug companies for 3.7 billion doses of a successful COVID-19 vaccine and China and India will use the doses they manufacture for their own citizens, leaving much of the world, especially poor countries, without access to any successful vaccine.

Atul Gawande says in The New Yorker that the key to beating coronavirus in the US is what other countries have done — running widespread, inexpensive testing and recommitting to public health. He notes that the only-in-America health system’s maze of referrals, prior authorizations, co-pays, insurer policies, large number of uninsured people, and inconsistent screening criteria have made it hard for people to get tested, and delayed results reporting by the four companies that run most US tests is limiting their value. He concludes, “The lunacy of our testing system is the lunacy of our health system in a microcosm.” He advocates addressing logistics issues, such as creating a testing grid similar to that of electric companies, where samples would be routed to labs with excess capacity while others are overwhelmed, describing the testing industry as, “The big four commercial labs are really logistics and distribution companies wrapped around a network of regional laboratories.” He calls out the success of San Francisco, which applied its experience in addressing HIV/AIDS to mobilize a rapid, effective COVID-19 public health response.

Penn State’s athletic medicine director says that one-third of Big Ten athletes who tested positive for COVID-19 showed mycoarditis on cardiac MRIs, regardless of whether or not they showed COVID-19 symptoms. 

Israel’s largest hospital uses facial recognition software, in conjunction with its existing security cameras, to identify visitors who aren’t wearing masks and give them encouraging messages like, “No mask kills my vibe.”

Other

TechCrunch profiles Peer Medical, a startup that offers lung cancer patients the ability to share treatments with each other using de-identified EHR data. Patients can search Peer Medical’s database by biomarker, stage, age, or gender to review verified treatments and care journeys.

A Surescripts report on health IT adoption finds that e-prescribing and real-time prescription benefit utilization have increased over the last six months.

Two-thirds of Americans who file bankruptcy do so because of healthcare expenses. Experts say a lot of those people have insurance that provides poor financial protection given that only 40% of Americans have enough savings to cover a $1,000 emergency expense.

Points from Epic CEO Judy Faulkner’s online interview with Cleveland Clinic CEO Tom Mihaljevic, MD:

• She was supposed to college summer work at University of Rochester in particle physics, and since she had never seen a computer, they gave her a Fortran book and one week to learn.
• She applied to graduate school in math, but University of Wisconsin moved her without asking to computer science, which she did not know was an option. She worked with informatics pioneer Warner Slack, MD and was later asked to develop a clinical system in the days before commercial EHRs and widespread use of commercial database management software.
• She started Epic as a half-time employee with two half-time assistants, working from a basement.
• She says the Midwest is a great company location because people are friendly and work hard and having a rural footprint means the company has room to put up new buildings as needed.
• Technology is moving from rules-based systems to artificial intelligence, with statistical methods providing ways to issue early alerts for potential sepsis and to manage drug-drug interactions.
• Clinician notes are four times longer in the US than in other countries due to the administrative requirements for getting paid.
• Clinicians should review their software options to make the system work their way, and where that isn’t possible, examine how they do things to see if there’s a better way that the system can support. It’s helpful to have specialist physician builders who know how to configure systems for their specialty.
• Epic has created the role of BFFs, who take the “best friends forever” approach in recognizing and publicizing client innovation and bringing back developments from other clients.
• MyChart is available to 165 million patients. Only 0.5% of MyChart users want to manage their own information, and the even that tiny number falls off with time. Patients want their health system to maintain and exchange their records.
• Epic Cosmos has 60 million customer patient records that are being used for research. Epic is building a “best care for your patient” module that will use this data along with that of the specific patient to provide clinicians with evidence-based recommendations.

Sponsor Updates

• Cerner associates deliver care kits, school supplies, and gift cards to those affected by Iowa’s devastating windstorm.
• Wolters Kluwer publishes “5 Forces for the Future: Virtual care reaching the vulnerable.”
• Frost & Sullivan recognizes Jvion with its 2020 North American Technology Innovation Leadership Award for its Care Optimization and Recommendation Enhancement (CORE) technology.
• Premier takes first place in AHRQ’s Bringing Predictive Analytics to Healthcare Challenge.
• Bumrungrad International Hospital in Thailand uses InterSystems TrakCare Lab Enterprise to create one of the first fully digital microbiology laboratories in the world.
• MDLive works with the Soldiers’ Angels’ Women of Valor Program to offer caregivers of veterans virtual care for physical and mental health.
• NextGate updates the usability, reporting, and performance of its Enterprise Master Patient Index with version 11.
• Goliath Technologies partners with IntraSystems to help IT professionals anticipate, troubleshoot, and document Citrix end-user performance issues.

Blog Posts

• The Right Medical Device Integration Strategy Can Increase the Efficiency of Medical Device Security (Capsule)
• Your Insulin Management Process is Wasting Nurses’ Time (Glytec)
• How to Troubleshoot “Citrix is Slow” for Remote Workers (Goliath Technologies)
• Beginners guide to painless machine learning (Google Cloud)
• Plan Now for New Electronic ADT Notification Requirements (Healthcare Triangle)
• The Post-Pandemic Leadership Conundrum: Balancing Expenses While Investing in Digital Transformation (The HCI Group)
• Telehealth is here to stay. Now what? (HCTec)
• Virtually Kicking Off the 2020 Healthcare Analytics Summit (Health Catalyst)
• Health Literacy Lessons from COVID-19 (Healthwise)
• Healthy People 2030 Elevates Social Determinants of Health (Imat Solutions)
• QPP Proposed Rule for 2021: Update & Analysis (Impact Advisors)
• Growing Our Company Culture While Working from Home (Imprivata)
• Data is Key to COVID-19 Contact Tracing and Syndromic Surveillance (InterSystems)
• Surgical schedules slow to recover even as operating rooms reopen (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• COVID-19: Healthcare Consumerism’s Tipping Point (Loyale Healthcare)
• A Guide to Patient Retention for Physical Therapists (MWTherapy)
• Apart But Not Alone: How Grief Support Prevails Amid a Pandemic (Netsmart)

Contacts

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

News 9/2/20

Top News

PicnicHealth — which assembles a user’s health history from the medical records of their providers using phone and fax, packages them into a personal health record, and then allows the user to send their anonymized data to drug companies as real-world evidence for research — raises $35 million in Series A and B funding rounds.

It’s not a free or even inexpensive service. Users pay $299 upfront to have their information gathered from their providers and then $39 per month to keep it current. They can choose the research studies to which they want their information released, but receive no compensation.

It seems unlikely that large numbers of people will pay that much. CareSync had a similar service with more user benefits and charged a fraction of this cost before the company shut down in June 2018.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Cerner. Cerner Corporation’s health technologies connect people and information systems in thousands of contracted provider facilities worldwide, dedicated to creating smarter and better care for individuals and communities. Recognized globally for innovation, Cerner assists clinicians in making care decisions and assists organizations in managing the health of their populations. The company also offers an integrated clinical and financial system to help manage day-to-day revenue functions, as well as a wide range of services to support clinical, financial, and operational needs, all focused on people. Healthcare is too important to stay the same. Thanks to Cerner for supporting HIStalk.

I found this YouTube video that describes how Great Lakes Health System is creating a single patient record using Cerner.

Webinars

September 3 (Thursday) 2 ET. “How Does A Global Pandemic Reshape Health IT? A Panel Discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rob Wallace, chief product officer, IMO; Andrew S. Kanter, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, IMO; Lori Kevin, VP of enterprise IT and security, IMO; Sahas Subramanian, MCA, enterprise architect, IMO. As COVID-19 continues to spread, regulation changes, code system updates, and an increased reliance on technology are making it hard to stay on top of the many ways the pandemic is altering health IT. What’s more, we’re confronting challenges that rely heavily on technological solutions – like accurate reporting tools or telehealth adaptations – and we need those solutions now. The panel of subject matter experts across the enterprise will share insights on how the global pandemic is reshaping the health IT world.

September 17 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2021 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.“ Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP of global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will review additions, deletions, and other revisions to the 2020 ICD-10-CM code set that will be critical in coding accurately for proper reimbursement.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

TigerConnect acquires Adjuvant’s physician scheduling tool, which it will release as TigerSchedule in combining physician scheduling with clinical collaboration.

Germany-based Semalytix — which analyzes patient-generated treatment experience information from their posts on blogs, forums, and social media and sells the insights to drug companies – raises $5 million in a Series A funding round.

Sales

• Oregon Health & Science University will implement Bright.md’s automated telehealth platform as part of its Virtual Care Hub, which will guide patients through an online interview whose results are combined from their EHR information to display a chart-ready SOAP note to the provider.

People

Chris Bayham, MBA (Brookdale Senior Living) joins payer-provider precision medicine technology vendor Xsolis as COO.

SignalPath hires Andy Corts  (Sarah Cannon Research Institute) as as SVP of sponsor and CRO solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

Collective Medical releases an infection control reporting solution for skilled nursing facilities that allows them to meet federal requirements for reporting COVID-19 cases to the federal government.

The American Medical Association releases the 2021 CPT code set, which includes the proposed CMS changes that take effect January 1, 2021.

Boston startup Statum Systems announces a mobile communication and collaboration system that communicates with traditional paging systems as a backup to WiFi and cell connections. Users add a smart card to their ID badge or smartphone case to allow their phone to connect via Bluetooth to a pager receiver, after which the system will choose from the best available communications network even during outages or when in areas with low signal penetration.

Government and Politics

The VA awards Cerner a $161 million contract to implement an enterprise health services network at four of its Ohio facilities. I assume, but haven’t confirmed, that this is a milestone payment for the VA’s general implementation of Cerner.

COVID-19

HHS bids out a $250 million contract for a public relations firm to “defeat despair and inspire hope” related to COVID-19 and to encourage businesses to reopen to restart the economy, with most of the money to be spent by the end of the year.

New White House medical adviser neuroradiologist Scott Atlas, MD is urging the White House to embrace a herd immunity strategy for COVID-19, calling for lifting restrictions so that the virus will spread through healthy populations while the government focuses on protecting high-risk people. Sweden’s use of that strategy yielded infection and death rates that are among the highest in the world and failed to prevent economic problems. Epidemiologists, of which Atlas is not one, project that reaching 65% herd immunity in the US would require over 2 million deaths.

Wesleyan University is testing every student and on-campus employee twice per week for COVID-19,  arranging for a 10-day isolation period for those who test positive, and performing contact tracing. Students, faculty, and staff members bring their ID to a tent, where they are given a nasal swab kit, perform their own swab, and return their sample to testing staff. The school has reported four positive results in nearly 5,000 tests.

An article in The Atlantic explains why contact tracing works everywhere in the world except the US:

• The US didn’t start early before case numbers became unmanageable.
• People often don’t answer their phone when called by someone they don’t know.
• Test results often take several days to arrive and people don’t always self-isolate while waiting for them.
• A significant number of Americans don’t trust the government or believe in conspiracy theories.
• The US doesn’t provide much social support, so those who test positive are expected to isolate away from work and family at their own expense and in what could be space-limited living quarters.

NIH announces that a Phase 3 trial of an investigational COVID-19 vaccine that was developed by Oxford University has begun and will ultimately include 30,000 adult volunteers in 30 states. AstraZeneca has purchased the rights to the vaccine.

ProPublica notes that the US has no overall strategy for testing symptom-free people for COVID-19 because of the different needs involved with clinical versus public health use. Symptom-free testing offers no clinical value since treatment would be the same whether positive or negative, but public health departments want to be able to identify those silent carriers to assess the overall severity and source of the infection’s spread and to perform contact tracing to ask people to isolate themselves.

The National Institutes of Health concludes says the data used by the FDA to support its Emergency Use Authorization for convalescent plasma treatment is not adequate to recommend the treatment or to make it a standard of care. NIH says no conclusions can be drawn in the absence of randomized clinical trials even though FDA, HHS, and the White House publicly announced the EUA as a historic breakthrough that will save 35 of 100 hospitalized patients in misinterpreting the study’s results.

The US will not participate in the World Health Organization’s 170-country Covax effort to develop, manufacture, and equitably distribute a coronavirus vaccine. A White House spokesperson announced that “we will not be constrained by multilateral organizations influenced by the corrupt World Health Organization and China.” Experts say the downside of the “America first” policy is that if none of the vaccines being tested here work, then Americans won’t have access to successful ones that other countries are testing. The global concern is that the US will hoard doses and vaccinate even low-risk people while other countries are left without.

Florida’s health department cuts ties with Quest Diagnostics after it discovers that the company failed to submit 75,000 COVID-19 positive results going back to April. Quest apologized, saying that a technical issue prevented it from reporting 75,000 test results of the 1.4 million tests it performed, and notes that individual patients and providers received their results in a timely manner even though the state did not.

Studies find that proper ventilation can help reduce coronavirus spread indoors, as researchers recommend that schools and business upgrade their air circulation systems and open windows when possible.

Apple and Google will include COVID-19 exposure notification in the next updates of IOS and Android that begin rollout immediately, eliminating the need for users to install them as a separate app. Users will receive a push notification of the public health options that are available in their area should they choose to opt in.

Sponsor Updates

• Arcadia makes its Outreach module available for free to payer and provider partners so that they can communicate with patients about pediatric vaccination needs and other gaps in care.
• Impact Advisors publishes a white paper titled “EHR Hostring Strategies and Options.”
• The Chartis Group hires James Green as a director of its revenue cycle practice.
• CereCore wins ClearlyRated’s 2020 Best of Staffing client and talent awards for service excellence.
• Public sector technology vendor Tyler Technologies and Cerner will help state health departments comply with Medicaid reporting requirements using Tyler’s Entellitrak and Cerner’s HealthIntent.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of The Informonster Podcast, “The COVID-19 Interoperability Alliance.”
• Dresner Advisory Services names Dimensional Insight an overall leader in business intelligence in its annual Industry Excellence awards.
• Everbridge and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children celebrate six years of successful collaboration.

Blog Posts

• Top 6 Problems with Paper Consent Forms (Access)
• 3 Steps to Ensure Smooth Medical Billing with Every Patient (AdvancedMD)
• The Immunization Gateway Portfolio: Preparing for COVID-19 Mass Vaccination (Audacious Inquiry)
• Maximizing Staff Scope of Practice (Bluetree)
• Interoperability e-Notification CoPs: Why a National Network is Critical (CarePort Health)
• Millions are Uninsured Due to COVID-19: What This Means for Payers (Collective Medical)
• CoverMyQuest: Updates from Our 2019 Winners (CoverMyMeds)
• Virtual Healthcare IT Projects Webinar Recording (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• What is FHIR and Why it Matters (Diameter Health)
• Going Big for Their Go-Live (EClinicalWorks)
• Tearing Down SDoH Barriers to Discharge During a Pandemic (Ensocare)
• Optimizing Data for Revenue Recovery in Your Health System (ESolutions)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/31/20

Top News

Konica Minolta will pay $500,000 to settle false claims act charges involving its former subsidiary Viztek, which the federal government says fraudulently obtained certification for its Exa EHR that allowed users to falsely collect Meaningful Use payments.

Also named was EHR certification company InfoGard, which “facilitated and participated” in Viztek’s false attestations by certifying the product even as its tester noted obvious manipulation.

Details of the whistleblower’s complaint, in which the government intervened without filing its own complaint, are more interesting than the $500,000 settlement might suggest:

• PACS vendor Viztek announced rollout of its EHR-PACS integrated Exa EHR in mid-2014. It developed that product in reworking its previously acquired Opal EHR, which was ONC certified.
• Viztek’s India-based developers underestimated the work that was required to bring Exa EHR up to 2014 edition standards.
• The whistleblower – Exa EHR’s product manager – said Viztek founder and president Joe Cermin told her that “I don’t care if you have to lie, beg, cheat, steal, or kill” to earn certification since failure to do so would jeopardize the millions of dollars that would result from the company’s acquisition by Konica Minolta, which was underway during the certification testing.
• Konica Minolta acquired the 120-employee, North Carolina-based Viztek in October 2015.
• Viztek chose the remote testing option so it could manipulate the testing scenarios using a hard-coded product version that was never released. The whistleblower was told to keep multiple tabs open on her screen, one to run the test script and the other to show an already-configured result. The software failed testing at several points, at which time the company’s executives would ask for a break to allow two on-call teams in India to dummy up test results on two versions of the software, then demonstrate the result of whichever team finished first. At several points, the developers accidently displayed live patient data.
• The developers hard-coded the EHR to pass the XML output requirements for Common MU Data Set by using programming they found on an ONC testing website. They didn’t even bother to remove the other EHR vendor’s name that was still embedded in the programming.
• InfoGard “facilitated and participated” in the false attestations by giving Viztek multiple attempts to pass and approving frequent breaks and delays that gave developers time to falsify the programing. The InfoGard tester passed the product even though she noticed that on-screen version numbers, colors, and field layouts changed after the developers had taken breaks.
• The UL subsidiary of Underwriters Laboratories acquired InfoGard in December 2015.

Reader Comments

From Debbie Downer: “Re: [health IT executive name omitted.] Does it seem they had to be at least somewhat evil to have made their way to the top?” We all have a good-bad behavior ratio that changes situationally, earning us a perceived “jerk score” that may be based on only superficial aspects of our character as observed at our most inopportune moments. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Neal Patterson kicked their dents in the universe with a psychologically obsessive focus, notoriously flaring temper, an intolerance of naysayers, psychological issues that in some cases were tied to a traumatic childhood, and a general indifference to the wellbeing of the folks who were rowing their corporate boat. But they built lasting and daringly innovative companies in their image that likely would not have happened if they were easygoing everymen. It’s probably not true that nice people finish last, but it is true that people who are successful in any field have to push themselves and others in ways that cheap-seaters would likely find despicable. Whether that leaves them happier on their deathbeds or whether society is better off as a result is an issue that is above my pay grade. Maybe my conclusion is that you can be happy only if you act as your natural self, regardless of how acceptable that may or may not be to others, and the vast majority of jerks don’t accomplish all that much.

From Woodstock Generation: “Re: US withdrawal from WHO. All of my HIM colleagues say no impact will result. We will continue to use ICD-10 diagnoses from WHO and modify them as usual to crate our ICD-10 CM. We will also will continue to create procedure codes (ICD-10 PCS) for use only in the US.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Many poll respondents say that their family connection and money situations have improved in the past year, although quite a few others don’t have much positive to report (with “optimism” taking a big hit, likely due to COVID-19).

New poll to your right or here: how much consumer and healthcare impact will the Amazon Halo wearable have?

Webinars

September 3 (Thursday) 2 ET. “How Does A Global Pandemic Reshape Health IT? A Panel Discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rob Wallace, chief product officer, IMO; Andrew S. Kanter, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, IMO; Lori Kevin, VP of enterprise IT and security, IMO; Sahas Subramanian, MCA, enterprise architect, IMO. As COVID-19 continues to spread, regulation changes, code system updates, and an increased reliance on technology are making it hard to stay on top of the many ways the pandemic is altering health IT. What’s more, we’re confronting challenges that rely heavily on technological solutions – like accurate reporting tools or telehealth adaptations – and we need those solutions now. The panel of subject matter experts across the enterprise will share insights on how the global pandemic is reshaping the health IT world.

September 17 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2021 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.“ Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP of global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will review additions, deletions, and other revisions to the 2020 ICD-10-CM code set that will be critical in coding accurately for proper reimbursement.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Prescription shopping vendor GoodRx files for an IPO, showing first-half results of $55 million in profit on $257 million in revenue with high growth in both. The company was valued at $3 billion in a 2018 funding round.

COVID-19

US COVID-19 deaths are at 183,000, with 220,000 projected by November 1.

Public health experts question whether COVID-19 PCR tests are overly sensitive, causing people who are carrying insignificant amounts of virus to be labeled as positive and treated as contagious. The answer isn’t to stop testing, as CDC’s controversial new guidance suggests, but instead to use the newly introduced rapid tests that are less sensitive. Other options would be to confirm PCR tests a few hours later with a rapid test, or to interpret the same PCR test result using lower cycle threshold ranges. A run of samples at New York’s state lab identified 794 positive results using the common setting of 40 cycles, but detuning the sensitivity to 35 cycles reduced that number in half, which would make the results more meaningful and make contact tracing easier. The experts also question why labs report their test results as simply positive or negative instead of listing the actual measured viral load.

HHS dismisses two of its high-level PR experts following the backlash that followed erroneous statements made by FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD about the effectiveness of convalescent plasma treatment that he later declined to correct in a public forum. Hahn, President Trump, and HHS Secretary Alex Azar touted FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization of the treatment as a “very historic breakthrough” that offers a 35% reduction in deaths, a wildly incorrect misinterpretation of results from an observational study that showed that a tiny subset of patients had 35% fewer deaths when given the treatment early versus those who were given it later. Hahn tweeted that he misspoke in characterizing the findings as an “absolute reduction” instead of a “relative reduction,” but he has not elaborated further or provided more accurate information to the public. No randomized clinical trial has been done to prove that convalescent plasma treatment reduces deaths, and even taking the data at face value suggests a 5% mortality reduction at best from using the 100-year-old treatment.

FDA assigns Emergency Use Authorization to allow all hospitalized COVID-19 patients to receive remdesivir, although no research has been published to prove its benefit. FDA issued an EUA in May for using the drug in non-ventilated hospitalized patients who need oxygen. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD said that “data show that this treatment has the potential to help even more hospitalized patients,” citing one study from May and another that found only that five days of treatment work as well as 10. Hospitals worry that broader authorization is unproven, it came in the absence of new research, and the EUA will make it harder to obtain the drug for patients whose need is better documented by evidence.

FDA Commissioner Hahn says the agency will authorize widespread use of a COVID-19 vaccine via Emergency Use Authorization before Phase III clinical trials are complete if they think the benefits outweigh the risks. He says it won’t be a political decision – companies apply for such authorization and FDA makes a determination based on the evidence they submit. The only countries that have approved vaccines before their clinical trials were completed are China and Russia.

People who are misinterpreting CDC’s data are spreading the rumor that only 6% of reported coronavirus deaths were caused by COVID-19, confusing the fact that 6% have COVID-19 as the only ICD-10 code listed while the other 94% include COVID-19 as well as comorbidities such as obesity or diabetes, as is common in many Americans and nearly ubiquitous in older people. It was already widely published that older, sicker people are more likely to die of COVID-19, as are minorities and those who are poorer. The pandemic won’t just go away by pretending that people who die of pneumonia in conjunction with coronavirus infection didn’t really die of COVID-19 and therefore everybody else’s odds are better. But you want to blame people for letting COVID-19 kill them by daring to be older, sicker, poorer, or less white, then these are some good numbers to share with others who don’t really care about their deaths either.

Other

Ascension Michigan will lay off 223 employees of its IT network operations and service desk in October as the health system outsources their jobs. SVP/CIO Gerry Lewis said in a blog post two weeks ago that “we have begun shifting some of our technology functions to third-party partners who specialize in these services” as part of its “digital transformation.”

Cleveland Clinic President and CEO Tom Mihaljevic, MD will interview Epic CEO Judy Faulkner on Wednesday, September 2 at 6 p.m. ET as part of the speaker series “Ideas For Tomorrow.” It will be live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube Live.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink demonstrates its skull-inserted brain-computer link in a pig, as the company continues its progress toward creating “neural shunts” that could allow paraplegics to regain use of their limbs. Musk also envisions people communicating using “conceptual telepathy” without writing or speaking. He admits that people will be wary of the technology that he calls “a Fitbit for your skull,” acknowledging that “this is increasingly sounding like a ‘Black Mirror’ episode.”

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx CEO William Febbo will present at the LD 500 virtual investor conference on September 3.
• The National Council for Prescription Drug Programs honors Surescripts Clinical Informatics Manager Larry King with its Rising Star Award.
• TriNetX announces that Duke-NUS, a medical school in Singapore, has joined its global research network.
• Vocera will present virtually at the Baird 2020 Global Healthcare Conference September 9, Wells Fargo Virtual Healthcare Conference September 10, and Morgan Stanley Virtual Global Healthcare Conference September 14.
• Wolters Kluwer launches “5 Forces for the Future” series to reimagine healthcare post-COVID-19.

Blog Posts

• The difference between ambient clinical intelligence and ambition (Nuance)
• How Far We’ve Come: Immunizations (OmniSys)
• My Unexpected First 100+ Days (PatientKeeper)
• Clarifying 5 Misconceptions about CMS’s E-Notifications Condition of Participation (PatientPing)
• Investing in Partnerships Pays Dividends (PMD)
• Executive Analysis Elevates a Transfer Center’s ROI and Strategic Value (Central Logic)
• Take Advantage of the PAMA Deadline Extension (Premier)
• Sell to hospitals. Get your product live. (Redox)
• Back to the Future with SailPoint Predictive Identity (SailPoint)
• 3 key questions to determine if your data protection software is Privacy-Grade (Spirion)
• How to strengthen your emergency call system to comply with Kari’s Law and the Ray Baum’s Act (Spok)
• Vocera and EASE: Humanizing the Patient and Family Experience, Together (Vocera)
• What Healthcare Can Learn From Fintech’s Digital Evolution (Waystar)
• Is Professional Liability Insurance Worth It? (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 8/28/20

Top News

Amazon introduces Halo, a health and wellness wearable, app, and membership program.

Cerner simultaneously announced that it has integrated its systems with Halo, which will allow consumers to share their connected health values with their care team. Sharp HealthCare is the first to implement Halo in a healthcare setting.

The screen-free Amazon Halo measures body composition from selfies, activity duration and intensity, sleep quality and quantity, and mood as evidenced by voice tone. It will also offer health improvement ideas, such as specific exercises.

The device is swim-proof and will run seven days on a 90-minute charge if its tones are disabled.

Scientists will be interested to study the types of sensors that Amazon is using and to learn if Amazon will publish results from their use.

Amazon Halo is available via an early access program for $65 and a $4 per month subscription after the first six months. The regular price will be $100.

Reader Comments

From Down Underwear: “Re: HIMSS. Good thing they didn’t go ahead with HIMSS20.” Researchers say the 175-attendee conference of drug company Biogen at Boston Marriott Long Wharf in February has led to at least 20,000 COVID-19 cases, based on tracking the virus’s genetic makeup over four Boston-area counties. HIMSS20 would have involved 50,000 attendees from all over the world, many of them working in patient care, so that would have been a disaster. Unrestricted travel as we have in the US makes it hard to contain and track the virus, as public health agencies are discovering in wondering how many of the hundreds of thousands of people who attended the recent Sturgis Motorcycle Rally brought coronavirus home with them.

From Hermit: “Re: Allscripts. Layoffs continue, with almost all of the Paragon development and product management team gone as jobs continue to move to India.” Unverified.

From GrBuckeye: “Re: Virginia Commonwealth University Health System. Outsourcing its revenue cycle operations to Ensemble Health Partners as of 11/1. Only patient-facing employees, such as in patient access and registration, will remain VCUHS employees, while the other 300 to 600 will become Ensemble employees. I assume that a press release will come out soon with more details.” Unverified.

Webinars

September 3 (Thursday) 2 ET. “How Does A Global Pandemic Reshape Health IT? A Panel Discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rob Wallace, chief product officer, IMO; Andrew S. Kanter, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, IMO; Lori Kevin, VP of enterprise IT and security, IMO; Sahas Subramanian, MCA, enterprise architect, IMO. As COVID-19 continues to spread, regulation changes, code system updates, and an increased reliance on technology are making it hard to stay on top of the many ways the pandemic is altering health IT. What’s more, we’re confronting challenges that rely heavily on technological solutions – like accurate reporting tools or telehealth adaptations – and we need those solutions now. The panel of subject matter experts across the enterprise will share insights on how the global pandemic is reshaping the health IT world.

September 17 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2021 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.“ Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP of global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will review additions, deletions, and other revisions to the 2020 ICD-10-CM code set that will be critical in coding accurately for proper reimbursement.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

SeamlessMD raises $3 million in a Series A funding round. The Toronto-based company’s app helps patients before, during, and after hospital stays. The company plans to expand its use of machine learning and expand into home and oncology care.

Research and advisory nonprofit Altarum sells its Prometheus Analytics software to Change Healthcare.

Employer-focused, prescription-savings startup Prescryptive Health raises $26 million in a Series A funding round. Co-founders Chris Blackley and Kevin Young started the company in 2017 after long stints at Microsoft.

Sales

• Medical University of South Carolina Children’s Health selects Proficient Health’s PH Connect referral and health data exchange software.
• Wellstar Health System (GA) will implement telestroke and teleneurology technology from VeeMed at nine of its hospitals.
• The Missouri Hospital Association’s Hospital Industry Data Institute will upgrade its statewide care coordination platform with predictive alerts and analytics from Collective Medical.

People

Sean Slovenski, former head of Walmart Health, joins diagnostic testing company BioIQ as CEO.

Best Buy names former IBM Watson Health executive Deborah DiSanzo (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) as president of Best Buy Health.

Ambulatory surgery network operator ValueHealth hires John Gresham (Cerner) as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Carrus Health (TX) implements Medhost’s Enterprise EHR and RCM software at its new Behavioral Hospital.

Nova Southeastern University (FL) goes live on InteliChart’s Healthy Outcomes patient engagement software across its 20 multi-specialty health centers.

CentraState Medical Center (NJ) implements tele-ICU services from Advanced ICU Care.

The University of Kansas Health System goes live on Epic at its locations in Great Bend.

COVID-19

The FDA issues Emergency Use Authorization for Abbott’s rapid test for COVID-19. The company will sell the credit card-sized test, which provides results in 15 minutes using technology much like a pregnancy test, for $5. The test uses a nasal swab and must be administered by a healthcare professional who is operating under a CLIA certificate. Abbott has developed a companion app called Navica, which will display a boarding pass-style, time-limited QR code that employers, schools, and group activity organizers can scan to limit entry to those who have tested negative. Abbott anticipates manufacturing 5 million tests a month starting in October, although the White House is rumored to have brokered a deal to buy 150 million of the tests for $750 million that the federal government will distribute to high-risk schools and nursing homes, which may exhaust the supply for many months.

CMS issues emergency regulations that include requiring hospitals to report COVID-19 patient and testing data daily to HHS or face possible termination of Medicare and Medicaid payments. In addition, nursing homes will be required to test staff and offer testing to residents.

Sources say that HHS and the White House pressured CDC to quietly issue new guidance this week for people who have been exposed to COVID-19 but who are not experiencing systems. CDC now says that those people should not seek COVID-19 testing. Experts are expressing public concern that the goal should be testing more people without symptoms instead of fewer, symptom-free people can be prolific spreaders, more widespread testing is important and especially so as students return to campus, and CDC is again changing its position under apparent White House pressure. CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD, responding to criticism, has since walked back the recommendation to say that testing “may be considered” for all close contacts of people who are known or suspected to be infected. However, the changed guidance remains on CDC’s website without such clarification.

The New York Times notes that since the White House no longer allows Anthony Fauci, MD to participate in high-profile interviews and the Sunday news programs, he is instead appearing on celebrity podcasts, academic webinars, and Instagram feeds where such approval is not required. Big-audience reporters are bypassing their lack of access by listening to his niche appearances and reporting his newsworthy comments. He is scheduled to offer a session at AMIA’s virtual symposium in November.

Other

A scenario-based survey of 523 graduating college students finds that nearly half would violate HIPAA for between $1,000 and $10 million. Between 65% and 78% of respondents would illegally share the medical records of a politician or reality show celebrity with media outlets to pay for a friend’s medical expenses.

Non-profit technology access service Human-I-T provides 30 tablets to allow COVID-19 patients of Olive View – UCLA Medical Center who can’t have visitors to connect virtually with their loved ones.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthwise employees and their families volunteer in the Boise, Idaho area by sewing and donating masks, and packing lunches.
• Goliath Technologies partners with Automai for app-performance monitoring.
• Intelligent Medical Objects publishes a new white paper, “The 21^st Century Cures Act in the age of COVID-19.”
• Kyruus Chief Customer Officer will co-present with Jefferson Health SVP Lisa Griffin during the virtual Greystone.Net Contact Experience Conference August 28.
• MDLive CEO and Chairman Charles Jones joins CNBC to discuss telemedicine amid the pandemic and the company’s plans to go public next year.
• 3M Health Information Systems makes its MModal virtual assistant technology compatible with the Hey Epic! Voice Assistant in Epic Hyperspace.
• Spok earns SOC 2 Type II compliance for Spok Go solutions, paging solutions.
• Cedar will integrate Waystar’s pricing estimates, payment options, and eligibility verification capabilities into its patient engagement software.
• Hayes adds revenue optimization insights to its MDaudit Enterprise revenue integrity software.
• SailPoint updates its Predictive Identity software to include integrations with Epic and Microsoft Teams.

Blog Posts

• Advancing telehealth with Amwell (Google Cloud)
• Analytics in the New Normal: The FDA and the Power of Real-Time Data, Collaboration, and Improved Interoperability in the COVID Fight (Health Catalyst)
• HDMLive Presents: The 5 B’s of interviewing (Health Data Movers)
• Lessons Learned While Implementing a Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) (Impact Advisors)
• How To Overcome Common Community Connect Hurdles (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Tracking Health Checks with Infor Workforce Management (Infor)
• How little things can make a big difference (Nordic)
• Risk Only Goes So Far: We need a new health outcomes equation (Jvion)
• Healthcare Affordability is More Than a Problem. It’s a Crisis (Loyale Healthcare)
• Plan Now for New Electronic ADT Notification Requirements (Healthcare Triangle)
• Investing In Partnerships Pays Dividends (PMD)
• A Guide to Patient Retention for Physical Therapists (MWTherapy)
• EHR Shortcomings Hinder Patient Matching and Contact Tracing Efforts for COVID-19 (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 8/26/20

Top News

Google Cloud invests $100 million in Amwell, with timing and per-share price to be set by the company’s announced IPO.

Amwell will move parts of its business from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud.

Reader Comments

From Chuck: “Re: Qualifacts and Credible. I heard they are announcing their merger tomorrow [Chuck was correct – he sent this on Monday and the announcement was Tuesday]. This is kind of like T-Mobile and Sprint. With Netsmart, that will make two 800-pound gorillas in the behavioral health EHR space, leaving a handful of mid-level EHRs (TenEleven, NextGen, Streamline, Echo, Foothold, Core Solutions) competing for larger opportunities.”

From Dancing Iguana: “Re: links. We aren’t seeing web traffic coming from HIStalk like we used to. Have you changed something?” I didn’t change anything, but this inquiry led me to learn that WordPress did in an effort to eliminate a particular kind of security issue. Links that open a new browser tab intentionally hide the source website from the receiving one. That can be changed in two ways: (a) by making programming changes; or (b) setting all links to open in the same browser tab instead of a new one. Example: here’s how it works now (a new tab opens), and here’s how it would look otherwise (the existing tab displays the linked page). Let’s go to the poll: would it bug you if clicking an HIStalk link opened the new page in the same browser tab instead of a new one as in the second option above? It probably would me since I don’t like using the “back” button for navigation and then re-loading the page, but that’s the default browser behavior. Now I know why companies have asked me if my readership is down (it isn’t) – the traffic I send them doesn’t show as coming from HIStalk.

Webinars

September 3 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “How Does A Global Pandemic Reshape Health IT? A Panel Discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rob Wallace, chief product officer, IMO; Andrew S. Kanter, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, IMO; Lori Kevin, VP of enterprise IT and security, IMO; Sahas Subramanian, MCA, enterprise architect, IMO. As COVID-19 continues to spread, regulation changes, code system updates, and an increased reliance on technology are making it hard to stay on top of the many ways the pandemic is altering health IT. What’s more, we’re confronting challenges that rely heavily on technological solutions – like accurate reporting tools or telehealth adaptations – and we need those solutions now. The panel of subject matter experts across the enterprise will share insights on how the global pandemic is reshaping the health IT world.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The private equity owners of behavioral software vendors Qualifacts and Credible Behavioral Health will merge their respective companies, giving the combined organization a client base of 800 behavioral health agencies. Warburg Pincus invested in Qualifacts a year ago at a reported valuation of $350 million.

Lyra Health, which offers technology-powered mental health benefits for employers, raises $110 million in a Series D funding round, increasing its total to $290 million and valuing the company at $1.1 billion. Co-founder and CEO David Ebersman spent 15 years as an executive with drug maker Genentech and then joined Facebook as CFO for five years before co-founding Lyra Health.

PatientPop raises $50 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $125 million. The company offers practice management tools such as website development, online scheduling, appointment reminders, and reputation management. The co-CEOs came from ShopNation, which offers a fashion shopping engine.

Sales

• Dignity Health Management Services will use Innovaccer’s Data Activation Platform for interoperability as well as its population health management solution. 

People

B.well Connected Health hires Dunnie Norman (InsightRX) as chief revenue officer.

Dan Thelen, MBA (Evergreen Healthcare Partners) joins First Health Advisory as VP of cybersecurity.

Jay Sultan, MA (Cognizant) joins LexisNexis Risk Solutions as VP of strategy in its healthcare business.

Announcements and Implementations

The VA launches its Cerner appointment scheduling system at the VA Central Ohio Healthcare System, with a VA-wide rollout to follow.

Health IT startup Emme launches its first product, a $99 Bluetooth-connected smart pill case that sends women reminders to take their birth control pill via its IOS-only app. The company says that 80% of women miss at least one pill each month, causing 1 million unintended pregnancies.

Government research contractor Mitre and Nuance will work together to advance use of the MCODE cancer research and treatment data standard by using Nuance’s Dragon Medical One to capture clinician dictation that is sent to the EHR.

COVID-19

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD, President Trump, and HHS Secretary Alex Azar incorrectly state that the use of convalescent plasma for treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients reduces deaths by 35% in announcing FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for the treatment. They mischaracterized the original Mayo Clinic study, which concluded that giving the plasma within three days of diagnosis was associated with a seven-day mortality rate of 8.7% versus 11.9% if transfused later, which represents a 35% relative (not absolute) improvement between the timings in a small fraction of patients but does not support any evidence of an improved survival rate overall. Hahn acknowledged his mistake in a Monday night tweet, but scientists question how he could have made such an obvious error and then allowed others to repeat it uncorrected. President Trump had accused the FDA on Twitter the day before the announcement as being run by the “deep state” and intentionally obstructing vaccine and treatment studies in hopes of harming his re-election bid, although Hahn says that that White House pressure did not impact FDA’s action. Scientists say the FDA’s EUA will have a negative effect since use of convalescent plasma has not undergone randomized controlled trials and now patients aren’t likely to sign up for those studies knowing that they have a 50% chance of receiving placebo when they can just have the plasma ordered directly under the EUA. They also worry that White House publicity will cause shortages of the plasma, which is collected from volunteer COVID-19 survivors, and that FDA might allow a vaccine to be released prematurely with similarly unconvincing science behind it.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar told hospitals in an April 21 email that they would be required to submit their COVID-19 capacity data to HHS’s newly launched TeleTracking database to be eligible for the federal government’s $100 billion provider relief fund, a stipulation that Congress had not included in the legislation. 

A Georgia health district explains that a sudden COVID-19 case jump was caused by activation of a new lab reporting connection to Navicent Health that sent a backlog of one hospital’s reports going back to mid-June. They organizations are working together to remove the duplicate entries.

A testing lab tells the NFL says that 77 new positive COVID-19 results that affected 11 football teams were false positives caused by contamination that occurred during test preparation.

Other

A shareholder of SCWorx Corp. sues the company, claiming it misled investors by announcing a contract to sell $35 million worth of COVID-19 test kits each week for 23 weeks to Rethink My Healthcare. The shareholder says that customer was too small to afford the kits that it had supposedly committed to buy. SCWorx offers hospital supply chain, analytics, and interoperability solutions. According to its SEC filings, it has eight employees and is losing money to the point that its auditors question its survival. It acquired several mixed martial arts fighting championships that it still operates as subsidiaries. WORX shares are a rollercoaster, trading in the past year from $1.50 to $15, currently at $1.56, valuing the company at $15 million.

Former Sutter Health CIO John Hummel, PhD passed along the back story of former Sutter IT project manager and convicted murderer Mario Garcia, who a jury found guilty of killing a 27-year-old woman in 2005 even though her body had not been found. John says police searched the IT facilities extensively and his CISO was able to recover deleted pictures from a Sutter-owned camera in which Garcia documented scratches to his face. The photos, along with DNA evidence that proved that the victim had been in his car, convinced the jury of his guilt. John spent years searching for the woman’s body as a promise to her mother and now investigators have finally found the remains of Christie Wilson buried at Garcia’s former residence.

Cory Chase, a network analyst at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, records “Quarantine Radio,” a half-hour music and humor show that he creates after his work-from-home day ends.

Sponsor Updates

• CloudWave Director of Sales Engineering Mike Donahue receives the Patriot Award through the DoD’s Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve after being nominated by CloudWave Technical Consultant and US Air Force Guard member Osmandy Polanco.
• Dimensional Insight sponsors registration for the St. Jude Walk/Run in Boston September 26.
• Dina will exhibit at Health Catalyst’s virtual Healthcare Analytics Summit September 1-3.
• Elsevier launches a Medical Student Hub for first-year students that offers masterclass videos, podcasts, survival tips, anatomy flashcards, and toolkits.
• Everbridge’s contact tracing software experiences rapid global adoption across education, corporate, and government sectors.

Blog Posts

• Looking beyond COVID-19: the top 3 telehealth challenges to start combatting now (Ability Network)
• Healthcare IT in the Age of Coronavirus: HIPAA & Cybersecurity Protections (AdvancedMD)
• Bluetree’s Managed Services: Close the Support Loop and Do More with Less (Bluetree)
• Using SDOH Data to Create More Healthy Days at Home (Dina)
• Your Superpower Is Your Virtual Front Door: Multiply your revenue starting now (Bright.md)
• From Reactive to Proactive Care (Capsule)
• Culture Still Driven by Leadership During Crisis Times (Impact Advisors)
• Addressing Physician Burnout via EHR Inboxes and Patient Message Management (ChartLogic)
• 3 Best Practices for Successfully Leveraging CMS Conditions of Participation (Collective Medical)
• Using Technology to Improve Medication Access and Impact More Patients (CoverMyMeds)
• Our National Conference in 2020 (EClinicalWorks)
• Five Strategies to Ensure Cybersecurity During COVID-19 and Beyond (Ensocare)
• Helping Hospitals Get Back on Their Feet with Advanced Analytics (EPSi)
• Hospitals and Health Systems: Using Revenue Integrity Principles to Stabilize Your Revenue Cycle Amid COVID-19 (ESolutions)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/24/20

Top News

Outset Medical, which offers a portable, cloud-connected home dialysis machine that can integrate with EHRs, files for a $100 million IPO.

The only connection required for the touchscreen-operated, sensor-managed portable machine is a wall outlet and tap water that it uses to create its own dialysate.

The company has raised $450 million, most recently $125 million in a Series E funding round earlier this year.

Reader Comments

From Puzzled PR: “Re: partnership press release. Why didn’t you mention our announcement?” I ignore any announcement that I can’t figure out within 15 seconds, including this infuriatingly imprecise one that has puffed some sort of “partnership” to the point I can’t tell who (if anyone) actually bought something. I doubt it was newsworthy anyway, but I honestly couldn’t tell. Too many PR cooks spoil the announcement broth in rendering simple statements such as “what does this company do” into intentional inflated gibberish in shooting for high-falutin’ prose and instead hitting their own foot. I typically don’t mention partnership announcements (because who cares?) and I also pass on “news” items that affect only existing clients who surely be contacted individually anyway. The folks whose committees ruin clear communication by over-polishing it always seem shocked that the rest of the world doesn’t take notice, either because they couldn’t figure it out or it was of minimal value even before being butchered.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A possibly surprising 60% of provider employees who registered for HIMSS20 say they won’t attend HIMSS21 even if COVID-19 isn’t a factor by then. Most respondents, based on what they know today, have already made plans one way or another, with few of them saying they don’t know yet.

New poll to your right or here, repeating one I did in the pre-COVID days of last summer that seems like years ago: what’s better about your life now compared to a year ago?

Webinars

September 3 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “How Does A Global Pandemic Reshape Health IT? A Panel Discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rob Wallace, chief product officer, IMO; Andrew S. Kanter, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, IMO; Lori Kevin, VP of enterprise IT and security, IMO; Sahas Subramanian, MCA, enterprise architect, IMO. As COVID-19 continues to spread, regulation changes, code system updates, and an increased reliance on technology are making it hard to stay on top of the many ways the pandemic is altering health IT. What’s more, we’re confronting challenges that rely heavily on technological solutions – like accurate reporting tools or telehealth adaptations – and we need those solutions now. The panel of subject matter experts across the enterprise will share insights on how the global pandemic is reshaping the health IT world.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Handheld ultrasound device manufacturer Exo raises $20 million in a Series B round, increasing its total to $100 million. The company will launch the device and its workflow software over the next few months in the US.

Hyland acquires Germany-based robotic process automation software vendor Another Monday.

A US appeals court reduces the $280 million in punitive damages that Tata Consultancy Services had been ordered to pay Epic in a 2014 trade secrets lawsuit, saying that $140 million is a reasonable figure. Tata continues to fight the lawsuit, arguing that it did not misuse the information that its consultants were accused of copying from Epic’s UserWeb while claiming to be Kaiser Permanente employees. The original jury award was $940 million, which was lowered to $420 million to comply with Wisconsin state caps on punitive damages. Epic accused Tata of stealing its intellectual property to improve its competing product Med Mantra. Tata employee Philippe Guionnet, who managed the company’s contracts with Kaiser, was the whistleblower who conveyed his suspicions to Epic.

People

Vinnie Whibbs (TogetherMD) joins TVR Communications as VP of enterprise solutions.

COVID-19

Updated models predict 227,000 to 300,000 US COVID-19 deaths by November and December. The current US death count is at 176,000.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD warns that a new HHS policy that removes FDA’s authority to oversee lab-developed tests will lead to direct-to-consumer tests that operate without FDA oversight and will leave FDA with no authority to take enforcement action against bad tests. FDA had traditionally not actively regulated such tests anyway, but now will be unable to work with test makers to improve quality in the absence of a process that was working.

FDA will reportedly authorize the use of convalescent plasma from recovered patients for treating COVID-19 under pressure from the White House on the eve of the Republican National Convention’s kickoff, although its Emergency Use Authorization will make it harder to conduct randomized clinical trials, which have never been performed on the procedure.

California’s infectious disease monitoring system recently went down for 20 days, hampering the efforts of local health departments to manage their pandemic response. The state’s backlog of 300,000 lab tests contained 15,000 that were positive for COVID-19, eliminating the possibility for individuals to isolate themselves and for public health officials to perform contact tracing. An outage in the state’s CalREDIE database prevented delivery of electronic lab reports to counties. Mendocino County performed its tracking by telephone and fax machine as usual, leading to its decision to shut down bars in even though the state’s backlogged electronica data showed the county as doing fine.

An August 7 wedding reception at a Maine inn with 65 attendees – 15 more than state law allows – has resulted in 53 known COVID-19 cases that were discovered by contact tracers. A woman who did not attend the reception died after becoming infected by someone who did.

In Ireland, two high-ranking federal government officials resign and others are under pressure after getting caught attending an 80-attendee golf tournament and dinner that was illegal given the country’s 50-person limit. The newly resigned / fired minister of agriculture, who had held the position for just six weeks, had warned citizens three days before that house parties were spreading the virus and that “COVID loves to party.”

Other

A Catholic hospital in Toronto opens up its Internet content filtering system to allow doctors to access the websites of abortion clinics for patient referrals.

Scientists in China say that their AI algorithm can predict coronary artery disease by looking at a person’s photo for signs of thinning or gray hair, wrinkles, and ear lobe creases.

Sponsor Updates

• The RedSail Technologies QCompass podcast features OmniSys Chief Innovation Officer David Pope, PharmD.
• SymphonyRM’s HealthOS: Health AI Powered Patient Engagement is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange.
• Waystar will open an office in Utah, creating up to 70 jobs over the next seven years.

Blog Posts

• New Survey Shows Telehealth Growth (Ingenious Med)
• Speed chart completion with cloud-based speech recognition (Nuance)
• Keeping up the fight on cancer during pandemic (OpenText)
• Telehealth: Any Way You Want It (PMD)
• Inside the Model that Predicts Surges in COVID-19 Cases (Premier)
• How Data Helps Wellsource Combat Chronic Disease (Pure Storage)
• Q3 2020 Product Updates: Integrate More with Less Code (Redox)
• Relatient Powers the Virtual Waiting Room with Contactless Patient Engagement (Relatient)
• How the COVID-19 Pandemic Shifted Prescribing Patterns: A Look at Real-Time Prescription Benefit Transaction Data from the First Half of 2020 (RxRevu)
• Leading with Intention: Integrity (SailPoint)
• Health Care Decision Making: Mobile Access to Financial Data is Helping Hospitals Respond (Strata Decision Technology)
• The Source for Patient Data Prescribers Can’t Go Without (Surescripts)
• Lessons Learned as We Prepare for COVID Wave 2 (Vocera)

Contacts

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

News 8/21/20

Top News

The Wall Street Journal reports that COVID-19 hospitalization data reporting, which was moved to an HHS system with little warning and with criticism from some members of Congress, will return to CDC’s control under a new system.

HHS denies the report, saying that no plan is on the table to have CDC take over again.

The WSJ article quotes a recent statement from Deborah Birx, MD that it interprets as signalling a move to a new CDC system. It did not read that way to me.

In a possibly related item, Politico reports that the federal government has launched Modernizing Public Health Reporting and Surveillance, a multi-year initiative to improve data quality at state and local health departments. Ideas being discussed include automating hospital and lab reporting, moving to electronic case reporting, replacing data systems, and digitizing mobile coronavirus testing sites. Experts worry that the program will conflict with existing efforts and question whether technologists at the White House’s US Digital Service have the knowledge to solve a problem that has vexed public health officials for years.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Healthcare Triangle. The Pleasonton, CA-based company brings together healthcare cloud and security vendor 8K Miles and health IT advisory and implementation services consultancy Cornerstone Advisors. It offers services such as IT strategy and planning, cloud technology, Epic and Meditech consulting, EHR managed services, backup and disaster recovery, data management and analytics, performance data, value-based care insights, supply chain management, and staffing optimization. The company’s customers include provider, payer, and life sciences organizations, with five of the world’s biggest pharma companies using its healthcare data pipeline management, analytics, and aggregation services. I interviewed Chairman and CEO Suresh Venkatachari a couple of months ago. Thanks to Healthcare Triangle for supporting HIStalk.

I cruised YouTube for Health Triangle videos and found this “Week in Review” series that I think is brilliant, especially given that I have no interest in the usual lame podcasts and videos from industry amateurs. The host is Health Triangle Director of Business Development and industry long-timer Damian David, who delivers a smooth, relaxing news recap and interview that he follows with a remarkably good song performance. Other episodes feature fine covers of “With or Without You,” “Sweet Melissa,” “The Wind Cries Mary,” and “Ring of Fire.”

Listening: new from Bully, which sounds like a new grunge album from Courtney Love and/or Hole. Bully isn’t really a band any more – singer-songwriter Alicia Bognanno did a Courtney in in sending her musical mates packing while keeping their collective moniker. She’s also like Love in being bipolar and thus prone to sprinkling her recordings with therapeutic yelling and growling that makes you happy she’s not mad at you. Bognanno is amused by those who compare her music to grunge, explaining that being born in 1990 means she didn’t exactly grow up listening to Nirvana.

Webinars

September 3 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “How Does A Global Pandemic Reshape Health IT? A Panel Discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rob Wallace, chief product officer, IMO; Andrew S. Kanter, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, IMO; Lori Kevin, VP of enterprise IT and security, IMO; Sahas Subramanian, MCA, enterprise architect, IMO. As COVID-19 continues to spread, regulation changes, code system updates, and an increased reliance on technology are making it hard to stay on top of the many ways the pandemic is altering health IT. What’s more, we’re confronting challenges that rely heavily on technological solutions – like accurate reporting tools or telehealth adaptations – and we need those solutions now. The panel of subject matter experts across the enterprise will share insights on how the global pandemic is reshaping the health IT world.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Clinical communications vendor Vocera acquires EASE Applications, which has developed messaging tools to help family members communicate with a patient’s care team during hospital stays. EASE co-founder Patrick de la Roza, now an SVP/GM at Vocera, started the company while working as a system administrator at AdventHealth Nicholson Center in Orlando.

Bankrupt smart pill developer Proteus Digital Health sells its assets to Japan-based pharmaceutical company Otsuka for $15 million. Otsuka had been an investor and partner of Proteus, which pre-bust was valued at $1.5 billion, apparently by folks with unreasonably optimistic expectations. Going down in flames with Proteus is the nearly $500 million poured into it by investors who rode the rocket up and then down through a Series H funding round.

Change Healthcare enhances its Enterprise Imaging Network with the acquisition of Nucleus.io, a cloud-based medical imaging company.

Emids acquires payer-focused IT consulting company FlexTech, its second acquisition since purchasing Encore Health Resources in 2017.

Urgent and primary care software vendor Experity acquires patient relationship management company Calibrater Health.

Year-old, China-based health platform operator JD Health raises $830 million in a Series B funding round. The company – which raised $1 billion in November 2019 Series A round that valued it at $7 billion – offers pharmacy delivery, telehealth services, genetic testing, and hospital systems. It processes 100,000 diagnostic inquiries each day and is working on an online family doctor service that will serve up to 50 million families. New investor Hillhouse Capital was founded in 2005 by a Yale graduate with $20 million in seed capital from Yale’s endowment fund and was named after a New Haven street. The investment firm, which focuses on businesses in Asia, runs a joint venture with Mayo Clinic to boost that provider’s influence in China.

Sales

• Genesis Health System (IA) will use Bright.md’s SmartExam software to power its expanded telemedicine service.
• Florida-based hospice Haven selects Netsmart’s MyUnity EHR.

People

Impact Advisors promotes Susan Stewart to VP and Amy Reid to VP of recruiting.

Senior home care support and technology vendor Seniorlink hires Amy McConnell (NantHealth) as chief compliance officer.

Steve Eckert (Avaap) joins Cook Children’s Health Care System (TX) as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

Baptist Health South Florida President and CEO Brian Keeley says the health system will spend upwards of $100 million on a digital transformation over the next several years that will include adding new scheduling and registration capabilities to its Cerner system; investing in analytics; upgrading its website with more patient engagement tools; and bolstering its Amwell-powered Care on Demand telemedicine app. The search for a chief digital officer is underway.

In Australia, SA Health implements interoperability software and services from InterSystems to interface its Notifiable Infectious Disease Surveillance system with new workflow technology as it prepares for future waves of COVID-19.

Carilion Clinic (VA) implements Wolters Kluwer’s AI-powered Sentri7 clinical surveillance software to more quickly identify patients at risk for C. diff infections.

Higi adds OptimizeRx’s prescription savings and patient educational materials to its Smart Health Stations that are installed in pharmacies and retailers.

Capsule Technologies announces GA of a cloud version of its Ventilated Patient Surveillance workstation that runs on Microsoft Azure. 

COVID-19

Researchers find from cell phone data that 7% of workers at a given nursing home also work in at least one other facility, calculating that eliminating such shared staffing would reduce COVID-19 infections by 44%.

The federal government forced companies to manufacture billions of dollars worth of ventilators under the Defense Production Act, but most of them are gathering dust in the national stockpile as COVID-19 treatment protocols de-emphasized their use after a high percentage of intubated patients died and their role in infecting caregivers was questioned. Less then one-fourth of hospitalized COVID-19 patients are placed on ventilators, a big drop from the pandemic’s early days. The federal government says it will either sell or give away dozens of thousands of the devices to other countries.

Pooled COVID-19 testing, which worked well in other countries to reduce the use of short-supply reagents, can’t be used in the US because our infection rates are so high. Partial samples from several patients are combined, the batch is tested for coronavirus, and a positive result triggers re-testing of the retained samples from the batch. Efficiency is good until positivity rates hit 5-10%, at which time the re-testing that is required takes more labor and reagent than testing the individual samples. Experts also question whether the pooled tests miss people with low levels of virus and worry about the extra work that is required for lab techs since robotic processors are overwhelmed.

I received a forwarded internal email from Baylor College of Medicine that looked at the Houston metro area’s wildly fluctuating COVID-19 testing numbers, which recently tripled. That turned out to have been caused by a state system upgrade on August 1 that increased doubled reporting capacity, which triggered a big surge as the backlog was being cleared. The email notes that public health has poorly integrated systems and still are sent manual results, including faxes, that someone has to enter.

Other

University of Colorado Health CMIO CT Lin, MD shares numbers on video versus in-person visits since the beginning of the year. In-person visits (purple) dropped off sharply in early March and were outnumbered in a handful of weeks by the virtual visits (cyan), but in-person visits have mostly recovered after the state ended its stay-at-home policy and virtual visits have gone back down. Total visit counts seem about the same now as in January and February, but virtual visits went from essentially zero to about 15% of the total. Extrapolation is always dangerous — especially looking at the seemingly unstoppable telehealth upturn in March — but one might speculate that even though some patients have been forced to discover the convenience and lower infection exposure of virtual visits, they still prefer seeing clinicians in person and having related services provided at the same time. It may also be that either (a) they would rather have an in-person visit, but might have a virtual one forced upon them for one reason or another; or (b) clinicians either get paid more predictably or can offer more services when sitting in the room with the patient. Visits from outside UCHealth’s network also aren’t accounted for, so third-party virtual visits and urgent care might be impacting the numbers. Lastly, it may be that a higher than normal number of virtual visits were due to deferred higher-acuity or chronic disease management services. I would be interested in seeing a drill-down of both visit types by nature of the visit, demographics of the patient, new versus existing patient, categorization of visits by diagnosis and services rendered, and the recency of previous visits.

I missed this earlier as an interesting wearables story. Texas Tech fires its woman’s basketball coach one day after a USA Today investigative report calls out its “culture of abuse” that included forcing players to wear heart rate monitors during games and punishing those whose pulse dropped below 90% of capacity for more than two minutes.

Sponsor Updates

• Medicomp Systems releases an updated version of its Quippe Nursing care planning and clinical documentation software.
• Goliath Technologies publishes a new case study, “Terralogic, IT Service Provider, Avoids ‘Citrix is Slow’ Escalations.”
• Phynd’s Schedule Advisor, which allows patients to see a provider’s open scheduling slots, is now available in Epic’s App Orchard.
• The HCI Group launches a Referral Incentive Program Department.
• PatientPing and Lyniate will develop a hospital connector solution for integrating ADT notifications using integration engines from Corepoint and then Rhapsody.  
• Kyruus adds online scheduling for virtual visits to its ProviderMatch for Consumers software for health systems.
• KDL Lab in Russia implements InterSystems TrakCare Lab Enterprise.
• Pure Storage publishes a new case study, “McArthur Lab Adds Capacity and Performance with FlashBlade.”
• Capsule announces GA of a cloud-deployed and -managed version of its Ventilated Patient Surveillance workstation, part of its Medical Device Information platform.
• Nuance’s virtual assistant technology for Hey Epic! in Hyperspace is now available through its Dragon Medical One cloud-based clinical documentation solution.

Blog Posts

• Virtual Roundtable: Physician Leaders Discuss How to Maximize the Value of Unique Device Identifiers (UDIs) (First Databank Health)
• As COVID-19 Overloads Hospitals and ICUs, Glycemic Management Can Help (Glytec)
• How McKesson used Google Cloud to rethink their database architecture (Google Cloud)
• Virtual Implementation for Cloud Communications Platforms (Halo Health)
• Build Versus Buy a Healthcare Enterprise Data Warehouse: How IT Leaders Choose the Best Option for Their Organizations (Health Catalyst)
• 5 Tips for Successfully Implementing Charlie in Your Prescription Renewal Workflows (Healthfinch)
• SHIEC 2020: Imat Solutions Giving HIEs Power to Expand Service Offerings (Imat Solutions)
• Leading Academic Study Shows the Value of Imprivata OneSign to Hospitalists (Imprivata)
• The 20-Year Evolution of Patient Electronic Signatures (Access)
• Building trusted relationships in this time of remote connections (Infor)
• Telehealth: Any Way You Want It (PMD)
• 3 Often Overlooked Payment Channels That Can Help Streamline Collections (InstaMed)
• History, never repeats. Or does it? (InterSystems)
• Supply Chain Management During a Medical Surge: How Hospitals Can Work Together (LiveProcess)
• Virtual Health Demands Virtual, Affordable Patient Payment (Loyale Healthcare)
• 6 Signs It’s Time to Hire a Physical Therapy Practice Management Consultant (MWTherapy)
• Our Healthcare Heroes Deserve a Day of Rest (Netsmart)

Contacts

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

News 8/19/20

Top News

Interoperability platform vendor Bridge Connector raises $25.5 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $45 million.

The Nashville-based company will use the funding to continue the rollout of its new Destination integration service. It says it is on track to boost growth by 1,000% in 2020.

Reader Comments

From Cam Sandford: “Re: telemedicine. I think the pushback against online classes offers a value warning.” Students who are paying megabucks for college tuition are not happy at being taught over the equivalent of Skype at full price, even though their degrees will presumably be worth the same in the end. The convenience factor isn’t convincing students and their parents that trading the campus experience for home learning is a good deal. The biggest risk to telemedicine is that patients often still have to go somewhere as a result –pharmacy, lab, x-ray facility, ED, or specialist – and that cancels out much of their overall convenience. I also wonder how patient satisfaction fared in the telemedicine tsunami, especially when segmented into the “I just need a prescription” kind versus complex, ongoing patient management. Most of us don’t conduct our business virtually with lawyers, accountants, and financial advisors and we might have the same reluctance to turn our medical issues over to the flickering image on a video screen, especially if we are just assigned some random, available doctor that we don’t know, can’t contact for follow-up questions or concerns, and will never see again. It would also be interesting to compare the experience, credentials, and outcomes of doctors who are willing to sell telemedicine time to those who aren’t, just like you don’t see top-tier actors and athletes hawking custom video birthday greetings on Cameo.

Webinars

August 19 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “A New Approach to Normalizing Data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rajiv Haravu, senior product manager, IMO; Denise Stoermer, product manager, IMO. Healthcare organizations manage an ever-increasing abundance of information from multiple systems, but problems with quality, accuracy, and completeness can make analysis unreliable for quality improvement and population health initiatives. The presenters will describe how IMO Precision Normalize improves clinical, quality, and financial decision-making by standardizing inconsistent diagnosis, procedure, medication, and lab data from diverse systems into common, clinically validated terminology.

September 3 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “How Does A Global Pandemic Reshape Health IT? A Panel Discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rob Wallace, chief product officer, IMO; Andrew S. Kanter, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, IMO; Lori Kevin, VP of enterprise IT and security, IMO; Sahas Subramanian, MCA, enterprise architect, IMO. As COVID-19 continues to spread, regulation changes, code system updates, and an increased reliance on technology are making it hard to stay on top of the many ways the pandemic is altering health IT. What’s more, we’re confronting challenges that rely heavily on technological solutions – like accurate reporting tools or telehealth adaptations – and we need those solutions now. The panel of subject matter experts across the enterprise will share insights on how the global pandemic is reshaping the health IT world.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Perhaps this is telemedicine’s next acquisition, Medical cannabis telemedicine provider PrestoDoctor expands to Illinois after success in other states in selling medical marijuana cards for $50 to $200, depending on the state. It is fascinating to see how many buzzy startups sell nothing but rubber-stamped doctor prescriptions delivered impersonally online, adding minimal value and contributing little to drug safety and appropriate use by at least occasionally prescribing whatever the patient wants to keep the patient and their employer happy.

Sales

• Michigan Medicine chooses Sectra for enterprise imaging.

People

CloudWave promotes Erik Littlejohn, MBA to president/COO and Joseph Badziong, MBA to CFO.

Ciox Health hires Nick Giannasi, PhD (Change Healthcare) as chief product officer.

Todd Johnson (GetWellNetwork) joins Avia as SVP/practice leader.

Nordic hires Jeff Buss, MS, MBA (EY) as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

WebMD and Krames launch WebMD Back to Care, which connects patients with available prescription payment assistance programs. The information will be included in end-of-visit patient education materials provided by Krames, which joined WebMD as part of its StayWell Company acquisition from drug maker Merck in March 2020.

Virginia Cardiovascular Specialists deploys PatientKeeper for reviewing patient information and capturing professional charges on mobile devices.

3M-owned MModal says that 150 healthcare organizations are using its virtual assistant technology that captures the doctor-patient conversation to automatically document the encounter.

COVID-19

FDA warns labs and providers that Thermo Fisher’s TaqPath COVID-19 test kit can deliver false positive results unless labs apply software updates and follow the company’s instructions for vortexing and centrifugation.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill moves undergraduate classes online just one week after the start of in-person classes. The university reported several COVID-19 breakouts in communal living areas and a 13.6% test positivity rate that quickly filled its isolation dorm. UNC had ignored CDC’s recommendations, declined to follow the county health department’s recommendation to delay in-person classes for five weeks, and didn’t tell faculty members about the health department’s warning that it should not bring students back to campus. The independent student newspaper published an editorial about the clusters of infection under the headline “UNC has a cluster****” on its hands,” except they used letters instead of asterisks in describing how the university should have know that students would immediately start behaving recklessly at parties even before last Monday’s class start. Football practice will continue, however, and a home game is scheduled for UNC’s largely closed campus on September 12.

North Carolina’s health department says Monday’s case count was lower than expected because a commercial lab was late in sending its data file, the second week in a row where testing numbers were wrong due to lab data problems.

A ProPublica report says that cellphone tracking data shows that visitors to Las Vegas casinos, which re-opened on June 4, are likely spreading coronavirus to communities all over the country. Travel-related transmission cannot be easily detected by contact tracing, which is local rather than national in nature.

Three  New Jersey hospitals implement thermal scanning to screen patients, visitors, and employees as they enter the premises, ignoring WHO’s conclusion that such scanners – which were never intended for medical use — do little except provide a false sense of security since many COVID-infected people are free of symptoms.

Other

Ohio-based contract Epic analyst Gurnee “GG” Green will be featured in the Democratic National Convention this week, explaining how her custom clothing boutique that she opened in December 2019 has struggled due to COVID-19.

The bond rater of Wise Health System (TX) says that one reason the health system’s margin has slipped is the cost of replacing Cerner with Allscripts, which in addition to staffing expense, created $12 million worth of revenue cycle inefficiency. It notes, however, that Wise Health Surgical Hospital improved its revenue cycle performance in 2019 following the EHR implementation.

Sponsor Updates

• The Ettain Group donates laptops to the Dottie Rose Foundation in support of its STEM and family-assistance efforts.
• Clinical Architecture will present during Logica’s Summer 2020 Virtual Meeting August 18-20.
• Everbridge wins The Help Desk Institute’s 2020 Best Customer Experience Award.

Blog Posts

• CDC advice for managing a staffing shortage – and how Ability can help (Ability Network)
• Three Simple Steps to Reducing Accounts Receivable (AdvancedMD)
• The 21st Century Cures Act: Deadline Approaching November 1 (Bluetree)
• Navigating the Next Phase of Telehealth Adoption (Bright.md)
• 3 Common Misconceptions About Business Associate Agreements (Datica)
• HAP’s Experience Managing Members During the COVID-19 Surge (CarePort)
• Mental Health Risks for COVID-19 Frontline Healthcare Workers (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Price Transparency 2021 – Are You Ready? (Health Triangle)
• Addressing Physician Burnout via EHR Inboxes and Patient Message Management (ChartLogic)
• What You Need to Know About the CMS Interoperability & Patient Access Rules (Collective Medical)
• Rethinking Data Protection with Air-Gapped, Consistent Backups in the Cloud (CloudWave)
• Five Ways Providers Can Help Mitigate Telehealth Access Challenges (CoverMyMeds)
• 7 Keys to Better EHR Usability (EClinicalWorks)
• Home Care’s Increased Role During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Ensocare)
• Helping Hospitals Get Back on Their Feet with Advanced Analytics (EPSi)
• McKnight’s Power Panel EBook – Succeeding Despite the 2020 Pandemic (ESolutions)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/17/20

Top News

Health IT vendor TeleTracking refuses to answer the Senate Health Committee’s questions about its $10.2 million contract to develop a HHS COVID-19 hospitalization reporting database to replace one used by CDC.

TeleTracking says it signed an NDA that prohibits it from explaining to Congress how it collects and shares data, the nature of its proposal to HHS, and communication it may have had with the White House or other government officials.

The Pittsburgh-based company directed such inquiries to HHS, which has not responded to a June 3 inquiry from Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), who asked why the government was creating what seemed to be a duplicate data collection system.

HHS CIO Jose Arrieta, who defended the contract and insisted that the work was bid competitively despite appearances that it was not, resigned Friday.

TeleTracking’s contract runs just five months, after which it can bill the government for an extension.

Reader Comments

From Concerned Exhibitor: “Re: HIMSS21. What are companies doing now that it has been moved to August? The contract says that if HIMSS21 cancels for any reason, HIMSS will keep 50% of exhibitor payments. Wondering if people will be attending, or will it be a vendor pool?” I’ll make that my weekly poll below, but based on the one I did a couple of weeks ago, nobody will decide anything until they can assess the pandemic situation.

From Minesweeper: “Re: HIMSS21. You should get them to sponsor the return of HIStalkapalooza – bet that would get people back in the mood to attend the conference!” I’ve never missed the headache and financial risk that was involved with throwing a party for everybody else for 10 years, so I’m happy to abrogate that responsibility.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two-thirds of poll respondents say they would not return to campus if so required by their employer, although skeptics might observe that respondent bravado might not evidence itself in a “get in here or you’re fired” scenario, possibly also noting that Epic employees who were (at that time) being forced back to campus for reasons they might not find adequate may have worked to get out the vote.

New poll to your right or here: Health system / provider employees: do you think you’ll attend HIMSS21? (assume COVID isn’t a factor by then). I realize that the unknowns are significant at this point, but I’m curious about those who have a pretty good idea of which way they’re leaning if pandemic issues are excluded. If the pandemic is still active, then it might just be exhibitors talking to cardboard cutouts.

Listening: new from Fantastic Negrito, the stage name for 52-year-old, Grammy-winning blues singer Xavier Dphrepaulezz (clearly the rebrand was justified). He had a rough upbringing and supported himself with various illegal activities over the years, but has turned into a thoughtful observer of society and the power of individuals to change it.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Capsule Technologies, which is upgrading from Gold. The Andover, MA company offers Medical Device Information Platform, which provides device integration, vital signs monitoring, and clinical surveillance solutions. It captures streaming clinical data from connected systems and transforms it into context-rich information for clinical documentation, alarm management, patient surveillance, decision support, predictive analytics, clinical research and more. The company’s 2,900 global clients use its platform to improve patient safety, simplify workflows, and raise satisfaction. The company recently announced its Ventilated Patient Surveillance workstation, launched at Yale New Haven Health System, that allows staff to monitor live streaming data from ventilators to minimize in-room exposure and PPE consumption for patients in temporary ICU rooms that don’t have hallway windows or easily-heard alarms. CEO Hemant Goel is an engineer by training with 30 years of healthcare IT leadership experience. Thanks to Capsule Technologies for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

August 19 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “A New Approach to Normalizing Data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rajiv Haravu, senior product manager, IMO; Denise Stoermer, product manager, IMO. Healthcare organizations manage an ever-increasing abundance of information from multiple systems, but problems with quality, accuracy, and completeness can make analysis unreliable for quality improvement and population health initiatives. The presenters will describe how IMO Precision Normalize improves clinical, quality, and financial decision-making by standardizing inconsistent diagnosis, procedure, medication, and lab data from diverse systems into common, clinically validated terminology.

September 3 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “How Does A Global Pandemic Reshape Health IT? A Panel Discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rob Wallace, chief product officer, IMO; Andrew S. Kanter, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, IMO; Lori Kevin, VP of enterprise IT and security, IMO; Sahas Subramanian, MCA, enterprise architect, IMO. As COVID-19 continues to spread, regulation changes, code system updates, and an increased reliance on technology are making it hard to stay on top of the many ways the pandemic is altering health IT. What’s more, we’re confronting challenges that rely heavily on technological solutions – like accurate reporting tools or telehealth adaptations – and we need those solutions now. The panel of subject matter experts across the enterprise will share insights on how the global pandemic is reshaping the health IT world.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Starboard Value, the activist investor whose purchase of just 1.2% of Cerner shares convinced the company to give it four board seats in April 2019, reduces its CERN holdings to 2.6 million shares, about 0.8% of the outstanding shares, worth less than $200 million. CERN shares have gone up 16% since the day Cerner capitulated, although the Nasdaq has moved up 38% in the same timeframe.

People

Karen Mellin (Swisslog) joins Harris Computer as EVP.

Announcements and Implementations

India Prime Minister Narendra Modi announces the National Digital Health Mission, in which all citizens will be issue a health ID card that links to a hospital-stored record of doctor visits, prescriptions, and tests. The voluntary program’s six systems include HealthID, DigiDoctor, Health Facility Registry, Personal Health Records, E-Pharmacy, and Telemedicine, of which all but the last two are already running. The government will issue specifications to allow companies to develop FHIR-connected solutions for the system. 

Government and Politics

HHS CIO Jose Arrieta resigned unexpectedly Friday night after 16 months on the job, saying he wants to spend time with his kids. It was the first CIO job for Arrieta, whose background was technology contracting.

Also resigning Friday were CDC’s chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, political appointees who had been accused by the White House of being insufficient loyal. They are forming a consulting firm.

COVID-19

The US death count ran past the 160,000 mark this weekend in 5.3 million cases.

COVID Tracking Project says Texas testing numbers are out of whack, with the number of tests dropping by 50% over a 10-day period followed by a record number of new tests on August 13 even as cases didn’t decline much. State-level data does not match that of the five countries with the highest volume of testing to date. The project reviewed the state’s data file and speculate that a state system upgrade to an electronic lab reporting system caused some tests to be uncounted in mishandling “pending assignment” tests. Questionable numbers from Texas are skewing national data because of the state’s size and significant COVID-19 outbreak.

FDA issues emergency use authorization for the SalivaDirect COVID-19 rapid diagnostic test that was developed by the Yale School of Public Health. The test offers major supply chain benefits since samples can be collected in any sterile container, it does not require a RNA extraction kit that is prone to shortages, and it can use a variety of common reagents and instruments. It also does not require use of a long nasal swab for sample collection. Yale will provided the test as an open source protocol to anyone who wants to manufacture it. Material cost is about $1 to $4 and results take just three hours. The NBA has been using the test since June.

Researchers prove that N95 masks can be cleaned for re-use by using multi-cookers such as the Instant Pot, which inactivated 99.9% of virus in a 50-minute dry heat cycle without pressure. Filtration capability was not affected after 20 cleanings.

Google Cloud extends free access to its COVID-19 public datasets through September 15, 2021.

CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD warns that public health will be jeopardized in the fall if Americans don’t start wearing masks, distancing, and improving the 50% flu shot rate to 65%. Otherwise, he says the combination of COVID-19 and flu could overwhelm some health systems.

Trials of promising antibody drugs to treat COVID-19 are being delayed by hospitals that are reassigning researchers to patient care roles as well as patients who are reluctant to participate. Companies that hoped to start shipping antibody doses by September are now looking toward the end of the year. Delayed test results are excluding prospective study patients because the drugs must be started within a few days of symptom onset. Hospitals also express concern about giving researchers on-campus space and bringing infected patients to campus for their infusions. Patients are passing in some cases because they assume they’ll get better on their own and don’t want to bother with participating if they might get a placebo anyway.

A CDC survey finds that 31% of unpaid caregivers for adults and 22% of essential workers considered suicide in previous 30 days.

Other

Revenue cycle company R1 RCM is apparently hit by a ransomware attack.

Epic notifies employees that it will immediately consolidate its training, implementation, QA, and technical communications under an application services division.

Cerner-sponsored Life Aid, which was launched in March to address veteran and first responder suicide, will be featured in a Discovery Channel special on August 30.

Bizarre: cosmetic surgeons are being overwhelmed with patients have who noticed sags and droopy eyes on their Zoom calls and want to trade their Botox for the scalpel. Some patients have realized that distancing and face masks are ideal for hiding post-op bruises and swelling. One 62-year-old woman spent $20,000 on a tummy tuck and breast job, rationalizing that she isn’t spending money on gas and shopping. Demand is also up for liposuction to address pandemic-driven weight gain.

Sponsor Updates

• CI Security publishes its “2020 H1 US Healthcare Data Breach Report.”
• OpenText reports fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020 financial results.
• PerfectServe announces bidirectional integration between its clinical communication platform and Nuance’s PowerConnect Actionable Findings solution within the radiologist’s Nuance PowerScribe reporting workflow.
• Relatient adds virtual waiting room capabilities to its patient engagement platform to meet the need for contactless and remote patient arrivals.
• CNBC’s Mad Money features SailPoint CEO Mark McClain.
• Spirion wins 2020 Tech Ascension Awards for Best SecOps and Best Compliance Solutions.
• TriNetX opens registration for the virtual TriNetX Summit September 22-23.

Blog Posts

• Top 10 Ways COVID-19 is Changing U.S. Healthcare Systems (Get-to-Market Health)
• RADLogics’ AI-powered solution supports the evaluation of COVID-19 patients (Nuance)
• Adherence for medication’s sake doesn’t work. Here is what does. (OptimizeRx)
• Mental Health: How Telehealth Technology Can Help (PMD)
• How Experience in Alternative Payment Models Put Providers a Step Ahead in Pandemic Response (Premier)
• Fighting Prescription Friction: How Real-Time Prescription Benefit Tools Can Streamline the Prescribing Process (RxRevu)
• Rethinking Work in Identity (SailPoint)
• Connect 20 Virtual Registration is Here (and it’s free!) (Spok)
• Redlands Community Hospital’s Multi-Channel Marketing Approach to Patient Engagement (StayWell)
• #Dedicated to a Bright Future and Better E-Prescribing (Surescripts)
• How to Fix Patient Outreach: Intelligence Oriented Outreach & the Patient 360° (SymphonyRM)
• Price transparency final rule: 6 steps to prepare (Waystar)
• 6 Ways to Become a Physical Therapy Clinic Owner (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 8/14/20

Top News

Health Catalyst reports Q2 results: revenue up 18%, adjusted EPS -$0.15 versus -$0.21, beating Wall Street expectations for both.

Health Catalyst also announced that it will acquire RCM software and services vendor Vitalware for $120 million in cash and shares. The purchase marks the company’s third acquisition this year, having acquired Able Health for $27 million in February and Healthfinch for $40 million last month.

The company also announced that Northwell Health has signed up for its Data Operating System analytics and applications platform.

Reader Comments

From Hope Springs Eternal: “Re: Ascension. Announced at an all-hands meeting Tuesday that the service desk, server, and network operations teams will be eliminated and outsourced to Accenture and HCL. The process will be completed by November 25, 2020, with affected associates getting severance and training assistance. I don’t know if the service desk calls will be handled in India as the coding now is.” Unverified, but also reported by a few folks on TheLayoff.com who noted that Ascension started down this path a couple of years ago.

From Ring Ring: “Re: CHIME. I’m hearing that it is looking to fully separate itself from HIMSS. Not necessarily news since they operate separately, but I’m more interested in the political presentation. Will CHIME no longer be held in conjunction with HIMSS and co-present the CIO of the Year award? Feels like there’s a story there, but I’m just not sure what it is.” Unverified.

From Demand Management: “Re: Medlio. What happened to them? We had them set up for our FHIR implementation and got the app downloaded and working, but now the app isn’t working and has been removed from the Apple store. The company’s website also doesn’t launch. We use TouchWorks and Medlio is still on their vendor list.” Medlio’s website is indeed down, their Twitter went silent a year and a half ago, and one of the founders seems to have taken a full-time job elsewhere, according to LinkedIn. Medlio has also been removed from the Allscripts app store, it appears. I’ve emailed the company but haven’t heard back. Seems like they would have let folks know if they are kaput.

From Daddy Sang Bass: “Re: Deep Purple. Begs the question, best rock bass player of all time?” My top five, in order: Chris Squire (Yes), John Entwistle (The Who), Geddy Lee (Rush), Geezer Butler (Black Sabbath), and Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers). Honorable mention: Gary Thain (Uriah Heep), Carol Kaye (The Wrecking Crew), Mike Rutherford (Genesis), Paul McCartney (The Beatles), and Tony Levin (King Crimson). I can’t think of any contenders from newer bands, but I don’t claim to listen to many of them – maybe Joe Dart from funk band Vulfpeck.

Webinars

August 19 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “A New Approach to Normalizing Data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rajiv Haravu, senior product manager, IMO; Denise Stoermer, product manager, IMO. Healthcare organizations manage an ever-increasing abundance of information from multiple systems, but problems with quality, accuracy, and completeness can make analysis unreliable for quality improvement and population health initiatives. The presenters will describe how IMO Precision Normalize improves clinical, quality, and financial decision-making by standardizing inconsistent diagnosis, procedure, medication, and lab data from diverse systems into common, clinically validated terminology.

September 3 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “How Does A Global Pandemic Reshape Health IT? A Panel Discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rob Wallace, chief product officer, IMO; Andrew S. Kanter, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, IMO; Lori Kevin, VP of enterprise IT and security, IMO; Sahas Subramanian, MCA, enterprise architect, IMO. As COVID-19 continues to spread, regulation changes, code system updates, and an increased reliance on technology are making it hard to stay on top of the many ways the pandemic is altering health IT. What’s more, we’re confronting challenges that rely heavily on technological solutions – like accurate reporting tools or telehealth adaptations – and we need those solutions now. The panel of subject matter experts across the enterprise will share insights on how the global pandemic is reshaping the health IT world.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Waystar will acquire Medicare-focused revenue cycle technology vendor ESolutions in a deal that values the company at over $1.3 billion. Francisco Partners acquired ESolutions in January 2015.

Care pathway automation company Lumeon raises $30 million in a Series D investment round, bringing its total funding to $79 million. The London-based company plans to expand its US presence.

Scotland-based Craneware will raise $100 million, about 20% of its market value, to fund potential acquisitions from a small number of opportunities it has identified.

AI-powered healthcare messaging vendor MPulse Mobile raises $16 million in a Series C funding round.

MDLive’s CEO says the company plans to launch an IPO early next year, encouraged by Teladoc’s announced $18.5 billion acquisition of Livongo.

Sales

• NorthBay Healthcare will implement PeraHealth’s Rothman Index patient surveillance technology at its two hospitals in Solano County, California.
• Northwell Health (NY) selects Health Catalyst’s Data Operating System.

People

LexisNexis Risk Solutions promotes Todd Garlitz to head of marketing for its healthcare business.

Provider search and scheduling vendor Kyruus hires Jamie Kiggen (Yotpo) as CFO.

Orleans Community Health (NY) promotes CIO Marc Shurtz to interim CEO/CFO.

Announcements and Implementations

Philips announces GA of Rapid Deployment Equipment Kits to help ICUs ramp up patient monitoring capabilities in the event of a COVID-19 surge.

Medhost expands its price transparency solution to allow providers to comply with the requirement to publicly post charges for 300 shoppable services by January 1, 2021.

Government and Politics

DirectTrust President and CEO Scott Stuewe tells me via email that while the VA OIG’s report on HIE use blamed low Direct use in the VA on lack of training from DirectTrust, along with facilities whose community partners don’t use it, DirectTrust doesn’t offer end-user training. DirectTrust is a membership and standards body and relies on vendors to train users on their specific implementation of Direct Secure Messaging. The DirectTrust EHR Roundtable, in which VA participates, recognizes the variability in utilization and is creating a best practices guidelines document to advance usability and use of Direct Secure Messaging.

COVID-19

CDC warns that face masks that are equipped with exhalation vents, like those typically made for construction workers, are not effective for preventing coronavirus spread. A previous study found that “neck gaiters” that pull up from the neck to cover the mouth and nose are ineffective for the same reason they are comfortable – they don’t restrict air flow, making them even worse than not wearing a mask at all.

Cedars-Sinai tweaks a predictive analytics tool originally developed to forecast staffing needs to track hospitalization volumes, supplies, and confirmed cases. It also helps providers tailor treatments and pinpoint patients likely to be readmitted.

WHO says that even though health authorities in China have found coronavirus on the surface of frozen food, evidence does not indicate that food or the food chain is involved with virus transmission.

Other

Epic makes its planned return to campus optional, reversing its previous decision and allowing employees to work from home through at least the end of the year. The county public health department says the 50 complaints it received from Epic employees led it to ask questions about why the return to campus was necessary in light of the county’s emergency order that calls for remote work “to the greatest extent possible.”

The latest national analysis of telemedicine visits from The Chartis Group finds that utilization has fallen from its peak visit level of 50% in mid-April to between 18 and 20% as of late July. Virtual visits in COVID-19 hot spot states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona have remained above the national average.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic volunteers help The River Food Pantry distribute over 100 pounds of curbside emergency food and supplies per household.
• Gartner gives Dimensional Insight a high rating in the Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer: Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms” report.
• To help prevent readmissions, PatientPing partners with Real Time Medical Systems to offer skilled nursing and post-acute care facilities real-time care notifications and identification of high-risk patients.
• Healthcare Growth Partners publishes its “HIT July 2020 Insights.”
• In the UK, Bolton NHS Foundation Trust pilots Imprivata’s Identity Governance technology.
• New Mexico’s Bernalillo County selects Netsmart’s CareManager technology to help coordinate care for people transitioning out of its correctional facilities.
• Medhost expands its Price Transparency solution to help providers comply with the updated Price Transparency Policy from CMS.
• Phynd receives Avia Health’s Vetted Designation for 2020 for its Phynd 360 provider data management platform and Phynd Provider Search software.
• Central Logic will host the online AO² Summit on September 15.
• PatientPing partners with Real Time Medical Systems to reduce hospital readmissions from skilled nursing and post-acute care facilities.
• Audacious Inquiry marks a decade as one of America’s fastest-growing private companies.
• Empericus incorporates Wolters Kluwer Health’s Health Language Reference Data Management capabilities into its Health Intelligence EHR for athletes.
• New data from Experity customer sites shows record urgent care patient volumes in July.

Blog Posts

• New best practices to help automate more secure Cloud deployments (Google Cloud)
• Using COVID-19 Value Sets for Patient Identification (Health Catalyst)
• Ready to Comply with New Information Blocking Rules? (Healthcare Triangle)
• Prioritize Revenue Cycle Team Building (Impact Advisors)
• 10 reasons to attend Inforum: The digital experience (Infor)
• Tips for a Successful Charge Capture and Champion Program (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Creating precise patient cohorts for acute conditions (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Patient Perspectives on Virtual Care Part 1: How to Increase Awareness of and Access to Virtual Care (Kyruus)
• In Healthcare, All Signs Point to Digital Transformation (Loyale Healthcare)
• 3 Things to Consider for Contactless Check-In at Your PT Practice (MWTherapy)
• Post-Acute Leaders Embrace Change to Combat COVID-19 (Netsmart)

Contacts

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

News 8/12/20

Top News

Providence-owned Providence Services Group acquires Meditech-focused consulting firm Navin Haffty.

Providence had previously acquired Meditech hosting and services vendor Engage, which will allow the combined companies to offer consulting, service desk, application support, staff augmentation, and technical services.

Providence also owns Epic consulting firm Bluetree and runs an Epic Community Connect hosting business.

The health system said last year that it planned to create a $1 billion business from its non-clinical investments. It  has 51 hospitals, over 1,000 clinics, and 120,000 employees.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: new from Deep Purple, not excavated from a 1970s music vault along with related artifacts such as Hammond A-100s and Gibson SGs, but rather offering a fresh-sounding entry in the barren wasteland of new hard rock. It will be a certain nose-scruncher for most folks who were raised on Auto-Tuned singer-dancers and hip-hoppers, but let’s see how those musicians hold up after 50+ years, 21 albums, and one original member left (72-year-old drummer Ian Paice, a much lesser figure than former members Jon Lord and Ritchie Blackmore). Just turn it up to 11 and hope you end up being a cool septuagenarian like these grandpas who can take you back if you’ve been, or take you there if you haven’t. The part at 2:13 is a dead ringer for Yes’s “Starship Trooper.” 

Webinars

August 19 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “A New Approach to Normalizing Data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rajiv Haravu, senior product manager, IMO; Denise Stoermer, product manager, IMO. Healthcare organizations manage an ever-increasing abundance of information from multiple systems, but problems with quality, accuracy, and completeness can make analysis unreliable for quality improvement and population health initiatives. The presenters will describe how IMO Precision Normalize improves clinical, quality, and financial decision-making by standardizing inconsistent diagnosis, procedure, medication, and lab data from diverse systems into common, clinically validated terminology.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Private equity firm K1 Investment Manager makes a significant investment in Rethink Autism, which offers a development disabilities platform that includes assessment, treatment planning, e-learning tools, analytics, and practice management. Rethink recently acquired pediatric therapy telehealth provider TheraWe. Rethink’s co-founders came from a company that provided labels and tags for the retail clothing industry.

Investors are noting that the combined market value of Teladoc and Livongo has dropped nearly $10 billion in the week since the former’s $18.5 billion acquisition of the latter was announced. Above is the one-year share performance of Teladoc (blue, up 188%), Livongo (red, up 212%), and the Nasdaq index (green, up 38%). It’s uglier over the past five days, where TDOC and LVGO have dropped 25% and 19%, respectively, since the announcement. 

Sales

• New Mexico’s largest county will implement Netsmart’s CareManager for post-incarceration population health and care management.

People

Clearinghouse operator Jopari hires Tom Turi (The SSI Group) as chief sales and marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Stanford University’s Stanford Center for Health Education launches “AI and Healthcare,” an online, four-course certification program that will be taught by its medical school faculty. Courses in the Coursera program include “Introduction to Healthcare,” “Introduction to Clinical Data,” “Fundamentals of Machine Learning for Healthcare,” and “Evaluations of AI Applications in Healthcare,” which are followed by a capstone project. The only cost specified is the $79 per course Coursera certificate fee.

Philips announces Virtual Care Station, a telehealth environment for public areas such as stores, libraries, and universities. The company developed the technology for the VA’s ATLAS program, which offers virtual clinics to American Legion and VFW posts.

Government and Politics

I wondered what happened to former Rep. John Fleming, MD (R-LA), who President Trump appointed to the newly created position of deputy assistant secretary for health technology in 2017. He seemed uncertain about the job when it was announced, initially stating that he was interviewing to become national coordinator, but then admitting, “I think it’s the same or a similar position – I really don’t know.” He apparently didn’t last long there – President Trump appointed him to become Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development in 2018, and then in March 2020 he was appointed Assistant to the President for Planning and Implementation. I can’t find any evidence that his former ONC position still exists. I interviewed him in January 2018.

Cerner VP of Strategic Growth Amanda Adkins, who took a leave from the company to seek a US House of Representative seat, wins the Republican primary and vows to defeat Rep. Sharice Davids, who is serving her first term. The healthcare platform of Adkins, a former state Republican party chairwoman, supports creating a national COVID-19 response plan and says the ACA is a failed experiment that increased cost. She says healthcare should be smarter, more transparent, and more affordable, but I haven’t seen her plan for achieving that.

COVID-19

Russia approves a COVID-19 vaccine that has not undergone widespread clinical trials and for which no Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials data has been published, raising concerns that President Vladimir Putin may be placing national pride and political gain ahead of consumer safety. Another theory is that Russia is trying to goad the US into rushing its own vaccines to market or to confuse the issue following its rumored disinformation campaigns. Russia says it will start vaccinating teachers and medical workers this month with Sputnik-V, the name it chose for the vaccine that reflects the world’s surprise in October 1957 that the Soviet Union had launched the first artificial Earth satellite, which triggered a space race with the US.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD notes that the US might get just one shot (pun intended, I assume) with a vaccine in a given season since it would be difficult to mount two vaccination campaigns in a short period. He says he would not take a vaccine like Russia’s that has been tested on only a few hundred people and says Russia is certainly not ahead of the US in that regard.

The New York Times questions whether federal government newcomer and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD has the fortitude and political savvy to stand up for patient safety under White House pressure to release a COVID-19 vaccine quickly. Hahn is not allowed to speak to the press by phone without having HHS spokesperson and longtime Trump supporter Michael Caputo on the line. FDA has been criticized for delaying approval of alternative COVID-19 diagnostic tests after CDC’s were found defective, allowing untested antibody tests to flood the market with minimal oversight, and for granting emergency use approval – revoked three weeks later – for using hydroxychloroquine in hospitalized patients.

California public health director Sonia Angell, MD, MPH resigns for unspecified reasons, one week after the state reported that it had underreported new cases due to a technical issue with electronic lab reports.

Mexico’s high COVID-19 death count is understated because residents are justifiably afraid of hospitals. Mexico City’s hospitals report that 40% of patients who are admitted with confirmed cases die in house and half of those deaths occur within 12 hours of admission. People who die at home aren’t tested and thus aren’t counted as being among the country’s 53,000 COVID-19 fatalities, although Mexico reported 71,000 more deaths than were expected in the spring. President Andres Manuel Lopez has urged citizens to stay home and use religious amulets instead of going to the hospital, and 70% of people say they would not feel safe taking a loved one to the hospital, some because of conspiracy theories involving genocide and organ harvesting.

An eight-state review of COVID-19 cases in nursing homes finds that higher staffing levels – but not health inspection scores or quality measure ratings – are associated with fewer cases. I would be interested in seeing an expanded analysis that considers ownership since I would bet that for-profit homes, especially those owned by private equity-backed chains, fall short in areas like staffing levels and infection control.

One-third of polled Americans, including more than half of Republicans, say they would not take a free FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine. On a slightly optimistic note, a 1954 survey about the then-new polio vaccine yielded about the same result.

A new study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health finds that an area’s density (population plus employment divided by land area) isn’t the primary driver of COVID-19 infection rates – it’s the degree of an area’s crowding into tight spaces, such bars, restaurants, sporting and entertainment events, and beaches. The authors believe that while density increases the incidence of close contact that theoretically should increase infection rate, that isn’t the case because people who live in dense areas are better at social distancing and wearing masks. They also conclude that evidence does not exist to support the move of city dwellers and businesses to the suburbs to avoid COVID-19.

The beginning of the end may be near for the fall 2020 college football season as the Big Ten postpones all fall sports, with football to be played in the spring if at all. The other four Power Five conferences haven’t announced their plans, although insiders say the PAC-12 has also decided not to play and doubts that spring football will happen either. 

University of Florida researchers detect live coronavirus in air samples taken up to 16 feet from hospitalized COVID-19 patients, raising the possibility of air-only spread, although the low viral quantities make it unclear whether people would likely become infected. The six-foot distancing recommendation assumes that only large droplets carry the virus. 

Other

Epic delayed its mandatory employee return to campus after the county health department warned the company that “remote work” does not mean sitting alone in private, on-campus offices as Epic had interpreted. The health department told Epic that such action might violate the county’s order. They’ve asked Epic to justify why it needs employees to work from the office starting September 21, not mentioning the first wave of returnees that was to have taken place this past Monday or the 4,000+ employees that were already working voluntarily on campus.

In the Philippines, the government-owned universal health coverage insurer says the agency is losing $50 million per week due to corruption that is enabled by weak IT systems. The anti-corruption commission says that PhilHealth’s executives and employees are filing claims for non-existent patients, while hospitals are upcoding visits to obtain higher payment and are falsely claiming to be treating COVID-19 cases to obtain emergency funds. The agency denies charges that its executives pocketed $300 million last year.

Two former employees of Talkspace, which offers text messaging based psychiatric counseling provided by contractors, claim that the company mines session transcripts for marketing purposes. Other former employees say that the company, which was getting stung by bad app store reviews, asked employees to create fake positive reviews and gave them burner phones to avoid getting caught. Talkspace’s executives deny the claims. Some of its contract providers complain that the company advertises 24/7 therapy even though it tells them they can set their own business hours; gives users a “I need help now” button that therapists must respond to quickly to avoid having their pay docked; and advertises therapy services even though a former version of its user agreement made it clear that it offers a “therapeutic conversation” but not “therapy.” The company charges $260 per month for unlimited asynchronous message response or $396 with four live, 30-minute sessions.

Sponsor Updates

• Health Catalyst will participate in the virtual Verity Research HCIT/Services Conference on August 12, and the Canaccord Genuity Annual Growth Conference on August 13.
• BioWorld profiles the use of Saykara’s voice-enabled mobile AI assistant at MIMIT Health, which reports a 500% productivity boost. 
• CareSignal and Innovaccer partner to combine population health data technology and deviceless remote patient monitoring.
• The Chartis Group promotes Laura Stearns to VP of talent development.
• Norway’s Directorate of Health relies on Everbridge’s Public Warning software to alert citizens traveling internationally to mitigate COVID-19 risks.

Blog Posts

• The Importance of Collaboration for Epic Implementations (314e)
• Reduce Operating Costs and Total Cost of Care with the Right EHR (AdvancedMD)
• Summer Reading Part 2: Creating harmony and reducing TCO in Imaging IT (Agfa Healthcare)
• Blueleaf Banter: Driving Cost Savings Through EHR Innovation (Bluetree)
• Curbing COVID-19-Related Alert Fatigue (Capsule)
• Henry Ford Health System’s Experience During COVID-19 Surge (CarePort)
• Bringing Speed and Accuracy to Practice Quality Reporting (ChartLogic)
• FHIR Patient Access: Health Plans Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Diameter Health)
• Data Analytics and the Fight Against COVID-19 (Dimensional Insight)
• National Health Center Week: Continuing the Legacy (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/10/20

Top News

VA OIG looks at how VA facilities and its community providers use HIEs.

The report finds that all 140 facilities have access to VA Exchange and VA Direct, but only 28 are using the latter because they weren’t offered training from DirectTrust or none of their community partners are using DirectTrust.

Twenty-two of 48 lower-acuity facilities still exchanging information via scanning, faxing, or mailing.

Users of Joint Legacy Viewer complain about cumbersome sign-on and poor data quality.

VA has 56 contracted VHIE community coordinators, but noted high turnover and engagement that “ranged from a high level of participation to little or no participation.”

OIG concludes that the Cerner implementation will improve the ease of exchange among VHA, DoD, and community providers.

The report recommends that the VA review barriers to using VA Direct, evaluate VA Exchange and VA Direct training programs, increase the number of community partners including other HIEs, and evaluate the work of the VHIE community coordinators. The VA accepted all four recommendations.

Reader Comments

From All the Marbles: “Re: newly rich Livongo executives. Does it even matter since they were all loaded before?” I’m speculating since I don’t know what it’s like having that kind of cash, but my reaction:

• Assets, not income, makes you wealthy, since you then have financial autonomy that nobody can take from you. Whoever signs your paycheck could stop doing so tomorrow. These folks are set for life.
• Everybody can find ways to spend ever-increasing amounts of money, but at some point pretty early in the wealth continuum, diminishing returns would kick in and the pleasure of buying a fourth house or third luxury car wouldn’t provide much of a thrill. I speculate that money makes things easier to some point, then starts making them harder and causes stress over losing a chunk of it via bad investment.
• Self-made people with big fortunes feel the psychological need to prove that earning it wasn’t a fluke, so they rarely sit poolside like a trust fund brat knowing they can’t outspend their interest and instead try new ventures (either the rich-person’s hobby kind or something a team can run day to day for them).
• I suspect rich, older folks realize that you don’t see hearses pulling U-Hauls, so they look for benevolent ways to publicly spend their money instead of bringing out the worst in squabbling, greedy family members.
• Everybody has some magic number that, given their personal expenses and ambitions, would allow them to live out their days comfortably free of job worries. In that sense, just as time is money when you’re making it, money is time when you want to stop making it. That might be a $1 million net worth for one person or a $50 million net worth for another and the combination of risk taken, luck, and the time value of money is what will or won’t  you there, hopefully in time to enjoy the result. I suspect that every one of those newly minted Livongo centimillionaires passed that point long ago, so while I’m sure they are thrilled to be sitting on an even larger embarrassment of riches today than last week, it won’t change their daily lives.

From Prime Spot: “Re: hospital parking. Lots of Twitter chatter about how it’s expensive and unfair to charge patients and families to park.” Hospital parking is always a mess, and I was shocked the first time I took a job with a health system that charged employees and even visitors for parking. My reactions then:

• Hospitals never have enough parking due to an absurdly large number of employees, doctors coming and going, patients and visitors coming in for ambulatory services on the same campus, and car-driving salespeople running around all over the place. We did an analysis of where employees and visitors were parking off campus and it was shocking — they would walk a half-mile to park in a residential neighborhood, either to find an available space or to avoid paying.
• Sometimes as an employee you can’t get a spot even though you’re paying monthly for one, and if you’re really unlucky, you might get relegated to offsite parking that involves a bus ride each way that isn’t nearly as nice as  its off-airport counterpart
• Hospital and university transportation services departments, like most bureaucracies, keep finding new ways to spend money on employees, vehicles, and infrastructure because they seem themselves as generating big profit, and all of that profit comes from permits and tickets.
• Hospital garages and parking lots are often located in areas where unrelated parking is in high demand or as part of a school where students will take up any available space, meaning that visitors wouldn’t get a spot if the per-hour charge wasn’t a deterrent to those with less motivation. Hotels charge paying guests $40-80 for overnight valet parking given the same demand with lack of alternatives.
• Hospitals sometimes don’t own their on-campus garages or contract out parking / valet services (I always picture mob involvement).
• It’s always funny that despite all the ways hospitals extricate money from patients under sometimes questionable circumstances, the only services for which bitter comparisons are made are parking and cafeteria.
• I personally would avoid on-campus appointments whenever possible, foreseeing sitting in traffic amidst impatient employees and lost visitors and then hiking quickly knowing I’ll be late (assuming I even know where I’m going from the bowels of the parking garage, like the “follow the yellow lines to the blue elevator, go up one floor, then cross the annex bridge and go down one floor” kind of hospital directions). I don’t like having my first aggravating customer experience before it even begins. Buy a dying mall and stick your doctors there.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIMSS21 attendance is, for the most part, out of the control of HIMSS and instead will be driven by pandemic status, poll respondents say.

New poll to your right or here: For those assigned to work from home: would you return to campus if the company required it in the next few weeks? Basically a yes/no answer is the only one an employer will offer, so do you feel strongly enough about not returning that you’ll accept termination for refusing?

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

Several readers saw my mention of new Donors Choose projects and sent generous donations to fund another round of them, with their dollars boosted by matching funds from my Anonymous Vendor Executive as well as third-party matching sources. Here’s what I fully funded:

• A document camera for Ms. E’s elementary school class in Salinas, CA.
• A webcam, laptop stand, and wireless keyboard for Ms. H’s elementary school class in Timbo, AR.
• Lighting, headset, device mount, and easel for Mx. Smith’s third grade class in Las Vegas, NV.
• Digital resources for Ms. G’s elementary school class in Seagoville, TX.
• Digital resources for Ms. D’s kindergarten class in Hoskinston, KY.
• Five headsets for Ms. S’s elementary school class in Santa Ana, CA.
• Daily journals for online sharing for Ms. M’s second grade class in Oxnard, CA.
• Math manipulatives for remote learning for Ms. S’s elementary school class in Waco, TX.
• Classroom supplies for Ms. D’s middle school class in Collinsville, IL.
• Flocabulary vocabulary learning for Ms. H’s elementary school class in Las Vegas, NV.
• Digital resources for Ms. R’s elementary school class in Philadelphia, PA.
• Agriculture books for Ms. J’s middle school class in Kinston, NC.
• Math manipulatives for Ms. F’s elementary school class in Wyandanch, NY.
• 50 take-home library books for Ms. C’s elementary school class in Calumet City, IL.
• 25 sets of headphones for Ms. S’s elementary school class in Houston, TX.
• A document camera for Ms. E’s elementary school class in Steelton, PA.
• Remote video learning equipment for Ms. R’s elementary school class in Oklahoma City, OK.
• Social distancing and teaching supplies for Ms. B’s elementary school class in Irving, TX.
• A document camera for Ms. T’s elementary school class in Apopka, FL.
• Sight word games for at-home use for Ms. C’s elementary school class in Hempstead, NY.
• A webcam, microphone, and earphones for online instruction for Ms. T’s middle school class in Chicago, IL.
• Online language proficiency tools for Ms. M’s elementary school class in Fairdale, KY.
• Digital social studies content for Ms. K’s middle school class on Connellsville, PA.
• Lighting for teaching virtual classes for Ms. T’s elementary school class in Mission, TX.
• STEM kits for Ms. A’s kindergarten class in Sacramento, CA.
• Headphones and a USB camera for Ms. N’s elementary school class in Harbor City, CA.
• A USB headset for Ms. B’s elementary school class in Kenner, LA.
• Take-home math materials for Ms. H’s elementary school class in Madera, CA.
• 20 magic boards and binders for Ms. M’s elementary school class in Chicago, IL.
• Math and science books for recording for online lessons for Ms. P’s elementary school class in Philadelphia, Pa.

Webinars

August 19 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “A New Approach to Normalizing Data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rajiv Haravu, senior product manager, IMO; Denise Stoermer, product manager, IMO. Healthcare organizations manage an ever-increasing abundance of information from multiple systems, but problems with quality, accuracy, and completeness can make analysis unreliable for quality improvement and population health initiatives. The presenters will describe how IMO Precision Normalize improves clinical, quality, and financial decision-making by standardizing inconsistent diagnosis, procedure, medication, and lab data from diverse systems into common, clinically validated terminology.

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

Sales

• NIH will extend its use of OpenText’s Content Suite and AppWorks for electronic document management and workflows.
• Transaction Data Systems chooses Waystar for claims processing by its independent pharmacy customers.

People

Mee Memorial Healthcare System (CA) promotes Rena Salamacha, MS to CEO. She previously served as IT director, CIO, and chief strategy and technology officer, COO, and interim CEO.

Lisa Crymes, MBA (Change Healthcare) joins Preventric AI as chief marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Elsevier expands its integration of its ClinicalPath (formerly Via Oncology) oncology decision support tool with Epic, including launching from Epic using SMART on FHIR, applying cancer staging data from Epic, navigating within Epic, queuing up treatment within Beacon protocols to reduce manual order entry, and documenting details as a note.

COVID-19

A New York Times analysis of CDC’s count of higher-than-expected death counts – probably caused by COVID-19 along with the situations it has created – at over 200,000 from March 15 through July 25 versus the official count of 161,000. This is a good full-impact number that would include the pandemic’s effect on stress, failure to seek medical care for other conditions, financial challenges, and failure to correctly account for deaths. I assume that it this number would also be subject to undercounting given the presumable decrease in deaths by accidents.

The field hospital created at Sacramento’s Sleep Train Arena sees just nine patients in 10 weeks, with $12 million in cost from rent paid to the Sacramento Kings, facility upgrades, and payment to 250 staffers. One traveling nurse company billed $428,000 to provide five pharmacists and five pharmacy technicians. Those involved say there was never a real plan on how to integrate with possibly overburdened hospitals and the state admits that it should have used local data to determine how to set up its 15 field hospitals.

Bill Gates says US COVID-19 tests are “complete garbage” because of delays in getting results, suggesting that paying companies for them only if the results come back in 24-48 hours would “fix it overnight.” He is optimistic overall, however, predicting that diagnostic and therapeutic innovation in the “rich world” will end COVID-19 by the end of 2021, with the rest of the world following a year later. However, he says it will take years to bring the global economy back to the levels of early 2020. He also notes that he would want remdesivir or dexamethasone today if hospitalized for coronavirus, but in 2-3 months the tool chest will expand with other antivirals and antibody therapy.

It’s been a busy COVID-19 week for one Georgia high school:

• The school suspended two students for taking a photo that showed a packed school hallway and sharing it to social media.
• After a national outcry, the school lifted the suspensions.
• Six students and three employees reported to the school that they had tested positive.
• Two brothers who reported experiencing symptoms were found to have gone to school Monday without wearing masks or social distancing, with a family member saying they didn’t realize the severity of the virus and weren’t encouraged to wear masks.
• The school moved to distance learning only for Monday and Tuesday while awaiting the results of contact tracing. They have told parents that they will notified Tuesday evening whether in-person instruction will resume.

Other

Epic changes its Monday mandatory return to campus, allowing employees who feel that their personal situation makes it unwise for them to return safely to campus to continue to work from home while Epic awaits further guidance from the county health department. Epic says Cleveland Clinic, a public health expert, and an epidemiologist are reviewing Epic’s plan, which originally called for bringing the first group of employees back to their offices on Monday and all employees working on campus by the end of September except for those at high risk, who could request an extension through November 2.

China’s Communist Party newspaper warns readers to “beware of health-tech firms’ snake oil,” which is pretty good advice. Its points, as written by a health policy lecturer in the London School of Economics:

• Big US tech companies have promised that analytics and AI will reduce costs and improve outcomes, but individual patient data is subject to subjective clinical judgment and is often plagued with missing records and lack of standardization.
• Those big US tech companies don’t know much about healthcare, and they rarely back up their black box algorithms with studies that prove their value.
• Predictive models are only as good as the data they are given, and since their assumptions are based on what is already know, they are best at reviewing the past and present rather than predicting the future.
• AI developers are, intentionally or not, just as biased as the rest of us, and using current healthcare data makes those systems prone to replicating past failures and successes.
• Hospitals and regulators shouldn’t just turn over patient data to developers – they should be actively involved in the design and deployment process.

Sponsor Updates

• The Dealmakers Podcast features PatientPing co-founder and CEO Jay Desai.
• Pure Storage’s Pure Good Foundation celebrates its fifth anniversary and announces that it has raised $2.3 million for charitable contributions.
• The Voice First Health Podcast features Gabe Charbonneau, MD and his use of the Saykara AI Assistant.

Blog Posts

• Addressing key questions and misperceptions of the 2021 E/M changes (Nordic)
• How to Beat the Prescription Drug Discount Card Game (OmniSys)
• Purpose Born of Frustration (OptimizeRx)
• From High Touch to High Tech: 5 Key Factors That Will Drive the Trajectory of Telehealth (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Better, Stronger, Faster: Leveraging the Amazon Cloud to Scale to the Demands of Telehealth (PMD)
• Five Reasons Health Systems are Prioritizing Integration with Specialists (Premier)
• (Re) Introducing Single-Sign On (SSO) (Redox)
• Why Remote Work is Not the New Normal (SailPoint)
• How healthcare prepares for cloud computing (Spok)
• Krames on FHIR: Blazing a trail in personalized patient education (StayWell)
• CMS Price Transparency Rule is Fast Approaching (Surescripts)
• Marketers, Clinicians, and Care Managers in the Patient 360 Ecosystem (SymphonyRM)
• Tufts Medical Center Elevates Human Experience in the Midst of the Pandemic (Vocera)
• How Advertising on LinkedIn Can Help Drive Patients to Your Physical Therapy Clinic (WebPT

Contacts

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

News 8/7/20

Top News

Blackstone will acquire a 75% stake in Ancestry for $4.7 billion, giving the private equity firm access to the company’s DNA information on 18 million people.

The genealogy company, which launched a consumer DNA testing service last year that it has expanded to include genetic health risks and insights, reports annual revenue of over $1 billion.

Ancestry was valued at $3 billion in 2017 and considered running an IPO twice since then, but faced slumping sales as both it and competitor 23andMe laid off employees. 23andMe has sold the genetic data of its customers to drug companies for clinical studies, an area in which Ancestry lags.

Reader Comments

From Bug Frowner: “Re: Epic’s return to work requirement. Ignores its county’s public health order.” Dane County, Wisconsin’s July 7 emergency order says business “should, to the greatest extent possible” facilitate remote work to minimize in-office presence. Epic is therefore not specifically breaking any law that I can see since the wording is more of a recommendation. I would struggle to return to campus work as an Epic employee if I were high risk and otherwise fastidiously isolating, but we all know that bosses make the rules and our choices are to comply or leave. Media coverage has, as it often does, lapsed into the sensationalistic in portraying the complaints of a tiny percentage of Epic employees as a topic for heated debate into which Internet cheap-seaters feel the need to insert themselves. More interesting to me is that Epic says that only 24 of its employees have tested positive, which seems like a tiny number out of 9,000+ mostly young employees, but I assume they haven’t yet mass tested the folks who will be returning to campus. Judy Faulkner has said the company is working on immunity passport capabilities for its EHR, so maybe they’ll run employee antibody testing even though that has limited value outside of healthcare provider organizations given relatively low overall infection rates.

From Al Lewis: “Re: Livongo’s sale for $18.5 billion. The entire employer community doesn’t even spend $18.7 billion on diabetes-coded admissions. Not even close. Nor have they claimed to reduce that one item, the item that should concern employees the most. And they never explained why they want everyone to test multiple times a day when Choosing Wisely says most Type 2 diabetics are more likely to harm themselves than benefit through overtesting. Meanwhile, as I will be posting in a few hours, the price of insulin is skyrocketing thanks to greedy PBMs and employers aren’t doing a thing about it.” I interviewed Al Lewis, who I titled “workplace wellness skeptic,” a few months ago and asked him for reaction to the acquisition news.

From Donor Here: “Re: matching Donors Choose funds from Tyson Foods and your Anonymous Vendor Executive. Is that still available?” Donors Choose still lists 24 unfunded projects for which Tyson Foods is matching donations 10-to-1 and I still have ample matching funds available from my Anonymous Vendor Executive. Many other projects offer 2x or 3x matching from companies and organizations, which is still a lot of bang for the buck. I just received an email today from middle school science teacher Ms. W in Washington, for which our $32 donation (which was then matched 10 to 1) bought distance learning tools (microphone, graphics tablet, lighting, and a camera mount) as well as a 15% optional donation to fund the work of Donors Choose.  She told me this morning that her school just announced 100% distance learning to start and she will immediately use the new technology to retool her her hands-on science classes for home learning. Donation instructions:

1. Purchase a gift card in the amount you’d like to donate.
2. Send the gift card by the email option to mr_histalk@histalk.com (that’s my Donors Choose account).
3. I’ll be notified of your donation and you can print your own receipt from Donors Choose for tax purposes.
4. I’ll pool the money, apply all matching funds I can get, and publicly report here which projects I funded, including teacher follow-up messages and photos.

From Live Longo Glen Tullman: “Re: Teladoc acquring Livongo. Paid too much, in a hurry to cash in some of its own overpriced shares.” My thoughts on the deal:

• This is the third-largest acquisition of a US company this year. Teladoc will give $0.592 of its shares plus $11 in cash ($159 per share) to buy Livongo.
• I don’t get the synergy, other than that both companies have to keep employers and insurers subscribing for services their constituents may not use and that may provide minimal benefit.
• The implicit market value of the combined money-losing companies is an eye-popping $37 billion, nearly double that of Cerner.
• TDOC’s market cap is $16.5 billion, nearly quadruple that of a year ago, on just $716 million in annual revenue. LVGO’s market cap is $1.5 billion, eight times that of September 30, 2019 on $207 million in revenue (selling price is 90 times revenue).
• Shares of both companies regained some of their losses Thursday after dropping hard after Wednesday’s announcement.
• LVGO’s Q2 earnings report from Wednesday went mostly unnoticed in the acquisition news, but the company had a good quarter, with revenue up 125%, adjusted EPS $0.11, beating expectations for both.
• Livongo’s executives will pocket fortunes from the acquisition just 12 months after its IPO. Lee Shapiro’s shares are worth around $860 million, Glen Tullman’s around $700 million, and Zane Burke (who joined as CEO just 19 months ago) holds shares worth around $160 million.
• I’m skeptical in general about early-stage companies that sell services through employers and insurers with unproven promises about saving them money, so I’ll simply say (a) good job Livongo for convincing Teladoc of predicted synergies, and (b) good job Teladoc for riding the likely temporary share price bump even as virtual visits slack off and health systems launch their own competing offerings to diversify. I don’t see the value for shareholders, patients, or the healthcare system in general, but then again I’m not a centimillionaire stuffing wads of investor cash down my pants. 

Webinars

August 19 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “A New Approach to Normalizing Data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rajiv Haravu, senior product manager, IMO; Denise Stoermer, product manager, IMO. Healthcare organizations manage an ever-increasing abundance of information from multiple systems, but problems with quality, accuracy, and completeness can make analysis unreliable for quality improvement and population health initiatives. The presenters will describe how IMO Precision Normalize improves clinical, quality, and financial decision-making by standardizing inconsistent diagnosis, procedure, medication, and lab data from diverse systems into common, clinically validated terminology.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nuance announces Q3 results: revenue down 10%, adjusted EPS $0.19 versus $0.20, beating analyst expectations for both. The company said in the earnings call that it has signed pilot agreements for its Dragon Ambient Experience with WellSpan, Boston Children’s, Children’s Atlanta, and Lehigh Valley.

CVS Health beats analyst expectations for Q2, reporting a 3% increase in revenue and adjusted EPS of $2.64 vs. $1.93. Utilization of telemedicine services through its Aetna network and MinuteClinics jumped over 700% during the quarter as patients stayed away from in-person office visits.

Cerner and VC firm LRVHealth invest $6 million in Xealth, a Providence Health & Services spin-off that has developed software to help providers find and prescribe digital health apps and programs.

Digital point-of-care prescription savings vendor OptimizeRx reports Q2 results: revenue up 25%, and adjusted EPS of $0.02 versus $0.09, beating analyst expectations for both.

CPSI announces Q2 results: revenue down 10%, EPS $0.12 versus $0.12, beating analyst expectations for earnings but falling short on revenue.

Signify Research says the crown jewel that Siemens Healthineers gets in its $16.4 billion cash acquisition of Varian Medical is the latter’s oncology software business, which has $600 million in annual revenue with an 18% year-over-year-growth. The report notes that oncology is positioned at the convergence of EHR, lab, radiology, and surgery systems and the need to collaborate for diagnosis and treatment creates complicated workflows. Elekta is Varian’s chief competitor in that area. Siemens Healthineers is focused on three digital areas — imaging AI, advanced imaging hardware, and lab diagnostics. Siemens Healthineers, spun  off from Siemens AG (which still owns 85% of its shares), is among a small group of medical technologies that have more than $20 billion in annual revenue, possibly coming in at #3 behind Medtronic and Johnson and Johnson.

Sales

• Michigan Medicine selects Mach7’s enterprise imaging technology. 
• CPSI selects cloud services from Google Cloud.
• The Iowa Health Information Network selects PDMP connectivity, analytics, risk assessment, and patient support technology from Appriss Health.

People

LexisNexis Risk Solutions promotes Josh Schoeller to CEO of its healthcare business.

Industry long-timer Andrew Eckert (Acelity) joins medical claims company Zelis as CEO. Eckert has held leadership positions at Eclipsys, TriZetto, and Valence Health.

Justin Manning (Nordic) joins Evergreen Healthcare Partners as principal consultant and VP of medical device and data integration.

Announcements and Implementations

UHIN adopts NextGate’s enterprise master patient index across its HIE network in Utah.

Redox announces GA of Data on Demand, giving developers the ability to query any EHR or health data sources via the company’s API.

AHRQ publishes an electronic patient-reported outcomes toolkit.

Government and Politics

Politico reports that the VA will re-commence its EHR overhaul with a rollout at an unnamed facility in October. The conversion from VistA to Cerner was halted earlier this year as VA facilities focused on preparing for and treating COVID-19 patients. The VA has switched its go-live plans from facilities in bigger metropolitan areas to those in smaller cities in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest, citing a lack of access during the pandemic to clinical experts who had been expected to help with system customizations for the larger facilities.

Politico also reports that two senators have introduced legislation that would make the post office’s address matching software available to EHRs via API for patient identification and matching.

COVID-19

An Ohio Department of Health contact tracing graphic shows how one infected church service attendee spread the virus to at least 91 people in five counties in less than three weeks. The graphic was tweeted by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who announced Thursday that he has tested positive for COVID-19 as part of the screening for his now-cancelled Thursday greeting of President Trump in Cleveland.

Virginia launches the Covidwise app, becoming the first state to launch an exposure notification app using technology from Apple and Google. The app notifies users if they come into contact with other users who’ve tested positive for COVID-19. Some public health experts have questioned the effectiveness of such apps, citing low and thus ineffective adoption rates, privacy concerns, false alarms, and a lack of nearby testing capacity.

University of Miami Health System launches a remote patient monitoring program for discharged COVID-19 patients using TytoCare home health devices.

The Harvard Global Health Institute and Google Cloud develop COVID-19 Public Forecasts, a free planning resource that offers healthcare workers 14-day projections of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths by county and state.

An MRI review of 100 recovered COVID-19 patients who had no pre-existing cardiac conditions — most of them who had experienced only minor COVID-19 symptoms and recovered at home — finds that 78% have cardiac involvement and 60% have ongoing myocardial inflammation. The authors conclude that cardiac involvement is unrelated to COVID-19 severity and warn that undetected inflammatory disease may present a large health burden in people who think they got over COVID-19 without incident.

The National Institutes of Health forms the Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center, which will use AI and machine learning to develop new diagnostic tools clinicians can use to better care for COVID-19 patients.

The New York Times explains how the US uniquely failed to control COVID-19:

• A tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions, which has also saddled the country with a world-lagging and unequal healthcare system.
• Lack of effective travel restrictions in excluding from the ban the family members of American citizens and permanent residents returning from infection-ravaged areas, failing to address the infection’s spread to Europe promptly, exempting the UK from travel limitations, and failing to create a quarantine process.
• Lack of state travel restriction enforcement.
• Testing delays caused by the CDC’s distribution of faulty tests that it insisted be used over tests that were developed in other countries.
• Commercial labs charging patients for COVID-19 testing, which discouraged their use.
• Conflicting public mask advice from WHO and CDC, some of that based on the need to prioritize the limited supply of them for healthcare workers, and allowing masks to be turned into a political symbol with partisanship as its most accurate predictor.
• The push by federal and state governments to reopen the economy with the virus still uncontrolled, which caused outbreaks afterward and provided only a brief recovery as personal fear and unemployment caused people to limit spending anyway.
• Mixed and confusing messages from political leaders and partisan news media, including distributing medical misinformation and expressing unwarranted optimism.

Other

HIMSS hires a second Australian Digital Health Agency executive as CIO Ronan O’Connor joins former CEO Tim Kelsey. O’Connor’s new role was not specified, but Kelsey became SVP of HIMSS Analytics International in January 2020.

HIMSS will continue to publish the mobile health app best-practices guidelines of Xcertia, a now-dissolved project of HIMSS, the American Medical Association, the American Health Association, and DHX Group. The Xcertia standards body was formed in December 2016, last updated its guidelines in February 2019, and then went silent shortly afterward. The organizations haven’t announced why they pulled the plug. The three principals of non-profit app curation organization DHX Group seem to have moved on to other projects.

The local paper says that at least 13 Epic employees claim that the company has demoted team leads who expressed concern about its plan to bring employees back to campus, which Epic denies.

European Union authorities will investigate Google’s acquisition of Fitbit, worried that Google will target ads based on the user fitness data that Fitbit collects. Google says it has no such plans and has offered to sign a contract that limits its use of the data. A consumer group concludes, “It is hugely important that the E.U. carries out this in-depth examination because wearable devices like Fitbit’s could in future give companies details of essentially everything consumers do 24/7.”

Sponsor Updates

• InterSystems launches T2020, the latest version of its TrakCare EHR, which includes COVID-19 functionality, an enhanced user experience, and a unified workspace for patient records and documentation.  
• Cloud Computing Outlook names Goliath Technologies a Top Virtualization Solutions Provider.
• HCI Group Chief Digital Officer Ed Marx publishes a new book, “Healthcare Digital Transformation: How Consumerism, Technology, and Pandemic are Accelerating the Future.”
• Spok announces that all 20 adult hospitals and all 10 children’s hospitals named to US News & World Report’s 2020-21 Best Hospitals Honor Roll use Spok clinical communication solutions.
• Saykara’s voice-enabled mobile AI assistant  is named as a healthcare innovation awards finalist.

Blog Posts

• Fear: Circling the Wagon vs. Innovating (Access)
• A Diabetes Educator’s Guide to EGlycemic Management Software (Glytec)
• Halo Health Top Performer in KLAS Clinical Communications Report (Halo Health)
• Steps for Effective Patient and Staff Contact Tracing to Defend Against COVID-19 Spread (Health Catalyst)
• Health Payer Priorities in Face of Ongoing Pandemic (Imat Solutions)
• COVID-19: What we know and where we’re headed (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• No time for guessing games: Three things payers need to consider if they are to survive the impacts of deferred care (Jvion)
• How Hospitals Can Thrive in the Midst of Constant Change (LiveProcess)
• Healthcare’s COVID-19 Response is a Window to the Industry’s Future (Loyale Healthcare)
• 2021 Medicare Proposed Rule Released for Physical Therapy (MWTherapy)
• Patient Matching in the Era of COVID-19: Maintaining Control Over Patient Privacy and Data Governance (NextGate)

Contacts

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

Teladoc To Acquire Livongo for $18.5 Billion

Virtual care provider Teladoc Health will acquire chronic condition management app vendor Livongo in a deal that values the company $18.5 billion, the companies announced this morning.

The announcement characterized the transaction as a merger, but the deal is structured as an acquisition. The combined companies will operate under the Teladoc name, Teladoc CEO Jason Gorevic will continue in that role, and Teladoc’s board chair will also remain in that role.

The share price of both companies dropped sharply midday Wednesday following the announcement. Both have seen their shares run up by multiples so far in 2020.

The companies expect their combined revenue to reach $1.3 billion in 2020. Teladoc just reported Q2 revenue of $241 million, up 85% as virtual visits increased by 203%.

Neither company has ever booked a quarterly profit. Teladoc went public in 2015, Livongo in 2019.

News 8/5/20

Top News

Siemens Healthineers will acquire radiation oncology technology vendor Varian Medical Systems for $16.4 billion.

Varian’s software offerings include treatment planning, treatment delivery, QA, image sharing, patient-reported outcomes, and the Aria oncology information system.

Reader Comments

From Spoofer: “Re: LinkedIn. It’s turning into Facebook now that Microsoft owns it.” I steer clear of LinkedIn except when looking up someone’s title or job history for the “People” section, but I have noticed that is becoming a home for folks (many of them salespeople) who believe themselves to be inspirational or instructional. It’s also drawing in users who litter it Facebook-like with personal musings, political commentary, and of course endless pitches for their employer or themselves.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Tyson Foods offered a $10 match for each $1 donated for specific Donors Choose projects, so I put my Anonymous Vendor Executive’s money to work in fully paying for these requests, most of which involve the rapid transition to remote learning. Donors Choose also sent me a note observing that this is the eighth consecutive year that HIStalk readers have supported classrooms, funding 631 projects that have impacted more than 50,000 students. I’ve already heard from several of these teachers:

• A camcorder for virtual learning and an air purifier for Coach H’s high school class in Sebastopol, MS.
• Online materials and lessons for Ms. D’s middle school class in Fort Smith, AR.
• A GoPro camera for virtual physical education and dance classes for Coach K’s elementary school class in Fort Smith, AR.
• Five Amazon Fire tablets and cases to replace the book corner activity that was cancelled because of COVID for the elementary school class of Ms. C in Nebo, KY.
• Two Chromebooks for Ms. P’s elementary school class in Forest, MS.
• Two Chromebooks for Ms. W’s elementary school class in Forest, MS.
• Classroom library supplies, organizers, clipboards, pads, pencils, cushions, earbuds, and file folders (which are no longer allowed to be shared) for the elementary school class of Ms. B in Omaha, NE, who is a second-year teacher.
• 30 headphones for Ms. S’s elementary school class in Vicksbug, MS.
• Bean bag chairs, dry erase boards, pencils, gloves, Play-Doh, balance balls,fidget toys, lanyards, pillows, charts, learning resources, and a long list of supplies for the elementary school class of Ms. R in Omaha, NE, who is a first-year teacher.
• 60 social emotional learning lesson books for Ms. S in Madisonville, KY, who is an elementary school counselor.
• An IPad, tripod, and tablet mount for the elementary school class of Ms. C in Lake, MS, who will create an online library of instructional videos for absent students or if the school closes due to COVID.
• A yearbook camera and all supplies for Mr. G’s middle school yearbook club of gifted and talented students in Madisonville, KY.
• Two IPads and a webcam to teach virtual learners at Ms. G’s elementary school class in Forest, MS.
• Supplies for at-home learners of Ms. D’s second grade class in Portland, ME.
• Math materials for Ms. P’s elementary school class in Sterling Heights, MI.
• 30 sets of headphones and 20 water bottles to allow Ms. J’s first grade school class in Chicago, IL to practice healthy behaviors.
• Digital and online learning resources for Mr. V’s high school class in Lake, MS.

Webinars

August 19 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “A New Approach to Normalizing Data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rajiv Haravu, senior product manager, IMO; Denise Stoermer, product manager, IMO. Healthcare organizations manage an ever-increasing abundance of information from multiple systems, but problems with quality, accuracy, and completeness can make analysis unreliable for quality improvement and population health initiatives. The presenters will describe how IMO Precision Normalize improves clinical, quality, and financial decision-making by standardizing inconsistent diagnosis, procedure, medication, and lab data from diverse systems into common, clinically validated terminology.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement services vendor Centauri Health Solutions acquires Applied Revenue Analytics, which offers business intelligence solutions.

Sales

• The US Department of State medical health units will implement Allscripts TouchWorks and FollowMyHeath, with the company serving as a subcontractor to MicroHealth. MicroHealth co-founder and CEO Frank Tucker served as a physician assistant, platoon leader, preventive medicine officer, and healthcare administrator for the US Army, CTO for Tricare, deputy CIO for the US Army Office of the Surgeon General, and an adjunct professor for several universities including the bioinformatics program of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. He has earned three master’s degrees (including in Physician Assistant Studies) and a doctorate of health science. The State Department chose the company for a $250 million project to manage the PHI of overseas government employees in 2019.

People

Brown & Toland Physicians (CA) hires Anne Barr, MBA (Counterpoint Advisors Network) as CIO.

Tom Foley (Cerner) joins AMD Global Medicine as VP of growth.

Ellkay hires Marc Probst, MBA (Intermountain Healthcare) as CIO.

Leidos promotes Liz Porter, MBA to president of its health group.

Amwell hires Serkan Kutan (Haven) as CTO.

Raymie McFarland (Glytec) joins glycemic management software vendor Monarch Medical Technologies as president and CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Surescripts announces two new network capabilities for specialty pharmacies, a Medications Gateway that gathers information from the patient’s EHR and electronic prior authorization.

PerfectServe announces GA of Patient and Family Communication, which delivers health updates to patients and caregivers; provides a virtual room with appointment reminders and mobile check-in; supports video visits; and provides a patient inreach module for responding to on-call patient needs with direct messaging and video. Development of the system was driven by customer feedback during COVID-19.

Vyne renames its dental practice data exchange systems that were formerly sold under the NEA nameplate (claims processing, electronic claims attachments, and encrypted email) as Vyne Dental.

Imprivata publishes a digital identity framework that offers health systems advice on creating an identity and access management strategy.

Black Book surveys find that lack of interoperability has detracted from COVID-19 care and that progress has stalled, partly due to CMS’s delayed enforcement of rules. Nearly all respondents say COVID-19 clinicians don’t get complete patient records and most say manual processes fall short in submitting pandemic information to public health agencies. Another survey of 324 COVID-diagnosed patients finds none of them had their full patient record available electronically when seen by their COVID treatment provider.

Canada’s Health Sciences North goes live on Agfa enterprise imaging at 15 sites.

North Carolina’s state HIE NC, HealthConnex, goes live on real-time event notification built on Audacious Inquiry’s Encounter Notification Service.

COVID-19

CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD tells a House coronavirus committee that CDC wasn’t involved in HHS’s decision to move COVID-19 hospitalization data from the CDC’s system to HHS Protect. He says he was told only after the decision was made and did not discuss it with Vice-President Pence or HHS Secretary Azar. Redfield says it was the right decision since the driving factor was the need to track remdesivir supplies.

“CBS This Morning” runs a news item about Epic employees who are worried about the company’s return to campus. CBS News obtained an Epic employee survey in which several hundred respondents (out of Epic’s 9,000+ employees, which CBS labels a “backlash”) expressed concerns. Epic sent an employee email Monday night saying it will bring in national experts to review its plan, also noting that 24 employees have tested positive for COVID-19, with none of those cases being attributed  to Epic. Epic will require its Wisconsin employees to return to campus on September 21.

Ellen MacKenzie, PhD, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says that COVID-19 is providing a lesson to “invest in public health or else” in failing to be prepared for the next crisis, concluding, “We cannot let the legacy of a public health crisis be the devaluing of public health itself.”

President Trump says that it is unreasonable to compare the US’s COVID-19 death rate per population to that of other countries with lower numbers, saying, “You have to go by the cases … we’re first, the best … you’re not reporting it correctly … because we do more tests, we have more cases … death is way down from where it was.” He concluded, “They are dying, that’s true. And it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control, as much as you can control it.”

New York City’s health commissioner Oxiris Barbot, MD resigns, saying Mayor Bill de Blasio has underused the department’s disease control expertise. A notable example was his reassignment of contact tracing responsibility to Health + Hospitals. She also created controversy in COVID’s early days by urging residents to visit restaurants and festivals as usual and said in a press conference that masks should be work only by those showing symptoms of infection. NYC Health + Hospitals Chief Population Officer Dave Chokshi, MD, MSc has already been chosen to replace her.

Rutgers University’s football program has 28 COVID-infected players and employees who have tested positive after several players attended an on-campus party. Meanwhile, 18 players and coaches of the Miami Marlins baseball team have tested positive and the team admits that it played a game on July 26 knowing at that time that four players had tested positive. Thirteen players and staff of the St. Louis Cardinals tested positive in the past week.

San Antonio Metro Health removes 619 COVID-19 cases from Sunday’s count after finding duplicate entries as it prepared to switch to a new contact tracing system. The agency says the data it receives from labs, hospitals, and doctors, as well as for people who have been tested in multiple locations, may contain misspellings, dates of birth, or different street abbreviations That can cause the same patient to be reported as multiple cases.

Delays in receiving COVID-19 testing results, caused by basic supply shortages and lack of a national strategy, are hampering the efforts of businesses and schools to reopen to employees and students who test negative. Delays of several days to weeks render the tests pointless.

Other

The New York Times examines whether telemedicine is here to say, raising these points:

• CMS’s coverage will end when the pandemic is no longer a declared public health emergency unless Congress passes legislation making it permanent.
• Insurers haven’t yet committed to paying for telemedicine visits comparably to in-person ones and may view telemedicine as a way to pay less.
• The cost and quality of telemedicine remains unproven for managing chronic conditions.
• Many or most patients prefer or require in-person visits.
• Insurers worry that telemedicine will increase visits without improving patient health, raising costs unnecessarily.
• Telemedicine may provide justification for doctors to bill phone calls that weren’t charged before, such as providing lab results or advising a patient to come in to the office.

A federal judge denies the plaintiff’s request to move a privacy lawsuit against UPMC to state court. UPMC is accused of sharing patient data with third parties for marketing purposes without their consent. The judge says the the lawsuit was correctly sent to federal court because UPMC was participating in HITECH.

In Argentina, an apparent server configuration error exposes the information of 115,000 people who had applied for COVID-19 quarantine exemptions. Researchers found that they could use basic information that had been exposed (ID number, gender, and phone number) to email the “circulation permit” to any email address. The exposed database was almost immediately attacked – but not disabled – by a “Meow bot” that finds and destroys exposed online data, speculated to have been created by a vigilante security expert who was annoyed by administrators who fail to secure online databases.

Sponsor Updates

• Bret Kinsella of Voicebot.ai hosts a podcast with Saykara founder and CEO Harjinder Sandh to talk about the company’s AI assistant for physicians.
• CareSignal and Innovaccer will partner to offer their remote patient monitoring and population health data technologies, respectively.
• ESolutions and Homecare Homebase collaborate to help home health agencies manage CMS Review Choice Demonstration.
• The Voicebot Podcast features Saykara founder and CEO Harjinder Sandhu.
• Surescripts earns Black Book’s #1 ranking in patient data exchange and interoperability.
• Fortified Health Security publishes its “2020 Mid-Year Horizon Report” on the state of cybersecurity in healthcare.
• QliqSoft incorporates Elsevier’s Interactive Patient Education with its Quincy chatbot and Virtual Visit software.

Blog Posts

• Preparing your stakeholders for new information blocking rules (Nordic)
• Hurricane Prep During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• What is the Role of a Project Manager in EHR Implementation? (314e)
• Where to Find COVID-19 Reimbursement Rates & Billing Change Information (AdvancedMD)
• Better control, a single, intuitive interface and scalable to your needs (Agfa Healthcare)
• Blueleaf Banter: Trends in the Community Connect Space (Bluetree)
• Recapping Our Virtual Care Coordination Summit, “COVID-19 in Detroit” (CarePort)
• ATA Conference Opioid Panel: Three Perspectives, One Goal (CareSignal)
• Care Collaboration: The Key to SNFs Addressing COVID-19 (Collective Medical)
• Service! Nonprofit Offers Help to Industry Peers When They Need It Most (CoverMyMeds)
• Healthcare Technologies Set to Break Out as a Result of Pandemic (Dimensional Insight)
• 3 Steps to Protect Home Care Workers in a COVID-19 Era (Dina)
• Hire the Best! Tips for Finding Office Talent (EClinicalWorks)
• Manual Care Transitions Are Having a Bigger Financial Impact Than You Think (Ensocare)
• CMS Rolls Out Review Choice Demonstration (ESolutions)
• Digital Wayfinding and COVID-19 Response for Hospitals (Everbridge)
• Delivering Primary Care in an Urgent Care Clinic (Experity)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/3/20

Top News

From the Allscripts earnings call, following the posting Q2 results that sent shares up 19% on Friday:

• The $365 million sales price of EPSi to Strata Decision Technology represents 7.5 times trailing 12-month revenue at 18.5 times adjusted EBITDA.
• The company sold no new Sunrise systems, although some existing customers extended their agreements.
• Allscripts will migrate the 450-clinician US Department of State medical units to a cloud-based version of TouchWorks and FollowMyHealth.
• CarePort is managing 40% of post-acute transitions in the US, with 18 million referrals per year.
• Allscripts says that while lower patient volumes and the DoJ settlement caused Q2 revenue to drop year over year, those headwinds will have smaller impact going forward.
• The company says that while it isn’t actively considering selling other parts of “the portfolio,” its data analysis and care coordination systems do more business outside the Allscripts EHR customer base and could stand on their own.
• Pressed by an analyst who observed that the company boosted its quarterly margin by cutting R&D to a level lower than that of competitors such as Epic, Allscripts says it moved work to its offshore employees and downsized its project management offices.

Reader Comments

From Anita Bath: “Re: HIMSS21. Odd that they still haven’t tweeted out that the date has changed.” I didn’t see any mentions on their so-called news site or HIMSS.org (except they’ve added it to the “Events” page) and no actual announcement was made on the conference website, which contains a mix of HIMSS20 and HIMSS21 references. Urgency is minimal since we’re a year away, but let’s hope communication and transparency improves compared to how the cancellation was mishandled. My primary PR advice would be to explain the often-repeated claim that the HIMSS contract prohibits it from offering refunds to attendees and exhibitors – why would HIMSS sign that, and with whom? (my interpretation is that the contract doesn’t require it to provide refunds, which is a vastly different issue). I’m not getting my $895 registration fee back regardless, so given that sunk cost and the fact that I would rather visit Baghdad than Las Vegas in the similar August weather, I will evaluate all over again whether it’s worth it. HIMSS has a big job in trying to drum up the bandwagon effect that makes HIMSS21 seem like a can’t-miss event, which is challenging because we will have already missed it for 30 months and ROI was questionable even before the unexpected contemplation period. And of course there’s the possibility that our coronavirus mess will still be keeping people home even a year from now, especially those from the entire rest of the world that has handled it better, and Las Vegas visitors will probably find COVID to be an exception to the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” mantra for bad behavior. The HIMSS21 floor plan shows 1,249 booths booked by about 350 vendors so far, including the usual big footprints of Cerner, Epic, Allscripts, EClinicalWorks, InterSystems, and Change Healthcare.

From Nick Rails: “Re: HIMSS. They have a long dry spell until August 2021, when the next bolus of revenue comes in.” I’m pretty sure exhibitor and attendee count will be down a lot, and some of those who show up will be applying credits for money they gave HIMSS years before. I expect all member organizations (especially the majority that, unlike HIMSS, gave full refunds for their cancelled conferences) to downsize while simultaneously strong-arming vendors to spend more money to offset those losses. That could create a downward spiral wherein the provider members (the “ladies” in the “ladies drink free” model of attracting those who are willing to pay for access) get so tired of being hit on that they stop coming.

From Long Memory: “Re: Strata. I seem to remember Allscripts suing them at one point over EPSi, which Strata is now acquiring.” Allscripts sued Strata Decision Technology in June 2016, claiming that the company hired former Allscripts Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Dan Michelson as CEO in 2012 and then used confidential Allscripts information to displace Allscripts-owned EPSi from KLAS’s #1 spot with Strata’s StrataJazz. I don’t know how that lawsuit turned out, but Strata will now own EPSi. Those with long industry memories will recall that Eclipsys acquired EPSi in early 2008 for $53 million in cash.

From Florida Unmasked: “Re: Baptist Health Jacksonville. Over 1,100 beds, signed with Epic last week. Didn’t see it here, so maybe it’s off-the-recordish.” Verified – they signed last week. Epic will displace Cerner.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents aren’t worried about career time bombs that are ticking away somewhere online, although it’s interesting that more folks worry about public information than social media posts. Probably because they can control the latter but not the former, which makes Google stalking unchallenging.

New poll to your right or here: Which factor will have the greatest impact on HIMSS21 attendance?

Pondering: why do company executives who boast that they have “right-sized” their business never take the blame for wrong-sizing it in the first place?

Webinars

August 19 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “A New Approach to Normalizing Data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rajiv Haravu, senior product manager, IMO; Denise Stoermer, product manager, IMO. Healthcare organizations manage an ever-increasing abundance of information from multiple systems, but problems with quality, accuracy, and completeness can make analysis unreliable for quality improvement and population health initiatives. The presenters will describe how IMO Precision Normalize improves clinical, quality, and financial decision-making by standardizing inconsistent diagnosis, procedure, medication, and lab data from diverse systems into common, clinically validated terminology.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Meditech reports Q2 results: revenue down 3.4%, EPS $0.88 versus $0.44. Product revenue declined 22%, but net income increased to $33 million.

Exchange-traded funds provider Global X ETFs launches the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF (EDOC) that will invest in telemedicine, analytics, connected health, and administrative digitization. The top percent holdings among its 40 investments are Ping An Healthcare, M3, Alibaba Health, Nuance, Teladoc Health, Veeva, Tandem Diabetes Care, Dexcom, Agilent Technologies, and Insulet. Also in its portfolio are Livongo, Cerner, Premier, R1 RCM, and Allscripts. I may start tracking the fund’s performance versus market indices, especially if I can set up some kind of portfolio tracker to monitor the share performance of the individual holdings.

Vocera announces Q2 results: revenue up 6%, adjusted EPS $0.10 versus $0.07.

Telemedicine and prescription drug vendor Lemonaid Health raises $33 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $55 million.

People

Bruce Brandes, MBA (Avia) joins Livongo as SVP of directed virtual care.

Announcements and Implementations

Researchers who reviewed TriNetX’s research database found that cancer screenings fell 90% in the first four months of 2020 compared to 2019.

COVID-19

A new CDC projection shows 20,000 more US COVID deaths in the next three weeks, raising the total to 173,000.

Data scientist Youyang Gu, MEng, whose online pandemic tracker has been among the most accurate, believes that the US has passed its peak of cases and expects daily deaths to top out this week. He warns, however, that many states ignore CDC’s reporting guidelines for “probable deaths,” which could skew his model. He expects to see 230,000 US deaths by November 1. Deaths are increasing most in Florida, Texas, and Mississippi, while cases are increasing most in Missouri and Oklahoma.

A YMCA sleepaway camp in north Georgia sees a COVID-19 outbreak in its first few days of operation, with 76% of campers and staff whose test results were reviewed by CDC showing positive. The camp took several precautions, including requiring campers to show proof of negative test results, but did not mandate mask-wearing, housed campers 15 to a cabin, and led groups in singing and cheering.

NPR calls out more problems with HHS’s COVID-19 hospitalization data switchover from CDC’s reliable system to a new $10 million one built by contractor TeleTracking. Hospital-submitted information appears to go live immediately before being QA’ed, sometimes with obvious errors, and HHS has backtracked on its original promise of updates multiple times per day to committing to only a weekly refresh. Hospital capacity information on HHS Protect Public Data Hub was last updated July 23 as I look just now 10 days later. Among several state-level anomalies, NPR found that CDC’s old system showed that 24% of Arizona’s inpatient hospital beds were occupied by COVID-19 patients, but the new system shows 42% occupancy even with 82 fewer patients, and Colorado’s state dashboard lists 341 hospitalized patients on July 30 versus HHS’s 491. 

Major League Baseball faces the possibility that its just-started season may end quickly as a second team cancels games after players and staff test positive for COVID-19. Meanwhile, 27-year-old Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez, who returned after a “mild” case of COVID, is out for the season due to COVID-caused myocarditis in a reminder that “recovering” from COVID doesn’t necessarily mean a return to previous health. 

Recreational boat-owning Americans are sneaking across the border to Canada and turning off their transponders like drug dealers, as locals decry having people from the “biggest Petri dish in the world” going ashore into their otherwise protected communities with no masks or distancing. Eighty percent of Canadians want the border to remain closed to Americans, who are seen as widely ignoring rules of personal responsibility.

Other

Systems of Samaritan Medical Center (ME) remain down from a July 25 malware attack.

Sponsor Updates

• Redox releases a new podcast, “EConsults and Coping with the Year 2020 with Gil Addo of RubiconMD.”
• Customers give Spirion their highest ratings in Gartner’s latest report on enterprise data loss prevention solutions.
• Netsmart lists 16 hospice and palliative care organizations that recently signed for its EHR.

Blog Posts

• My internship at Nuance in the wake of COVID-19: uncertainty and satisfaction (Nuance)
• Texting Consumers is Smart Business Strategy (OptimizeRx)
• How Virtual Waiting Rooms Protect Patients, Staff, and Productivity (PerfectServe)
• MIPS 2020 – What’s New? (PMD)
• Uncover the Hidden Pharmacy Supply Expenses (Premier)
• Pure Accelerates Hospital’s Recovery from Ransomware Attack (Pure Storage)
• Challenges of Remote Patient Monitoring Technology: When and How to Use SMS Texts and Phone Calls for Patients (CareSignal)
• Maximizing Outcomes in the Post-Acute Care Space (Relatient)
• How the Stress Test That is 2020 Taught Me to Lead with Intention (SailPoint)
• Why scalability is crucial to reducing your sensitive data exposure (Spirion)
• U.S. News announces the 2020-21 best hospitals, all rely on Spok (Spok)
• Telehealth technology: from scramble to strategy (StayWell)
• Marketers, Clinicians, and Care Managers in the Patient 360° Ecosystem (SymphonyRM)
• System Administration Appreciation Day – Celebrating Heroes Supporting Heroes (Vocera)
• Using Google Maps and Business Messages to Attract More New PT Patients (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 7/31/20

Top News

HIMSS reschedules its HIMSS21 conference to August 9-13 in Las Vegas. It was originally planned for March 1-5.

HIMSS22 reportedly remains on schedule in Orlando for March 2022, just seven months later.

Reader Comments

From Pearl Drops: “Re: HIMSS21. In August? In Las Vegas? Really?” My reaction:

• Assuming the event actually happens a year from now, it will have been 30 months since the last live HIMSS conference. Relevance is a crapshoot given the ill will created by the HIMSS20 refund policies, the pandemic’s financial impact on exhibitors and attendees, and the many months everybody will have had to decide whether they should just show up lemming-like as usual or instead look harder at ROI. People have learned to live without restaurants, sports, and concerts in their absence with potentially permanent impact, so a full-fledged return to conference life is far from assured. 
• The email says HIMSS22 will remain on track for March in Orlando, which would mean doing it all over again just seven months later, so the fatigue factor could be significant.
• The revenue hit to HIMSS is surely monumental just from timing alone, not even considering a likely big drop-off in exhibitor and registrant revenue.
• The timing of HIMSS20 could not have been worse for HIMSS since it coincided with the early start of a long pandemic, thus impacting at minimum both HIMSS20 and HIMSS21. RSNA20 moved to a virtual event in losing one live conference, but its 2021 conference will take place as planned unless 2021 is a full-year scratch, in which case HIMSS will be in even more trouble.
• I visited my least-favorite city of Las Vegas in late June a few years back to scout HIStalkapalooza venues, and it was nuclear hot even then. I swear my flip-flops started melting while walking to the pool, which was steamier than any hot tub should be. Miserable outdoor heat is good for exhibitors and casinos, however.

From Concision: “Re: health IT articles. Have you noticed how long they take to get to the point and start off reciting the obvious?” I have. Writers are either short on skill or long on vanity when they can’t lead off with compelling information and instead meander around before making some questionably valuable point. I turned down a lot of Readers Write articles because of my #2 test (after #1, “don’t pitch your company”) – if three randomly chosen sentences don’t contain anything insightful or fresh, or if the opening sentences stiffly recap universally known facts, then you’re wasting the time of readers.

From Vaporware?: “Re: DoD. Fascinating update from Cerner earnings call, and a reminder that the CommonWell Vaporware Alliance was formed in March 2013 to address the DoD’s expressed desire for an interoperable EHR.” Cerner mentioned in the earnings call that DoD and the VA launched a joint HIE in April and will connect to CommonWell later this year.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Everbridge. The Burlington, MA-based company is the global leader for integrated critical event management (CEM) solutions that automate and accelerate organizations’ operational response to critical events to help keep people safe and businesses running faster. More than 1,200 hospitals rely on the Everbridge CEM Platform to deliver resilience on an unprecedented scale. With COVID-19, Everbridge is helping hospitals to safely resume care and establish a new normal with a robust risk mitigation and emergency response platform that offers automated contact tracing and wellness checks, safe and secure telehealth, critical events management platform, incident management response for cybersecurity risks, and digital wayfinding with blue-dot turn-by-turn navigation. Thanks to Everbridge for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

August 19 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “A New Approach to Normalizing Data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rajiv Haravu, senior product manager, IMO; Denise Stoermer, product manager, IMO. Healthcare organizations manage an ever-increasing abundance of information from multiple systems, but problems with quality, accuracy, and completeness can make analysis unreliable for quality improvement and population health initiatives. The presenters will describe how IMO Precision Normalize improves clinical, quality, and financial decision-making by standardizing inconsistent diagnosis, procedure, medication, and lab data from diverse systems into common, clinically validated terminology.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts reports Q2 results: revenue down 8.6%, adjusted EPS $0.18 versus $0.17,  beating Wall Street expectations for both.

Allscripts will sell its EPSi business unit to Roper Technologies-owned Strata Decision Technology for $365 million.

Cerner reports Q2 results: revenue down 7%, EPS $0.44 versus $0.39, beating consensus earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. From the earnings call:

• The company says its revenue came in lower than expected because the pandemic impacted sales or timing of some low-margin offerings, such as technology resale and billed travel.
• Q3 revenue expectations have been reduced because of divested businesses and a larger-than-expected pandemic impact, but the company expects earnings to grow due to cost reduction.
• The company says it won’t cut R&D spending.
• Cerner says that while virtual go-lives work for simple implementations, the future model will be a hybrid, with fewer people on site who are supported centrally, which also reduces billable travel for the client. The company notes that employees are 25% more productive working remotely because avoiding two half-days of travel during the work week means they have five days billable per week instead of four.
• Cerner is looking beyond its Amwell virtual visit partnership to virtual hospitals and ICUs that would involve its CareAware platform.
• An analyst asked about a $35 million acquisition that he saw on the cash flow statement, which Cerner says was for a cybersecurity company that it can’t talk about otherwise.
• Cerner is interested in acquisitions related to research data and analytics.
• The grating phrase “new operating model” thankfully wasn’t uttered even once.

Teladoc Health reports Q2 results: revenue up 80%, EPS -$0.34 versus –$0.41, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings. Expenses increased 63%, mostly in marketing, sales, technology, and acquisition costs, and the company projects a loss per share of $1.36 and $1.45 for the year.

Private equity firms TA Associates and Francisco Partners invest in healthcare clearinghouse operator Edifecs at a valuation of up to $1.8 billion.

Private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners acquires a stake in WellSky from TPG Capital that values the company at over $3 billion.

Ciox Health acquires NLP vendor Medal to enhance its real-world data business for drug companies and researchers with information extracted from unstructured EHR data. 

NantHealth acquires OpenNMS, which offers an open source network management system.

In-hospital specialty care telemedicine provider SOC Telemed merges with Healthcare Merger Corp. in a complicated transaction that will create a Nasdaq-listed company that values SOC at $720 million.

Sales

• Australian Capital Territory government chooses Epic for implementation across Canberra’s public hospitals and community health centers in a 10-year, $80 million contract.
• Summit Healthcare announces several new clients for its Summit All Access for web-based and mobile information sharing, including ADT notification, community data sharing, and downtime data access.
• Franciscan Health chooses Accruent’s Connectiv software, based on ServiceNow, to manage its facilities and biomedical assets and devices.

People

David Tucker. MHA, MBA (Huntzinger Management Group) joins 314e as VP of sales and client services.

Announcements and Implementations

WebPT adds 1,700 clinics to its rehab therapy platform in the first half of 2020 as the company rolled out a virtual visit system, a digital patient intake feature to minimize waiting room contact, and increased use of its patient relationship management solution. 

Diameter Health releases its turnkey FHIR Patient Access solution that allows payers to comply with CMS requirements that they give members access to their data using FHIR standards.

Goliath Technologies creates a managed service offering for remotely monitoring the availability of applications running under Citrix and VMware Horizon, which allows clients to make sure users aren’t having problems accessing business applications from home or other offsite locations.

InterSystems lists how its TrakCare health information system has been globally deployed in response to COVID-19, including rollout of a screening module that was installed on site in Beijing early in the pandemic, connecting labs and temporary hospitals in Madrid, creating interfaces between new COVID-19 testing machines to its lab system in 48 hours, and implementing TrakCare Lab Enterprise for the 118 COVID-19 labs of the UAE’s Pure Health in two weeks.

Premier enhances its crisis forecasting and planning technology to predict a given hospital’s COVID-19 patient census in near real time.

DirectTrust releases the draft of its Trusted Instant Messaging+ standard for testing.

Aiva offers customers of its in-room patient communication system – which is powered by voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant — with caregiver-to-caregiver technology from Hillrom’s Voalte.

Cerner will add Nuance’s virtual assistant technology to Millennium, allowing users to navigate by voice for chart search, order entry, and scheduling. 

Intelligent Medical Objects launches IMO Precision Normalize, which standardizes diagnosis, procedure, medication, and lab data from diverse systems into common, clinically validated terminology.

Government and Politics

An NPR investigation into HHS’s awarding of a $10 million contract to health IT vendor TeleTracking for a COVID-19 hospitalization data collection system finds several irregularities:

• HHS first said the contract was sole source, but now says it was competitively bid among six companies that it declines to name using criteria that it declines to list.
• The process HHS used to award the bid is normally used for innovative research, not the development of government databases.
• TeleTracking’s CEO is a long-time Republican donor who is loosely connected to a company that financed billions of dollars worth of Trump Organization projects.
• The contract ends in September and TeleTracking says it hopes for an extension, which could cost millions. The current contract is 20 times larger than all of TeleTracking’s previous federal contracts combined.

COVID-19

The US now leads the world in number of COVID-19 deaths per day, averaging over 1,000 and most recently hitting nearly 1,500 as total US deaths crossed the 150,000 mark. The US has less than 5% of the world’s population, but nearly 25% of its COVID-19 deaths.

An HIStalk reader reports that their large Texas hospital has been forced yet again to change COVID-19 testing platforms due to a nationwide supply shortage, leaving clinicians and the IT folks scrambling. Delayed results force clinicians to assume that the patient is positive, which requires them to needlessly use PPE that is also in short supply.

The COVID Tracking Project says COVID-19 hospitalization data is now unreliable, partially due to HHS’s no-notice switch to a new reporting system:

• Some states can’t report their data at all, some hospitals have stopped submitting data, and hospitalizations don’t always line up with local case counts.
• HHS and state-reported hospitalization information is sometimes dramatically different, with HHS oddly reporting higher numbers much of the time.
• HHS collects information of all COVID-19 hospitalizations, including suspected cases, but some states report only those cases in which COVID-19 is the primary diagnosis.
• States that collect information from state hospital associations may not be reporting numbers from the VA or other federal hospitals.
• Each state decides on its own which information to make public on dashboards and reports, which then feeds national dashboards such as that of the COVID Tracking Project.
• Case, testing, and death data remain accurate because the information was not affected by HHS’s change.

University of Colorado School of Medicine describes in a JAMIA article how it applied informatics interventions to meet UCHealth’s COVID-19 challenges, drawing on the relationships its doctors and nurses have with frontline staff and their experience in leading change. The team:

• Used an electronic teaching tool to ramp up EHR training for nurses who were being prepared for inpatient roles.
• Developed an electronic training guide for volunteer clinicians that included embedded videos and linked resources that covered, EHR, rounding, and common patient conditions.
• Created new Epic-based pathways using AgileMD that included proning, clinical trials, convalescent plasma, antivirals, anticoagulation, intubation checklist, septic shock, and hyperinflammatory response treatment.
• Added “indication for use” to discourage unapproved use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.
• Created a Virtual Health Command Center to train clinicians on its Epic-integrated Vidyo virtual visit system in two weeks.
• Coordinated with the patient experience team to present training webinars on conducting video visits, including non-verbal communication and reflective listening.
• Partnered with Masimo to deploy a wearable device for discharged patients to monitor respiratory rate, heart rate, and pulse oximetry.
• Redeployed tablets to COVID-19 units to minimize staff exposure, to provide remote translator service, to help the palliative care team convene videoconferences with patients and families, to present group therapy for psychology and rehab, and to capture audio and video from non-networked monitors so that nurses can listen for alarms from the nursing station (pictured above).
• Created a Microsoft Teams collaboration site for regional intensivists, which then led to creating a public website for community providers.
• Developed logic for three levels of COVID-19 chart alerts based on patient check-in information.
• Developed note templates to store patient advance directive status in a central location.
• Helped nurses who were not able to work in the hospitals to use Epic Secure Chat to follow patients and then update their families, who were not allowed to visit.
• Created a scoring tool to ration therapy if needed.
• Studied EHR data for information that could be predictive of hospitalization rates. 

Yale New Haven Hospital describes how it customized Epic’s antimicrobial stewardship module for COVID-19, developing patient lists, assessment tools, and a handoff process, all to support reviewing a large number of patients quickly and to optimize their management.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD raises an interesting economic point.

Wolters Kluwer Health uses clinical search activity in its UpToDate reference, along with online and mobility data, to predict COVID-19 outbreaks in specific areas.

Seventeen University of Florida Health anesthesiology residents and one fellow contract COVID-19 after attending a party that was attended by 20-30 residents. The health system refused to acknowledge either the outbreak or the party in inappropriately citing HIPAA.

Former Republican candidate for President Herman Cain dies at 74 of COVID-19, for which he tested positive nine days after attending President Trump’s June 20 Tulsa rally without wearing a mask even though he was a Stage 4 colon cancer survivor.

The House of Representatives requires members to wear masks following the COVID-19 diagnosis of Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who previously refused to wear a mask for protection against the “Wuhan virus” and then speculated after testing positive that, “I can’t help but think that if I hadn’t been wearing a mask so much in the last 10 days or so, I really wonder if I would’ve gotten it.”

Amazon Prime Air drone engineers design NIH-approved face shields that Amazon will sell at cost to frontline workers, saving them at least one-third over other reusable face shields at $2.65 each. The company is also offering an open sourced design package for 3D printing and injection molding.

A Vanity Fair investigative report finds that a White House panel led by Jared Kushner developed a national COVID-19 testing strategy and ordered 3.5 million China-produced tests for $52 million from a company connected to the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates, but the tests were contaminated and unusable. The group’s national testing strategy was never announced and testing responsibility was eventually moved to individual states, to the group’s surprise. It called for federal distribution of test kits, oversight of contact tracing, lifting contract restrictions on where doctors and hospitals send tests so that any laboratory could perform testing, reporting all test results to a national repository as well as state and local health departments, and rapidly scaling up antibody testing to support returning employees to work. It also proposed establishing a “national Sentinel Surveillance System” with real-time identification of hot spots. The plan lost favor with President Trump, who insiders say was worried that more widespread testing would increase case counts that would harm his re-election chances. He favored optimistic coronoavirus models from Deborah Birx, MD that were eventually proven to be wildly wrong. The report also found that one member of Kushner’s team argued that a national plan would squander the political opportunity to blame Democratic governors of states that were being hit hardest early in the pandemic.

Other

Nacogdoches Memorial Hospital (TX) and Cerner agree on partial payment to settle the $20 million the hospital owes for an implementation it delayed repeatedly and finally cancelled.

Sponsor Updates

• Diameter Health launches FHIR Patient Access to help payers comply with federal regulatory requirements to provide members with access to their health data using FHIR standards.
• TriNetX will conduct a medical record review of 200 hospitalized COVID-19 patients to create a dataset that can be used to support drug treatment and vaccine research.
• InterSystems introduces a new credentialing program for its products and technologies.
• Fortune profiles the way in which Jvion re-focused its CORE technology to develop a COVID-19 community vulnerability map.

Blog Posts

• MIPS 2020 – What’s New? (PMD)
• Top 10 Ways COVID-19 is Changing US Healthcare Systems (Get-to-Market Health)
• Healthcare’s New Help Desk: A Modern Approach (HCTec)
• HAS 20 Virtual: Featuring a World-Class Lineup of Keynote Speakers (Health Catalyst)
• American Telemedicine Association: Improving Patient Outcomes and Cost Savings at Esse Health by Leveraging Deviceless Remote Monitoring Technology (CareSignal)
• Taking Prescription Renewal Workflows from Good to Great (Healthfinch)
• Consumers Want Convenience and Telehealth from Health Payers (Imat Solutions)
• Continued Cloud Conversions Give ERP the Attention it Deserves (Impact Advisors)
• Maintaining a Culture of Wellness in a Virtual Work Environment (Imprivata)
• Why Interoperability is Crucial to Medtech’s Survival (InterSystems)
• Insights from Banner Health: How to Transform Your Digital Front Door (Kyruus)
• How Hospitals can Thrive in the Midst of Constant Change (LiveProcess)
• Financial Agility is Essential to Healthcare’s Post-COVID-19 New Normal (Loyale Healthcare)
• How to Create a Business Plan for Your Physical Therapy Private Practice (MWTherapy)
• Senior Living Leaders Innovate to Combat COVID-19 (Netsmart)
• Top 10 Telehealth Benefits and Challenges Concerning Hospitals (Access)
• Are quality metrics becoming MacGuffins of healthcare? (Nordic)
• American Telemedicine Association: Improving Patient Outcomes and Cost Savings at Esse Health by Leveraging Deviceless Remote Monitoring Technology (CareSignal)

Contacts

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