News 6/24/20

Top News

CMS Administrator Seema Verma says that analysis of Medicare claims confirms that socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity of COVID-19 patients affect their likelihood of complications.

Verma says the US health system needs to transition from fee-for-service to value-based care and to hold providers accountable for outcomes.

CMS has started publishing a monthly Medicare COVID-19 Data Snapshot. The initial release indicates that 325,000 Medicare beneficiaries were diagnosed with COVID-19 through May 16, with 110,000 of them being hospitalized. Blacks were hospitalized at a rate four times that of whites.

CMS also announces the creation of CMS’s Office of Burden Reduction and Health Informatics, which will look at the burden of meeting CMS compliance requirements, fostering innovation through interoperability, and using technology to create new tools to allow patients to own and carry their health data and to give clinicians their complete medical history.

Reader Comments

From Wilson’s Gremlin: “Re: telehealth visits. I’m wondering what percentage have deficient pre-screenings performed (temperature, blood pressure) because appointments are remote? Or that require patients to leave home afterward for follow-up (for blood to be drawn or for a nasal swab)?” Good question – maybe someone knows. That would lead me to wonder whether traditional practices had to reconfigure their EHR to make in-person measurements such as temperature optional rather than required. It would also be interesting to know how many physical trips a virtual visit generates (lab, pharmacy, X-ray, PCP, etc.) although most of those would have been required even with a face-to-face visit.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Newbie vendor prospecting and marketing people are working energetically from home with minimal supervision and mentorship, so I’ll provide these tips:

• Do not “circle back” if a health IT executive didn’t find your first unsolicited email interesting enough to respond the first time.
• Do not hound people on LinkedIn with unsolicited connections and boilerplate messages.
• Do not send unsolicited calendar appointments.
• Whatever your company sells may well be the most important part of your universe, but the provider world is dealing with decimated revenue and COVID-19 challenges, so you aren’t anyone’s top priority.
• Those books on lead generation, sales funnels, and social media marketing that you ordered from Amazon push ideas that are not only ineffective in selling to the health system C-suite, but often detrimental.
• Focus on their problems, not your needs.
• It is risky for an industry newbie to pursue a conversation with someone who has decades of health IT leadership. Your unfamiliarity with the industry’s lingo, lack of broad knowledge, and insecurity-driven adherence to the company-approved conversational script makes success unlikely even if you get someone on the phone.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner conducts another round of layoffs, this time involving 100 employees. The nails-on-blackboard corporate phrase “new operating model” was uttered yet again as an explanation.

CoverMyMeds finds in a comprehensive prescription access report that 70% of patients have made sacrifices to obtain their medications, while 30% of providers say their patients are unable to pay for meds. COVID-19 has caused changes – 20% of patients paid cash for prescriptions; two-thirds say they are more likely to use telehealth going forward; 30% of providers say their biggest telehealth challenges are privacy concerns and lack of EHR integration; and 80% of providers say their telemedicine use is hampered by patients who lack technology skills. Patients who are prescribed specialty medications report delays of up to several weeks waiting for prior authorization. Most prescribers don’t trust the formulary and insurance benefit information contained in their EHRs and 86% of them say their office bears a “high” or “extremely high” workload burden in managing prior authorization requests.

High-acuity house call provider DispatchHealth raises $136 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $217 million. It offers home visits that can include lab work, EKG, infectious disease tests, medications, IV placement, breathing treatments, suturing, catheter placement, and splinting.  The company operates in 19 cities and accepts many insurances, leaving patients an out-of-pocket cost that averages $5 to $44.

Sales

• Billings Clinic (MT) will implement TransformativeMed’s specialty- and disease-specific EHR workflows, which include notification, messaging, and a COVID-19 app. The company will also be developing a nursing handoff app.

People

Physician practice change analytics vendor Empiric Health hires Spiro Papadopoulos (Stanson Health) as VP of business development.

Shally Pannikode (WellStar Health System) joins Humana as CVP/CIO of healthcare services.

Rush University Medical Center SVP/CIO Shafiq Rab has resigned, according to his LinkedIn.

Announcements and Implementations

AbleTo launches population-based virtual mental health services to payers.

PatientKeeper develops its Charge Capture software into a FHIR-based app that is embedded in Cerner, allowing clinicians to launch the charge entry screen within their Cerner workflow to record patient charges.

COVID-19

US COVID-19 infection doubling time has dropped from 60 days last week to 52 days now, with 31 states reporting an expanding epidemic. Deaths are at their lowest levels in three months, however, leading to interesting speculation as to why. Most likely answer – younger people are getting increasingly infected without becoming seriously ill, but the infection’s spread to more vulnerable populations in the absence of mitigation strategies is inevitable. Most optimistic but unlikely answer – treatments and care management are improving outcomes.

Coronavirus seems to be infecting people under 50 at higher rates than were observed in the Northeast, with 50% of hospitalized patients and 30% of those in ICUs being under 50 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The median age of people who are testing positive in Florida has dropped from 65 years in March to 35 now, which may be a function of more widespread testing, but also possibly because older people are protecting themselves better. Florida hospitals are admitting more COVID-19 patients in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

Texas Children’s Hospital starts admitting adult patients to free up Houston-area beds for the expected surge of COVID-19 patients. Houston Methodist Hospital says COVID-19 admissions have tripled since Memorial Day.

A preliminary report suggests that oral dexamethasone – which is cheap, readily available, and low in significant side effects — can reduce mortality in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, especially those who are ventilated or receiving oxygen.

The European Union is likely to add the US to its list of countries whose citizens will be barred from entering its 27 countries because of out-of-control COVID-19 spread. Travel restrictions will be loosened on July 1 for countries whose new infections in the previous 14 days meet or beat the EU’s average of 16 per 100,000 residents. The US is at 107.

A COVID-19 congressional hearing finds that President Trump hasn’t spoken to the government’s key pandemic players in several weeks, including NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, MD and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD. CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD declined to answer when asked.

Other

A White House executive order suspends issuance of H-1B work visas through at least the rest of the year, prohibits US companies from transferring foreign executives to long-term US assignments, and blocks US entry of spouses of foreign-born workers. The federal government says the order will keep 525,000 people out of the country to protect American jobs. The H-1B employer program is for highly educated people in specialty occupations, most of them in technology, medicine, academics, and engineering.

Cerner VP of Government Services Julie Stoner says the VA’s rollout will take 10 years.

Sponsor Updates

• Pivot Point Consulting performs a virtual Epic go-live at Carle Foundation Hospital (IL).
• Central Logic CEO Angie Franks will describe health system telehealth use cases in a presentation this week to the virtual American Telemedicine Association Conference & Expo.
• Health Catalyst joins the FDA’s COVID-19 Evidence Accelerator.
• Optimum Healthcare IT and University of North Florida create an EHR apprenticeship program called Last Mile Training.
• Capita Healthcare Decisions adds Healthwise’s evidence-based information to its Salus Universal patient engagement and relationship software.
• The Chartis Group publishes a new white paper, “After the Surge: Five Health System Imperatives in the Age of COVID-19.”
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, releases the latest edition of its Critical Care Obstetrics Podcast, “DKA Made Simple.”

Blog Posts

• 3 Aspects of Epic Interfaces Worth Outsourcing (314e)
• Improve staff-manager relationships with collaborative scheduling (Ability Network)
• 3 Ways You’re Wasting Time in Your Medical Practice (AdvancedMD)
• Nurses of Spok: Kiley Black on blending technology and nursing (Spok)
• Agfa HealthCare shortlisted at the new Health Tech Leaders Awards 2020 (Agfa Healthcare)
• Supporting Epic Clinical Users During Staffing Mobilization (CereCore)
• Why It’s Critical to Choose an ONC-Certified EHR Solution (ChartLogic)
• The Increasingly Critical Role of Home Health (Collective Medical)
• Removing Barriers to Patient Care at the Pharmacy (CoverMyMeds)
• What Are the New CMS and ONC Interoperability Rules for Payers? (Cumberland Consulting Group)
• Using TCM to Improve Care & Capture Revenue (EClinicalWorks)
• Using NEMT to Solve for COVID-Related Obstacles (Ensocare)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/22/20

Top News

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin calls for the healthcare system there to roll out out digital systems and to use artificial intelligence.

Putin told health workers in a videoconference that Russia should use its experience in successfully addressing coronavirus to improve the overall reliability of its healthcare system.

Reader Comments

From Options Exercise Program: “Re: PatientPing’s delayed funding announcement. If you’re going to disclose a raise, make it timely. When public companies do this, we (the investor research community) used to call it ‘painting the tape.’ It matters because the backdrop between now and then is very different. Raising the money during this current time (COVID) sends a very different signal of optimism than it did when the raise occurred. Same quarter plus or minus is fine, but not 16 months.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

More than half of poll respondents expect the use of virtual provider visits to increase in the next year over today’s already-increased levels, although two commenters correctly observed that the challenges are not related to technology limitations, consumer or provider preference, or clinical outcomes – it’s all about payments by CMS and insurers.

New poll to your right or here: For those who have had a recent telehealth visit: how was pre-visit information (allergies, meds, recent history, current problem, etc.) collected?

Listening: new from Travis, a Scotland-based (“Glaswegian,” a new word to me) indie band that has been around for 30 years. They couldn’t make a video for the new tune because of coronavirus lockdowns, so singer Fran Healy and his son drew their own.

Webinars

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

People

Arcadia promotes Debbie Conboy to VP of risk adjustment and quality products and hires Catherine Turbett, MHA (Lumeris) as VP of ACO and health plan account operations.

Announcements and Implementations

KLAS didn’t send me its “US Hospital EMR Market Share 2020” report, so I’ll summarize what its blog post says. Only Epic and Meditech had a net gain in hospitals in 2019. Epic has won most of the new big-hospital decisions over several years, but Cerner bagged the DoD/VA elephant. KLAS says there is room for another market entrant, but it glosses over the time, money, and determination that would be required to develop, sell, and install a new hospital EHR. On an unrelated note, I have a minor grammatical quibble with KLAS for writing “multi-tenet” instead of “multi-tenant.”

COVID-19

The New York Times reports that nursing homes are taking advantage of being off limits to ombudsmen during the pandemic by evicting low-profit residents — such as those on Medicaid — to free up beds for profitable COVID-19 patients. Some facilities have discharged residents with no notice to unregulated boardinghouses and cheap motels, sometimes without notifying their families. Nursing homes make much of their profit from post-surgery rehab patients who are covered by private insurance, the supply of which has dwindled as hospitals halted non-essential services. Seventy percent of US nursing homes are for-profit businesses, with 11% of them being owned by private equity firms.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says that the 10 states that are seeing record-high new COVID-19 cases (AL, AZ, CA, FL, NV, NC, OK, OR, SC, TX) are losing control of the epidemic, as doubling time has fallen to under 10 days. He questions whether the governments of those states possess the political will to implement mitigation steps that could slow the spread. Researchers have noted that states that have higher mobility and low testing and tracing are more likely to be experiencing outbreaks. Arizona’s positive test rate is at 17% and its case count has turned sharply upward, far more than any other state. Thoughts that COVID-19 will throttle itself back in the heat – which were already questionable given its early impact in warm areas of the globe – should consider Arizona (highs in Phoenix are at 110 degrees) as evidence to the contrary, or perhaps more specifically, that congregating indoors under air conditioning without masks once lockdowns have eased is great viral exploit.

President Trump tells attendees of his Tulsa rally that he ordered government officials to slow down COVID-19 testing. He explained, “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people. You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please.”

The American Red Cross says blood donations have dropped sharply due to lockdowns and coronavirus fears, and as an incentive to lure donors back, is offering them a free COVID-19 antibody test.

A Harvard working paper finds that the COVID-19 mortality rate of black people ranges from seven to nine times higher than that of white people, depending on age group, meaning that the “years of potential life lost” of both blacks and Hispanic / Latino populations are higher than that of whites despite their much smaller population. 

ProPublica reports that 12% of New Jersey’s nursing home residents died of COVID-19, along with 6% of all nursing home residents in New York, when the states ordered unprepared nursing homes to take all hospital transfers and prohibited them from testing prospective residents for COVID-19 in a “reverse triage” attempt to free up hospital beds. State officials based their order on federal guidance that allowed such transfers if the nursing home met a list of criteria, but nobody was sure who was responsible for assessing their readiness. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that 50,000 of the country’s 122,000 COVID-19 deaths have involved long-term care residents and employees.

Former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, MD says that while the US is applying impressive technology expertise to COVID-19, we’re ignoring the basics, such as wearing masks and distancing.

Other

A federal grand jury indicts a Detroit man for the 2014 hack of UPMC’s HR system, where he is accused of selling the information of 65,000 employees on the dark web to conspirators who used it to file fraudulent tax returns. The LinkedIn of Justin Sean Johnson says he is a Oracle PeopleSoft expert who worked as a a self-employed cybersecurity researcher for several years, now employed as an IT specialist at FEMA.

Sponsor Updates

• Premier develops Intersectta, an oncology-focused group purchasing organization to source cancer and other specialty drugs.
• Relatient publishes a new case study, “Cherokee Health Systems Powers Telehealth with Patient Engagement, Goes Live Across 24 Locations During COVID-19.”
• CareSignal publishes a case study titled “How Mercy Built a Technology-Enhanced Care Management Model to Scale Care Management and Increase Patient Engagement.”
• Saykara congratulates customer OrthoIndy on receiving the Healthgrades 2020 Patient Safety Excellence Award.
• Spok appoints Brett Shockley (Journey.AI) to its board.
• TriNetX will partner with Parexel to advance real-world data use in clinical development.

Blog Posts

• IT Assessment: Am I Organized for Success in the Long Run? (Impact Advisors)
• PMD: Helping Practices and Patients Navigate Telehealth When They Need it Most (PMD)
• Getting Back to Regulatory Readiness (Premier)
• How to Put Your RPA in 6th Gear (Summit Healthcare)
• Leading a Data-Driven Healthcare Marketing Culture (SymphonyRM)
• Year of the Nurse and Midwife 2020 – What’s Your Story? (Vocera)
• More than PPE: Safety Precautions for Physical Therapists in the Age of COVID-19 (WebPT)

Sponsor Spotlight

Get-to-Market Health is a specialized consultancy focused exclusively on accelerating sales and driving revenue growth for healthcare solution providers. We work with business leaders to simplify the complexity and unique buying patterns of the healthcare market. Bringing deep, broad experience and valuable network connections, the partners at Get-to-Market Health are industry experts. We have worked at and with dozens of healthcare technology businesses ranging from small startups to large, established companies. We help our clients navigate the challenges they face as they work to drive revenue and market innovation.

(Sponsor Spotlight is free for HIStalk Platinum sponsors).

Contacts

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

News 6/19/20

Top News

Member-owned health plan Health Care Service Corporation will create a Payer Platform to connect its health plans to in-network Epic-using health systems for reviewing patient data, managing claims payment and prior authorization, and facilitating care management.

HCSC is the country’s fifth-largest health insurer, with 16 million members enrolled in Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

HCSC acquired care management solutions vendor Medecision for $121 million in mid-2008 and is a partial owner of clearinghouse operator Availity.

Reader Comments

From Cellular Terrorist: “Re: COVID-19. You should call out the states that refused to apply sound public health measures and are now having record-breaking case numbers.” The problem with the federal government allowing states to do whatever they want is that we as a country can’t or won’t curtail unencumbered travel, so a Florida resident or visitor who parties down mask-free could spread COVID to more responsible areas in the “weakest link” theory. COVID-19 has demonstrated that we Americans don’t care much about science and can’t be bothered with inconveniences like wearing masks unless they promise to save us instead of someone else, so perhaps the “we’re all going to get it eventually anyway” crowd is right. What happens in Vegas doesn’t unfortunately stay in Vegas when it comes to coronavirus.

From Contact Tracy: “Re: contact tracing. See this press release for what my company is about to launch.” As an occasional bearer of bad news, allow me to level-set you: (a) use of any contact tracing app in the US will be under 15% and will drop quickly, making zero difference, and what little adoption there is will be all Apple and Google; and (b) contact tracing in general in the US won’t work because nobody trusts anybody, especially anyone connected with government in any form, enough to give them any personal information, much less their contact names and information, and they won’t even answer phone calls and emails from public health officials. We had better excel at developing a vaccine since every prevention strategy that worked elsewhere — lockdowns, masks, widespread testing, contact tracing, travel limitations, and immunity passports – requires nearly universal adoption and won’t fly in a fatally divided country like ours. Not to mention that we are a lot unhealthier than much of the developed world and will experience a higher rate of coronavirus-related deaths as result. We’re at 120,000 now, more than two Vietnam Wars’ worth (and to paraphrase Chief Brody said in “Jaws,” you’re gonna need a bigger wall). 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The grocery chain pharmacy (those are always cheaper than drugstore chains in my experience) filled my 360-day prescriptions for blood pressure and cholesterol meds with a 91-day supply even though I wanted a full year’s worth and was paying cash using a GoodRx coupon. They said GoodRx rejected the 360-day quantity, so I called GoodRx and was quickly connected to a pleasant, actual human who verified that some vaguely described policy limits fills to a 91-day supply in some cases. She could not describe those cases or explain why the app would issue a coupon that was not valid. I still got a year’s supply, paying $82 instead of the expected $60, and only then because the pharmacist found a coupon from a GoodRx competitor. At least the recent federal change that prohibits PBMs gagging pharmacists from telling patients about lower-cost options worked for me and I was impressed with GoodRx’s customer service. Meanwhile, CNBC reports that the software guys who started GoodRx have built a business worth $3 billion in finding yet another illogical loophole in our illogical healthcare non-system.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

PatientPing confirms the reader rumor that I recently ran: the $60 million Series C fund raise that it announced last week was actually completed in February 2019. The company told me that it held the announcement “to peg it to exciting company milestones and product capability rollouts,” which was explained to the Boston business paper as waiting on CMS to publish legislation that requires hospitals and EDs to send ADT notifications, a core capability of PatientPing. That CMS action was delayed, so the announcement was held as well. Experts note that private companies like PatientPing can announcing funding whenever they want or can skip an announcement altogether. It doesn’t feel right to me to hold off for 16 months, but only because a prospect might infer overly optimistic business conditions during a pandemic in which health systems have been nearly shut down for months.

Redox confirms a reader-reported rumor I sent their way, acknowledging that it laid off 44 people, about 25% of its headcount, on Tuesday. The company says it had planned to double its size in 2020 as it had in 2019 and hired accordingly, but COVID-19 changed the focus of financially strapped health systems. Redox is working with customers and partners to place those of its employees who were affected  –contact christine@redoxengine.com.

Social services referral software vendor Unite Us acquires Staple Health, an analytics company that focuses on social determinants of health.

Signify Research reviews the plan of Mednax to sell its radiology groups and Virtual Radiologic teleradiology business, with the company renaming itself back to its original name of Pediatrix Medical Group as a pediatrics and obstetrics business. Signify notes that the company paid $500 million for VRad in 2015, added 10 practices, and grew revenues by 10% to $3.5 billion, but piled on debt and saw EBITDA slide 24% over the four years. VRad is the world’s largest teleradiology provider. The company announced in early April that it would cut executive salaries, furlough and reduce the pay of non-clinical employees, and cut non-essential expenses in reaction to COVID-19. Signify expects VRad to benefit from its work on AI algorithms over the past several years.

Sales

• MultiCare Connected Care (WA) selects Innovaccer’s Data Activation Platform and InGraph population health analytics.
• Stonewall Memorial Hospital District (TX) selects CPSI’s Evident EHR and TruBridge RCM software and services.
• AdventHealth will implement Virtustream’s Healthcare Cloud to power its new Epic system.

People

Craig Joseph, MD (Avaap) joins Nordic as chief medical officer.

Arcadia promotes Debbie Conboy to VP of risk adjustment and quality products and hires Catherine Turbett (Steward Health Care) as VP of ACO and health plan account operations.

Announcements and Implementations

OrthoIndy (IN) implements Saykara’s AI-based physician charting app.

COVID-19

NIH’s All Of Us research project adds three COVID-19 data collection components for researchers who are approved to study data from its 350,000 participants:

• Testing at least 10,000 samples from recent enrollees for COVID-19 antibodies, hoping to determine rates of exposure by region.
• An online survey that asks about COVID-19 symptoms, stress, social distancing, and economic impact that participants can take monthly to understand effects over time.
• EHR data analysis from the 200,000 participants who have shared their information, with plans to standardize the information to investigate patterns, symptoms, associated health problems, and the outcome of drugs and other treatments.

Scientific American explains the accuracy rates of COVID-19 antibody tests, which are particularly important since the results are often considered reliable without verification. The authors explain that false-positive results, which are the most impactful, are more likely with low infection rates. Example: the same test that has 95% specificity (few false positives) and 95% sensitivity (few false negatives) will give a false-positive rate of 14% when the infection rate is 25%, but will issue falsely positive results 50% of the time when the infection is 5%. In other words, COVID-19 antibody tests are likely to issue a lot of false positive results that may encourage people to return to normal life because they think they are immune (not to even mention that nobody has proven that people who have COVID-19 antibodies are immune from reinfection).

FDA will participate in the COVID-19 Diagnostics Evidence Accelerator, a real-time diagnostic testing evaluation program that is a companion to the previously announced Therapeutic Evidence Accelerator.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says that employers can’t require employees to take COVID-19 antibody tests before returning to work, basing its decision on CDC’s warning that antibodies don’t equate to immunity and therefore testing for them should not drive workplace decisions.

Other

It’s not just COVID-related fears that are keeping people away from medical practices and hospitals – the New York Times reminds readers that millions of Americans have lost jobs, income, and health insurance during the pandemic and can’t afford the high cost of healthcare, especially after reading about the aggressive debt collection practices of hospitals and practices. I’ll add one more item – even those who are able to get new health insurance will see their deductibles reset, meaning that someone with an ACA plan could be looking at several thousand dollars of deductibles before insurance starts paying anything.

Epic employees will return to the company’s headquarters in Verona, WI in four stages during July and August. Over one-third of the company’s employees have already returned to office work. The company says it is slowly resuming essential travel.

Researchers note that patient race and ethnicity are often used by algorithms that drive clinical decisions even though nobody knows whether underlying genetics are causing the observed differences in outcomes. The researchers caution that it’s not wise to simply apply a race-based digital fudge factor without knowing if genetic differences are responsible rather than societal issues, economic factors, or past inequities. Otherwise, minority patients may be denied services because of misinterpreted risk factors or the assumption of suboptimal outcomes.

Sponsor Updates

• RamSoft adds QliqSoft’s virtual visit technology to its RIS/PACS solutions.
• Healthwise receives five Digital Health Awards during the Health Information Resource Center’s 2020 spring competition.
• Intelligent Medical Objects publishes a new white paper, “The Evolution of the EHR.”
• Medhost joins the Amazon Web Services Partner Network as a Technology Partner.
• Black Book ranks Netsmart #1 in 10 categories across behavioral health and post-acute settings, including top overall post-acute care IT services and solution vendor.
• BridgeHealth offers its members access to flexible physical therapy solutions through WebPT’s Networks program.
• MDLive CMO Cynthia Zelis, MD joins the NCQA’s Taskforce on Telehealth Policy.

Blog Posts

• First CGM Basal-Bolus Insulin Titration Study Shows Future Potential for Remote Patient Monitoring (Glytec)
• Data scientists assist medical researchers in the fight against COVID-19 (Google Cloud)
• Finding the telehealth-life balance (Greenway Health)
• HealthNxt: The Next Great Advance in Virtual Care (The HCI Group)
• The Right Skills at the Right Time for Healthcare IT (HCTec)
• Activity-Based Costing in Healthcare During COVID-19: Meeting Four Critical Needs (Health Catalyst)
• I am still a nurse: Supporting the clinical voice of our customers (Hyland)
• Role of Health Data Analytics in Post COVID-19 World (Imat Solutions)
• Use Your COVID-19 Work to Build Data Governance (Impact Advisors)
• How to avoid disruption from loss of technical expertise (Infor)
• An Unprecedented Challenge: Serving Our Customers Through Passion and Commitment (InterSystems)
• CFO Playbook – Turning Financial Trauma into Transformation (Loyale Healthcare)
• Key Tips to Address Technology Frustration Within Your Organization (Netsmart)

Contacts

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

News 6/17/20

Top News

Epic cancels its UGM 2020 user meeting, which was scheduled for August 24-27 in Verona, WI.

Epic says some UGM elements will be offered online even though “we truly believe that an in-person meeting is irreplaceable.”

A CIO reader says the CEO council and CIO roundtable will still be offered, although they add, “Not sure who is attending either one given travel budget cuts.”

Reader Comments

From Newly Jobless: “Re: [company name omitted.] Laid off 25% of staff today.” Unverified. I didn’t get this in time to confirm with the company before my Tuesday evening deadline and I saw nothing on TheLayoff.com, but if you were affected, let me know.

From Prudent Investor: “Re: your readership stats. How now compared to last year?” Up, and I’m surprised to be getting more inquiries from potential sponsors than back in the heady days of Meaningful Use. I guess the lost conference year of 2020 left companies with more marketing money but fewer channels for exposure. Investment activity seems robust as well, so I suspect companies are eyeing the opportunity to gain competitive advantage in a suddenly leveled playing field.

From Hopeful Employee: “Re: Revint. I’ve been here two years and they just announced the third CEO since I started. I hope this one fires the management team and invests to integrate all these companies that New Mountain Capital has thrown together. They weren’t even honest about firing the current CEO, we employees aren’t idiots.” Scroll down to the People section for the new CEO’s details.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Halo Health. The Cincinnati-based, physician-founded company offers the Halo Clinical Communication and Collaboration Platform (CCCP), a scalable, AWS cloud-based solution that includes secure messaging, on-call, role-based scheduling, VoIP calling, critical results, alerts, and care team tools in a unified mobile platform. The Halo Platform’s unique workflow management system instantly delivers time-sensitive information to the right person, role, or team, allowing health systems to accelerate patient care, increase clinician efficiency, and improve financial outcomes. Halo is a strategic technical and clinical workflow partner dedicated to achieving customer objectives such as standardizing communication, consolidating technology, and connecting the physician community. Thanks to Halo Health for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

June 18 (Thursday) 12:30 ET. “Understanding the ONC’s Final Rule: Using FHIR HL7 for Successful EHR Integrations.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Bob Salitsky, healthcare IT expert, Newfire Global Partners; Jaya Plmanabhan, MS, healthcare data scientist. This fast-paced, 30-minute webinar will provide an overview of the Final Rule and describe how technology vendors, payers, and providers can use FHIR HL7 to deliver true interoperability. Attendees will learn how to define the data, technology, and flows needed for their EHR integration projects; how products can retrieve health information while meeting compliance regulations; and the benefit of adopting quickly to the future of data exchange while simplifying future integration efforts.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Proteus Digital Health, the “smart pill” digital health darling that was once valued at $1.5 billion, files Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company staked its future on the support of drug manufacturers, who are known for deep pockets but a short attention span for shiny technology objects.

Walmart acquires the technology assets of online pharmacy CareZone for a rumored $200 million. The company’s app allows consumers to scan their pill bottles to create a medication profile, set up reminders, and track health measurements. CareZone will continue to operate its pharmacy, which was excluded from the network of pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts a couple of years ago in a contract dispute.

Abacus Insights, which combines EHR and third-party data to allow health plans to personalize the care experience of their members, raises $35 million in a Series B funding round.

CareMesh – whose communications platform includes a national provider directory, event notifications, secure communications, and care transition workflows – raises $5 million in a seed funding round.

Surgisphere, the tiny company whose questionably sourced aggregated EHR data was responsible for two major research article retractions, takes down its website and social media accounts. I noticed that founder Sapan Desai, MD, PhD has also removed his LinkedIn. Some speculate that the company has shut down, which would be reasonable given the permanent stench that is now attached to its name.

People

Geeta Nayyar, MD, MBA (Greenway Health) joins Salesforce as executive medical director.

Revenue integrity technology vendor Revint hires Lee Rivas (RELX) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Experity launches Face Sheet, a patient history view of its urgent care EHR that provides an overview of past visits, supporting urgent care “hybrid clinics” that are providing primary care services or other continuing services.

Inspira Health (NJ) goes live on KyruusOne and ProviderMatch for Consumers, both from Kyruus.

COVID-19 testing company Curative is using the interoperability platform of Redox to send results to state health departments.

Epic highlights the use of its Pulse Central, which aggregates data from 1,200 Epic-using hospitals, to send standard COVID-19 metrics to public health organizations in near real time.

Carequality publishes an implementation guide for electronic case reporting, which can be used to report infectious disease cases to public health organizations.

Access releases Impression, a new version of its paperless, web-based electronic forms solution that allows hospitals to send patients forms (such as for pre-registration) for electronic completion and signing from anywhere. 

The American College of Cardiology will offer its members Heartbeat Health’s digital platform for cardiology-specific telemedicine and virtual care, which incorporates doctor-patient sharing of wearables-powered diagnostics, remote patient monitoring, and outcomes tracking. I interviewed Heartbeat Health founder and CEO Jeff Wessler, MD, MPH a few months back and I confess that it’s one of my favorites – he was refreshingly thoughtful about his vision of how cardiology practice can be optimized with a combination of in-office visits and virtual care that emphasizes prevention as well as treatment.

COVID-19

FDA revokes its emergency use authorization of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for treating COVID-19, finding that the drugs don’t have enough potential benefit to outweigh their risk of side effects that are sometimes fatal. HHS Secretary Alex Azar says that the only impact of the decision is that hospitals can no longer use federal stockpiles of the drugs — doctors can still prescribe them however they want and the FDA change may clear up misunderstanding that they are for hospitalized patients only.

Researchers question whether the medical journal peer review process is broken following retraction of articles by NEJM and The Lancet whose flaws that were obvious to expert readers. Issues:

• Peer review isn’t intended to detect outright fraud, which may or may not be involved in the retracted articles that used data from Surgisphere.
• COVID-19 has created an urgency to get information to the front lines within days rather than the usual many months, leaving little time for review.
• The supply of unpaid, uncredited, well-credentialed peer reviewers is limited.
• NEJM says it should have used hospital data experts in its peer review and pledges to require independent validation of database quality going forward.

The New Yorker describes how some Utah startups with little healthcare knowledge threw together COVID-19 tools (testing, online assessments, and a command center) to rush into a no-bid contract with the state in public-private partnership called TestUtah that was expanded to other states. The reliability of TestUtah’s results came into quick question; it was using tests that had not been allowed in the US until an FDA emergency use authorization was issued; its testing machine was approved only for use on agricultural DNA rather than human RNA; and it was stockpiling hydroxychloroquine in planning to offer treatment as well as diagnosis. TestUtah processed its lab tests in an unmarked back room of a 122-bed hospital that had equipment stacked on old desks and conference room tables sitting on carpeted floors, using a home food sealing machine to seal specimens. CMS inspectors noted several problems with its process and threatened to sanction the hospital’s lab for failing to supervise its work. TestUtah blames the criticism it received on political partisanship and the desire of University of Utah’s lab company and Intermountain Healthcare to squelch competition. The state overrode the recommendations of its public health director to extend TestUtah’s contract, then demoted her.

A tiny lab in Texas is billing insurance companies several thousand dollars for a COVID-19 test that costs just $100 from the major labs, taking advantage of a mandate from Congress that requires insurers to pay the full costs of the tests for out-of-network lab work.

FDA gives emergency use authorization for US hospitals to use an AI-powered COVID-19 patient deterioration early warning tool that was developed by Israel-based tele-ICU platform vendor CLEW. 

Other

A study finds that the rate and completeness of public health disease reporting by hospitals, practices, and labs improves when using HIE-generated, pre-populated forms instead of filling out and faxing paper forms.

Sponsor Updates

• Pivot Point Consulting will offer health-risk trajectory analytics from Jvion to help hospitals get employees back to work and patients back to their normal care activities.
• A proof-of-concept study finds that patients who used Glytec’s Glucommander insulin dosing software with a continuous glucose monitoring system showed a 26% improvement in time in range.
• AdvancedMD releases a new e-book, “Post-COVID-19: Moving to ‘Better Than Normal’ – four essential elements in getting past merely normal.”
• Microsoft features Central Logic in its special COVID-19 podcast series.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, releases a new episode of its Critical Care Obstetrics Podcast, “Simulation Mistakes.”
• Black Book ranks Nordic as #1 in client satisfaction in the category of strategic initiatives advisory.

Blog Posts

• 3 Reasons You Need Professional Healthcare IT Testing for Interoperability (314e)
• Three tips for a better nurse engagement that drives quality care (Ability Network)
• The Essential Resource Guide to Hospital-Enabled Virtual care: Part 1 of 5 (Access)
• 5 Reasons Why Health Systems Need to Implement an Enterprise Imaging Platform (Agfa Healthcare)
• The Case for a Situational Awareness Network for Emergency Response (Audacious Inquiry)
• Health Plan Learnings from Our COVID-19 Efforts (CarePort Health)
• Legacy Data Archive: Avoiding the Sticker Shock of Data Retention (CereCore)
• ChartLogic Lands Among SoftwareAdvice’s EHR FrontRunners (ChartLogic)
• Navigating new Medicare hospital outpatient department authorization requirements (Nordic)
• Be Ready for a Breach: The Case for Remote DFIR and Virtual Incident Response (CI Security)
• 10 Steps to Ensure ERP Health (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Meeting the Needs of Complex Patient Populations Through Care Collaboration (Collective Medical)
• Electronic Prescription Management and Enrollment for Specialty Medications (CoverMyMeds)
• The Future of Healthcare: How Telehealth Will Change After COVID-19 (Dimensional Insight)
• BAYADA: Proactive COVID Safety Plan Helps Client Acquisition, Staff Retention (Dina)
• Finding a New Normal: The Patient Experience (EClinicalWorks)
• 7 must haves for your patient scheduling system (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/15/20

Top News

Milliman acquires Wisconsin-based employee health monitoring technology vendor Healthio, which it will pair with its predictive analytics offering.

Reader Comments

From Lab Matters: “Re: article titles. I see some that capitalize just the first letter of the first word, while others capitalize each word. Am I stuck in the grammar rules of the past? Please help settle my existential conflict.” I capitalize each word because a title looks like a weird sentence to me otherwise. Not to mention that the style guides of AP, APA, Chicago, MLA, and New York Times all agree that the first, last, and important words of an article’s title should be capitalized. However, a recent AP change suggests using “sentence style” for headlines and websites, where only the first word and any proper nouns are capitalized in a “Hawaiian shirt Friday” kind of formally dictated informality. This would be one of a few cases in which I disagree with AP since it seems to be bowing to those who didn’t know or didn’t follow its longstanding rules, although I acknowledge that sentence case is probably a bit easier to read as long as it is used consistently within the same website. I resolve my existential conflicts on style by carefully thinking through the options, choosing the one that makes most sense to me, and sticking with it, and in the spirit of grammatical harmony in the title capitalization question, I use the original style rather than my own when I cite an article from elsewhere. Let’s not even acknowledge that some health IT vendor website capitalize all letters in their press release and blog titles, maybe the same ones that insist on capitalizing all the letters in the company’s name (which gets put right back to first-letter-only here per AP style).

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Folks who work in health IT are nearly evenly split over whether they would trust research findings based on aggregated EHR information.

New poll to your right or here: How will the use of virtual provider visits change between now and June 2021?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Saykara.The Seattle-based company is working to combat the epidemic of physician burnout that has surfaced from increasingly burdensome documentation requirements and time spent on EHR data entry. They’ve built the first fully ambient and autonomous AI-powered assistant for physicians. Their iPhone app, named Kara, listens to physician-patient conversations, then interprets and transforms the salient content required for notes, orders, referrals, and more, and enters both structured and unstructured data directly to the EHR. Kara is specialty agnostic and being used by doctors all across the country. Data shows that time spent charting is reduced by an average of 70%, after-hours (“pajama time”) charting is eliminated, and note quality and completeness is enhanced by 25%. Saykara was founded in 2015 by Harjinder Sandhu, a serial healthcare technology entrepreneur and former Nuance executive who has stood at the forefront of innovations in speech recognition and machine learning for more than 20 years. See their video featuring doctors from Hancock Health. Thanks to Saykara for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

June 18 (Thursday) 12:30 ET. “Understanding the ONC’s Final Rule: Using FHIR HL7 for Successful EHR Integrations.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Bob Salitsky, healthcare IT expert, Newfire Global Partners; Jaya Plmanabhan, MS, healthcare data scientist. This fast-paced, 30-minute webinar will provide an overview of the Final Rule and describe how technology vendors, payers, and providers can use FHIR HL7 to deliver true interoperability. Attendees will learn how to define the data, technology, and flows needed for their EHR integration projects; how products can retrieve health information while meeting compliance regulations; and the benefit of adopting quickly to the future of data exchange while simplifying future integration efforts.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The investment firm owner of Clinical Ink is putting the drug clinical trials electronic tools company on the market after owning it for two years.

A false claims act whistleblower lawsuit brought against EHR vendor Medhost and Community Health Systems by two former CHS IT executives is dismissed, with the judge saying that the “heaps of alleged facts” that were presented don’t prove the claimed misconduct.

Sales

• United Methodist Communities (NJ) will implement systems from VirtuSense and Netsmart as funded by a grant from the FCC’s COVID-19 Telehealth Program.
• MetroHealth (OH) will use the social services referral platform of Unite Us. Co-founder and CEO Dan Brillman, MBA is a US Air Force Reserve major and pilot with campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, while co-founder Taylor Justice, MBA graduated from West Point and served as a US Army infantry officer.

People

Digital ambulatory surgery platform vendor ValueHealth hires Don Bisbee, MBA (Cerner) as president.

COVID-19

One-fifth of US nursing homes have less than a week’s supply of PPE on hand despite the federal government’s April 30 promise to help them with their needs to address COVID-19, which has killed 43,000 residents. Many have not received PPE shipments, some received only cloth masks and low-quality ponchos, and most say the quantities they received will last only a few days. The head of one Catholic nursing home group concludes, “The federal government’s failure to nationalize the supply chain and take control of it contributed to the deaths in nursing homes.”

A Seattle man who recovered from COVID-19 after a 62-day hospital experiences survivor’s guilt after seeing his hospital bill of $1.1 million, which doesn’t include the two-week rehab stay that followed. Medicare will cover most of his bill and he may pay nothing because of the federal government’s COVID-19’s bailout money, which the Seattle paper says is “like we’re doing an experiment for what universal health coverage might be like, but confining it to only this one illness.”

Rates of new cases and test positivity are trending up in Arizona, California, Florida,and Texas, suggesting that hospitalization and ICU bed usage will be increasing to possibly dangerously high levels over the new few weeks.

A new study of COVID-19 in Japan finds that symptom-free people aged 20-39 were most often the source of primary exposure, while healthcare facilities were most often involved. The authors also conclude that close-proximity singing, cheering, exercising, and bar conversation were associated with many of the clusters.

Other

Former Mass General Brigham and Cerner executive John Glaser, PhD makes the case to redesign EHRs around the patient-clinician medical plan rather than their current role as a place to record the byproducts it generates. He advocates keeping existing EHRs while addressing specific needs via wrap-around modules that providers can buy to meet their specific challenges (population health management, HIEs, patient-facing apps, and analytics). The next-generation EHR should include:

• A library of situation-specific care plans.
• Treatment algorithms.
• A master plan that is supplemented with to-do lists for each type of caregiver.
• Interoperability that allows the plan to travel across care settings, geographies, and EHRs.
• Decision support and workflow.
• Analytics tools that assess the patient’s individual plan and apply relevant lessons learned from the broader patient population.

County-owned, 647-bed New Hanover Regional Medical Center (NC) entertains acquisition and partnership offers from the state’s big health systems, with Duke Health offering $1.35 billion, Novant committing to $1.5 billion at closing and $2.5 billion in improvements, and Atrium Health offering a 40-year lease at $28 million per year and along with $2.2 billion in improvements.

Epic sends an internal email only to its diversity, equity, and inclusion employee groups, warning them that they should not participate in a virtual walkout in support of Black Lives Matter. Some white employees complained to the local paper that the email should have gone to everyone.The company also updated its employee policy to limit use of company resources for work purposes.

In Canada, the medical association of Newfoundland and Labrador complains about the government’s new app that connects people with a nurse practitioner in an extension of its 811 HealthLine telephone program. The doctors are unhappy that they weren’t consulted and are worried that the NP won’t see the patient’s electronic record, but the health minister says that’s a problem in general because some doctors use paper charts, some use an EHR, and some use Meditech’s regional implementation. He adds that the service was launched because people are happy with their virtual visits with doctors and they are equally effective as face-to-face visits in most cases, also noting that doctors don’t have a monopoly on providing healthcare services.

Sponsor Updates

• ChartLogic is named as a SoftwareAdvice.com’s EHR FrontRunner.
• PatientKeeper wins a Bronze PR Club Bell Ringer Award for its integrated marketing communications strategy.
• The local paper profiles PerfectServe’s efforts to provide providers with free software and services during the pandemic.
• The Big Unlock podcast features Phynd CEO Tom White.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “Powered by Battery with Redox CEO Luke Bonney.”
• Summit Healthcare names Amanda Mehlenbacher (Nicholas H. Noyes Memorial Hospital) implementation engineer.

Blog Posts

• How health systems can optimize revenues and resources (Ingenious Med)
• AI in Healthcare: 3 Tips to Avoid Common Pitfalls (Pivot Point Consulting)
• The Not-so-New Normal (PMD)
• Meeting Unparalleled Demand for Critical Supplies and Drugs (Premier)
• Explore the Pure//Accelerate “Un-keynote” Keynotes (Pure Storage)
• Virtual Patient Waiting Rooms: What They Are, Why You Need One, and How to Create It (Relatient)
• In Favor of the Shift (SailPoint)
• Classifying Data Processing (Spirion)
• Checking Up on Content, to Check in with Patients (StayWell)
• Right Around the Corner: 2021 CMS Rule Requiring Real Time Benefit Tools (Surescripts)
• End-of-Life Visitation with Safety and Compassion (Vocera)
• Everything You Need to Know About Legally Providing Telehealth (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 6/12/20

Top News

Silicon Valley investment firm Iconiq makes a “significant” investment in healthcare workforce management software vendor QGenda that values the company at just over $1 billion.

Francisco Partners, which considered selling the company in May, will remain Atlanta-based QGenda’s majority owner.

Reader Comments

From Going Live: “Re: EHR go-lives. Are they still happening? What measures are being taken to protect those involved?” The only go-lives I’ve heard about in the past couple of months were done remotely, but perhaps others have been involved in the traditional version and can report. I would be surprised if hospitals that were preparing for COVID overrun and banning patient visitors were simultaneously undertaking a go-live that involved on-site help.

From Confused: “Re: [vendor name omitted.] Announced new funding, but this news is 16 months old, according to former employees.” I reached out to the company, which says it held the announcement “to peg it to exciting company milestones and product capability rollouts.” I’m not listing their name since this could be commonly accepted practice for all I know and there’s no reason to call them out if so. I didn’t find any of the usual investment sources that listed the actual funding date — they all used the recent announcement date instead. Maybe the biggest takeaway here is that while it is impressive that companies are announcing new funding during a pandemic and its associated economic downturn, the funding itself may have occurred before all that happened or when its competitive situation was different than now.

From Doctor Doctor: “Re: COVID-19. I’ve seen a lot of dumb opinions and advice from doctors quoted on news sites and social media.” As have I. People erroneously think that all doctors from every practice setting are science-based, apolitical, free of commerce-related bias, current in their knowledge, and just as qualified as epidemiologists, virologists, and public health experts to speak authoritatively on COVID-19’s transmission, mitigation strategies, and treatment.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Somehow I missed that John Glaser left Cerner back in November 2019, according to his LinkedIn. He’s on the board of health IT-related organizations Press Ganey, EHealth Initiative, InTouch Health, American Telemedicine Association, PatientPing, Relatient, and Scottsdale Institute, also serving as a senior advisor to Brighton Park Capital.

Webinars

June 18 (Thursday) 12:30 ET. “Understanding the ONC’s Final Rule: Using FHIR HL7 for Successful EHR Integrations.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Bob Salitsky, healthcare IT expert, Newfire Global Partners; Jaya Plmanabhan, MS, healthcare data scientist. This fast-paced, 30-minute webinar will provide an overview of the Final Rule and describe how technology vendors, payers, and providers can use FHIR HL7 to deliver true interoperability. Attendees will learn how to define the data, technology, and flows needed for their EHR integration projects; how products can retrieve health information while meeting compliance regulations; and the benefit of adopting quickly to the future of data exchange while simplifying future integration efforts.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Provider search and scheduling software vendor Kyruus raises $30 million in a venture round from Francisco Partners, bringing its total funding to $155 million.

Wellsheet raises $3.8 million in a Series A funding round. The New Jersey-based startup has developed software that uses predictive analytics to optimize provider workflows.

Genetic clinical decision support company ActX secures a patent pertaining to cloud-based storage and real-time distribution of biological information.

Automated virtual care vendor Conversa Health raises $12 million in a Series B funding round.

Sales

• Health and Social Care Northern Ireland signs a $351 million contract with Epic for implementation across five trusts and its ambulance service.

People

Optum promotes former Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation director Patrick Conway, MD to CEO of its Care Solutions group.

Virtual care technology vendor Conversa Health promotes Murray Brozinsky to CEO.

Kevin Lynch (Netgain) joins Datica as CEO. Co-founder and former CEO Jeremy Pierotti takes on the role of president.

Announcements and Implementations

Goliath Technologies helps Maimonides Medical Center (NY) anticipate, troubleshoot, and resolve Citrix slowdown issues.

Nuance Dragon Medical One voice assistant users can now access UpToDate clinical content from Wolters Kluwer Health.

Novant Health (NC) implements iQueue for Operating Rooms from LeanTaas to help its surgical facilities ramp back up to pre-COVID-19 capacities.

Health Catalyst will launch a quality reporting product that combines its Data Operating System with measures, visualizations, and workflows from Able Health, which it acquired earlier this year.

Government and Politics

The VA gives Cerner a $99 million task order for sustainment support of hardware and software associated with its $10 billion EHR modernization project.

COVID-19

Regeneron begins the first clinical trials of antibodies for COVID-19 treatment, which if successful, could be cleared for emergency use by fall assuming production can be ramped up.

Researchers identify 12 malware-distributing Android apps that were disguised to look like COVID-19 contact tracing apps issued by the governments of Brazil, Italy, Russia, Singapore, and other countries.

Business Insider reports that just three states – Alabama, North Dakota, and South Carolina – will use contact tracing apps from Apple and Google. Seventeen states have said they won’t use contact-tracing apps at all, while 19 remain undecided.

None of the 140 customers of a Missouri hair salon whose hair was cut by two stylists who worked for eight days despite having active, symptomatic COVID-19 infection have become infected. Health department officials credit the salon’s insistence on mask-wearing by both customers and employees, its wider spacing of chairs, and its staggered appointment times to reduce group waiting. The stylists have been released from isolation. Experts are increasingly convinced that wearing masks could significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Mount Sinai (NY) uses a grant from Microsoft’s AI for Health program to develop an informatics center dedicated to COVID-19 research.

The Department of Justice charges the president of a biotechnology company with submitting $69 million in fraudulent COVID-19 and allergy testing claims to mislead investors. Arrayit’s Mark Schena, PhD allegedly paid kickbacks to doctors for ordering allergy testing regardless of medical need, used the revenue to misrepresent the company’s prospects to investors, then jumped on the COVID-19 bandwagon with diagnostic tests whose accuracy was questionable.

Privacy and Security

StayWell secures the portal it hosts for the State of Kentucky’s health and wellness incentive program after discovering two data breaches that exposed employee email addresses, passwords, and biometric screening and health assessment data. The breach also resulted in fraudulent gift card redemptions.

Other

Bloomberg Businessweek describes the negative effects of private equity firms buying dermatology practices, 10% of which are now owned by PE firms:

• The PE formula of drastically cutting costs and flipping the business for a profit in 3-5 years with a 20-30% annualized return makes it difficult to serve both patients and investors effectively.
• Corporate-owned medical practices are illegal in many states, but lawyers get around that by creating a management company that buys a practice’s non-clinical accesses and bills its doctors for its services, which is supposed to keep medical decisions separate from profit-seeking ones even though PE firms admit that they insert themselves into the clinical side of the practice.
• Doctors in solo practice can sell out for $7-12 million, with some of that paid in equity. Patients are not notified of the practice’s new owner.
• Some of the acquiring firms pay cash bonuses to offices that hit daily and monthly financial goals, encouraging them to perform as many procedures as possible. In some cases, medical assistants earned their bonuses by falsifying documentation and doctors were told to falsely claim that they were supervising PAs.
• PE firms push dermatologists to perform more high-profit procedures such as cosmetic surgery, laser treatments, and Mohs surgeries, the latter of which are sometimes performed by traveling labs that are flown in or that work from temporary parking lot clinics.
• PE firms buy labs and hire their own pathologists to keep revenue in-house, which is legally allowed under Stark laws only for dermatology and a few other specialties.
• Doctors are pushed to see more patients and sometimes are forced to use inferior medical supplies and equipment. One dermatologist says their employer insisted that surgery patients be sent home with open wounds so they would be forced to return the next day for suturing, which allowed the practice to bill them a second time.
• 25% of the dermatologists with the highest biopsy rate work for private equity-backed groups who encourage diagnosing “Pre- pre- pre-cancer” to get patients to have skin blotches removed.
• A dermatologist says that the debt-saddled chains are struggling to find their expected buyers since “there’s a limit to how much money you can make when you’re sticking knives into human skin for profit.” As a result, the PE firms are moving into specialties that perform more invasive procedures, such as urology.

Sponsor Updates

• Banner Health (AZ) expands its use of Spok’s Care Connect communication software.
• Health Catalyst will partner with life sciences company Sprim to use real-world evidence to inform clinical trials for liver disease.
• Gartner includes Imat Solutions in its “US Healthcare Payer CIOs Boost Medicare Advantage Star Ratings Using Engagement Hubs and Insights” report.
• The “HIT Like a Girl” podcast will feature Intelligent Medical Objects CEO Ann Barnes on June 10.
• NextGate’s identity-matching EMPI solution is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
• Arcadia makes available a COVID-19 Recovery Toolkit to help its customers resume normal operations.
• Wolters Kluwer Health helps to develop and virtually host the American Diabetes Association’s 80th Scientific Sessions June
• Providers from five health systems will present their experience with implementing Glytec’s EGlycemic Management System during the 2020 Diabetes Technology Society Virtual Hospital Poster Session. 12-16.
• PCare adds on-demand movies and television shows from Tubi to its COVID-19 Tablet Configuration Solution.
• Optimum Healthcare IT posts a case study titled “ Virtual Epic Go-Live at Valley Children’s Healthcare.”

Blog Posts

• 5 ways to enhance your cloud storage security and data protection (Google Cloud)
• Tackle your billing backlog to increase cash flow (Greenway Health)
• What is Clinical Communication? (Halo Health)
• Enabling Digital Foundations for the Future (The HCI Group)
• Clinical NLP Part 2: A Better Equation for Calculating Quality Measures (Wolters Kluwer Health Language)
• Why It’s Necessary to Integrate Protocols into Existing Workflows (Healthfinch)
• The Secret to Creating the Most Satisfied Patients (Healthwise)
• The Essential Resource Guide to Hospital-Enabled Virtual Care | Part 1 of 5 (Access)
• Overview of Nordic’s Capacity Simulation and Management Solution (Nordic)
• 2020 health IT trends: Revisited (Hyland)
• A Leading Look at Revenue Integrity (Impact Advisors)
• Are you getting the most from your IT investments? (Imprivata)
• Creating an effective remote workforce strategy (Infor)
• Help simplify nurses’ lives: 5 ways to streamline nursing workflows (Spok)
• MIPS Registry and Reporting: Increase Quality Time with Patients While Maximizing Revenue (Ingenious Med)
• Moving Toward Meaningful Mental Health Data (InterSystems)
• Meeting Your Communities’ Mental Health Needs During and After COVID-19 (Kyruus)
• How COVID-19 is Advancing Healthcare’s Need for a Digital Transformation (Medhost)
• Strategies to Bolster Infection Control and Surveillance Amid COVID-19 (Netsmart)

Contacts

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

News 6/10/20

Top News

PatientPing raises $60 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to more than $100 million.

Reader Comments

From X-Treem Geek: “Re: Duke–UNC anti-trust lawsuit brought by physicians. Looks like they will soon face a new lawsuit for faculty.” Duke University and University of North Carolina paid $54.5 million in mid-2019 to settle a class action lawsuit in which academic physicians found evidence of a decades-long “no poach” agreement in which the schools agreed to avoid recruiting each other’s doctors to keep salaries in check. The new case seeks damages for non-medical faculty members who were not part of the original lawsuit.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Cerner tells me that tiny analytics vendor Surgisphere – which is under fire for its use of EHR data of unknown provenance to publish error-filled, now-retracted COVID-19 research studies – is not a Health Facts customer. Surgisphere has declined to disclose how it obtained a massive database of de-identified patient encounters from hospital EHRs, and many large health systems say they’ve never provided such data to the company. Meanwhile a non-profit in Africa that was using a Surgisphere-provided COVID-19 Severity Scoring Tool powered by the same database rescinds its recommendation of the software.

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

Webinars

June 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “COVID-19: preparing your OR for elective surgeries.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Janice Kelly, MS, RN, president, AORN Syntegrity Inc.; David Bocanegra, RN, nurse informaticist, IMO. The presenters will cover the steps and guidelines that are needed for hospitals to resume performing elective surgeries and how healthcare information technology can optimize efficiencies and financial outcomes for the return of the OR.

June 18 (Thursday) 12:30 ET. “Understanding the ONC’s Final Rule: Using FHIR HL7 for Successful EHR Integrations.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Bob Salitsky, healthcare IT expert, Newfire Global Partners; Jaya Plmanabhan, MS, healthcare data scientist. This fast-paced, 30-minute webinar will provide an overview of the Final Rule and describe how technology vendors, payers, and providers can use FHIR HL7 to deliver true interoperability. Attendees will learn how to define the data, technology, and flows needed for their EHR integration projects; how products can retrieve health information while meeting compliance regulations; and the benefit of adopting quickly to the future of data exchange while simplifying future integration efforts.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Business Insider profiles Doxy.me, which saw the user count for its browser-based telehealth platform jump from 80,000 in January to 700,000 now. The company is run from the house of the CEO, Medical University of South Carolina Assistant Professor Brandon Welch, MS, PhD, whose doctorate is in biomedical informatics. Headcount has increased from 15 full-time employees to more than 50. The company says it isn’t interested in the pitches it is suddenly getting from venture capital firms that have until now characterized telehealth platforms as a commodity. Welch, who says the company’s main competitor is Zoom, concludes, “The only thing providers care about is a way to connect with their patients. They don’t need all the other crap that other telemedicine solutions are providing. We just keep it simple and made it easy to sign up.” Doxy.me’s basic product is free, with paid upgrades available for expanded functionality and institutional use.

Banyan Medical Systems offers its virtual care and telemedicine platform with no upfront costs to eligible hospitals that are waiting for funding from FCC’s COVID-19 Telehealth Program. I did a double take at the company’s information page that says funding expires on June 31, 2020, a day that will live in infamy for not actually existing.

Sales

• Poplar Bluff Regional Medical Center (MO) will implement Pulsara’s telehealth and communication platform.
• Rady Children’s Hospital – San Diego chooses Syft’s Synergy for supply chain management.
• FDA will use HealthVerity’s privacy-protected data exchange for performing COVID-19 research on real-world datasets.
• North Carolina’s HHS will use a COVID-19 version of the OpenBeds Critical Resource Tracker to track treatment and equipment resources across the state. The existing OpenBeds platform was developed to allow states to pool their behavioral health resources. OpenBeds is owned by Appriss Health, which is best known for its state prescription drug monitoring program systems.

People

Mount Sinai Health System (NY) promotes Kristin Myers, MPH to EVP/CIO and dean for IT.

Announcements and Implementations

A Black Book survey finds that 93% of hospitals and large physician practices have seen financial IT system shortcomings exposed during the pandemic. Most CFOs say they will not reduce or defer financial system spending as they look to IT to improve revenue capture and to provide analytics and forecasting support.

Nemours Children’s Health System (FL) saw its telehealth visit count jump from 800 in April 2019 to 30,000 in April 2020, where it uses InterSystems technology to exchange information between its EHR and the its CareConnect virtual system for scheduling appointments.

OptimizeRx says that a partnership with an unnamed organization will expand the reach of its specialty medication platform to 300 health systems that use Cerner and Epic.

Government and Politics

Insurers, hospitals, and unions are pushing Congress to spend $100 billion to pay the COBRA insurance payments of 27 million laid-off workers who would basically get their health insurance for free. They are also supporting expanded ACA subsidies and Medicaid, but expect the COBRA bill to gain the widest support in Congress since it bypasses ACA-related politics.

COVID-19

WHO makes a questionable statement that people who are free of COVID-19 symptoms don’t spread the infection, failing to differentiate between “asymptomatic” (infected patients who never experience symptoms) from “pre-symptomatic” (those who are infected but don’t exhibit symptoms until days later). WHO based its conclusion on a tiny review of contact tracing in China, whose findings are not in agreement with four rigorous studies that used actual data instead of people who simply speculate that their infections came from someone with symptoms. The resulting mass media clickbait interpretation makes the definitive statement that people won’t become infected if they avoid those with obvious symptoms, which could affect mitigation strategies such as encouraging social distancing and wearing masks. UPDATE: WHO clarifies that 6-41% of people who are infected don’t have symptoms but can still spread it, with 40% of infections coming from those symptom-free people. WHO says it regrets calling such spread “very rare.” Bottom line: nothing new has been learned and WHO takes a black eye for allowing scientists to confuse the public with poorly worded or researched comments, although they are at least allowing scientists to speak without bureaucratic filters. WHO also said in its correction that nobody should assume that its employees who are speaking at press conferences are speaking on behalf of WHO, which is truly bizarre.

Experts warn that temperature screening of employees and customers provides false reassurance given New York data showing that 70% of people admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 did not have a fever.

Getting people back to work in high-rise office buildings that house thousands of workers creates a new problem with social distancing – limiting the number of people who are allowed in an elevator simultaneously while avoiding having them log-jammed in close proximity in the lobby.

HHS will run out of its free supply of remdesivir by the end of this month as Gilead tries to ramp up production of the antiviral, whose modest benefit to hospitalized COVID-19 patients was enough to convince HHS to distribute it to some hospitals.

Other

Mozilla names the OpenMRS EHR as one of three open source winners of a $50,000 grant from its COVID-19 Solutions Fund. The award will be used to create the OpenMRS Public Health Response system that will include data collection tools, reports, and interfaces with public health systems.

Tuesday saw mixed messages from CMS Administrator Seema Verma on telehealth. She told STAT that “it would not be a good thing to force our beneficiaries to go back to in-person visits,” but then hinted that CMS needs to look at whether it should pay the same rates as in-person visits. She then said in an announcement encouraging the reopening of healthcare facilities that “while telehealth has proven to be a lifeline, nothing can absolutely replace the gold standard: in-person care.” I’m wondering if those who jubilantly predicted that the telehealth genie could not be put back in the bottle may have overestimated, as it seems clear that many providers and patients prefer in-office care; practices are more efficient (and therefore more profitable) when their providers are flitting between multiple exam rooms simultaneously, using non-physician helpers optimally, and perhaps upselling other services; kludgy solutions like Zoom and Skype offer an underwhelming, make-do experience; and the couple of months of virtual-only visits may not have been adequate to permanently change habits. All it would take is a pullback in CMS’s emergency payment and licensure policies to fill the waiting rooms again.

In India, a state government investigates the case of an 80-year-old hospital patient whose family could pay only part of his bill. The hospital, worried about collecting the balance owed, refused to discharged the man and instead tied him to the bed.

Sponsor Updates

• CompuGroup Medical sponsors recognition of Teachers of the Year in its US headquarters in Phoenix. The company provides CGM ELVI for telehealth, which allows teachers and students to connect virtually for counseling and speech therapy sessions.
• Artifact Health engineering VP Jake Lieman describes the company’s experience in integrating its mobile physician query platform with Cerner using Cerner’s APIs.
• Impact Advisors is named to CRN’s 2020 Solution Provider 500 list for the sixth consecutive year.
• Clinical data exchange capabilities from InterSystems helps Nemours Children’s Health System scale its CareConnect telemedicine service.
• XpresSpa will use AdvancedMD’s practice management and EHR software at its new XpresCheck COVID-19 screening and testing facilities in US airports.
• CompuGroup Medical recognizes Teachers of the Year in Phoenix, the home of its US headquarters.
• Elsevier Clinical Solutions adds Portuguese-language content to its COVID-19 Healthcare Hub.
• Ellkay supports the Alpine Learning Group’s virtual Go the Distance for Autism Ride as a platinum sponsor.

Blog Posts

• Improving Financial and Clinical Outcomes During COVID-19 (CareSignal)
• The Importance of Progress Metrics for Epic Go-Live Support (314e)
• Skilled nursing facilities to receive break on reporting staffing data (Ability Network)
• Patient Financial Engagement in a Post-COVID-19 World (AdvancedMD)
• Team up: Xero Viewer & Microsoft Teams Integration for faster COVID-19 Response at PAHT, UK (Agfa Healthcare)
• CMS’ New Hospital Notification Rule: Validation of health information exchange and an opportunity to push further (Audacious Inquiry)
• Interoperability Q&A with Ross Marguiles, Associate at Foley Hoag: Part 1 (CarePort)
• Lessons Learned: Addressing the Pandemic Through Care Collaboration (Collective Medical)
• 10 Years After Diagnosis, Cancer Survivor Focuses on the Future (CoverMyMeds)
• Lessons Learned from Hospital Leaders in the COVID-19 Pandemic (Dimensional Insight)
• 10,000 Daily Pre-Shift Health Checks with Dina’s COVID-19 Screening Tools (Dina)
• Expanding the Range of Specialty Care (EClinicalWorks)
• Telehealth Benefits Expansion: Helping Providers Maximize Reimbursement (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/8/20

Top News

A GAO review finds that the VA has implemented effective configuration decision-making in its Cerner implementation by holding national workshops and creating 18 EHR councils, but needs to improve representation at local workshops.

The report also notes that while the VA and DoD both user Cerner, coordination is needed to allow sharing of information and tasks, such as VA’s requirement to maintain durable orders for life-sustaining treatment across patient encounters that is not supported by the DoD’s Cerner configuration.

Reader Comments

From Quinn Martin: “Re: rebranding. Why so hostile to the marketing folks?” That was Dr. Jayne, but I agree with her conclusion. Rebranding is admirable, but publicly pontificating about it and the process that went into it is not. Companies for some reason feel the need to yammer on in press releases about the naively aspirational big-picture ideas that led them to choose a particular website color or logo style (probably just to stroke the marketing people who dreamed it up) and the whole world just rolls its eyes. Just do it and let your audience react without trying to forcibly steer them to pre-conclude how wonderful it all is. My experience is that even though non-marketing company executives grudgingly go along with the process, they aren’t simultaneously committing to implement corporate change as part of the pig-lipsticking process, so it’s usually fluff anyway. Show, don’t tell.

From Creole Mustard: “Re: HIMSS. Pledges to stand against racial inequality.” I will provide a pro bono communication plan for this effort – publicly report how many people of color are on the HIMSS board and executive team, then ask vendor and provider organizations to do the same. I’ll recycle my advice from above – show, don’t tell.

From Didn’t Attend: “Re: HIMSS. Do you agree with Dr. Jayne’s assessment of HIMSS as greedy because they aren’t giving HIMSS20 refunds?” Not exactly. HIMSS was always about profit, highly paid executives, behaving like a vendor, and profitably commingling providers and vendors in a boat show environment that had little to do with patients or actual health. However, it clearly met a market need, as evidenced by its ever-increasing headcount and revenue. My take: I don’t think HIMSS is financially capable of providing HIMSS20 refunds even if it were inclined to do so, especially given the uncertainty of the conference industry in general, from which HIMSS generates $43 million of its $95 million in revenue. Imagine sitting around the HIMSS conference room table trying to plan HIMSS21 amidst the choking dust that remains from the implosion of HIMSS20. Where HIMSS needs to step up is in transparency and honesty instead of brandishing its force majeure clause in the faces of the members and exhibitors who express concerns – those members are really all it has left at this point. HIMSS20 was scheduled for just three months ago, so maybe they are still crafting strategy and exploring options, but I think the wounds are festering rather than healing. Now is the time to win us all back over. Other cancelled conferences seem to be doing a better job of managing the fallout, and while it’s probably unfair to compare leadership styles, I think former CEO Steve Lieber would have taken positive control of the narrative instead of creating a communications void that its critics are happy to fill.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

More than 80% of poll respondents prefer to work from home at least one day per week.

New poll to your right or here: Would you trust medical research findings that are based on analyzing the EHR data of hundreds of hospitals?

I celebrated the anniversary of the heroics of D-Day, now 76 years in the rear-view mirror, by reading “A Train Near Madgeburg,” a previously untold story of how Americans (mostly teenagers) of the 743rd Tank Battalion, which was one of three tank battalions that landed in the first wave on Omaha Beach, became the world’s first witnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust in April 1945. They rolled into Germany, and purely by serendipity, found and liberated a train full of 2,500 starving concentration camp prisoners who were minutes away from being exterminated to hide evidence of crimes against humanity to the the tune of millions of deaths. The author, a high school teacher, told the stories of those boys of long ago and those mostly women and children they saved, bringing them together in reunions at his school to provide their first-hand accounts. I was uncomfortable with the similarity of those 1933-1945 events to today’s headlines, but I was moved by the actions of one battle-fatigued, eight-man M5 light tank crew who, deep into Nazi Germany and surrounded by mostly hostile locals, were left alone overnight in their single light tank to guard the train’s occupants, who they assured were “under the protection of the United States Army.” Few books capture both the worst and best aspects of humanity like this one and the lessons it contains are worth careful study.

Webinars

June 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “COVID-19: preparing your OR for elective surgeries.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Janice Kelly, MS, RN, president, AORN Syntegrity Inc.; David Bocanegra, RN, nurse informaticist, IMO. The presenters will cover the steps and guidelines that are needed for hospitals to resume performing elective surgeries and how healthcare information technology can optimize efficiencies and financial outcomes for the return of the OR.

June 18 (Thursday) 12:30 ET. “Understanding the ONC’s Final Rule: Using FHIR HL7 for Successful EHR Integrations.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Bob Salitsky, healthcare IT expert, Newfire Global Partners; Jaya Plmanabhan, MS, healthcare data scientist. This fast-paced, 30-minute webinar will provide an overview of the Final Rule and describe how technology vendors, payers, and providers can use FHIR HL7 to deliver true interoperability. Attendees will learn how to define the data, technology, and flows needed for their EHR integration projects; how products can retrieve health information while meeting compliance regulations; and the benefit of adopting quickly to the future of data exchange while simplifying future integration efforts.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

NorthShore University HealthSystem completes a precision medicine program in which genetic data is loaded into ActX’s genomic service, then is used within Epic to alert medication ordering clinicians of potential genetics-related side effects, efficacy, or dosing considerations. Long-timers know ActX founder and CEO Andy Ury, MD, whose leadership history includes Physician Micro Systems and Practice Partner. In an unrelated note, whose “let’s just make up words” idea led to the grammatical abomination of “NorthShore” and “HealthSystem?” The CEO blabbered on in 2008 about how the former Evanston Northwestern Healthcare had “outgrown its name,” the “NorthShore” part communicates the all-important “prestige,” and the “brand equation” needed to include “University,” all of which were guaranteed to ensure “ushering in a new era.” I’m guessing the locals just call it “North Shore” anyway are are either indifferent to or annoyed by the impersonal “system” in the name.

Announcements and Implementations

Scripps Mercy Hospital San Diego is using Dexcom’s continuous glucose monitoring system for managing inpatient diabetics, including those with COVID-19 who would otherwise require finger sticks.

COVID-19

The government of Delhi, India files charges against a private hospital that failed to report its COVID-19 test results using the government’s mandatory reporting app. The chief minister also issued a warning to hospitals that he says are turning away COVID-19 patients to free up beds to sell on the black market.

US combined deaths for pneumonia, influenza, and COVID-19 as a percentage of the total continue to taper off sharply, on track to return to pre-COVID levels. Total US coronavirus deaths are at 111,000, with the projection that has been most accurate over time predicting 190,000 deaths by September 1.

CMS acknowledges the wide discrepancy between its just-published data on COVID-19 cases in Virginia nursing homes with data from the state’s Department of Health. CMS reports that one nursing home has had 90 residents die of COVID-19 when in fact it has had zero deaths in zero confirmed cases. CMS also reports only nursing home information, while the state includes assisted living centers in its totals. The industry’s trade group says CDC’s slow approval of new accounts explains the 29 facilities that did not report at all. Virginia has refused to provided totals for specific nursing homes since the state defines corporations as “persons” whose confidential information cannot be published.

Sponsor Updates

• Pivot Point Consulting Managing Partner Rachel Marano joins Vaco’s latest Free Yourself podcast, “Flexing to the Curve in Healthcare IT.”
• PerfectServe recognizes customer St. Elizabeth Healthcare as its 2020 Healthcare Champion.
• The Late Late Show host James Corden will keynote Pure Storage’s Pure//Accelerate Digital event on June 10.
• Santa Rosa Consulting publishes a new case study featuring Berkshire Health Systems.
• Spirion welcomes new board members T.E.N. CEO Marci McCarthy and Fannie Mae Deputy General Counsel Jennifer Mailander.

Blog Posts

• A Real View: Supporting Northwell radiologists and the Javits center field hospital with innovation and infrastructure (Nuance)
• Don’t Miss Out on New MTM Opportunities (OmniSys)
• Rapid Radiology puts the focus on senior care (OpenText)
• Wake of the Floor: Enhancing Patient Engagement as we Emerge from the Shutdown (PCare)
• Newborns Don’t Defer Birth: A Clear Case to Better Equip L&D Clinicians (PeriGen)
• Your Future Revealed: Telehealth with PMD (PMD)
• Disrupt or Be Disrupted: Aligning with Independent Physicians Post-Pandemic (Premier)
• HR & Payroll’s Critical Role in Overcoming COVID-19 (ROI Healthcare Solutions)
• Your Workforce Has Changed, So Must Your Identity Strategy (SailPoint)
• 5 strategies to destressing IT teams in stressful times (StayWell)
• COVID-19 Revenue Recovery: Four Steps to Successful Program Launch (Strata Decision Technology)
• The Cost of an EHR Downtime (Summit Healthcare)
• How to Prepare for the Perfect Storm: Hurricane Season and COVID-19 (Surescripts)
• HonorHealth’s AVP Healthcare Marketing on Growth and Loyalty (SymphonyRM)
• End-of-Life Visitation with Safety and Compassion (Vocera)
• Culture After Crisis: How Clinics Must Evolve to Support Employees in the Coming Months (WebPT)
• A Leading Look at Revenue Integrity (Impact Advisors)

Contacts

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

News 6/5/20

Top News

Governments around the world have changed their COVID-19 policies using apparently flawed research findings from virtually unknown US analytics vendor Surgisphere, whose handful of employees includes a science fiction writer and an adult entertainer.

Lancet has retracted the paper and NEJM has begun the retraction process for hydroxychloroquine-related articles that were based on suspicious data from the company, which is led by founder, CEO, and former vascular surgeon Sapan Desai, MD, PhD.

Surgisphere, which does not identify any scientific advisory board that oversees its work, recently pivoted from publishing medical textbooks. It claims to have created a real-time database of 240 million anonymized patient encounters from 1,200 healthcare organizations in 45 countries, It says the information is provided by “our hospital customers,” although the company declines to name them and no hospitals have come forward as being among those data-providing customers.

Desai says the company has 11 employees. He says it uses AI/ML to perform the data analysis, further explaining, “The labor intensive task required for exporting the data from an electronic health records, converting it into the format required by our data dictionary, and fully de-identifying the data is done by the healthcare partner.”

I found a 2015 paper with Desai as the lead author that used Cerner Health Facts as its data source, so I’m wondering if that’s what Surgisphere uses. I’ve asked Cerner to confirm and am waiting to hear back. I have confirmed that the source is not Epic Cosmos.

As an HIStalk reader says, “This is a major setback for science and the credibility of medical expertise.” I would add that it may also call into question how researchers use aggregated EHR data to draw clinical conclusions when they may not fully understand the semantics and sourcing of that data, especially when most of us know how messy and maddeningly inconsistent EHR data can be even within a single health system, with the potential of AI/ML to introduce further errors while trying to clean it up.

Webinars

June 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “COVID-19: preparing your OR for elective surgeries.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Janice Kelly, MS, RN, president, AORN Syntegrity Inc.; David Bocanegra, RN, nurse informaticist, IMO. The presenters will cover the steps and guidelines that are needed for hospitals to resume performing elective surgeries and how healthcare information technology can optimize efficiencies and financial outcomes for the return of the OR.

June 18 (Thursday) 12:30 ET. “Understanding the ONC’s Final Rule: Using FHIR HL7 for Successful EHR Integrations.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Bob Salitsky, healthcare IT expert, Newfire Global Partners; Jaya Plmanabhan, MS, healthcare data scientist. This fast-paced, 30-minute webinar will provide an overview of the Final Rule and describe how technology vendors, payers, and providers can use FHIR HL7 to deliver true interoperability. Attendees will learn how to define the data, technology, and flows needed for their EHR integration projects; how products can retrieve health information while meeting compliance regulations; and the benefit of adopting quickly to the future of data exchange while simplifying future integration efforts.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

RCM company R1’s shares jumped over 9% on the news that it will acquire Cerner’s RevWorks business in a transaction valued at $30 million. As part of the deal, Cerner will offer R1’s software and services to customers and prospects. In an April 2019 earnings call, company reps said RevWorks had grown stagnant, contributing $200 million in annual revenue. Cerner had been using its RevWorks offerings “to more tightly align the client to Cerner” for additional sales of its software and services.

Sales

• Cumberland River Hospital (TN) selects RCM software and services from TruBridge, and EHR technology from CPSI sister company Evident.
• CHI Texas Health Network selects Innovaccer’s FHIR Data Activation Platform to help it better manage utilization, care workflows, and patient outreach.

People

Moffitt Cancer Center promotes interim CIO Elizabeth Lindsay-Wood, MBA to the permanent VP/CIO position.

MDLive names Cynthia Zelis, MD (University Hospitals) as chief medical officer.

Intermountain Healthcare hires Ryan Smith, MBA (Health Catalyst) as VP/CIO. He replaces Marc Probst, MBA, who will retire.

AI-powered physician assistant developer Saykara hires Joy Efron (Glytec) as VP of marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

Change Healthcare announces GA of Connected Consumer Health, which includes provider search, appointment scheduling, patient intake, messaging, and billing.

Healthfully adds NextGate’s enterprise master patient index to its white-labeled personal health and wellness record.

Banner Health will use video technology to conduct rounding on patients with COVID-19, repurposing patient room TVs with videoconferencing via virtual care technology from VeeMed and Intel.

Beauregard Health System (LA) implements SOC’s Telemed IQ software for critical care, inpatient neurology, emergency neurology, psychiatry, and cardiology.

Government and Politics

Congressional sources say the VA probably won’t restart its Cerner rollout until the fall because of COVID-19 demands.

A GAO review finds that the “Mar-a-Lago group” of three influential associates of President Trump meddled in the VA’s decision-making as private citizens, including influencing its selection of Cerner, but GAO says it was outside the scope of its investigation to determine whether the group constituted a formal advisory committee whose membership and role carry legal ramifications. Mostly it seems the three — none of whom have any government or military experience — wasted the VA’s time in demanding to become involved, pitching themselves and their associates for various projects, and asking newbie questions using the mandate from the president that left VA officials uncertain about how much effort to spend dealing with them.

HHS provides health systems an additional $250 million to help them expand virtual care and telemedicine services, train staff, procure PPE, and coordinate COVID-19 responses.

COVID-19

HHS issues new COVID-19 testing data requirements that it hopes will give it better understanding of the outbreak. Laboratories must report de-identified COVID-19 testing results to the CDC in one of three ways: (a) through local health departments via HL7 or CSV; (b) by a centralized platform such as AIMS whose information is then routed to CDC; or (c) via an HIE. Required data elements include patient demographics (age, race, ethnicity, sex, ZIP code, and county of residence); provider name and NPI; and date ordered and collected. The same information must be provided for home-based tests. HHS asks (but does not require) that the patient’s name, address, phone number, and date of birth be collected and reported. Also recommended but not mandatory is that the lab results include the test result, unique patient identifier, LOINC-coded test ordered, device identifier, and accession number.  HHS wants to start receiving the new data elements as soon as possible, but no later than August 1.

Morgan Stanley’s COVID-19 model shows a slowly expanding epidemic in the US, with cases and/or hospitalizations rising in Arkansas, Arizona, North Carolina, Washington, Utah, and Texas, leading to its concerns that the US will experience an earlier second wave than other Western nations and will carry a big infection burden into fall as reintroducing mitigation strategies afterward may not be feasible.

Sweden’s top epidemiologist admits that the country’s controversial strategy of avoiding lockdowns to allow mounting a sustained COVID019 response has not been successful, as its 43 deaths per 100,000 population ranks among the worst globally and the country’s economy is slumping anyway.

Premier asks HHS to make 24 temporary, COVID-related regulatory waivers permanent, primarily those involving telehealth. They include allowing non-rural providers to provide services, expanding the types of practitioners, allowing audio-only visits, and expanding telehealth to occupational and behavioral health services. Premier also recommends changing EMTALA to allow pre-admission screening, allowing nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform routine medical tasks, and eliminating the rule that requires Medicare patients to undergo a three-day inpatient hospital stay before they can be admitted to a skilled nursing facility.

Fitbit secures Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA for its new Fitbit Flow ventilator. The wearables company developed the device with help from the Mass General Brigham Center for COVID Innovation and emergency physicians at Oregon Health & Science University.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that hydroxychloroquine did not prevent people who had been exposed to COVID-19 from developing the disease.

Other

A Cleveland Clinic analysis of EHR data finds that while behavioral health ED visits dropped by 28% with the implementation of stay-at-home orders, suicide-related encounters decreased by 60%. The authors don’t know whether the drop-off was due to people not seeking mental health care, using behavioral telehealth services as an alternative, or experiencing fewer suicidal thoughts while isolated. The authors will correlate these findings with actual suicide rates once those are published.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health’s customer support teams for UpToDate, Ovid, and Lippincott each win a NorthFace ScoreBoard Award from the Customer Relationship Management Institute.
• Microsoft awards Billings Clinic (MT) and Health Catalyst a joint 2020 Health Innovation Award.
• Health Data Movers publishes a new case study, “COVID-19 Rapid Response.”
• Dina will sponsor the June 18 virtual demo day of Home Health Care News, where it will showcase its COVID-19 employee health screening and reporting tools.
• Hyland donates $10,000 to The Foundation of FirstHealth’s COVID-19 Response Fund.
• KLAS recognizes Impact Advisors with top marks in its Clinical Optimization Services 2020 report.
• Nordic releases a new edition of its HIT Breakdown podcast, “Automating submission of data to registries.”
• CentralLogic publishes a new case study, “Arizona Surge Line: A unique collaborative response to the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.”
• Bright.md announces that its Smart Exam virtual care technology is now available in Epic’s App Orchard.
• Health Data Movers announces new account managers.
• Health Catalyst will participate virtually in the William Blair Annual Growth Stock Conference on June 10 and the Goldman Sachs Annual Global Healthcare Conference on June 11.

Blog Posts

• How Connected Medical Devices Can Slow COVID-19 Spread in Hospitals (Capsule)
• Coping with COVID-19 – Part 2 (Ingenious Med)
• Single Sign-On vs. MFA: Do You Know the Difference? (Fortified Health Security)
• Maimonides Medical Center Quickly Troubleshoots “Citrix is Slow” Complaints (Goliath Technologies)
• How Google Cloud partners are supporting customers during COVID-19 (Google Cloud)
• Drive-Through COVID-19 Testing Best Practices (Halo Health)
• Virtual Care in Population Health (The HCI Group)
• HITComm – A COVID-19 HIT Solutions Forum (HCTec)
• The Able Health Quality Measures Solution: Why a Comprehensive Approach Matters (Health Catalyst)
• Implementing Prescription Renewal Technology During a Pandemic (Healthfinch)
• Did You Know That the Imat Platform Brings More Meaning to Data Through Natural Language Processing? (Imat Solutions)
• Planning Your Comeback (Impact Advisors)
• Patient-centric and Cost-effective staffing tools designed for Healthcare (Infor)
• The impact of canceling elective procedures due to COVID-19 (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• To Recover After COVID-19, Healthcare Providers Must Advance Tools for Patient Self-Help (Loyale Healthcare)
• How EHRs Help Nurses Balance Care Planning (Medhost)
• What it means to survive cancer, 10 years later (Meditech)
• 7 Biggest Issues Facing Physical Therapists in 2020 (And Tips on Tackling Them) (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 6/3/20

Top News

Private equity firm Rubicon Technology Partners takes a majority position in patient access center platform vendor Central Logic.

Terms were not announced, but pre-deal rumors suggested a deal value of $110-125 million. The company had previously raised $14 million.

I interviewed President and CEO Angie Franks four months ago.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week marks HIStalk’s 17th birthday. I put together a snapshot of that summer of 2003 last year just to remind long-timers what was happening in the health IT world back then:

• Some big healthcare names were George W. Bush, Tommy Thompson, Tom Scully, Dennis O’Leary, Erich Reinhardt, Linda Kloss, Anthony Principi, and Neal Patterson.
• Hospitals were struggling with early CPOE implementations.
• Kaiser Permanente had just chosen Epic.
• Cerner had just made its first UK sales and opened its new headquarters.
• HIMSS offered HIMSS03 in San Diego (with keynotes from Jeff Immelt, Rudy Giuliani, and Patch Adams) following Summer HIMSS in Chicago and also launched Solutions Toolkit, the predecessor to HIMSS Analytics.
• Computers ran Windows XP while users licked their wounds caused by Windows ME and awaited / dreaded the promised magic of Windows Vista as the effects of the “every other Windows release sucks” rule were about to be felt.
• People sent messages on BlackBerry devices and talked on the Nokia cell phones that dominated the market four years before the IPhone came out.
• Companies such as MercuryMD, Misys, First Consulting Group, Per-Se, IDX, Healthlink, Quovadx, Alaris, and Sentillion were making a few sales.
• Health IT news came slowly and with little critical review other than from expensive, low-circulation newsletters such as “Inside Healthcare Computing” and “HIS Insider.”

Readers whose primary news interest is one or a handful of companies occasionally ask for a separate “news feed” for just those companies. That’s not practical to do since each HIStalk news post contains a lot of unrelated news items to support convenient reading, but this sample page shows the most recent news mentions of Cerner (just as an example) that I’ve copied/pasted into a single page with original dates. It wouldn’t be too hard to keep company-specific pages updated, and the bonus to readers is that instead of just being a bunch of low-quality stuff from around the web, it would just be those stories that I’ve already vetted as being worthy of a news post mention. Let me know if you would find this useful, and if so, for which companies. I won’t bother creating more work for myself if it isn’t important to someone.

Webinars

June 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “COVID-19: preparing your OR for elective surgeries.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Janice Kelly, MS, RN, president, AORN Syntegrity Inc.; David Bocanegra, RN, nurse informaticist, IMO. The presenters will cover the steps and guidelines that are needed for hospitals to resume performing elective surgeries and how healthcare information technology can optimize efficiencies and financial outcomes for the return of the OR.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Change Healthcare acquires retail pharmacy technology vendor PDX for $208 million.

Healthcare Growth Partners polls 80 private equity funds about COVID-19’s impact, concluding that those investors are slightly bullish on health IT for the long term compared to the overall market. About 25% of the firms are either pausing activities until the market stabilizes or are waiting to see how COVID-19 plays out, but companies are not generally targeting distressed or discounted opportunities. Many of their portfolio companies are applying for federal relief programs, delaying payables, and seeking additional capital. Most respondents expect a full economic recovery to be unlikely until a COVID-19 vaccine is introduced. All expect to continue closing deals, although half will be looking harder at pricing or strategic value.

NextGen Healthcare reports Q4 results: revenue up 1%, adjusted EPS $0.20 vs. $0.23, swinging to a GAAP loss that fell short of Wall Street expectations but still beating revenue expectations.

Netsmart acquires post-acute and behavioral consulting firm Quality In Real Time, adding the company’s OASIS, MDS, and coding and advisory consulting services to its McBee business.

Konica Minolta Precision Medicine acquires Backpack Health, which offers a personal health record and anonymized research data collection app.

Canada’s Well Health completes its acquisition of Indivica, which serves 1,900 primary care clinics in Canada and represents Well Health’s seventh EHR vendor acquisition.

Allscripts names retired KPMG executive Beth Altman to its board.

Sales

• North Central Health Care (WI) will implement Cerner’s Behavioral Health EHR in three multi-specialty behavioral facilities.
• Northwestern Memorial HealthCare (IL) chooses Visage Imaging’s Visage 7.
• Hospital Sisters Health System will use Empiric Health’s AI-driven analytics to address unwanted clinical variation, mining operative notes with natural language processing to form surgical cohorts to identify outliers.

People

Cerner hires Jerome Labat (Micro Focus) as CTO.

Sandy Phillips (Analytic Intuition) joins HIE Networks as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Epic partners with its local county agencies to implement Coordinated Care Management, a technology platform that streamlines healthcare and community services to address social determinants of health. Epic is waiving part of its license and implementation fees.

A study finds that 88% of acute hospitals send information to HIEs at the patient’s transition of care, but only 56% of inpatient psychiatric units provide that information electronically.

Surescripts releases Real-Time Prescription Benefit for Pharmacy, which allows pharmacists to advise patients on out-of-pocket costs and alternatives using pricing, coverage, and prior authorization information from the patient’s insurance.

COVID-19

CMS reports that COVID-19 has hit US nursing homes hard, with the first publicly announced count (which is likely underestimated) count showing 60,000 confirmed cases and 26,000 deaths, with 450 staff members also dying of the infection. Meanwhile, USA Today analysis of state-reported data that, unlike CMS’s numbers, includes assisted living facilities places the number of deaths at nearly 41,000.

A WHO-conducted meta analysis of 172 studies confirms that frontline medical workers should be wearing N95 masks, which offer 96% protection against coronavirus versus 77% for surgical masks. Eye protection appears to offer additional benefit. For public spaces, distancing of at least three feet and wearing of cotton masks were associated with protection. Experts are frustrated CDC was slow to recommend masks and later downgraded its recommendation of N95 masks to surgical masks on the basis of supply rather than effectiveness.

A China-based manufacturer of N95 masks misses a deadline for earning US federal safety certification, voiding its $1 billion deal with the state of California for which it has already been paid $495 million. The company was supposed to provide 300 million masks, but NIOSH turned down its certification due to “concerning” issues with its design, manufacturing, and quality inspection. Electric vehicle manufacturer Build Your Dreams opened a plant in China in March that it said would allow manufacturing 5 million masks and 300,000 bottles of disinfectant per day, leading to a deal with the state that critics called “secretive.”

Experts remind that temperature checks aren’t very useful for COVID-19 screening since most patients who test positive don’t have fever, especially before they start showing symptoms.

White House coronavirus testing czar Admiral Brett Giroir has been reassigned back to his regular HHS job as of mid-June and will not be replaced.

The state of Nevada contracts for COVID-19 testing from G42, an artificial intelligence company whose ToTok messaging app is used to spy on civilians in the United Arab Emirates. University Medical Center is performing tests provided by G42 and is considering using its product for population health management and genomics studies. ToTok became popular in UAE because the country bans Internet calls and the app provides a seemingly government-approved way to conduct video and text chat, which security experts say is the government’s covert way of getting users to install spyware voluntarily instead of hacking their phones.

Sponsor Updates

• Collective Medical end users can now sponsor home health organizations to rapidly onboard and begin collaborating on care for shared patients.
• Impact Advisors is recognized in KLAS’s }Clinical Optimization Services 2020” report.

Blog Posts

• Social Determinants of Health Amidst a Pandemic (Collective Medical)
• 3 Advantages of EHR Digital Learning for Large Health Systems (314e)
• How to tell nurses they can’t have the day off (Ability Network)
• Total Telehealth & The Grant to Pay for It Now (Access)
• Medical practice cybersecurity: 4 Sure Ways to Stop Cyber Thieves (AdvancedMD)
• How De-Identified Patient Data Fuels COVID-19 Research (ChartLogic)
• Why Now is a Good Time to Shift Your Focus (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• Dina’s COVID-19 Employee Screening Solutions Are Live in 20 States (Dina)
• Reinventing Your Practice During Extreme Times (EClinicalWorks)
• What Does the “New Normal” Look Like for Acute Care? (Ensocare)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/1/20

Top News

Virtual diabetes clinic vendor Onduo names Vindell Washington, MD, MHCM as interim CEO.

Google’s Verily hired the former national coordinator for health IT as chief clinical officer early this year.

Verily and France-based drug maker Sanofi formed Onduo as a joint venture in 2016 with a $500 million investment, A December 2019 restructuring eliminated most of the stake of Sanofi, which said it had invested too much in the business as it was ending development of diabetes and cardiovascular drugs due to poor sales.

Onduo’s customer base is employers and health plans.

Onduo founding CEO Josh Riff, MD, MBA “is leaving to pursue other early-stage entrepreneurial opportunities.”

Reader Comments

From Greg: “Re: US withdrawal from WHO. What impact will this have on licensing ICD-10, for which WHO holds the copyright?” WHO authorizes the US government to modify the ICD-10 data set (created for mostly public health and research purposes) to develop our ICD-10-CM (for our unique use of it as a billing tool). I don’t know the terms of the agreement, although I found online references to “member states” only. If WHO wanted to be petulantly punitive, and if the licensing terms allow it, they could create a near-shutdown of US healthcare with the stroke of a pen. Meanwhile, some countries are already using ICD-11, which has been out for two years, although its official effective date is January 1, 2022 (HHS has said we’ll consider it here for 2025 or 2027). Bottom line: I don’t know, but I suspect federal officials haven’t even thought about that.

From Dazed and Confused: “Re: journalistic style. Is it ‘health care’ or ‘healthcare?’” I use the rules of the “AP Stylebook” for journalists with few exceptions, but one of those is that I write “healthcare” as a single word. I don’t have a strong feeling either way , but the one-word variant saves space without sacrificing (although I acknowledge that “medicalcare” or “hospitalcare” don’t work). I also really dislike AP’s 1950s-style state abbreviations (“Conn.”) so I use the shorter USPS abbreviations instead (“CT.”) The most important takeaway is that every site should have its own consistent standards, ideally with 95% of them from the Stylebook and the rest customized for defensible reasons. I spend extra effort making HIStalk deceptively easy to read and understand, even as I acknowledge that I’m an outlier when most online content ranges from annoyingly sloppy to unintelligible.

From Creative Juice: “Re: Change Healthcare and TriZetto. Hearing any rumors?” I am not, but maybe someone out there is.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two-thirds of poll respondents expect their working conditions to be better a year from now, with most of them expecting to remain with their current employer.

New poll to your right or here: what is your preferred work location?

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Ingenious Med. The physician-founded company has, since 1999, helped health systems and physician groups (70% of the country’s largest health systems and physician management companies) strengthen their revenue cycle, gain data-driven insights, extend EHR functionality, align with quality measures, and optimize workflows with mobile and web solutions. Health system offerings include revenue optimization (clinician charge capture, physician performance dashboards, coding tools); data intelligence (benchmark management, disparate data connection, automatic capture and processing of patient and charge data); and value-based alignment (flagging patients for quality measures, care team coordination, MIPS registry). ROI is 13-15x, with a $30,000 annual revenue increase per physician. Health IT long-timers make up the company’s entire executive team, including CEO Nimesh Shah and founder and chief medical officer Steven Liu, MD. Thanks to Ingenious Med for supporting HIStalk.

I found this Ingenious Med overview on YouTube.

I’m looking for a few folks who interact with us occasionally on behalf of HIStalk sponsors to give us feedback. Contact Jenn if you are our contact for a sponsoring company and can spare a few minutes by email.

Webinars

June 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “COVID-19: preparing your OR for elective surgeries.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Janice Kelly, MS, RN, president, AORN Syntegrity Inc.; David Bocanegra, RN, nurse informaticist, IMO. The presenters will cover the steps and guidelines that are needed for hospitals to resume performing elective surgeries and how healthcare information technology can optimize efficiencies and financial outcomes for the return of the OR.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Hematology technology vendor Haemonetics sells some of its blood center donor management systems to Italy-based GPI Group and its US software subsidiary Hemasoft.

Siren, which manufactures fabric that is embedded with medical monitoring sensors, raises $12 million in a Series B funding round. The company’s first product is a wirelessly connect temperature monitoring sock for patients who are a risk for diabetic foot ulcers.

India’s securities and exchange board warns Tata Consultancy Services that the company should have prominently disclosed to investors in 2016 that it had been assessed a $940 million penalty in a trade secrets lawsuit that was brought by Epic (the judgment was later reduced to $420 million as required by Wisconsin’s judgment caps). TCS disclosed the value of the judgment only in the contingent liabilities section of its financial results report, which Sebi says did not provide adequate notice to investors. Epic’s lawsuit accused TCS employees who were contracting with Kaiser Permanente of misrepresenting themselves as KP employees, which allowed them to use Epic’s UserWeb to download proprietary information that Epic says was intended to jumpstart development of a competing system.

Announcements and Implementations

Netsmart launches a COVID-19 Mobile Screening Solution that helps organizations screen employees, clients, and visitors with questions about travel, existing health conditions, symptoms, and any previous test results.

COVID-19

AdventHealth sues an attorney who it said kept a $2 million fee after failing to provide a promised 10 million N95 masks for $57.5 million.

Broad COVID-19 screening of patients who visited Seattle Children’s Hospital for a blood draw for any reason finds that 1% were positive in April in a sharp uptick from March as the outbreak spread. Most patients had no symptoms but developed a robust immune response, suggesting that a vaccine could be successful.

Israel starts closing schools that have spikes of new COVID-19 infections, as a single student infects over 100 people. The government will close 17 schools and start issuing fines for violating policies regarding distancing and wearing masks. The country has had 284 COVID-19 deaths in 17,000 cases. Meanwhile in Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country, a full-blown outbreak is underway even as the government relaxes restrictions to restart the economy and citizens flout travel rules to gather for Ramadan.

A Washington county’s public health department reports that its workers are being threatened on social media, have had their home addresses posted online, and been the target of suggestions that they be assaulted. Fringe elements make their job of containing the pandemic harder, they say, especially following big budget and staffing cuts in 2008, and they wish people understand that they do contact tracing all the time to combat cases of food poisoning. I can’t imagine working as a contact tracer in today’s environment.

Other

Hospital EHRs are doing a better job of identifying potentially harmful medication ordering errors – their scores on simulation testing have improved from 54% in 2009 to 66% in 2018 — but advanced clinical decision support lags and overall results vary among hospitals that use the same EHR. The authors conclude that EHRs are nearly universally deployed in hospitals, but they still fail to meet federally endorsed health IT safety measures 30% of the time, leading to a recommendation that hospitals perform their own CPOE safety tests annually and share the results with their vendor.

A brilliant summary of the now-virtual American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting.

Sponsor Updates

• Central Logic CEO Angie Franks and Banner Health Senior Director of Transfer Services Charley Larsen are interviewed about the Arizona Surge Line public health project.
• The local news covers the implementation of Meditech’s Virtual Visit software at several Canadian hospitals.
• A Forbes Technology Council post features Greenway Health Chief Technology & Innovation Officer Kali Durgampudi.
• Loyale Healthcare makes available to its customers two RevSpring solutions – Talksoft patient messaging and IVR Advantage.
• OmniSys, the National Community Pharmacists Association, and the Association of Diabetes Care & Education Specialists launch an initiative to help small business independent pharmacies offer the National Diabetes Prevention Program to people with prediabetes.
• OptimizeRx will present at the virtual William Blair & Company’s annual Growth Stock Conference June 10.
• Pure Storage announces first quarter fiscal 2021 financial results.
• Forbes features ROI Healthcare Solutions in an article on COVID-19’s impact on IT.
• The Puget Sound Business Journal profiles TransformativeMed.
• The Wall Street Journal features TriNetX VP of Clinical Sciences Jennifer Stacey in an article on AI’s role in understanding heart disease in COVID-19 patients.
• Wolters Kluwer Health wins a Bronze Stevie Award from the American Business Awards for its Care Without Judgement video series.

Blog Posts

• Coping with COVID-19 – Part 1 (Ingenious Med)
• Planning for a Post-COVID-19 World (Netsmart)
• Patient-centric and cost-effective staffing tools designed for healthcare (Infor)
• Minimizing Germs When Contact for Payments is Unavoidable (InstaMed)
• The impact of canceling elective procedures due to COVID-19 (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• 3 Benefits of Taking Your Access Center Remote (Kyruus)
• 7 Benefits of a Cloud-Hosted Healthcare Information Technology Solution (Medhost)
• Embracing innovation and virtual training in a pandemic (Meditech)
• 3 Ways to Measure Physical Therapist Productivity (MWTherapy)
• Online Privacy Threats Increasing with More Internet Use (NextGate)
• CureMetrix integrates with Nuance AI Marketplace to deliver breast cancer screening solutions (Nuance)
• Testing, tracking and treating: How OpenText supports healthcare and life sciences customers (OpenText)
• New Rules for Nationwide Health Data Interoperability (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Supporting Patients, One Video Call at a Time (PMD)
• As Elective Surgeries Resume, A Spotlight on OR Efficiency (Premier)
• Pure Accelerate Digital 2020 is Coming! (Pure Storage)
• Five Lessons from Implementing Coronavirus Contingency Planning (Redox)
• Contactless Patient Intake Powers the New Patient Journey (Relatient)
• In the post-Covid world, organizations will have to revise their business models: Part 2 (SailPoint)
• Spirion Takes Home Three 2020 Stevie American Business Awards (Spirion)
• COVID-19 Revenue Recovery: Four Steps to Successful Program Launch (Strata Decision Technology)
• Remote Workforces Make Proactive Alerting and Monitoring More Critical Than Ever (Summit Healthcare)
• The Exam Room is a Sacred Space: How One Doctor Broaches Prescription Costs (Surescripts)
• AI and Patient Lifetime Value – A Cross-Industry Conversation (SymphonyRM)
• A 3-Point Strategy to Help Strengthen Nurse Resiliency (Vocera)
• How to Adjust Your Clinic’s Marketing Strategy in Light of COVID-19 (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 5/29/20

Top News

Retail health kiosk company Higi raises $30 million in an investment round that includes financing from Babylon Health, the high-profile, UK-based telemedicine vendor that has strong ties to the NHS.

Babylon Health CEO Ali Parsa plans to integrate his company’s software and services with Higi’s Smart Health Stations.

Reader Comments

From B4 You Leap: “Re: work from home. Your editorial on reader comments related to office space was great. I am surprised that in everyone’s haste to make working from home a permanent lifestyle change, none have considered the many downsides. Most notably, outsourcing. Sure if you bring an A game every day, all the time, you are probably safe. You are probably also the top 15 percent of everyone working. For the rest, when you are perpetually remote and providing detailed performance metrics of your productivity, you have given every outsourcer a blueprint of what exactly you do and how much it costs for you to do so. I’d like to believe that our employers also place value on the intangible benefits and loyalty of long-term employees. But I doubt it.” I agree. Employee-manager relationships are likely to be devalued in the ongoing absence of an interpersonal connection. I’ve managed a few higher-level IT folks who worked permanently and by choice from my health system’s far-flung hospitals, and while they loved keeping distant from the day-to-day corporate politics and developed closer relationships with their appreciative users that the rest of us envied, they weren’t fully participative in our decisions that involved them and they were never promoted because that would have required them to relocate to the corporate office. I also agree that remote workers may be more susceptible to having their work seen as a commodity. Remember that the so-called “gig economy” sounded entrepreneurial and worker-focused until it became clear that driving for Uber or delivering DoorDash was a regular job with all the good parts skimmed off.

From Kermit: “Re: HIPAA. A PA GOP spokesperson cites HIPAA to justify not telling representatives about a fellow lawmaker’s positive COVID diagnosis.” It’s the now-common, ugly admixture of science and politics as Democratic members accuse the Republicans of intentionally hiding the positive COVID-19 test of State Rep. Andrew Lewis. Lewis says he immediately self-isolated even before his test result arrived and he then provided the information that officials needed to conduct mandatory contact tracing. All of that sounds rational until you get to the House Republican spokesperson, who declared, “I know you guys know that in the media, but HIPAA limits exactly what anyone can say about a co-worker’s medical history.” It would be great if HIPAA really was what people misbelieve it to be. 

Dear people of the US, especially those who work in marketing: you are unfortunately and perhaps unknowingly displaying your ignorance or indifference (or your Arizona or Hawaii residency) when you list your pre-November event with a time zone qualifier that contains the letter “S” (like EST). We are on “daylight” time (EDT) for the next several months, so anything with an “S” is wrong except for events in those two non-DST states. I truly don’t understand why this is so hard to comprehend or remember, and yet the jarring prevalence of this error suggests that it is. Just use ET, CT, MT, or PT year round and you’ll look smarter.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Health Data Movers. The company, which was founded in 2012, offers services related to EHR implementation, optimization, and interoperability, specializing in Epic implementations, data conversions, and product development. Some of its notable Epic successes include helping clients with EpicCare Ambulatory, Phoenix, Healthy Planet, Beacon, Kaleidoscope, Resolute HB, and Resolute PB. It partners with the top health systems, medical device companies, and digital health vendors to move healthcare data in putting patients first. Thanks to Health Data Movers for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

June 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “COVID-19: preparing your OR for elective surgeries.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Janice Kelly, MS, RN, president, AORN Syntegrity Inc.; David Bocanegra, RN, nurse informaticist, IMO. The presenters will cover the steps and guidelines that are needed for hospitals to resume performing elective surgeries and how healthcare information technology can optimize efficiencies and financial outcomes for the return of the OR.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Care automation vendor Bright.md raises $16.7 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $29 million.

Healthcare AI company Orbita raises $9 million.

Oncology Analytics raises $28 million in a Series C funding round.

Clinical operations improvement startup MDMetrix raises $1.1 million as it accommodates increasing demand for its COVID-19 Mission Control technology. The company spun out of Seattle Children’s hospital in 2016. CEO Warren Ratliff is the co-founder and former COO of Caradigm, which GE Healthcare sold off in pieces between 2017 and 2018.

Sales

• Forty-nine municipalities in Sweden’s Västra Götaland region will implement Cerner Millenium.
• Sanford Health (SD) signs a contract with Sectra for cardiology-focused enterprise imaging software.
• Pittsburgh-based ClinicalConnect HIE selects real-time, patient event alerts from Secure Exchange Solutions.
• LabCorp’s drug development business, Covance, will use Medable’s digital clinical trials platform to enroll and manage patients.

People

John Kelly (Cigna) joins PatientKeeper as CTO.

Tom Barnett (University of Rochester Medical Center) replaces retiring Beverly Jordan as VP/CIO at Baptist Memorial Health Care (TN).

3M Health Information Systems promotes Mark Endres to VP of international business development.

Announcements and Implementations

Propeller Health receives FDA 510(k) clearance to connect patients using AstraZeneca’s Symbicort inhaler to its digital health technology, which delivers analytics on medication usage via sensors and an accompanying app. The company was acquired by ResMed for $225 million in late 2018.

Waiting room content company Outcome Health emerges from media hibernation to announce GA of its Virtual Waiting Room, which gives providers the ability to show patients custom media while they wait for video appointments to begin.

Consumer health advocate CARIN Alliance launches My Health Application, a website that helps visitors choose an aggregation tool for their clinical, coverage, and payment information.

Revenue cycle and workflow management platform vendor ESolutions offers providers free use of a new Medicare Beneficiary Identifier lookup tool for claims reimbursement.

Government and Politics

The National Institutes of Health issues an RFI on digital health solutions that can help it build a central data hub for COVID-19 researchers. The NIH is especially interested in wearables, smartphone apps, and new ways to analyze and aggregate de-identified data for population health management efforts.

COVID-19

Herd immunity is unlikely to deter the spread of COVID-19 any time soon, according to several studies in which even areas with heavy infection rates (and thus heavy death counts) have mostly single-digit percentages of people testing positive for antibodies versus the 60% that would be needed to inhibit the virus’s spread. Only 20% of people have tested positive for antibodies in New York City even after 200,000 cases, 51,000 hospitalizations, and at least 16,000 deaths.

In more negative herd immunity news, only half of polled Americans say they will volunteer to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if one is developed, with around one-third of poll respondents saying they aren’t sure. Groups with the highest “I’m definitely not getting it” percentage are blacks and Republicans. Just 20% of those polled expect to see a vaccine made publicly available in 2020.

Former CDC director Tom Frieden, MD believes that the key to saving lives during and after the pandemic is found in reporting deaths of all causes weekly, protecting healthcare workers and the most vulnerable, ensuring that non-COVID-19 care is available and accessible, and managing safe re-openings to make sure communities don’t fall into poverty and poor health.

Cerner develops COVID-19 re-opening and social distancing projections for 60 countries using data from sources that include CDC, Johns Hopkins, Definitive Healthcare, and the COVID Tracking Project.

Other

Modern Healthcare notes the steep revenue declines that healthcare associations are experiencing as their conferences move to a virtual format. RSNA will lose 45% of its total revenue from its just-announced cancellation of its November meeting, MGMA says it generates 80% less revenue from virtual versus in-person conferences, HFMA’s cancelled live annual conference contributes one-third of its total revenue, and HIMSS declined to comment. It’s interesting that HIMSS and RSNA were by far the most dependent on meeting revenue, but HIMSS made 70% more money on its conference than RSNA’s.

Sponsor Updates

• Ellkay offers a testimonial from LetsGetChecked CEO Peter Foley about the companies’ efforts to expand access to COVID-19 testing at home.
• Greenway Health CMO Geeta Nayyar, MD appears on the HIT Like a Girl podcast.
• The National Committee for Quality Assurance names Imat Solutions a beta testing partner for its ECQM Certification Program.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a case study titled “Multi-Facility Integrated EHR and Technology Implementation & Training at Tower Health.”
• Meditech will host its 2020 Nurse Forum online June 17-19.
• T-System earns the top client experience ranking for emergency department information systems for the sixth year in a row, according to a new Black Book survey of 1,100 end users.
• Omni-HealthData wins Best Overall Healthcare Data Analytics Platform in the MedTech Breakthrough Awards for the second year in a row.
• The Chartis Group publishes a new paper, “Telehealth: Current Trends and Long-Term Implications.”

Blog Posts

• New KLAS Report Lists Engage as a Top-Rated Firm for Go-Live Support (Engage)
• Like Telehealth? There’s More! (EClinicalWorks)
• Medicare MBI: COVID-19 and Medicare Claims (Experian Health)
• Kwampirs Trojan Targets Healthcare Industry (Fortified Health Security)
• Diabetes Technology Society: 2020 Virtual Event Case Study Takeaways (Glytec)
• 7 social distancing tips for healthcare waiting rooms (Greenway Health)
• Epic Application Support: A Better Way for the “New Normal” (HCTec)
• Restarting Ambulatory Care and Elective Procedures: Analytics Guide Safe, Pragmatic Decisions (Health Catalyst)
• Clinical NLP Part 1: Spotlight on Risk Adjustment (Wolters Kluwer, Health Language)
• 3 Ways Content as a Service Helps You Win at Social Media (Healthwise)
• Studies in reacting to crisis with agility: The power of partnerships (Nordic)
• I am still a nurse: Here’s why that matters (Hyland)
• OVID-19 Pandemic Creating Demand for Virtual Health Records (Imat Solutions)
• Finding Optimism in Challenging Times (Impact Advisors)
• COVID Crisis: How Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters responded (Imprivata)

Contacts

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

News 5/27/20

Top News

China’s continued use of its COVID-19 contact tracing phone app – which assigns users color codes that permit or deny them access to stores and public transportation — raises concerns that the government will make it an ongoing standard since features unrelated to COVID-19 are being added even as the pandemic’s impact wanes.

A Communist Party secretary says his city’s app should be an “intimate health guardian” that is “loved so much that you cannot bear to part with it.”

Officials in Hangzhou are considering using the app to assign a “personal health index” that is based on the user’s sleep, exercise, and smoking and drinking. Other cities are trying to keep users running the apps by giving them access to store coupons and the ability to schedule hospital visits.

Another region is using the app to assigned an “honesty health code” in which party officials will downgrade the user’s normal green code to yellow or red based on “whether your party spirit is healthy.”

Reader Comments

From Stayin’ Alive: “Re: returning to campus. At our place, there’s a generational gap. Younger leaders are pressing for more remote work with adequate monitoring. The older guard want butts back in seats, but can’t explain the why, other than that healthcare is unique. We’ve supported applications and other technology remotely for three months, but nobody can explain why that can’t be sustainable.” Management is always challenged to quantify the deliverables of most employees, whether they’re sitting in a cubicle or at their dining room table (and of course to justify their own existence as overseers). That’s why a lot of performance reviews end up being based on subservience, peer likeability, and creating the image of efficiency and expertise even when it doesn’t exist. Old-school managers were taught to use oppressive practices to make their least-productive employees behave themselves in the absence of willingness to terminate them, coupled with the feel-good idea that every employee should be treated the same. Everybody can point out the employees who contribute disproportionately and anchor the boat for everybody around them, so it’s crazy not to reward them with looser oversight, more self-direction, a few nice perks, and a more collegial interpersonal approach. It’s a lot easier to keep them than replace them.

From Home Office Space: “Re: working from home. What do you expect to see as the downside of that as a permanent arrangement?” The lack of ability to raise the knowledge level of less-experienced employees via face-to-face conversations, serendipitous break room encounters, and interpersonal dynamics. Another is the difficulty creating a culture as happens in all-travel consulting firms. It’s exactly the same as in online education – both are good for self-directed, experienced people or for relatively short terms, but not a good substitute for those who are trying to work their way up. It will be interesting to see how job promotions are doled out now that face time has been replaced by FaceTime.

From John: “Re: scam award emails. Here is another, the third I’ve received in a week, all from different organizations. Desperation?” This one came from International Forum on Advancements in Healthcare, which offers “the most-awaited healthcare conference” in Las Vegas in December. This is yet another offering from Prism Events, a think tank of diligent India-born workers who occupy a rented PO box in a rundown house in Wilmington, DE. The “manager of speaker outreach” who sent John an unsolicited email asking for his phone number (while not providing her own) says in her LinkedIn that her job is to sift through other LinkedIn profiles to create nominees for “Top 100 Leaders” and “Top 50 Companies.” A ton of folks have slapped this made-up award on their LinkedIn, which would be reason enough for me to not hire them even if I was otherwise inclined. I am always shocked at how many people – many of them light on education and upward job mobility – who will plaster all kinds of eye-rolling certifications, awards, and obviously inflated job descriptions on their LinkedIn.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Halo Health. The Cincinnati-based company’s cloud-based Halo Clinical Communication Platform (the company was formerly known as Doc Halo) reduces care delays and clinician burnout via unified clinical communication (secure messaging, VoIP calling, mobilization of critical alerts, and advanced clinical workflow that incorporates on-call scheduling). Real-time integration includes EHR, PBX, PACS, LIS, and middleware. Halo Health is offering urgent deployment of its secure messaging for COVID-19 efforts at no charge for up to six months and offers a best practices guide and webinar, with customer examples including anesthesia intubation, virtual care teams, clinical team mobilization, SNF messaging, and instant notification of test results. CEO and co-founder Jose Barreau, MD is board certified in internal medicine, hematology, and medical oncology and is passionate about addressing the need for clinicians to improve care through better communication, while co-founder and CFO Alessio Nasini is an industry long-timer with Merge Healthcare. Some of its customers are Atrium Health, Henry Ford Health System, and Trinity Health. Thanks to Halo Health for supporting HIStalk.

I found this new Halo Platform explainer video on YouTube.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Insiders report that an unnamed private equity firm will acquire patient transfer management platform vendor Central Logic for more than $100 million. I interviewed President and CEO Angie Franks in late January.

ONC provides $1.1 million in funding to engage The Sequoia Project to continue as the Recognized Coordinating Entity for TEFCA for a second year.

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS report on clinical optimization services – which it defines as workflow refinement, application enhancement, and clinician training – places “2020 Best in KLAS” winner Chartis Group as #1, with both Chartis Group and Nordic also earning client nods for deep Epic expertise.

A UPMC cardiologist’s app that generates a post-visit summary using AI-extracted speech finds new use in telehealth visits, where patients are more likely to forget their session details due to technology and proximity distractions. Doctors use the Abridge service by calling the patient using an assigned phone number, after which the call is recorded and the medically relevant portions are transcribed and made available to the patient. Patients can use the app directly for in-person and telehealth visits. UPMC-owned Abridge plans to to send the information to the EHR in its next phase.

Philips earns FDA’s 510(k) clearance for its wireless, wearable biosensor for measuring vital signs for patients who are in lower-acuity hospital rooms. The five-day disposable patch collects respiratory and heart rate every one minute and integrates with the company’s analytics software for early warning of deterioration, including in COVID-19 patients, where it reduces the use of PPE.

COVID-19

Premier Inc. and 15 of its member health systems acquire a minority stake in Prestige Ameritech, the US’s largest surgical face mask manufacturer. The company manufactures its products in Fort Worth, TX and sells only to US customers. The US sources 80% of its masks from China and Southeast Asia, complicating the supply chain.

A pre-print study finds that coronavirus levels in a given city’s sewer sludge is highly correlated with the days-later COVID-19 epidemiological curve hospital admissions.

A CNN report concludes that “the world sacrificed its elderly in the race to protect hospitals” as nursing mortality home death rates are finally starting to surface. Countries in Europe are reporting that from one-third to more than half of their total COVID-19 deaths occurred among elderly residents of care homes as testing capacity was insufficient, national guidelines were lacking, and those facilities were given low priority for PPE and support for absent employees. Employees at a New York City state-run veteran nursing home defiantly publish a Memorial Day list of the nearly 50 of its 250 residents that died of COVID-19 in a four-week period through late April.

An interesting observation by former CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt. The pandemic and its death toll are, for most of us, an abstract concept of someone else’s problem.

A JAMIA-published article finds that the biggest problem with local, state, and federal public health agencies using hospital data to manage the pandemic is that most of those agencies aren’t capable of receiving electronic data. I might point out, however, that the underlying data came from surveyed hospitals who rarely self-identify as interoperability obstructers.

Data from China, which has largely defeated coronavirus if their reported numbers are to believed, suggests that patterns of lower subway ridership and higher levels of online collaboration have persisted, suggesting that work is changing there.

The latest projection from the most accurate US COVID-19 prediction model says the current death toll will rise from today’s 100,000 to more than 200,000 by September 1, which I note is pretty close the 220,000 low-end number that was projected early in the pandemic by the Imperial College group to much skepticism. Photos from this past weekend of beaches and bars packed with non-mitigating celebrants should encourage bettors to choose the “over.” It’s also important to note that our antiquated and politically manipulated methods of counting at the state level mean the real death count is a lot higher than the official numbers. Meanwhile, Brazil’s daily COVID-19 death count exceeded that of the US for the first time this week, as the country reported 807 deaths in 24 hours versus 620 in the US.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott defends issuing a $295 million, 27-month contract – paid for by federal taxpayers – to a little-known company that will perform COVID-19 contact tracing. Salesforce tech firm MTX Group, which has 200 mostly India-based employees, refuses to provide details on the similar work it claims to be performing for several other states and was allowed to redact its own state contract before it was released to the press.

Other

The New York Times reports that 20 large health systems received $5 billion in federal bailout grants even as they were sitting on $100 billion of stockpiled cash. The article highlights Providence Health System, which received $509 million from the fund that was intended to keep health systems solvent even though Providence invests in hedge funds, runs two venture capital funds, and works with private equity firms as it banks $1 billion in annual profit. The quickly designed bailout program assigned payouts that were based on Medicare payments for 2019, meaning most of the money went to big, profitable systems instead of struggling community hospitals that are quickly depleting their modest cash reserves. According to Health Care Institute President Niall Brennan, “If you ever hear a hospital complaining they don’t have enough money, see if they have a venture fund. If you’ve got play money, you’re fine.”

Sponsor Updates

• Datica provides EHR integration for clinical surveillance company VigiLanz’s COVID Quick Start solution, available to hospitals for free for six months.
• The Chartis Group develops the interactive Telehealth Adoption Tracker.

Blog Posts

• How COVID-19 will Change the Face of Digital Learning for Healthcare IT (314e)
• Empower your nurses to focus on resident-centered care (Ability)
• Six out of eight leaders choose to use Agfa HealthCare technology (Agfa HealthCare)
• Accustomed to Instagram, Millennial Physicians Won’t Stand for 1980s EMR Technology (Artifact Health)
• Complying with CMS’s Final Interoperability Rule Using an Intermediary (CarePort)
• How COVID-19 is Affecting ACOs (Collective Medical)
• 4 ways communication tech can help clinicians in distress (Spok)
• 7 Strategies to Improve Prior Authorization Management from Anywhere (CoverMyMeds)
• What the Data Tells Us About Social Disparities in COVID-19 Outcomes (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 5/25/20

Top News

Kaiser Permanente EVP/CIO Dick Daniels announces his retirement.

Daniels joined the organization in 2008. He reports to Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO Gregory Adams. His retirement will be effective in mid-June.

Reader Comments

From Gary: “Re: your Top Healthcare Leader nomination. The photo you included really conveys how prestigious that award is. Still, if there was an award for someone who provides value to me as a healthcare professional, you would be on the top of my list – no joke. I have been a daily reader of your blog for as long as I can remember because you not only provide timely, valuable information but also because of the humorous notes like the above. Thank you for all you do to inform, educate and amuse.” You made my day – thanks. I’m especially contemplative and appreciative as HIStalk approaches its 17th birthday in a few days.

From HCITMasterClass: “Re: your Top Healthcare Leader nomination. Here’s another one you might find fun.” The Healthcare Technology Report lists its “Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs of 2020.” This outfit isn’t as scammy as others I’ve noted and its writers appear to be closer to native English speakers than its lower-rent competitors, although it carefully protects its anonymity by offering no address or employee lists. I Google-stalked its phone number and found that the owner is ZenLeads (dba Apollo) which sells lead generation software and databases from co-working spaces in San Francisco and Phoenix. It runs a maze of publications across unrelated industries, all of which seem to issue similar “top executives” awards. My interest in crappy news and awards sites isn’t that they attempt to extract cash in playing to executive egos since that’s apparently a viable market – it’s to see which of their featured authors and award winners proudly tout their “gosh, I sure love me” accomplishment.

From Swing Bar: “Re: HIMSS. Will they make a run at your HISsies ‘worst vendor’ and “stupidest vendor strategic move’ awards over their HIMSS20 refund policy?” Quite possibly, depending on the mood of readers in early 2021 when I conduct the nominating and voting. Egotistical behavior usually has an influence, and by many reports, HIMSS is still being terse in steadfastly defending its claimed lack of flexibility in offering HIMSS20 refunds. My experience is that it is not unfortunate or self-inflicted events that harms an organization as much as a lack of humility or commitment to change in its response to the event. We will see the full impact only when the HIMSS21 site is launched, which will include the available exhibit hall space. HIMSS may even hide that Freeman-produced floor map out of fear of creating a bandwagon effect that will reduce exhibitor and attendee registrations even further. Meanwhile, Las Vegas still has hotel deals available for HIMSS21 dates while bypassing HIMSS and OnPeak, with Harrah’s going for $69, Bellagio for $199, Caesar’s Palace for $149, Flamingo for $63, Excalibur for $40, and Luxor for $53 (upcharges over the previous non-nonconference week are modest). All hotels are offering the free, flexible cancellations that HIMSS does not. The Venetian is $483 and that makes me wonder if it’s the only hotel that HIMSS has locked down so far.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Only about 10% of poll respondents expect their family’s financial security to be a lot worse 18 months from now.

New poll to your right or here: What will your job look like a year from now?

Thanks to the provider IT folks who shared their plans for returning employees to campus.

Memorial Day 2020

People are fretting how they’ll spend their Memorial Day summer kickoff given coronavirus restrictions and concerns, but here’s an idea – use a subset of the time as it was intended to honor those who died while serving in the armed forces. You don’t have to be a fan of the military to support those who signed up voluntarily, were paid little, disrupted their families, and died carrying out the task that was assigned to them.

In Flanders Fields
By John McCrae

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Webinars

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

Announcements and Implementations

FDA’s Sentinel Operations Center at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute is working with TriNetX’s global health research network to monitor priority drugs that are being used for treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients, studying its real-time, de-identified COVID-19 data set to review utilization and safety of drugs being used in the field.

COVID-19

Only 60% of states report COVID-related hospitalizations, but of those that do, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Wisconsin, Virginia, Minnesota, and Ohio are all reporting upticks. Hospitals in some large Alabama cities have no ICU beds available, while Minnesota’s COVID units are full.

President Trump vows that “we’re not going to close the country” if predictions of a second wave of COVID-19 in winter turn out to be true.

In a “good news, bad news” item, scientists say that lower levels of virus circulation in summer will push clinical trials of vaccines back into the fall.

A NEJM-published preliminary report on using remdesivir in hospitalized COVID-19 patients with lower respiratory tract involvement finds that recovery time was 11 days versus 15 for placebo. Expected death rates were 30% lower, but the study was stopped early and thus doesn’t prove that survival odds were improved. The drug’s benefit seems most significant in early-stage patients with less-severe symptoms, but study design influenced that finding as well.

A large-scale, observational study finds that widely hyped drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine did not improve COVID-19 outcomes and were associated with heart rhythm problems and higher death rates, the same conclusions that previous observational studies reached.

Updated CDC guidance says COVID-19 doesn’t spread easily from touching surfaces or objects – it’s getting near your fellow humans you have to worry about.

Another round of studies finds that COVID-19 PCR tests for active infection continue to register as positive long after a recovering patient is free of infection and thus not contagious, because the tests detect dead virus. That makes clearing patients for a return to work more difficult.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says China is developing its COVID-19 vaccine efforts around the old-school method of using inactivated virus, while the US is focusing in newer, less-proven technology that should provide a better result. His conclusion is that China is focusing on being “first to get shots in arms” even though the resulting protection will not be broad.

President Trump suspends travel to the US from Brazil three weeks after it became the world’s new pandemic epicenter even as its president has called COVID-19 a “little flu,”refused to implement lockdowns, and has promoted chloroquine treatments. Cities there are digging fields of mass graves and two health ministers have departed in just four weeks after conflicts with President Jair Bolsonaro. Brazil officially reports 360,000 cases and nearly 23,000 deaths, second only to the US, and a study says the real numbers likely higher than those being reported, perhaps as much as 12-fold.

The US COVID-19 death toll will likely hit 100,000 this holiday weekend and the virus remains all around us, including at Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, where they’re partying like its 2019. Perhaps there’s an obvious reason that we have one-third of the world’s cases and deaths. It’s not really Darwin Awards territory when these folks may walk away unharmed but kill unfortunate others due to their lax behavior.

Sponsor Updates

• VoyageLA profiles artist and NextGate VP of Software Engineering Gevik Nalbandian.
• Clinical Computer Systems releases the latest edition of The Critical Care Obstetrics podcast, “The Hemodynamics of Hemmorrhage.”
• Redox releases new podcast episodes, “Exploring Healthcare Platforms.”
• ROI Healthcare Solutions receives a Bronze Stevie Award in the 2020 American Business Awards.
• Vocera will transition its annual stockholders meeting to a virtual event on June 5.

Blog Posts

• How Healthy Are Your Employees? What You Can – And Can’t – Ask During the Pandemic (Dina)
• Healthcare’s Post-COVID-19 Margin Recovery Plan: Permanent Digitally-Enabled Cost Take-outs that Win with Patients (Loyale Healthcare)
• How cloud infrastructure supports our business and customers during the COVID-19 pandemic (Meditech)
• Health Systems Share COVID-19 Financial Recovery Strategies in First Client Huddle (Health Catalyst)
• Growing Stronger Through Change (Netsmart)
• OpenText Fax and Epic are Integrated! (OpenText)
• Wake of the Flood: Enhancing Patient Engagement as We Emerge from the Shutdown (PCare)
• How to avoid patient misidentification and claims denials amidst COVID-19 (Experian Health)
• CMS Conditions of Participation, Compliance Audits & Consequences (PatientPing)
• Amidst the COVID-19 Surge, a Provider Says Thanks (PatientKeeper)
• Legislative Policy Update! Ready or Not, Let’s take a deep dive into information blocking (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Patient Benefits of an Advanced Automated Answering Service Solution (PerfectServe)
• Why Smart Leaders Know a Paradigm Shift Beats the Status Quo (Pure Storage)
• Medical Offices Plan to Re-Open and Stay Open with Digital Billing and Contactless Payments (Relatient)
• In the post-COVID world, organizations will have to revise their business models: Part 1 (SailPoint)
• Redefining Data Classification: Part 1 in The Evolution of Data Classification Series (Spirion)
• StayWell recognized for creative excellence in this year’s Hermes awards (StayWell)
• Maintaining Momentum on Your Paused Projects (Summit Healthcare)
• Helping Frontline Healthcare Workers with Technical Prowess and Empathy (Surescripts)
• 6 telehealth rev cycle metrics to track right now (Waystar)
• The Role of Telehealth as the World Reopens (WebPT)

Contacts

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

Survey Results: Provider IT Department Plans for Returning Employees to Campus

Working from home and remote meetings are both still considered the norm. Only have 50% of normal occupancy of the office, and have a sign-up SharePoint so that we stay until that limit. We keep track of everyone present and which rooms they’ve used in case there’s an infection later and we need to keep track. Avoid using anyone else’s wings /floors /meeting rooms. Hand sanitizers at almost every single intersection. Everyone is required to wipe down the meeting room and/or desk before use with sanitizer, which is provided. Point person who is in charge of maintaining rules in each area. No use of refrigerators, and dishwashers have to be run at highest temperature. No external visitors unless already approved.

For the near term, we are not. We have virtualized all our contact center agents, finance, HR, marketing, IT, legal etc. As we get into a groove, we are finding that maybe not everyone returns. Also, being in the epicenter of NY/NJ, we still are very cautious. When we return (after Labor Day), it will be on a rotating basis, 2-3 days a week, to be able to do social distancing, deep cleaning, masks, Plexiglas in cubicles, not sharing of equipment, etc. Right now our focus is on returning the hospitals and physician practices to operations. And we are starting antibody testing of every single teammate, which will be completed by mid to late June – that’s 36,000 people.

We have four different office spaces. We are reviewing the spaces and will schedule staff onsite alternating 2-3 days per week ensuring social distancing. Will rotate staff weekly two days in office and three three home and than the reverse.

Bringing back while requiring masks to be worn. No travel.

My IT organization announced today that all employees will continue remote work practice until 1/1/21 at the earliest. This includes all install and go-live support and all corporate travel has been suspended until that date. The remote employees were approximately 40% of the workforce prior to the lockdown. The “bring back in” is not an issue for use today. Ask again in seven months.

Temp check when entering designated employee entrances. Must wear mask into the building. Mask must be worn when outside of office. Can remove mask if in office alone.

The IT department employees returning on-site follow the exact same protocols that all hospital and clinic employee departments follow. There is no differentiation. All employees must enter through the same designated employee entrances where temperature is checked via an infrared thermometer. Any employees (and visitors) with a temp of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher OR exhibit visible signs of illness symptoms are not allowed to enter the building. Employees who are turned away must contact the their supervisor and the employee health department to make arrangements for continued remote work and for X number of days away from the hospital before being allowed to attempt to enter on-site again. X changes are set according CDC guidelines.  Cloth face mask worn at all times in the hospital. The only exception is at your desk or in other areas where there are not other people or the possibility that other people would enter the area. CDC social distancing guidelines are to be observed as well.

There is nothing formal. Departments are taking it on a person-by-person basis. A big challenge is reconfiguring work areas so that workers are more than six feet away from each other. Since many have been successfully working remotely, there will be a clash of opinions about having employees return at all  (We need you back in the office. Why? We’ve been successful not being in the office.)

Bringing back 50% of staff on alternating days. Created A/B groups based on the office cubicle configuration so that no more than two employees per pod would be in on a given day. Keeping an alternating three-day / two-day bi-weekly work from home schedule. Marked off six-foot separations on the floors to indicate proper social distancing from cubicles and in conference rooms. Removed extra chairs from conference rooms and kitchen to allow only the number of individuals to conform with social distancing. Providing masks, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant wipes to staff for work space use.

Not allowed in the break room without mask and gloves on. Limit the number of people allowed in the break room at a time. Moved people around so that desks and offices create safe distances. Not everyone is allowed in the office at one time, so staggered schedule between WFH days and in office days. If you go to a hospital for more than a few hours, you WFH for 14 days.

We will continue remote work for the foreseeable future. We’ve been doing just fine being 100% remote for the past two months, so there is no rush to bring folks back into the office.

Presently evaluating how many workers we will ask to return to offices, considering office reconfiguration requirements to ensure proper social distancing. Many workers are rightly concerned with potential COVID spread. We are working to demonstrate the productivity impact of working from home, which we believe to be positive. With a large number of elderly workers, we must be concerned wit their vulnerability. As communities reopen, we have to watch for increased COVID incidence.

Schedule time for people to come to the office and remove all of their personal items and non-work items from their work surfaces to allow consistent cleaning. Extra furniture being removed. Face coverings required in common areas and screening required upon entering building. Still requiring manager approval to return to the office. We will have to have staggered start times to avoid congregation at the screening stations and staggered work days to ensure proper social distancing. That dense cube farm that seemed great is now a major liability. No personal reusable water bottles, coffee cups, etc. are allowed unless filled at home but cannot be refilled at work. Bottom line, still encouraging IT staff to stay at home unless absolutely necessary to be on campus.

Our team was almost entirely remote (almost entirely out-of-state, in fact) so we’ll see no change. Our sibling teams were more local-focused, but I expect they will drop to two or three onsite days per week, in shifts (likely in perpetuity, in my opinion).

For the most part, continuing to encourage them to work from home and limit days in the office. When in the office, they will be under the same masking policies as all staff. No in-person meetings unless social distancing can be enforced. No allowing vendors on campus unless they are required as part of installation, implementation, or service. No sales calls.

We are not actually trying to bring everyone back into the office. And we will wait until some time after the recommendations take place to do so. We are planning a very gradual increase to onsite work, starting with only coming in if needed to perform a function not able to be done appropriately remotely (where interacting with other individuals and/or equipment requires it). We’ve found that our team has been quite productive in the current mode and I see no reason to rush them back in.

We are considering 100% work from home and giving up our office space. Our employee productivity remains high, our employees are happier, and we believe it will be an advantage in recruiting new employees. We already have departments 100% remote, and more departments are considering going 100% remote.

At our organization in Colorado, we’ve been using the CareCognitics workforce assessment tool for all of our employees. This includes evaluating each employee every day for risk for COVID-19 and escalating those at risk to testing when needed. The tool also assesses the mental health state of each employee. It has escalation to HR or other supervisors as needed. The analytics back end also tells us who hasn’t done their daily assessment so we can address that with the employee. Along with daily assessments, we also have created back to work assessments for those that have been off so we can assess them before they return.

We aren’t. Honestly, we’re evaluating whether we will for a large majority or just move to mostly permanent work from home.

News 5/22/20

Top News

Optum acquires post-acute care management company NaviHealth.

The company’s private equity owner gets $1.1 billion in cash after buying a majority stake in the company for $400 million just 21 months ago.

The deal values NaviHealth at $2.5 billion.

Reader Comments

From Dumas: “Re: Epic’s COVID-19 immunity passport. They didn’t name the organization they are working with, but I think it’s probably Bluetree, which is owned by one of Epic’s biggest shops in Providence. They are working with Lumedic, which is also owned by Providence, to create an app that stores COVID-19 test status and immunity status that Bluetree specifically calls an immunity passport that is being considered by other organizations.” Unverified, but Lumedic has published screen shots of such a credential (above). I assume that Epic’s role is to provide results of COVID-19 diagnostic and antibody tests.

From Serrano Seed: “Re: HIMSS20. A group of exhibitors is petitioning for a refund of exhibit space fees.” The group of a couple of dozen companies, most of which I admit I’ve never heard of, hopes to shame HIMSS into refunding their exhibitor money for the cancelled conference. I suspect their efforts will be futile since (a) big-name exhibitors aren’t included; (b) their leverage is minimal given that HIMSS already has their money and, short of legal proceedings, seems unwilling or unable to return it; and (c) the cost of every company that is listed bailing on HIMSS21 (not likely) is minimal compared to the cost of refunding all exhibitors. I suspect that their polite petition will be far less effective than an impolite lawsuit.

From Nasty Parts: “Re: IBM Watson Health. I hear they are cleaning house, with some saying up to 80% of employees have been let go and a number of products (minus the employees who support them) being sold to Vizient.” Unverified. IBM Watson Health’s PR contact did not respond to my inquiry.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s my lucky day, y’all! I have learned from Mr. Prashant Kumar via LinkedIn that I have been “shortlisted for the Top 100 Healthcare Leaders award,” where I (fingers crossed!) will stride humbly across a Las Vegas stage later this year for my bestowment at a conference that is conveniently operated by Mr. Kumar’s employer, with my award consisting of a registration fee discount. I am especially grateful that the judges recognize my global healthcare leadership, given that I don’t actually lead anyone and despite the fact that my only job that is listed on LinkedIn is “Cynical Blowhard Healthcare IT Blogger.” Above is the upscale Wilmington, DE headquarters of the conferring organization Prism Events, in which the fate of my esteemed award rests in the capable hands of several dozen all-Indian employees who conduct their deliberations in a rented PO box.

Provider IT folks, help your peers by describing your department’s plan for bringing employees back to the office (or not, as the case may be), even if you’re just following organization-wide policies and would like to summarize those. I’ll post a recap this weekend. Thanks to those who have already provided some good (and sometimes surprising) ideas.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Amwell will use a $194 million Series C funding round to further scale its telemedicine technology and services. Reports of delays and crashing calls due to record utilization during the COVID-19 pandemic had already forced it to upgrade its hardware and software, in addition to onboarding new providers. The Boston-based company has raised over $700 million since launching in 2006.

Sales

• The Idaho Health Data Exchange selects 4medica’s enterprise master patient index software and data-cleansing service.
• Pathos Clinical Solutions will implement OpenText’s EMR-Link for secure EHR integration and CPOE between its lab and clinicians.
• Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto signs a seven-year contract with Allscripts for managed services of the company’s Patient Flow software.
• Texas-based GI Alliance selects Modernizing Medicine’s EHR for gastroenterology.
• University of Alabama Birmingham Medicine will deploy sepsis-monitoring software from Ambient Clinical Analytics.

People

EHR vendor Casamba promotes Billie Nutter to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Valley Children’s Healthcare (CA) goes live on Epic with virtual support from Optimum Healthcare IT.

Engage offers a free version of its WaitTimes app customized for COVID-19 testing sites for 90 days.

Carequality announces that 1 billion clinical documents have been exchanged via its interoperability framework since it launched in 2016. The organization will soon add image-sharing to its HIE capabilities.

Valley Community Healthcare (CA) rolls out virtual visit software from Otto Health.

Patient engagement software vendor Conversa Health launches Employee HealthCheck, an automated COVID-19 screening app for employers that was developed with help from UCSF Health.

Flagler Health (FL) and consumer digital health company Healthfully develop a similar app that also includes virtual visit capabilities.

A KLAS report on go-live support finds that engagement size is decreasing as the large health system market for new systems has matured. CSI Healthcare IT, Engage, and Medasource excel at executive involvement, while HCI Group and Nuance draw the most customer complaints about employee quality.

Government and Politics

HHS will award $5 million to support research into the ways healthcare organizations are responding to COVID-19, including the impact of expanded telemedicine services and digital care tools.

HHS issues an RFI on re-developing the IT strategy behind its Strategic National Stockpile of items associated with coronavirus-like pandemics. The new strategy would include greater use of analytics to forecast requirements. Comments are due May 29.

COVID-19

Alabama, North Dakota, and South Carolina become the first states to publicly commit to using contact-tracing technology developed by Google and Apple in their respective COVID-19 exposure notification apps.

The FDA launches a research project into the origin, treatment, and diagnostic patterns of COVID-19 using Aetion’s Evidence Platform, which aggregates data from EHRs, claims, registries, and clinical trials.

UC San Diego Health develops a remote patient monitoring program for COVID-19 patients recovering at home that includes a wearable to track vital signs, and activity and sleep levels; and an app through which they can report symptoms and communicate with their providers. The next phase of the program will use machine learning to predict a change in symptoms.

The Atlantic reports on the CDC’s practice – and that of four states as well — of combining the results of viral and antibody tests, which produces misleading metrics that governors are using to develop their re-opening plans.

The federal government will pay AstraZeneca up to $1.2 billion for the development and delivery of 300 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine by October.

Officials in Iceland are underwhelmed by the impact the national contact-tracing app has had on COVID-19 containment efforts, stressing that, despite its high adoption rate, manual techniques like phone calls have been more effective: “The technology is more or less … I wouldn’t say useless. But it’s the integration of the two that gives you results. I would say it has proven useful in a few cases, but it wasn’t a game changer for us.”

Current and former government and health system leaders collaborate on a national #OpenSafely plan that calls for, among other things:

• Following already documented plans to open communities up after two weeks of declining case counts.
• Ensuring adequate diagnostic testing is available.
• Implementing contact tracing and voluntary isolation.
• Improving and implementing safety standards and protocols.
• Protecting populations most at risk.
• Ensuring adequate PPE.
• Widespread use of telemedicine.
• Screenings and symptom monitoring.

Other

Researchers develop a wearable they hope can successfully predict the onset of COVID-19 symptoms. The patch tracks coughing and respiratory activity, heart rate, and temperature, and then transmits the data to cloud-based data management software, where algorithms transform it into graphical summaries.

Sponsor Updates

• Elsevier’s Clinical Path wins Best Computerized Decision Support Solution award from MedTech Breakthrough for the second year in a row.
• Ellkay offers a customer testimonial featuring its COVID-19-related interoperability work with Acutis Diagnostics.
• Infusion service company Option Care Health expands its use of Wolters Kluwer’s compounding compliance solutions for patient care.
• Healthwise celebrates its 45th anniversary.
• Omni-HealthData adds new data visualizations and interactive dashboards to its COVID-19 Resource Center.
• InterSystems publishes a new case study, “Helping Care Teams on the Front Lines: Providence St. Joseph Health.”
• Kyruus ProviderMatch for Consumers wins the Best Patient Registration & Scheduling Solution award from MedTech Breakthrough.
• ROI Healthcare Solutions launches an EDI Benchmarking and Health Check Eligibility Survey for Infor (Lawson) users.
• The Healthcare Technology Report includes Waystar CEO Matt Hawkins, AdvancedMD CEO Raul Villar, and CompuGroup Medical Chairman Frank Gotthardt on its list of “The Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs Of 2020.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health will publish the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s portfolio of five medical specialty journals.
• InterSystems adds support for AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 M6g instances for IRS and IRIS.
• Relatient expands availability of its solutions in Athenahealth’s Marketplace to include patient self-scheduling, patient intake, and secure two-way messaging.

Blog Posts

• LabFinder Enhances Connectivity Partnership To Streamline COVID-19 Tests And Results For Providers And Patients (Ellkay)
• Supporting Patients, One Video Call at a Time (PMD)
• Routine Care During Nonroutine Times (EClinicalWorks)
• How Alarm Management Differs from Alarm Surveillance (Capsule)
• Using Transportation to Reduce Patient Readmission Risk (Ensocare)
• Cloud cost optimization: principles for lasting success (Google Cloud)
• The $484 billion spending package: 10 top questions answered (Greenway Health)
• How Augmented Intelligence Can Enhance Revenue Integrity in Healthcare (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Predicting COVID-19 Reemergence Among Previously Recovered Cases (HBI Solutions)
• How to move to a Virtual EHR Training Model (The HCI Group)
• MyChart Support is a Necessity (HCTec)
• Ensuring Continuity of Care & Recouping Revenue Post Pandemic (Healthfinch)
• Managing clinical information when telehealth is the new normal (Hyland)
• Supporting healthcare delivery organizations during COVID-19 (Imprivata)
• Care Management Experience Combined with Technology Expertise Bring New Insights to Healthcare Operations (Infor)
• Finding Optimism in Challenging Times (Impact Advisors)
• Financially recovering from COVID-19: Strategies to maximize cash flow (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 5/20/20

Top News

Microsoft announces Cloud for Healthcare, its first industry-specific cloud offering.

The platform provides capabilities to deploy virtual visits, assessment chatbots, remote monitoring, referral management, patient engagement tools, and intelligent outreach.

The new Booking app in Teams allows providers to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual visits from inside Teams.

Microsoft is offering a six-month free trial of Cloud for Healthcare.

Reader Comments

From Nutter Round: “Re: Epic. I’m interested in how the company is responding to Wisconsin’s overturning of stay-at-home recommendations. Will it penalize employees who take advantage of the ‘right’ to congregate in bars?” I will invite Epic folk to weigh in, although I can’t imagine that the company is mounting an operation to surveil the after-work activities of its employees.

From Remote No More: “Re: returning employees to in-office work. I work in the IT department of a healthcare provider in a large city. I’d like to hear how other provider IT departments are planning for such a return. No sense in planning this in a silo.” Good question, thanks. I’ve created a quick response form for provider IT department folks to anonymously describe their policies and practices for bringing remote workers back to the office. HIStalk crowdsourcing is of high value to readers who are looking for ideas, so please take a moment to respond. I’m sure we would all be interested in general hospital policies about bringing at-home workers back to the office as well.

From Long-Time Reader: “Re: not HIT related. A piece of the GI snare broke off during removal of a polyp from my duodenum. My lawyer’s GI expert says standard protocol does not requiring examining the snare afterward to see if it broke since the assumption is that the patient will just pass it anyway.” This was not an anonymous submission and therefore represents a real request for help, so GI clinicians are welcome to comment.

From Media Horror: “Re: MedTech Breakthrough Awards. Seems like yet another shady healthcare racket.” The company is suspiciously protective of its privacy given that it claims to be a marketing intelligence organization even though it seems only to dispense awards. Its minimal online presence hides everything important: physical address, executive names, telephone number, and award judging methodology. It masks its website’s domain registrar and lists no employees on LinkedIn other than the “photo not supplied” and generically named managing director James Johnson. It seems to offer no products or services beyond handing out awards. I can’t say that it’s a health IT racket, but I can say that it at least bears a strong physical resemblance to others I’ve seen that typically involve offshore companies.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Narrative Shift. The Herbster, WI-based company crafts written and visual narratives for companies who understand the value of generating excitement and curiosity about their products and services with prospective customers. A powerful narrative builds the brand effectively, gets the attention of prospects, and establishes stickiness with current customers. The company has 23 years of healthcare experience and thus does not require customers to educate its team or to develop their own marketing and sales deliverables. Narrative Shift is especially interested in working with new and founder-led ventures. As the company concludes, “We’ve seen too much crappy marketing and design developed for health technology companies,” motivating it to take on the mission of delivering attractive, witty, creative, and effective messaging. Thanks to Narrative Shift for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner joins the Fortune 500 largest US companies by annual revenue, coming in at #498. 

PE Hub reports that Francisco Partners is looking for a buyer for medical practice scheduling platform vendor QGenda. FP made its growth investment in June 2016. The Atlanta-based company reportedly has EBITDA of $25 million on revenue of $75 million.

Omada Health, which offers a chronic disease management platform primarily to employers, acquires digital physical therapy solution vendor Physera for a rumored $30 million. Physera has raised $10.8 million, most of it in a March 2019 Series A funding round.

Sales

• Collective Medical is providing the technology that Cigna uses to quickly identify and manage its customers who visit an ED with symptoms of possible COVID-19 infection.

People

Experity hires Kim Commito (WellSky) as SVP of product management.

COVID-19

A JAMA Network editorial says that the federal government could be collecting COVID-related patient data in real time using existing EHRs and HIEs rather than emailed worksheets and anonymous digital thermometer reports, but it would first need to overcome issues such as opt-in requirements, willingness of hospitals to participate given the possible alienation of their profitable patients, and lack of a national identifier. The authors recommend creating a national health IT infrastructure that would allow real-time, patient-level data collection as has been done in other countries (including using cell phone-based location data), but with its use limited to public health emergencies.

The geospatial expert who developed Florida Department of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard that was touted as the gold standard by the White House says she was fired after refusing to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.” Rebekah Jones was offered a settlement to resign after disagreeing with her bosses. They had ordered her remove a column containing the date in which patients said they first experienced symptoms since some of those occurred weeks before the state officially admitted that residents had been infected. Florida’s government has declined to provide race and ethnicity case details and won’t give scientists the underlying data that the site uses to allow them to perform their own analyses, while a graph published by the Georgia Department of Health that showed a continuous case decline was found to have been sorted in descending rather than chronological order.

President Trump tells reporters that he is taking the unproven malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to prevent coronavirus infection. Asked about the medical evidence that supports his decision, he replied, “Here’s my evidence: I get a lot of calls about it.” FDA softened its previous advice immediately after the president’s statement, moving from a position that consumers should not take the drug outside the hospital setting to advising that it’s up to them and their doctor to decide.

Fluid physics researchers determine that six-foot physical distancing is adequate as long as wind speed is zero, but saliva droplets can travel up to 20 feet in even a light breeze.

Moderna reports that the coronavirus vaccine it is developing has raised antibodies in the eight patients who are receiving it, with levels comparable to those seen in recovered COVID-19 patients. Experts warn that many drug trials look good in early phases but fail quickly afterward.

A preliminary, small study in South Korea finds that recovering COVID-19 patients do not spread infection, as the virus they shed is dead. The government will therefore allow patients who have been discharged from isolation to return to work or school without obtaining a final negative test.

COVID Exit Strategy maps the readiness of states to reopen safely based on the White House-issued gating strategy of disease spread, hospital capacity, and testing capacity.

Utah, North Dakota, and South Dakota have rolled out contact tracing apps without much success in generating participation rates of under 2%. Utah’s Healthy Together app has resulted in zero instances in which contracts were traced.

A health reform professor says she was wrong in calling for the federal government to require that private insurance pay for COVID-19 testing. Reasons: a huge number of people need to be tested, many of them retested repeatedly; providers can set whatever price they want with the cost ranging from $50 to $1,000 per test; it doesn’t help people who don’t have insurance; and insurers will need to reduce test access or raise premiums to cover the cost. She says a better approach is a testing and vaccination fund, overseen by the federal government, to provide free diagnostic and antibody tests for anyone who needs them to return to work or classes. That group could also negotiate pricing for a vaccine if and when one is developed.

Sponsor Updates

• MassChallenge features CareSignal in its new video, “Innovation in the Age of COVID-19.”
• Meditech AVPs Janet Desroche and Cathy Turner, RN speak with ANIA President Cheryl Parker, PhD, RN about the company’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
• Experian launches an interactive US map showing populations most susceptible to developing severe cases of COVID-19.
• MedTech Breakthrough names Kyruus Provider Match for Consumers as its “Best Patient Registration & Scheduling Solution.”
• Vocera Vina is named “Best Overall MHealth Solution” in the MedTech Breakthrough Awards.”
• Clinical Architecture releases the latest edition of its Informonster Podcast, “A History and Analysis of ICD-10.”
• ConnectiveRx will participate in a virtual job fair May 27 from 8:30-10 a.m.

Blog Posts

• The Benefits of Healthcare IT Staff Augmentation for Acute Needs (314e)
• A New Normal: Rethinking Elective Procedures & Informed Consents (Access)
• How to Scale & Optimize Your Telehealth Offerings (Part 2) (AdvancedMD)
• A conversation with Brian Sanderson, National Healthcare Leader at Crowe LLP (Artifact Health)
• Cares Act Part III: Why telehealth should be in your future plan (Bluetree)
• Unprecedented Times Call for Unprecedented Humanity and Thoughtfulness (Bright.md)
• Health IT and the COVID19 Pandemic (Datica)
• Real-time home health notifications and patient insights (CarePort)
• Ways to Improve Interoperability During the COVID-19 Pandemic (ChartLogic)
• 2020 Health System CIO Priorities – CHIME Survey (CereCore)
• How the COVID-19 Pandemic is Affecting Care at Children’s Hospitals (Dimensional Insight)
• Planning to Reopen Amid COVID-19? 5 Steps for Success (Dina)

Contacts

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