A Change Healthcare SEC filing indicates that the company has received a Department of Justice request for additional information about its proposed $13 billion acquisition by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum.
The American Hospital Association asked DoJ for an antitrust review on March 17, expressing concerns about reduced health IT market competition and moving control of healthcare data from the independent Change Health to the insurer-owned Optum.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
The most popular poll respondent options for improving the privacy of patient data involve restricting the sale or sharing of identifiable data without the patient’s permission.
New poll to your right or here: Which city or region has the strongest claim to call itself the US capital of healthcare technology? I’m sure I didn’t think of every contender, so add a comment after voting if I missed an important one. I’ll compare these results to those of a similar poll I ran many years ago.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Sales
Summit Healthcare announces several sales of its Provider Alert ADT notification and care coordination solution, including Lincoln Surgical Hospital, Bartlett Regional Hospital, and Madera Community Hospital.
People
Jillian Wood, MBA joins Pivot Point Consulting as VP of marketing and operations.
Sphere promotes Ryne Natzke, MBA to SVP of growth and strategy.
COVID-19
The remarkable pace of COVID-19 vaccination in the US continues with daily doses exceeding 3 million, as CDC reports that nearly 20% of adults are fully vaccinated and 72% of those 65 and over have had at least one shot.
Case counts are surging again in Michigan, Massachusetts, and the New York tri-state area , with much of the increase in the 10-19 age group. Overall US case counts are also rising again, with increases in 34 states, and hospitalization numbers are up in 20 states. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD urges surging vaccine supplies to the hardest-hit areas.
In Canada, a physician and past president of the Ontario Medical Association says that COVID-19 has exposed the weaknesses of non-integrated EHRs. He says it’s getting better, but in the mean time, “There’s no way of tracking who’s ill and no way of sharing information electronically from say Collingwood hospital to Toronto General and there’s no way of sharing information from the hospital to public health if someone’s really sick with COVID so they can start the contact tracing process. It’s all done by paper and fax and that sort of thing.”
Other
The updated HIMSS21 schedule shows that some of the keynote speakers that were scheduled for HIMSS20 will be back —Alex Rodriguez, former governors Terry McAuliffe and Chris Christie, and Arianna Huffington. I assume that former President Trump won’t be kicking things off this time around. I made my keynoter suggestions last November.
KHN describes a patient whose $30 yearly arthritis injection was suddenly billed at $1,400, of which she owed $355. The hospital-employed doctor had been moved up one floor in the same building to be classified as a “hospital setting” that supports a $1,260 “operating room services” fee even though the woman didn’t have a procedure or infusion. The hospital threatened to take her to collections, so her family chipped in to cover the cost. As someone pointed out on Twitter, it would be like a Starbuck’s $2 coffee that costs $20 if you buy it from a stand inside a grocery store.
Sponsor Updates
Nuance announces that independent ambulatory clinics are accelerating the adoption of its Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX) ambient clinical intelligent solution and reporting significant gains in satisfaction.
Pure Storage’s FlashBlade nears $1 billion in sales and is used by more than 25% pf the Fortune 100.
GHU Paris selects Sectra’s digital pathology solution.
Vocera is partnering with Status Solutions to enhance and expand alert management solutions in long-term care facilities.
The Modern CTO podcast features Waystar CTO Chris Schremser.
Telehealth vendor Amwell reports Q4 results: revenue up 34% with a net loss of $50.6 million versus $22.7 million. The company did not provide per-share numbers.
Amwell saw increases of several hundred percent in providers and visits for the year, but revenue increased only 65%.
AMWL shares, which closed on their first day of trading in September 2020 at $23.07, are at $17, valuing the company at $4 billion.
Amwell expects $265 million in revenue for 2021, nearly flat over 2020, and a loss in the $150 million range.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Reminder: several folks have said they no longer get my email updates. There’s a cure: sign up again. Hyperactive spam filters have driven email deliverability way down, especially for those that are sent to a group, so it can’t hurt to re-enter your email address (you won’t get duplicate email).
Jenn came up with a “Beat the Heat” HIStalk sponsorship idea for companies that won’t be exhibiting at HIMSS21. Sign up as a new Platinum sponsor and Jenn will include a promoted webinar and an email announcement just because she’s nice. For the cost of a HIMSS21 exhibit hall power strip, (OK, I’m exaggerating slightly), you’ll get exposure that lasts a year rather than three frantic days, and you’ll be running long before the conference starts. The crazy market valuations of health technology companies these days suggest that it’s a good time to get your company name out there among actual decision-makers, especially with all these SPACs desperately looking for dance partners to acquire. Tell Lorre that Jenn sent you.
Listening: After All, an obscure 1960s Tallahassee, FL band of Florida State graduates whose “heavy on the Hammond” British-sounding psychedelic prog sound at times resembled their contemporaries ELP, the Doors, or even Blood, Sweat & Tears. Their experimental album tracks were all over the place and the singer was trying to figure out whether to croon or growl, but they gave it their best shot for the band’s only album and its weeks-long existence– they hired a local 19-year-old Tallahassee poet (who later co-wrote “Tennessee Whiskey”) to write lyrics for songs in several popular styles, recorded the album with stunning production quality in two days as a producer friend’s freebie, then immediately went back to their day jobs having taken and missed their one shot. The band’s singer-songwriter, Mark Ellerbee — an FSU music grad who had served in Vietnam as an Army medic — enjoyed several years of minor fame as the drummer of the Oak Ridge Boys and worked for the state until he died in 2013 at 71, with his obituary video including the back jacket of the After All album. I hope Mark Ellerbee’s grandson knows how much his grandpa and his buds rocked it back in 1969 even though the world paid no attention. I think a movie is in order, complete with a psychedelic soundtrack. Rock in peace, Mark.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
At-home lab test vendor Everlywell acquires testing company PWNHealth and self-collected lab test processor Home Access Health Corporation, valuing the company at a reported $3 billion. Founder and CEO Julia Cheek, MBA is an investor and previously worked as an executive of money transfer company MoneyGram.
Ginger, which offers mental health and coaching services via text chat and video, raises $100 million in a Series E funding round.
Sales
MiraVista Behavioral Health Center (MA) will implement Medsphere’s EHR and revenue cycle platform.
Government IT provider FEI Systems will add NextGate’s EMPI to its data warehouse platform for patient matching and identification.
People
Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare hires Ron Fuschillo, MBA (Renown Health) as SVP/CIO.
MTBC – which will soon be renamed to CareCloud after acquiring that EHR vendor in January 2020 – promotes A. Hadi Chaudhry to CEO. He replaces Stephen Snyder, JD, who will move to chief strategy officer and continue as a director.
C. Pat Heyman joins Health Systems Informatics as VP of sales.
Announcements and Implementations
Wolters Kluwer, Health announces Chart Review Accelerator, part of its Health Language platform, which helps clinicians by scanning medical records using clinical natural language processing for medical necessity reviews, HEDIS quality reporting, and risk adjustment.
Humana and Epic will add support for electronic prior authorizations and member insights, expanding their original project that developed Humana’s Real-Time Benefits Check tool. They will also add decision support for specialist referrals.
Cerner will enable EHR data retrieval to New York Life to reduce life insurance application processing time.
A new KLAS report looks at the patient engagement ecosystem, which it defines well in the above graphic. Vendors that are increasing their capabilities the most, often through acquisitions, are GetWellNetwork, Vocera, Salesforce, and CipherHealth. The broadest capability hospital-centric vendors are Epic, Allscripts, and R1, while on the ambulatory side, it’s Athenahealth, NextGen Healthcare, Luma Health, and Mend. The most commonly offered capabilities are pre- and post-visit communication and education. Providers are increasingly interested in white-labeled products that allow them to create their own branded digital front door.
Government and Politics
HHS OCR announces its 17th HIPAA RIght of Access settlement, as Arbour Hospital agrees to pay $65,000 for failing to provide a patient with medical records copies within 30 days despite a previous OCR warning involving the same patient.
COVID-19
CDC reports that 130 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered, with 18% of US adults being fully vaccinated as well as 44% of those 65 and over. The White House doubled its vaccination goal Thursday in aiming for 200 million vaccine shots in President Biden’s first 100 days.
US deaths are at 541,000.
Michigan’s COVID-19 case rate has jumped to the country’s second-highest, with big increases in younger populations who aren’t eligible for vaccination yet, and hospitals are again filling with COVID-19 patients. Health officials think the increase is due to more infectious strains and spread via youth sports among parents of school-aged children. The state’s vaccination program started slowly, but rollout is accelerating and experts say it’s a race against the variants, which may be a challenge that other states experience.
AstraZeneca insists in an update that despite the concerns of US government scientists, its COVID-19 vaccine is 76% effective at reducing symptomatic infection and 100% effective against severe cases.
The COO of Chicago’s 122-bed Loretto Hospital resigns following reports that he used COVID-19 vaccine that was intended for low-income West Side residents and used it to vaccinate employees of his luxury wristwatch dealer, his favorite steakhouse, and Trump Tower, where he owns a $3 million condo. Anosh Ahmed, MD also posted a photo of himself posing with Eric Trump with a claim that he vaccinated him as well, but later said he was joking. The hospital admits that 200 people at the CEO’s church were also given hospital vaccine early and it reportedly also offered shots to county judges. The hospital has been cut off from further vaccine shipments.
The LA Times estimates that venture-backed startup Curative, led by a 25-year-old founder, has earned at least $1 billion in revenue from sales of largely unproven self-administered mouth swab tests for COVID-19. The city of Los Angeles paid the company at least $82 million to run mass testing sites, for which the city is seeking federal reimbursement, and the company is billing health insurers — who are forced by law to pay for the tests — $325 each versus an actual cost of a few dollars. A Colorado health system retested some of the company’s results and found them to be wrong, while FDA says its self-testing is not reliable.
Other
Astria Health (WA) blames Cerner for its bankruptcy and the closure of Astria Regional Medical center in bankruptcy court, contending that Cerner fraudulently misrepresented that Millennium would integrate seamlessly with its revenue cycle offerings. Astria Health says its collections went from 97% of net revenue to 54% after Cerner’s billing system went live and the Medicare and Medicaid claims of its clinics were frequently rejected. Cerner denies the allegations. Cerner previously objected to the health system’s planned bankruptcy because Astria Health had $10.7 million in unpaid bills that it did not plan to pay because it said Cerner problems had cost it $150 million, but the parties resolved that issue in December 2020 and the bankruptcy proceeded.
Sponsor Updates
Medicomp Systems launches a new healthcare podcast spotlighting ways to improve health IT.
Black Book Research names Netsmart as having the highest customer satisfaction among post-acute ambulatory health technology platforms.
IT Central Station ranks Everbridge the top IT alerting solution for 2020 based on peer product reviews.
Long-term care alert management system vendor Status Solutions and Vocera will integrate their offerings to route notifications via the Vocera Badge, smartphone app, or workstation.
Clinical Architecture releases a new podcast, “Reimagining Public Health Surveillance and Reporting with Dr. Donald Rucker.”
The Chartis Group has been honored by Forbes as one of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms for the third consecutive year.
Ingenious Med publishes a new white paper, “How to Minimize Physician Burnout and Optimize Revenues: Lessons learned from the pandemic.”
Lyniate publishes a new white paper, “Integration Strategies for Healthcare IT Vendors.”
Medhost offers its customers role-based Medhost Learning Essentials from Medhost University.
Providence Digital Innovation Group alum DexCare raises $20 million in a Series A financing round.
DexCare, which originally developed software for Providence’s ambulatory care sites, offers a platform to allow patients to self-schedule across multiple locations in dynamically routing them to the most appropriate care access point.
Co-founders Derek Streat and Sean O’Connor, who will run the company, came from University of Washington spinout C-SATS, which sold technology to make OR recordings of surgeries to allow outside experts to evaluate the skill of surgeons. That company was sold to Johnson & Johnson in 2019.
DexCare’s customers include Providence, Community Health Network, Houston Methodist, and Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Reader Comments
From Bedazzled: “Re: HIMSS21. I’m wondering if you will repeat your 1/29 poll about attendee plans? I’m sure many organizations are thinking through what their level of involvement will be.” I probably won’t run another poll for a while since I expect little has changed in less than two months, and at some point, everybody needs to just decide to either go or not instead of worrying until the last minute who else will be there. Two-thirds of HIMSS20 registrants said in that last poll I ran that they won’t attend HIMSS21, although I might be skeptical about generalizability. I figure I should be on hand to write it up whether it’s a success or a bust (maybe even more importantly if it’s the latter), so I booked the Palazzo at a great rate of $229 with no resort fee through HIMSS / OnPeak after wasting a ton of time trying to decipher their refund policy, which I think is that your card gets charged one night’s stay three weeks before the August 9 start date, then if HIMSS21 is cancelled afterward, that’s all you lose. I ordinarily would Airbnb a condo or house, but I’m not bringing a crew this time since there’s no HIStalkaplaooza or booth, so I’ll just Lyft from the airport and then everything will be just an elevator ride away.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Appriss, known in healthcare for its prescription drug monitoring program interface capabilities, acquires patient event notification vendor PatientPing for a reported $500 million.
After raising $44 million in January, health data and analytics company Komodo Health announces a $220 million Series E funding round.
Ro raises $500 million in a Series D funding round that brings its total to $876 million, and valuation to $5 billion. The company, which now markets itself as a digital health clinic, offers telemedicine, online prescription delivery, in-home lab and nursing services, and smoking cessation programs. Hemant Taneja, managing partner at Ro investor General Catalyst, has also invested in the new Glen Tullman-led Transcarent, which helps self-insured employers guide employees to more cost-effective care.
Data aggregation and analytics company Evidation Health will use a Series E funding round of $153 million to offer more virtual health programs as part of its digital health research network.
AppliedVR, which offers virtual reality-based chronic pain treatments, raises $29 million in a Series A funding round.
Sales
Mercy Iowa City (IA) will implement Allscripts Sunrise, delivered by Microsoft Azure.
People
Patty Lavely, MBA (CIO Consulting, LLC) joins Health Care District of Palm Beach County as VP/CIO/CDO.
Jennifer Anderson (North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance) joins Intellect Resources as VP of client services delivery.
Divurgent names Bob Farrar (Cognizant) as principal of payer services.
Announcements and Implementations
Meditech works with Code, Dryrain Technologies, and ACS MediHealth to develop a mobile barcode scanning app that is compatible with its Expanse EHR.
Cone Health (NC) implements the Loopback Analytics platform to improve value-based care and specialty pharmacy initiatives.
Hinchingbrooke Hospital in England goes live on enterprise imaging and Xero universal viewer technology from Agfa HealthCare.
Lumeon adds patient self-scheduling to its care journey orchestration platform.
Government and Politics
Hospitals that have published their confidential prices to comply with the new CMS requirement have some cases intentionally coded their websites to hide those pages from web searches.
FDA’s second-highest ranking official — Principal Deputy Commissioner and acting CIO Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD — will leave the agency next month. Abernethy, a hematologist-oncologist who was formerly a professor at Duke University School of Medicine and chief medical and scientific officer with Flatiron Health, said in a tweet, “If COVID has taught us anything, it’s that we need to rethink US digital health infrastructure. This transformation will require new ways of working across traditional silos in government & business/tech, ensuring we always put patients first.”
COVID-19
AstraZeneca issues a press release saying that US trials of its COVID-19 vaccine that is being used in Europe show a 79% efficacy against symptomatic infection and 100% protection against hospitalization and severe disease, but the independent review board that advises NIH says the company may have used outdated information from its trials and should enlist that board’s help to review the findings. The AstraZeneca vaccine is important globally because it costs just $4 per dose to manufacture and can be stored for up to six months under normal refrigeration. Observers say the vaccine is fine, but the drug company is not inspiring much confidence with its questionable communication and coordination with US regulators.
China’s efforts to enhance its global influence by offering countries its domestically produced COVID-19 vaccines are being hindered because the manufacturers of the two products — Sinovac and state-owned Sinopharm – still haven’t published data from their clinical trials from early 2020, raising questions about whether the efficacy of the vaccine is competitive with those made elsewhere. Sinopharm’s UAE distributor has suggested that some recipients take a third shot due to insufficient antibody response, while Sinovac’s studied efficacy rate has varied from 50% to 80%. The vaccines have been approved for use by 60 countries, many of which are unable to get the Pfizer and Moderna products that wealthier countries have bought up.
Texas Roadhouse founder and CEO Kent Taylor dies by suicide at 65 after experience debilitating long-term COVID symptoms that included severe tinnitus.
Sponsor Updates
PatientPing achieves full certification status under the state of Massachusetts’ Mass HIway Event Notification Service initiative.
Cerner releases a new podcast, “A tale of two crises and the value of health data interoperability.”
Change Healthcare will exhibit and sponsor at Rise National 2021 March 26, 29, and 30.
CloudWave’s OpSus Live cloud hosting for healthcare service achieves a “Best Practice” rating after successful completion of the Meditech Infrastructure and Supporting IT Process Audit with Securance Consulting.
Wolters Kluwer Health releases Lippincott TelemedInsights to help providers implement sustainable virtual care models.
VA Secretary Denis McDonough orders a strategic review of the VA’s Cerner EHR implementation. He said in an announcement that while the VA is committed to Cerner Millennium, problems with its use at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center make “a strategic review necessary.”
The VA says its ongoing post-deployment analysis at Mann-Grandstaff has necessitated a rollout schedule change, although Columbus remains as the next go-live site.
The VA’s 12-week review will include optimizing productivity and clinical workflow and looking into patient-facing functions such as the patient portal, data syndication, and revenue cycle.
Rep. Cathy Rodgers (R-WA) asked McDonough last Wednesday to launch an inquiry following reports of problems with prescription ordering, the patient portal, and user training. She calls the system “broken” and suggested a review of Mann-Grandstaff staffing, productivity, staff morale, training resources, and remaining infrastructure improvements.
The GAO recommended in a report last month that the VA delay going live at additional sites until it resolves call critical problems at Mann-Grandstaff, which was its first center to go live in October. The VA responded that it agreed in principle, but would not delay further rollouts.
Cerner provided a statement in response to the VA’s review announcement, saying that it supports the decision, that the company’s priority remains veterans and delivering solutions that drive care transformation in the VA, and that it is proud of its successes that include one of the largest health data migrations in history and deployment of a joint HIE between the DoD, VA, and community partners.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Poll respondents handily choose insurance companies over hospitals as offering the worst customer service in healthcare. It’s interesting to me how huge, profitable companies of the recurring revenue type nearly always offer embarrassingly bad service to their paying customers – cable companies, broadband providers, cell service providers, streaming subscription companies, and banks. Shouldn’t customer service be able to scale along with other parts of the business, and don’t these companies deploy enough analytics to understand the net present value of a customer who only needs to be occasionally helped – often because of the company’s mistake — to keep writing those monthly checks?
New poll to your right or here: Which should be done to better protect patient data? I’m sure I didn’t think of all possibilities, but I did include a “no changes needed” option and you can always vote and then click the poll’s “comments” link to add your own thoughts. I’m always surprised by how many people – some of them in healthcare – forget that the 25-year-old HIPAA, which is a HHS/CMS rule, applies only to covered entities and their business associates, and even then only if those providers submit electronic claims. Maybe a legal expert can weigh on what privacy protections the general legal system offers to the medical records of individuals – if my neighbor steals a printout of my medical records from my car seat and posts them on Facebook, do I have legal recourse?
I’m at the “go or no go” HIMSS21 decision point since it’s probably time to book travel arrangements. I’m leaning toward “go” because I should write about it regardless of how it turns out, but only if I can get a refundable lodging reservation in case the conference is cancelled. A flight on Southwest would be ideal since they would give a refund or credit if the conference isn’t held. I always get my north-south orientation of the Strip mixed up, but Google Maps tells me that the Wynn (where some sessions will be held ) is 0.8 miles from the Palazzo, meaning either queuing up for a shuttle or talking a long walk through sidewalks that are steaming with the urine of panhandlers and trying to convince yourself that 110 degrees isn’t all that bad because it’s a dry heat.
Listening: The Bengsons, an award-winning indie-folk husband and wife who debuted their latest work in a self-filmed, commissioned documentary film that was recorded in their house. It’s a refreshing counterpoint to the usual glitzy celebrity musicians (who sometimes make millions even though they don’t write songs, weren’t committed enough to learn to play an instrument, and can’t read music) in which we see them just singing and playing unadorned, with a gut-punching, powerful personal narrative from Abigail midway through that also explains her joy. This kind of performance art should be the future, even when we are once again allowed to wildly overpay for seats in which we watch a huge monitor of someone lip-synching and prancing impersonally on stage a hundred yards away. If you need something more smoothly soulful, Xavier Omär’s NPR Tiny Desk concert from last week is excellent.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Announcements and Implementations
Meditech adds vaccine eligibility checking to the self-scheduling component of its patient portal.
Government and Politics
The American Hospital Association asks the Department of Justice to review the proposed $13 billion acquisition of Change Healthcare by Optum. AHA says that the deal would reduce competition in health IT sales and would give Optum’s parent company, insurer UnitedHealth Group, access to claims data that would “further increase UGH’s already massive market power.”
COVID-19
CDC reports that 31% of American adults have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose and 17% have been fully vaccinated, as 121 million doses have been administered. A record 3.1 million vaccinations were given Saturday.
Some areas of the country are experiencing a COVID-19 case resurgence, which experts think is due to variants that can’t be verified because less testing is being done. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says we need better ways to link clinical outcomes with each identified variant.
The New York Times observes that the US government will soon be issued a patent for the invention that made at least five versions of COVID-19 vaccine possible, providing one last chance to pressure drug companies to expand access to poorer countries. Some countries are asking the World Trade Organization to waive patent restrictions so they can produce their own, while Russia and China are taking advantage of “vaccine diplomacy.”
A review of 62 papers that examined the use of AI for detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray and CT images finds that every model was unsuitable for clinical use because of methodological flaws or underlying biases. The authors found that use of publicly available datasets is problematic because they often exclude groups such as children and don’t include demographic information, systems are sometimes trained on low-resolution images, timing of tests and the view chosen can affect conclusions, and doctors would rarely diagnose or differentiate COVID-19 from images alone.
Other
The commissioners of Rowan County, NC give Atrium Health 30 days to establish EHR sharing with the county’s emergency medical services department, which ended in later 2019 and left first responders with no ability to review the hospital records of transported patients for EMS quality assurance review.
Billionaire Denny Sanford, who made his fortune providing high-interest credit cards to people with poor credit scores, donates $300 million to Sanford Health for projects that include creating a virtual hospital. He has donated more than $1 billion to the health system that changed its name from Sioux Valley Hospitals and Health Systems in return.
Taiwan-based Cloudmed raises $275,000 in an IndieGoGo campaign for its ICare cardiovascular tester, which it says is the world’s smallest. The phone-paired device includes real-time reporting, data sharing, lifestyle and dietary recommendations, and on-call clinical experts. Sensors include EKG, oxygen saturation, heart rate, blood pressure, and fatigue. Campaign supporters can get the device in May for $99, two for $159, or four for $269. Its $2 per month subscription offers SOS calling, medication reminders, summary reports, measurement journals, and advanced measurements. Thanks to reader AnotherDave for sending the link.
Kaiser Heath News says that COVID-related telehealth rules for out-of-state providers could have unintended consequences if made permanent – increased provider fraud, loss of profitable patients by local providers who may stop accepting money-losing Medicaid patients, and reduced access for patients who have limited technology literacy or internet access.
Social services referral platform vendor Unite Us raises $150 million in Series C financing, increasing its total to $195 million and valuing the company at $1.6 billion.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Amazon will expand its employee-only Amazon Care virtual health pilot project to its workers in all 50 states, then will offer the program to other companies later this year. The company says in its explainer video that it will bring care to the person instead of vice versa in “reimagining the practice of medicine” and “we’re rebuilding the whole delivery system around the human at the center.” The full program includes 24×7 virtual visits, at-home tests and treatments, prescription delivery, and a dedicated care team.
Healthcare analytics vendor Clarify Health raises $115 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $178 million. The company says its database of claims, EHR information, prescription records, and behavioral health data spans 300 million unique patient lives.
Data management and analytics vendor Clearsense raises $30 million in funding.
Sales
Kuwait’s Health Assurance Hospitals Company chooses the InterSystems TrakCare EHR.
Citizens Memorial Healthcare will use cloud disaster recovery services from Healthcare Triangle.
Ochsner Health chooses CarePort’s care transition solution.
Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health will deploy Netsmart’s My Avatar EHR and CareFabric platform.
Muscogee (Creek) Nation Health System of Oklahoma will use Everbridge’s vaccine distribution system to manage registration, scheduling, administration, tracking, and reporting.
Speare Memorial Hospital (NH) will implement Meditech’s Expanse EHR using Meditech as a Service.
Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health will implement digital fingerprinting health information protection from Terbium Labs and will invest in the company.
People
Glen Tullman (Livongo) joins Transcarent as CEO, expanding on his role as executive chair. The company helps self-insured employers guide employees to more cost effective care and takes a percentage of their savings. Tullman and Hemant Taneja are investors in the company as they were in Livongo, which they sold to Teladoc Health for $18.5 billion last fall.
AGS Health announces several executive hires: Proneet Sharma, MBA (Sutherland) as COO; Cheryl Cruver, MPA (Sonifi Health) as chief revenue officer; Ashish Mohan as CFO; Ekta Singh. MBA as chief human resources officer; and Phillip Park, MBA as VP of corporate development and finance.
Announcements and Implementations
Sphere launches an expanded patient payment platform that includes a mobile check-in, intake, and payment experience and the ability for patients to leave a card-on-file token for automatic payment of billing plan balances.
Remote patient monitoring solution vendor CareSimple incorporates health education material from Healthwise.
InterSystems offers its IRIS data platform as a managed service via Amazon Web Services.
Medhost announces YourCare Continuum, an enhanced care coordination solution.
IllumiCare will add the Epic-integrated WHIRL user customization app that was developed by Wake Forest Baptist Health to its Smart Ribbon. WHIRL compresses the Epic information of 10 patients per printed page to create a customizable rounding list.
Greenway Health launches GRS Select, a customizable RCM offering.
Government and Politics
The Senate confirms Xavier Becerra, JD – who served as California’s attorney general and as a member of Congress — as HHS secretary.
COVID-19
CDC reports that 113 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered in the US, with 28.5% of adults having had at least one shot and 12% being fully immunized.
Epic will offer its 10,000 employees COVID-19 vaccination on its still-closed Verona campus as approved by Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services, which has deemed the company’s software and its employees as critical. The program will be run by Mequon, WI-based flu shot clinic provider VaxPro.
Researchers will study the effects of COVID-19 vaccination on people with long COVID following anecdotal reports that their symptoms improved or disappeared shortly after injection.
Other
A Vanderbilt University Medical Center study finds that an EHR-based, real-time suicide risk model performed well in non-psychiatric clinical settings, using EHR demographics, diagnoses, medications, previous healthcare utilization, and Area Deprivation Indices that are driven by ZIP code. The authors note, however, that the model can’t capture potentially important information that is stored in free text or outside the institution’s EHR.
A review of the 100 largest US hospitals by bed count finds that two-thirds are not in compliance with CMS’s price transparency rule, either by failing to post the files at all or not included payer-specific negotiated rates.
Sponsor Updates
The local paper profiles Redox’s recent growth, including new funding; and expansion plans.
OptimizeRx’s recurring revenue grows as it secures 19 new enterprise-level engagements in Q1 2021.
PatientPing publishes a new white paper, “The COVID Rebound: How Real-Time Alerts Can Help SNFs Solve Three Key Challenges.”
Diameter Health summarizes the research it published with KONZA that demonstrates that quality score calculation is more accurate when using data from an HIE rather than a single EHR.
Pure Storage announces the GA of its Pure Cloud Block Store on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
Spirion publishes a new report, “Deliver Effective Sensitive Data Protection with 3 Must-Have Standards.”
Hospital Alemao Oswaldo Cruz joins the TriNetX network to expand its clinical research capabilities in Brazil and Latin America.
Zen Healthcare IT publishes a new case study, “Zen Healthcare IT Fast Tracks EHealth Exchange Onboarding for AdVault.”
WEDI features Fortified Health Security CEO Dan Dodson on its podcast.
Forbes includes Impact Advisors on its annual list of “America’s Best Management Consulting Firms” for the fifth consecutive year.
Tegria, Providence’s recently formed rollup of its nine health IT acquisitions, acquires health IT consulting firm Cumberland.
Cumberland, which was founded in 2004, will operate as an independent Tegria business unit. It will add to the company’s capabilities in claims and benefit administration systems, care management systems, managed services, and technology optimization.
Tegria’s other consulting and technology brands include Bluetree, Community Technologies, Engage, and Navin Haffty.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Healthcare development platform vendor Commure acquires Karuna Health, a digital patient communication startup based in San Francisco.
Employer-focused care navigation company Grand Rounds merges with Doctor on Demand. Grand Rounds CEO Owen Tripp will lead the new company, which will retain the Grand Rounds name. Doctor on Demand CEO Hill Ferguson will remain head of that brand.
Sales
UC Davis Medical Center (CA) will implement adverse event tracking and disease management software from Qview Health across all of its departments and services.
Emory Healthcare in Atlanta selects enterprise imaging technology from Sectra, which it will link with neighboring Grady Health System.
Kidney Disease Medical Group in Los Angeles will use Emerge’s platform to enhance its Athenahealth EHR.
The Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers will leverage PatientPing’s real-time admission, discharge, and transfer alerts to monitor patient events across its network of 52 centers.
People
Cone Health (NC) interim CTO Doug McMillian takes on the additional role of CISO.
Bright.md names Steve Giannini (Opal) as CEO. He takes over from co-founder Ray Costantini, who remains on the board.
Announcements and Implementations
Vyne Medical adds auto-indexing to its Trace integrated communication exchange engine, which allows health systems to transform documents and unstructured patient information into structured, shareable data without hand-keying information.
Spectrum Health (MI) incorporates TytoCare’s home medical exam kit into its virtual care services.
Newport Hospital and Health Services (WA) implements Epic through the software vendor’s Community Connect program.
Kingman Regional Medical Center (AZ) works with Meditech Professional Services to redesign workflows based on key performance indicators.
Digital health engagement platform vendor Quil launches Caregiving Circle, which allows a patient’s family and friends to join them for addressing health events or navigating day-to-day activities. The initial user is Penn Medicine’s orthopedic department, which will use the product for geriatric hip events.
Government and Politics
The Defense Health Agency works with Cerner to develop MassVax, a COVID-19 vaccine management system the DoD is incorporating into MHS Genesis.
The Texas Health Services Authority receives additional funding from ONC’s STAR HIE Program to expand its work with the SANER Project, a collaboration led by Audacious Inquiry that is working to develop better COVID-19-related data-sharing processes.
COVID-19
CDC reports that 28% of US adults have been given at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. Total administered doses are at 111 million. US deaths are at 533,000.
Several EU countries suspend their use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine after reports of abnormal blood clotting from Norway. WHO advises that no proven link exists for the 37 cases in 17 million vaccinations and thus recommends the product’s continued use. AstraZeneca notes that the occurrence of thrombotic events among vaccinated people is actually lower than in the general public and no such events were observed in 60,000 clinical trials participants.
WHO’s chief scientist says that better COVID-19 vaccines could be released later this year or next year, possibly products that don’t require needles and that can be stored at room temperature.
Zocdoc founder Cyrus Massoumi, MBA launches Dr. B, a website that helps eligible people locate COVID-19 vaccines in danger of going to waste. The service, largely a volunteer effort so far, is sending out availability alerts for two providers in New York and is working to onboard 200 more across the country.
The Atlantic writers who founded the just-completed COVID Tracking Project — which for all of 2020 was the most-reliable, best-vetted source of US coronavirus testing, infection, and hospitalization, even including the CDC’s failed dashboard — say US data reporting systems failed because they were working as (poorly) designed:
Pandemic preparation plans emphasized data-driven decision-making without considering that the required information might be unavailable or unreliable.
States inconsistently rolled up their detailed data into simple federal feeds that appeared to be standardized, but really weren’t, leading to errors in the epidemiological models that were created from that information.
Data “travel at different speeds,” so coronavirus testing and case data is always a snapshot in time of information that can’t just be combined, such as with fast-reported case counts and slow-reported negative test results.
Reports of deaths are delayed from a handful of days to months, meaning that an outbreak’s death toll can’t be accurately reported until weeks after it is already over.
The federal government says that 4 million antigen tests are being performed daily, but state records show a small percentage of that number, and nobody has been able to explain the difference or whether the unreported results are significant.
The data the authors trust most is HHS’s hospital-reported data.
Data-driven thinking isn’t necessarily better than other forms of reasoning, and could even be worse if the underlying data deficiencies aren’t understood. A recent example was CDC’s March 1 warning about an uptick in case and death counts caused by variants, which the authors knew wasn’t accurate since case counts had been falling sharply for the previous month. Those numbers jumped because states were processing a backlog of death certificates, especially in storm-crippled Texas.
At least five states regularly submit incomplete data, yet that flawed information is being used by CDC to advise those states on school reopening.
Other
A study finds that quality measures that are calculated from a single provider organization’s EHR data differ from those calculated from aggregated HIE data in 19% of patients, which the authors attribute to patients who see multiple providers. Pneumonia vaccination of older adults, for example, was 7% better when looking at the data of all participants than when calculated from a single provider’s data. The authors conclude that information exchange is essential for accurately calculating quality measures that drive provider payment.
Kaiser Health News says that even though millions of Americans are wearing prescribed, expensive continuous glucose monitoring patches, little evidence exists that the extra cost over cheap daily finger sticks provide better outcomes for people with Type 2 diabetes who don’t use insulin. The manufacturers are aggressively pushing them for Type 2 use because of the large potential customer base as compared to Type 1 diabetics.
Sponsor Updates
Ascom Americas Senior Product Mobility Manager Jack Langsam raises $5,000 for Susan G. Komen.
CarePort CEO and founder Lissy Hu, MD will speak at the Whole Person Care Summit March 23.
Central Logic welcomes back Jodi Hubler to its board.
Impact Advisors is named to the Forbes list of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms for 2021.
KLAS ranks Cumberland’s payer IT consulting services number two in the “2021 Best in KLAS: Software & Services Report.”
EClinicalWorks publishes a guide to choosing a vaccine administration management system.
Lyniate names Christy Evans (Surescripts) director of strategic partners, and announces new partnerships with Sensato and Secure Exchange Solutions.
The full in-person conference costs $895 at the early bird rate, which includes the digital program, while digital-only registration costs $395.
HIMSS says the digital program will not be a duplication or live stream of on-site activities. It will contain “keynote-level conversations,” company announcements, education sessions, and networking opportunities.
Those who registered for HIMSS20 and intend to apply their credit to HIMSS21 need to click an individually emailed link to roll over their registration instead of registering again. The rollover email also interestingly notes that registrants must upload a headshot that will be printed on their badge, which I’m guessing is related to HIMSS20 registrations, which are not transferrable to another attendee.
The HIMSS21 exhibitor list shows 416 companies, 69 of them first-time exhibitors.
Meanwhile, HIMSS pays $2.8 million to settle class action charges brought by HatchMed and other HIMSS20 exhibitors who complained that they received no refund when the conference was cancelled. Lawsuit class members have two options: (a) apply a 50% credit of their HIMSS20 exhibitor fees to HIMSS21 and another 10% for HIMSS22; or (b) take a 20% cash refund of HIMSS20 fees along with a 30% credit of those fees applied toward HIMSS21 and 10% applied toward HIMSS22.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Vendors, you know what you should be doing to create better webinars and presentations: (a) focus on the value to attendees instead of pitching product; and (b) get a credible presenter who can demonstrate enthusiasm and knowledge. I feel sorry for marketing people who are tasked with checking the “we did a webinar” box, then have to strong-arm any available presenter to develop a program, create slides and notes, and then deliver a decent presentation. I think that’s why webinars often feature company salespeople as the key presenters, which is convenient but not exactly compelling to prospective attendees.
New poll to your right or here, in a repeat from several years ago: Which organization most often provides poor customer service in your personal experience?
Listening: Sandy Denny, the lead singer of British folk rock band Fairport Convention in the late 1960s. Her voice was angelic and her phrasing immaculate, but her life was tragic – her many self-harm injuries that resulted from a lifetime of behavioral health problems caused her physical pain and substance abuse that led to her death in 1978 at 31 years of age. She had little commercial success despite boundless talent, and while her song “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” (which she wrote at 19) is often played at funerals, most people think it was written by Judy Collins because Collins covered it (her version is also excellent). Trivia: Denny sang “The Battle of Evermore” with Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin IV as the only guest artist the band ever recorded. Along similar musical lines falls Australia’s The Seekers, best known for their peppy movie song “Georgy Girl,” but better represented by “I’ll Never Find Another You,” in which I imagine Judith Durham and the band still elicit occasional listener tears 57 years later with a deceptively simple but strongly arranged song that was flawlessly executed without ego or technical assistance. It is a jarring but satisfying reality to hear the same youthfully exuberant foursome recreate their performance identically in their 70s.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Shares of insurer Clover Health, which went public via a SPAC merger on January 8, have dropped 46% since then versus the Nasdaq’s 1% gain, valuing the company at $3.6 billion.
India-based healthcare AI vendor Zasti will open its US headquarters in Loudoun County, VA.
PatientBond launches Insights Accelerator, which provides health systems and other providers with healthcare consumer market research and psychographic data for marketing.
Musculoskeletal exercise and health coaching app vendor Hinge Health acquires Enso, which offers an electrical nerve stimulation wearable for pain relief. Enso says 56% of its users experience immediate pain relief and 36% report improved physical function.
Announcements and Implementations
UCM Digital Health adds clinical content from UpToDate and Emmi to its virtual health platform using the Content-as-a-Service cloud model of Wolters Kluwer Health.
Crossover Health expands its health centers and virtual care for Amazon employees and their dependents to five regions in TX, AZ, KY, MI, and CA. The company was founded in 2010 by Medsphere co-founder Scott Shreeve, MD, who I interviewed about his long-ago career change in October 2019.
COVID-19
CDC reports that 106 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 136 million distributed, with 21% of Americans having had at least one dose and a remarkable 63% of those over 65 having taken their first shot. Over 14% of US adults have been fully vaccinated. High penetration of nursing home vaccination has pushed cases, hospitalizations, and deaths hugely down.
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says that the US’s aggressive vaccination program has greatly reduced the risk of variants that are causing big case upticks in Eastern Europe and Italy that have brought back lockdowns. He agrees with President Biden that July 4 gatherings will be safe to organize since vaccine supplies should be ample for everyone in April.
The New York Times looks at how buggy self-scheduling systems are slowing down COVID-19 vaccinations due to being used in ways that were not foreseen in their design, errors caused by the demand for frequent updates, lack of interoperability, the challenges of tracking two-shot administration, crashes caused by high demand, and lack of security in allowing appointment links to be shared and re-used.
An NPR survey finds that the highest percentage of vaccine hesitancy is in Republican men and supporters of former President Donald Trump, while hesitancy among blacks is now even lower than that of whites. The idea that black Americans are unusually vaccine hesitant and thus will require extra convincing was disproven by this survey.
Two Johns Hopkins epidemiologists warn in a New York Times opinion piece that COVID-19 testing should not be scaled back in diverting resources from surveillance to vaccination. They say the volume of rapid antigen tests needs to be increased and the price reduced to support routine use in testing students, employees, and families considering a gathering.
Other
HIMSS will move from its 33 W. Monroe headquarters in Chicago to a 30,000-square-foot space that it has subleased from Gartner Research at the 24-story River North Point building at 350 N. Orleans Street, the former Apparel Center that is connected by skywalk to the Merchandise Mart.
In Canada, CBC picks up the story of a military veteran who killed family members and then took his own life after a patchwork of EHRs failed to alert his new doctor about his psychiatric treatment in the military for proper follow-up. It notes that Nova Scotia is trying to move to a one patient, one record system, but is years away, as family practices use a single ER but hospitals run SHARE, Meditech, and One Concept systems that can’t communicate with each other. Experts note that even if the ideal system is implemented in Nova Scotia, providers still won’t be able to see a patient’s records from other provinces.
UCHealth CMIO CT Lin, MD provides a fascinating look at how workers at a drive-through vaccination site optimized their processes (UCHealth wrote a playbook on how to do mass vaccinations). He describes using Epic’s Rover smartphone app for mobile documentation, but EHR use also created problems – other Epic-using facilities sometimes charted vaccine administration on the wrong patient, so their shared data incorrectly said they had already received shots when they showed up. I can heartily endorse the “problem line” approach he describes since I used it at the final HIStalkapalooza – we moved people who were having problems (like showing up without being invited) to a dedicated table to keep the main line moving. We can only wish that airlines (remember them?) took this approach instead of allowing all available ticket counter or gate staff to frown together in puzzlement over a single monitor while everybody in line scowls.
Sponsor Updates
The local paper profiles the experience of four InterSystems interns.
The McBee CareThreads Podcast features Kim Elsberry, senior director of population health at Netsmart.
Spirion joins the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association.
Sponsored point-of-care patient education vendor PatientPoint acquires one-time high flyer Outcome Health to form PatientPoint Health Technologies.
The acquisition was rumored in October 2020, when the value of the combined companies was estimated at $600 million.
Outcome Health was valued at $5 billion until November 2019, when its two founders and two of its executives were charged with $1 billion in fraud for overstating revenue and inflating ad performance to overcharge drug company advertising clients.
Outcome Health’s founders, former CEO Rishi Shah and former president Shradha Agarwal, along with the two other executives, have pleaded not guilty to fraud and are scheduled to stand trial in February 2022.
Reader Comments
From Digital Dragoon: “Re: technology and insurers. Some of these tools will be threats to individual hospitals and practices, probably the smaller ones.” Maybe, but the bigger threat is those providers staying relatively small, which means they can’t compete effectively in many areas. Small banks were a good example of limited-scale operations that may or may not have jumped on ATMs and online services, but they were going to be toast regardless because they were being circled by competitors who were committed to change – not just semi-accepting of it – in a quest to gain economy of scale. Also note that those small banks didn’t usually fail and instead sold out profitably to the better-funded and more intense regional chains that were rapidly on their way to becoming national powerhouses, courtesy of altered anti-competitive laws (changing regulations is another thing that big companies can do that smaller ones can’t). Most of those small banks were probably not unhappy about being bought out and may have conducted themselves all along knowing that they were likely to enjoy a financially successful outcome. Takeaway: technology doesn’t necessarily drive success, but it is often competitively used by successful companies who pair it with ambition and skilled execution.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Dear PR people: I almost never read a press release that starts with the word “today” given that (a) every announcement pertains to “today” (it being an announcement and all); and (b) the date of the announcement’s already defines “today” better than the word, which won’t be “today” when someone reads it tomorrow.
Reader Mark’s generous donation, with matching funds applied from my Anonymous Vendor Executive and other sources, fully funded these Donors Choose teacher grant requests:
Headphones for virtual learners of Ms. B’s elementary school class in Houston, TX.
A mobile whiteboard for math lessons for Ms. C’s first grade class in Fresno, CA.
A document camera for Ms. M’s kindergarten class in Sharon, WI.
Mobile carts and storage bins for simultaneous in-person and virtual class of Ms. A in Dallas, TX.
Math manipulatives for Ms. M’s elementary school class in Detroit, MI.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Germany-based imaging workflow vendor Brainlab acquires Mint Medical, which provides a structured workflow for analyzing medical images.
Forward Health, which offers direct primary care at a flat fee of $149 per month in eight US cities, raises $225 million in a Series D funding round.
Vancouver-based Well Health will acquire Intrahealth, a New Zealand EHR vendor, for $15 million.
Sales
Walgreens uses Nuance’s Intelligent Engagement conversational chatbot to help customers schedule their COVID-19 vaccinations by telephone.
Northeast Georgia Health System chooses Kyruus ProviderMatch to create a system-wide provider directory and power patient-provider matching for consumer search.
CareMount Medical will deploy RCxRules Revenue Cycle Rules Engine for claims scrubbing and submission.
Northeast Ohio Medical University licenses VisualDx to teach observational clinical reasoning and differential diagnosis, especially in patients with dark skin, which represent 28% of the VisualDx images versus 19.5% in common medical education resources.
Michigan Medicine contracts for 3M’s speech recognition, coding, and clinical documentation products. 3M acquired MModal’s technology business, which included most of the products involved in this sale, in early 2019 for $1 billion.
Healthcare Outcomes Performance Company selects Emerge to convert data from its legacy EHRs to Athenahealth, normalize the data sets, and create a searchable database.
Leon Medical Centers (FL) will implement Bluestream Health’s telehealth platform.
People
Lauren Verdery (EY) joins Nordic as SVP of brand, marketing, and communications.
Health Data Movers hires Monte Hess (Quest Diagnostics) as VP of sales and recruiting.
Industry long-timer Jeff Litterst, who was most recently director of enterprise sales at NThrive, died Monday at 57.
Announcements and Implementations
PeriGen’s Vigilance continuous labor monitoring system goes live in Area 25 Health Centre in Malawi in a project with Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. Facebook posts about the center by Mr. Omar of Child Legacy International show a patient meal (all products were harvested from the health center’s own garden except the rice) and a local artisan teaching expectant mothers how to weave.
Health Catalyst launches an updated Healthcare.AI suite of products and services.
Healthcare Growth Partners advised Bizmatics on its acquisition by Harris Healthcare.
Censinet announces RiskOps, which consolidates enterprise risk management and operations across clinical, regulatory, cybersecurity, research, and supply chain.
Metro Health – University of Michigan Health reports that hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia were reduced by 54% and 40%, respectively, since its implementation of Glytec’s EGlycemic Management System. Metro Health implemented the cloud-based system remotely last year as COVID-19 interrupted its planned rollout.
Google Cloud announces GA of an API that collects and stores the privacy choices of an app’s users, then validates individual data requests to determine if they should be allowed based on those stored user preferences.
COVID-19
WHO declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic on March 11, 2020. I ran reader poll results that day in which 75% of respondents said that cancelling HIMSS20 was the right thing to do. That day’s HIStalk also included warnings about ICU demand and a shortage of ventilators and staff in hospitals in Italy, as well as comments from former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD (just before the pandemic was officially declared) warning that the US was already overrun with coronavirus, public gatherings would need to be curtailed, and businesses should plan to offer teleworking.
One year after the pandemic was declared, CDC reports that 96 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 128 million distributed, with the US on track to have 100 million citizens vaccinated by early April. The US has contracted for more than enough supply to vaccinate everyone.
COVID-19 was the US’s third-leading cause of death in 2020 as overall deaths jumped 15%.
Other
In Canada, a doctor who treated a veteran who later committed a triple murder and then killed himself says that a better connection between provincial and military EHRs “would certainly be beneficial.” He said that accessing the patient’s Halifax records required using that province’s buggy SHARE web viewer, but even then, some of the doctors who saw the patient kept only paper notes that weren’t being scanned into Meditech and SHARE, so he didn’t know the patient’s history. The man had been home from residential psychiatric treatment for two months and the doctor still didn’t have access to his chart, leading to confusion over who was supposed to be coordinating his care.
A study of clinical decision support rules in nine Epic-using sites finds that 0.5% of the statements contained errors in Boolean logic, whose nested true-false statements can be hard for people to intuitively understand. The authors recommend that EHR vendors consider adding the open source error-checking tool that they developed for the study. They also note that their method can detect only logic statement errors, not cases in which a statement won’t work as expected, such as a rule that attempts to identify patients outside of normal weight range by selecting BMI < 25 and BMI > 25, where “and” should be “or” since both conditions will never be simultaneously true and thus no patient will ever be selected.
Sponsor Updates
Everbridge receives a new patent related to its Public Warning system, pertaining to technology focused on hybrid population alerting systems and intelligent sending of messages in public mobile networks.
Authority Magazine features “Kelly Maggiore of Impact Advisors on The 5 Leadership Lessons She Learned From Her Experience.”
The Chartis Center for Rural Health honors Mercy Health Lakeshore as a 2021 Top 100 Critical Access Hospital.
Former Practice Fusion Director of National Accounts Steven Mack pleads guilty to attempting to obstruct the federal investigation into the relationship between Practice Fusion and Purdue Pharma after admitting he deleted hundreds of relevant computer files from his work-issued laptop.
Practice Fusion paid a $145 million settlement in January 2020 to resolve federal allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by configuring its EHR software to influence the prescribing practices of its end users for the benefit of opioid manufacturers like Purdue.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor GetWellNetwork. The Bethesda, MD-based company’s interactive solutions engage patients and families, empower clinicians, and deliver outcomes that matter. It has been helping to unite providers and patients as partners in the healthcare journey for 20 years. From inpatient to outpatient, its comprehensive cross-continuum platform bridges care settings to create a seamless experience for patients and their families. Recent big news for the company was its acquisition of Docent Health, which offers AI-enabled outreach technology for consumer engagement and “next best step” in their care across episodes. Thanks to GetWellNetwork for supporting HIStalk.
I took a look at the technology being touted by some of the insurance companies and for-profit primary care chains that claim that their “full tech stack” differentiates them from stodgier but infinitely larger and more profitable competitors. That seems to be especially common in companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans. Consumer-facing apps usually had some combination of these capabilities:
Appointment scheduling.
Messaging, either directly with clinicians or with a “concierge team.”
Telehealth visits.
Plan details and benefits management.
Status of claims, payments, prescriptions, and lab results.
Doctor and urgent care finder.
Cost comparisons, either drug or procedure.
Smart watch or fitness tracker connectivity for health prompts, activity goals, synchronization.
Collaborative sharing of EHR data and clinician notes (this was one specific national primary care practice).
These services alone don’t offer much competitive advantage since they are commonly offered. I expect that back-end systems contribute more to how companies market themselves, upsell to members, and create efficiency that may or may not translate into efficiency that can boost margins, so these seem a lot more important. Some of those I thought of:
Anything that can help an insurer get to the scale needed to reduce per-member costs, improve provider negotiating position, and improve actuarial forecasts. Predicting and controlling costs is the bread and butter of insurance companies, which are not, despite their self-assigned labels, technology firms.
Sales tools, especially for insurers and their broker network.
Automated onboarding systems.
Any kind of self-service capabilities that can reduce administrative costs.
Enrollment for clinical trials, selling data to drug companies.
Supporting paperless communications.
Efficiently serving employers, who are the actual customer for most US-sold health insurance.
Analytics to nudge members into behaviors that reduce short- or medium-term costs (companies aren’t likely to worry about long-term costs since members come and go and these public traded companies worry quarter to quarter).
Customer relationship management to help overcome impersonal relationships at scale and to sell additional services, either those offered by the company or co-marketed through a third party.
Chatbots to support members with administrative needs at scale.
Patient education.
Chronic condition monitoring and at-home monitoring to reduce the need for provider services.
Customer segmentation and analytics to support variable pricing.
Tools for clinicians to help ensure evidence-based practice, reduce documentation burden, increase payment efficiency.
Fraud detection.
Trying to integrate the web of third-party services that is the US healthcare system (labs, specialists, out-of-network providers, pharmacies, medical devices, home care, etc.) to provide a single experience that customers value.
My admittedly superficial conclusion is that most of the consumer-facing technology that insurers are rolling out is limited, focusing mostly on administrative tasks, upselling and cross-selling, and giving customers an alternative to long phone wait times for questions or complaints. A significant reason for this limited technology arsenal is that pure insurers have a mostly intrusive administrative role between the provider and the patient. It’s a different and much more interesting story when the insurer has vertically integrated itself to offer its own services in competing with providers who accept its insurance (as in the Kaiser Permanente model).
For me, then, companies that have a small insurance footprint (in terms of enrollees, markets served, revenue, etc.) seem to be highly at risk to big competitors who can outspend them, replicate their innovative tech tools, and just buy those companies if they get too sassy. US healthcare is almost always dominated by big companies that kept getting bigger, and late starters who hope that tech-powered disruption can upend the market (whether the insurance market or the stock market) may find that to be harder than it sounds.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Canadian telecommunications company Telus will acquire Babylon Health’s Canadian operations. The deal includes a $70 million licensing fee for virtual care technology already used by Canadians in the Babylon by Telus Health app. Babylon Health is reportedly exploring IPO options via merger with an SPAC.
Patient payment vendor Cedar raises $200 million in a Series D investment round led by Tiger Global Management, giving it a $3.2 billion valuation.
Rural hospital operator Rennova Health cancels plans to sell its software and genetic testing interpretation divisions to InnovaQor, which would also include telehealth technology that Rennova had licensed from TPT Global Tech. Rennova says the companies could not agree on terms, but it will still pursue separating its software assets.
AI-powered cancer pathology diagnostics vendor Ibex Medical Analytics raises $38 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $52 million.
Sales
USA Health (AL) selects Twistle’s COVID-19 vaccine management technology, including automated patient outreach and adverse effect reporting.
Wellstar Health System (GA) will offer its employees digital health and wellness resources from Sharecare, and will work with the Atlanta-based company to develop similar tools for patients.
Hartford HealthCare (CT) will implement Cedar’s patient billing software.
The Christ Hospital Health Network (OH) selects Omnicell’s automated Central Pharmacy Dispensing Service.
Mountain Health Network (WV) will work with Infor, The Chartis Group, and Avaap to implement Infor’s CloudSuite ERP technology.
People
Kevin Johnson, MD, MS (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) joins University of Pennsylvania as professor, VP of applied informatics at University of Pennsylvania Health System, director of a new informatics center, and senior scientist in science communication.
Southwestern Health Resources hires Donghui Wu, PhD, MBA (Texas Health Resources) as VP of data science and analytics officer.
Investor and advisor Scott Vertrees joins Heal as CEO, replacing co-founder Nick Desai, who remains a shareholder.
H1 names Julie Stern (HealthReveal) CISO and VP of engineering.
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise promotes Lisa Simpson to head of North American sales.
Provider analytics vendor Trilliant Health hires Sanjula Jain, PhD (The Health Management Academy) as SVP of market strategy / chief research officer.
Announcements and Implementations
Fifteen VA health systems and medical centers in 11 states join Medicom’s health information network.
Change Healthcare announces GA of Data Science as a Service, which assists customers in using de-identified claims and social determinants of health data for analytics projects.
Philips will add OpenDoctor’s radiology patient self-scheduling technology to its new Patient Management Solution of its Radiology Workflow Suite. The system will also offer contactless registration, automated communication, and intake questionnaires.
Meditech launches a genomics solution for its Expanse EHR, which includes the ability to collect and store patient genetic information, connect to reference labs, and enable personalized treatment. Its embedded pharmacogenomic alerts are provided by First Databank.
PVerify launches a real-time and batch Medicare Beneficiary Identifier lookup solution that can be accessed via API, Excel file batch processing, or individual patient lookup on the company’s portal.
COVID-19
CDC says it’s OK for people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to gather indoors without masks and distancing, as long as the group is made up of either all people who have been fully vaccinated or those from the same household who are not at increased risk. Masks and distancing are still recommended while in public, while visiting with unvaccinated people who are at increased risk, or when assembling in groups that involve multiple households. Domestic and international travel are still not recommended, advice that CDC defends by citing a lack of information about the impact of variants.
A study finds that the relationship between obesity and negative COVID-19 outcomes is nearly linear, as increased BMI is associated with higher rates of hospitalization and death. Severely obese patients were 33% more likely to be hospitalized and 61% more likely to die of COVID-19 than non-obese people.
A study that was performed using University of California EHR data finds that 27% of people who tested positive for COVID-19 experienced symptoms that lasted 60 or more days afterward, including shortness of breath, chest pain, cough, or abdominal pain. Many of those people did not originally experience any symptoms when they tested positive, and the severity of any initial symptoms didn’t always line up with eventual post-COVID problems. Patients in all age groups had long COVID effects, including 11 of the 34 children in the study. The study was limited in that (a) it was not able to review people who were asymptomatic but didn’t get tested; and (b) the static 60-day snapshot would have missed an unknown of people who don’t develop problems until after two months.
Other
A long-time hospital IT technologist friend of HIStalk and supporter of my Donors Choose projects sent a CIO job opening my way for Denver Health. You can read all about its clinical and community services (the latter are extensive), and on the IT side, Denver Health is in the 91st percentile of Epic’s gold stars program and recently migrated its self-hosted data centers to colocation centers (the new CIO will lead development of a full-blown cloud strategy). US News & World Report ranks Denver and nearby Colorado cities as four of the best five places to live in the US (Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Fort Collins). What better candidate can you get, my reader asks, than someone who routinely reads HIStalk? I appreciated that thought so much that I decided to mention the job opening here, which I usually wouldn’t do.
University of Washington researchers develop an Alexa skill that can detect heart rhythm problems in people who sit within two feet of a smart speaker during a telehealth visit. They are also looking at whether the same technology could detect sleep apnea in the home.
Sponsor Updates
Clinical Architecture staff volunteer at the Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana.
Capsule receives the 2021 New Product Innovation Award in the North American remote ventilator surveillance industry.
Humber River Hospital in Canada deploys Ascom’s transformative tech ecosystem for improved patient safety.
CarePort announces that more than 130 hospitals and health systems selected CarePort Care Management in 2020.
CereCore publishes an overview of Meditech reporting and regulatory submission.
The Cerner Charitable Foundation approves medical grants for 66 children.
SOC Telemed earns full URAC accreditation in telemedicine.
Frost & Sullivan features Change Healthcare in its Executive Brief, “Empowering Healthcare with a Cloud-based Enterprise Imaging Strategy.”
ChartSpan will market its services to members of the Kentucky Hospital Association.
Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, releases a new Clinical Concepts in Obstetrics podcast, “Cardiac Disease in Pregnancy.”
Divurgent releases a new episode of The Vurge podcast, “Using AI to Identify and Correct Issues with Claims.”
Waystar adds text statements to its line of payment tools, and announces that nearly 300 healthcare facilities now use its Price Transparency solution.
Harris acquires Bizmatics, which offers the PrognoCIS EHR/PM.
Recent acquisitions have given Canada-based Harris, which is owned by Constellation Software, a long list of health IT brands that includes Amazing Charts, GEMMS, QuadraMed, Iatric Systems, IMDSoft, Just Associates, Picis, Obix, DigiChart, Uniphy Health, and MediSolution.
Reader Comments
From ML Ratio: “Re: tech-powered insurers. Several are going public and touting their technology. Will you be covering them?” Probably not since I think they are blowing smoke in trying to convince investors that they are sexy tech companies instead of boring old insurers whose profitability is based on stealing someone else’s insurance customers, negotiating provider contracts, and managing their medical loss ratio. You’re still an insurance company if most of your income is generated by premiums rather than a cute app or quickly launched telehealth program whose main end product is buzz. That’s especially true of recent startups whose website and pitch deck tries to make you think they are the next Facebook. Ignore the self-assigned labels and focus on their tiny market share, handful of coverage areas, and big competitors to whom they provide little threat. You don’t want to go toe-to-toe with UnitedHealth Group, Anthem, or Centene armed only with a clever idea for making Medicare Advantage primary care seem more interesting
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Culbert Healthcare Solutions. The Woburn, MA-based company’s patient access, clinical workflow, and revenue cycle operations experience, combined with its deep IT strategy and deployment experience, uniquely qualifies it to select, implement, and optimize healthcare technologies. Its health IT consulting team includes former CIOs and vendor-focused analysts who design and deliver high-value services that advance the delivery of care, enhance the patient experience, and improve financial performance. Thanks to Culbert Healthcare Solutions for supporting HIStalk.
About 60% of poll respondents say their company’s work culture is the same or better now as it was a year ago, results I didn’t expect given a tough year of pandemic challenges, remote work, and uncertainty. I’m interested to see how both company culture and internal job opportunities are affected when some but not all employees continue working remotely as a permanent arrangement. Remote workers were out of sight, out of mind in the places I’ve worked, with those jobs (other than consulting or sales) best suited for folks who weren’t looking to gain responsibility, get promoted, or boost their resumes with challenging new assignments. Those rewards were given to the familiar faces of people who spend their days around conference room tables, in unplanned hallway conversations, and at lunch with those who have some control over their occupational destiny.
Thanks to the following companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo for more information and to thank them for keeping my keyboard clacking.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Real estate investment trust Omega Healthcare Investors acquires Connected Living, which provides smart devices, apps, and wearables to senior housing and care companies.
Ascension Ventures raises $285 million for its fifth strategic venture capital fund, increasing its assets under management to more than $1 billion.
The one-month performance of the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health EFT is a loss of 18% versus the Nasdaq’s 9% loss. EDOC shares are up 15% since their July 30, 2020 listing, trailing the Nasdaq’s 19% gain in the same period.
Announcements and Implementations
Walmart heir Alice Walton, who is one of the world’s richest women at a reported net worth of $60 billion, announces that her non-profit will create a new medical school, Whole Health School of Medicine and Health Sciences, in Walmart’s home town of Bentonville, AR.
COVID-19
Nearly one-fourth of Americans have received at least their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine, including 59% of those 65-75 and 69% of those over 75.
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD predicts that meetings and widespread travel will return to the US in July through September, but that will slow again to some degree as cooler weather drives people back indoors.
Sponsor Updates
Nordic welcomes Saran Sonaisamy (Cognizant) as director of cloud transformation and cybersecurity.
PerfectServe publishes a new case study featuring the University of Tennessee Medical Center, “EMR Embedded Communication Improves Efficiency.”
Pure Storage and Equinix develop a Bare Metal as a Service storage offering that delivers a unified, connected platform for any stage of an organization’s cloud journey.
Redox releases a new podcast, “Withings’ Journey from Consumer to Remote Patient Monitoring.”
Several health systems and home-based care companies – including Amazon Care, Intermountain Healthcare, Ascension, and Landmark Care – form Moving Health Home.
The coalition will try to convince the federal government to permanently pay for telehealth, remote patient monitoring, virtual disease prevention and management, caregiver support, and medical record sharing as an alternative to in-hospital care.
The group says that the pandemic has shown that clinical services can be safely and effectively provided at home. Many Americans, they say, would prefer receiving services at home instead of in hospitals.
The announcement says that home health services have been focused on delivering short-term services to primarily seniors who are recovering from an illness, injury, or hospital stay. They believe that home care should be a regular option for primary care, behavioral health, chronic disease management, and hospital-level care.
Reader Comments
From HIMSS Venues: “Re: post-COVID events. My hope is that they will combine in-person and virtual sessions, which will open up those smaller venues like San Diego, New Orleans, and Atlanta. HIMSS in San Diego was always my favorite.” San Diego was my favorite HIMSS city by far, which places it on the opposite end of the spectrum from Las Vegas. My recent mention of San Diego was with the same thought you had – conferences are likely to be smaller, so perhaps San Diego could be added back into the HIMSS rotation. My HIMSS experience in Atlanta and Dallas was big-box bland, while New Orleans was heavy on personality and great food that was more than cancelled out by infrastructure that bordered on third world at HIMSS13 (cramped airport, decrepit hotels, lack of service personnel, and boil water advisories) I’m on the bubble with Chicago because weather can be iffy and hotels are expensive, although I had fun staying in a VRBO house in Bridgeport last time. The San Diego downside to me is its limited number of business class hotels and its landlocked, often fogged-in airport that provides a white-knuckle, steep descent thrill ride with each landing. It’s hard for HIMSS to be nimble since big conferences require infinitely complicated planning and contract negotiations, so if they interrupt the Las Vegas-Orlando back-and-forth, I would expect them to push Chicago yet again to keep their own costs down. I’ll take it over Las Vegas any day.
From Spinout: “Re: partnership. What do marketing people think that word means when they use it in announcements?” They think it means free PR. I’m slowly moving to a policy of not mentioning any announcement that references a “partnership” since:
I can’t tell 90% of the time exactly what the business arrangement is under which the companies will work together, which I suspect is intentional obfuscation.
If it’s some kind of marketing or sales agreement (i.e. “we’ll both try to sell our customers each other’s stuff”), then nobody cares.
If one “partner” is writing a check to the other, then the agreement should be clearly labeled as a sale, not a partnership, which would then earn my mention.
I get a lot more interested in “collaboration” and “partnership” when they result in something that will be useful to the industry at large, which is rare. It’s mostly a concept that would only interest a salesperson.
From Unicornrows: “Re: billion-dollar valuation companies. We have a lot in healthcare.” We have a lot of companies with a billion-dollar valuation but a lot fewer that are actually worth a billion dollars, with the difference being irrational exuberance in a frothy market. I’ve heard the theories that SPACs and various forms of corporate financial shell games haven’t caused companies to be excessively valued, but I’m a fundamentals guy and most of these companies seem to be struggling to sell much of anything except their own shares. The unicorns and SPACs are floating all health IT boats at the moment, but at some point the telehealth, RPA, tech-heavy health insurance, and employee wellness music will stop due to lack of ROI and financial performance and that’s when sitting on a big position in a “story stock” becomes less fun. However, people who have more money than I could earn in 10 lifetimes are placing their bets, so follow their lead if you want but recognize that it’s a zero-sum game and many of those gung-ho traders weren’t in the market during the dot-com boom and bust that taught many of us lessons. Buy shares early and you are dealing with an insider who, by definition, knows the value of both their shares and your money and chooses the latter.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Lyniate. The Boston-based company partners with healthcare organizations around the globe, delivering cutting-edge solutions to address interoperability challenges. The company’s industry-leading products, Corepoint and Rhapsody, are used by thousands of customers to send hundreds of millions of messages every day. Lyniate is committed to delivering the best interoperability solutions for healthcare organizations, from specialty clinics to large networks, from payers to vendors, and everything in between to build the future of interoperability. Thanks to Lyniate for supporting HIStalk.
I found this explainer video about Lyniate on YouTube. Should you be of the barbeque persuasion as I am, study this video recap by Lyniate UK employee James Hardacre, who has embraced his inner Texas pitmaster by creating a fire-enabled (pun intended) Rhapsody engine connection to his collection of smokers to write temperatures to a database for graphing to monitor low-and-slow progress, which is fascinating to hear him describe with a British accent.
I continue to hear from readers who have stopped getting my email updates. I’ve described before how overaggressive email server settings on their end keep recipients from receiving emails that they signed up for. My suggestion is to simply sign up again, which will either fix the problem or do nothing (you won’t get duplicate emails no matter what). I use the emails only to send notices that I’ve published something new, which means just a handful of emails each week and no spam.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Premier acquires Canada-based Invoice Delivery Services — which offers a system that converts paper and PDF invoices to electronic form to reduce the costs of invoicing, tracking, and payments — for $80 million. Premier will operate the business under the Remitra name.
Publicly traded hospital operator Universal Health Services says in its Q4 earnings report that its fall cyberattack cost it $67 million in labor costs and delayed billing, but it expects to get most of that back from cyberinsurance.
New Duke University personalized chronic care spinout ZealCare will launch later this month, co-founded by former Duke University Health System CEO Ralph Snyderman, MD and personalized healthcare research fellow Connor Drake, PhD. President, CEO, and investor Maureen O’Connor comes from BCBS North Carolina and breast cancer screening AI technology vendor Whiterabbit.
Medical technology vendor BD acquires 20-employee GSL Solutions, which offers RFID-powered will-call prescription cabinets and drug dispensing systems. The original developers and founders are Oregon State graduates in pharmacy and computer engineering, respectively.
Sales
In Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador choose Change Healthcare Canada to develop staff scheduling software for its hospitals and long-term care facilities, also giving the company up to $28 million in incentives for cost savings it identifies.
Axiom Healthcare Services will implement a customized version of Azalea Health’s EHR for its two behavioral health hospitals.
People
Industry long-timer Mike Raymer (AngelMD) joins clinical trials training and compliance solutions vendor Pro-ficiency as CEO.
Announcements and Implementations
Health system staffing and services vendor HCTec launches a vaccine administration support service.
A new KLAS report on EHR best practices for hospitals of under 200 beds finds that while their vendors provide technology and support, the hospitals need to get IT teams involved with frontline clinicians, set realistic expectations, invest in IT resources, deploy skilled trainers with required clinician engagement, and create a collaborative relationship with their vendor that has regular touch points. Meditech’s updated technology and more prescriptive implementation approach have elevated Expanse to the top spot in satisfaction.
Black Book’s annual survey of ambulatory practices find that specialty-driven EHRs earn the top satisfaction, although most specialists regret their hurried EHR choice and implementation that failed to consider connectivity with other providers. Nearly all specialty practices that expect to change EHRs will be looking only at cloud-based systems because of cost.
Medical and safety technology vendor Dräger will work with several healthcare organizations to develop medical device interoperability standards in a US Army-funded project that will use IEEE’s service-oriented device connectivity (SDC) standard.
Walgreens expands its Find Care digital health marketplace, which is part of the Walgreens app, with 11 new providers.
Government and Politics
A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study finds that Medicare would have saved $1.7 billion in 2017 if prescribers and/or patients had not insisted on using a brand name drug for which a generic equivalent was available.
COVID-19
CDC reports 83 million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered versus 110 million distributed (76%). Hospital inpatient count continues to trend down, at 42,000 this week versus the peak of 125,000 in early January.
Italy invokes its European Union powers to block the export of 251,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to Australia. EU countries are frustrated that they can’t meet their stated vaccination goals because AstraZeneca is tens of millions of doses behind its agreed-on delivery schedule. Italy’s foreign ministry flagged the shipment from AstraZeneca’s factory in Rome, noting that Australia is not considered by the EU to be a vulnerable country.
California’s switch to Blue Shield to distribute coronavirus vaccine will require consumers to use MyTurn to sign up and V-Save to report adverse events, while providers will be required to use MyCAVax for enrollment and vaccine management; MyTurn for clinic management; MyTurn, EHR, or CAIR2 to report daily doses administered; VAERS, FDA, or V-Safe to report adverse events; and VaccineFinder to report daily inventory. I learned this from the Twitter of Christopher Longhurst, MD, MS, CIO/associate chief medical officer of UC San Diego Health.
New York State continues testing IBM and Salesforce-developed Excelsior Pass for attendees of professional sports events, which allows people who have recently tested negative for COVID-19 or been vaccinated to present an on-screen or printed QR code “boarding pass” that will give them entry into the venue. The system is based on IBM Watson Works Digital Health Pass digital wallet. I haven’t seen an whether the system actually tries to import vaccination and testing records (it seems like patient identification and the wide variety of testing sites and systems would make that hard) or if it just allows users to self-report their COVID-19 status – each venue sets its own requirements.
Other
The Las Vegas Sands company sells the Venetian, Palazzo, and the Sands Expo and Convention Center for $6.25 billion as it exits the US to focus on running casinos in Asia and venturing into online gambling. The company lost $300 million in the most recent quarter because of the pandemic and its founder and CEO Sheldon Adelson died in January. The sale will close in Q4, after HIMSS21 has concluded in whatever form it eventually takes. I admit that while I like nearly nothing about Las Vegas, I prefer naturally occurring tackiness (like the off-Strip liquor stores that offer inebriates thousands of kinds of airline-sized bottles to guzzle down on the sidewalk) over upscale but even tackier gondoliers, fake sky ceilings, and celebrity-licensed generic restaurants.
A Kentucky woman sues a hospital that performed a mammogram that detected signs of cancer, but then mistakenly sent her an all-clear letter. Digital forensics experts say the radiology tech chose the wrong software drop-down option, triggering the “no cancer detected” letter, after which radiology department employees tried to hide her mistake by changing the entries. The hospital refused to turn over system audit logs until it was served with a court order, then claimed that the logs can’t track changes accurately because the hospital’s software was buggy and is no longer sold. Experts say that EHR audit logs are seldom useful for malpractice cases because they are hard to interpret and require hiring expensive experts to review them. The digital forensics expert in this case is Andy Garrett, who started Garrett Discovery in 2007 after leaving his Navy IT job. His small company offers EDiscovery, cell phone forensics, social media evidence collection, audio and video forensics, cell phone analysis, and a service in which attorneys who are questioning potential jurors are provided with their real-time social media histories and background checks.
Sponsor Updates
Everbridge announces the newest enhancements to its ManageBridge critical event management mobile app.
The HCI Group releases a new Digital Voices with Ed Marx podcast, “How I Made My First Million at Age 25!”
ChartSpan will offer its Chronic Care Management program to members of the Kentucky Hospital Association.
Health Data Movers publishes a new white paper, “How We Make it Happen: Transplant Data Conversion.”
EHR/PM vendor ISalus will integrate electronic prior authorization from CoverMyMeds .
KLAS recognizes Impact Advisors as a high performer in its latest “ERP Implementation Report.”
Infor makes new courses available for Infor CloudSuite Healthcare.
HHS OIG Principal Deputy Inspector General Christi Grimm, MPA and HHS OIG Chief Medical Officer Julie Taitsman, MD, JD say that prescriptions should be required to include the condition for which the drug is being prescribed.
They say in a Stat opinion piece that including the reason the drug is being prescribed would help Medicare detect off-label use that is not payable, such as prescribing hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.
The authors believe that including the diagnosis would also help people organize the meds of their family members and would make it easier for pharmacists to identify safety issues. They note that privacy concerns are minimal since pharmacists are bound by HIPAA.
Cures Act standards already require EHRs to be able to send and receive the reason for the prescription.
HHS OIG previously made the same recommend in 2011, when it was endorsed by the American Pharmacists Association.
Reader Comments
From Carry On: “Re: my new CIO job. Thanks for mentioning it. I have been an avid HIStalk reader for many years and it is required reading for my team.” I’m always surprised when someone says that they read what I write, given that I just fill an empty screen with whatever interests me without considering the invisible presence of bystanders. An industry legend seemed puzzled years ago when I expressed skepticism about how many CIOs read HIStalk (since I have no way of knowing), after which that person said every CIO they know reads it. Regardless, I’m happy to have anyone who keeps coming back.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Mayo Clinic-backed maternal and fetal remote patient monitoring company Marani Health raises $3.7 million.
Blueprint Health Merger will raise $200 million through its IPO, according to SEC filings. Led by former Thomson Reuters CEO Richard Harrington and former Virgin Pulse CEO Rajiv Kumar, MD the blank-check company plans to pursue digital healthcare deals.
Health IT vendor MTBC renames itself CareCloud, the EHR vendor it acquired last year for $36 million.
DeliverHealth Solutions completes its acquisition of Nuance’s transcription services business and EScription technology, first announced last November. Nuance holds a minority share in the Madison, WI-based company.
Hill-Rom cancels its plan to acquire ambulatory ECG monitoring vendor Bardy Diagnostics for $375 million, citing potentially unexpected reductions in Medicare reimbursements for patient-monitoring devices. Bardy has filed a lawsuit in an effort to force the acquisition.
Truvian Sciences raises a $105 million Series C round of financing. The company, which counts former Livongo Chairman Glen Tullman among its investors, is developing an automated, bench-top device that can perform multiple blood tests. Truvian President and CEO Jeff Hawkins has stressed that the company’s goals are far less “extravagant” than those of its pseudo-predecessor, Theranos.
Reperio Health raises $6 million in seed funding to advance the rollout of its kits for employer-provided, at-home wellness screenings. The co-founders came from contact lens prescription service Sightbox, which Johnson & Johnson acquired in mid-2017 and then shut down two years later.
Sales
Apervita embeds Diameter Health’s data optimization and interoperability capabilities within its care collaboration software.
The government of Scotland chooses Genesis Automation for hospital inventory tracking.
People
Philips hires Shez Partovi, MD (Amazon Web Services) as chief innovation and strategy officer and a member of the company’s executive committee. He held executive informatics roles at Dignity Health from 2011-2018 and helped launch the biomedical informatics program at Arizona State University. He replaces Jeroen Tas, who is leaving the company to spend more time coaching digital businesses.
Divurgent hires Adam Tallinger (Impact Advisors) as VP of provider services.
Northern Inyo Healthcare District (CA) will implement Cerner Millenium through the CommunityWorks program.
Sharp HealthCare is using Experian Health’s Patient Schedule to allow patients to self-schedule COVID-19 vaccinations.
Highmark Health and Verily will develop digital solutions for chronic care management in a six-year collaboration that includes Verily-owned wellness app vendor Onduo, whose CEO is former National Coordinator Vindell Washington, MD, MS.
Diameter Health develops a HL7 C-CDA Online Search Tool for the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture and its Companion Guide.
Community Hospital (CO) goes live on Meditech Expanse.
Gatorade introduces its first wearable, a “sweat patch” and IOS-only app that measures sweat loss during exercise to recommend the volume of sports drink to consume as a replacement (guess which one?) Single-use patches costs $12.50 each, which would seem to limit the potential customer base.
Period tracking app vendor Clue earns FDA clearance for its “digital birth control,” which statistically models a woman’s self-reported period onset to predict days where they are more likely to become pregnant. The company claims that the app is 92% effective with typical use, although it recently removed a similar feature from its period tracking app because it was found to be unreliable for avoiding pregnancy. The company’s user access agreement had better be airtight to prevent disastrous payouts from the inevitable lawsuits that claim unwanted pregnancy in demanding the net present value of the resulting lifetime cost.
Senior living community operator Asbury Communities renames its Frederick, MD-based IT outsourcing and consulting group to ThriveWell Tech.
Government and Politics
CMS hires Liz Fowler (Commonwealth Fund) to lead its Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
Naval Medical Center San Diego goes live on Cerner in the fourth wave of the DoD’s MHS Genesis rollouts.
COVID-19
President Biden says that the US will have enough doses of COVID-19 vaccine to give every adult American their shots by the end of May, cutting two months off the previously announced timeline.
Merck will help competitor Johnson & Johnson manufacture the latter’s COVID-19 vaccine in a deal brokered by the White House to ramp up supplies. Merck, which manufactures and sells several other vaccines, halted Phase 1 clinical trials of its own COVID-19 vaccine on January 25 when the product failed to elicit adequate antibody response.
Novavax expects FDA to issue Emergency Use Authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine as early as May. Novavax, which has a contract to supply 100 million doses to the US, was forced to delay the start of its Phase 3 trials twice due to manufacturing holdups, possibly giving it a too-late start in the race and raising the potential that patients will go off-study to get a known vaccine rather than a possible placebo.
Microsoft admits that problems with its COVID-19 vaccine appointment scheduling system have caused frustration for several states and their residents, with errors, web page crashes, and inability to complete appointments. The timing is not great given that the company’s recent rollout of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
Researchers find that high employee turnover at nursing homes may have contributed to their large number of COVID-19 deaths, as their infection control practices may not have been adequate. The average nursing home experienced a 128% one-year turnover rate, while some exceeded 300%. Owners of nursing homes, many of them for-profit companies and private equity firms, say Medicaid doesn’t pay them enough to ensure adequate staffing, while observers note that any increase in federal payments should be earmarked to make sure they don’t end up in the pockets of those owners.
Colleges that spent big money on symptom-based COVID-19 screening technologies such as temperature scanners, self-reporting app passports, location tracking, and heart rate monitors have seen few results because the technologies can’t detect pre-symptomatic carriers, they are often inaccurate, and they aren’t always used consistently. Most of the schools, some of them eminent medical research centers, aren’t studying the effectiveness and outcomes of their use of the technologies.
The founder and CEO of Zocdoc explains why vaccination self-scheduling is harder than it looks:
Walled garden practice management systems weren’t designed to connect to patient-facing scheduling systems.
Sign-up screens collect too much information upfront before showing any available appointments, and if none are available, the user is required to start over to try again.
Too little time was available to develop scalable, integrated systems.
Other
Nursing informatics students: AMIA is offering a travel stipend for poster presenters at this fall’s annual symposium in San Diego, with submissions due March 10. That’s bringing back my fond memories of HIMSS in San Diego, where I enjoyed the opening reception on the patio overlooking the bay, Old Town for Mexican food, and Balboa Park for walking in the sun. They still haven’t expanded the civic center, so San Diego will remain a HIMSS orphan along with New Orleans, Atlanta, and Dallas (I’m excluding Chicago since HIMSS is like a jilted lover who wants desperately to patch things up despite its two-for-two whiffs).
Madison Magazine profiles Carebot Health, launched by Healthfinch co-founder Jonathan Baran and former Healthfinch sales director Tyler Marklein last March. The startup is focused on helping providers use its automated software to manage COVID-19 vaccinations. Health Catalyst acquired Healthfinch in July for $40 million.
In a reverse telemedicine (or perhaps a telejudicial) session, California’s medical board investigates a plastic surgeon after he reports to his Zoom traffic court hearing while wearing scrubs in front of a patient who was on the operating table. A Superior Court commissioner ends the proceeds — eloquently, I would say — in explaining, “Unless I’m mistaken, I’m seeing a defendant that’s in the middle of an operating room appearing to be actively engaged in providing services to a patient … I do not feel comfortable for the welfare of a patient if you’re in the process of operating.”
Sponsor Updates
Meditech announces that 61 hospitals went live on Expanse in 2020.
Cerner Chief Human Resources Officer Tracy Platt joins the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce board.
Deloitte will offer CareSignal’s Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring to its healthcare clients.
ChartSpan announces its partnership with I2I Population Health.
The local news covers the new $240 million CoverMyMeds headquarters, set to open sometime this summer.
Staffing Industry Analysts includes Ettain Group CEO Trent Beekman on its “Staffing 100” list.
Wolters Kluwer Health introduces Lippincott Clinical Context, a suite of digital learning tools intended to help medical schools as they incorporate digital and remote instruction into their curriculum.
Cigna’s Evernorth health services business will acquire telehealth vendor MDLive, the company announced Friday. Terms were not disclosed.
MDLive had raised $200 million and was reportedly valued at $1 billion early last fall, when it was considering an IPO.
Reader Comments
From Umbrella Beverage: “Re: Twilio. Was down Friday, affecting the ability of multi-factor authentication vendors (Entrust, Duo, Imprivata) to send out second-factor push or SMS notifications to phones, thus the ability of those users to access any services. Have the Russians figured out that Twilio is the center of the SMS universe?” Twilio’s incident log shows Friday downtime with “cross-platform API erors involving multiple products” that was resolved at just after noon Eastern on Friday. I’ll take this as an opportunity to provide some background on Twilio. The company offers APIs for sending and receiving phone calls and text messages, such as those for two-factor authentication, and Epic uses Twilio Programmable Video for its native telehealth offering. Twilio is huge, with 4,500 employees, over $1 billion in annual revenue, and a $61 billion market cap. TWLO shares are like riding a rocket, up 240% in the past year versus the Dow’s 20% rise. Had you invested $10,000 on April 20, 2020 when the company’s deal with Epic was announced, you would be holding well over $36,000 in shares today. The co-founder and CEO is a multi-billionaire, of course.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
One might quibble with the clinical and business operations of hospitals, but don’t doubt their ability to market themselves, although their owned medical practices don’t register to poll respondents any higher than independent ones (probably because they don’t always make their ownership obvious).
New poll to your right or here: How does your employer’s company culture compare today to a year ago? Define “company culture” however you like, but in general, think of the company’s social fabric – what it encourages or discourages, how it relates to employees and customers, how well its goals align with those of employees, and how its beliefs and leadership practices are likely to make it successful for the long term. Vote, then click the “comments” link to explain whether you saw changes during the pandemic.
March 1 isn’t spring, but with the changes in weather and COVID-19 trajectory, it feels that way, especially now that baseball spring training games have started. It was one year ago Friday that HIMSS20 was cancelled, an early warning that 2020 was going to be eventful in all the wrong ways. Parts of the country that were almost cold enough to store Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine on the back porch last week have swung to daytime highs that are nearly 100 degrees warmer. I get the feeling that the US economy is about to rebound vigorously, although national debt, lingering and structural unemployment, political divisiveness, and income inequality are sobering long-term issues that could have major geopolitical ramifications.
I started subscribing in 2017 to a little-known app called Texture, which was like the Netflix of magazines. Apple bought the company a few months later, subscriptions automatically lapsed while Apple retooled their acquisition, and I lost interest and didn’t sign up under the newly christened Apple News+. I discovered this weekend that Mrs. HIStalk had subscribed on her own, mostly to read The Atlantic, and I Googled to find that her $9.95 per month subscription can be shared by up to six family members under Apple’s Family Sharing (which also includes Apple’s music, TV, games, and ICloud storage subscriptions – am I the only person who didn’t know about this?) I’m back in, and minor quibbles aside about lost features (easy back-issue searching, such as for Consumer Reports), it’s better now. Included are a bunch of expensive national newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle; the Wall Street Journal (!!); Business Insider; PCMag; National Geographic; Consumer Reports; and 300 magazines with a nice mix of travel, food, sports, and vacuous celebrity updates. Like Texture before it, you can follow specific publications or topics, but it also brings up articles it thinks you’ll like based on your perusal habits, giving you an endlessly scrolling page of reading material that beats the heck out of killing time on Facebook looking at feta pasta recipes and faked prank videos.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Health Catalyst reports Q4 results: revenue up 22%, EPS –$0.16 versus -$0.21, beating estimates for both. HCAT shares are up 69% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 54% gain, valuing the company at $2.1 billion.
Paul Black chose the perhaps unfortunate term of “infectious enthusiasm” to describe the company’s success in 2020.
The company will continue to encourage on-premise clients to move to its Azure-powered hosting services.
The Veradigm EHR and linked claims data-selling business was discussed at some length, with the company noting that while most of its data comes from the ambulatory EHRs of customers, that’s the most important to drug companies since that’s where most prescribing happens.
CEO Paul Black reiterated that it sold EPSi and CarePort Health in Q4 because those businesses “were not receiving the appropriate valuation under Allscripts ownership.”
Black says he does not see the just-formed Truveta organization, which includes big Allscripts client Northwell, as affecting its Veradigm business.
President and CFO Rick Poulton says that the company’s “extensive data rights” from its ambulatory EHR customers give Veradigm an advantage over competitors who are chasing that “in vogue” business model.
Allscripts expects the fragmented US EHR market to consolidate and the company expects to be a net winner in system replacement, while “outside the US is still a lot of greenfield.”
Black said, in response to an analyst’s question, that client feedback on Sunrise 20.0 has been “universally positive,” but declined to specifically answer another question about the number of Sunrise clients.
Humana will offer its Medicare Advantage customers who are patients of Mercy access to the health system’s Mercy Virtual telehealth service. Also included in the agreement is a value-based care component, where Humana will pay Mercy based on outcomes instead of fee-for-service.
TriNetX appoints four new members to its board following October’s acquisition of a majority stake in October 2020, including former Pfizer Chairman and CEO Ian Read as chair.
COVID-19
FDA issues its Emergency Use Authorization to the COVID-19 vaccine of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen subsidiary, a single-shot product that requires simple refrigeration instead of the two-shot, freezer-stored vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. The boost in vaccine supply to 20 million doses per week, along with the new vaccine’s simple storage requirements, could add up to 25% to US vaccination capacity almost immediately. Mostly missed by the press – the first two vaccines were tested before coronavirus variants surfaced, so their efficacy against them is unknown, but the J&J vaccine were tested later and was proven to be effective against those variants (suggesting that the other two vaccines probably are also effective).
CDC reports that 73 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered out of 96 million distributed (76%), with 19% of the adult US population having received at least one dose. The pace could soon reach 3 million doses per day.
A KFF poll finds that the percentage of Americans who plan to wait and see before being vaccinated has dropped from 39% in December to 22% now. The 15% who say they won’t get it under any circumstances remains unchanged. Groups with the highest resistance to being vaccinated are Republicans and rural residents, while 25% of non-healthcare essential workers and 14% of healthcare workers fall into the “wait and see” category.
The state of California declines to renew its coronavirus mobile testing contract with Alphabet-owned Verily, which the federal and state government touted last year as a high tech approach to help Americans find COVID-19 testing. The state says the program, which cost $63 million and was operated entirely by subcontractors, didn’t serve poor areas of the state. Optum/UHG-owned OptumServe is now operating state vaccine clinics, but one county had already cancelled its contract with OptumServe, saying that its testing clinics were poorly run, performed only a few dozen tests in each 12-hour session, spent a lot of money sending negative tests results by FedEx next-day delivery instead of electronically, and were staffed by employees who were “coughing violently” and not wearing PPE.
Other
A two-year study finds that Medicare’s PAMA decision support requirement for ordering expensive advanced imaging exams – as implemented with Change Healthcare / National Decision Support Company CareSelect – improved ordering appropriateness. The authors note the limitations of their study – inappropriate use could have been reduced by other simultaneous changes, users can game CDS by choosing an invalid ordering reason, and the lack of pre-CDS implementation data – but their next step will be to have experts determine order appropriateness by reviewing EHR and imaging data.
A few Epic employees told the Madison paper that the company has told employees to stop holding discussion groups related to diversity, equity, and inclusion on company time and has eliminated a training session on identifying white privilege. The article notes that Epic, with $2.9 billion in annual revenue and 10,000 employees, is unusual for not having a chief diversity officer or other executive to manage equity and inclusion and instead created a a diversity council made up of five employees who still work in their full-time jobs.
A Florida pediatrician who was arrested on child pornography charges asks the court to let him conduct telehealth visits. He initially told investigators that he thought he was downloading photos of older girls, but finally agreed with a detective’s observation that a pediatrician should be able to recognize pre-pubescent children.
Sponsor Updates
Meditech launches a Telemetry Appropriateness Toolkit in its Expanse EHR.
PatientPing publishes a new case study, “How Kintegra Health is improving transitions of care and succeeding in value-based care programs through real-time ADT notifications.”
PeriGen’s innovative perinatal technology supports the US Surgeon General’s call to action to improve maternal health.
The Ethisphere Institute recognizes Premier as “One of the World’s Most Ethical Companies” for the 14th year in a row.
Pure Storage announces fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2021 financial results.
Sectra publishes a new e-book, “The radiologist’s handbook for future excellence 2021: Key technologies to amplify success.”
Krames publishes a new infographic, “Easy telehealth tips to drive positive patient experience.”
Vocera releases a new podcast, “The Burden and Joy of Caregiving During the Pandemic.”
Population health management technology vendor Innovaccer raises $105 million in a Series D funding round, increasing its total to $225 million and valuing the company at $1.3 billion.
The company’s co-founders are Abhinav Shashank (CEO), Sandeep Gupta (COO), and Kanav Hasija (chief customer officer).
Reader Comments
From Inquiring Minds Wanna Know: “Re: Olive Health. No HCIT firm in recent years has gotten more favorable press. Not Catalyst, Zocdoc, or any of 10 other ‘show ponies’ trotted out by leading healthcare PE outfits like Francisco Partners or Vista Equity. Is it enormous budget or a new healthcare PR firm?” The company has wrapped what seems like mundane technology in a thick layer of trendy buzzwords and Silicon Valley brashness for a business whose first funding round (of $450 million total through a Series F) was a Series A in 2013. I’m surprised that the company hasn’t arranged a quick IPO or SPAC merger to take advantage of a frothy stock market, but until that happens, the only folks who can pore over its financials are the investors who have driven its valuation to $1.5 billion. I will say this, having had many HIStalk sponsors over the years whose renewed PR efforts were followed shortly after by being favorably acquired: it’s worth the effort to get a company’s message – whether pointless buzz or meaty news — out to gain and retain the attention of prospects and investors, especially the latter when those SPACs are desperately looking for acquisitions. I am uncomfortable with companies and people that promote themselves shamelessly, but I begrudgingly acknowledge that it’s hard to be successful if nobody has heard of you. Any press, good or bad, is better than no press.
From RTW: “Re: COVID-19. The biggest need is to reopen travel and offices, agreed?” No. The biggest need is to reopen schools, whose closing was scantily supported by evidence in the first place. The economy, our future economic prospects, and the mental health of citizens will suffer as long as parents are forced to stay home with their kids who are receiving an inferior online education and missing important social services and developmental opportunities with effects that won’t be obvious for years. Some parents would rather keep their kids at home, which is fine, but most would welcome that aspect of returning to semi-normal rather than expanding restaurant and bar capacity and allowing bigger sports crowds. Much has changed and been learned in the pandemic’s first year.
From Google Clusters: “Re: Google Care Studio. Recall that Epic stopped working with Google Cloud a year ago over privacy concerns.” Epic announced in January 2020 that it was calling off further integration with Google Cloud and instead would focus on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure because of customer interest. Google was at that time facing privacy criticism from its deal with Ascension to develop EHR search and aggregation tools in a project that was named Care Studio this week, but I don’t recall that Epic specifically mentioned privacy concerns in its decision. Cerner also passed on Google despite a rumored incentive in the tens of millions of dollars, going with AWS instead.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Experian Health. The company collaborates with more than 3,400 hospitals and 7,300 other healthcare organizations representing 500,000-plus providers — almost 60% of the market — to provide data-driven platforms to empower its clients to make smarter business decisions, boast a better bottom line, and foster stronger patient relationships. Its industry-leading solutions include revenue cycle management, identity management, patient engagement, and care management. Thanks to Experian Health for supporting HIStalk.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Here’s the recording of Wednesday’s webinar, “Maximizing the Value of Digital Initiatives with Enterprise Provider Data Management,” sponsored by Phynd.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Allscripts reports Q4 results: revenue down 7%, adjusted EPS $0.29 versus $0.17, beating earnings estimates but falling short on revenue.
Healthcare Bluebook acquires the quality division of Quantros.
Redox raises $45 million in a Series D funding round, increasing its total to $95 million.
Digital prescription support vendor Medisafe raises $30 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $52 million.
Teladoc Health reports Q4 results: revenue up 151%, EPS –$3.07 versus –$0.26, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings that were affected by acquisition and share payout costs from its $18.5 billion acquisition of Livongo in October 2020. Teladoc said in the earnings call that it provided 10.5 million virtual visits for the year and brought on 15 million new paid members. Share price dropped 14% Thursday, valuing the company at $32 billion. TDOC shares are up 123% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 42% gain.
EHR prescription messaging platform vendor OptimizeRx reports Q4 results: revenue up 123%, adjusted EPS $0.20 versus $0.07, beating Wall Street expectations for both. OPRX shares have risen 420% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 42% gain, valuing the company at $930 million.
People
Kate Barimani (The Advisory Board Company) joins analytics vendor Covera Health as VP of provider partnerships.
Industry long-timer Brian Graves (Hospital IQ) joins Optum as VP of provider solution sales.
Workforce management platform vendor IntelyCare hires David Burke, MBA (QPID Health) as CFO.
Montgomery County Memorial Hospital (IA) promotes Ron Kloewer, MHA to CEO. He was CIO for 28 years before being promoted to COO in November 2020 and tapped to replace the retiring CEO next month.
Announcements and Implementations
HIMSS announces that its membership has grown by 20,000 in the past six months to 100,000.
InterSystems releases an enhancement to its TrakCare health information system that will allow UK sites to schedule COVID-19 vaccinations.
Microsoft’s April update for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare – when was released in the fall – will include a patient self-scheduling solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365, the ability to schedule and launch Microsoft Teams virtual visits from within Epic, home health and remote patient monitoring features for Dynamics 365 and Teams, and additional Azure API for FHIR capabilities for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare tools.
Government and Politics
A Georgia man is sentenced to six months in federal prison for falsely claiming that his former girlfriend – a hospital nurse – violated HIPAA by emailing pictures of trauma patients outside the hospital.
COVID-19
CDC reports that 66 million of 89 million COVID-19 vaccines distributed have been administered (75%). About 6% of Americans have been given both doses.
A physician-epidemiologist says that COVID-19 shaved just five days off average US life expectancy in 2020, not the one-year number that CDC published last week. Public experts use life expectancy projections that assume no change from one year to another, which have been shown to distort the impact of events that affect mortality for only a brief part of the average lifetime, such as pandemics and wars. In other words, losing a full year of life expectancy would require the same number of pandemic deaths every year for the rest of someone’s life, when in fact life expectancy will almost certainly rebound to that of previous years once the pandemic is over.
FDA’s vaccine advisory committee finds that J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine offers high efficacy across all demographics, based on the company’s study data. The J&J vaccine will likely earn FDA’s emergency use authorization in the next few days. All major vaccines (J&J, Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax, and Sputnik) offer 100% protection against death or hospitalization (hat tip on that to @EricTopol), so take whatever one you can get.
US nursing home deaths from COVID-19 have fallen by 65% in the past two months as 4.5 million residents and employees have received at least one dose of the vaccine. The drop-off is even more pronounced than of the population in general.
Washington State Department of Health cuts off COVID-19 vaccine shipments to publicly traded concierge medicine provider One Medical after complaints that it provided doses to its own executives and customers who were not eligible under local guidelines. The company also offers the vaccine to all of its employees regardless of their risk factors or exposure. Doctors report that young patients with no health issues were able to sign up for a trial membership and then book a vaccination appointment even though health workers were being waitlisted, with the company responding that upgrading its systems to screen appointments was too hard and that it won’t question someone’s declaration that they are eligible.
The Ad Council looks at COVID-19 messaging for its upcoming pro-vaccination campaign, saying that positive messages (acknowledging hesitancy concerns, vaccination as a pathway to regaining human connection, protecting family, and acknowledging personal choice) will work better than negative messages (fear tactics, referring to “the right thing to do,” overpromising, and emphasizing “back to normal” that most people won’t experience). Most interesting to me is the level of trust people place in various messengers.
Other
ECRI’s health IT patient safety workgroup publishes a white paper on reducing alert fatigue. One of its recommendations is a standard set of metrics for monitoring and optimization:
How many alerts fired and who received them? This would be reported as the number of alerts per 100 orders or per encounter, broken out by department, specialty, and the type of user who received the alert.
Did the alert fire appropriately?
What did the alert recipient do? That includes think time, rates of acceptance or override, override reasons, and clinician comments.
What impact did the alert have on recipients?
A Cleveland TV station profiles Peggy and Bill Schneck, who met as 17-year-old service workers at Cleveland Clinic in 1975 and were married four years later. He studied IT and is a Cleveland Clinic systems analyst, while she became an RN and is now a nursing informatics instructor.
Sponsor Updates
Everbridge VP of Global Account Management & Customer Success MJ McCarthy wins a 2021 Stevie Award in the category of Worldwide Sales Executive of the Year.
Meditech publishes a new success story, “Med Center Health’s vaccination process supports high volume and eliminates waste.”
Google Health expands the pilot of its EHR search and data presentation tool, which it has named Care Studio.
The system provides a centralized view and search capability of patient information that is stored one or more EHRs.
Ascension was the pilot site, for which Google earned the attention of Congress a year ago for how the company intends to use and protect patient information. Google has made assurances that it does not own patient data, doesn’t sell it, and won’t use it for advertising purposes.
Clinicians from unnamed sites in Nashville, TN and Jacksonville, FL will use an early release of Care Studio and provide feedback about its usability, usefulness, and workflow integration.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor RCxRules. The Burlington, VT-based company, founded in 2010, helps healthcare organizations succeed with both value-based care and fee-for-service billing models. Its unique, predictive rules engine ensures compliance with healthcare’s complex regulatory and reimbursement rules. Integrating with leading EMRs and PM systems, RCxRules software addresses issues before they affect revenue, delivering claims with the most accurate financial and HCC data — every time, guaranteed. Thanks to RCxRules for supporting HIStalk.
Listening: a grab bag of obscure 1960s psychedelia, which is mostly new to me. The naively optimistic flower children who formed forgotten bands 50-plus years ago are now dying off without fanfare. Little-known groups I’ve discovered: The Fallen Angels, Kaleidoscope, and The Peanut Butter Conspiracy (in addition to one of my all-time favorites and not obscure at all The Love). I am contemplating a foray into collecting LPs and 45s for the first time since I suspect a lot of this trippy vinyl is moldering in basement junk boxes and deserves better. It is sweetly sad to think of someone’s great-grandma passing away in her 80s without her family knowing that, if only for a few weeks, she was a sun-drenched Renaissance faire goddess with flowers in her hair, whose heartfelt, unskilled folkie crooning soundtracked the personal summer of love for thousands or millions of people who are struggling, as she did, to reconcile the sunny days of youthful exuberance and seeming immortality with the realization that the clock is running out. “Legacy” is an uncomfortable topic for me since I envy artists whose work will continue to be discovered and appreciated by new generations.
I ran across the best acronym-based group name ever, the Paediatric International Patient Safety and Quality Community, aka PIPSQC (“pipsqueak.”)
Odd grammatical quirk, almost entirely heard in 20-somethings: pointlessly expanding “thank you” to “thank you so much.”
Webinars
February 24 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Maximizing the Value of Digital Initiatives with Enterprise Provider Data Management.” Sponsor: Phynd Technologies. Presenters: Tom White, founder and CEO, Phynd Technologies; Adam Cherrington, research director, KLAS Research. Health systems can derive great business value and competitive advantage by centrally managing their provider data. A clear roadmap and management solution can solve problems with fragmented data, workflows, and patient experiences and support operational efficiency and delivery of a remarkable patient experience. The presenters will describe common pitfalls in managing enterprise information and digital strategy in silos, how to align stakeholders to maximize the value of digital initiatives, and how leading health systems are using best-of-breed strategies to evolve provider data management.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Tech-enabled insurance startup Oscar Health plans to raise over $1 billion through its IPO, scheduled to take place next week. Like competitor Clover Health, the Alphabet-backed company has yet to show a profit, despite having raised $1.6 billion since launching in 2012. Analysts, however, are quick to predict a $6.7 billion valuation.
Precision medicine technology vendor Tempus will collaborate with Texas Oncology-owned Precision Health Informatics to advance clinical research and personalize patient care. Both are for-profit companies.
Sales
Jackson Hospital and Clinic (AL) will implement CPSI subsidiary TruBridge’s RCM software and services.
Mercy Iowa City selects Spok Go clinical communications software.
RxRevu develops SwiftMx, giving providers access to medical price transparency and coverage information via EHRs from vendors like Cerner.
General Leonard Wood Army Community Hospital (MO) employees prepare to go live on Cerner as part of the DoD’s MHS Genesis Cerner roll out.
CommonSpirit Health uses VeeMed’s tele-ICU physician services across its Dignity Health and Catholic Health hospitals.
Jupiter Medical Center implements Artifact Health’s mobile app for physician queries.
A new KLAS report looks at the EHR experience of medium to large home health agencies, finding that MatrixCare Home Health leads the market, while Epic Dorothy follows closely as used mostly by health system-owned agencies. Homecare Homebase is widely used, but receives the lowest rating for quality of support. WellSky’s customers report lower satisfaction as the company grows and acquires, while users of Netsmart’s acquired products (Homecare Advisor and Homecare) say development has slowed as the company focuses on its MyUnity Enterprise platform.
DirectTrust publishes an implementation guide for sending ADT event notifications via the Direct Standard.
Government and Politics
TeleICU provider RemoteICU sues HHS for not allowing US-licensed physicians who live outside the US to bill Medicare for telehealth services.
In Canada, New Brunswick’s auditor general says that the province’s EHR rollout failed, where $21 million was spent on a system that fewer than half its physicians are using and that does not integrate with hospital systems. The New Brunswick Medical Society partnered with private company Accreon to create Velante to sell the software, then kept pumping money into the failing program and adding switchover subsidies until the exclusive deal ended in 2019. Velante is closing and the software vendor, Intrahealth Canada, will take over support.
COVID-19
J&J says it will ship 20 million doses of its single-shot vaccine in the US by the end of March if it receives FDA’s emergency use authorization, earlier than expected.
Other
HIMSS said early this month that it would provide more information on HIMSS21 on February 19. I didn’t see any specific announcement, but the FAQ now says that registration will open in early March. HIMSS will also run an extra-cost, single-day “CIO Summit” that will be followed by a “curated CIO experience” now that CHIME has pulled out. Exhibitor count is at 410 versus 1,300 at HIMSS19.
St. Margaret’s Health-Spring Valley (IL) reverts to paper-based processes after its IT team discovers a data breach, forcing it to shut down all of its Web-based systems.
An AMA article touts the use of Xcertia app development guidelines — developed by AMA, HIMSS, and other groups — even though the Xcertia project was shut down in August 2020. HIMSS said at the time that the effort would continue with oversight by a HIMSS work group.
Sponsor Updates
AdvancedMD shares the product enhancements that will be made available during its Winter 2021 Release.
Black Book Market Research includes Impact Advisors among the top-rated RCM services and optimization consultants.
Cone Health (NC) expands its use of PatientPing’s real-time event notification software to include community providers.
PeriGen affirms that its technology supports the US Surgeon General’s call to action to improve management of maternal health.
CereCore relocates its Nashville headquarters to, in the near future, better accommodate its workforce and partners.
Cerner releases a new podcast, “How diverse, community-based hospitals are a lifeline to saving clinical research.”
The Chartis Group publishes a new brief, “Partner with Purpose: How to Build a Winning Playbook to Guide Health System Partnership Strategy.”
Columbus CEO includes CoverMyMeds Senior Manager of Employee Engagement Lachandra Baker in its Future 50 initiative.
Wolters Kluwer Health highlights the top four challenges facing CMS Administrator nominee Chiquita Brooks-LaSure.
Quil becomes a HealthShare Exchange MarketStreet partner.
Medical Marketing & Media includes OptimizeRx SVP and Principal of Agency Channels Angelo Campano to its “40 Under 40” list.
The Wall Street Journal reports that IBM is considering selling IBM Watson Health.
Observers estimate that IBM Watson Health has $1 billion in annual revenue, but loses money.
The grab bag of acquired businesses that may be sold off to private equity or in one or more SPAC mergers include Merge Healthcare, Phytel, and Truven Health Analytics. IBM spent billions on the acquisitions that one of its former executives called a “bet the ranch” move that followed Watson’s game show win on “Jeopardy!”
IBM’s new CEO hopes to catch up to rivals in cloud computing after IBM paid $34 billion to acquire Red Hat in mid-2019.
Reader Comments
From Jeff: “Re: Change Healthcare acquisition by UHG/OptumInsight. Ronald Hirsch, MD of R1 RCM says consensus is that UHG will modify the criteria to their advantage, resulting in fewer patients meeting criteria for inpatient admission and therefore being held in an outpatient observation status.”
From GeddyAlexNeil: “Re: Change Healthcare acquisition by UHG/OptumInsight. I’ve worked at Optum, McKesson, and GE. This combination seems either brilliant or a total mismatch. In the Bill Miller era when I worked there, Optum was generally pretty good in their acquisition hit rate (Catarmaran, Alere, Humedica, and MedExpress). There’s also been some that at the time were well thought out, but the market shifted and/or they miscalculated (Picis). My opinion was they they have a thoughtful approach and historically done a good job integrating the new company into the fold, unlike McKesson. New leadership is here, however. Change is a behemoth saddled with the likes of HealthQuest (yes, it is still around at Emory and AU Medical Center), but first and foremost, it is almost impossible to send a claim today that doesn’t travel through the Change clearinghouse at some point. There has to be value that Optum sees in owning the EDI infrastructure that is Change. The Optum as we know it today was built on the back of the clinical services in the fringe (homecare, urgent care) and the PBM business. This was Ingenix, the code book company and the company whose electronic version of codes were built under the hood of every EMR/PM system in the country before it was Optum. Above all else, Optum is the sister company of one of the top payers that providers love to hate. And if I’m not mistaken, Optum is now larger than its insurer sister by several billion. Optum also represents a disproportionally large percentage of UHS quarterly earnings.”
From The Nazz: “Re: apps are dead. I would say at least that modern web technology makes possible to deliver the same functionality via a web page.” I’ve ditched other apps than the Washington Post one. Accuweather inexplicably decided to make its app landscape mode only on the IPad, so I replaced it with The Weather Channel but really don’t need either. I use Amazon’s website over the app at times since the IPad app won’t let you buy Kindle books. I like the Kindle app for reading books, the Walmart app for online grocery ordering, Waze for driving, and the Sonos app for playing music literally every day, but it’s a bunch of seldom-used icons after those. I think people are right that patients don’t need or want specific apps – MyChart is amazing on the browser and I’m fine with the Walgreens web page instead of their app. All I need is password management and rarely speech recognition and IOS provides those (LastPass is great on the desktop, but speech recognition isn’t as convenient there).
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
External electronic records weren’t reviewed in just over half the most recent encounters of poll respondents, although they would not have been useful in about two-thirds of those visits anyway.
New poll to your right or here: Which of your local care providers has earned your most positive brand perception? How that brand perception was created – by experience or otherwise – is up to you, as is the distinction among types of services offered. It would probably be the hospital-owned practices for me even though I’m happy with my direct primary care physician as well — it’s just that the former has spent a lot more energy and money to create a brand image than my one-woman physician practice.
Webinars
February 24 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Maximizing the Value of Digital Initiatives with Enterprise Provider Data Management.” Sponsor: Phynd Technologies. Presenters: Tom White, founder and CEO, Phynd Technologies; Adam Cherrington, research director, KLAS Research. Health systems can derive great business value and competitive advantage by centrally managing their provider data. A clear roadmap and management solution can solve problems with fragmented data, workflows, and patient experiences and support operational efficiency and delivery of a remarkable patient experience. The presenters will describe common pitfalls in managing enterprise information and digital strategy in silos, how to align stakeholders to maximize the value of digital initiatives, and how leading health systems are using best-of-breed strategies to evolve provider data management.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Business Insider reports that Walmart has changed its 2018 plan to spend $3 billion to open 4,000 clinics by 2029, with new company teams now focusing on e-commerce as it has opened just 20 clinics in more of an experiment than a commitment.
Spok reports Q4 results: revenue down 5%, EPS $-$2.44 versus -$0.50.
Just-formed, Columbus-based Medicaid Managed Care insurer Circulo raises $50 million in funding and announces that it will use software from Olive and share its CEO Sean Lane.
Sales
Mon Health System (WV) chooses PatientMatters IntelliAdvisor consulting services to direct its pre-access service center.
People
Seattle Children’s promotes Eric Tham, MD, MS to interim SVP of its research institute.
WellStar Health System hires Hank Capps, MD (Novant Health) as EVP / chief information and digital officer.
Announcements and Implementations
A KLAS review of ERP implementation firms finds that among software vendors, Workday offers strong software knowledge but falls short on guidance, while Infor’s improvements have significantly improved the client experience. The large number of recent Workday implementations has led to shortage of experienced resources across all firms, including Workday itself. Among consulting firms, Accenture and Huron stand out, while Deloitte and KPMG get mixed reviews from customers. Less-complex implementations are managed well by Avaap, Bails, and ROI Healthcare Solutions, while Chartis Group and Impact Advisors are newer to ERP work but are showing early success. Healthcare IT Leaders earns the highest score of ERP staffing firms.
COVID-19
US COVID-19 deaths will cross the 500,000 mark early this week. All major metrics are sharply down. The count of hospitalized patients dropped below 59,000, about the same as at the worst point in the spring and summer surges.
Researchers find from re-examining originally submitted FDA vaccine data that both the Pfizer and Moderna products have first-dose efficacy of 92%, suggesting that the best use of the available vaccine supply would be to get first doses into as many people as possible, then worry about second doses later, to cut the time to reach herd immunity in half.
New research published in The Lance finds that the Oxford / AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is more effective when the second dose is given 12 or more weeks after the first dose versus the usual four weeks.
Israel rolls out its “green passport” program in which gyms, theaters, hotels, concert halls, and synagogues will partially reopen only to people who have either been vaccinated for COVID-19 or who have recovered from previous infection and thus are not eligible to receive the vaccine. People can download the Health Ministry’s app, then create passport certificate with a QR code. The data sources will apparently be the Health Ministry’s vaccination records and treatment records from the country’s HMOs.
A nine-month follow-up study of COVID-19 patients, most of them with mild disease, finds that 30% had persistent symptoms, most commonly fatigue and loss of sense of smell or taste.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH says that schools can safely open regardless of the degree of community spread of coronavirus as long as they require masks and distancing among students and staff.
Other
An AMIA study finds that its 2009 policy meeting underestimated the degree of EHR-caused burnout while overestimating the impact of HITECH-powered identify theft and fraud alerting. Most of the recommendations from that meeting have resulted in little, if any, action.
Adventist Health says its CommonWell to Carequality connection has allowed it to exchange patient information with 340 health systems, sending 8 million documents and receiving 44 million.
Sponsor Updates
CareSignal publishes a case study titled “Remote Monitoring to Support Members’ Chronic and Behavioral Health.”
OptimizeRx will present at the virtual SVB Leerink 10th Annual Global Healthcare Conference February 25.
Nordic publishes a new white paper, “2021 E/M Updates: EHR Workflow and Operational Considerations.”
PatientPing’s national network of ACOs earns over $260 million in savings under the Next Generation ACO model.
Pure Storage updates its flagship Purity software for FlashBlade and FlashArray to accelerate Windows applications, deliver ransomware protection across file, block, and native cloud-based apps; and make hybrid storage for departmental and data center workloads obsolete with a third-generation FlashArray//C all-QLC platform.
Health Catalyst seeks speaker and showcase proposals for its virtual Healthcare Analytics Summit September 21-23.
ReMedi Health Solutions works with the Houston Food Bank to provide over 2,000 meals to the Houston community.
Sectra publishes a new case study, “One for all – native support for automated breast ultrasound in Sectra’s expanded breast imaging PACS.”
TriNetX publishes a new case study, “TriNetX Helps Cuyahoga County’s MetroHealth System in Ohio Strive for Clinical Research Leadership Through Data Sharing.”
Sam Hupert, MD CEO of Visage Imaging parent company Pro Medicus, shares his thoughts on the company’s 2020-21 final results.
Imaging vendor Intelerad acquires Lumedx, which offers cardiovascular information systems and analytics.
Reader Comments
From Editorial Ed: “Re: job seekers. You should publish every week or two a list of people who let you know that they are out of work and looking for health IT jobs. Just use a table format limiting it to name, last job and company, position being sought, and a link to their LinkedIn profile.” I’m not opposed to the idea, although I have a lot of readers and it might get out of hand.
From Pondering Partnership: “Re: Change Healthcare – Optum Insight merger. Would like to see a survey of your readers about whether they see this as positive or negative, why, and whether they will stop doing business with either company.” I got no responses when I asked previously, so here’s one last chance for customers of either company to weigh in by contacting me with their anonymous thoughts.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Healthcare IT Leaders. The Alpharetta, GA-based company is a national leader in IT workforce solutions, connecting healthcare organizations with experienced technology talent for implementation services, project management, consulting, and full-time hiring. Areas of focus include EMR, ERP, WFM, RCM, and CRM. KLAS #1 rated for Business Services (Best in KLAS 2020) and highly-KLAS rated for HIT implementation and staffing, the company has ranked on the Inc. 5000 five consecutive years and has been named a Best Place to Work by the Atlanta Business Chronicle and one of America’s Best Professional Recruiting Firms by Forbes. Its COVID-19 practice, Healthy Returns, offers comprehensive onsite COVID-19 testing, contact tracing, and vaccination support. Thanks to Healthcare IT Leaders for supporting HIStalk.
My latest widespread but puzzling new conversational grammar quirk: people who say something like “customers ask what does our product do” instead of “customers ask what our product does.” I started hearing that kind of sentence construction recently and it has spread to probably 80% of such usage.
Webinars
February 24 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Maximizing the Value of Digital Initiatives with Enterprise Provider Data Management.” Sponsor: Phynd Technologies. Presenters: Tom White, founder and CEO, Phynd Technologies; Adam Cherrington, research director, KLAS Research. Health systems can derive great business value and competitive advantage by centrally managing their provider data. A clear roadmap and management solution can solve problems with fragmented data, workflows, and patient experiences and support operational efficiency and delivery of a remarkable patient experience. The presenters will describe common pitfalls in managing enterprise information and digital strategy in silos, how to align stakeholders to maximize the value of digital initiatives, and how leading health systems are using best-of-breed strategies to evolve provider data management.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Cancer care management software vendor Carevive raises $18 million in a Series C funding round.
Sales
Several counties in Florida go live on Everbridge’s vaccine distribution solution and the state of West Virginia will use the system to coordinate vaccinations through a pharmacy chain.
Nine hospitals choose CloudWave’s Opsus Cloud for hosting and disaster recovery services, while another 10 have engaged the company to build local data center cloud edge platforms.
Tift Regional Medical Center (GA) chooses Wolters Kluwer Health’s POC Advisor for sepsis detection and treatment.
People
Nathaniel Weiss, former CEO of LiveProcess and Standard Molecular, launches VelloHealth, which offers real-time care coordination software for serious mental illness.
Gretchen Tegethoff, MSIST (CoverMyMeds) joins Ellkay as regional vice president of strategic relationships.
Paul Ricci — who retired from Nuance in 2018 and then took an interim CEO role at SOC Telemed until the company went public via a SPAC in October 2020 – is named CEO of behavioral health EHR vendor Qualifacts. He replaces David Klements, who remains on the board.
Law firm McGuireWoods expands its digital health team by hiring three partners: Jonathan Ishee, JD, MPH, MS (Vorys, Sater, Seymour, and Pease); Janice Walker-Suchyta, JD (Seyfarth Shaw); and Andrea Linna, JD (Honigman). McGuireWoods deals with corporate transactions and private equity deals. Ishee earned an MS in health informatics in 2004 and is an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at UTHealth in Houston.
Cardiologist, inventor, and Nobel Peace Prize antiwar activist Bernard Lown, MD dies at 99. He co-invented the defibrillator, created one of the first cardiac ICUs, formed a non-profit group that launched a satellite to deliver medical training to doctors in Africa and Asia, and created the Lown Institute that ranks hospitals on their civic leadership, inclusivity, avoidance of overuse, and pay equity.
Announcements and Implementations
Capsule Technologies releases its Generation 3 Vitals Plus patient monitoring and clinical documentation solution in its Medical Device Information Platform. It allows hospitals to perform continuous monitoring and remote clinical surveillance outside the ICU. Philips acquired Capsule last month for $635 million.
TriNetX adds COVID-19 vaccination data to its platform and real-world data set, which will allow researchers to perform their own studies of de-identified EHR patient data to look at comorbidities, reinfection, and outcomes.
CarePort will use the provider directory of MedAllies to allow users to comply with CMS’s ADT notification Condition of Participation.
Particle Health announces a FHIR API that will allow developers to create products that can search the information of 270 million patients.
Amwell releases Hospital TV 100, a kit that turns existing hospital TVs into telehealth endpoints. Intermountain Healthcare has deployed 1,200 of the units.
The Consumer Technology Association launches an ANSI-accredited standard for the use of AI in healthcare, which consists only of definitions for a few dozen terms such as “algorithm” and “big data” as agreed on by 50 big-name organizations and companies.
COVID-19
CDC reports that 56 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 72 million delivered (78%) and 15 million people have received both doses.
CDC will spend $200 million to increase the number of coronavirus samples that are genetically sequenced as surveillance for the spread of variants.
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD predicts a less-active COVID-19 spring and summer because infections and vaccinations have raised protective immunity to 40%.
Overall US life expectancy dropped by a full year in the first half of 2020, while that of the black population was reduced by 2.7 years. The life expectancy of black Americans is now six years less than that of whites.
The Los Angeles Times features its owner – billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose NantWorks conglomerate owns ImmunoBio, which is developing a coronavirus vaccine – as the host of a video series that covers COVID-19. One of his interviewees is a South African geneticist who is an ImmuneBio partner, which was not disclosed in the discussion, as they discussed the logistical shortcomings of existing vaccines. NantWorks also owns health IT vendor NantHealth.
KHN reports the plight of the rural 25-bed St. James Parish Hospital in Louisiana, which does not have an ICU and at times cannot find a hospital closer than 600 miles away that will accept a transfer. The hospital has seen 70% of its employees decline COVID-19 vaccination
Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest healthcare company, will have only a few million COVID-19 vaccine doses available in the next few weeks when FDA could approve its use. The US government paid the company $1 billion to develop the vaccine in exchange for 100 million doses after having given it $456 million in March, but J&J says that most of the promised first-half doses won’t be available until June. The company’s vaccine requires one dose instead of two and can be stored in refrigerators rather than in freezers.
Mount Sinai Health System (NY) halts its use of convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19 patients, saying that it has shown no clinical benefit in repeated clinical trials.
The state of Iowa cancels its contract with Microsoft for a COVID-19 vaccination appointment system, deciding that it would be to hard to combine the several existing systems that are being used by health departments and pharmacies.
A man in England is offered COVID-19 vaccine early after his doctor’s office enters his height incorrectly as 6.2 centimeters instead of 6 feet 2 inches.
Other
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, announces a $600 million program to improve cybersecurity in the public and private sector, saying that two recent hospital ransomware attacks show how serious the threat is.
The CEO of Medicare Advantage insurer Clover Health – which is facing reviews by the Department of Justice and the SEC as well as short-seller pressure – unleashes a profanity-filled tirade against a Forbes reporter who wrote an article whose headline he didn’t like. Vivek Garipalli became a paper billionaire when Clover went public via a SPAC last month, valuing the company at nearly $4 billion. Clover offers physicians its Clover Assistant to manage patient care, paying them a fee of $200 every time the software is used during a patient visit. The money-losing company, which operates in some counties of seven states, did not report prior to going public that it is the subject of a Department of Justice False Claims Act investigation for improperly inducing patient referrals. Clover’s board includes folks who have a health IT connection – Flatiron Health co-founder and former CEO Nathaniel Turner and former Allscripts and Livongo executive Lee Shapiro.
Kaiser Family Foundation uses Epic Health Research Network to find that hospital admissions dropped to a low of 69% of expected admissions in the first week of April 2020, but have remained at above 90% since June 2020, leaving the full-year reduction in admissions at 8.5%. Non-COVID-19 hospitalizations started dropping again with November 2020’s COVID-19 surge, suggesting that people are deferring or forgoing care, possibly because of hospital capacity constraints. Fewer care-seekers boosted the gross margins of insurers, as their medical loss ratios were lower.
In observation of the death of Bernard Lown, MD this week, here are the Lown Institute’s 2020 Shkreli Awards from last month for egregious healthcare profiteering and dysfunction, in the spirit of pharma bro and federal inmate Martin Shkreli:
Private equity-owned physician staffing companies spent millions to squash surprise billing legislation while cutting physician pay and accepting $60 million in CARES Act interest-free loans.
Hucksters, some of them physicians, pushed fake COVID-19 cures.
Connecticut internet Steven Murphy, MD offered to run public COVID-19 testing sites for several towns, then billed the insurance of patients for large panels of tests for other infections at an estimated cost of up to $2,000 per person.
Hospitals punished their clinicians who wore masks, claiming they didn’t need them and would scare patients.
Brigham and Women’s CEO Elizabeth Nabel, MD wrote an op-ed defending high drug prices while not disclosing that Moderna paid her nearly $500,000 in 2019 for serving on it board, after which she sold $8.5 million of the vaccine maker’s stock.
Executives of the four big drug companies that developed COVID-19 vaccines declined to participate in a WHO program to share information to develop and distribute treatments, vaccines, and diagnostics.
Nursing homes failed to protect their residents from COVID-19.
Four California health systems refused to accept transfers of poorly insured COVID-19 patients even though they had available beds.
Moderna, which had 100% of its $1 billion in COVID-19 vaccine development costs covered by the US government, set the highest price of all companies that offer a vaccine.
FEMA’s PPE task force airlifted PPE in from other countries, but instead of distributing it to states, gave it to six private medical supply companies to sell to the highest bidders.
Sponsor Updates
OmniSys uses Virtustream’s Enterprise Cloud and XStreamCare Services to ensure its pharmacy customers can meet the demands of COVID-19 vaccine management.
WellSpan Health (PA) expands its Nuance Dragon Ambient Experience deployment to improve care access and patient and provider experiences.
SymphonyRM names former Intermountain Healthcare CIO Marc Probst to its board.
Healthcare Growth Partners advised Symplr on its acquisition of Phynd Technologies, which closed earlier this week.
In the UK, InterSystems makes COVID-19 vaccination appointment scheduling available through its TrakCare system.
Loyale Healthcare publishes a new industry analysis, “Growth in Healthcare Spending will Decelerate Post-COVID: How Hospitals Should Plan.”
Meditech publishes a new case study, “NMC Health decreases antibiotic use through Meditech’s Antimicrobial Stewardship Toolkit.”
Traditionally Professional Courtesy is something that physicians gave each other - but we had to be careful with it when…