Monday Morning Update 2/15/21

Top News

A new GAO report recommends that the VA stop its implementation of Cerner until all known critical issues have been addressed.

The VA agrees in principle, but says it won’t stop the rollout and instead will test and mitigate risks.

Most of the GAO’s data came from work performed last fall. VA has since closed most of the high-severity issues that GAO noted. Just 55 of the previous nearly 400 issues remain open.The VA says it will have all issues resolved by January 2022.

Next up for go-live is Puget Sound Health Care System in Q4 2021. 

Reader Comments

From DAX Facts: “Re: Nuance’s DAX ambient clinical intelligence. Users have told me that their hospitals are finding it hard to generate ROI because just freeing up physician time doesn’t necessarily result in more visits or revenue. What are your thoughts on how much value DAX adds and how that will be reflected in its pricing?” I’ve been wondering that myself, especially after last week’s Nuance earnings call in which DAX consumed a lot of company and analyst discussion that I assume reflects financial expectations. DAX customers mentioned in the earnings include Duke Health, San Joaquin Hospital, Mercy Health, Rush, WellSpan, Connecticut Children’s, and Cooper Health. I would be interested in firsthand experience at a macro level, i.e. how do physicians like it and is the expectation that it will pay for itself? Let me know and I’ll keep you and your organization anonymous, of course. I’ll also add that hospitals aren’t good at turning newfound employee free time into anything more than a less-stressful workday, which offers some burnout benefits but doesn’t excite CFOs who have to write the checks.

From Damocles: “Re: Cerner’s bankrupt client who owes $63 million in an arbitration judgment. You are correct that it was Belbadi Enterprises. Cerner is still pursuing taking possession of a Vancouver, WA property that was held by a subsidiary by way of the company’s former CEO. Cerner hired forensic accountants and investigators who found that the company moved money back and forth with that subsidiary, even though Vandevco / Belbadi claimed that no tie exists. Also stiffed were consulting firms who were hired to install Cerner for the UAE’s Ministry of Health and Populations, which were left with unpaid bills when MOHP signed a direct contract with Cerner and cut Belbadi out of the deal. I’m sure it’s a sensitive issue since Belbadi is still an active entity in the UAE and the former CEO is a member of one of the ruling families, even though he lined his pockets with money that should have gone to Cerner and other vendors.” It’s good to be king, or in this case, brother of your country’s minister of justice and the 10th richest UAE citizen.

From IHeartHIStalk: “Re: counterfeit N95 masks from China. Meanwhile, small US manufacturers can’t find mask buyers.” The New York Times profiles DemeTech, a family-run Miami business that invested tens of millions of dollars in mask manufacturing equipment and spent nine months earning federal approval to sell N95 masks, but now the owner can’t find buyers for the 30 million masks he has in inventory and he is laying off employees. Despite vows to “buy American,” health systems, medical supply distributors, and state governments don’t want to change their buying habits or spend a bit more on masks that are made in this country. Manufacturers are also being hurt by Facebook and Google advertising bans that were intended to thwart mask profiteers. Big players like 3M and Honeywell, spurred by the Defense Production act, are selling 120 million masks each month, mostly to distributors that resell to hospitals who need more than twice that number.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents would be most concerned about credit card or payment information in the event their medical records were disclosed. The good news there is: (a) I would hope that most PM/EHR systems don’t retain credit card information or store it via a payment processor’s secure system; and (b) you can always cancel a credit card and start over with no repercussions, unlike having your medical information disclosed to the world. Behind credit card information is behavioral information, and far behind that is a list of social habits. After that, most people don’t really care.

New poll to your right or here: In your most recent physician or hospital encounter, were your electronic records from one or more other providers reviewed?

I dropped by Walgreens Friday to procure vital medical supplies (Valentine’s Day cards, candy, and stuffed animals) and saw that they are giving COVID-19 vaccine shots by appointment. It was a bit jarring after reading and writing so much about the vaccine over many months to see unexcited employees calling people up from their waiting area chairs to get their injection. Chain drugstores are all about the foot traffic that generates high-margin impulse sales (like Valentine’s Day cards, candy, and stuffed animals) and COVID-19 vaccinations will see dozens of millions of people traipsing through their aisles to the back of the store in two visits. Sometimes a business’s biggest challenge, and a profitable one if they can pull it off, is to get people into their store for the first time.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Gyant (pronounced “giant.”) The San Francisco-based company’s empathic, intuitive virtual assistant guides patients through the complexity of their digital healthcare journeys, driving more meaningful patient-doctor engagement. It reduces clinical strain and support staff overhead, improves outcomes, and exceeds patient expectations. The company’s conversational AI learning loop handholds patients from the virtual front door through their entire clinical journey by integrating deeply into EHR workflows and driving higher levels of efficiency that improve patient outcomes and make them feel truly valued. Thanks to Gyant for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a Gyant explainer video I found on YouTube.

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

Listening: new from reader-recommended Starcrawler, some LA teen punk rockers who sound kind of like L7 meets the New York Dolls and Iggy and the Stooges. That’s a lot of musicality and 1970s influence from kids who are barely old enough to drive. Their live shows are apparently pretty nuts.

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

Continuous glucose monitoring device vendor Dexcom launches a venture capital fund that will identify and invest in opportunities to supplement its core business. The fund will focus on sensing technology, analytics, remote patient monitoring, and population health management.

Vocera announces Q4 results: revenue up 14%, adjusted EPS $0.28 versus $0.15, beating Wall Street expectations for both. Shares jumped 25% Friday following the announcement, with VCRA shares up 76% in the past 12 months versus the Dow’s 6% gain, valuing the company at $1.7 billion. Vocera said in the earnings call that Q4 bookings were the highest in the company’s history as COVID-19 has elevated hospital priority for communication and workflow solutions that keep employees safe.    

Announcements and Implementations

Well Health announces that its COVID Vaccination Self-Scheduling is available to providers through self-scheduling partners. The system allows scheduling both appointments, maximizes doses through appointment optimization, follows up for second doses, and provides secure message to patients regardless of whether they are registered in the EHR.

Government and Politics

HHS OCR settles its 16th HIPAA Right of Access case, with Sharp HealthCare paying $70,000 for taking seven months to send an electronic copy of a patient’s records to a third party. OCR originally closed the case after giving Sharp technical assistance, but the patient filed a second complaint two months later when the records had still not been sent.

COVID-19

US COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations continue their steep downward trend, with just 69,000 hospitalized patient versus nearly double that number just a few weeks ago. Still, the numbers are higher now than in the spring and summer surges.

CDC reports that 51 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of the 70 million distributed (72%), split nearly evenly between the Pfizer and Moderna products. 

UK scientists find that the B117 coronavirus variant is not only more infectious, which was previously documented, but it also appears to be 30% to 70% more lethal given limited study so far. If that finding holds after further research, spread of the variant could disproportionally increase hospitalizations and deaths even beyond just causing a higher number of infections. In Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador is already seeing a B117-fueled outbreak and has escalated mitigation measures.

New Jersey’s vaccine hotline stops booking appointments after callers report that they were given incorrect information. The state says it will provide extra training for the hotline’s 2,000 agents and is working out software problems with vendor Microsoft. The state had weeks of outages with its online registration system, warning that Microsoft’s Vaccine Management system may never work. The state says Microsoft doesn’t have enough support people and some of them are offshore and thus unavailable during US working hours.

In yet another example of COVID-19 vaccination software shortcomings, FDA is still trying to bring up its BEST system for monitoring vaccine side effects using real-world evidence. BEST will eventually be able to review the medical records of 100 million people in real time, but it relies on EHR and claims data that aren’t always filed for no-charge vaccinations. The system is also so new that FDA hasn’t yet calculated the rates of background problems with people who haven’t received the vaccine, so they can’t easily identify unusual events. For now, the federal government is using several other systems that don’t share information, including the 30-year-old FDA/CDC VAERS system for self-reported vaccine problems.

Virtua Health finds a bug in its vaccination self-scheduling system when it notices that 70% of its 300,000 appointments are duplicates, requiring 10,000 phone calls to work out the duplications but freeing up 5,000 open slots by doing so. They didn’t indicate the software they use, but the signup form uses Epic MyChart. UPDATE: A Virtua Health spokesperson clarifies that the scheduling system did not have a bug, it just didn’t prevent people from making multiple appointments. The 70% number doesn’t refer to the number of duplicates of the 300,000 total appointments, but rather that of those duplicates, 70% of them were made in error due because users weren’t sure how to schedule both first- and second-dose appointments or didn’t wait for the confirmation email before scheduling again.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s top aide admits that the state withheld data about COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes because it feared an investigation by the federal Justice Department. The state’s nursing homes have had 15,000 COVID-19 deaths, nearly double the previously reported total, which the state did not confirm until faced with a court order. Cuomo issued an executive order in March 2020 that required nursing homes to readmit their residents following their hospitalization for COVID-19 treatment, but state health officials have claimed – without providing details – that the high rate of nursing home deaths was caused by infected employees and not the residents themselves.

The federal government has not developed a plan to allocate COVID-19 vaccine for the 6,000-employee US Public Health Service, telling them that they should visit military treatment facilities that are sometimes turning them away in confusion about whether they are eligible (all of them are, per the Pentagon’s priority list). Public Health Service officers are being deployed to deliver care to COVID-19 patients and to work on mass vaccination programs.

The Atlantic explains how the small, poor country of Bhutan controlled coronavirus so well that it has recorded just one COVID-19 death:

• The country can’t afford to run an expensive US-style health system, so it focuses instead on public health and prevention.
• Within two weeks of China’s first report to the WHO of an unknown pneumonia outbreak, Bhutan drafted an emergency plan and started screening people at airports.
• With six hours of discovering its first confirmed COVID-19 case in early March – an American tourist – the Yale-educated epidemiologist who is its health minister had 300 possible contacts traced and quarantined.
• The government issued clear daily updates.
• Bhutan banned tourists, closed schools and public institutions, closed entertainment venues, and urged mask-wearing and distancing.
• The government paid for hotel accommodations and meals for those who were quarantined.
• The first positive case outside of quarantine triggered a national three-week lockdown in which the government delivered food and medicine to every household.
• The king’s relief fund provided financial assistance to those who had lost income, created a national registry for vulnerable citizens, and sent packages of medical items to every resident over 60.

Other

Stanford researchers find that higher-ranked children’s hospitals that have their own EHR instead of sharing one with an adult hospital perform better in rankings. I can offer many reasons for this correlation that go beyond the article’s suggestion that these hospitals don’t treat children as “small adults” or that their systems are all that different given that they use the same couple of vendors. I’m also skeptical that EHR’s configuration and use has a measurable effect on objective quality measures (did those hospitals show improvement after they implemented their systems?) I would also question whether rankings derived from self-reported US News & World Report surveys are reflective of quality. Maybe the most important unanswered question is whether children’s hospitals that deploy their own standalone EHRs are able to configure them differently (or are more likely to do so) than those that follow broader rules because they share a system with an adult hospital. That would make a better study – take a few ordering pathways that peds hospitals do differently (medication dose range checking, growth charts, use of patient identifiers, etc.) and see if they are implemented differently in standalone versus shared EHRs, and if they are, determine whether that’s because of EHR limitations or corporate choice.

Informatics experts in Switzerland say there’s no such thing as “your electronic medical record” there, as some clinics are still using paper records and fax machines and the system is fragmented by having both government-run and private systems. Cantons even used fax machines to send COVID-19 case information to the federal government for tracking. Data stored in silos, the experts say, will stand in the way of using promising AI applications.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx announces the pricing of the previously announced underwritten public offering of 1,325,000 shares of its common stock at $49.50 per share.
• Cerner supports mass COVID-19 vaccinations around the world.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “From Buzzword to Buzzer-Beater: How SDOH stands to take COVID head on.”
• TriNetX will work with German hospital organization VUD to build a collaborative network of university hospitals and medical schools as part of the TriNetX global health research network.
• Well Health makes COVID-19 vaccination self-scheduling capabilities available through multiple industry-leading partners.

Blog Posts

• Optimizing telehealth with AI-powered technologies – protect your patients and revenue (Nuance)
• New E/M documentation changes: Where does your organization stand? (Nordic)
• What “The Brady Bunch” Can Teach Healthcare Organizations About Blending Workforces as Part of M&A (Pivot Point Consulting)
• The Case for Mobile-Based Telehealth (PMD)
• MSSP 2020 Expenditure and Utilization Reports and Calculators May Be Misleading (Premier)
• Care Journey Orchestration Tackles Healthcare’s Biggest Operational Challenges (Lumeon)
• Design Considerations for Healthcare Products that Require EHR Integration (Redox)
• Email Appointment Reminder Templates That Will Help Your Patient Engagement (Relatient)
• Denver Startup Helps Combat the High Cost of Prescription Drugs (RxRevu)
• TeleNeurology Offers Real-Time Clinician Collaboration (SOC Telemed)
• When no news might be missed news: Closed loop reporting in healthcare (Spok)
• AHA Guest Blog: What heart and stroke patients should know about COVID-19 vaccines (Krames)
• Top billing mistakes and how to fix them (Waystar)
• Give to Get: The How and Why of Patient Loyalty Programs (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 2/12/21

Top News

Providence and several other big health systems form Truveta, a Seattle-based startup that will provide its hospital owners, drug companies, and researchers with anonymized patient data for approved research projects.

The company notes that its information spans health systems and thus, unlike that offered by insurance companies, does not disproportionately represent white and insured patients. 

Truveta, which is run by former Microsoft executive Terry Myerson, has hired 53 employees.

As with all such companies, patients do not share in the profit of having their information sold or used and are not required by HIPAA to be notified of the arrangement.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I ran across the latest HIMSS tax filings, for the year ending June 30, 2019, and provided a brief summary. The version that includes the first half of 2020 – and thus some of the HIMSS20 damage – will be posted in July.

Thanks to PatientKeeper for quickly snapping up the top-of-page banner spot for a long-term run. They have been an HIStalk sponsor since June 2008.

Listening: new from Jagwar Twin, the solo project of singer-songwriter Roy English. It’s modern, mostly upbeat pop with a hip hop edge, without the usual one-track collaborations, overreliance on computers, and profanity. I also ran across some amazing 1960s soul (from the viral hits chart of Portugal, for some reason) of Memphis-born soul singer-songwriter William Bell, who recorded for the legendary Stax Records, got drafted into the Army for a two-year hitch, had a couple of hits and awards, and is still playing at 81 years of age. His is the joyous, gospel-influenced music that could only come from America. I don’t recall ever hearing his stuff, but it is remarkable.

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

Value-based care coordination and payments vendor Signify Health prices its IPO at a valuation of $5.3 billion. The company’s CEO is Kyle Armbrester, MBA, who along with several of his executive team peers, used to work for Athenahealth.

Cerner reports Q4 earnings: revenue down 3%, adjusted EPS $0.78 versus $0.75, meeting earnings expectations and exceeding on revenue. CERN shares dropped slightly on the news and down 1% over the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 46% gain, valuing the company at $24 billion. From the earnings call:

• The company says it has reduced annualized operating expenses by $300 million in the past two years and has reduced its product set from 25,000 features to 400 products.
• Cerner expects to create a $1 billion health network business by 2025.
• Asked by an analyst how the company can simultaneously address losing market share to Epic as well as convincing customers to choose Cerner in innovative areas where it competes with new companies, President Don Trigg says Cerner was built to work on the current business as well as to identify new growth opportunities that may be adjacencies or new markets. They are looking at new buyer types beyond providers, such as payer, employer, government, and pharma.
• Trigg said in response to a question about how it will work with pharma contract research organizations following its acquisition of Kantar Health that Cerner’s differentiators are data as well as access to patients and providers. The acquisition allows linking data to support capabilities needed for late-stage drug trials.
• Cerner expects the acquired Kantar Health to generate about $150 million in revenue for 2021 even with COVID-19 slowdowns.
• The company may divest a limited number of assets in 2021, but is mostly interested in acquisitions.
• Health systems that participate in Cerner’s Learning Health Network share the revenue that Cerner earns from drug companies.
• Cerner’s federal business generates $1 billion per year and is growing at a mid-teens percentage rate. It sees opportunity in contracting with new agency work, especially on the network side, and the company will become more efficient with its experience as a prime contractor.
• The company took a $20 million charge that was due to an entity in the Middle East declaring bankruptcy. That entity wasn’t named, but I assume it was Belbadi Enterprises, a sole proprietorship that was formed by Abu Dhabi’s former health minister that signed a deal in 2008 to provide Cerner to UAE hospitals. Cerner was awarded $62 million, but was never paid, and then failed in its attempt to seize Oregon real estate that was owned by a related company.

CPSI announces Q4 results: revenue down 5%, EPS $0.22 versus $0.78, missing Wall Street expectations for both and sending shares down 11%. CPSI shares are up 25% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 46% gain, valuing the company at $446 million. The company said in the earnings call that it has hired an advisor to review its business in hopes of increasing shareholder value. It also said in an SEC filing that it will reduce its workforce by 1%, or 21 employees.

Sales

• Nuvance Health chooses SymphonyRM for data science-powered consumer engagement, including Next Best Actions, outreach and consumer preference management, and market analytics.
• In England, West Hertfordshire NHS Trust signs a 10-year, $41 million contract for Cerner.
• Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration will deploy the PULSE (Patient Unified Lookup System for Emergencies) Enterprise platform of Audacious Inquiry for public assistance around COVID-19 and hurricanes.
• Community Health Network selects Jvion’s CORE (Care Optimization and Recommendation Enhancement) to allow care navigators to reach out to vulnerable ACO members who are deferring care during the pandemic.
• Saint Peter’s University Hospital (NJ) will implement CarePort Interop, an event notification system from WellSky-owned CarePort that supports compliance with new CMS Condition of Participation requirements.

People

Mary Lantin, MPH (Optum) joins Diameter Health as president/COO.

Innovaccer hires industry long-timer John Pigott (Allscripts) as management director of its payer and life sciences sales team.

Aver hires Michael Johnson (Rx30) as chief revenue officer.

EFamilyCare, which offers family caregivers virtual support from experts to reduce hospitalizations, promotes Naveen Kathuria, JD to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

The HCI Group earns Meditech UK Ready implementation certification.

FDA issues 510(K) clearance to B-Secur’s ECG algorithm library for signal conditioning, heart rate, and arrhythmia analysis. The Northern Ireland-based company’s technology can be licensed by medical technology vendors and is approved for home and healthcare environments.

Well Health and Twilio partner to offer providers two patient engagement options, particularly around COVID-19 vaccination – supporting providers who want to built custom workflows using Twilio’s SMS and voice delivery APIs and those who would prefer to roll out Well’s Health pre-built platform that supports bidirectional texting, email, telephone, and live chat in 19 languages.

Smarter Health, which sells a payer-provider data integration platform in Southeast Asia, will offer data analytics from Health Catalyst.

Arkansas State Hospital goes live on Medsphere’s CareVue Cloud EHR and RCM Cloud.

A new KLAS report on clinical documentation improvement finds that Iodine, ChartWise, and Optum lead in performance, while 3M 360 Encompass is often considered because of its strong technology but service and support lags and customers complain about being nickeled and dimed.

Government and Politics

Renown Health (NV) will pay $75,000 to settle HIPAA Right of Access charges that it took 11 months to send an electronic copy of a patient’s records to her attorney.

COVID-19

CDC reports that 45 million doses of the 66 million COVID-19 vaccine doses that have been distributed have been administered (68%). Anthony Fauci, MD predicts that an increased supply of vaccine will allow any American to get a shot who wants one by April, but logistical limits will make achieving herd immunity unlikely before late summer. A new poll finds that one-third of Americans definitely or probably won’t get the vaccine, which predicts both an epidemiologic challenge as well as a shift from a shortage of supply to a deficiency of demand.

FDA issues emergency use authorization to a combination of two Eli Lilly monoclonal antibodies (bamlanivimab and etesevimab) for the treatment of COVID-19 in patients who are over 65 or who have other medical conditions, where risk of hospitalization and death can be reduced by 70%. Also new in COVID-19 treatment: the RECOVERY study finds that tocilizumab reduces mortality, inpatient stay length, and a need for ventilation of patients who are hypoxic and have inflammation.

Volunteer technologists have quickly developed vaccination appointment websites that centralize information from multiple sites in each state, but the beneficiaries are usually tech-savvy people who have time on their hands to cruise for appointments, not necessarily disadvantaged groups who have the highest need. Some of the sites don’t take into account eligibility differences between a state and individual counties, such as in California where the state’s 65-year-old threshold is overridden by the 75-year cutoff of some counties, leading people to show up at sites with their system-generated appointment and barcode in hand only to be turned away because they don’t meet county criteria.

The federal government says that a flood of fake 3M N95 masks from China is the most consistent COVID-19 scam, as hospitals have in some cases distributed the counterfeit masks to frontline workers. 3M says that 10 million counterfeit masks have been seized and it has fielded 10,500 authenticity questions. On the other hand, testing has found that the fake masks actually work about as well as the real thing, even though they are harder to breathe through and seal-and-fit isn’t always adequate.

Overrun hospitals in Mexico are sending COVID-19 patients home, where they are likely to die because their families can’t get oxygen tanks. A national shortage has caused the price to jump to $800 for the smallest tank (10 times the US price) and criminal groups are hijacking trucks carrying the tanks and stealing them at gunpoint from hospitals that are then sold by uncertified profiteers from their cars. Desperate family members are also paying thousands of dollars for oxygen concentrators that don’t necessarily work.

India will use Co-WIN to manage its efforts to inoculate 300 million people for COVID-19 by August, which has no ability to extract high-priority people from a list based on age and comorbidities. Epidemiologists say that the only surefire way to hit the numbers target is to go door to door and sign high-risk people up. They also question whether Co-WIN will be used to collect private health data since signing up for a shot automatically creates a national health ID that is supposed to be voluntary.

Other

The IT director of 15-bed critical access hospital Syringa Hospital (ID) urges its board to stick with Cerner instead of following its plan to use Epic from Kootenai Health. The hospital says it is switching to gain cost savings and better connectivity to other Epic hospitals, but the IT director says it would “really grieve me” to re-do the work and warns that not all information will convert. She adds that Epic isn’t in the top five EHRs for small hospitals. A board member said she appreciates the input, but the IT director’s view is slanted because “that’s her baby,” adding that the board expected the hospital’s leadership to come to them with a recommendation and instead they were divided.

Sponsor Updates

• Altruista Health adds evidence-based medical content from Healthwise to its GuidingCare care management and population health software.
• Change Healthcare has joined the Health Evolution Forum as a leadership partner.
• The Chartis Center for Rural Health publishes a new report, “Crises Collide: The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Rural Health Safety Net.”
• Over the past 12 months, Glytec’s FDA-cleared EGMS software has been used in an additional 6,500 beds and is now partnering with over 300 healthcare facilities across the country.
• The HCI Group launches a new podcast, “DGTL Voices with Ed Marx.”
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions announces its “Top 100 Hospice and Home Health Agencies Rankings for 2020.”
• NextGate achieves HITRUST CSF Certification to further mitigate risk in third-party privacy, security, and compliance.

Blog Posts

• The Power of Collaboration in Vaccine Distribution Management (Everbridge)
• A Suite of Solutions for a Sweet Solution: A Recipe for Superior Glycemic Management Success (Glytec)
• CEO Perspective: Alert Fatigue, Interruptions Put Patient Safety at Risk (Halo Health)
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Healthcare: Four Real-World Improvements (Health Catalyst)
• A Peek Inside Biden’s Healthcare Priorities (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• Healthcare A/V: Critical to Plan, Challenging to Define, Deploy, and Support (Impact Advisors)
• Overwhelmed with COVID-19 Vaccine Reporting Requirements? Zen has the Solution. (Zen Healthcare IT)
• New multi-tenant curriculum for Infor FSM, Infor HCM, and CloudSuite Health Care (Infor)
• Why Cardiologists Count on Healthy Data for Healthy Hearts (InterSystems)
• Worth the watch: Advancing women leaders in health IT (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Growth in Healthcare Spending Will Decelerate Post-COVID: How Hospitals Should Plan (Loyale Healthcare)
• Care Journey Orchestration Tackles Healthcare’s Biggest Operational Challenges (Lumeon)
• Make Your Hospital an Integrated Hub of Community Healthcare (Medhost)
• The Do’s and Don’ts of a successful EHR implementation (Meditech)
• Transforming an HIE into a “Population Health Utility” is Helping Nebraska Fight COVID-19 (NextGate)

Contacts

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

HIMSS Financial Highlights

This information is from the 2018 Form 990 of HIMSS, which covers the tax year ending June 30, 2019. The 2019 form, which will include the first half of 2020 when HIMSS20 was cancelled, will be filed in July 2021.

Income and Expense

Total revenue: $112 million (up 18% from the previous year)
Total expenses: $91 million (down 5.5% from the previous year)
Revenue less expenses: $21.2 million (versus a $1.2 million loss the previous year)

Program Service Revenue

Conferences: $42.8 million
Corporate sponsorships: $13.1 million
Membership: $12.9 million
Advertising and media: $10.0 million (classified as unrelated business revenue)
Analytics and maturity models: $3.0 million

Revenue from Related Organizations

HIMSS Media: $13.2 million
HIMSS Analytics: $3.0 million
Personal Connected Health Alliance: $2.6 million
HIMSS Europe: $1.6 million

HIMSS also reported taxable partnerships through its Healthbox consulting firm. 

Major Expenses

Conferences: $15.9 million
IT: $6.4 million
Occupancy: $2.2 million
Travel: $4.1 million

Highest Compensated Employees

Steve Lieber, former president and CEO: $2,666,485 (retired December 2017)
Hal Wolf, president and CEO: $1,291,414
Carla Smith, EVP: $671,788 (resigned November 2018)
Bruce Steinberg, managing director, international: $548,909
John Whelan, EVP, HIMSS Media: $426,732
Blain Newton, EVP, HIMSS Analytics: $451,265
Stephen Wretling, chief technology and innovation officer: $393,866
Patricia Mechael, EVP, Personal Connected Health Alliance: $355,787 (six months)

Total salaries and wages: $38 million for 459 employees, plus $4.1 million in pension plans and other employee benefits.

News 2/10/21

Top News

Nuance acquires Saykara, a developer of automated charting software.

Saykara founder and CEO Harjinder Sandhu, PhD was an executive in Nuance’s healthcare research and development division before co-founding automated patient engagement company Twistle in 2011 and Saykara in 2015.

Nuance will assign Saykara’s 30 employees to its Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX) team. A stock analyst asked Nuance how they would keep Sandhu since “he keeps leaving and developing more stuff you guys are buying” (he was a co-founder of Nuance acquisition MedRemote as well). Nuance CEO Mark Benjamin says the opportunity with the acquisition was to combine the scientists of both companies.

I interviewed Harjinder Sandhu this past October, when I asked him how he would compare Saykara’s Kara to Nuance’s DAX.

Reader Comments

From Equity Management Person: “Re: SPACs. Here are some counterpoints.” Thanks for providing an expert’s point of view in response to my cheap-seats comment about the SPAC phenomenon. EMP makes these points:

• SPACs have two years to consummate a deal per their IPO documents. 
• As a result, It’s a target-rich environment and a lot of SPACS are doing value-creating transactions.
• An inherent backstop exists to prevent SPACs from rushing into bad deals. They have to convince sophisticated institutional sponsors who have veto rights that the deal is a good one. Those investors get their initial investment back if the company fails to close a deal.
• SPACs are technically equivalent to IPOs except that the SPAC sponsor takes a lot of the fees than investment banks would take during a formal IPO underwriting.
• It’s an interesting question why SPACS are suddenly so popular, but target companies are deliberately selecting that route given other options (IPOs, direct listings, and strategic sales), so SPACs offer what those companies think is the most attractive package of valuation, governance, and deal certainty.
• SPACs are unlikely to be stranded because of a lack of follow-on capital and investor interest. The sponsor is a a core institutional block holder who is invested in the success of the company. The company will have greater access to capital and better long-term outcomes than being let go into a market without any backers except investment banks, which offer little credibility to institutional investors by their association and research overage.

From Dry Heat: “Re: Super Bowl commercials. You should have a similar contest for health IT vendor ads.” I’m not sure that companies in our industry have the media savvy or cash to produce jaw-dropping ads given their niche B2B audience, but an ad contest for HIMSS conference week would be fun in the presence of adequate enthusiasm, even in the form of creative video messages rather than “commercials.” My favorite Super Bowl commercial is “Terry Tate: Office Linebacker,“ but it’s also an illustration of entertainment versus commercial success — Reebok ended it fairly quickly despite endless watercooler buzz because the connection to the company was subtle and sales were mostly unaffected. Reebok shoe competitor K-Swiss later produced the most profanely funny and Tate-like video I’ve seen (NSFW and definitely don’t click if you don’t know for sure that you like the always-offensive and profane “Eastside & Down.”) K-Swiss was brave for featuring Kenny Powers, MFCEO, but buzz aside, they sold the money-hemorrhaging company to a Korea-based outfit shortly after.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor ChartSpan. The Greenville, SC-based company is the largest managed service provider of chronic care management (CCM) programs in the United States. It provides turnkey managed care coordination and compliance programs for doctors, clinics, and health systems. ChartSpan manages patient care coordination and value-based programs for more than 100 of the most successful practices and health systems in the United States. In addition, ChartSpan offers a SaaS-based Annual Wellness Visit program that allows practices to maximize their AWV capture rate by simplifying the AWV process. Through these offerings, ChartSpan is able to help practices increase their reimbursements while improving patient outcomes. Thanks to ChartSpan for supporting HIStalk. 

Here’s a good “what we do” intro video from ChartSpan that also defines the value of chronic care management.

I subscribed to the online edition of the AP Stylebook since I refer to it often in choosing to follow most (but not all) of its own standards. Below are some I follow except when I slip up:

• Spell out numbers from one to nine but use numerals for anything 10 and above. Exceptions: spell out any number used as the first word of a sentence (“Ninety tourists visited”) and if the number precedes a unit of measure that doesn’t refer to time (“he made a 6-foot putt” but “a six-month delay.”)
• Regardless of how a company stylizes its own name, do not use all-capital letters unless they are pronounced individually (“IBM” is correct, “MEDITECH” is not, and “EPIC” is a figment of your imagination because even they can’t understand why people all-caps their name); do not use symbols (“MModal,” not “M*Modal”); and capitalize the first letter (“Athenahealth” rather than “athenahealth.”)
• Periods and commas always go inside quotation marks.
• Capitalize job titles only if they are formally assigned and are included right before the person’s name. It is “Epic President Carl Dvorak,” but “Carl Dvorak, president of Epic.”
• Use “health care” instead of “healthcare” even though the latter is in the dictionary. (I’m an AP outlaw in this issue mostly because of laziness in knowing I have to type it out many times each day).
• Don’t use copyright or trademark symbols — they are just for the company’s marketing materials.
• Plurals of words of any size require adding only an S with no apostrophe (“it will be in the low 20s,” “this is a meeting of CIOs”) except for those of one letter (“he earned four A’s”).
• Use “coronavirus” to refer to the virus and “COVID-19” as the disease it causes. Do not shorten to “COVID” or use “Covid.”

I noticed that the Walgreens website wasn’t working this morning, which from Googling seems to have been the case for a couple of days.

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

Talent solutions company Ettain Group acquires INT Technologies, a veteran-owned staffing and consulting company that serves a variety of industries including healthcare.

Sitka raises $14 million in a Series A funding round, increasing its total to $22 million. The company offers PCPs the ability to virtually consult with specialists using its VConsult software.

Paging Weird News Andy: microbial sciences company Seed Health acquires Auggi, whose AI technology analyzes pictures of bowel movements to assess gastrointestinal health. Auggi also offers an app for use in clinical trials, while Seed will launch a consumer app this year.

Nuance announces Q1 results: revenue down 4%, adjusted EPS $0.20 versus $0.22, beating Wall Street expectations for both. The company said in the earnings call that revenue for Dragon Medical and Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX) rose 22% over Q1 of last year, with DAX contributing $10 to 20 million in annual recurring revenue and customers expanding their implementation to additional medical specialties.

Sales

• Bayhealth (DE) will implement Infor’s CloudSuite Healthcare, Clinical Bridge, D/EPM, and True Cost technologies.
• The Center for Human Development (MA) selects Netsmart’s CareFabric software to unify workflows across its 80 programs and services.
• Summit Healthcare announces that nine health systems have contracted for Summit Scripting Toolkit, its robotic process automation platform.

People

Jeff McHugh (R1 RCM) joins Innovaccer as regional VP of sales.

Bret Cottick (Olive) joins Medical Informatics Corp. as national VP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Beauregard Health System (LA) goes live on Meditech Expanse with consulting help from Engage.

Wake Forest Baptist Health (NC) implements RxRevu’s SwiftRx Direct real-time prescription benefit software.

Blessing Health System (IL) develops a home-based care program for COVID-19 patients using remote patient monitoring and telemedicine software from Cloud Dx.

The 377th Medical Group at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico will go live on Cerner Millenium in April as part of the DoD’s continued rollout of MHS Genesis.

True Health (FL) leverages Emerge’s ChartGenie and ChartScout technologies in its conversion to Athenahealth.

COVID-19

All US COVID-19 measures are trending down significantly to early fall 2020 levels, with the hospitalization number slipping to around 80,000. US deaths are at 465,000, 20% of the world’s total. CDC reports that 42 million of 59 million distributed vaccine doses have been administered (71%).

The hottest topic among epidemiologists – should the 90 million Americans who have already had COVID-19 receive just one dose of vaccine? Consensus seems to be yes given the performance of the vaccines in clinical studies and the need to maximize the use of a limited supplies of vaccines.

Another software developer takes it upon themselves to create an easy-to-use COVID-19 vaccination sign-up site. Huge Ma, a 31-year-old Airbnb software engineer, spends five days developing TurboVax, which compiles all available New York City appointments from the several signup systems and locations. Others have developed similar sites in New York and elsewhere. A Manhattan clinical psychologist who realized that none of her elderly relatives could have made their own appointments by finding the sites and booking a time slot online before someone grabs them concludes, “The system is set up to be a technology race between 25-year-olds and 85-year-olds. That’s not a race, that’s elder neglect.”

Other

A security researcher’s analysis of 30 popular health apps (they weren’t named) finds problems:

• 50% of the apps store sensitive patient information.
• 100% of API endpoints were subject to BOLA attacks (broken object-level authorization) that can allow access to full patient records.
• 50% of the apps allowed clinicians to access to records of any patient by changing the URL that is passed in the “GET” command.
• 100% of the apps failed to implement certificate pinning to prevent person-in-the-middle attacks.
• 77% of the apps used hard-coded API keys that never expire and 7% use hard-coded names and passwords.
• 50% of APIs did not authenticate requests with tokens.

Imagine if this were a hospital: a remote hacker gains access to a Florida city’s water treatment system and increases the amount of sodium hydroxide to dangerous levels, which was luckily noticed and quickly reversed by a supervisor who happened to observe the change happening on his computer screen. The city has disabled the remote access function that the hacker used.

Another news item that may bear healthcare lessons, especially about consumer usability and how medical apps are supported. The family of a 20-year-old student sues trading firm Robinhood after he kills himself upon seeing his account balance reach a $730,000 loss. Alex Kearns, who tried unsuccessfully to reach someone at the company several times before taking his own life, didn’t actually owe $730,000 – he didn’t realize that Robinhood’s on-screen balance didn’t include the value of his unexercised options, which would have given him an overall $16,000 profit. The last words of his suicide note, in which he said he had “no clue” about what he was doing, were, “How was a 20-year-old with no income able to get assigned almost $1 million worth of leverage?” The company says it has improved its user interface, added help desk staff, and started asking new users about their finances and trading experience.

Sponsor Updates

• Ettain Group wins ClearlyRated’s Best of Staffing Client and Talent Diamond Awards for the 10^th consecutive year.
• Cerner staffers help vaccinate 2,300 people at its headquarters in Kansas City, MO.
• Spok makes its Spok Go clinical workflow automation tool available in Australia.
• The local paper profiles consulting firm Divurgent and the ways in which it has helped support hospitals during the pandemic.
• AdvancedMD will cover half of the dues for 40 new members of the Association of Independent Doctors.
• Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise hosts its first global virtual conference for partners.
• Central Logic saw record-breaking growth, awareness, and momentum in 2020 as health systems have increased their focus on “operating as one.”
• Collective Medical joins the Healthix Vendor Interoperability Program.
• The State of California-Emergency Medical Services Authority selects Elsevier to deliver a COVID-19 online learning program for nurses.
• Ellkay will present during the virtual HIMSS Central & North Florida Chapter event on February 17.
• Emerge hires Jake Harvey (Salesforce) as customer experience manager.
• Nine Summit Healthcare customers sign on for the company’s Scripting Toolkit and Robotic Process Automation platform.
• CityMD (NY) improves its Net Promoter Score after implementing patient engagement software, including virtual line capabilities, from Experity.
• CarePort customer John Muir Health (CA) adds Connect and Insight capabilities to better track and manage patients across care settings.
• Emanate Health (CA) works with Meditech Professional Services to develop disease investigation and contact tracing dashboards in its Meditech Expanse EHR.

Blog Posts

• Congress Passes Amendment to HIPAA Regulations (AdvancedMD)
• Utilising the Workflow Engine of Enterprise Imaging at King Faisal Specialist Hospital (Agfa HealthCare)
• Marketing’s Pandemic Pivot (Ascom)
• Stolen Patient Records a Hot Commodity on the Dark Web (Capsule)
• Complying with CMS’s Patient Event Notification CoP: Common Pitfalls to Avoid (CarePort)
• Mental Health Key to Bolstering the Post-Pandemic Economy (Medsphere)
• Multi-Team EHR Projects: Three Keys to Cross-Team Communication and Leadership (CereCore)
• EHR-Supplied Timestamp Data Provides Critical Healthcare Insights (ChartLogic)
• 4 Principles of Successful Governance (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Medicare, Medicaid and the Prior Authorization Process (CoverMyMeds)
• 5 Tech Trends That are Ready to Dominate 2021! (Dimensional Insight)
• Osage Led Dina’s Investment Round: Here’s Why They Led (Dina)
• One Key for 2021: Staying Focused on Patients (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 2/8/21

Top News

Duke University spinout Clinetic, whose software monitors EHR activity to identify patients for clinical trials or to suggest next step sin their care, raises $6.4 million in equity.

CEO Thomas Kaminski was previously SVP of corporate strategy for LabCorp, board chair Allan Kirk, MD, PhD is surgeon-in-chief of Duke University Health System, and board member Rob Califf, MD is former FDA commissioner.

Founder Erich Huang, MD, PhD is Duke Health’s chief data officer and directs its health data science center and data science accelerator.

Reader Comments

From Frumious Bandersnatch: “Re: your HIStalk mug from 2014. I love it! So sorry I missed that HIMSS since it would have been worth the trip. I realized today that I have been following you for many years now – glad you’re still here.” HIMSS conferences blur together, but I have the advantage of being able to refer back to my super-detailed HIStalk write-ups to remember what happened way back then. Memorable events of HIMSS14 (daily details here, here, here, here, and here) include:

• The opening reception was hard to find in the bowels of the Hyatt Regency across the street, signs were wrong, bar lines were long even with drink tickets, and racket in the airplane hangar-like space was deafening.
• Hillary Clinton said nothing interesting in her keynote, which cost HIMSS $200K-plus.
• This was our first year hiring Party on the Moon as the HIStalkapalooza band. They turned it into a dance that brought even wall-hugging IT nerds onto the floor.
• I enjoy irony, so I assigned Lorre to accept HIStalk’s Industry Pioneer Award from Sunquest CEO Richard Atkin, who had recently fired her after her 16-year executive career there. You might enjoy Lorre’s description of how that felt and what she thought of HIMSS14.
• This was our first time exhibiting, where we tried to be upbeat about the tiny, remote space that my $6,000 bought us and its uneasy adjacency to the back-of-hall bathrooms. Still, we had a lot of visitors and celebrity booth-greeters disproportionate to our cemetery plot sized booth.
• Not only was I cranky about lugging mugs around that few folks wanted, I also spent too much on having two designs of lanyard pins made, which were “limited edition” in that: (a) I never did them again; and (b) demand for them was truly limited. I dread running across a box of these in a closet somewhere, although I think I tossed them.

From Carl SPACkler: “Re: SPACS. Good for the industry or no?” It’s hard to say, but a ton of health IT SPACs are out there and they are required by law to spend their money on acquisitions within several months, which means that many of them will end up with subpar, overly expensive dance partners that had little reason to become publicly traded and that will fail to attract ongoing investment afterward. It feels to me like everybody is desperate to get a deal done before the bubble bursts. Having your long-term vendor or employer go public is like having your significant other join a cult. It could be a rough ride for hastily acquired companies that needed more time to prepare for their financial close-ups.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I will urge the significant number of folks who haven’t completed a living will and medical power of attorney to do it right now, then store the papers somewhere they can be easily located in a moment of need. You don’t need to spend money or hire a lawyer if that’s a barrier – you can download free, state-specific forms that you can complete in maybe five minutes and then you are set for life (or death). There’s no reason to put family members through the anguish of what you would want when it’s so easy to just tell them.

New poll to your right or here: What part of your medical record would you be most angry at having disclosed publicly? Some folks will indignantly say they need an “all of the above” option, but that’s not the point – it’s what single part of your chart is most sensitive to you. I guess mine would be credit card information since that’s the only item that would inconvenience me — the rest simply identifies me as boringly mortal like everybody else, should strangers actually care.

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

“Voice robotic process automation” vendor Infinitus comes out of stealth mode with a $21 million Series A funding round. The company’s technology asks machine-generated questions in phone calls, such as for public health outreach and insurer inquiries, then tailors further questions based on responses. Most of the folks involved come from Google or Rakuten, but the standout for me is operations guy Brad Holden, who earned a Carnegie Mellon degree in mechanical and biomedical engineering; enlisted in the US Marines as a platoon commander in Operation Enduring Freedom in Helmand, Afghanistan, where his platoon cleared routes of insurgents and IEDs; and then came home to earn a Harvard MBA.

People

Patient engagement platform vendor PatientBond hires Justin Dearborn (ICM Partners) as CEO. He replaces Anurag Juneja, PhD, who will continue as president.

COVID-19

CDC’s vaccination stats: 41 million doses administered of 59 million distributed (69%). COVID-19 tests, cases, and hospitalizations are continuing their sharp trend downward, but deaths haven’t followed yet and are running more than 3,000 per day. COVID-19 cases in nursing homes are dropping off as vaccine rollout continues.

The more contagious B117 coronavirus variant is spreading in the US exactly as predicted, with cases doubling every 10 days on its way to becoming the dominant strain by March. Its spread makes the dialing back of mitigation measures by several states, such as expanding in-restaurant dining, appear unwise. It also increases the importance of getting people vaccinated quickly.

Johnson & Johnson requests FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine, although FDA’s advisory panel doesn’t meet to review its clinical data until February 26. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says he expects J&J’s vaccine, which requires just a single shot, to be distributed through pharmacies because it does not require special storage other than normal refrigeration, while Pfizer’s vaccine will probably be limited to big distribution centers because it requires ultra-cold freezers.

Experts remind that while some of the available coronavirus vaccines have higher efficacy rates than others, all of them are 100% effective at keeping recipients from becoming seriously ill or dying.

The Multi-State Partnership for Prevention accuses CDC of misrepresenting Deloitte’s employees as their own during a demonstration of MSPP’s PrepMod vaccination software. CDC then gave Deloitte a $44 million, no-bid contract to develop a system that ended up working up much like PrepMod. The owner and only principal of the for-profit affiliate of MSPP that developed PrepMod has filed a cease and desist notice, pending a lawsuit, claiming that Deloitte stole her intellectual property and then tried to hire her to help it copy its functionality. Ten states are using the Deloitte VAMS system, which was free to them, while 28 have bought PrepMod. Another developer of vaccine information systems confirms that his company and his competitors were asked to participate in meetings with CDC and Deloitte, but then were shut out of bidding when Deloitte was contracted directly.

The White House invokes the Defense Production Act to manufacture 61 million at-home or point-of-care coronavirus tests by summer. It will also use DPA to increase the manufacturing of surgical gloves and two components that are used in Pfizer’s vaccine packaging.

Boulder Medical Center (CO) cancels the COVID-19 vaccination appointment of a 72-year-old cancer survivor because of an unpaid $244 hospital balance.

CDC confirms that US flu activity is basically zero, easing fears of a “twindemic.”

Other

Hackers post patient information from Leon Medical Centers (FL) and Nocona General Hospital (TX) on the dark web.

Henry Ford Health System researchers find that the IPhone 12’s charging magnets can disrupt implanted cardiac defibrillators, leading Apple to issue a warning that users should keep the products 6 inches away from medical devices at all times at 12 inches away when the devices are charging.

Olivia Adams, a 28-year-old software developer who is on maternity leave from Athenahealth, develops a COVID-19 vaccination sign-up website for those residents of Massachusetts who are 75 and older. She coded a site that scrapes information from a bunch of individual sites and displays available appointments in a central location. She said it was challenging because nobody asked the developers of the individual sites to make them interoperable.

Sponsor Updates

• Clinical Architecture publishes a new case study, “The Joint Commission Experience with Symedical.”
• Nuance has been recognized for the fourth consecutive year as the highest-rated vendor in Opus Research’s “Decision Maker’s Guide to Enterprise Intelligent Assistants.”
• Nordic, for the third year in a row, is the only firm with a rating higher than 90 across seven or more “Best in KLAS” categories.
• Premier encourages nonprofit community programs that provide healthcare to underserved populations to apply for its $100,000 Monroe E. Trout Premier Cares Award by March 9.
• Pure Storage announces the new FlashBlade for Azure Stack Hub integration that delivers unified fast file and object capabilities for hybrid-cloud architectures.
• Spirion announces that The Tolly Group, an independent testing lab, has benchmarked its effectiveness in discovering personal, sensitive, and regulated data at 98.5% accuracy.

Blog Posts

• 3 Strategies for Doing More with Less in CDI (Nuance)
• Innovate4Outcomes: How to Improve Patient Outcomes (OptimizeRx)
• Rising to the Challenge: VOAGBR’s Story of Strength (Netsmart)
• How to Communicate COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution with Your Patients (PatientBond)
• Resolutions for the Rest of This New Year (PatientKeeper)
• How PatientIQ integrates their patient-reported outcomes platform in just 13 days (Redox)
• Email Appointment Reminder Templates That Will Help Your Patient Engagement (Relatient)
• Defining a comprehensive data strategy to shape the health care of tomorrow (Cerner)
• 2021 Will Be the Year Telemedicine Loses the “Tele” (SOC Telemed)
• Maintain Compliance with HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules in a Remote Work Environment (Sphere)
• Your Quickstart Guide to HIPAA Compliance (Spirion)
• Supporting Veterans’ health with specialized, interactive health education (Krames)
• #Dedicated to Securing the Actionable Intelligence Frontline Workers Need (Surescripts)
• You Can’t Just Say: “Tomorrow, we’re going to be a High Reliability Organization” (TransformativeMed)
• Secure Messaging App Connect Loved Ones, Provides Peace of Mind for NICU Parents (Vocera)
• 3 Keyword Types to Include in Your PT Clinic Website (Plus Examples) (WebPT)
• Thanks to Our Customers, Well Health Earns 2021 Best in KLAS Patient Outreach (Well Health)

Contacts

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

News 2/5/21

Top News

Netsmart acquires GPM, which offers a community-based long-term and post-acute care mobile EHR and care coordination platform.

Reader Comments

From Curious Jorge: “Re: reader survey. I appreciate the offer of a $50 gift card for completing your reader survey! However, you have awesomely enhanced my IT and informatics experience for years, so I should be sending you a gift card and a huge thank you! Please donate the card to your favorite charity.” CJ is a physician informaticist who completed my reader survey and was randomly drawn as a gift card winner. Their gracious deferral of the prize allowed me to fully fund – with matching money from my Anonymous Vendor Executive and other sources — the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Ms. R in Sebastian, FL, who asked for a library of 30 take-home math and science books for her second-grade class. She sent a note saying, “Your kindness and generosity is warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated! It has been one of the most unusual and interesting school years I’ve had, so your donation to our project is an absolute bright spot that we really needed. The future scientists of the world will be so happy!”

From Journo June: “Re: journalist. Do you consider what you do as being one?” Not for most of what I do. I’ve explained to Katie the Intern that I see those who write health IT stuff as falling into three camps: (a) journalists interview actual sources and follow established technical and ethical standards to create original news, which I do when the situation warrants; (b) writers have a level of health IT education and leadership experience that gives their news callouts and opinions credibility; and (c) typists paraphrase the writing of others without even understanding it themselves, adding zero value except to give bored readers a redundant copy of useless material to waste time on. My example of the latter is those lame “best hamburgers in all 50 states” articles in which a junior nobody uses Yelp and Google to crib public comments and photos in dutifully cranking out worthless clickbait. Finding health IT typists would not be an onerous challenge.

From Code Slinger: “Re: programming. Should I be ashamed to admit that most of my health IT programming years involved dead languages like RPG and COBOL?” Absolutely not. Those are just the paintbrushes that your employer made you use. Unless you coded to someone else’s spec only, you are still an artist who understands logical thinking, user behavior, the use of brilliant algorithms to address real-life uncertainty, and how to visualize an alternate universe inside your head and turn it into reality. Programmers might have rolled their eyes at my self-taught, kludgy coding back in the day, but I made those bits and bytes howl in giving life to the software figments of my imagination. The most valuable skill isn’t knowing how you make the computer do what you want, but rather defining what you want it to do.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Ettain Health, offering healthcare IT talent and consulting solutions. Services include IT strategy, vendor selection, pre-implementation planning, system design and build, training, activation and go-live support, help desk, and system optimization, as well as IT outsourcing and application management. Additionally, in response to COVID-19, Ettain Health delivers customized on-site and remote support services including vaccination rollout assistance to provide scheduling and registration through any EHR, training, project management, help desk, and portal support. Ettain Health is a division of talent solutions company Ettain Group, which has 21 US locations and annual revenue of $500 million, deep experience in Epic, Cerner, Meditech (including Expanse consulting certification), and other EHRs. It has a 25-year history of delivering talent solutions, employs more than 400 full-time health IT consultants, and has completed more than 500 EHR implementation projects. Thanks to Ettain Health for supporting HIStalk.

Listening: new from Lucero, country-tinged, heartfelt jangle rock from Memphis that kind of reminds me of Deer Tick because of the singer’s gravelly voice. Despite some 1980s influence, I wouldn’t call it either retro or trendy, just a distinctly American blend from a hard-working, middle-aged band that has been plugging away for 20+ years. I’m not a fan of country, but this is OK since they don’t wear silly cowboy hats and they aren’t bro-country working class posers who add exactly one pedal steel lick to a soulless, corporately written bubblegum pop song so they don’t have to compete on the actual pop charts. People who don’t roll their eyes at musicians wearing cowboy hats indoors must also think that AC/DC’s 65-year-old Angus Young spends his days in a uniforms-required prep school.

HIMSS14 will always be the “Year of Those Darned Mugs” for me because I overbought the giveaways and we kept moving heavy cases of them from one place to another in trying to entice people to take them. I was interviewing CloudWave President Erik Littlejohn today and he said, “You won’t remember this, but maybe seven years ago at HIMSS you had all those mugs to move …” and I knew exactly where he was going with that story. Three guys from our exhibit hall booth neighbor Park Place International volunteered to help Lorre haul in three heavy boxes full of mugs from her car that was parked in an OCCC garage that seemed like a mile away. Not only did they lug them in on their shoulders, they did it wearing their all-black booth finery under the punishing Florida sun. Erik was one of them. Above is the Darned Mug that sits on my desk, and all memories about it are bad except for those guys from Park Place (now CloudWave). Meanwhile, while we’re looking back, do you see any familiar reveler faces in the HIStalkpalooza 2014 video?

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

Nordic acquires Bails & Associates, which provides ERP consulting with specialization in Infor.

Patient experience platform vendor NexHealth acquires digital forms company Enlive. NexHealth’s EHR-integrated offerings include online scheduling, patient communications, telehealth, and virtual waiting rooms.

New Zealand-based cancer screening software vendor Volpara Health acquires CRA Health, a Boston-based Mass General spinoff that offers EHR-integrated breast cancer risk assessment and recommendations, for $18 million.

Change Healthcare announces Q3 results: revenue down 3%, adjusted EPS $0.34 versus $0.33, beating earnings estimates but falling short on revenue. The company’s $13 billion acquisition by Optum is expected to close in the second half of 2021.

Medical research data management platform data vendor Flywheel raises $15 million in a Series B funding round. I’m fascinated that CEO Jim Olson’s education involves math and religion, and companies he has run include online gambling, supportive medical care, a family of youth ministries, and career exploration for young adults.

Consumer genetic testing company 23andMe will go public in merging with a Richard Branson-run SPAC in a deal that values the company at $3.5 billion.

Sales

• Community Health Network (IN) chooses Jvion’s prescriptive AI to identity ACO members who are risk of deteriorating due to pandemic-deferred care.

People

Carevive hires Bruno Lempernesse (Medidata) as CEO. He replaces founder Madelyn Herzfeld, RN, who moves to board vice chair.

Quil hires Kim McEwen, MA (Livongo) as VP of client delivery and Ashley Stevens (Imprivata, above) as VP of provider sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Mayo Clinic will work with Spok to enhance its Spok Go communications platform, including critical test results reporting, family and patient engagement, task management, and medical device integration.

Relatient announces a patient self-scheduling tool for COVID-19 vaccine appointments.

LexisNexis Health Care develops a streamlined onboarding process for Epic’s MyChart, which uses the company’s Instant Verify and Instant ID Q&A for identity validation, to expedite vaccination appointment scheduling. 

Israel-based CLEW Medical earns FDA’s 510(k) clearance for its hemodynamic instability prediction solution for ICU patients.

Saudi Arabia’s health minister reviews the progress of the Epic implementation at King Fahd Medical Center, noting that the implementation was completed on schedule despite COVID-related challenges. 

KLAS’s non-US Best in KLAS report finds that telehealth has been massively expanded globally during COVID-19, but patients would also like to see consolidated patient portals, provider communication, and self-scheduling. Top ranked in the acute care EHR category are:

• InterSystems TrakCare (Asia / Oceania)
• Epic (Canada)
• Epic (Europe)
• MV Soul (Latin America)
• Cerner (Middle East / Africa)

A KLAS Arch Collaborative report on large-practice ambulatory clinician EHR training finds that Epic and NextGen Healthcare lead on training quality; Epic, Meditech, and NextGen have the highest satisfaction with EHR personalization; and Athenahealth, Cerner, and Epic are strong at identifying users who need extra help. Most organizations say the EHR supports patient-centered care, with that list topped by Meditech Expanse, Epic, and NextGen. 

COVID-19

CDC reports that 33.9 million of the 56 million COVID-19 vaccine doses that have been distributed have been administered (61%).

A new Census Bureau survey finds that only 51% of unvaccinated Americans will “definitely get” COVID-19 vaccine. Herd immunity is not guaranteed when 24% of people say they probably or definitely won’t take the shot, not even counting those who want it but may not end up getting it.

Physicians who have been performing fast-result COVID-19 testing in their practices are eliminating that service since insurers sometimes pay them less than half of the test’s cost. Federal law requires insurers to cover the cost so that testing is free to patients, but does not define how reimbursement is calculated and doctors are prohibited from billing the difference to patients.

Newly elected Missouri state representative and medical clinic operator Patrica Derges is indicted on 20 counts for selling patients fake stem cell treatments after claiming on local TV that they cure COVID-19. She is licensed as an assistant physician, having graduated from a Caribbean medical school without being chosen for a residency.

Other

AMIA opens a CEO search a year after the resignation of Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD. EVP/COO Karen Greenwood has been serving as interim.

A reader says this story has Weird News Andy written all over it. A man falls asleep listening to music on his AirPods, then wakes up with a dry throat and just one AirPod. An emergency endoscopy turns up the second one, which he had swallowed. 

Sponsor Updates

• CHIME names Capsule CEO Hemant Goel a Healthcare Hero for outstanding service during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Kyruus announces significant core business momentum in 2020 as it accelerates expansion into the payer market.
• Everbridge announces that the State of West Virginia has administered nearly 100% of first-round doses using the company’s Vaccine Distribution software to schedule COVID-19 vaccinations.
• The Race to Value Podcast features The HCI Group Chief Digital Officer Ed Marx.
• Medicomp Systems CMO Jay Anders will present at Health Datapalooza February 18.
• NextGate receives the United Kingdom National Cyber Security Centre’s Cyber Essentials certification.

Bog Posts

• Chief nurse and critical care nurse practitioner discusses HHS Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Stolen Patient Records a Hot Commodity on the Dark Web (Capsule)
• Digital Wayfinding: More Than Just a Hospital Roadmap (Everbridge)
• Chipping Away at Avoidable Days: How Even Small Improvements in Patient Length of Stay Add Up (Central Logic)
• Answers to 8 Frequently Asked Questions About COVID-19 Vaccines (First Databank)
• Experts Explain Why People with Diabetes Should Get the COVID-19 Vaccine (Glytec)
• What is Telemedicine Going to Look Like in 2021? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Infographic: The Impact of Alarm and Alert Fatigue (Halo Health)
• Why Data-Driven Healthcare is the Best Defense Against COVID-19 (Health Catalyst)
• Make Every Pregnant Patient Feel Like You Make House Calls (Healthwise)
• Enterprise Imaging: Organizational Challenges and Lessons Learned (Impact Advisors)
• Moving Forward (Imprivata)
• How Personalization Can Improve the Patient Payment Experience (InstaMed)
• Meeting the Hype in 2021: Machine Learning in Healthcare (InterSystems)
• Making bank or bankrolling waste: Why surgical schedules need healthy dictionaries (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• What’s in store for clinical AI under the new administration? (Jvion)
• Eight Best Practices for COVID-19 Vaccine Scheduling Online: Insights from Our Health System Customers (Kyruus)
• Situation Management Gives Hospitals the Power to Thrive Under Pressure (LiveProcess)
• Price Transparency Rule Now in Effect: What You Need to Know (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 2/3/21

Top News

HIMSS confirms that HIMSS21 remains on schedule for August 9-13 in Las Vegas, but announces that it will also include a virtual component.

HIMSS will determine later — based on vaccination rates, infection rates, and federal guidelines – whether it will need to cancel in-person activities in Las Vegas.

The next HIMSS21 update will be published on February 19, which will include announcement of the date on which registration will open.

Reader Comments

From Just_a_CIO: “Re: HIMSS and CHIME. Getting a divorce, as quietly announced a while ago but in a more formal letter from CHIME this week. This likely further dooms HIMSS to the boat show only role and maybe gives CHIME a chance to get back to its roots with a more educational / peer-to-peer event. Vendors will always play a role since someone needs to pay to put these things on, but it seems CHIME has a better shot at striking the right balance as a smaller, more focused conference. What do you think?” CHIME confirms that it won’t be participating in HIMSS21, as the organizations “have decided to explore different directions in how we serve and grow our memberships.” CHIME will offer broadcast events in April and June and presumably others to follow, and had already announced that the Fall Forum in October will also offer a hybrid model. Here are my random thoughts as the reader requested:

• Certainly CHIME is better scaled to survive on the proceeds of running a smaller conference, although it was beginning to show signs of HIMSS-like dollar sign eyes. It’s a good time to refocus.
• Nearly all member organizations walk an ethical tightrope in deciding how hard to milk the willingness of sellers to pay for exposure to buyers in the “ladies drink free” model. Perhaps it’s a bit cleaner for CHIME since vendors can’t be members.
• I often question why hospital executives can’t perform their job duties without heading off to luxury resorts for networking and education. I’ve only ever worked in healthcare, so I don’t know if it’s common for C-level executives in other industries to rely on ideas from peers in other companies, to expect their vendors to educate them, or to wander back and forth between customer and vendor jobs.
• I’ve always been uncomfortable with cocooning CIOs off in their own track at the HIMSS conference. All events should be open to all attendees except for those that require extra payment (well, I don’t really like those either, but I digress). Exhibitors need to come to terms with the idea that most of the people who visit booths don’t have titles that suggest decision-maker, yet they have every right to be welcomed and in fact often actually do have influence beyond their job titles.
• I’m not really fooling myself that I yearn for a quieter, more educational conference even though I don’t go to the parties. Boat show or not, you’ll usually find me in the exhibit hall, where the collective energy, fun, noise, and elbows-flying capitalism is more interesting than most of the educational sessions, which often end up being run by the same vendors anyway.
• Now that I’ve said a lot without really saying anything, I’ll ask CHIME members, HIMSS members, vendors, and whoever cares – what do you like or not like about CHIME’s break from the HIMSS conference?

From Masshopper: “Re: VPay. Have heard that Optum is acquiring the company, adding to its healthcare payments and clearinghouse capabilities that it gained with the purchase of Change Healthcare last month.” I haven’t heard anything.

From Toothpick It: “Re: Olive’s new PR. What exactly is ‘AI cybernetics?’” I don’t think the term “cybernetics” is used much these days, but it involves feedback loops, which one could argue that in the absence of connections to physical devices like an artificial pancreas or something, simply means computer programming or scripting. Olive’s latest announcement says its product is being used by 675 US hospitals to deliver $100 million in efficiencies (that’s around $150,000 per hospital). It tripled headcount to 550 “Olivians” in the past year and will double it again in 2021 in a distributed work model it calls “The Grid.” You have to think that some science fiction nerds are involved.

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

Private equity firm Abry Partners acquires healthcare cloud and managed services vendor CloudWave through a majority investment.

Hillrom purchases EarlySense’s contact-free, continuous-monitoring technology for $30 million. EarlySense CEO Matt Johnson says the company will now focus on its remote monitoring technology for the post-acute market. Hillrom announced several weeks ago that it will acquire Bardy Diagnostics for $375 million.

Zyter acquires population health software vendor Casenet from Centene, which had acquired the company in 2012.

Healthcare Growth Partners lists the transactions it closed in 2020. On the sell side: Firstsource acquired Patient Matters, Coronis Health acquired PMG, Intraprise Health acquired HIPAA One, Intelerad acquired Digisonics, Provation acquired EPreop, and EverCommerce acquired AlertMD. On the buy side, Ontellus acquired Intertel, Symplr acquired Wolters Kluser ComplyTrack, and Symplr acquired The Patient Safety Company.

Sales

• In England, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust signs a $170 million, 15-year contract with Siemens Healthineers for the planning, installation, and maintenance of 222 pieces of imaging equipment.
• MedStar Health and Intermountain Healthcare sign legacy PACS replacement contracts with Visage Imaging, which will deploy its product via Google Cloud. 

People

Premier CEO Susan DeVore will retire effective May 1, 2021. She will be replaced by President Mike Alkire.

Praveen Chopra (George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates) joins Gundersen Health System (WI) as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Jackson Memorial Hospital (FL) implements Everbridge’s COVID-19 Shield: Vaccine Distribution software.

Divurgent develops a virtual patient support solution to help healthcare facilities handle call volumes related to COVID-19 vaccination scheduling.

Visage Imaging parent Pro Medicus Limited earns FDA clearance for its first AI algorithm, which assesses breast density from mammography studies.

Healthcare Triangle and CareTech Solutions partner to offer Meditech customers their cloud-based disaster recovery / backup solutions and secure hosting, respectively.

Allscripts-owned Veradigm signs a three-year deal giving ConnectiveRx exclusive rights to deliver electronic prescription coupons on Allscripts EHRs and Veradigm’s e-prescribing network.

COVID-19

The federal government says it will start delivering vaccine directly to 6,500 chain pharmacy stores starting next week to provide more vaccination sites. Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid are among the 21 chains involved.

Beaumont Health System (MI) temporarily shuts down its COVID-19 vaccine scheduling system after a user finds and shares an Epic loophole that allowed 2,700 ineligible patients to schedule appointments that were ultimately cancelled.

MIT Technology Review covers the many shortcomings of CDC’s $44 million VAMS vaccine management system — built by Deloitte under a no-bid contact — that South Carolina’s health department head “says has become a cuss word.” Nearly all states are passing on the free system and either building their own or paying for commercial systems, and people who are trying to use it to sign up for shots are so frequently unsuccessful that vaccine doses are going unused. The authors note that while it might seem questionable that Deloitte was given the no-bid contract despite a history of similar failures, CGI Federal has earned $5.6 billion in federal IT work since being fired for the Healthcare.gov debacle.

North Carolina upgrades its CVMS vaccine management system that one county health director says is a bigger problem than vaccine shortages. Clinics have found that it takes eight hours of data entry to record each one-hour administration of 200 vaccine doses, and that any data entry errors must be corrected at the state level.

Some California county and local health officials question the decision last week by Governor Gavin Newsom to turn COVID-19 vaccination over to Blue Shield of California, which was given an emergency, no-bid contract. Those officials note that Blue Shield has no history with a similarly sized project, the organization is a Newsom political donor, and it has minimal relationships with underserved communities. Blue Shield’s bar for success is low given that county efforts that have resulted in confusing appointment systems, shifting vaccine eligibility rules, long lines, and faulty data collection that has left the state unable to say exactly how many doses have been administered. Kaiser Permanente will run its own program for 9 million members and assist Blue Shield, but says slow vaccine shipments mean that at the current rate of vaccine deliveries, it will take four years to give just its own members their first doses.

Studies of Russia’s Sputnik COVID-19 vaccine find that it is 92% effective, with zero severe cases or deaths in the active group. Phase III results suggest that most of that effectiveness may occur after the first dose, with researchers now investigating a single-dose regimen. Mexico has already signed a contract for Sputnik and is expected to issue emergency use authorization almost immediately. The Russian government says that going through the US regulatory process isn’t a priority.

Four hundred Cerner employees will help administer COVID-19 vaccines at company headquarters later this week as part of the Operation Safe coalition in North Kansas City, MO. The coalition, which includes local hospitals and governments, hopes to vaccinate up to 4,500 people every other week.

Nine top New York health officials have quit as Governor Andrew Cuomo addresses vaccination delays by taking control away from state and local public health officials and giving it to large health systems in declaring that he doesn’t trust government scientific experts. Those workers say Cuomo blindsided them with policy decisions and ignored their plans that had required years of preparation, instead relying on long-time advisors, consultants, and a lobbyist from Northwell Health to make decisions. A former New York City health official and epidemiologist says the government lost control of vaccination pacing early by giving most of its doses to hospitals, which they say lack the skills, experience, and perspective to manage a public health initiative.

Meanwhile, Governor Cuomo says he may reopen indoor restaurant dining on Valentine’s Day even though per-capita case counts are 64% higher than when he halted indoor dining in December. The New York Times says that the graphs he used to illustrate a recent drop in test positivity rates are misleadingly optimistic in several ways.

In England, World War II veteran Captain Sir Tom Moore, who raised dozens of millions of dollars for NHS last year by walking through his garden to observe his 100th birthday, dies of COVID-19.

Other

The New York Times finds that major health systems are declining to bill Medicaid for treatment of auto accident injuries and are instead placing liens on the accident settlements of patients for the full, undiscounted list prices of services rendered. Medicaid would have paid $2,500 for one patient’s treatment, but the hospital used a lien to go after $13,000. Hospitals are asking patients to sign waivers agreeing to not bill insurance, telling them their insurer shouldn’t have to pay for an accident someone else caused, failing to mention that signing means the patient themselves will pay the full price out of any settlement they receive. HFMA, in an apparent “if it’s not illegal it must be ethical” view, says it is reasonable for hospitals to seek payment from whoever will pay the most.

Best in KLAS

KLAS announces “Best in KLAS Software & Services 2021,” which includes a change in which products in niche categories are awarded full “Best in KLAS” distinction rather than the previous “Category Leader.” Some of the winners are:

• Epic, Galen Healthcare Solutions, and The Chartis Group are named as notable performers.
• IBM Watson Health Merge PACS is named most-improved software product, while Athenahealth’s AthenaPractice EMR is tagged as most-improved physician practice product.
• The top three highest-ranked software suites are Epic, Meditech Expanse, and Cerner.
• Epic, Athenahealth, and NextGen Healthcare take the top three spots among physician practice vendors.
• The top three IT services firms are Galen Healthcare, Prominence, and S&P Consultants.
• Chartis Group, Accenture, and Guidehouse earned the top three spots in healthcare management consulting.

Some of the individual category winners:

Inpatient Clinical Care

• Large-hospital acute care EMR: Epic
• Small-hospital acute care EMR: Meditech Expanse.
• Clinical decision support (care plans and order sets): Zynx Health.
• Interoperability platform: InterSystems HealthShare

Ambulatory and Post-Acute Care

• Large-practice ambulatory EMR: Epic
• Medium-sized practice ambulatory EMR: NextGen Healthcare
• Large-practice practice management: Epic
• Medium-sized practice management: NextGen Healthcare
• Small practice ambulatory PM/EHR: Kareo
• Ambulatory specialty EHR: PCC (pediatrics)
• Ambulatory care RCM services: R1 RCM
• Behavioral health: Cerner
• Claims and clearinghouse: Waystar
• Small home health EHR: Meditech
• Large home health EHR: MatrixCare
• Long-term care: PointClickCare
• Patient intake management: Phreesia

Financial, Revenue Cycle, and HIM

• Business decision support: Strata Decision Technology
• Charge master management: Vitalware by Health Catalyst
• Claims management: Quadax
• Clinical documentation improvement: ChartWise
• Computer-assisted coding: Dolbey Fusion
• ERP: Workday
  AI/data science solutions: Epic
• Business intelligence and analytics: Dimensional Insight
• Large-hospital patient accounting and management: Epic
• Small-hospital patient accounting and management: Meditech Expanse
• Patient financial engagement: Patientco
• Quality management: Nuance Quality Solutions
• Robotic process automation: Databound
• Nurse and staff scheduling: Schedule360
• Physician scheduling: QGenda
• Front-end speech recognition: Nuance Dragon Medical One
• Talent management: Workday
• Time and attendance: API Healthcare

Value-Based Care

• CRM: Salesforce
• Digital rounding: GetWellNetwork
• Interactive patient systems: PCare
• Patient outreach: Well Health
• Patient portal: Epic MyChart
• Population health management: Innovaccer
• Remote patient monitoring: Health Recovery Solutions
• Videoconferencing: Microsoft Teams
• Virtual care, non-EHR: Caregility

Security and Privacy

• Access management: Identity Automation
• Clinical communications: Telmediq by PerfectServe
• Security and privacy consulting: Impact Advisors
• Security and privacy managed services: CynergisTek

Services and Consulting

• Application hosting: Epic
• Clinical optimization: Chartis Group
• Eligibility enrollment: Change Healthcare
• Financial improvement consulting: Chartis Group
• Go-live support: Engage
• Healthcare management consulting: Chartis Group
• Health IT advisory: Huntzinger Management Group
• Large implementation leadership: Engage
• Small implementation leadership: S&P Consultants
• Staffing: Galen Healthcare
• Outsourced coding; AGS Health
• Revenue cycle optimization: Softek
• Revenue cycle outsourcing: Ensemble Health Partners
• Transcription services: AQuity
• Value-based care consulting: ECG Management Consulting
• Value-based care managed services: Arcadia

Sponsor Updates

• Diana Nole, EVP and GM of Nuance’s Healthcare division, joins the Exactech Board of Directors.
• Harris Healthcare migrates its Harris Flex EHR to the InterSystems Iris for Health data platform.
• Healthcare Triangle offers customers its cloud-based disaster recovery and backup services along with Meditech-certified secure production hosting of EHR and enterprise applications from CareTech Solutions.
• TMC names Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s Rainbow cloud-based communication platform a 2021 Remote Work Pioneer.
• Artifact Health publishes a case study, “OU Health standardizes physician query workflow and achieves positive results.”
• Change Healthcare publishes a new e-book, “Poised to Transform: AI in the Revenue Cycle – a Signature Research Study.”
• The Chartis Group promotes Ben Perry to principal in its Strategy Practice.
• Engage and Navin Haffty announce they have aligned sales forces to improve the client experience.
• Swiss Re will leverage Diameter Health’s Fusion data-refinement technology to improve the speed and quality of their life insurance underwriting.

Blog Posts

• Driving Positive Outcomes with Virtual Care (AdvancedMD)
• Great Partner Management – The Keys to the Kingdom (Ascom)
• Leaning into Telemedicine: 5 Ways to Enable More Effective Virtual Visits (CereCore)
• Top 4 Tips for Transitioning to a New EHR (ChartLogic)
• Healthcare 2021: Regulatory trends to watch (EClinicalWorks)
• CEO’s Corner: It’s not a Debate, Healthcare is Broken (Emerge)

Contacts

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

HIMSS Confirms that HIMSS21 Remains On Track

HIMSS announced in an exhibitor communication this morning that HIMSS21 remains on track for August 9-13 in Las Vegas. It will be a “completely reimagined hybrid event” that includes an online component.

HIMSS says registration timing is comparable with previous years, 11,000 HIMSS20 registrants can transfer their registration to HIMS21, and 10,000 hotel room dates have been reserved. It has received 700 session proposals, also comparable with past years.

Exhibitor count is at 400, about two-thirds the usual number in a comparable timeframe.

HIMSS says it will set a go/no go date for the in-person component closer to the conference date when the impact of vaccination rates, infection rates, and government health recommendations will be clearer.

HIMSS will provide its next HIMSS21 update on February 19, when the registration opening date will be announced.

HIMSS22 remains on schedule for March 2022 in Orlando.

Monday Morning Update 2/1/21

Top News

Digital health company Sharecare acquires AI solutions vendor Doc.ai. Terms were not disclosed.

Doc.ai had raised $41 million in two seed funding rounds.

Reports from late last week indicated that the deal was underway and that the combined companies will be taken public via a SPAC transaction at a valuation of $4 billion.

Reader Comments

From Library Carrel: “Re: IMedX. The national provider of medical transcription services to hundreds of hospitals had a malware / ransomware attack bring down the entire IMedX Express platform. Hospitals have been down since Monday 1/25 with no projected resolution.” IMedX’s rarely used Twitter account and its webpage do not mention the outage, but BJC’s most recent update at this writing says that IMedX remains down, although it says it’s working with “a vendor” to resolve an IMEdX problem. I’ve seen no mention anywhere else, so I can’t say if this is just a BJC problem or if the issue is IMedX’s problem. I messaged IMedX via their client support contact form Saturday afternoon, but haven’t heard back. IMedX has a lot of customers, so I would be surprised if it’s a national outage that nobody has mentioned on Twitter or websites, which would then suggest that it’s something specific to BJC.

From Cron Job: “Re: Olive. You don’t usually take on a vendor unless their is snake oil involved. What gives with this firm? Of course the EHR vendors would be more than happy if we didn’t use this or any other AI tool since they will have a product ‘soon.’” I have made no comments about Olive, although I have run some that readers submitted. I don’t have an opinion on Olive, other than it’s interesting that they sold check-in kiosks and patient matching solutions under their previous name CrossChx through 2018, then sold that business off to focus on an abandoned internal project that used screen-scraping and macros, with the renamed company claiming to offer “the Internet of healthcare” that will eliminate $1 trillion of healthcare costs. It’s up to the customer to figure out if it offers more than just the usual scripting tool to control other applications and whether it provides ROI. KLAS did an emerging technology profile on the company in September 2019, which I don’t remember reading, so it would be interesting to see how they stack it up against RPA competitors and how customers feel it’s working for them.

From J U Stice: “Re: Darena Solutions. Their so-called free promotion for BlueButtonPro is not really free. They are waiving implementation and subscription fees until 12/31/22. How about a little transparency?” Their FAQ is pretty clear on the terms and it is indeed free, just for a limited period (but nearly two years is a long time in free health IT land). They are gambling that customers who have gone to the trouble to implement their solution will find it worth keeping once the free period runs out, not the first vendor to make that offer.

From Hidden: “Re: HIMSS21 call for speakers. Closed months ago. Looks like you are confusing the open call for proposals for the extra-cost pre-conference symposia.” You are correct, thanks. The HIMSS21 website contains a “Call for Proposals” menu item under “Program,” but that is indeed is for just topic-specific, extra-cost symposia and forums. The general call was open from early October until early November, and those links now jump to the optional events call for proposals.

From Booth Carpet Eye Watering: “Re: HIMSS21. I haven’t heard of some of the companies that are featured exhibitors.” Me neither. We all know Athenahealth, BD, Epic, InterSystems, and possibly Updox, but the names Bravado Health, Podium, Surgical Directions, and Tegria are new to me. I also noticed that Cerner, Meditech, Allscripts, McKesson, IBM, and Microsoft aren’t on the exhibitor list when checking booth locations for the biggest companies.

From Lissome Waif: “Re: Baylor Scott & White. Some of the contractors the employees will be moving to are Atos, Citius Tech, and Health Catalyst.” Unverified.

From SPACMan: “Re: SPACs. With the SPAC craze picking up steam, when will HIStalk get itself acquired by one?” I’m picturing “The Unincorporated Man” science fiction novel that I haven’t actually read, in which every citizen is incorporated at birth with shares sold on the open market (maybe to pay their exorbitant L&D hospital bill), after which the person spends their life trying to finance a share buy-back to gain their emancipation from their owners. I am money-unmotivated and would rebel at creative oversight, so HIStalk will one day have an initially puzzling, then concerning home page that isn’t changing, at which point you will know that I have lost interest or died. Maybe it’s not the most amazing art, but it’s my art, and it will stay that way.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

About 30% of the three-fourths of poll respondents who use Facebook have debated strangers on Facebook. Rob made a brilliant, pithy observation: “Pseudo-anonymous commenting systems offer the closest thing to public critique of mainstream viewpoints. Just because a great percentage of it it sounds Neanderthal-like does not mean it is bad — it just means you are noticing how dumb most people are for the first time.” I frequently wonder if Facebook users are representative of the percentage of people in real life who are angry, uninformed, or not terribly bright in general. I hold hope, without any evidence, that maybe Facebook just attracts and overrepresents people who have a lot of free time for reasons that appear obvious from their profiles.  

New poll to your right or here:  Which advance directive documents could your family or friends quickly find if you became medically unresponsive? The process takes quite a few steps: creating the documents, storing them somewhere accessible, making sure the people who will be watching over your care know that they exist and where to find them, and making sure those documents find their way to the hospital and chart. The next step is out of your hands – hoping staff remember don’t do something you don’t want, either from lack of coordination or their insistence on going all-in medically no matter the papers say.

I can’t claim that the results of my HIMSS21 poll are statistically valid given small sample size and unvetted respondents, but for what it’s worth if anything since a reader asked me to run it, it’s nearly an even split among vendors who registered to exhibit at HIMSS20 who plan to have a booth at HIMSS21. Nearly two-thirds of individual HIMSS20 registrants say they won’t attend HIMSS21. The big challenge is that COVID is eating up the clock and available bandwidth and we just don’t know if conferences will return to their longstanding status as must-see TV. The folks who liked HIMSS conferences when crowds were thin, booths were modest, and the after-hours social calendar wasn’t 10-deep with events may see the unlikely return to what it used to be.

Lorre wants me to tell you that she has a rare opening for the Top Spot Banner ad at the top of every HIStalk page. The previous occupant drew a few thousand clicks over a many-month run and the satisfaction of seeing their name first every time they read the site. Contact Lorre.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Ascom. The Morrisville, NC-based company – part of the global Ascom — is a communication solutions provider that focuses on mobile workflow to close digital information gaps to support making the best possible decisions. Hospital solutions to overcome poor communication include mobile workflow; noise reduction from device alerts; location services for finding staff, equipment, or patients; and staff security. Its Telligence system can function as a standalone nurse call system or a fully integrated, end-to-end patient response system that can provide access to key clinical content and capture information at the bedside, while TelliConnect Station supports automated staff check-in, efficient clinical workflows, quick charting, and medical device integration. The enterprise-grade, Android-powered Ascom Myco 3 smartphone is designed for healthcare professionals, equipped with a 5-inch Corning Gorilla Glass 3 display, noise and echo cancellation, barcode scanner, LED beacon, and a true hot-swap battery. Its Telecare IP supports senior living communities with caregiver contact, monitored active or passive check-ins, resident profiles, bed sensor integration, a help button, and wander management sensors that can automatically lock doors. Managing Director Kelly Feist, MBA is an industry long-timer who has held executive roles with Siemens, Eclipsys, Sunquest, and Philips. Thanks to Ascom for supporting HIStalk.

I found this brand new Ascom video on YouTube that provides an overview of how its solutions support a high-reliability ICU. It’s one of the most artistic, interesting product videos I’ve seen, a wordless model of “show, don’t tell” efficiency that says a lot in an entirely enjoyable 4.5 minutes. 

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

I accidentally ran across last week’s earnings call transcript of Roper Technologies, whose healthcare holdings include Sunquest and Strata Decision. I was surprised that while Strata got a brief mention in the Friday call for its acquisition of EPSi, Sunquest wasn’t mentioned. That seems surprising since they used to talk about it quite a bit.

People

Mike Remmenga (CorroHealth) joins Central Logic as VP of client success.

Announcements and Implementations

Anthem launches Anthem Digital Incubator, which will help early-stage companies that are working on personalized healthcare apps. Participants will be able to use Anthem’s de-identified patient data to validate their technology. The Palo Alto-based organization will apparently report to VP of digital care delivery Kate Merton, who holds a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology and an MBA from Duke. 

COVID-19

US case counts continued their sharp decline over the weekend. However, a new IHME forecast predicts that under the best-case scenario, another 200,000 Americans will die of COVID-19 in the next three months. The current death toll stands at 439,000.

CDC reports that 29.6 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 50 million doses distributed (60%).

A CDC emergency order that takes effect Tuesday will require masks for passengers of airplanes, trains, subways, buses, taxis, and ride-shares. Transportation operators are assigned the responsibility of making passengers comply.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says that we now have three effective COVID-19 vaccines, including the Johnson & Johnson one that will be available soon, but FDA needs to streamline the regulatory process so that they can be updated quickly to address new variants, similar to software updates.

CDC’s $44 million, Deloitte-developed VAMS vaccination management system is being used by just nine states, even though it’s free to them, and one of those is moving away from it and another is looking for a replacement. Riverside Health System said it abandoned the system within a week of starting employee vaccination clinics because it was slow and prone to crashing, leading them to use Epic instead.

Massachusetts legislators call for the state to create a single vaccine registration portal and a 24/7 hotline that supports multiple languages. The current system requires looking up locations on a website, then clicking to external websites to sign up and search for appointments. 

Florida will implement a statewide, ShareCare-powered vaccine appointment system in taking the program over from overwhelmed county public health departments. The state has also granted grocery story chain Publix – a donor to the governor’s political committee – exclusive rights to offer vaccinations in its pharmacies in some locations, raising concerns that the chain has few locations in poor areas. Florida’s surgeon general also issued an advisory that gives vaccination priority to state residents following a backlash from year-round residents who saw Northern tourists and visiting Canadians taking up all the available appointments.

New York City provides an example of the difficulty in ensuring vaccine equity. New York Presbyterian sets up a vaccination site in a Latino neighborhood, but white people traveled from other parts of the city and state and took most of the slots. A city councilman likens sign-up to “The Hunger Games,” where making an appointment requires a computer, Internet connectivity, and English speaking skills to navigate the required portal.

The mass vaccination site at LA’s Dodger Stadium shuts down for an hour when anti-vaccine protesters who organized a “scamdemic protest” block the entrance, extending the already hours-long wait to be vaccinated.

Sheriff’s deputies secure Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center (WA) after anti-vaccine and COVID conspiracy theorists, some carrying weapons and gas masks, protest outside the ED that a 74-year-old woman inside was being medically kidnapped. She was being treated for a urinary tract infection and had asked to stay, but refused to be COVID tested or to wear a mask despite having a fever, so the hospital moved her to a quarantine area. Her daughter demanded to see her, refused to wear a mask, and then called 911 when she was not allowed in. A friend of the daughter live-streamed a call for supporters to overwhelm the sheriff’s office with calls demanding the woman’s discharge. Deputies pushed some protesters back out a door they had entered after it was opened to admit an unrelated person who was seeking care. The woman finally changed her mind and decided that she wanted to go home, so she was promptly discharged.

Sponsor Updates

• The Sharp Index, in partnership with Medicomp Systems honor Saykara and Vocera with Sharp Index Awards in the category of “Best Health Tech Company to Reduce Physician Burnout.”
• Arcadia announces that its healthcare customers have successfully begun nationwide, multilingual COVID-19 vaccination outreach campaigns using Arcadia’s analytics.
• Nuance will participate in the virtual SVB Leerink Annual Global Healthcare Conference February 25-26, and in the virtual Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecommunications March 1.
• OptimizeRx names Nick Cassotis senior director of sales.
• Netsmart releases a new CareThreads Podcast, “How Electronic Visit Verification Impacts Providers.”
• CHIME names Nordic Chairman of the Board Bruce Cerullo a Healthcare Hero for his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “Reproduction & Pediatrics pt 3: Dama Dipayana Co-founder & CEO of Manatee.”
• Visage Imaging will sponsor the AI Hackathon during the virtual SIO 2021 February 5.

Blog Posts

• Top Insights for EHR Go-Live Success in a Virtual World (Nuance)
• Near, far, [project] manage wherever you are (Nordic)
• 3 Ways to Grow Patient Volume in 2021 (PatientBond)
• Staff Augmentation Versus Managed Services. It’s Not an Either/Or Decision. (Pivot Point Consulting)
• A Pandemic Pregnancy: Pros, Cons, and Preparedness (PMD)
• The Secrets of Direct Sourcing Success (Premier)
• How to Architect Products for EHR Integration to Support Clinical Workflows (Redox)
• Close the Gaps in Your Prescription Price Transparency Strategy (RxRevu)
• Is your company properly securing data wherever it lives? (Spirion)
• 4 reasons to re-evaluate your management of critical test results (Spok)
• Every successful journey – and health care technology implementation – starts with a good plan (Krames)
• How Patient Benefit Data can Help Create an Optimal Prescription (Surescripts)
• Frontline Healthcare Worker: The Ultimate Ninja Warrior (Vocera)
• What is Revenue Integrity and Why is Everyone in Healthcare Talking About It? (Waystar)
• What Physical Therapists Need to Know About the 2021 COVID-19 Relief Bill (WebPT)
• Leveraging a Touchless Check-In System in a Post-Pandemic World (Well Health)
• Overwhelmed with COVID-19 Vaccine Reporting Requirements? Zen has the solution. (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 1/29/21

Top News

Athenahealth will pay $18.25 million to settle federal False Claims Act allegations that it paid kickbacks to increase sales of its products from January 2014 through September 2020.

The federal government says the company’s marketing programs:

• Provided prospects with all-expense-paid sporting, entertainment, and recreational events, including luxury trips to the Masters Tournament and Kentucky Derby.
• Paid customers up to $3,000 for each new physician who signed up after being identified by the customer as a prospect.
• Entered into deals with companies that were retiring their health IT products (SOAPware was the biggest such arrangement) to refer their users to Athenahealth.

Reader Comments

From Dirty Martini: “Re: Olive. I interview with them just over a year ago for a solution architect position, which reviews tasks that are candidates for automation and then translates the requirements from the customer to the development. Nothing about their services involved AI and customers could do everything they were proposing with standard Epic enterprise functionality. It’s interesting to see how much they’ve grown, but I’m not confident they have actual AI or will have it in the near future.”

From Dripping Faucet: “Re: Baylor Scott & White. Stay tuned for outsourcing and layoffs.” The health system announced Monday that it will outsource or reassign 1,700 employees in hoping to save $600 million over five years. Two-thirds of those affected will be transferred to third-party partners, while 650 jobs will be eliminated with the possibility of retraining for different positions. The health system didn’t announce those third-party partners, but employees reported that one of them is Atos.

From Pondering Exhibitor: “Re: HIMSS21. Looks like there a lot of available spaces or those labeled ‘HIMSS’ on the show floor. Will you be doing an updated survey to ask vendors and attendees about their HIMSS21 plans? The deadline to cancel booth space is February 4.” That’s just a week away, so I’ll run a special poll now: For those who signed up for HIMSS20 as an attendee or exhibitor, what are your HIMSS21 plans? You can add a comment with an explanation of your decision after you vote. The floor plan shows 401 exhibitors, no keynotes have been announced, and the call for proposals runs until February 24, so it will be a leap of faith to commit without knowing who is presenting and exhibiting, not to mention that COVID limitations are hard to predict these days. I have heard nothing as a member or HIMSS20 registrant, but an exhibitor passed along a rumor today that HIMSS will make some kind announcement about HIMSS21 in the next three days, and given its quietness otherwise, it could be a significant one that will make my poll instantly obsolete.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Quil. The Philadelphia-based company, which is a joint venture between Independence Health Group and Comcast, is the digital health platform that offers personalized and interactive health journeys to consumers and their caregivers. Quil is committed to educating and engaging consumers, leading to better health experiences and better outcomes, at a lower cost. Quil serves patients, members, and their caregivers in partnership with their healthcare providers and health plans nationally. Thanks to Quil for supporting HIStalk.

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

GetWellNetwork acquires consumer engagement software vendor Docent Health.

Emids acquires software development consulting firm Macadamian.

EHR-integrated patient-specific prescription pricing platform vendor RxRevu raises $7 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $28 million.

Investors are reportedly discussing executing a deal in which consumer health information platform Sharecare would be merged with AI vendor Doc.ai with the combined companies then being taken public at a valuation of $4 billion.

SCP & CO Healthcare Acquisition Company, a health IT-focused SPAC, closes its initial offering for $230 million and will begin looking for one or more companies to absorb.

NextGen Healthcare reports Q3 results: revenue up 3%, adjusted EPS $0.26 versus $0.23, beating Wall Street expectations for both. NXGN shares are up 59% in the past year versus the Nasdaq’s 45% gain, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.

The Cincinnati business paper profiles clinical collaboration platform vendor Halo Health,  which just announced new financing and the hiring of its first chief marketing officer and CTO.

Sales

• The state of West Virginia will use Everbridge’s COVID-19 Shield Vaccine Distribution – an extension of its critical event management system —  to coordinate vaccine distribution and schedule appointments.
• UNC Health chooses Medicom Health’s Epic-integrated Rx Savings Assistant solution to notify prescribers of pharma discounts and free trials for their patients.

People

4Medica hires Cynthia McIntyre (IBM Watson Health) as SVP of sales and marketing.

Children’s therapy provider The Theraplay Family of Companies names Fran Spivak, MS, RN (Strive Health) as VP of IT.

Verily hires Preston Simons, MBA (Simons & Associates) as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Optimum Healthcare IT will offer its CareerPath health IT apprenticeship program at University of Colorado Denver, giving students three months of health IT training, then hiring them on after completion.

Darena Solutions offers a free version of its BlueButtonPro solution for meeting Cures Act interoperability and patient access requirements.

A new KLAS report on quality management solutions — which includes quality and regulatory reporting, performance improvement and benchmarking, and patient safety and risk – finds that Naunce and Medisolv lead in overall performance, while Conduent users are dissatisfied and the company has backed away from its Juvo product and is again developing the Midas platform. IBM Watson Health has the lowest “would buy again” percentage as users report lack of innovation and the feeling that the company has forgotten them. Premier scores well for advanced users but is seen as being expensive, while Vizient users like its peer-hospital comparison but think the product is cumbersome.

A Black Book population health management poll of hospitals, practices, and payers finds that most expect to spend more for systems and integration, while one-third expect the government to offer incentives for providers who participate in information blocking rule fixes. Some of the PHM system vendors that score tops in customer satisfaction and loyalty are Azara Healthcare, Inovalon, I2I Population Health, Cerner, Datarobot, Casenet Trucare, and Epic MyChart.

Government and Politics

Oki Mek, recently promoted to HHS’s first chief AI officer, shares its AI plan, in which it defines its role as an AI regulator, investor, convener, and catalyst.

The state of Oklahoma rejects a protest from non-profit HIE MyHealth Access Network, whose $19.9 million software bid for a statewide HIE was turned down in favor of $49.8 million offer from Orion Health.

CACI wins a $96 million US Army task order to test, train, and deploy its MC4 battlefield EHR.

COVID-19

CDC reports that 26 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 48 million distributed (54%).

A KHN report says that information about who has been given COVID-19 vaccine is only as good as the US’s 64 unconnected vaccine registries, which is to say not good at all since many immunization records are missing race, ethnicity, or occupation that might be useful in monitoring progress.

Seattle’s Overlake Medical Center & Clinics is chastised by the governor for emailing 100 big donors with a link to sign up for invitation-only COVID-19 vaccination even though its public-facing scheduling site showed no available appointments. The email said that the hospital had reserved 500 openings over a week and contained an access code for access. The hospital apologized and said the invitation was a quick fix that followed last week’s eligibility expansion to anyone 65 or over, with the demand that followed overloading its scheduling system. The hospital says it simply contacted the people whose email addresses were on file as an efficient way to open up slots that couldn’t be moved easily to the new scheduling system.

California will turn over its struggling COVID-19 vaccination program to Blue Shield of California, which will oversee distribution and most likely replace the state’s complex vaccine eligibility rules with age-based ones that aren’t dictated by where the individual lives or the jobs they hold. Governor Gavin Newsom had challenged state residents to hold him accountable for administering 1 million doses in 10 days, but two weeks later, found that coding errors and lags in reporting made it impossible to even know how many doses have been administered.

North Carolina’s state hospital association complains to the governor that the state’s Accenture-developed COVID Vaccine Management System is burdensome and ineffective, creating bottlenecks in vaccine delivery. The system, which will cost $7 million through May, does not provide vaccination scheduling or text message reminders as the state’s contract requires. One hospital says it takes 8.5 minutes to upload the data of a single patient, while another reports that a 1,000-shot clinic requires 5-6 nurses to perform data entry for two days afterward since the system requires entry of 14 fields that are required by the federal government and another seven that the state added.

Salesforce announces Vaccine Cloud, which helps government agencies, healthcare organizations, and others deploy and manage their vaccine programs. Provider functionality includes inventory management, staff training, payment, and community communication for notifications and second-shot reminders.

The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein asks public health experts how to prepare for a 50% jump in COVID-19 contagiousness six weeks now because of the B117 variant, which could kill up to 300,000 more Americans:

• Increase the use of genomic sequencing to see how and where the virus is mutating.
• Don’t reopen restaurants and bars just because recent numbers are coming down.
• Avoid total lockdowns and instead get the FDA to speed up approval of rapid, at-home tests.
• CDC should give direct guidance on what kinds of masks to wear in various situations and the government should consider distributing high-quality masks.

Other

ECRI lists its top 10 health technology hazards for 2021:

1. Managing medical devices that are marketed under FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization.
2. Order entry mistakes caused by accepting partial names of drugs. ECRI recommends populating search fields only after the first five letters of the name have been entered.
3. Revisit the quick rollout of telehealth to consider patient technology inequalities, user training, integration with other systems, and determining which patients are well suited for telehealth visits.
4. Review imported N95 masks, especially KN95 masks from China, because they sometimes fail to provide the claimed level of protection.
5. Avoid the use of consumer-grade monitoring devices in the acute care environment wherever possible, including pulse oximeters, blood pressure cuffs, and glucose monitors.
6. Review the capabilities and use of UV disinfection devices, which are not usually regulated by FDA.
7. Assess the capability of medical device vendors to manage the third-party software they use.
8. Conduct a risk-benefit analysis of AI functionality to make sure that the data a system was trained on is representative of the organization’s population.
9. Avoid remote operation of medical devices whenever possible in trying to conserve PPE, which can lead to less-frequent patient observation, placing devices where staff can’t see or hear them, and creating tripping hazards from hallway placement.
10. Employ QA measures and clinician approval of 3D-printed devices.

Sponsor Updates

• WellSky-owned CarePort’s Interop interoperability solution is made available in Epic App Orchard to satisfy CMS’s April 30, 2021 Conditions of Participation requirement that hospitals notify a patient’s other providers of ADT activity.
• The HCI Group VP of Provider Delivery Will Conaway celebrates two years on the Forbes Technology Council.
• MHS will integrate its CareProminence platform with the Healthwise Care Management Solution for health education.
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions wins CyberSecured Awards from Security Today in the categories of fraud protection and threat intelligence.
• Cerner receives a fourth consecutive perfect score in the yearly Corporate Equality Index.
• Optimum Healthcare IT and the University of Colorado Denver partner to offer recent college graduates an apprenticeship pathway to high-paying healthcare IT jobs.
• Ellkay features Meditech’s Helen Waters in its Women in Health IT series.

Blog Posts

• Industry Alert: Urgent Care Named as Key Venue in Biden’s Vaccine Distribution Strategy (Experity)
• Four Predictions for Diabetes Management and Technology in 2021 (Glytec)
• Physician On-Call Scheduling is Changing – What You Need to Know (Halo Health)
• 2021 Revenue Cycle – What to Expect? (Healthcare Triangle)
• 5 key differences between consumer and enterprise biometrics (Part 1) (Imprivata)
• Vaccine Administration – And All That It Requires – Is Overwhelming Health Systems (HCTec)
• Healthcare Process Improvement: Six Strategies for Organizationwide Transformation (Health Catalyst)
• Scottsdale Institute CIO Summit Examines New Alignment for IT (Impact Advisors)
• Exploring the need for patient data normalization (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• How to Simplify Your Healthcare Worker Vaccination Program (LiveProcess)
• The 2021 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference & How Hospitals Stay Relevant After COVID (Loyale Healthcare)
• COVID-19 vaccination self-scheduling – why we’ve released our own vaccine management solution (Lumeon)
• Improving Operating Room Utilization (Medhost)
• Anticipate the unimaginable: 5 steps to mitigate crises (Meditech)
• 4 Essential Physical Therapy Themes to Watch in 2021 (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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

News 1/27/21

Top News

Provider management, credentialing, and payer enrollment technology vendor Symplr acquires Phynd Technologies, which offers provider data management software.

The acquisition price was not disclosed. Phynd had raised $11.4 million in funding through a year-ago Series B round.

Symplr parent company Clearlake Capital Group had considered selling the company last July at a valuation of up to $2 billion.

The Phynd acquisition is Symplr’s sixth since Clearlake took ownership in 2018.

Reader Comments

From Long-Time Fan: “Re: Olive. I’ve been bombarded with ads for the company in news feeds, social media, and now a giant billboard. I’m astounded by the scale of their customer and recruitment campaigns and their ability to attract venture capital, but the company seems kind of fluffy and ambiguous. The most specific service I can understand is a claims scrubber, which is nothing earth-shattering. I thought you might jump on the case with an interview or something.” I suspect that an interview would not be fruitful, although I’m willing to talk with CEO Sean Lane, who has a stellar military background but no healthcare experience that I can find. They list a bunch of healthcare customers like Yale New Haven, Centura, and MedStar, so if you work there and have personally seen Olive’s impact and potential whether good or bad, tell me and I’ll keep both you and your employer anonymous.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor LexisNexis Health Care. The Alpharetta, GA-based company helps providers meet interoperability goals and gives patients more control of their health data. It offers the most robust and accurate provider, patient, and member data in the industry. It helps improve patient engagement and outcomes through proprietary linking, claims analytics, SDOH data, and predictive science. The company’s identity access management platform helps protect patient identities and prevent fraud. Thanks to LexisNexis Health Care for supporting HIStalk.

I found this LexisNexis Health Care video that explains best practices for creating a Social Determinants of Health program.

I lose thankfully few HIStalk sponsors, and most of those defections involve companies that have been successfully acquired by another sponsor (I admire this even though it’s depressing losing sponsors). I still fret over the others, who sometimes leave for good reasons (“we don’t have any money”) or bad reasons (the new marketing rep assigned to us has zero industry knowledge and has never heard of HIStalk but wants to look decisive by cancelling). Here’s a win-win for these pre-HIMSS21 times where we’re all just making it up as we go — if your company last sponsored more than a year ago, I’ll spiff you some extra months on your first comeback year. Contact me.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health IT, supply chain, and consulting company Medsphere acquires Marketware, a developer of relationship management software and analytics for healthcare organizations. Marketware CEO Alex Obbard came to the company from patient relationship management vendor Solutionreach.

OptimizeRx, whose communications platform connects life sciences companies, physicians, and patients, expects Q4 revenue to increase 117% to $16 million.

Sales

• RML Specialty Hospital (IL) selects Engage to provide cloud hosting for its upcoming implementation of Meditech Expanse.
• La Rabida Children’s Hospital (IL) will integrate Emerge ChartScout and The Floating Hospital (NY) chooses Emerge’s data conversion services for its EHR implementation.
• The MetroHealth System will implement Montreal-based Tactio Health Group’s CareSimple remote patient monitoring solution, integrated with Epic.

People

Fern Health, which offers employers a digital platform for chronic back and joint pain, hires Brad Lawson, MBA (Marshalsea Health) as CEO. He replaces Travis Bond, who has joined dementia risk prediction technology vendor Altoida as CEO.

The Chartis Group promotes Catharine Wilder to VP of practice operations.

Interlace Health (fka FormFast) promotes Allison Reichenbach to president.

Lumeon names Tom Zajac as executive chair of its board.

Announcements and Implementations

Consulting firm ReMedi Health Solutions assists a Northeastern health system with a virtual Cerner go live across 23 facilities.

Halifax Health (FL) implements Pure Storage’s FlashArray to ensure the stability of its Meditech system during natural disasters.

The AMA’s technology development subsidiary AMA Innovations and Onyx Technology will develop a FHIR-based messaging solution to connect providers and social care networks, which it will enter in an HHS social care referral challenge.

A new CoverMyMeds report finds that 65% of patients have been impacted by the pandemic, 36% skipped medications and treatments to pay other bills, and more than 40% either diverted payments for essential items for prescriptions or stretched their prescriptions by taking fewer or smaller doses than were prescribed. Most asked their provider about price and affordability options and 43% checked a pharmacy price comparison app when a prescription cost more than they expected.

SOC Telemed launches a TelePulmonology consultation service through its Telemed IQ on-demand telemedicine platform..

A new CHIME-KLAS white paper on EHR interoperability finds that deep interoperability is progressing but still too low and most vendors have improved their ability to connect with outside EHRs. However, cost remains the most frequently identified provider barrier, especially in smaller health systems. The highest-valued interoperability method is public HIE, but that is followed closely by national networks and direct messaging. Use of FHIR APIs still lags proprietary APIs and mostly involves customers of big EHR vendors using them to exchange patient records and to support clinician and patient tools. Respondents identified deeper patient-record exchange and population health as the most-needed use cases in the next 2-3 years.

COVID-19

HHS seeks approval make its July switchover in hospital COVID-19 reporting systems permanent, which would make the TeleTracking-developed system the standard in replacing CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network.

Several industries and companies are developing vaccination passport apps without national or international coordination, leading to the possibility that an individual might need to install and maintain several for specific purposes. Questions are also coming up about how to get electronic vaccination information into those systems without the possibility of fraud since the only official patient record in the US is a handwritten paper card.

Philadelphia’s health department ends its partnership with Philly Fighting COVID, the overseer of its largest vaccination site, after discovering that its registration website is operated by a recently formed for-profit arm whose privacy policy does not precluded disclosing the information of those who sign up. The site says the information entered by users – 60,000 of them so far – is shared with the city’s Health Department, which denies involvement with the site. Philly Fighting Covid originally performed COVID-19 testing, but quickly shut those locations down and cancelled appointments when it was chosen to administer vaccine. The organization was reported to have given shots to anyone who signed up regardless of their assigned priority.  A nurse claims that the CEO of both organizations, 22-year-old Drexel graduate student Andrei Doroshin who has no healthcare experience, took vaccine vials offsite to administer to private individuals, while a vaccination site volunteer said teenaged students were vaccinating each other and taking photos as the clinic ended. Doroshin also lists himself a filmmaker, an executive with a cell therapy company, a resort developer, and manager of an investment company.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH says that the federal government doesn’t know many doses of COVID-19 vaccine it has on hand, leaving state health officials to work blind in setting up vaccination sites, scheduling staff coverage, and issuing appointments without knowing how many doses they will receive.

A VA study finds that the mortality rate of COVID-19 patients in the ICU doubled when the unit was overloaded with coronavirus patients.

Google will donate $150 million to help promote COVID-19 vaccine education and equitable distribution, and will incorporate vaccination clinic locations and details in its Search and Maps tools starting with Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

The CEO of casino operator Great Canadian Gaming Corp. resigns after he and his wife were caught flying to Yukon Territory, skipping the mandatory self-isolation, and posing as motel workers so they could jump the COVID-19 vaccine line.

Other

A longtime resident of Tiny Township in Ontario makes a $5 million donation to its Georgian Bay Hospital, $1 million of which will be used to upgrade the hospital’s record-keeping to Meditech Expanse.

Corporate therapists say that remote workers who use social media-resembling tools like Slack all day exhibit the same “mix of hyper-engagement and lack of empathy” as they might on Facebook. Company cultures are being lost as remote workers use company time and tools to argue politics, bully each other, ignore requirements to turn on their webcams during video calls, confront management, and spend their day chatting constantly in ways that might alienate older workers who were not raised sharing their whole lives electronically. Employment lawyers urge employers not to let use of online tools get out of hand to avoid lawsuits, offended co-workers, or unfair performance reviews.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Symplr in its acquisition of Phynd Technologies.
• The UpTech Report features Saykara CEO Harjinder Sandhu.
• Agfa HealthCare releases a new case study focused on enterprise imaging’s role in personalized, end-to-end care for cancer patients at IFO in Rome, Italy.
• CereCore recognizes 13 team members with its annual Rock Solid Award.
• NEJM Catalyst features the Arizona Surge Line and its innovative use of Central Logic technology to coordinate public health services across the state.
• Cerner donates 100 laptops to Kansas City students.
• Change Healthcare releases a new podcast, “The Policy Connection: Healthcare Policy and the Road Ahead for States.”
• Clinical Architecture names Morgan Johnson to its Team Services group.
• Hunt Scanlon includes Direct Recruiters on its list of “Top 40 Cyber Technology Search Firms.”
• Divurgent releases a new podcast, “The Integration of Music Therapy in Biotechnology.”
• Former health IT executive Tom Zajac joins Lumeon’s Board of Directors as executive chairman.
• SOC Telemed adds tele-pulmonology consulting services to its Telemed IQ platform.
• CoverMyMeds publishes the “2021 Medication Access Report.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health launches Lippincott Connect, an interactive digital medical textbook.

Blog Posts

• Leveraging Health IT Offshore Services for 24/7 Customer Support (314e)
• Are you on track to comply with CMS’ new Conditions of Participation (CoP) requirements? (Audacious Inquiry)
• CMS’ Geo Model – The New Disruptor in Value-Based Care? (Bluetree)
• Healthcare Data Privacy: We Have Met the Enemy and They are Us. (CloudWave)
• The Evolution of EHRs and Patient Price Transparency (CoverMyMeds)
• 5 Healthcare Trends to Look Out for in 2021 (Dimensional Insight)
• 3 Ways Health Plans Can Open the Door to In-Home Care (Dina)
• 3 ways AI is shaping the future of clinical research (Elsevier Clinical Solutions)
• Optimization Services: Make a Difference in 2021! (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 1/25/21

Top News

ONC opens a challenge project to create realistic patient data for the open source Synthea synthetic health data engine.

Synthea creates simulated lifelong health records that can be used by developers and researchers to support patient-centered outcomes research while they are waiting for access to real clinical data.

Up to six winners will be chosen for prizes of $10,000 to $50,000.

Reader Comments

From Maybe Going: “Re: HIMSS21. No registration page yet?” The conference site says that registration will open in January. The latest entry on the “Conference News & Announcements” page is from five months ago. We are just over six months away from the scheduled start of HIMSS21. HIMSS22 is scheduled for seven months later in March 2022 in Orlando.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents who have worked for an acquired company say their jobs got worse afterward.

New poll to your right or here: Have you argued with, criticized, or publicly disagreed with someone on Facebook who you have never met personally? Background: I don’t understand the perceived benefit of arguing publicly online and I can’t identify with how someone’s political or social beliefs can be so defining to their self-worth that they need defend them to faceless strangers, but Facebook fight-picking seems to be everybody’s favorite pastime. Mrs. HIStalk sometimes gets worked up over some clearly stupid or trolling comment and wants to respond, but I always provide my unsolicited advice: (a) you’ve never had your mind changed by a stranger’s Facebook comment and neither has anyone else; and (b) do you really want to spar with some keyboard warrior who can find our address from your name? I would consider social media to be a place for thoughtful discussion only if (a) everybody had to register with one and only one account using their validated name and address; and (b) I could click any comment to mute the author permanently.

I’m puzzled at why I’ve seen the city of “St. Louis” – its legal name – spelled out several times in the last week or two as “Saint Louis” by folks whose tendency seems to be to erroneously shorten rather than lengthen words (“Saint Louis University” is correct only because it is named after the actual saint and not the city). The city’s pronunciation is equally vexing – it should be “loo-EEE” given that it was named by French speakers who were referring to their king, whose delight would probably be diminished upon hearing that ‘Murcans mispronounce his name as LOO_us. Even the state’s name is illogically converted by some residents to Missou-ruh. It’s interesting that we choose names from other languages, but then mispronounce them intentionally or otherwise to make them uniquely ours (see Texas, just north of “I see an X so I’m saying an X” Mexico).

It’s a slow-to-no news day compared to the usual HIMSS-focused seasonal burst of PR activity. Enjoy the few minutes you will save as a result.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Announcements and Implementations

Eighteen hospitals of Steward Health Care complete their virtual implementation of a regionally shared Meditech Expanse EHR.

Divurgent launches a Virtual Patient Support Solution to help providers manage COVID-19 vaccination scheduling calls.

A Mass General / Harvard Medical School study that was performed using real-world data from the TriNetX global health research network finds that people who have autoimmune or immune-suppressing rheumatic conditions are less likely to experience severe COVID-19 outcomes. The authors, who reviewed the de-identified information of 8,500 patients, also noted that the death risk to those patients remains substantial at 5-6% within 30 days of diagnosis.

Beverly Knight Children’s Hospital goes live on Vocera Ease for connecting parents with their NNICU babies. Employees applied for and received a Pampers Bright Beginnings NICU Connectivity Grant to fund the project.

COVID-19

Sunday’s COVID-19 hospitalizations in the US dropped to 110,628, new deaths to 1,940, and new cases the lowest other than on Christmas Day since December 1 at 142,949. The numbers are likely retreating after holiday-caused spikes, but the lull may be temporary as the B117 variant increases in prevalence. The US death count is at 417,000.

CDC reports that 20.5 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 41.4 million distributed (50%). The federal government says that vaccine availability won’t improve until April due to manufacturing capacity, so experts urge the government focus on fixing state and local vaccination center problems that can’t even get existing limited supplies into arms.

The New York Times warns that the US should learn from Britain’s experience of hospitals becoming overwhelmed with patients, partly driven by the more contagious B117 coronavirus variant. One example is overloaded liquid oxygen pipes, caused by the use of high-flow oxygen for COVID-19 patients in trying to avoid the use of ventilators. The article also notes that hospitals have been reluctant to delay elective procedures, causing staff burnout, and quotes doctors who worry about how COVID survivors can be rehabilitated.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx will present at the B. Riley Securities 2021 Vision Day Virtual Conference January 28.
• PatientPing publishes a new white paper, “CMS Direct Contracting: Preparing for the New Model & How to Succeed with Real-Time Data.”
• Arcadia congratulates Micky Tripathi on his new leadership role as National Coordinator for Health Information Technology with the Department of Health and Human Services.
• TrustRadius has recognized Pure Storage’s FlashArray for Best Customer Support and Best Usability.
• Relatient publishes a new case study, “The Warren Clinic Leverages Epic and Relatient to Distribute COVID-19 Vaccines.”
• Spirion will host a series of virtual events January 26-28 in support of Data Privacy Day.
• MD Tech Review names Zen Healthcare IT a “Top Healthcare Interoperability Solution Provider of 2020.”

Blog Posts

• Telehealth – here to stay. The growing need to expand access to care. (Nuance)
• Every season is immunization season. How can you maximize your patient experience? (OmniSys)
• Healthcare interoperability and the vendor-system divide (Nordic)
• How Can Application Rationalization Create Immediate Value During M&A? (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Physician Burnout with Information Technology (PMD)
• Premier Data: Supplies for COVID-19 Testing, Diagnostics and Treatment at Risk of Shortage (Premier)
• COVID-19 Vaccine Reporting for Public Health Agencies from Redox (Redox)
• How Does the Cloud Work? Understanding Cloud Computing in Healthcare (Spok)
• How one DME supplier took on the challenge of same or similar denials (Waystar)
• 4 Things to Consider When Restructuring Your Clinic’s Compensation Plan (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 1/22/21

Top News

The Biden administration chooses Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP as National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. He replaces Don Rucker, MD, MS, MBA, who was named national coordinator in April 2017.

Tripathi was chief alliance officer for Arcadia, which last year acquired the assets of the closed Massachusetts EHealth Collaborative, of which Tripathi served as CEO for 15 years.

Tripathi has resigned from the boards of Datica, HL7 FHIR Foundation, CommonWell, and The Sequoia Project.

Reader Comments

From Rad Idea: “Re: PACS. Mach7 (which acquired Client Outlook and its eUnity viewer last year) won the enterprise viewing RFP from Trinity Health this past November, with an option to add VNA, diagnostic viewer, and worklist. It’s a big deal since Trinity does 60% more studies than the big academic radiology heavyweights.” Thanks. Australia-based Mach7, which restructured and fired its CEO a couple of years ago in a cost-cutting effort, has an impressive roster of big customers. Trinity signed a seven-year, $5 million contract for its enterprise viewer in November. Shares in M7T, which trade on the ASX, value the company at $313 million.

From PEI: “Re: Nano-X. Ever run across them? I’ve heard some interesting stories and wondered about your thoughts.” The technology explanations of Israel-based Nano-X goes way over my head, but it involves low-cost and portable diagnostic imaging, which has yet to earn FDA approval. The chairman and CEO apparently invented wireless phone charging. NNOX did its IPO in August 20 and shares are up 166% since, valuing the company at $2.7 billion. Fun reading of the “interesting stories” variety (but of unverified validity) is the analysis of fraud chasers Citron Research, which calls the company “Theranos 2.0” with just 20-odd employees and “nothing more than a science project with a simple rendering, minimal R&D, fake customers, no FDA approval, and fraudulent claims that are beyond the realm of possibility.” Perhaps readers have more information to contribute.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Dr. Jayne’s office chair write-up spurred me to long-deferred action to replace my old, cheap Office Depot model, whose defective height-adjusting mechanism made it a poor man’s carnival drop tower ride. I was happy to find a local office furniture store that buys used chairs from closed or relocated businesses, refurbishes them, then sells them cheap with a one-year warranty. My new chair is a fully tricked out Herman Miller Celle that came from a closed Blue Cross Blue Shield office that turned in 1,000 of them. The retail price is $750, so $199 seemed like a bargain. I didn’t realize how un-ergonomic and cheap-feeling my old chair was until I sat in a decent, highly adjustable one where my back actually touches the chair.

Listening: new soul / R&B from Grammy winners Black Pumas, which I ran across before finding that they played virtually at the inauguration this week.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HealthStream will acquire policy management technology vendor ComplyAlign for $2 million in cash.

Text chat-based telehealth vendor K Health raises $132 million in a Series E funding round that values the company at over $1 billion. K Health offers unlimited online doctor chats for $9 per month, also offering pediatrics in 15 states and single urgent care visits for $19. Co-founder and CEO Allon Bloch, MBA previously started several online businesses, none of them related to healthcare.

UnitedHealth Group reports Q3 results: revenue up 8% to $65.1 billion with Optum as its biggest percentage contributor, EPS $2.51 versus $3.90, beating estimates for both. The company said in the earnings call that its OptumCare business will add another 10,000 employed and affiliated physicians to its existing 50,000 in 2021. It expects the combination of its acquired Change Healthcare and OptumInsight to allow it to introduce evidenced-based criteria into clinician workflow.

Healthcare outcomes and community service connection vendor Pieces acquires Bowtie Business Intelligence, which offers a data management platform.

Compute Health Acquisition, a SPAC that will focus on healthcare technology, files for a $750 million IPO that will value the company at around $1 billion. The company is led by Intel Chairman Omar Ishrak, PhD, who was formerly CEO of Medtronic. Medtronic is interested in buying 1.5 million shares in the company, he says.

Hillrom will acquire ambulatory ECG monitoring vendor Bardy Diagnostics for $375 million in cash.

Healthcare conversational AI vendor MPulse Mobile acquires health video course developer The Big Know.

Sales

• Community Care Plan chooses CareSignal’s Deviceless Remote Monitoring program to send self-management text messages to its Medicaid members.
• New York State Office of Mental Health chooses Cerner’s hosted revenue cycle management solutions in a 10-year contract that covers 23 inpatient and 155 outpatient facilities.

People

Cerner hires Mark Erceg (Tiffany & Company) as VP/CFO. He replaces Marc Naughton, whose departure was announced last fall. Cerner’s entire executive team has now been replaced since Brent Shafer was hired as chairman and CEO in January 2018, with the exception of Don Trigg, who was then president of Cerner Health Ventures and is now president of Cerner.

David Tavares, founder and CEO of alarm and event notification vendor Connexall, died last week at 73.

Announcements and Implementations

Jvion launches its COVID Vaccination Prioritization Index, which helps public health officials determine which areas need more vaccines based on an AI-powered analysis of each community’s makeup. I randomly chose Roane County WV, which is high priority as explained in the graphic above.

AI researchers from Facebook work with NYU Langone Health to develop software that analyzes chest x-rays to predict if COVID-19 patients will deteriorate or require oxygen. The researchers say their models are research solutions rather than products and will make them open source to allow hospitals to tune them using their own data.

The local TV station covers how SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital allows the family members of patients to send photos electronically to their in-room entertainment system. The video doesn’t mention the interactive patient system vendor that does the heavy lifting, but freeze-framing the video shows that it’s PCare.

Government and Politics

Implementation of HHS’s December 10 rule that reduces the time providers have to give patients copies of their records will be delayed for 60 days in a Biden administration review of all recent HHS actions.

HHS OCR will not impose HIPAA penalties related to use of online scheduling to make COVID-19 vaccination appointments.

COVID-19

The COVID Tracking Project shows 122,700 people hospitalized in the US, with the trend continuing down. Deaths hit a daily record 4,409 as the US total increased to 406,000.

CDC shows as of Wednesday that 16.5 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 36 million distributed (46%).

Amazon offers in a letter sent to President Biden to use its operations, IT, and communications to help get people vaccinated.

Experts question the COVID-19 vaccination plan of Washington, D.C. – which is already struggling with vaccine distribution problems – to open up priority slots to anyone who is overweight, which would be more than half of the district’s residents. An obesity researcher says that “it’s not much of of a discriminator any more if you define a co-morbidity as something that almost everybody has.” The city will also use the honor system in requiring those showing up for a vaccine to answer two questions – are you a resident, and do you have at least one priority chronic condition – with no proof required.

The White House publishes its 200-page national COVID-19 strategy, in which the federal government will:

• Provide expert-led, science-based public briefings and CDC-led communication and guidance.
• Give states more support and funding to “convert vaccines into vaccinations.”
• Expand vaccine production and purchasing.
• End the policy of holding back second doses and encourage states to move quickly through the priority groups.
• Create as many vaccination venues as are needed, including federally run centers in stadiums and conference centers, drugstores, VA hospitals, physician office, hospitals, urgent care centers, and mobile clinics.
• Compensate providers fairly for administering the vaccine, expanding the FMAP to 100% for Medicaid enrollees and assigning CMS to review whether payment rates are appropriate.
• Strengthen the federal government’s approach to vaccination data collection.
• Have CDC and FDA perform real-time safety monitoring of vaccines through expanded systems.
• Expand provider scope-of-practice laws and waive licensing requirements to meet community workforce needs.
• Require masks and distancing within federal buildings and lands and require mask-wearing on planes, trains, and other public transportation.
• Develop a COVID-19 treatment discovery and development plan.
• Establish a US Public Health Jobs Corps to provide 100,000 contact tracers, community health workers, and public health nurses.
• Provide technical help with the use of technology and data to guide response.
• Invoke the Defense Production Act to fix supply problems with vaccination and testing supplies and PPE.
• Implement a national strategy to support the safe reopening of schools, with most K-8 schools to be open within 100 days, including Congress-approved funding.
• Provide emergency funds to help hard-hit childcare providers remain open and to support higher education operation.
• Restore the US’s participation in the World Health Organization.

Other

The non-profit, Tulsa-based MyHealth Access Network protests the state’s selection of Orion Health to provide a statewide HIE platform for $49.8 million, which is nearly $30 million more than its own bid. ONC warned the state in a January 6 email that scrapping MyHealth and starting over was a bad idea. MyHealth bid $106.6 million on December 30, 2019, then lowered its price nine months later to $41.7 million when the state asked for its best and final offer, then lowered its price again to $19.9 million. The federal government will pay 90% of the cost.

I mentioned that health IT long-timer Amy Gleason had a big role in the successful implementation of HHS’s COVID hospital data reporting system as part of the US Digital Service. She invites other industry folks to join the group. I’m fantasizing about how cool it must be to casually name-drop “The White House” as a current or previous employer when meeting someone.

Sponsor Updates

• Everbridge launches its enhanced Public Warning System.
• Experity adds distribution phase information to its state-by-state COVID vaccine plan tracker.
• The HCI Group hires Blake Richardville as a business development executive, and Eli Lemkin as an account executive.
• Kyruus adds online consumer scheduling for COVID-19 vaccine visits to its patient access platform.
• Lumeon publishes the “US Patient Access Leadership Report 2020/21.”
• Medicomp Systems sponsors the awards section of the Physician Burnout Symposium through January 29.
• Meditech customer Northeastern Vermont connects the full birth experience with Expanse Labor and Delivery.

Blog Posts

• 4 Predictions for Diabetes Management and Technology in 2021 (Glytec)
• Secure Text Messaging Benefits Extend Beyond EPHI Protection (Halo Health)
• The 2021 Healthcare Financial Forecast: What to Expect, How to Prepare (Health Catalyst)
• Cooking and Consulting with Joe – Week 1 – Mustard Crusted Salmon (Health Data Movers)
• Digital Programs Let You Enroll More Patients in Cardiac Rehab (Healthwise)
• 2020 ushered in the era of the “Payvider” (Infor)
• Shifting Mindsets for Population Health (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Transform Situational Awareness into Hospital Efficiency (LiveProcess)
• Parallels between HIPAA and 21st Century Cures Act (Medhost)
• 3 Things to Know About ONC’s Project US@ (NextGate)

Contacts

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

News 1/20/21

Top News

The co-founder of The COVID Tracking Project outlines the success of HHS’s fast switchover last summer from the CDC’s National Health Safety Network hospital reporting database to the TeleTracking-developed HHS Protect.

The article in The Atlantic urges the new administration to continue using the HHS system instead of switching back to NHSN.

Many observers assumed that the government made the change to marginalize CDC and to make its COVID-19 response appear to be more effective, but the author says The Covid Tracking Project’s investigation found no evidence of “cooking the books.”

Some points:

• CDC approved the reporting change, contrary to media reports saying its scientists were blindsided by the White House.
• NHSN is an old system that was jury-rigged to collect COVID-19 hospital data. Leidos maintains the system under a $60 million contract. Adding urgently needed data collection fields was taking weeks.
• HHS Protect’s data was all over the place at first, as hospitals worked to make the switch. Its reports now match those that states submit and have eliminated NHSN’s odd data swings and unexplained variability.
• By the end of 2020, 96% of hospitals were reporting their data to the new system every day.
• The system has been enhanced to include metadata, staff shortage details, and hospital-level capacity data to show where health systems are overwhelmed.
• The COVID Tracking Project concludes that the system has “enormous potential to be the federal numbers we’ve always wanted” and urges the new administration to keep using it.

The leader of the development team was health IT veteran Amy Gleason of the White House’s inter-agency United States Digital Service, which was created by the Obama administration to bring private industry technologists into government. She is credited with making the system production-worthy and fixing data issues. She has previously worked for CareSync, Allscripts, MediNotes, Bond Technologies, and Misys Healthcare.

Reader Comments

From Bone Spur: “Re: podcast. My list of good and bad ones. ” As a hardcore radio and TV channel-flipper, I don’t have the attention span to spend 15 minutes listening to what I could read in 15 seconds (or abandon in five). Maybe I would feel differently for something funny or dramatic where getting to the point isn’t the primary objective, but not news, opinion, or freeform yakking. My perception is that industry leaders who are busy holding jobs of responsibility — the folks I might find interesting enough to listen to — mostly aren’t screwing around doing podcasts and YouTube videos. Industry podcasts remind me of “King of Comedy,” the Scorsese-De Niro cult film that I watched the other night in which aspiring comedian Rupert Pupkin wows an imaginary TV audience from a talk show set that he built in his mother’s basement. Still, I figure that Katie the Intern might need more video production on her journalism resume, so I’ve suggested that she do some video interviews. Plus Pupkin actually did become a star in the movie’s darkly predictive ending, so you never know.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Philips will acquire medical device integration vendor Capsule Technologies for $635 million in cash.

Accountable care organization operator Aledade, which was co-founded by former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD in 2014, raises $100 million in funding round that increases its total to $294 million and values the company at over $2 billion.

Conversa Health, which offers a virtual care and triage platform, expands its Series B funding round to $20 million

Newfire Global Partners will launch an office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia next month that will provide around-the-clock technical operations to clients in healthcare and other critical industries.

Sales

• The State of Pennsylvania selects Aunt Bertha to help it build a statewide resource and referral portal for healthcare and social services.
• Yale New Haven Health System (CT) will work with Gozio Health to develop an app with wayfinding, patient portal, and virtual care features.
• Behavioral health provider Springstone (KY) will use VisiQuate’s RCM software and consulting services.

People

GetWellNetwork promotes Nikia Bergan to president.

John Ward (Atos North America Healthcare) joins Divurgent as CFO.

Karen Marhefka (Impact Advisors) joins RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers Health as deputy CIO and VP of IT for their combined medical group in New Jersey.

CI Security promotes Kristoffer Turner to VP of security operations for its Critical Insight Security Operations Centers, and hires Steve Sedlock (EPSi) as chief revenue officer.

Christine Boyle, who held marketing executive roles in Oncology Analytics, Get-to-Market Health, Caradigm, Microsoft, and Sentillion, died of cancer on January 9. She was 50.

Announcements and Implementations

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences regional campuses implement Epic.

UnitedHealthcare launches a virtual primary care service for employers powered by Amwell. The payer had attempted before COVID to offer telemedicine services through its network of primary care practices, but found physician uptake slow due to reimbursement issues.

East Orange General Hospital (NJ) rolls out bedside tablets from PadInMotion for patient education, entertainment, and care team messaging.

Government and Politics

ONC will invest $20 million in projects related to helping communities share vaccine-related data, and supporting immunization-related collaborations between HIEs.

A reader who is a nationally recognized provider-side HIPAA expert (I’m leaving them anonymous) called out a recent court decision about MD Anderson, which they say will change how entities look at HIPAA breaches, enforcement, and penalties. Here’s the summary:

• An appeals court last week vacated MD Anderson’s $4.3 million HHS OCR civil money penalty that was imposed in 2017 following three lost device incidents in 2012 and 2013. The unencrypted mobile devices contained the information of 35,000 patients.
• The court ruled that the penalty was “arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law” in questioning how HHS OCR interprets HIPAA violations and sets penalty amounts.
• The ruling noted that MD Anderson had provided IronKey technology to encrypt PHI on mobile devices and the training to use it, but employees had not enabled it on the lost laptop and two USB drives. The court said that HIPAA requires only that covered entities “implement a mechanism to encrypt,” also noting that the health system’s IT user agreement requires employees to enable the provided encryption.
• The court also questioned whether information has been “disclosed” to an outside entity, as HIPAA defines, when it is stolen or lost. It said, “It defies reason to say an entity affirmatively acts to disclose information when someone steals it” and that the word “information” means that someone has been “informed” by it, which hasn’t been proven just because devices can’t be located.
• The court’s conclusion, which HHS could contest, is that losing unprotected PHI is not disclosure and likely isn’t an enforceable action under HIPAA.

COVID-19

Monday’s US COVID numbers: 123,848 hospitalized, 1,393 deaths, as the numbers trend sharply down but with potential underreporting due to the MLK holiday. It’s just a short break in any case, experts warn, as the more contagious B117 coronavirus variant spreads. The US crossed the 400,000 death mark Tuesday and the incoming CDC director predicts 500,000 by mid-February.

CDC hasn’t updated its vaccination numbers since Friday morning. Meanwhile, Florida reports that 45,000 people are already overdue for their second shot.

Lumeon announces GA of its COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign Management software featuring automated patient outreach, self-scheduling, and surveys.

Sponsor Updates

• In Australia, InterSystems TrakCare and Launceston General Hospital become the first to support the new ISBT 128 blood labeling standard with a digital interface to the National Blood Authority’s BloodNet online ordering and inventory management system.
• CNBC’s Squawk Box features Change Healthcare and the Vaccination Credential Initiative.
• The Chartis Group promotes Brian Spendley to principal in its strategy and private equity advisory practices.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new Informonster Podcast, “CommonWell Health Alliance and the Mission to Bring People and Data Together.”

Blog Posts

• Tips for Making EHR Digital Learning More Productive (314e)
• COVID-19 vaccinations: Ability helps providers get paid (Ability Network)
• Top 3 Healthcare IT Trends of 2021 (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• AdvancedMD launches Hub, customer community portal (AdvancedMD)
• Bluetree Network, a Tegria Company, Honored as One of the Best Places to Work in 2021, a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award Winner (Bluetree)
• Leveraging Technology to Power Improved Outcomes in Acute and Post-Acute Care (CarePort Health)
• Three Ways Health IT Project Kickoff Meetings Fall Short (CereCore)
• Honoring the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. (Cerner)
• How Providers Can Keep Their Focus During the COVID Era (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 1/18/21

Top News

Cerner announces that Chief Client and Services Officer John Peterzalek and Chief Legal Officer Randy Sims will leave the company. They will be replaced by Cerner Government Services President Travis Dalton and SVP of Cloud Strategy / Chief IP Officer Dan Devers, respectively.

Cerner Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer said in the internal announcement that the company’s annual client survey results require a greater sense of urgency in strengthening relationships, delivering on promises, innovating faster, and executing on strategies.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents don’t have a significant chunk of their net worth invested in health IT company ownership.

New poll to your right or here: For those who have worked for a company or healthcare organization that was acquired, how was your job afterward? I’ve mostly worked for big health systems that were the acquirer, which worked out well for me. My job also didn’t change much during my stint with a bottom-feeder vendor whose series of owners couldn’t wait to pawn it off on someone else like a gas station Christmas fruitcake, but only because (a) it wasn’t that great of a job to begin with; (b) I was somewhat safe as a clinical-technical subject matter expert who was happy to keep my head down while the mahogany row battles were being fought above me (literally and figuratively). My sense is that having your company acquired for unfavorable terms brands you with the collective stench of your previous employer’s failure, while those who actually captained the ship into the iceberg elbow women and children aside in fleeing for the corporate lifeboats.

The suddenly overused word that I’m sick of hearing: all forms of “lean,” including lean in, forward-leaning, left- or right-leaning, and leaning into. Unless you’re talking about someone who is unsteady on their feet, a carburetor, quality improvement, the director of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” or that tower in Pisa, better word choices are available.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

People

Former Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt, who was previously CEO of OptumInsight and more recently founder of non-profit United States of Care, will take a temporary role as advisor the President-elect’s COVID team. That’s him accepting his “Healthcare IT Industry Figure of the Year” award at the final HIStalkapalooza in New Orleans in 2017, which was right after I interviewed him.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthcare development platform vendor Commure joins the Postman API Network, making its FHIR and authentication APIs available to healthcare developers. Clinical scenarios covered include telehealth, care team management, inpatient medical workflows, and capturing data with forms. Commure’s co-founder and executive chairman is investor Hemant Taneja, who started and sold Livongo, while its CEO is Brent Dover, who was president of Medicity and Health Catalyst. The company has raised $42 million in funding.

COVID-19

Saturday saw 126,139 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US, with 3,695 deaths. The death total will pass 400,000 early this week.

CDC says the more contagious B117 coronavirus variant will become the dominant strain in the US by March, which some experts predict will happen even sooner based on UK experience. In addition, the B1351 variant is probably already active in the US and may be resistant to at least one antibody therapy. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says that new COVID-19 cases have likely peaked, but deaths and hospitalizations will continue to grow over the next few weeks as a lagging indicator. 

CDC reports that as of Friday, 12.3 million people have received COVID-19 vaccine first doses versus 31.2 million doses distributed, with less than 40% of available doses actually given.

Operation Warp Speed held CDC’s vaccine distribution plan for two months last summer, leaving state and local officials little time to implement mass vaccination programs. 

HHS imposes term limits on its top few dozen scientists at FDA and CDC, who would face reassignment every five years, in a rule that the new administration is likely to cancel.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx promotes Kennedy Whitney to marketing coordinator.
• D CEO and Dallas Innovates recognizes Phynd Technologies CEO Tom White as a finalist for their Start-Up Innovator of the Year award.
• KLAS Research recognizes Relatient as the highest rated patient engagement platform with 10 validated capabilities.
• Everest Group names Nordic a “Leader” in its “Healthcare IT Services Specialists PEAK Matrix Assessment 2021.”
• Spirion introduces its Customer Marketplace, an online hub for third-party data privacy and security integrations, applications, best practices, and training information.
• TriNetX will present during the Friends of the National Library of Medicine’s virtual workshop January 27 on real-world data and EHRs in clinical research.
• Well Health joins the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’ KidsX digital accelerator as part of its initial cohort.

Blog Posts

• Inference Analytics Advanced Neural Network generates impressions based on radiologist findings (Nuance)
• American use of the EHR: What can we learn from others? (Nordic)
• Will 2021 be the Year of the Digital Health Platform? (PatientBond)
• When Plans Change: Lessons for Business Leaders from the Pandemic (PatientKeeper)
• Patient Simulators: Innovation Through Necessity (PMD)
• Five Issues Limiting the Vaccine Rollout – and How to Fix Them (Premier)
• The ABCs of healthcare IT (a vocab sheet) (Redox)
• The COVID-19 Vaccine Has Arrived: Here’s How Relatient is Helping (Relatient)
• A Nurse’s Greatest Fear, Part 2: Giving Clinicians Greater Insight & Improving Patient Safety Outside of the ICU (Capsule Technologies)
• 8 steps to take in the event of a data breach at your hospital (Spok)
• Thriving in a Virtual Work Environment (Summit Healthcare)
• Empowering Patients with Another Relationship They Can Count On (Surescripts)
• Interview / AI Research Insights (Visage Imaging)
• Revenue Cycle 101: Prior Authorization (Waystar)
• Beat the Heat: How to Fight Burnout in Your Rehab Therapy Practice (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 1/15/21

Top News

Health and technology leaders announce the Vaccination Credential Initiative, which hopes to provide digital access to COVID-19 vaccination records using the open SMART Health Cards specification.

Individuals could obtain an encrypted digital copy of their immunization credentials to store in a digital wallet or could receive a paper form containing a QR code.

The goal of the initiative is to connect to The Commons Project Foundation’s CommonPass, which is being used for travel and return-to-work vaccine verification.

Participants include CARIN Alliance, Cerner, Change Healthcare, The Commons Project Foundation, Epic, Evernorth, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Mitre, Oracle, Safe Health, and Salesforce.

Reader Comments

From Assign Me Up: “Re: email updates. Please enroll me at this new address and remove the old one.” I’ve been remiss in not providing self-service email signup instruction reminders in many months, so here’s a refresher:

• Sign up for updates here or using the “Subscribe to updates” menu option under Contact (desktop format) or the “Get email updates” menu option (mobile format).
• Watch for the verification email that follows since it may end up on your spam folder and you’ll receive no further emails unless you confirm this one.
• Review your email rules, whitelist, company email server setup, etc. if you aren’t receiving the emails you signed up for. The automatic sending of the emails is highly reliable, but the receiving of them is much less so and is not something I can control (spam tools have eliminated the reliability and timeliness of email delivery, unfortunately).
• Unsubscribe your old address by clicking the ‘”unsubscribe” link that is at the bottom of each email. Or, do nothing since your inactive old address will cancel itself even if you do nothing.
• Reminder: I do absolutely nothing with the email addresses, so all you’ll get as a result of signing up is a notice that I’ve posted something new. I collect only the actual email address itself, don’t use those addresses for anything else, and don’t make them available to others.

From Clog Queen: “Re: HIStalkapalooza shoe contest. I think that in these challenging times (don’t all emails start with that phrase these days?) you should do a virtual version.” Certainly the shoe contest would virtualize better than most conference components since judges would just need to review photos, perform their deliberations, then announce the winners. I bet closets are full of low-mileage yet stylish zapatos since they add no value to a Zoom call.

From Dunning Notice: “Re: HIMSS21. Are you doing a booth this year, assuming the conference goes on?” No. It’s been nice in the past to have a place to say hello to readers on the show floor, but it’s not worth the several thousand dollars that a microscopic 10×10 foot space costs when I have nothing to sell that would offset that personal expense. I’ll probably (not certainly as of yet) be treading the thick exhibit hall carpet as a paying attendee, using my HIMSS20 registration rollover, if HIMSS21 happens. Thank goodness I ended HIStalkapalooza in its 10th iteration at HIMSS17 since I would have faced financial Armageddon otherwise from the cancelled HIMSS20.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor PatientBond. The Salt Lake City company applies consumer insights and innovative technologies to digital patient engagement. Its Digital Health Platform uses a proprietary psychographic segmentation model that allows health systems, urgent care facilities, and medical practices to personalize messaging and digital channels to each individual’s motivations and preferences, supporting market share growth (patient acquisition and loyalty, service line marketing, and social reputation management);  improved patient outcomes (closing care gaps, improving medication adherence, and automating care coordination); and increased patient payments (reminders, online payments, digital statements, and card-on-file messaging). The cloud-based, API-driven platform requires no training, no software to install, and offers easy integration with most CRM, EMR, and PM systems. Discover which of its five psychographic segments you fit in as a patient by answering a 12-question survey. Thanks to PatientBond for supporting HIStalk.

Thanks to the 2,000 folks who completed my once-yearly reader survey. Resultant factoids:

• 94% of respondents say they have a higher appreciation for companies they read about in HIStalk, while 82% have a higher appreciation for HIStalk sponsors.
• 94% say that reading HIStalk helped them perform their job better in 2020, which is a relief since that’s my most-valued metric.
• I’ve emailed the winners of $50 Amazon gift cards who were randomly drawn from participants. Thanks to all who completed the survey.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Provider and resource scheduling system vendor QGenda acquires Shift Admin, which offers shift-based specialty scheduling for emergency medicine, urgent care, and hospital medicine.

Signify Research says the EHR market in Europe and EMEA in 2020 was better than in the US, which declined due to COVID-related financial challenges. It also notes that consolidation is picking up in Europe, with Dedalus acquiring Agfa’s HCIS business, CompuGroup Medical buying parts of Cerner’s non-Millennium assets, and the merger of big Nordics vendors Tieto and EVRY.

Lumiata — which applies AI to 120 million patients records to predict patient outcomes, clinical costs, and risks for providers and payers – raises $14 million in a Series B funding round.

Cerner says in its J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference investor presentation that it will create a billion-dollar data business in selling de-identified patient data as real-world evidence to drug companies, partly driven by its $375 million cash acquisition last month of Kantar Health.

Walgreens says in its J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference presentation that it will create a tech-enabled healthcare startup as a “company within a company” that will offer a customer engagement platform, a personalization engine, a care integration platform, and a health marketplace. The company says that neither a digital-only nor a physical-only platform can be successful. It will partner with best-in-class companies as an integrator. The company said in Q&A that it expects to be part of the care team in offering patients real-time information for managing conditions and recommending medication changes to doctors, enabled by the increasing scope of pharmacist practice in some states. Walgreens has seen a 40% jump in pharmacist involvement with medication therapy management. It adds that a patient with multiple chronic conditions is forced to log into multiple apps, a process that it intends to simplify.

NextGen Healthcare’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare deck highlights its December 2019 acquisition of telehealth platform vendor Otto Health for a reported $22 million, after which its virtual visits have increased by 68%, active user count has jumped from 300 to 13,000, and contracted annual recurring revenue has increased from $200,000 to $9 million.

Sales

• Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services chooses Cerner’s EHR for four additional behavioral health facilities. 
• Konica Minolta Japan will use InterSystems IRIS for Health and its HL7 FHIR interoperability capability to connect its devices with other systems, such as the EHR.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthwise announces five Digital Health Programs – for diabetes, cardiac rehab, colonoscopy and endoscopy, orthopedics, and pregnancy and newborn – that allow providers to send education and reminders and receive individual and aggregated analytics to monitor patient progress.

Meditech offers a short-form Quick Vaccination solution that allows hospitals to administer COVID-19 vaccine at high-volume locations and transmit vaccine data to state systems.

Specialty EHR vendor Modernizing Medicine acquires Exscribe, which offers an orthopedics EHR.

A new KLAS report on structured reporting in cardiology finds that Change Healthcare and IBM Watson Health lead in adoption, Epic saw the biggest adoption increase but Cupid still requires a lot of work and is missing some functionality, and customers of Lumedx are frustrated with poor training, support, and development.

Government and Politics

Flo Health settles FTC charges that its Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker app shared user information with Facebook, Google, and other companies while assuring users that it would keep their information private. The company will have its privacy practices independently reviewed and will get user consent before sharing user data. Some members of FTC’s panel dissented parts of the settlement, saying that FTC should have charged Flo with violating the Health Breach Notification Rule that would have required notifying individual users, while Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips issued a statement saying that simply requiring a company to notify users isn’t worth much if those users have no remedial actions available to them.

A Department of Defense annual review of its MHS Genesis Cerner implementation (thanks to reader Vaporware? for sending the link) finds that:

• MHS Genesis “is not operationally suitable because training remains unsatisfactory, dissemination of system change information is inadequate, and usability problems persist.”
• The system is operationally effective for basic operations in conventional clinics, but not for some specialty clinics and business areas.
• Performance scores increased from 45% of tested performance measures to 78%, with improvements needed in medical readiness, provider referrals, business intelligence, billing, coding, and reporting.
• System usability improved from “unacceptable” to “marginal-low.”
• The project has 158 open high-priority issues.
• Information exchange with required external systems was “sporadic, and the data were sometimes inaccurate and complete.” AHLTA-housed patient allergies, meds, and immunizations didn’t transfer to Cerner 13% of the time and care was sometimes delayed because of the manual reconciliation that was required.
• Cybersecurity experts found the system to be “not survivable in the complex, cyber-contested environment of a major medical facility.”
• Testing has not yet been performed to determine if the system can sustain the expected number of users at full deployment.

COVID-19

US COVID-19 hospitalization numbers dropped a bit on Wednesday, with 130,383 people in hospital beds with COVID. Daily deaths were also below record numbers at 4,022. Hard-hit UK and Ireland, which have high B117 variant activity, also showed a sharply reduced number of cases. CDC reports that 11 million vaccine doses have been administered of 31 million distributed, leaving two-thirds of them sitting unused.

The COVID Tracking Project warns that it will no longer report “recovered” patient numbers since not all states report that number and the term “recovered” has no standard definition and thus is reported in different ways by individual states. It also notes that many people who have had COVID-19 still don’t consider themselves to be free of symptoms.

CDC will require all travelers who are entering the US – including US residents — to show either (a) their negative coronavirus test results from within the previous three days; or (b) proof that they have recovered from COVID-19. Airlines will be instructed to not allow boarding to any passengers who cannot provide the documentation.

China locks down 22 million residents of several cities following a COVID-19 outbreak. The entire country of 1.4 billion people is reporting 109 new cases per day, while the US has that many new cases every four minutes with one-fourth of China’s population.

A Public Health England pre-print study finds that people who have already had COVID-19 are 83% less likely to get it again and are probably protected for at least five months.The researchers note that nobody knows if they can still spread infection to others.

People from Canada and Argentina are traveling on private jets to Florida to get COVID-19 vaccine, taking advantage of the state’s policy to vaccinate anyone over age 64 regardless of residency.

Stormont Vail Health disables its employee COVID-19 vaccine sign-up site after discovering that outsiders were able to sign up for shots using links that employees had shared with them. The hospital will now require those who are being vaccinated to show their badges, which it wasn’t doing before.

The former president and CEO of Canada’s London Health Sciences Centre sues the hospital for $2 million, claiming that he was fired this week for making five trips to the US despite Canada’s ban on non-essential travel across the border. Paul Woods, who is a Canadian citizen who holds permanent resident status in the US, says the hospital’s chief counsel approved his request to visit his daughter and his fiancée in Michigan as long as he self-isolated afterward. The hospital’s board chair resigned the day after the lawsuit was filed, admitting no wrongdoing.

Other

AdventHealth’s replacement of Cerner, Athenahealth, and Homecare Homebase with Epic will cost $370 million in capital cost plus $290 million in operating cost, according to its J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference presentation. AdventHealth, the former Adventist Health System, says Its first go-live will be in Q4 of this year and the last will be finished a year later. The Florida-based system has 50 hospital campuses in nine states, 2,300 employed physicians, 80,000 employees, and $12.5 billion in annual revenue.

Prosecutors say that Theranos destroyed the SQL database of its laboratory information system when it closed its New Jersey facility in 2018, making its patient records unavailable for use in the federal government’s fraud case. The company paid a firm that was run by an associate of former Theranos COO Sunny Balwani $10 million over seven years to administer the database. Theranos provided the government with three versions of the backup before the company shut down, but all of them were encrypted with a password that everyone involved claims they have forgotten. Prosecutors hoped to use the database to prove their claims that tests offered by Theranos were unreliable, including one thyroid test whose failure rate was over 50%. The government also asked the court to deny the motion by former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to exclude what she calls “anecdotal” test results since the company destroyed the database while under subpoena.

A public hospital in China becomes the first to bill a patient using its blockchain-based invoicing system, which allows patients to review their medical and billing records on their phones. 

HIMSS21’s home of Las Vegas, which has the highest unemployment rate of major US metro areas at 11.5%, is taking another hit this week with the move of the Consumer Electronics Show to a virtual format. CES was supposed to be the first event in the $1 billion expansion of the Las Vegas Convention Center, which remains unused. CES expects its show to return in 2022, but most likely in a partially digital form.

Talk about positive patient ID: Denver police arrest the wrong woman for burglary after being told their suspect was an inpatient at St. Joseph’s Hospital, which they confused with Denver Health, where they arrested patient Sarah Cook in her hospital bed. Cook, who is a nurse, spent two nights in jail until police checked surveillance footage and realized that the brown-haired Cook wasn’t the blonde suspect they were seeking. The police department apologized, the officers were suspended for 10 days for failing to positively identify Cook before arresting her, and Cook is suing the police department.

Sponsor Updates

• The United States Park Police and the District of Columbia government will use Everbridge software to provide subscribers with safety, weather, traffic, event, and emergency alerts leading up to and during the presidential inauguration.
• Experity offers updates on state-based COVID-19 vaccine provider enrollment information.
• The HCI Group Chief Digital Officer Ed Marx will speak at the HIMSS Dallas/Forth Worth Chapter’s Annual C-Suite Panel January 29.
• Konica Minolta Japan selects InterSystems IRIS for Health for rapid, FHIR-based data integration for imaging devices.
• Nordic is named a leader in Everest Group’s Healthcare IT Services Specialists PEAK Matrix Assessment 2021.
• Ten health system customers of Kyruus are using its COVID-19 vaccine scheduling capabilities and have booked 100,000 appointments in the first month.
• The local paper profiles the way in which a Medical University of South Carolina student used Jvion’s technology to find patients at risk for COVID complications.
• Meditech offers customers access to its complimentary Quick Vaccination solution to reduce the burden of COVID-19 mass vaccination distribution.

Blog Posts

• Build vs. Buy: Insulin Dosing Software (Glytec)
• Value-Based Care: A 2021 Priority (Halo Health)
• Why Data-Driven Healthcare is the Best Defense Against COVID-19 (Health Catalyst)
• Why Virtual Diabetes Programs Should Be the New Normal (Healthwise)
• COVID-19 has created additional digital identity management challenges in healthcare, Imprivata survey reveals (Imprivata)
• Save the dates: 2021 code system updates at-a-glance (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Advancing digital health solutions beyond the pandemic (Meditech)
• 2020 Year End Review: Our Most Accessed Patient Experience Resources (Kyruus)
• How COVID-19 Has Changed Healthcare (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Haven Shuts Down But Disruption Thrives (Loyale Healthcare)
• More Than Just Compliance, EPrescribing Can Reduce Opioid Misuse and Overdose Deaths (Medhost)
• Department of Health and Human Services Extends Public Health Emergency (MWTherapy)
• Top Trends Shaping the IT Industry in 2021 (Newfire Global Partners)

Contacts

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

News 1/13/21

Top News

ONC releases United States Core Data for Interoperability Draft Version 2 for public comment.

Reader Comments

From What the HIMSS?”: “Re: HIMSS21. Any idea of how it will look? I hear a hybrid in-person and virtual approach. I’m not sure what that would even look like or if it would be worth my time to attend.” I haven’t heard anything, but I am interested in what readers have heard, especially exhibitors who are usually the first to know. Big conferences seem iffy to me for 2021 given that:

• Our country’s vaccine rollout in a raging pandemic is plodding along, pushing herd immunity  far down the road, and that’s assuming that new virus variants don’t make the situation worse.
• Attendance, presentation, and exhibitor decisions will need to be made fairly soon even as attention and stretched cash are being directed elsewhere because of the pandemic.
• An unknown number of folks won’t be comfortable herding into crammed spaces of unknown ventilation any time soon, regardless of mitigation measures.
• Hospital employees are busy dealing with COVID demands that may or may not end by August.
• It will have been 18 months since HIMSS19 when HIMSS21 rolls around, so the bandwagon effect that has always guaranteed big registration numbers will be diminished.

From Listicle: “Re: Becker’s. Found this on Twitter.” The various Becker’s publications are mostly written by recent college grads (this one from the class of 2020) whose entire job is looking up stuff someone else posted online and paraphrasing it while applying no expertise beyond wordsmithing. Most “news” sites think their readers are too unmotivated to read a story that doesn’t have pictures, so they resort to using irrelevant stock art and photos when everything else is copyrighted by the original source. Adding insult to injury in this case is that the Tweeter declared the swap of the photo of a black doctor with a white one to be racist, failing to notice that the original one isn’t Adekunle Odunsi, MD, PhD either (Google would have saved her some embarrassment). Not to mention that it’s pretty obvious that these are stock photos. Anyway, that’s just how these sites work since news has turned into a zip-bang-pow comic book for people who can’t read more than three consecutive sentences without breaking for a fun video.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I might be the only person who didn’t know that several companies sell USB 3.0 flash drives that are equipped with a Lightning plug that lets you move photos off your IPhone, perform automatic backups, stream video, and exchange files with other devices. It’s probably worth a shot at around $40 for 128 GB, even with some user reports of buggy required software, but still frustrating that you just plug MicroSD cards into Android phones while Apple’s lack support for external memory requires after-market gadgets, cords, and adapters.

Listening: The Fly-Bi-Nites, a long-defunct psychedelic band from Atlanta that made the “Found Love” 45 single in 1967, sold 300 copies, then disbanded when its members went to college. Singer and co-writer Greg Presmanes still records occasionally (country music, though, in an interesting pivot) and is a 72-year-old partner in an Atlanta law firm who must have some great stories to tell his grandkids. I Shazam’ed the song while watching Season 1 of the pretty good “Hap and Leonard” series on Netflix and appreciating its bizarre soundtrack that ranges from the aforementioned psychedelia to hippie-hating, throaty country warblers that were all the rage in the Vietnam-divided 1960s.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “The One Communication Strategy Clinicians Need Now.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenters: Clay Callison, MD, CMIO, University of Tennessee Medical Center; Nicholas E. Perkins, DO, MS, hospitalist and physician informaticist, Prisma Health. Healthcare organizations are leveraging their current investments and reducing their vendor footprint, so there’s no room for clutter in healthcare communication. The presenters will describe the one communication strategy that clinicians and organizations need today, how to improve patient experience and protect revenue, and how to drive the communication efficiency of clinical teams.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Home care coordination software vendor Dina raises $7 million in a Series A funding round. The Chicago-based company has also developed an AI-powered virtual assistant for patients and software to help employers with staff availability tracking and automated COVID-19 screening.

Health data and analytics company Komodo Health secures $44 million in Series D funding and acquires Mavens, a cloud-based technology company that is focused on biotech, rare disease, and specialty pharma markets.

Central Logic acquires Acuity Link, a developer of communications and logistics management software for healthcare transportation.

Sales

• Community Health Network (IN) selects automated appointment scheduling and chatbot software from Loyal.
• Scripps Mercy Partners (CA) will implement Doctible’s patient relationship management technology across its practice network.
• La Rabida Children’s Hospital selects Emerge for clinical data access.

People

Jim Corrigan (ERT) joins ConnectiveRx as president.

SOC Telemed names Ron Egan (GE Healthcare) chief customer officer.

Heidi Kemp, MEd (The SSI Group) joins Medstreaming as VP of marketing and channel partners.

Announcements and Implementations

Dominion Radiology Associates (VA) implements Spok Go care team messaging software.

Nuance announces GA of its Patient Engagement Virtual Assistant Platform.

Prescription patient engagement service vendors Pleio and Medisafe launch GoodStart, in which patients who are starting new prescriptions are supported with live calls and digital nudges from Pleio’s concierge program, then transition to Medisafe’s medication management services.

Athenahealth will include health plan data in its display of patient medical records in a collaboration with insurer Humana.

Healthcare Growth Partners publishes its twice-yearly market review, which is so brilliantly written and admirably concise that any attempt I would make to summarize it would do more harm than good. It’s not a dispassionately nerdy investor view of obscure data points, but rather a big-picture view of our entire industry. I don’t strew editorial superlatives indiscriminately, but I can’t help but fawn over an investor-focused report that grabs me with this brilliant opening paragraph that is as close to poetry as you’ll get in a financially focused report:

The paradox of a raging bull market amidst a raging pandemic is a reality nearly impossible to reconcile. While health IT fundamentals are as  strong as ever, it feels cavalier to begin our market discussion without recognizing the toll of this pandemic. After all, we at HGP and readers of our research choose to be in healthcare because we collectively believe in the industry’s responsibility to serve the greater good. We know our industry is fraught with moral hazard, and while a few seek to exploit, most aim to solve. Fueled by low interest rates and stimulus, the pandemic has bolstered the investment thesis in health informatics, yet we know the gains will never atone for the losses.

Government and Politics

HHS allocates $8 million to the three-year Telehealth Broadband Pilot program, which helps rural providers assess broadband capacity and implement virtual care.

Banner Health pays $200,000 to settle HIPAA Right of Access violations involving five-month delays in giving two patients access to their records.

The owner of an Orlando telemarketing center is convicted of federal charges of healthcare fraud for cold-calling Medicare beneficiaries to offer them “free” cancer genetic tests, bribing telemedicine doctors to order the $6,000 tests without ever talking to the patient, and then selling the resulting orders to laboratories in return for kickbacks. Labs submitted $2.8 million of the claims, Medicare paid $880,000, and the call center owner made $180,000.

COVID-19

The latest COVID-19 statistics for the US as of Monday:

• 129,748 people are hospital inpatients.
• 1,739 people died.
• Deaths are at 376,000.
• States with the highest number of deaths per 100K population in the past week are Arizona, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
• 9 million vaccine first doses have been administered of the 25.5 million doses distributed, leaving two-thirds of available doses sitting in freezers.

US Representatives Bonnie Coleman (D-NJ), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Brad Schneider (D-IL) test positive for COVID-19 after sheltering in place in the Capitol last week along with several Republican colleagues who refused to wear the masks that they were offered. Congresswoman Coleman is a 75-year-old cancer survivor.

New York City’s comptroller says that online COVID-19 vaccine signup is so complicated that appointment slots aren’t being filled. He says that setting up an account involves a multi-step verification process, six more steps are needed to set up an appointment, and the user is required to complete up to 51 data fields and upload an image of their insurance card. A college professor says it took her 4.5 hours to find a location and make an appointment. The city has three sign-up websites, seven community clinics each have their own, four require calling them on the phone, and one involves email.

HHS will ask hospitals to submit weekly numbers on how many of their employees and patients have been vaccinated.

The family of a healthy, 50-year-old Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who died of COVID-19 says he was infected when a patient on whom he was performing a lip injection coughed on him, then called the office days later to let them know she had since tested positive for COVID-19.

Former White House coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas, MD deletes his Twitter after complaining that he lost 12,000 followers in a purge of accounts that were spreading misinformation.

A London-based mathematician-epidemiologist and public health professor illustrates the potential number of deaths from a more transmissible strain such as the B117 variant (yellow line) versus a strain that is 50% more lethal (red) or the original virus strain (gray). Ireland’s case count has jumped six-fold in just a couple of weeks as B117 became the dominant strain (9% of cases on December 27 versus 46% on January 10).

Beaumont Health (MI) CIO Hans Keil says the system tripled its server capacity over the weekend to better handle patient requests for COVID-19 vaccine appointments through its Epic MyChart patient portal. The system crashed Friday morning after nearly 9,000 patients — 10 times the usual number — attempted to access it at the same time.

WHO says that global COVID-19 herd immunity is not likely to be reached this year, making it critical that countries maintain mitigation measures, especially as poorer countries struggle to obtain vaccine whose supply is being bought up by wealthier ones.

Well Health develops a COVID-19 vaccine rapid deployment and implementation program that includes pre-appointment resources.

Other

An analysis in JAMA of medical fundraisers conducted on GoFundMe shows that users sought more than $10 billion and raised $3 billion in charitable contributions over an eight-year period. Treatment for cancer and trauma/injury were the top fundraising categories.

Sponsor Updates

• Santa Rosa Consulting staff donate toys and books to Toys for Tots.
• A local news podcast features Arcadia Chief Medical Officer Rich Parker, MD discussing Community Health Plan of Washington’s rollout of the company’s COVID-19 vaccination education and engagement platform.
• Artifact Health publishes a new case study, “OU Health standardizes physician query workflow and achieves positive results.”
• Vaco and Pivot Point Consulting launch a LinkedIn Live series that showcases female leaders across all industries.
• The Chartis Group unveils Next Intelligence branding.
• Ellkay features Meditech EVP Helen Waters in the latest installment of its Women in Health IT series.
• The National Quality Forum re-appoints Health Catalyst SVP of Professional Services Stephen Grossbart to its Primary Care and Chronic Illness Standing Committee.
• Change Healthcare helps providers comply with the CMS Price Transparency Rule with its Shop Book and Pay and Clearance Estimator Patient Direct solutions.
• Saykara wins a 2021 BIG Innovation Award for its AI-powered voice assistant that automates clinical charting, and the 2021 Sharp Index Award for “Best Health Tech Company to Reduce Burnout.”
• Central Logic adds Intelligent Transport and Bed Visibility capabilities to its healthcare access and orchestration technology.

Blog Posts

• Why It’s So Important to Perform Clinical Validation During EHR Data Conversion (314e)
• Top 10 Tips to Start Your Healthcare ESignature Project Now (Access)
• Prestera Health exposes 3,700+ patients’ info in email breach (AdvancedMD)
• Agfa HealthCare supports leading hospitals in Latin America (Agfa HealthCare)
• Differentiate Yourself: Upgrade Your Virtual Care Platform Strategy (Bluetree)
• The Hidden Benefits of a Legacy Data Management Strategy (CereCore)
• The Compelling Case for ‘Healthcare Access and Orchestration’ and Why It Matters (Central Logic)
• The 4 cybersecurity resolutions every care provider should make in 2021 (Cerner)
• Combating Ransomware: Preparation and Teamwork (Dimensional Insight)
• How HEDIS Analytics is Helping Healthcare Practices (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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