News 7/3/24

Top News

Heritage Valley Health System (PA) will pay $950,000 to settle potential HIPAA security rule violations related to a 2017 ransomware attack that was caused by malware that spread from Nuance to multiple healthcare organizations.

The health system filed a lawsuit against Nuance in 2019 claiming that the vendor failed to prevent the attack, but the suit was dismissed due to contractual technicalities.

Reader Comments

From Angel of AI: “Re: healthcare fraud. What was the largest fraud by number of US patients impacted? Have any that involved medical devices run unto the tens of thousands of patients?” Zeroing in on documented “fraud” rather than just product-related issues narrows the field quite a bit. I was going to say HCA’s various legal and civil challenges over the years, which I believe included performing unnecessary invasive procedures, but I don’t know the extent of that. Theranos might also make the list since while the fraud involved lab testing machines that gave inaccurate results 10% of the time but with unknown effect on outcomes.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m a new customer, but YouTube Premium is already my most-valued streaming service. Why: it’s ad free, plays in the background, includes YouTube Music, and lets me download videos to play offline. It’s $13.99 for an individual membership and $22.99 per month for families of up to five members with discounts for paying annually. Tips: I play on the big screen through a Roku streaming device, use the Roku app’s remote instead of the physical one so I can type search terms more easily, and turn on good audio like a sound bar. I will acknowledge that 98% of what’s on YouTube is purely intended as time-wasting junk, but the rest is well-made gold and YouTube is better than I expected at suggesting something I’ll like. Mostly I watch videos related to travel destinations, old TV clips, concerts, and how-to fixit help. We still subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, and one of the P-ones (I can never remember if its Paramount+ or Peacock), but I would give up YouTube Premium last.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Chronic pain management technology vendor Upside Health shuts down.

Care enablement technology company Fabric acquires virtual care service provider MeMD from the now-shuttered Walmart Health. Walmart bought the business, which was started in 2010, in 2021 for a reported $6 million. Fabric acquired virtual healthcare assistant startup Gyant and announced a $60 million Series A funding round earlier this year.

Telehealth vendor Amwell announces a reverse stock split in order to avoid delisting on the New York Stock Exchange. AMWL shares have lost 87% of their value in the past 12 months to $0.29, valuing the company at $86 million.

Google and TikTok ban ADHD telehealth provider Done Global from advertising on their platforms amidst a federal investigation that has expanded to include five additional people of interest. Done’s CEO and clinical president were arrested last month on charges of distributing Adderall, healthcare fraud, and obstruction of justice.

Virtual primary care company K Health raises a $50 million funding round.

Sales

• Babson Diagnostics will implement Ellkay’s lab-ordering software and LKCareEvolve clinician portal as a part of its BetterWay blood-testing service.
• Adventist Health (CA) selects The Garage’s population health management software.
• Cleveland Clinic will integrate Masimo’s Hospital Automation Platform with its patient monitoring technologies as part of its TeleCritical Care program.

People

Cordea Consulting promotes Thomas Sjostedt to VP of sales.

Greater Houston Healthconnect promotes Junaid Husain, ALM, MBA to CEO.

Ron Wozny, MBA (HealthSmart) joins MyDirectives as SVP of marketing and business development.

CSI Companies hires Douglas Herr (Healthcare IT Leaders) as SVP of client services and strategy.

Carrie Damon, MHA (CommonSpirit Health) joins KPMG as global chief digital officer of KPMG Delivery Network.

Announcements and Implementations

UT Health East Texas implements virtual nursing from Care.ai across its network.

UCHealth (CO) rolls out prior authorization software co-developed with Arrive Health at three of its clinics. It will implement the software across its network next year. UCHealth invested in Arrive’s (fka RxRevu) Series A funding round in 2019 after working with the company for several years through its Care Innovation Center.

The Headwaters High-Value Network clinically integrated network launches with 19 independent rural Minnesota hospitals as members. HVN will consider shared technology solutions in population health management, analytics, and are management.

Government and Politics

NHS London’s medical director says pathology services across its six boroughs are operating at 46% capacity since its pathology services vendor Synnovis was hit with a ransomware attack on June 3.

The Department of Justice recaps the recent sentences of these former Outcome Health executives who were involved in a $1 billion corporate fraud scheme. Three other executives have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing. DOJ summarizes, “faking it until you make it is not an acceptable practice for any business.”

• Co-founder and CEO Rishi Shah: seven years and six months in prison.
• Co-founder and President Shradha Agarwal: three years in a halfway house.
• CEO/CFO Brad Purdy: two years and three months in prison.

Other

UTHealth San Antonio previews the technologies its new Multispecialty and Research Hospital will feature when it opens in December, including virtual nursing, smart beds, and three “Rosey” robots that will deliver items to the 144-bed facility’s nursing units.

Sponsor Updates

• Inovalon joins the Meditech Alliance ecosystem of partner organizations.
• AdvancedMD launches new automation and payment capabilities to help private practices increase productivity and drive more revenue.  
• Augmedix AI Advisory Council member Lisa Rotenstein publishes new research in JAMA Network Open, “Virtual Scribes and Physician Time Spent on Electronic Health Records.”
• AvaSure publishes a new case study, “How UCHealth used Telehealth Technologies to Slash Code Blues up to 70%.”
• Cordea Consulting promotes Michael Tierney to recruiting supervisor.

Blog Posts

• Enhancing Healthcare Practices Through Effective Benefit Verification (AdvancedMD)
• Agfa Insights: UKIO 2024 Key Takeaways (Agfa HealthCare)
• Leveraging Global Resources to Address HIM and Clinical Labor Shortages (AGS Health)
• Analytics in 2024: Making the most sense out of your data (Altera Digital Health)
• Navigating Governance: Build Your Healthcare Analytics Communication Framework (Artera)
• Inaccurate Provider Directories Create Barriers to Care (Availity)
• New York City FC & Capital Rx – More Than a Sleeve Partnership (Capital Rx)
• 7 Ways to Optimize Meditech Expanse for Provider Satisfaction (CereCore)
• Optimizing RCM for Growth Today and Tomorrow (EClinicalWorks)
• Enhance Patient Experience with Continuous Insurance Coverage Search (FinThrive)
• The 6 Logical Steps to Data Migration (Five9)
• Education on Patient Liability Should Occur Every Step of the Way (Impact Advisors)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 7/1/24

Top News

Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago reports in a data breach filing notice that the information of 791,000 people was exposed to ransomware hackers in its January 31 cyberattack.

The Rhysida ransomware group claimed in March that it had stolen the hospital’s data and sold it for $3.4 million.

The hospital finished restoring its systems on May 20.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents would like to see government review or approval when private equity firms propose to conduct a provider-related transaction. I’m siding with commenter and industry long-timer Bill Spooner, who suggests that equal attention be paid to not-for-profit transactions since the goal is the same, to eliminate competition and to buy practices as bed-fillers under the guise of integration.

New poll to your right or here, following up on Dr. Jayne’s comments last week and some excellent observations from reader DrM: Does healthcare have an oversupply of physician informaticists? I’m focusing just on the physician part of clinical informatics since that was the subject of Dr. Jayne’s original pondering.

Today I learned – at least I think I did — that my long-time dentist’s practice was acquired years ago by Heartland Dental, which is owned by private equity firm KKR. I’m speculating on the “acquired” part since Heartland labels itself as a DSO (dental services organization) that serves “affiliates,” but it sounds like they either buy practices outright or perhaps take a majority position. Whatever they do, it involves 1,700 practices, 20,000 employees, and the opening of several dozen new practices from scratch each year. I should be relieved that unlike PE-acquired medical practices or hospitals, it doesn’t seem that quality or customer service have slipped.

I don’t watch TV and therefore had never seen Conan O’Brien on anything until YouTube pushed a video at me this weekend from something called “First We Feast Hot Ones” (never heard of it), in which Conan takes over the show as only someone who is smart, funny, and schooled in improv could do (not to mention sticking to the bit while chugging down high-Scoville hot sauce). That led me down the rabbit hole of a Dr. Arroyo follow-up and then a deep dive into old appearances by Jordan Schlansky and savagely funny, Robert Smigel-operated Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, all of which were new to me. I don’t listen to podcasts, but “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” might lure me in. Conan sold his Team Coco podcast network for $150 million two years ago to Sirius XM, or as Triumph recently called it, “the abandoned mall of the entertainment industry” and then added, “Why get your milk for free when you could rent the cow for $21.99 a month?”

I nominate “please know” as the most irritating wording in corporate blathering history, given that it’s meaningless, superfluous (just tell us what you want us to know), and also gratingly fawning since companies use it to feign sincerity and humility, usually because of their own misstep or misbehavior. I rank it above even “please don’t hesitate to call” to attempt to sound more professional (sort of like the pompous “utilize” or “leverage” instead of “use.”) I’m more amused than annoyed at out-of-office email replies that claim “I will have limited access to email” as though the person doesn’t own a smartphone instead of just admitting that they at least temporarily have more important things to do.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Optum notifies Massachusetts regulators that it won’t follow through on a previously announced agreement to buy Steward Health Care’s physician network.

People

Optum promotes Cara Griffin to SVP of marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS report on digital rounding solutions for nurses finds that Huron, the 2024 Best in KLAS winner, tops the list in customer satisfaction and the ability to drive outcomes and reduce nurse workload.

Other

Australia’s SA health orders an investigation into an error in its Sunrise EHR that miscalculated the estimated due dates of 1,700 pregnant women, raising concerns that the incorrect dates may have caused clinicians to induce labor too early.

Sponsor Updates

• Consensus Cloud Solutions receives the 2024 CSO Award from Foundry’s CSO for demonstrating outstanding business value and thought leadership.
• Black Book Research declares Inovalon the top-ranked vendor in robust data integration and predictive analytics, according to feedback from managed care, health plans, and payer technology users.
• Five9 publishes a new e-book, “AI in Healthcare: How AI Drives Value for Five9 Healthcare Customers.”
• Waystar takes Black Book’s top spot for end-to-end revenue RCM solutions for health systems.
• Surescripts Chief Product Officer Tara Dragert joins the NCPDP Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
• Inovalon announces a partnership with the Meditech Alliance, which will offer the company’s end-to-end RCM to Meditech customers.
• TruBridge publishes a new case study, “How Texas Institute for Surgery Increased Cash Flow and Decreased AR Days.”

Blog Posts

• Can the ONC help drive greater API adoption? (Zen Healthcare IT)
• Enhanced Care Management: Care Coordination for California’s Most Vulnerable (Netsmart)
• The rise of inboxologists in healthcare: Does it really matter who responds? (Nordic)
• 3 Healthcare HR Challenges GenAI Can Help Solve (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• From Aspiration to Achievement: Stacia Fredericks’ Educational Journey with the Assistance of the QGenda /AACN Nursing Scholarship (QGenda)
• 2024 HL7 FHIR DevDays Top 5 takeaways (a newbie’s take) (Redox)
• 5 tips to improve patient health literacy (Sonifi Health)
• How to Provide a Scalable, Flexible, and Seamless Financial Experience (TrustCommerce)
• At Moose Pharmacy the Future of Community Pharmacy is Rooted in the Past (Surescripts)
• How to Combat Key Stressors in Nursing (Symplr)
• Their Words. Not Ours. (Visage Imaging)

Contacts

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

News 6/28/24

Top News

Walgreens Boots Alliance reports Q3 results: revenue up 2.6%, adjusted EPS $0.63 versus $1.00, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings. The company also lowered FY 2024 EPS guidance, citing inconsistent consumer spending. Shares shed 22% of their value following the Thursday morning announcement, dropping their price to 1997 levels.

Walgreens will reduce its stake in primary care provider VillageMD and will no longer hold a majority share. CEO Tim Wentworth, who took the job in October, says that Walgreens will no longer seek majority ownership of primary and specialty care provider businesses and will instead pursue “capital-light services” with a larger range of providers and payers

Walgreens will close a “meaningful percent” of its underperforming stores, which represent about one-fourth of its 8,600 locations. Its review of stores to close will include proximity to other Walgreens and the local crime level in some cities. It says it will work with state Medicaid programs and local law enforcement as the “last company standing” in areas that would be pharmacy deserts otherwise. The company had already closed 625 locations.

Reader Comments

From Steve Shihadeh: “Re: your ‘Death of a Salesman’ response. Pretty good considering your experience and contempt .” Industry long-timer Steve of Get-to-Market Health adds these insights:

• The best salespeople have a great balance of product and service knowledge, relationship skills, and a real appreciation for what drives the buyer.
• AI gives good salespeople the chance to be better prepared and have more compelling presentations and facts.
• While AI is all the rage today, in some ways it is like every big technical evolution. PC, Internet, Search, WiFi, etc. The best sales people will learn about it and find the way to relate it to what the customer needs and how it impacts them in a positive manner.

From Vince Remembered: “Re: ‘Death of a Salesman.’ Your response about salespeople was slightly cynical before turning positive, but not nearly as much so as the late, great Vince Ciotti in your 2019 interview.” I love that interview with industry long-timer Vince and re-read it often. Here are Vince’s thoughts about salespeople, which may or may not remain relevant several decades after his experience:

We hired salesman at SMS and they spent one day walking around all the offices, saying hello, shaking hands. Who are you? What do you do? Oh, OK. Then boom, after one day, they were out there selling. They had no idea what they were selling. It doesn’t matter. Sales is commissions. If you sell a lot of systems, you make a lot of money and you get promoted and you become a big cheese. If you don’t sell any systems, you get fired. You’re going to go to another company and try again. You don’t learn the product. You haven’t been an installer or a customer service rep. You haven’t worked with the system. You have no idea how the system works. What you know how to do is smile, be pleasant, buy lunch, buy dinner, shake hands, be charming, have people trust you, get them to sign the contract, and then run like hell because you’ve got to make some more sales.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors earn attention from digital health decision-makers, including provider folk, investors, and potential acquisition partners. You’re reading the site already, so imagine the pride of saying, “hey, that’s our name and ad up there.” Contact Lorre, who is motivated by the summer slowdown to offer perks and packages for new signups, and who is likely to offer attractive bundles to startups and former sponsors that rejoin the fold. Thirsty Insta influencers and podcast hosts will perform tricks like an organ grinder’s monkey in desperately seeking views and likes, but we’re talking professional B2B recognition and market influence here.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Data platform and analytics vendor Arcadia acquires CareJourney, which offers claims-sourced provider cost and quality data.

Patient access managed services vendor Hummingbird Healthcare closes a $10 million Series A funding round that was led by UCHealth. CEO Jeremy Schwach was formerly CEO Of Bluetree Network, which was acquired by Tegria in 2019.

The Private Equity Stakeholder Project publishes “The Pillaging of Steward Health Care,” which notes that former owner Cerberus Capital Management generated $1.2 billion by selling off the real estate its hospitals sat on, paid fund investors a $484 million dividend from the proceeds, expanded the chain to become the country’s largest private operator of for-profit hospitals, then dumped the investment with the help of its real estate landlord having made $800 million over its 10-year ownership. The report observes that Steward paid its ownership a $111 million dividend, after which Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre bought a $40 million yacht and the company splurged on two private jets. Meanwhile, Steward missed rent payments, racked up patient safety concerns, laid of employees, closed hospitals, and last month filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $9 billion in liabilities, most of it due to the real estate company to which Cerebrus sold the real estate. Terms that were part of new financing require the company to close hospitals that it can’t sell in a bidding process that started this week, as officials in the eight states in which Steward operates hospitals worry about loss of services.

New Jersey-based Atlantic Health System will acquire Saint Peter’s Healthcare System.

Amazon renames its 18-month-old Amazon Clinic to Amazon One Medical Pay-per-visit, which will offer pay-per-visit telehealth – $29 for message-based visits, $49 for video — and a membership program for on-demand virtual care and next-day appointments at One Medical offices.

Sales

• Findhelp announces new SDoH network customers Stanford Children’s Health, Virginia Association of Free & Charitable Clinics, and Connxus.
• Community Health Network will implement Microsoft Azure and Nuance Dragon Medical as it increases its use of DAX Copilot and Dragon Medical One.
• Emergency Services Inc. will implement the recently launched Augmedix Go ED ambient AI for emergency medicine at an unnamed large hospital in central Ohio.

People

Healthcare IT Leaders names Jody Buchman, MBA (Clarivate) as SVP of continuous services and David Unger (MedKick) as VP of EHR and RCM.

Government and Politics

Federal authorities will seize the $8 million Chicago mansion of Outcome Health founder Rishi Shah, one of three former company executives who are facing prison time for fraud involving electronic advertising in waiting rooms.Outcome was valued at $5.5 billion before its collapse, with Shah’s net worth estimated at $3.6 billion. The Outcome name was retired in 2021 with the acquisition of its remains by healthcare digital marketing company PatientPoint. Update: 38-year-old Rishi Shah was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison on Wednesday. Co-founder Shradha Agarwal was sentenced to three years in a halfway house on Thursday.

The VA says that it is so far behind on paying contract provider claims due to Change Healthcare’s ransomware downtime that it won’t catch up until February, a year after the original incident. It also expects that its payments from insurers won’t catch up until October.

Privacy and Security

San Diego’s PBS TV station notes that Palomar Health Medical Group’s phones and computer systems remain down from a May 5 cyberattack. Patients report problems getting paper prescriptions filled and nurses relying on the patient to tell them the doctor’s diagnosis.

Sponsor Updates

• Inovalon publishes a new study, “Race/Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Position in Emergency Department Utilization in Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma.”
• FinThrive publishes a new case study, “Lawrence General Hospital Successfully Switches to FinThrive After a Cyberattack.”
• Imperial Beach Community Clinic (CA) adds AI, patient engagement, and AI-powered medical scribe capabilities to its implementation of EClinicalWorks.
• First Databank will share information from RxEOB’s prescription pricing transparency application through its FDB Vela prescribing network.
• Healthcare IT Leaders CMO Alex Gramling joins the United Way of Southern Maine’s board.
• Visage Imaging will showcase new enhancements to its Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform at the SIIM annual meeting in National Harbor, MD this week.
• Children’s National Hospital (Washington, DC) expands its use of Laudio’s AI-enhanced workflow platform to include nurse educators.
• Linus Health leaders publish a new peer-reviewed paper, “Towards a lifelong personalized brain health program: empowering individuals to define, pursue, and monitor meaningful outcomes.”
• Loyal achieves TX-RAMP Level 2 Certification for its Chatbot solution from the Texas Department of Information Resources.

Blog Posts

• Pioneering Business Continuity in Healthcare: FinThrive’s Standby Solutions (FinThrive)
• New Five9 Data: AI in CX – It is not replacing humans (Five9)
• How Mature is Your Healthcare SOC? (Fortified Health Security)
• Rising and Falling Tides: The State of Money Supply and Health IT (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• Practice Managers Finding Effective Solutions to Maintain Smooth Clinical Operations Amidst Staff Shortages (Impact Advisors)
• The Promising Convergence of Payer Strategy and Compliance with the CMS Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule (InterSystems)
• AI & Healthcare Marketing. Are You Ready? (Loyal)
• Tips for participating in CHIME’s Digital Health Most Wired program and survey (Meditech)
• Navigating MIPS Compliance: Tips for Medicare Wound Care Providers (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 6/26/24

Top News

HHS releases a final rule that establishes “disincentives” for healthcare providers who are found by HHS OIG to have committed information blocking. It will take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register.

Hospitals will be penalized via the Medicare Promoting Interoperability Program, MIPS-eligible clinicians will sit out a calendar year, and ACOs who participate in the Medicare Shared Savings Program will be made ineligible for at least one year. Health IT developers, HIEs, and health information networks can be penalized up to $1 million per occurrence, as previously announced.

OIG will use four priorities for enforcement: the potential to cause patient harm, the potential to impact a provider’s ability to care for patients, issues of longstanding duration, and practices that have caused financial loss to federal healthcare programs.

HHS plans to eventually impose disincentives on all healthcare providers rather than just those who provide services under Medicare. It also says that other agencies could establish their own disincentives.

Reader Comments

From Troy: “Re: UAB Birmingham. Reportedly purchased all five Ascension hospitals in the Birmingham area.” Verified following board approval Tuesday. UAB Health System will pay $450 million for five-hospital Ascension St. Vincent’s, whose flagship is 400-bed St. Vincent’s Hospital. The health system has 5,000 employees.

From Thusly Honored: “Re: CIO Times Magazine. I COULD be an important person if I just paid a nominal fee of $1,800.” The India-based magazine – one of several that focus on specific verticals — is selling a spot among “Top 5 HealthTech Leaders Moving Towards Bright Future,” whose odd wording confirms authorship by non-native speakers. The $1,800 deal offers a profile write-up, advertising, and “collaboration” in publishing press releases and guest articles (honestly, this isn’t all that different from my pay-for-play competitors who will run just about any interview, guest post, or company puff piece once the check clears). Respectable companies surely don’t want their names involved, so most “winners” are one-person companies like real estate agents, consulting firms, personal coaches, and self-proclaimed spiritual leaders. The healthcare list publishes in July, when I’ll be like a viewer of “To Catch a Predator” to see which industry blowhards get caught paying to have their vanity stroked.

From AT: “Re: ‘Death of a Salesman.’ Your thoughts on the future of sales as a profession, both for health IT and at large.” It’s natural that you would ask me given my experience in sales (zero) and my occasional contempt for the process (glad-handing hired guns with limited product knowledge who will push iron for whoever pays the highest commission). Still, I begrudgingly acknowledge that “nothing happens until someone sells something” and that prospects often need prodding and education to reach a purchase decision that might be in their organization’s best interest. My conclusions, which could use some help from people who actually know sales:

• Every company will continue to need salespeople, probably even more of them, and people who excel at selling will never be unemployed. AI is not a threat.
• Unlike many professions, everyone in a company knows who the best salespeople are. They often are the best at building relationships that span employers.
• Automation, analytics, and AI won’t make mid-pack salespeople automatically better, but they will amplify the effectiveness of the best salespeople by letting them focus on relationships and help them identify the prospects that are most likely to buy.
• Remote and virtual selling are newly valued competencies, especially for lower-margin products or those that can be explained in a straightforward way.
• Getting people to sign on the line which is dotted remains the highest-valued skill in most companies.
• Maybe the biggest question is how prospects will do research (AI, the recommendations of colleagues, etc.), whether products offer demonstrable ROI that support sales, and whether the role of sales-killers (often the prospect’s IT department or CFO) is changing.
• If sales were easy, companies wouldn’t hire the best people to do it.

Webinars

June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

EVisit acquires inpatient tele-consult technology that was developed by UPMC Enterprises and secures investments from UPMC and MedStar Health (MD).

Health and social care navigation software vendor Pear Suite receives $1 million in funding.

University Hospitals (OH) will eliminate 300 non-clinical positions and reorganize its leadership structure in an effort to overcome financial challenges. It attributes its nearly half billion dollars in operating losses over the last two years to inflation, rising employee costs, and expenses associated with its Epic implementation last fall.

Sales

• Watertown Regional Medical Center (WI) will implement MSK-related care protocols, analytics, and patient engagement software from Healthcare Outcomes Performance Company.
• Unity Health in Toronto will go live on Epic in November.
• A health system in Ohio will roll out Augmedix’s Go ED generative AI clinical documentation technology with help from Emergency Services Inc.
• Children’s National Hospital expands its use of Laudio for prioritizing and automating the key responsibilities of frontline leaders.
• Preferred Management Corporation will deploy Meditech Expanse via the Meditech as a Service platform to its seven hospitals and nine clinics in Texas.

People

Optimum Healthcare IT names Rick Shepardson (Clearsense) EVP of enterprise application services.

Antonio Cueto, MBA, LLM, MS (Eden Health) joins Capital Rx as CFO.

Valley Health System (NJ) hires K. Nadeem Ahmed, MD (The Aga Khan University) as CMIO.

Firasat Hussain (Arrivia) joins SnapCare as CTO.

John Evans (Evergreen Health Partners) joins Sutter Health as VP of digital care.

Michael O’Toole, MS (Nordic Global) joins Coker as SVP.

Announcements and Implementations

Researchers publish their lessons learned about using patient-generated data to fuel clinical decision support, which they conclude isn’t as easy as it sounds and requires new policies processes, technologies, and expertise.

FinThrive announces GA of Standby Claims and Standby Eligibility, backup solutions that are designed to help providers maintain financial stability during revenue cycle interruptions.

Regional HIE and health IT consulting firm Centralis Health uses Zen Healthcare IT’s Gemini Integration capabilities to connect to the EHealth Exchange network and Carequality framework.

FDA clears AliveCor’s AI-powered, single-cable ECG system that can detect 14 arrhythmias and 21 morphologies, including acute MI.

Orlando Health launches Arthur, a self-developed IPad app that allows non-verbal inpatients to communicate by typing or choosing graphics.

Oracle announces GA of the voice-first Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant for ambulatory clinics.

Government and Politics

A KFF Health News investigation finds that error-prone Medicaid eligibility systems that were developed by Deloitte have caused eligible people to be turned down. The company has been award eligibility systems contracts by 25 states that are worth at least $5 billion.

Privacy and Security

Greenwood Leflore Hospital and Sharkey Issaquena Community Hospital, both in Mississippi, will implement cybersecurity software from Microsoft through a recently announced White House initiative that offers rural hospitals cybersecurity resources at free and reduced rates.

Vikas Singla will serve two years of home detention after being found guilty of hacking into several Gwinnett Medical Center (GA) systems in 2018 in an effort to create business for Securolytics, where he was employed as COO. He has already paid $800,000 in restitution.

Sponsor Updates

• Consensus Cloud Solutions matches MUSE Inspire Conference attendee contributions to donate $3,700 to pediatric medical transport charity AeroAngel.
• FinThrive VP of Health Insights Jonathan Wiik authors a new book, “The RCM Advantage: Transformative Revenue Management for Healthcare.”
• Vyne Medical publishes a new customer success story, “Efficiency Elevated: A Hospital’s Success Story with Customized Healthcare Solutions.”
• AdvancedMD announces a new integration partnership with Mental Health Technologies.
• Artera adds patient self-scheduling appointment capabilities to its Harmony patient engagement platform.
• Care.ai announces that it has been recognized as a 2024 Top Company in Smart Rooms by Avia Marketplace.
• Visage Imaging publishes a new video titled “Visage 7 CloudPACS – Five Things You Need to Know.”

Blog Posts

• Customer Exclusive: My life in flow – Part 2 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Applying Technology to Mid-Cycle Operations (AGS Health)
• Collaboration between hospitals will get NHS back on its feet (Altera Digital Health)
• Impact and challenges of large language models in healthcare (Arcadia)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/24/24

Top News

A Texas federal court sides with the AHA, Texas Hospital Association, and two health systems in ruling that HHS does not have the authority to invoke HIPAA to ban the use of web tracking tools by providers.

The plaintiffs said in their lawsuit that HHS had issued an unlawful rule that masqueraded as guidance.

The judge specifically rejected HHS’s argument that website tracking data – which doesn’t identify an individual and can’t easily be used to do so – is individually identifiable health information that is protected by HIPAA.

Reader Comments

From Fact Checker: “Re: value of digital health. I see that the survey was done by a ‘creative market research agency, and their methodology was equally creative – they used an online survey of 56 health insurance executives who are involved with digital health. Of course they are going to say that customers of the company are pleased with the newfound strengths of digital health, or otherwise, they would be out of a high-paying job. They should spend more time fixing or eliminating the prior auth process rather than contracting for self-congratulatory surveys.” Industry executive surveys that ask about what they are using or how users / customers like it are prone to bias, given that the people who authorized or oversee the software they bought would be ill-advised to say anything negative and thus implicate themselves in faulty decision-making. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose by spouting off gripes, even ones where they aren’t named as a source. There’s not much value in warning people to avoid making the same mistake you did.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents don’t see the threat of government penalties as a way to improve healthcare cybersecurity. Reader National Geographic posted an analogy involving gazelles running from cheetahs and then finished with an even stronger one related to pirates:

Did you know that maritime piracy peaked in 2010 with 445 attacks? In 2022, there were 115 attacks. Many factors have contributed to the steep decline, including navy involvement, increased security, and targeting of originating countries. Oddly, no one suggested shooting holes in the hulls of the victims as an effective deterrence.

New poll to your right or here: should state or federal government require review and/or approval of provider-related private equity transactions? We allowed for-profit companies to by whatever healthcare assets they want, so do we let the status quo ride, draw the line at PE firms, or tighten laws on any for-profit company buying a hospital or practice?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Augmedix. Augmedix (Nasdaq: AUGX) empowers clinicians to connect with patients by liberating them from administrative burden through the power of ambient AI, data, and trust. The platform transforms natural conversations into organized medical notes, structured data, and point-of-care notifications that enhance efficiency and clinical decision support. Incorporating data from millions of interactions across all care settings, Augmedix collaborates with hospitals and health systems to improve clinical, operational, and financial outcomes. Thanks to Augmedix for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s an intro video for Augmedix.

Webinars

June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Sharecare, which went public via a SPAC merger in July 2021 at a $4 billion valuation, will be acquired and taken private by investment firm Altaris at a price of around $500 million.

Kaiser-created value-based care organization Risant Health will acquire North Carolina-based Cone Health as its second health system after Geisinger. Cone Health will retain its brand, board, and leadership team.

Philips Respironics will cut 300 manufacturing jobs in western Pennsylvania and relocate 500 workers at its Pittsburgh headquarters to nearby plants, two months after the company was hit with an FDA consent decree for selling sleep apnea machines and ventilators that contained toxic foam. The Department of Justice is continuing its investigation into whether the company knew about the problem years before its massive recall, which would subject it to criminal charges. Philips bought Respironics, which invented the modern CPAP device, in 2008. 

Change Healthcare will begin notifying individuals who were affected by its ransomware attack in late July. Andrew Witty, CEO of parent company UnitedHealh Group, previously estimated that up to one-third of Americans may have had their data compromised.

The Russian hacker group that launched a ransomware attack on UK-based pathology provider Synnovis – which disrupted operations at several London hospitals – publishes 400 GB of stolen data after its $50 million ransom demand was not met.

Sponsor Updates

• Health Data Movers releases a new “Quick Hits” podcast, “Transforming Healthcare IT with Crystal Broj.”
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast, “Interview with Joshua Reischer, MD.”
• Waystar will exhibit at the EClinicalWorks Dallas Day Show June 26.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a video titled “How Top Health Systems Are Using GenAI to Wow Employees.”

Black Book Research publishes the results of its 2024 RCM user survey. The following HIStalk Sponsors have achieved top rankings:

• Waystar – Inpatient hospital claims management solutions / End-to-end RCM software, large hospital chains, systems, and IDNs / End-to-end RCM software, large inpatient facilities and academic medical centers / Physician clearinghouse services, five to 10 practitioners.
• MRO – Release of information and secure provider data exchange.
• Inovalon – Provider RCM intelligence and analytics solutions.
• FinThrive – Chargemaster and price transparency solutions / Provider revenue/charge integrity and billing compliance solutions / End-to-end RCM outsourcing, community hospitals 101-250 beds.
• TruBridge – End-to-end RCM software, small/rural/critical access hospital chains, systems, and IDNs / Patient accounting systems, community hospitals.
• Availity – Physician clearinghouse services, 26+ practitioners.
• Symplr – Spend management solutions.
• QGenda – Nurse/clinician staff scheduling solutions.
• RLDatix – Financial governance and risk management solutions.
• CereCore – RCM IT infrastructure and tech support services.

Blog Posts

• How healthcare leaders can turn the burnout problem into an opportunity (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Four EVV Challenges and How Addressing Them Can Improve Care and Operations (Netsmart)
• Best practices in enterprise care management for patient-centered care excellence (Nordic)
• Top Challenges for CNIOs: Governance, Priorities, and More (PerfectServe)
• From Aspiration to Achievement: Stacia Fredericks’ Educational Journey with the Assistance of the QGenda/AACN Nursing Scholarship (QGenda)
• Key takeaways from Snowflake’s 2024 Data Cloud Summit (Redox)
• How to Know It’s Time for a Security Best Practices Risk Assessment (CereCore)
• The List of Therapeutic Alternatives Makes Everyone Happy (Surescripts)
• Top Metrics for a Healthcare Quality Management Dashboard (Symplr)

Contacts

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

News 6/21/24

Top News

An AMA physician survey finds that nearly 25% believe that prior authorization processes have caused a serious adverse event.

Two-thirds of respondents don’t believe that PA decision criteria are evidence-based. 

Nearly all of the respondents believe that prior authorization work increases physician burnout, with the average physician dealing with 43 PA requests per week that require 12 hours of physician and staff time.

One-fourth of respondents say their requests are often or always denied, while most believe that PA increases overall utilization as patients are forced to try ineffective treatments or to schedule more appointments because of PA-caused delays.

Reader Comments

From Former Nordic Exec: “Re: Nordic. I haven’t seen you report on the lawsuit that continues to impact the company’s leadership team.” I missed this item, although I admit that it doesn’t clear my interest hurdle. John Distefano sued Nordic Consulting Partners and now-retired CEO James Costanzo in February 2023, claiming that Nordic stole his software idea after he contracted with the company to develop and monetize it. The issue is murky because the parties signed various agreements as contractors and then with Distefano as an employee, which gives the company rights to anything an employee creates. Distefano created Wellward, which creates care plans from disconnected health and consumer information. The legal documents I’m able to view – as a litigation illiterate who doesn’t subscribe to PACER or other services – don’t paint a strong case, especially since it doesn’t seem that Nordic ever did anything with the software. I wouldn’t consider this item newsworthy unless a court rules against the company and mandates a big payout, nor would it seem to warrant a lot of executive concern. 

Webinars

June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Lifespan will rename itself to Brown University Health as part of a seven-year, $150 million Brown University investment in the health system.

Prior authorization technology vendor Humata Health raises a $25 million investment. Founder and CEO Jeremy Friese, MD, MBA, was co-founder and CEO at Verata Health. That company was acquired by now-defunct Olive AI in December 2020. Friese formed Humata Health to buy back the Verata PA assets from Olive in its wind-down.

Sales

• Deaconess Health System will provide 24×7 urgent care in all 50 states via virtual visits from KeyCare, which offers patients access from Epic MyChart. 
• HHS agency ARPA-H — the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health — will use Palantir software to support its healthcare R&D efforts.

Announcements and Implementations

An EY survey of 56 health insurance executives finds that most believe that member experience has become more personalized — partly due to mobile apps, member portals, and telehealth – and member satisfaction increases when they have access to their own information. Most respondents tout the value of medical device wearables. The majority believe that digital health solutions can help reduce costs, but few of them have seen ROI.

Government and Politics

California’s attorney general co-sponsors proposed legislation that would allow require the office’s approval to complete private equity and hedge fund transactions in healthcare. The law could upend the business model that is known as Captive Professional Corporation or Friendly PC model, in which a clinician forms a professional corporation for billing but contracts with an outside company to provide services, thus avoiding conflicts with state laws that address the corporate practice of medicine. The issue is getting significant exposure in the investment and digital health communities through the reporting of Christina Farr, who believes that the legislation would have a major impact on digital health vendors.

Privacy and Security

The Russian hackers who launched a ransomware attack against UK-based pathology services vendor Synnovis have demanded a $50 million payment.

Other

Bizarre: a doctor and former elected official in Kenya who became a billionaire by opening hospitals sees his hospitals and his personal mansion set for the auction block after he is accused of using the hospitals as a front for his involvement with an international organ smuggling syndicate.

A food vlogger’s video titled “The Most Expensive Restaurant in America” draws millions of views, as Trigg Ferrano parodies his hospital stay. I wouldn’t deem it particularly clever or funny, but I feel that way for most YouTube videos whose goal seems to give people yet another way to waste time. I imagine it’s worse on Insta or TikTok, which I don’t use and haven’t installed.

Sponsor Updates

• Surescripts will implement the NCPDP SCRIPT Standard Version 2023011, Real-Time Prescription Benefit v13, and Formulary and Benefit v60 standards upgrades following publication of the CMS final rule.
• AvaSure hosts its Chief Nursing Executives Advisory Board in Nashville to share best practices for leveraging virtual care delivery models.
• Vyne Medical adds FormUSign, a new tool for automating electronic forms, to its Trace data workflow platform.
• Ellkay publishes a new customer success story featuring Lehigh Valley Health Network.
• Findhelp announces that benefits screening platform and case management system vendor Single Stop will add Findhelp’s hundreds of thousands of locations to its community resources map.
• CereCore will partner with FinThrive to deliver Revenue Cycle Management Technology Adoption Model (RCMTAM) consulting and advisory services to providers.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new case study titled “Epic Go-Live Success: Navigating a Cyber Outage at Guthrie Lourdes Hospital.”
• RLDatix CEO Jeff Surges will speak at the HFMA Annual Conference next week.
• FinThrive joins the Meditech Alliance Program, giving Meditech Expanse end users access to its Claims Manager and Access Coordinator Insurance Verifier solutions.
• Linus Health announces recent industry recognitions for its efforts to develop better tools for assessing cognitive function.
• MRO CEO Jason Brown wins EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year 2024 Greater Philadelphia Award.

Blog Posts

• New Five9 Data: AI in CX – It is not replacing humans (Five9)
• How a Continuous SOC Protects Healthcare Data (Fortified Health Security)
• Are You Confident in Your Health System’s Business Resilience? (Impact Advisors)
• Evaluating Impact of Medicare Cost Cap for Insulin on Patient Treatment (Inovalon)
• Medhost Q&A: Blue Ridge Medical Center’s Transition to Rural Emergency Hospital (Medhost)
• How ServiceNow Can Disrupt Healthcare – In a Good Way (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Surveillance Collaborative breaks new ground with Meditech’s predictive analytics solution (Meditech)
• CMS Final Rule: Physical Therapy Medicare Guidelines for 2024 and Updates (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 6/19/24

Top News

Stat reports that Alphabet’s Verily will pivot – for the second time in two years – by retiring its chronic disease management app Onduo and moving to a new one called Lightpath, which will focus on AI-sprinkled diabetes treatment and issuing prescriptions for GLP-1 drugs.

Stat notes that selling weight loss prescriptions is quite a fall from Verily’s charter mission to “defeat Mother Nature” with moonshot ideas such as cancer detection, public health monitoring, and a smart contact lens.

Verily was launched in 2015 as part of Google X and raised $3.5 billion in funding.

Verily’s chairman, president, and CEO is Stephen Gillett, whose background is cybersecurity and executive stints with Best Buy and Starbucks.

Reader Comments

From Deadbeat Dasher: “Re: medical debt. This editorial says the credit reporting system shouldn’t punish Americans for getting sick.” Allow me to take the counterpoint to the article in asking, why shouldn’t medical debt continue to be included in credit reports?

• A lender should be able to see the total amount of debt that a consumer owes in assessing their ability and willingness to pay the new debt they request.
• Including medical debt on credit reports gives people an incentive to pay what they owe.
• Credit report omission argument is a convenient way to avoid addressing the real issues of out-of-control healthcare costs, provider billing errors, insurer foot-dragging, and lack of pricing transparency and the ability to shop around.
• On top of that, it’s really an indictment of the three credit reporting companies that don’t get paid for accuracy, keeping consumers happy, or responding to consumers who ask to have mistakes on their record fixed.
• My conclusion: omitting medical debt in credit reports is like excluding criminal history from background reporting using the reasoning that it is unfair, prejudiced, perhaps of limited predictive ability, and possibly erroneous without consumer recourse for correction. Hiding either type of information addresses the symptom, not the problems, and places companies at a disadvantage that make significant decisions based on the accuracy and completeness of consumer record. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Capital Rx. ‍Capital Rx is a full-service pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) and pharmacy benefit administrator (PBA), advancing our nation’s electronic healthcare infrastructure to improve drug price visibility and patient outcomes. As a Certified B Corp, Capital Rx is executing its mission through the deployment of JUDI, the company’s cloud-native enterprise health platform, and a Single-Ledger Model, which increases visibility and reduces variability in drug prices. JUDI connects every aspect of the pharmacy ecosystem in one efficient, scalable platform, servicing millions of members for Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial plans. Together with its clients, Capital Rx is reimagining the administration of pharmacy benefits and rebuilding trust in healthcare. Thanks to Capital Rx for supporting HIStalk.

I found this Capital Rx video on YouTube, titled “Meet JUDI — The Enterprise Health Platform For Commercial, Medicare & Medicaid Plans.”

Webinars

June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Tempus AI, which specializes in precision medicine and intelligent diagnostics, raises $410 million in its IPO, giving it a valuation of $6 billion. Founder and CEO Eric Lefkofsky co-founded Groupon and remains its chairman.

Home care management solutions vendor HHAeXchange acquires Cashe Software, which offers homecare operations and billing software.

Sales

• Sage Memorial Hospital (AZ) will implement Sonifi Health’s interactive patient engagement technology when it opens later this year.
• Children’s Health Ireland selects Ascom’s Alerts and Notification Management System.
• Praia Health will use Clear’s identity verification capabilities within its patient-focused digital experience software for health systems.
• WakeMed (NC) will deploy Bamboo Health’s care coordination solutions.
• Virtual physical therapy provider Hinge Health will offer its members access to Upswing Health’s digital platform for musculoskeletal health.

People

AtlantiCare names Jordan Ruch, MBA (RWJBarnabas Health) as CIO.

Capital Rx hires Antonio Garcia Cueto, MBA (Eden Health) as CFO.

Acentra Health names Heather Adamson, MS (Integra Connect) as SVP of marketing.

Keith Belton (Symplr) joins Fluent Dental Market Insights as SVP of marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

Christus Health (TX) implements Abridge’s AI-powered clinical documentation software.

Health system-collective Truveta adds support for real-world evidence submissions to FDA.

Healthcare wearable safety technology vendor Canopy releases a wearable safety button and safety app for home health providers.

Government and Politics

New data from ONC finds that the number of hospitals that are routinely sharing health data grew from 28% in 2018 to 43% in 2023. Of those, 92% noted they had necessary clinical data available from outside providers at the bedside, improving continuity of care.

CMS will stop accepting new applications on July 12 for the advance payments program it set up in March to help providers impacted by the Change Healthcare ransomware attack. The program has made 4,722 advance payments totaling $717 million, and issued $2.55 billion in accelerated payments.

Healthcare privacy and policy experts Tina Grande, MHS and Deven McGraw, JD, MPH, LLM highlight in a Health Affairs editorial that entities are using interoperability technology and policies to seek patient data for non-treatment purposes. They say that companies are posing as providers or, in the case of law firms seeking malpractice information, as the patient themselves. They recommend these changes:

• Fund health information exchange to prevent participants from adopting business models that are based on selling de-identified data.
• Tighten rules for the business associates of organizations that aren’t their direct customer.
• Penalize data misuse with termination from the network, banning company officers from future health network participation, and imposing FTC fines for unfair trade practices.
• Create a safe harbor for trusted exchange participants which unknowingly provide data to a participant that misstates their intentions.
• Add a FAQ that describes how entities can decline to share data without violating information blocking regulations.
• Issue clearer guidance on non-treatment purposes.
• Extend health data privacy protections to entities that collect health information and share it with patients, which is not covered by HIPAA, and define expectations for obtaining patient consent and ID verification.

Privacy and Security

NHS England reports that London-area hospitals have had to cancel or reschedule 1,500 appointments and surgeries as a result of the June 3 ransomware attack on pathology services vendor Synnovis.

Other

A ProPublica report finds that “life coaches” are mostly unregulated compared to therapists, with no specified training, certification, or ethics pledge required. Anyone can hang out a life coach shingle, and some of those who do so are former therapists who got in professional trouble. A hotbed is Utah, which is known as the “fraud capital of the United States” because many multi-level marketing scammers are Latter-Day Saints who prey on other Mormons who trust them because of their religion.

Interesting: Wells Fargo fires more than a dozen work-from-home employees of its wealth and investment management business after finding that they were using widely available mouse-jiggling software to simulate work. Maybe they should have fired their managers for not being able to notice that they weren’t productive, but in fairness, that’s the case in every business that employs knowledge workers.

Sponsor Updates

• Waystar staff across the country celebrate the company’s Nasdaq debut.

The following HIStalk sponsors will exhibit at the HFMA Annual Conference June 24-27 in Las Vegas:

• AGS Health
• Alpha II
• Altera Digital Health
• Arcadia
• Availity
• CereCore
• FinThrive
• Inovalon
• MRO
• Nordic
• QGenda
• RLDatix
• TruBridge
• TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company
• VisiQuate
• Waystar
• Wolters Kluwer

Blog Posts

• Charge Capture and Reconciliation for Strong Revenue Cycle Management (CereCore)
• Encephalopathy Coding: Challenges and Solutions (AGS Health)
• Supply chain attacks: Understanding one of cybersecurity’s biggest threats (Altera Digital Health)
• What to Expect During an OCR Audit or Investigation and How to Prepare (Clearwater)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/17/24

Top News

Ascension restores EHR access across its organization, although it once again warns patients that it is still back-entering data that was collected manually since the May 8 ransomware attack.

Remediation of other systems continues, with no timeline provided.

Reader Comments

From Talkin’ Yankees: “Re: arrested executives of Done. What about the investors who funded their company?” Just about any local doctor could pocket lots of cash by writing prescriptions for whatever the customer / patient wants, even if it’s not good for them. Few doctors are willing to sell such prescription-writing services directly, and even those who might be tempted tread lightly because their customers and pharmacies are local and word gets around quickly. Investors flocked to Adderall slingers like Done and Cerebral, which were basically invisible behind websites and mailed prescriptions going all over the US. Both companies raised hundreds of millions of dollars from dozens of investors and weren’t about to let medical ethics stand in their way of scaling to keep those investors happy. I would not be opposed to holding board members equally accountable as executives, although investors who have less day-to-day involvement might rightly claim they didn’t know (and probably didn’t want to know). The fact that no Theranos board members are sharing a country club cell with Elizabeth Holmes suggests long odds of that happening.

From Big Red Zero: “Re: Oracle Health. Feinberg says the contract extension is a testament to its progress in delivering a world-class EHR to the VA.” Company cheerleaders David Feinberg and Seema Verma had to put a positive spin on the 11-month extension. They conveniently didn’t note that Congress was so frustrated with Oracle and the VA that it insisted on one-year extensions instead of the original five as contained in the original, no-bid contract. At least Oracle must have met whatever requirements were needed to earn the renewal and can justifiably celebrate not getting fired, for now anyway. The VA doesn’t really have a backup plan other than to re-implement VistA, which they claim is not only unsustainable, but more expensive than Oracle Health.

From PE Pauper: “Re: private equity buying hospitals and medical practices. Some members of Congress are trying to make laws to limit the damage they can do.” That’s well and good if it passes with teeth in it (unlikely in our political environment), but meanwhile, the cliché of blaming the game rather than the player rules:

• PE firms break no laws when they load hospitals with unsustainable debt, sell the real estate they sit on Hahnemann-style to immediately get their money back, slash costs dangerously, and then either close the doors or file bankruptcy hoping for a bailout. Like much of corporate America, all of this is unethical, but not necessarily illegal. It’s a bad healthcare system if the only thing propping it up is the assumption of pure intentions.
• So-called “non-profit” health systems aren’t much better given aggressive business practices, closing of unprofitable but vital services, and stashing piles of cash offshore. Not to mention suing patients into bankruptcy.
• Nobody notices the inefficiency or indifference of hospital bureaucracy until they move into the patient or caregiver role. Otherwise, more people would be storming the hospital castle with torches and pitchforks.
• I know to avoid a Chinese buffet that has a long track record of near-failing sanitation scores, but I don’t have that same information or choices when it comes to hospitals. The building is architecturally precious, the lobby has a piano and cabinets full of crystal awards, and they sell sushi in the cafeteria, so it must be a good place to obtain life-or-death care. Once I’m in a bed, the chances of transferring elsewhere are low.
• Health systems are politically untouchable due to aggressive lobbying and large community employment, so legislators would need to spank  PE firms directly without hitting hospitals with friendly fire.
• Like it or not, the health system that we have have allowed to develop – one that would not be accepted by any other developed country — will be run by interchangeable corporate suits who call the shots of what happens during your most vulnerable, painful, and life-altering moments. Whether they work for PE, insurers, or regional /national health systems won’t make much difference.  

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Oracle EVP Ken Glueck wrote that “everyone in the industry” understands that Epic’s Judy Faulkner is the biggest obstacle to interoperability, a premise with which 78% of poll respondents disagree. See their comments. 

New poll to your right or here: Are government penalties effective in getting health systems to improve their cybersecurity practices? I would likely vote no since the business impact far exceeds any added-on penalty that the government might impose after the fact. But of course that begs an alternative question – what would provide that encouragement given that cybersecurity awareness is probably already adequate? Where did Ascension fall short, or is it simply impossible to protect against ransomware attacks like theirs?

Want to support what I do and gain company exposure in the process? Ask Lorre to sign you up as a new HIStalk sponsor – it takes one day, but you reap the benefit in 364 others by reaching my influential audience. Lorre can usually be persuaded to offer some first-year perks, which I pretend not to notice since I like the ego boost of bringing on new sponsors.

Today I learned that the term for the near-obsolete verbal practice of dropping the letter R in pronunciation is called a “non-rhotic” accent as practiced in the “pahk the cah” areas of New England, New York, and parts of the coastal South. Actors of the black-and-white era then latched onto the clearly phony “British Announcer Voice” to sound less regional and more sophisticated. Unrelated to R-dropping is R-adding, such as saying “warsh” instead of “wash.” Up next is the “Confederate A,” where people in parts of the deep South (and born-in-California actors trying to sound generically Southern) might pronounce “try” as “trah.”

Webinars

June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Amwell names co-founder, chairman, and co-CEO Ido Schoenberg, MD as sole CEO. Co-founder and former co-CEO, Roy Schoenberg, MD, MPH – his brother — will remain on the board. AMWL shares have lost 83% of their value in the past 12 months and are off 99% from their January 2021 high, when the company’s valuation was nearly $9 billion versus today’s $116 million.

Government and Politics

CDC warns people who have been getting Adderall from telehealth provider Done – whose executives were arrested last week on Adderall-related charges – should not resort to buying the drugs on the street as an alternative. CDC says that patients should ask their PCP about finding a new prescriber, noting that 7 of every 10 illicit pills that the DEA seizes contain a lethal dose of fentanyl.

Sponsor Updates

• Medhost’s Cloud Team sorts donations from local grocery stores at Second Harvest, which then distributes them to communities in need.
• For the second year in a row, Black Book Research survey-takers give InteliChart top marks for end-user satisfaction in the areas of patient engagement and consumer outreach solutions.
• QGenda publishes a case study, “Banner Health Uses QGenda’s Workforce Management Platform to Improve Patient Access and Time Allocation.”
• Redox releases a new Diagnosing Healthtech Podcast, “Overcoming challenges of delivering omnichannel healthcare at scale with Marcus Osborne.”
• CereCore hires Zach Grieshop as AVP of client technical services and names Kim Waters as principal to its newly formed revenue cycle advisory.
• RLDatix publishes a new resource, “The Joint Commission (JTC) Infection Prevention Updates July 1st – How RLDatix Compliance Solutions Can Help.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health Executive Director of Continuing Education Karen Innocent, DNP, RN, joins the American Nurses Credentialing Center Commission on Accreditation in Nursing Continuing Professional Development.

Blog Posts

• Integrating with your EHR: Comparing common data integration methods (Notable)
• Netsmart’s Top 5 Features for Physical Therapy Documentation Systems (Netsmart)
• Prioritizing patient-centered billing: HFMA report emphasizes clear and compassionate strategies (Nordic)
• How ServiceNow can Disrupt Healthcare – In a Good Way (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Nurses of Note 2024: The Pediatric Nurse Practitioner (PerfectServe)
• Four Pieces of Wisdom to Accelerate Digital Health Innovation (Rhapsody)
• Ahead of the Game: Q&A on Upgrading E-Prescribing Standards (Surescripts)
• Beyond the 7 Elements: Preparing Your Hospital for Future Compliance Challenges (Symplr)
• Mitigating No-Shows with Appointment Scheduling and Reminder Software (TruBridge)

Contacts

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

News 6/14/24

Top News

Ascension provides updates about its May 8 ransomware attack:

• The cyberattack was launched by a malicious email that was opened by an unsuspecting employee.
• The attackers took information from file services that employees use for daily and routine tasks, some of which are likely to contain PHI.
• Ascension is offering free credit monitoring and identity theft protection services to any patient or employee who requests it.
• EHR access has been restored in nine regions and in parts of two other regions. Organization-wide EHR access restoration is still on track for Friday, June 14.

Reader Comments

From Siri Soundalike: “Re: advice for my nurse colleague. He has many years of experience in several aspects of healthcare, earned an MBA, and was involved in starting an unrelated business. He is looking for other career opportunities and wondered what directions the diverse HIStalk readership suggests.” I will invite readers to add their thoughts. Their advice could be more targeted if they understood the type of work he wants to do (corporate employee, hands-on provider, entrepreneur,etc.) and whether he has geographic restrictions. Advice would also likely vary if he’s 30 with young children versus a financially secure 50-year-old. My first question would be, is his dream job as an employee or as a business owner? If he says “either is OK,” then more self-reflection is indicated before bringing others into the discussion.

From Kinko: “Re: healthcare disruptors. Just because a big company is dabbling in healthcare doesn’t make it a disruptor.” Agreed. You’re just a disruptor-wannabe until you actually disrupt something, which rarely happens in healthcare except in some niche where insurers and regulators don’t tread. The lumbering interlopers usually end their would-be role as healthcare disruptors and instead slink away as healthcare departers.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Maybe healthcare should do this. Mrs. H received an email from the shop that is checking out her car after it went into limp mode, requiring it to be towed and me to rescue her from anxious roadside pacing. A phone-recorded video that was attached to the email featured the mechanic walking around explaining what he found as he pointed at parts. An estimate or email summary would have been equally effective, but it felt more personal to have the expert explaining informally.

Webinars

June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Microsoft retires the GPT Builder part of its $20 Copilot Pro subscription three months after it announced it, saying that the company will shift focus to commercial and enterprise sales.

Sales

• Cloud PACS vendor Synthesis Health announces new customers Tahoe Carson Radiology, Naugatuck Valley Radiology, and Intermountain Medical Imaging.

People

Matt Wojcik, MPH (Crossroads) joins Solaris Health as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

HealthLynked rolls out an online medical record request form that uses DocuSign to send patient information requests to hospitals, physician offices, and laboratories. The records are added to the company’s network, which allows patients to share their own records with providers.

Komodo Health announces Komodo Patient Insurance, which offers the pharmacy and medical insurance status of 200 million de-identified US lives.

Government and Politics

Federal agents arrest the CEO and clinical president of ADHD telehealth provider Done on charges of distributing Adderall, healthcare fraud, and obstruction of justice. The Department of Justice charged founder and CEO Ruthia He and Clinical President David Brody, MD for illegally distributing 40 million units of Adderall and other stimulants without medical justification, which DoJ says generated $100 million in revenue.

The Justice Department and FTC settle their claims under behavioral telehealth vendor Cerebral, which will pay $5 million in consumer refunds and $2 million in civil penalties for exposing user health information via deficient security practices and lax prescribing of Adderall. The government will continue charges against former CEO Kyle Robertson, who left the company in 2022 to start vanity online drug provider Zealthy, which targets patients who seek drugs for depression, obesity, erectile dysfunction, hair loss, and testosterone deficiency. The federal government has added Zealthy to its complaint.

The VA extends its contract with Oracle Health for an unspecified term, presumably the one-year period that Congress mandated to hold the company more accountable for the troubled implementation.

The VA moves several technology projects and 600 personnel under its Digital Health Office, which it launched on June 2. The office will include connected care, population health, health informatics, and AI programs as the VA’s central coordinator of digital health projects. The VA is recruiting for the office’s permanent leadership, with the interim being Nadia Smith, MBA, acting chief digital health officer, who joined the VA in September 2023 after 27 years of federal government consulting.

Real Time Medical Systems accuses post-acute EHR vendor PointClickCare (PCC) of information blocking, seeking a federal judge’s intervention to compel PCC to grant access to skilled nursing patient data. PCC argues that providing that access would expose its systems to hacker bots that could slow operations or compromise patient data. Analytics vendor Real Time contends that PCC, which offers a competing service, is attempting to drive it out of business. Real Time claims that PCC previously forced its employees to perform manual queries after completing a CAPTCHA challenge, despite Real Time’s HITRUST certification. PCC says provides information to 1,900 companies via a more secure method. Real Time claims that PCC told it directly that its own introduction of a competing product meant that it would no longer provide Real Time with data access.

CMS actuaries estimate that US healthcare spending will outpace economic growth with an average 5.6% annually from 2023 to 2032. Hospital spending increased an estimated 10.1% last year. Medicare has the highest predicted 10-year average annual increase of 7.4% among payers due to increased enrollment of baby boomers through 2029. The actuaries predict that healthcare spending will increase to nearly 20% of the gross domestic product.

A US Senate Finance Committee report finds that Vanderbilt University Medical Center failed to protect patient privacy when it provided the requested records of 82 transgender patients to Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. VUMC says it did not violate privacy laws because it was required to provide the records, a premise that is being questioned by a patient lawsuit and an HHS OCR investigation. The affected patients were not notified until ACLU filed a lawsuit.

Sponsor Updates

• HCTec sponsors the Tennessee HIMSS Chapter’s annual golf tournament.
• FinThrive releases a new Healthcare Rethink Podcast, “Rebel Healthcare: The True Patient Lead Journey Toward Improving Healthcare.”
• Laudio will exhibit at the Organization of Nurse Leaders Annual Meeting June 13-14 in Newport, Rhode Island.
• Bizmatics will integrate DrFirst’s RxInform patient engagement solution into its EHR to improve medication adherence.

Blog Posts

• Findhelp & NextGen: Integrating to Support the Whole Patient (Findhelp)
• Cyber Security in Healthcare: How Providers Can Improve Data Safety and Cyber Resilience (FinThrive)
• CCW Panel Recap: How We Can Empower Those Around Us (Five9)
• Breaking Silos: How SOC and Compliance Teams Can Transform Healthcare Security (Fortified Health Security)
• Award-Winning Data Visualization Solution: A Deep Dive into SDOH Software for Life Sciences (Inovalon)
• Advancing GenAI Capabilities and Bringing Interoperability Solutions to Researchers and Patients (InterSystems)
• Meditech supports innovation and cultivates partnerships at MUSE Inspire 2024 (Meditech)
• Elevate Your Quality Scores: A Guide to Maximize MIPS/MVP in 2024 (MRO)
• Embracing AI in Healthcare: Overcoming Concerns Benefits All (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 6/12/24

Top News

Oracle reports Q4 results: revenue up 3%, adjusted EPS $1.63 versus $1.67, missing Wall Street expectations for both.

ORCL shares advanced in extended trading following the announcement as the company announced new cloud sales to Google and OpenAI.

Cerner was barely mentioned in the call and in none of the analyst questions.

From the earnings call:

• The company sold 30 contracts worth $12 billion in the past quarter.
• OpenAI will run deep learning and AI workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
• Starting in September, Google Cloud customers can directly access Oracle database services running in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
• CEO Safra Catz said, “I will no longer be breaking out the Cerner business in my results. And even though it will begin to grow modestly throughout the year in both revenue and operating margins, it’s not necessary to break it out any more because it is now operating in a growth mode.”
• Larry Ellison says that the company can serve small customers, with Oracle deploying small data centers at its own expense – ones that will fit on a ship or submarine – that provide a fall Oracle cloud using six standard half racks in a conventional data center, with the client paying only for the service they use.
• Ellison says that Oracle is building a 200 megawatt data center and is planning some that are approaching a gigawatt.
• Ellison says the industry will move to support customers who choose to run multiple clouds:  “We’ll get rid of these fees for moving data from cloud to cloud, and all the clouds will be interconnected, and customers can pick their favorite service from their favorite cloud and mix and match whatever they want to use and do it easily and seamlessly.“

Reader Comments

From HIT Girl: “Re: Ascension. Covering itself in glory yet again.” A member of the Four Tops soul group sues Ascension Macomb Oakland Hospital, alleging that ED employees who were treating him for shortness of breath placed him in a straitjacket, denied him oxygen, and ordered psychiatric tests after he informed them that he was a celebrity with a history of issues with stalkers and fans. Employees believed him only after his wife showed them phone video of him performing with the group at the Grammy Awards, after which the hospital offered a $25 gift card as an apology. Perhaps their skepticism was justified since the singer – who also runs a Los Angeles-based ministry – is 53 years old and the group’s last hit charted three years before he was born. More shocking is that the group, which was formed in 1953, still has a founding member on stage, 88-year-old Duke Fakir. They have upcoming US concert dates.

Webinars

June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

NeuroFlow, whose system helps risk-bearing healthcare organizations surface and support behavioral health needs, acquires Owl, which offers a measurement-based care platform.

Sales

• Landmark Hospital of Cape Girardeau (MO) selects telemedicine services from Doctors Anytime.
• Alliance Medical will implement Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging software across its 120 imaging sites in the UK.
• Olympic Medical Center (WA) will enhance its telecardiology program with software and services from Eagle Telemedicine.
• The University of South Carolina will use Rimidi’s remote patient monitoring technology as a part of the postpartum care offered at an affiliated multispecialty clinic.

People

Jim Deischer, MBA (Nordic) joins Cardamom Health as VP of finance.

Teladoc Health names Chuck Divita (GuideWell) CEO.

Ed Glynn, MD, MBA (HCA Healthcare) joins RhythmX AI as chief clinical officer.

Ada Health names Nick Altebrando, MA (DayTwo) chief product officer and Yury Rozenman (Propeller Health) SVP of business development.

Announcements and Implementations

St. Luke’s (MN) will transition to Epic as a part of its acquisition by Aspirus Health. They have been running Meditech, I believe.

Belfast Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland goes live on Epic.

In England, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust will go live on Oracle Health later this week. The organization announced last October that it had paused its rollout plans to work through unspecified issues that were discovered during testing.

Mount Sinai Medical Center (FL) implements remote patient monitoring capabilities from HealthSnap. Mount Sinai will deploy HealthSnap’s chronic care management services across its primary care facilities beginning next month.

CCS launches PropheSee, an AI-powered predictive model that improves continuous glucose monitoring device adherence rates by up to 50%, saving an estimated $2,200 per patient per year.

Privacy and Security

The White House partners with Microsoft and Google to offer rural hospitals free and low-cost cybersecurity resources. Google has also committed to launching a pilot program with select rural hospitals to develop cybersecurity capabilities that are tailored to their needs.

Australian e-prescribing vendor MediSecure faces insolvency as it deals with the effects of a ransomware attack in early May and being denied a government bailout afterward.

Sponsor Updates

• SmartSense by Digi sponsors the St. Louis Golf Classic benefiting Autism Speaks.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Streamlining Data Reporting for Primary Care Centers of Eastern Kentucky.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces that its UpToDate clinical decision support solution has been awarded accreditation with commendation from the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education.
• A hospital in South Carolina prepares to go live on Ascom’s Unite software.
• KLAS recognizes Availity with its 2024 Points of Light Award for its collaborative work with prior authorization requests and approvals.
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “What Matters to a Healthcare CFO? EHR Implementation & Strategic Planning Advice.”
• Divurgent releases a new episode of The Vurge Podcast, “Aspire to Inspire: Chuck Podesta’s Journey of Healthcare IT Leadership and Reinvention.”

Blog Posts

• AdvancedMD & Salesforce: Integrating for patient intake, scheduling & reporting (AdvancedMD)
• Customer Exclusive: My life in flow – Part 1 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Millenial matters in medicine (Altera Digital Health)
• Emerging technologies’ impact on the future of healthcare delivery (Arcadia)
• Navigating Governance: Defining Outcomes in Your Patient Engagement Strategy (Artera)
• What to Expect During an OCR Audit or Investigation and How to Prepare (Clearwater)
• How Data Analytics Can Help Advance Your EHR Strategy (Dimensional Insight)
• Empowering Graduates: Navigating the Job Market as a Gen Z Professional (Direct Recruiters)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/10/24

Top News

An internal VA report finds that less than 20% of its Oracle Health users believe that the system helps them deliver high-quality care and just 13% believe that it helps keep their patients safe.

The survey of 2,000 VA users was conducted in March and April by KLAS, which told VA officials that their scores were the worst they have ever seen.

The Bloomberg article also notes that while Oracle is touting the DoD’s implementation, it fared only slightly better, with 30% of its surveyed users saying that the system helps them deliver high-quality care.

Another VA report says that while it hopes to raise user satisfaction scores to be comparable with those in non-VA hospitals, the $16 billion Oracle Health system – which has gone live in just six VA facilities since its first in October 2020 — may never reach the satisfaction levels of the VA’s homegrown VistA product.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The ratio of poll respondents who have a worsened opinion of Oracle Health compared to those with an improved opinion is 10 to 1.

New poll to your right or here: Do you agree with an Oracle exec’s claim that Epic’s Judy Faulkner is the biggest obstacle to interoperability? EVP Ken Glueck wrote that “everyone in the industry” understands that this is the case, so I’m interested in the poll results and any comments you would care to add. 

I’ll soon announce new sponsors who responded to my suggestion to wangle some freebies out of Lorre during the usual slow summer. She is also reaching out to a few companies that we had to cancel after they went radio silent due to staff changes or other internal disarray. Note: the only thing you can buy from me is a sponsorship — I don’t sell video interviews or sponsored content, although marketing people seem shocked to hear that since many sites do.

Webinars

June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Waystar raises $968 million in its IPO, which values the company at $3.7 billion. Nasdaq-traded WAY shares opened Friday morning at $21.50 and closed at $20.70. Waystar lost $50 million in each of the past two years.

OHSU will lay off at least 500 of its 21,000 employees. The health system is pursuing an acquisition of Legacy Health, touting its own financial strength and its intention to use $1 billion in bond offerings over 10 years to improve infrastructure.

People

Specialty EHR/PM vendor Nextech hires Rusty Frantz, MS (NextGen Healthcare) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Mount Sinai Health System wins the 2024 Hearst Health Prize for its NutriScan AI application that identifies malnutrition in hospitalized patients by analyzing EHR data.

A McKinsey survey finds that most health system executives see digital transformation as a high, but underfunded, priority. They named virtual health and digital front doors as potentially offering the biggest benefit. Top challenges are the limitations of their legacy systems, lack of budget, and workforce readiness. Satisfaction with digital investments is high, but the self-assessed lack of rollout progress leads McKinsey to question whether they are scaling their digital programs effectively.

Government and Politics

The VA completes its rollout of VA Health Chat in all VISNs, offering VA health services by chat as powered by CirrusMD.

Idaho ends its contract with the Idaho Health Data Exchange, citing its lack of financial transparency and previous bankruptcy. State watchdogs found that the non-profit had spent $94 million, most of it from federal grants, but the state’s creation of it as a private, non-profit corporation allowed it to operate with minimal state oversight.

Privacy and Security

Ascension’s cybersecurity event update indicates that it has restored EHR access to six of its markets and remains on track to complete all of them by June 14. It warns patients that their patient portal may not show medical record data after May 8 – the date its systems went offline – since the information that was collected on paper must now be entered into the EHR.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare IT Leaders staff stock shelves and help shoppers at The Our Neighbors’ Table Market in Amesbury, MA.
• Visage Imaging will exhibit at the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM 2024) Annual Meeting in National Harbor, MD, June 27-29.
• CereCore publishes the latest edition of its “Partnership Perspectives” digital magazine.
• Wolters Kluwer Health partners with the Black Nurse Collaborative to increase focus on improving advocacy for underrepresented groups in nursing.
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast titled “Interview with Kit Delgado, MD.”
• Redox publishes a new case study, “Ambience Healthcare selects Redox to integrate their AI Operating System – reducing clinician documentation time by 80%.”
• Rhapsody publishes a case study, “OU Health standardizes on Epic & Corepoint Integration Engine amidst M&A activity.”
• RLDatix launches the RLDatix Safety Institute to research safety design and care delivery risk reduction best practices.
• Sectra launches a new diagnostic IT module for genomics within molecular pathology, developed in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
• Surescripts publishes the “QHIN Use Case Guide: 17 Clinical & Business Scenarios.”
• Tegria will present at the International Performance Management Institute Healthcare IT Institute June 10 in Orlando.

Blog Posts

• How to Think About Healthcare Data During AI Integration Planning (CereCore)
• Integrated Care: Uniting Physical and Behavioral Health with One Vision (Netsmart)
• From burnout to balance: The untapped power of medical assistants in healthcare (Nordic)
• How GenAI is Humanizing the Healthcare Employee Experience (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 4 Best Smartphones for Nurse Communication (PerfectServe)
• Credentialing in Healthcare: Understanding the History, Hurdles, and Opportunities (QGenda)
• Empowering Healthcare IT Leaders in the Tech-Driven Staffing Landscape (Revuud)
• Transforming Specialty Medication Access: Spotlight on Allergy, Oncology, and Dermatology (RxLightning)
• Leadership Spotlight: Meghan Seus, Vice President of Product Management (Sonifi Health)
• How to Address Social Determinants of Health Factors Impacting Patient Payment Experience (TrustCommerce)
• Proof in the Pudding: More Pharmacists are Prescribing (Surescripts)
• Leadership Insights to Inspire Teams & Drive Innovation (Symplr)
• Innovating Rural Healthcare: Insights from the 2024 TruBridge National Customer Conference (TruBridge)
• Breast cancer screenings have been dialed back to age 40; plan ahead to tackle emerging care gaps (Upfront Healthcare)
• Need to improve revenue capture? Start with charge capture + DRG accuracy (Waystar)
• AI and Healthcare Data Interoperability: Opportunities and Challenges Ahead (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 6/7/24

Top News

Endpoints News reports that Walmart lost $230 million last year alone on its Walmart Health clinics before announcing their closure a few weeks ago. It launched the business in April 2019.

The company had opened just 51 clinics of its planned 1,000; failed in its attempt to pivot from cash-paying customers to value-based care programs with insurers; and attracted only 932 attributed Medicare Advantage patients versus its goal of 9,600.

Former employees say the company underinvested in marketing to the point that even in-store shoppers weren’t aware of the clinics. Two employees say the company will shut down all locations on June 28.

This excellent article was written by Senior Health Tech Reporter Shelby Livingston, MS, who covered healthcare with Modern Healthcare and Business Inside before joining Endpoints News just over a month ago.

Reader Comments

From HIT_Consulting_Insider: “Re: Nordic. I’ve heard they laid off 70 core staff and potentially 300 across their family of brands. A rumor is also circulating that Bon Secours Mercy Health and its VC arm Accrete Health Partners are considering selling the company. I think a lot of the industry would be interested in knowing if either of these are accurate. Thanks for all that you do to provide transparency in the industry.” Reported by multiple readers, who also said that President Don Hodgson, who was announced seven weeks ago as the company’s next CEO to replace the retiring Jim Costanzo, was part of the RIF (the company didn’t confirm this, but his bio has been removed from its executive page). Nordic previously acquired S&P Consultants, Bails, and Healthtech. Accrete is led by Bon Secours Mercy Health CDO Jason Szczuka, JD. A Nordic spokesperson provided this response to my inquiry:

Like many of our health care clients and partners, Nordic is navigating economic challenges and has reassessed its strategic priorities to adapt to ongoing market shifts. Reductions are always a last resort, and after careful examination of our business, we have made the difficult decision to implement a 2% reduction in force. Our recent changes have been due to a variety of standard business activity, including planned retirements and departures to explore new opportunities. Our parent company, Accrete Health Partners, is committed to helping ensure that Nordic is best positioned to be successful for years to come.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m looking for interesting people to interview from outside the vendor world. I enjoy talking to folks who are insightful, articulate, and wryly cynical, with extra points for being a loose cannon who is unmuzzled by employer media policies. It only takes about 20 minutes via a Zoom session. Contact me. Writing this made me ponder how many CEO interviews I’ve done, of which I counted 766.

I’m feeling like a Luddite in admitting that I don’t really know what Apple Pay is or why I should use it instead of those hunks of plastic that live in my well-worn wallet. Remediating that will be my weekend project.

Today’s unrequested mini grammar reminder: use “who” as a relative pronoun only when referring to people (“I have a friend who likes to play golf”) and use “that” when referring to everything else (“I have a dog that is hungry.”) Bonus tip: don’t use “amount” when referring to countable nouns. “The company laid off a large amount of employees” should instead be “a large number of employees.” I don’t criticize incorrect usage, including my own, but I try hard to make it easier to understand me and I correct article submissions before I run them.

Webinars

June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Executive search firm Direct Recruiters, Inc. acquires Health Innovations, which recruits in the areas of population health, value-based care, and innovation. Radiologist David Gorstein, MD, managing director of Health Innovations, will lead DRI’s population health practice.

Digital stethoscope manufacturer and AI algorithm developer Eko Health raises $41 million in Series D financing, which it will use to expand access to its AI-powered, FDA-approved detection tools for cardiac and pulmonary disease.

Health Catalyst acquires Carevive Systems, which offers cancer treatment support tools for oncology providers and life sciences researchers. The company’s platform offers treatment planning, remote symptom monitoring, post-treatment care, and applied analytics.

Announcements and Implementations

DirectTrust launches an accreditation program for digital health apps, which will use privacy, security, transparency, and interoperability criteria as provided by the Digital Therapeutics Alliance trade association.

Government and Politics

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) blames HHS for healthcare cyberattacks, saying that it has failed to regulate and oversee the industry. He says in a letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra that the health sector shouldn’t be allowed to self-regulate cybersecurity. He wants HHS to:

• Mandate technical cybersecurity standards for systemically important entities (SIEs) such as clearinghouses and large health systems.
• Require SIEs to demonstrate that they can recover quickly from attacks.
• Conduct cybersecurity audits as required by HITECH, including those organizations that haven’t had HHS audits performed.
• Provide cybersecurity technical assistance to providers.

A federal judge rules against FTC’s attempt  to block the $320 million sale of two North Carolina hospitals to Novant Health, ruling that the hospitals would likely close otherwise. North Carolina’s state treasurer had filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting FTC’s request.

Mobile telehealth carts that were placed in rural New York schools remain unused as the state legislature eliminates funding for school telemedicine programs. One school district was counting on the state’s plan to pay two-thirds of the annual $16,000 operating cost to contract with provider Mobile Primary Care, with the remainder to be covered by billing the insurance of parents. The district had hoped to reduce COVID-skyrocketed absenteeism and to consider offering mental health support.

Privacy and Security

Ascension restores EHR access to its Florida, Alabama, Austin, Tennessee, and Maryland markets and remains on track to complete restoration by the end of next week. A ransomware attack took its systems offline on May 8.

Sponsor Updates

• Pivot Point Consulting sponsors Kootenai Health Foundation’s annual golf tournament.
• Inovalon, Availity, Surescripts, Arcadia, Ellkay, FinThrive, First Databank, Symplr, InterSystems, and Wolters Kluwer Health will exhibit at AHIP 2024 June 11-13 in Las Vegas.
• EClinicalWorks announces that Rocky Mountain Women’s Clinic (ID) and Stone Mountain Health Services (VA) have implemented its Sunoh.ai virtual medical scribe technology.
• First Databank names Grant Ripperda software engineer, Andrea Mitchell data test engineer, and Sean Murphy software test supervisor.
• Five9 US Radiology Specialists shares insights on areas it could automate and what AI means for its organization.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new issue of its “The Optimum Pulse” newsletter.
• Linus Health will sponsor the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America 2024 Educating America Tour stop in Boston on June 12.
• Thomas Medical Centre in Singapore goes live on Meditech Expanse.
• MRO releases a new episode of its MRO Exchange: Connecting Healthcare Executives Podcast, “Healthmap Solutions CIO Bill Moore.”
• NeuroFlow releases a new Bridging the Gap Podcast, “Policy Updates Shaking Up Integrated Care.”

Blog Posts

• Feeling burned out? There’s a tech prescription for that! (EClinicalWorks)
• Partnering to Support Pennsylvania and Give CBOs a Seat at the Table (Findhelp)
• No Surprises Act: Two Years Later, IDR Process Results and How Providers can Prepare for Success (FinThrive)
• Healthcare Cybersecurity Threats: May 2024 (Fortified Health Security)
• Leading Change Through Crisis (Impact Advisors)
• 3 Ways to Increase EMR Testing Speed & Accuracy (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• SNF Regulations: Important Updates for Compliance (Inovalon)
• Really … Billboards? (Lucem Health)
• 5 Ways MedTeam Enhances Contract Management for Healthcare Providers (Medhost)
• A revenue cycle roadmap leads to positive outcomes at Phelps Memorial Health Center (Meditech)
• Panel Discusses the Future of Rehab Therapy Tech at Next Customer Conference (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 6/5/24

Top News

Ascension says in a June 4 cyberattack update that it has restored EHR access in its Florida, Alabama, and Austin markets. It hopes to use that experience to make the EHR available to the entire organization by next Friday, June 14.

The health system adds that its retail pharmacy, home delivery, and specialty pharmacy sites have reopened and can once again receive prescriptions electronically.

Ascension’s systems have been offline for four weeks.

Ascension warns that remediation of its other systems is ongoing and will require time to complete.

Reader Comments

From Janky: “Re: conferences. How do companies justify the ROI of exhibiting? It’s not like every exhibitor goes home with a fistful of hot leads or commitments for on-site follow-up.” I don’t run conferences, but I’ll describe how I position the value of sponsoring my site that goes beyond lead generation or immediate pipeline building.

• Everything a company does, including making sales, happens because someone has heard of them, probably repeatedly. One-shot exposure, regardless of the medium, will rarely be enough to seal a deal.
• Exposure isn’t just to prospects, but also potential partners, acquirers, acquisition targets, investors, executive hires, and consultants who may influence prospects. Most of the sponsors I lose is because a company — very often another of my sponsors –buys them.
• Our industry has quite a few competitive niches with specific audiences, and conferences and sponsorships will probably reach some who are outside traditional marketing channels.
• Prospects often make buying decisions based on an early recommendation by a non-C level employee who tips their boss off to a possible solution to their specific problems. You can’t just cold call C-level employees hoping for magic. Don’t ignore the influence that is wielded by attendees and readers who are at the mid-executive level or who are clinicians.
• It’s impossible to tell which kind of exposure, and to which people, will provide a pathway to success until after the fact.
• My conclusion is that companies that expect dramatic, short-term, easily-measurable ROI from conference participation or being a sponsor will do a one-and-done because they don’t see that result. Those who see it as patiently building a foundation and making industry connections in often intangible ways will end up reaping the benefit over the longer term.

Webinars

June 6 (Thursday) noon ET. “From Data to Decisions: The Vital Combination of AI and Human Expertise in Patient Care.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: David Wetherhold, MD, CMIO of ambulatory systems, Scripps Health; Dana Darger, RPh, director of pharmacy, Monument Health Rapid City Hospital; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. In this Epic Med Management Fireside Chat, two health system leaders will share real-world examples of how AI is working in concert with their clinicians to streamline medication management by populating medication histories into Epic. generating initial drafts of patient conversations, and summarizing complex information. The presenters will also cover the latest developments on the critical and expanding role of pharmacists in patient care.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business & Stock

Waste Management will acquire Stericycle for $7.2 billion. Stericycle specializes in medical waste disposal, compliance training, and secure information destruction. It sold off its patient engagement solutions business to Carenet Health in 2022. I remember the Stericycle team always having fun, candy-filled booths during the heyday of HIMSS.

UPMC acquires Washington Health System (PA), which includes two hospitals and 18 practices. Washington Health will presumably move its Veradigm inpatient and EClinicalWorks outpatient EHRs to UPMC’s new Epic system.

Healthcare workflow automation software startup Keragon launches with $3 million in funding. The company specializes in using AI to synchronize patient data across different apps in real time.

Sword Health, which offers AI-powered digital support solutions for issues related to musculoskeletal problems, physical therapy, and pelvic therapy, raises $130 million in financing that increases its valuation to $3 billion. The company also announces a conversational AI tool called Phoenix that conducts natural conversations with patients, provides them with verbal feedback, and summarizes their performance for their clinician.

Sales

• Visage Imaging signs new customers Consulting Radiology, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, Moffitt Cancer Center, and US Radiology Specialists.
• WellSpan Health (PA) will enhance primary care delivery with wraparound behavioral healthcare services and technology from Concert Health.
• Johns Hopkins Health Plans launches a multi-payer portal powered by Availity Essentials to help providers manage benefits, claims, and authorizations.

People

Adam Hameed, MBA (GrandPad) joins Glooko as president of connected care.

Baptist Health South Florida promotes Sha Edathumparampil to chief digital and information officer.

Eagle Telemedicine names Kat Thousand, RN, MHA (Envision Healthcare) VP of clinical services.

Sherman Sanchez, MHA (BN Consulting) joins Dina as president.

SSM Health (IL) hires Saad Chaudhry, MPP, MS (Luminis Health) as chief digital officer.

Health Recovery Solutions promotes Jason Comer, JD to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS report finds that the move to the cloud for image viewing and/or storage is happening quickly, with Visage Imaging and Sectra generating both high customer confidence and market interest. Customer perception of Intelerad’s cloud strategy is mixed, while users of GE HealthCare question its ability to execute. Visage Imaging, Agfa HealthCare, and Sectra top the list in “confidence in vendor’s strategy for imaging in the cloud.” The biggest concerns about moving to the cloud are cost, privacy and security, the bandwidth and infrastructure that are required, and system performance.

Privacy and Security

Several London hospitals declare a critical incident and cancel procedures due to a ransomware attack on pathology services vendor Synnovis. The company is a partnership between Synlab UK and Ireland, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

A judge rules that CMS inappropriately lowered the 2024 Medicare Advantage star ratings of SCAN Health Plan, which cost the plan hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced federal bonuses. As a result, the government will pay SCAN $250 million, which is likely to encourage other MA plans to seek a recalculation of their bonuses. Experts say that the star system doesn’t accurately reflect quality of care.

Sponsor Updates

• Groups of Availity HR staff work with Challenges Inc. to build and personalize wagons for Nemours Children’s Hospital and Ronald McDonald House Charities.
• Wolters Kluwer Health will offer ConsortiEX’s Assure-Trak IV Workflow Management in its Simplify+ compounding compliance suite.
• Healthcare Growth Partners launches HGP Health IT Momentum Index, which offers a real-time view into health IT M&A, investment value, and valuations.
• Visage Imaging’s Director of Customer Experience Steve Deaton participates in a new video titled “The Imaging Wire Show: Throwing Out the Imaging Playbook with Apple Vision Pro.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new case study titled “EMR Test Management at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare.”
• Get-to-Market Health founder Steve Shihadeh joins Penn Presbyterian Medical Center’s board of trustees.
• Loyal announces that its consumer health platform is now available on the Oracle Healthcare Marketplace.
• Business Awards UK recognizes Altera Digital Health UK with its IT Product of the Year Award for its Sunrise solution.
• Arcadia publishes a new guide, “3 solutions to master data management.”
• Arrive Health publishes a new whitepaper, “The Crushing Weight of Prior Authorization and What You Can Do About It.”
• AvaSure will integrate CLEW’s advanced clinical surveillance solutions with its virtual care platform.
• Biofourmis will present at the Hospital @ Home Leadership Summit June 5 in Boston.
• Cardamom Health CEO Vivek Swaminathan celebrates the launch of the Wisconsin Investment Fund, a VC initiative that will initially invest $100 million in startups throughout the state.
• Clinical Architecture partners with Ready Computing to offer healthcare organizations an industry-leading solution to consolidate, manage, and improve the quality of clinical data at scale.
• DrFirst announces that its AI-powered SmartRenewal solution earned high ratings from customers in KLAS Research’s latest First Look report.

Black Book announces the 2024 awards for the highest user experience and customer satisfaction in health plan technology and outsourcing, recognizing the following HIStalk sponsors:

• Symplr – end-to-end provider data management and credentialing solutions.
• Inovalon – payer cloud platform.
• Surescripts – payer member safety, PBM, and pharmacy solutions.
• Availity – clearinghouse alternative solutions.

Blog Posts

• MIPS Improvement Activities: What qualifies as a high-weight activity? (AdvancedMD)
• Agfa HealthCare: Leading the Way in Healthcare Innovation at SIIM 2024 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Building Your Digital Workforce: Launching and Sustaining Your Intelligent Automation Journey (AGS Health)
• Budget-friendly ways to improve your cybersecurity (Altera Digital Health)
• What you should know about SDoH and SOGI, the data sources shaping health equity (Arcadia)
• The Impact of Prior Authorizations on Patient Care (Availity)
• Managed Services: A Scalable Solution for Community Connect Support (Cardamom Health)
• Burnout Buster: Prioritizing the “People Piece” During an EHR Replacement (CereCore)
• Capture More Revenue and Save Resources with Artera’s New Intake and Payments Solution (Artera)
• Compliance Matters: User Access Monitoring – 5 Things You May Not Be Thinking About (Clearwater)
• Cybersecurity in Healthcare: Why Response and Recovery Matter (Divurgent)

Sponsor Spotlight

Revuud has launched a new AI matching functionality designed to revolutionize talent acquisition. This advanced matching algorithm swiftly sifts through talent profiles, pinpointing candidates whose skills, experiences, and preferences perfectly align with job requirements. By leveraging continuous learning from user interactions, feedback, and successful matches, the system refines its capabilities over time, delivering increasingly accurate and relevant results. This innovation promises significant time savings, expediting the hiring process by rapidly identifying the most suitable candidates.

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/3/24

Top News

HHS OCR updates its cybersecurity FAQ to include the Change Healthcare cyberattack:

• Nobody has issued the breach notification that was due April 21, 60 days from when the incident occurred.
• Covered entities should contact Change Healthcare if they expect the company to issue the mandatory breach notification to affected patients on their behalf.
• Providers don’t have to issue a breach notification as long Change agrees to do so.
• All parties are responsible for ensuring that affected patients are notified.
• OCR’s interest in the business associates of the companies, including providers, is secondary.
• Determining if a ransomware attack is a HIPAA breach involves whether the attack caused PHI to be encrypted and the likelihood that the PHI is identifiable or capable of being re-identified and whether the data was actually acquired or used.

Reader Comments

From Orator: “Re: Oracle. Does the company believe that sarcastic, confrontational pieces like Ken Glueck’s blog post panning the BI article will draw healthcare admiration or improve sales?” Larry Ellison is widely recognized as Silicon Valley’s biggest bully, and one might expect his underlings to share that trait. I don’t think that this type of argumentative swagger has ever worked in healthcare, although ironically Cerner’s Neal Patterson was probably the best example before Larry bought his former company, and even Neal learned that macho personal attacks on Epic and Judy Faulkner just made Cerner look worse. Our industry respects corporate drive, but only when it is backed by some level of humility and empathy for the patients and employees of mostly non-profit health systems. Ken didn’t help the cause of the obviously butthurt Oracle by launching a public peeing match against a minimally influential website, although he’s done it before. Far better would have been a professional, factual, accomplish-centered response from David Feinberg, who at least carries healthcare credibility and holds the title of “chairman of Oracle Health,” even though it seems to be a ceremonial role of glad-handing and selfie-snapping while while the real puppet masters are Oracle’s EVPs.

Just in case any other health IT executives are considering providing their angry hot take on negative reporting about the company, I’ll offer this:

• Don’t give a negative story legs by mentioning it, unless most of the industry is buzzing about it and demands a response.
• Focus on the unemotional correction of misinformation.
• Acknowledge any claimed issues that are factual and commit to resolving them.
• Consult the employees who are the most knowledgeable to identify the article’s errors and the validity of the company’s planned response.
• Keep the tone professional and constructive since the company will be judged on it. Have a communications expert review and offer suggestions.
• Don’t take shots at competitors, or even better, don’t even acknowledge that they exist unless they are the focus of the article.
• Attribute the article to the executive who has the best credentials or highest recognition among the article’s audience.
• Consider the article’s sources and examine whether a company disconnect exists caused them to convey erroneous or negative information.
• Invite dialog and offer to continue the discussion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s close to an even split among poll respondents about the federal government paying for the development of health system cybersecurity tools. Commenters expressed these supporting thoughts: the federal government needs to protect patient information because healthcare organizations aren’t doing it well and someone needs to do something drastic before a bad actor takes the entire health system down. Counterpoints: the feds should encourage / require health systems to effectively using existing security technologies and the government should not spend taxpayer money just because health systems haven’t.

New poll to your right or here: How has your opinion about Oracle Health changed in the past 12 months?

HIStalk turns 21 this week, started by me in 2003 as a hobby that would keep me current on the industry for my health system IT executive job. The time has flown by and filling the blank screen energizes me every single day. I’m thrilled to have readers and sponsors, but my selfish motivation has always been my own satisfaction, although it’s gratifying that influential readers make decisions based on what they read here.

Webinars

June 6 (Thursday) noon ET. “From Data to Decisions: The Vital Combination of AI and Human Expertise in Patient Care.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: David Wetherhold, MD, CMIO of ambulatory systems, Scripps Health; Dana Darger, RPh, director of pharmacy, Monument Health Rapid City Hospital; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. In this Epic Med Management Fireside Chat, two health system leaders will share real-world examples of how AI is working in concert with their clinicians to streamline medication management by populating medication histories into Epic. generating initial drafts of patient conversations, and summarizing complex information. The presenters will also cover the latest developments on the critical and expanding role of pharmacists in patient care.

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

Other

Attorneys for a woman whose baby died during childbirth at Springhill Medical Center (AL) during a 2019 cyberattack ask the judge in her negligence lawsuit to force the hospital pay the settlement that they previously agreed to. The lawsuit claims that the ransomware attack took down the fetal monitoring system that should have alerted nurses to call the OB-GYN, who has said that she would have performed a C-section had she known that the baby’s umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. The hospital said that the doctor had the responsibility to notify the patient. The lawsuit is believed to be the first in which a patient’s death was attributed to ransomware.

Contacts

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

News 5/31/24

Top News

Waystar targets a valuation of nearly $4 billion in its upcoming IPO.

The company, which was formed in early 2018 by the merger of Navicure and ZirMed, was valued at $2.7 billion in a 2019 investment.

Reader Comments

From Mandible: “Re: Oracle Health. The Business Insider article struck a nerve. The company’s blog post exposes a lot of anger. It also takes a shot at Epic for their lack of commitment to interoperability.” The Oracle response is a textbook example of why companies should take a breath and get PR help before lashing out in righteous indignation, not to mention that they should follow Mark Twain’s advice to “never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” Oracle’s blog post was penned by EVP Ken Glueck, whose background is politics and lobbying (EVP Mike Sicilia, who has gone radio silent for months, was also a company lobbyist, and neither have any healthcare experience). I’ll summarize the post further down the page. Business Insider is likely delighted that the company is giving it free publicity and probably a ton of inbound clicks for a marginally informative piece. This isn’t Ken’s first journalism rodeo – he used Oracle’s blog to go nuclear on The Intercept when it reported that Oracle was marketing its analytics software to police in dissent-suppressing countries and then doxxed the reporter (and had his Twitter account suspended for doing so) and urged followers to send him dirt about her. Click the graphic above to enlarge the archived copy before the reference was expunged. Unrelated: despite being in such a high-ranking position, Ken’s photo appears basically nowhere on the Internet and he doesn’t include it in his X and LinkedIn profiles, so I can’t include his headshot.

From Jeepers: “Re: Oracle Health. Oracle stockholders should be livid that objective due diligence was not performed before buying Cerner. Larry Ellison wanted it and all his yes men said yes. The board and maybe even the SEC has a case for dereliction of duties or similar charge.” The comment quoted in the Business Insider article came from the Senate testimony of Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia: “I would say there’s always things that you discover after the fact. You know, we certainly had read the press, and we certainly had read things that were publicly disclosed. But there’s nothing like owning something to fully understand what’s going on.” It should be noted that Sicilia was referring to the VA project specifically, not the entirety of the Cerner acquisition.

Webinars

June 6 (Thursday) noon ET. “From Data to Decisions: The Vital Combination of AI and Human Expertise in Patient Care.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: David Wetherhold, MD, CMIO of ambulatory systems, Scripps Health; Dana Darger, RPh, director of pharmacy, Monument Health Rapid City Hospital; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. In this Epic Med Management Fireside Chat, two health system leaders will share real-world examples of how AI is working in concert with their clinicians to streamline medication management by populating medication histories into Epic. generating initial drafts of patient conversations, and summarizing complex information. The presenters will also cover the latest developments on the critical and expanding role of pharmacists in patient care.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Dollar General ends its parking lot clinic program that it launched with DocGo less than 18 months ago as part of its DG | Wellbeing brand.

Virtual Therapeutics, which offers game-based mental health apps, will acquire game-based cognitive treatment vendor Akili for $34 million in cash. Akili went public via a SPAC merger in August 2022 at a $1 billion valuation and saw its shares lose 70% of their value in the first week of trading. They are now down 97%.

Pharmacy workflow automation vendor Plenful raises $17 million in a Series A funding round.

IMO, aka Intelligent Medical Objects, renames itself to IMO Health.

Cardamom Health will receive funding from the newly launched Wisconsin Investment Fund.

Oracle EVP Ken Glueck lashes out at Business Insider and its “Oracle deadly gamble” article (he dismisses it as “clickbait”) that questions its VA performance and the state of the former Cerner business in general. Summary:

• The article recycles old news, anonymous quotes, and its own piece from two years ago while omitting Oracle’s response, which he says is “your typical Business Insider preconceived ‘expose’’.”
• The Cerner system has improved since BI’s July 2022 piece. Oracle fixed the “unknown queue” problem in 2022 just 10 days after it was reported.
• DoD implemented the Cerner system successfully and it has gone live at the jointly operated Lovell Federal Health Care Center, the first go-live since Oracle acquired Cerner.
• Glueck cites a 2020 BI article about Epic that he calls a “puff piece” that contains “Epic misinformation.”
• He calls Epic CEO Judy Faulkner “the single biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability” and says that Epic’s contracts give the company ownership of patient data in “stretching HIPAA beyond recognition.”
• He says the same issues that caused other industry outsiders to fail in healthcare will cause Epic to fail and Oracle to succeed.

People

Augmedix hires Alex Stinard, MD (HCA) as chief clinical AI officer.

Phillip LaJoie (Qbase) joins the Defense Health Agency as COO of the market technology integration office.

DirectTrust’s Interoperable Secure Cloud Fax Consensus Body elects Jeffrey Sullivan, MS (Consensus Cloud Solutions) as chairperson.

Announcements and Implementations

Medicare Advantage insurer Clover Health will offer its Clover Assistant clinical decision support tool for sale to payers and providers. The company went public in a SPAC merger in January 2021 at a $7 billion valuation, now at $553 million.

Ascension says in a May 29 cybersecurity event update that it has restored EHR access in one of its markets.

UCSF and UCSF Health receive a $5 million charitable donation to develop a system that will monitor the performance of AI tools in real time for efficacy, safety, and equity.

Black Book ranks Veradigm’s Payerpath as the #1 overall provider of claims and clearinghouse platform solutions for small medical practices.

Government and Politics

HHS taps national coordinator for health IT Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP as acting chief artificial intelligence officer while it searches for a permanent replacement. He will also continue in his national coordinator role.

Other

In England, BBC News investigates claims of a cover-up involving problems with NHS’s electronic patient record systems, which it says have been linked to three deaths, have left 200,000 medical letters unsent, and have caused payment problems in half of the trusts. The coroner who reviewed one of the deaths specifically called out its Cerner / Oracle Health system for not clearly indicating the level of acuity of ED patients as did the system it replaced.

Ukraine-connected digital health vendor BeKey runs a crowd-funding campaign for its rollout of YODD (Your Online Doctor Diagnostics), a telehealth device for homes. The company will donate devices to people in Ukraine and volunteers with Doctors4UA. Supporters will receive one of the devices later this year.

Contacts

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

News 5/29/24

Top News

Veradigm will seek strategic alternatives for the company, which could include its sale.

The company has named President and Chief Commercial Officer Tom Langan as interim CEO, starting June 7. He will replace interim CEO Yin Ho, MD, MBA, who will leave the company and resign from its board now that her term of service has expired.

Veradigm dismissed CEO Richard Poulton and CFO Leah Jones in December 2023 as the company struggled to address overdue financial reports that threatened its stock listing.

MDRX shares are down 37% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $812 million. They closed up 16% Tuesday on the news.

Veradigm acquired AI company ScienceIO in March 2024 for $140 million in cash.

SEC filings indicate that Veradigm’s board has approved stock awards of $1 million to $3 million for each of its top four officers, with accelerated vesting following a change of control.

Reader Comments

From Bombast: “Re: Ascension outages. My elderly mother, who is being treated at a Florida Ascension facility, found that the results of her CT scan can’t be shared digitally with her care team. That leaves her anxiously waiting to see if she really has a suspected blood clot near her heart, and if so, how her respective providers plan to treat it. ARPA-H’s UPGRADE effort is too little, too late.” Media sites are offering superficial coverage of Ascension hospital wait times, ambulance diversions, and patient inconvenience that are driven by its downtime, which is at 21 days and counting. Soothing corporate reassurances aside, you can bet that it’s chaos and patient harm in the uncarpeted areas of its hospitals. Health systems always justify their gazillion-dollar implementation of Epic or Cerner by touting its patient care benefit, but when that system goes offline for an extended period, they always claim that patient care is unchanged.

From Benevolence: “Re: the Business Insider article on Oracle Health. Living in KC, this felt like a giant pile-on to current and former Cernerites, deserved or not. Morale is already pretty low after rounds of layoffs and bad press.” The article was a mishmash in trying to tie together previous incursions of Big Business into healthcare IT, the VA’s stalled rollout of Oracle Health, and the legacy Cerner problems that Oracle claims that its pre-acquisition due diligence didn’t uncover. I didn’t see much new or insightful in the article other than some quotes from insiders. Oracle Health should be more worried that the industry learned nearly simultaneously – via a KLAS report that went live three days before the Business Insider article – that it lost 71 hospitals and 15,000 beds in 2023 while Epic gained 153 and 29,000, respectively. My takeaways: (a) the bandwagon effect, if nothing else, will send more Cerner clients into the arms of Epic; and (b) Oracle is already griping about low Cerner margins that are likely to worsen as customer count drops. Larry Ellison’s plans to use customer data for medical advancement won’t fly if health systems walk that data over to Epic. The article’s focus was on the VA, which is a bit harsh to Oracle Health since the VA has a long history of botching technology implementations via the disconnect between its officials who see the need for change versus civil service employees who are threatened by it. My conclusion is that the former Cerner business continues to be a nagging distraction to the otherwise surging Oracle except in Larry Ellison’s mind, and if he loses interest or dies in the saddle, a fire sale seems inevitable. Meanwhile, Oracle’s next earnings report is due June 18.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two-thirds of poll respondents who hold certification or fellowship credentials don’t list them on their business cards or email signatures.

New poll to your right or here: Should the federal government fund the development of cybersecurity tools for health systems? Argument for: it’s arguably critical national infrastructure. Argument against: health systems are private businesses that are raking in huge profits that could fund their own security instead of waiting for taxpayers to foot the bill.

Webinars

June 6 (Thursday) noon ET. “From Data to Decisions: The Vital Combination of AI and Human Expertise in Patient Care.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: David Wetherhold, MD, CMIO of ambulatory systems, Scripps Health; Dana Darger, RPh, director of pharmacy, Monument Health Rapid City Hospital; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. In this Epic Med Management Fireside Chat, two health system leaders will share real-world examples of how AI is working in concert with their clinicians to streamline medication management by populating medication histories into Epic. generating initial drafts of patient conversations, and summarizing complex information. The presenters will also cover the latest developments on the critical and expanding role of pharmacists in patient care.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CVS Health is reportedly looking for a private equity partner to provide capital to expand its primary care chain Oak Street Health, which it acquired for $10 billion last year.

Sales

• Community Action Association of Pennsylvania will use Findhelp’s closed loop referral platform and network to develop PA Navigate, a statewide community information network that will connect people with community services.

Announcements and Implementations

Waystar says that tests of its Google Cloud-powered AI solutions show that the time that is needed needed to generate procedure pre-authorization was reduced by 99.9% by extracting requirements from payer datasets.

Government and Politics

The VA announces the winners of its AI Tech Sprint, which had use case categories of ambient dictation and outside medical record summarization:

• Ambient dictation – Nuance, Abridge, Knowtex, Althea Health, and TranscribeMD.
• Outside medical record summarization: Palantir, Althea Health, Abstractive Health, Commure, and TranscribeMD.

Privacy and Security

Ascension’s most recent cybersecurity event update from May 24 says that it hopes that patients and clinicians “will see progress across our points of care” this week. It adds that vendors and partners are reconnecting to its network.

Other

“South Park” brilliantly skewers the US healthcare system in a widely shared clip from its “The End of Obesity” episode, in which Cartman’s insurer refuses to cover Ozempic. It includes typewriters, fax machines, paper forms on clipboards, and line printers churning perforated paper. The insurance company’s refusal to pay is summarized as, “The medical director’s job is just to say no.” 

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD supports The Family Institute at Northwestern University during its Gratitude Gala fundraiser benefiting the Bette D. Harris Clinic.
• EClinicalWorks customer Rocky Mountain Women’s Clinic reports its integration of AI medical scribe software Sunoh.ai has helped its clinicians save at least two hours a day on clinical documentation.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Diana Anderson, MD.”
• TruBridge earns “Peer Reviewed by HFMA” designation for its medical coding services, the company’s third solution to earn the honor.
• Mayo Clinic expands its partnership with QGenda and will implement QGenda Advanced Scheduling and On-Call for its clinicians at all campuses.
• RLDatix launches the RLDatix Safety Institute, an approved Patient Safety Organization that will research safety design and care delivery risk reduction best practices.
• Sectra publishes a new whitepaper, “Navigating the challenges of radiography – from student attrition to workforce shortages.”
• Symplr is a proud sponsor of the Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation.
• Tegria will sponsor the 2024 Cognizant Health Sciences Conference June 10-13 in Orlando.
• Verato will exhibit at the CSTE Annual Conference June 10-12 in Pittsburgh.
• CereCore publishes a new edition of its magazine, “Partnership Perspectives.”

Blog Posts

• How to Think About Healthcare Data During AI Integration Planning (CereCore)
• Organizational Change Management Challenges (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How to Prep Your Medical Practice for the Holidays (PerfectServe)
• Your Next Innovation Opportunity: Disrupting the Status Quo in Specialty Pharmacy (RxLightning)
• 4 healthcare data challenges and their impacts (Spok)
• AI & Healthcare: Let’s Keep the Human in the Loop (Surescripts)
• How to Enhance Your Clinical Communications Improvement Project (Symplr)
• How AI is Revolutionizing RCM Analytics (TruBridge)

Contacts

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

News 5/24/24

Top News

HHS/NIH’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) offers up to $50 million to fund development of technology that can secure hospital IT environments.

The system, which it calls UPGRADE, will scan hospital computer systems for vulnerabilities and weaknesses and automatically apply patches as needed.

ARPA-H says that achieving its goals will likely require the formation of teams with different kinds of technical expertise. A virtual Proposers’ Day webcast will be held on June 20.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor RLDatix. Every day around the world, thousands of patients are harmed by care delivery errors, many of which are preventable. We want to change that. RLDatix is on a mission to improve healthcare by enabling a world where patients receive the best and safest care possible. Trusted by thousands of clients around the world, our connected healthcare operations platform combines software and trusted services to empower organizations with critical data insights across risk, safety, compliance, provider lifecycle, and workforce management. Our user-centric approach provides a holistic, real-time view of healthcare operations, connecting disparate information across the enterprise, thus giving organizational leadership the contextualized data they need to make better-informed decisions. Thanks to RLDatix for supporting HIStalk.

It’s Summer Doldrums ‘round these parts, where the industry takes a collective hammock nap until Labor Day and we do a PBS-like sponsor pledge drive. Do you need website traffic, exposure to potential business or M&A partners, or to stay top of mind with prospects? You read HIStalk and so do many of the industry’s decision-makers. Contact Lorre, Jenn, or me about sponsorship spiffs for:

• Former sponsors who return to the fold.
• Startups.
• Webinar promotion (Lorre does BOGO in the slow months).
• Email promotion.

Today I learned that the nine-question PHQ-9 paper form that primary care doctors use to screen patients for depression was developed by a drug company to increase sales of its antidepressants. The marketing team of drug maker Pfizer designed the form to overcome the reluctance of PCPs to prescribe antidepressants such as Pfizer’s own Zoloft. Such drugs were previously ordered almost entirely by psychiatrists who weren’t likely to generate big sales volumes. The form was never intended to be anything more than a conversation-starter between doctor and patient, but overloaded PCPs often use it as a standalone tool.

Check out what some HIStalk sponsors have in store for the 2024 Muse Inspire Conference next week in the Denver area.

I was amused that EHR vendor Fusion Health announced a sale to Illinois Department of Corrections, a target market that the company calls “movement-restricted communities.” They might have made up that term since I don’t see it used elsewhere.

Webinars

June 6 (Thursday) noon ET. “From Data to Decisions: The Vital Combination of AI and Human Expertise in Patient Care.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: David Wetherhold, MD, CMIO of ambulatory systems, Scripps Health; Dana Darger, RPh, director of pharmacy, Monument Health Rapid City Hospital; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. In this Epic Med Management Fireside Chat, two health system leaders will share real-world examples of how AI is working in concert with their clinicians to streamline medication management by populating medication histories into Epic. generating initial drafts of patient conversations, and summarizing complex information. The presenters will also cover the latest developments on the critical and expanding role of pharmacists in patient care.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Vancouver-based  technology-based workplace health solution provider CloudMD will be taken private by a private equity firm as it struggles with liquidity following several acquisitions and its failure to file a Q4 earnings report. DOC.V shares are at $0.045, valuing the company at $14 million.

Twin Health, which uses a digital twin AI platform to help members achieve remission from type 2 diabetes, expands into the obesity market with a program that focuses on sustainable weight loss that complements the use of GLP-1 drugs.

Real-world data and evidence platform vendor Atropos Health raises $33 million in a Series B funding round. The company was founded in 2019 by three Stanford University PhDs as the Green Button research project.

People

Ellkay hires Nicholas Szymanski, MBA (Signature Healthcare) as COO.

Industry long-timer Terri Steinberg, MD, MBA (Medecision) retires.

Cynthia Porter, MBA retires after 34 years as CEO of Porter Research.

Announcements and Implementations

Ontario-based Halton Healthcare joins Project AMPLIFI, care coordination program that connects long-term care facilities and Meditech hospitals to allow sharing patient medical histories.

Microsoft announces GigaPath, a whole-slide foundation model for digital pathology that it developed with Providence and University of Washington.

Redox will partner with Snowflake to facilitate data exchange between legacy healthcare systems and Snowflake’s Healthcare & Life Sciences Cloud.

Government and Politics

The Irish government publishes “Digital for Care: A Digital Health Framework for Ireland 2024-203.”

ONC reports that 70% of hospitals engaged in all four domains of interoperability (send, receive, find, and integrate) in 2023, up from 46% in 2018. Other tidbits:

• The percentage of hospitals that routinely engage in that exchange rose from 28% to 43%, with a much higher percentage among system-affiliated hospitals.
• While 71% of hospitals have electronic access to clinical data from other providers, only 42% of clinicians regularly use that information.
• Most hospitals aren’t sending summary of care documents to external hospitals or ambulatory care providers.
• While 17% of hospitals send information to long-term, post-acute care providers, only 8% receive information back from them.
• ONC concludes that the interoperability bar needs to be raised to focus on routine exchange of information.

Sponsor Updates

• In Kansas, Blue Valley School District honors Netsmart COO Tom Herzog with its Friends of Education Award.
• DrFirst announces the winners of its 2024 Healthiverse Heroes Awards.
• Meditech’s Traverse Exchange Canada connects its first pilot organization, Champlain Association of Meditech Partners, to Oracle’s e-Hub.
• The Association for Community Affiliated Plans names First Databank a preferred vendor.
• FinThrive releases a new Healthcare Rethink Podcast, “Got a Healthcare IT Renovation Project? We have a DIY Book for you!”
• Five9 will present at three upcoming investor conferences.
• MRO launches a new podcast, “The MRO Exchange: Connecting Healthcare Executives,” with healthcare quality reporting as its first topic.
• Fortified Health Security welcomes Alex Callahan as its summer accounting intern.
• Healthcare Growth Partners releases the May edition of “HGP Observations.”
• Konza National Network announces that Family Health Center (MS) has joined its QHIN.
• MRO launches a podcast, “The MRO Exchange: Connecting Healthcare Executives.”
• NeuroFlow develops a suicide risk calculator to help healthcare leaders understand the risk in their patient populations.

The following HIStalk sponsors will exhibit at the MUSE Inspire Conference May 28-31 in Denver – CereCore, CloudWave, Consensus Cloud Solutions, Dimensional Insight, DrFirst, Ellkay, Elsevier, FinThrive, First Databank, Meditech, Nuance, Tegria, TruBridge, Vyne Medical, and Waystar.

Blog Posts

• Navigating the HTI-1 Final Rule with Transparent and Reliable Clinical Decision Support (Medicomp Systems)
• Navigating CMS Updates: Adapting to Evolving Healthcare Machine-Readable File Regulations (FinThrive)
• Support Maternal Health by Addressing Social Determinants of Health (Findhelp)
• Hospital Staffing in Summertime (Impact Advisors)
• Gene Scheurer: Beyond the Buzzword: Practical Digital Transformation Strategies For Health Systems (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• AAPACN 2024: Hot Topics for Skilled Nursing Facilities (Inovalon)
• AFib Management: The Latest Innovations in Screening, Treatment, and Stroke Prevention (Lucem Health)
• 3 Ways to Get Quick Returns from Your Hospital Revenue Cycle (Medhost)
• Southern Ohio Medical Center battles the opioid crisis and drives change in their community (Meditech)
• Is Physical Therapy Necessary After Hip Replacement? (Net Health)

Contacts

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