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News 6/19/24

June 18, 2024 News Comments Off on News 6/19/24

Top News

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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

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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

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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

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

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

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

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


Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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


Government and Politics

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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

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  • 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


Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/17/24

June 16, 2024 News Comments Off on Monday Morning Update 6/17/24

Top News

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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

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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

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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

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  • 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


Contacts

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

News 6/14/24

June 13, 2024 News 4 Comments

Top News

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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

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


Announcements and Implementations

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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  • 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


Contacts

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

News 6/12/24

June 11, 2024 News Comments Off on News 6/12/24

Top News

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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

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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

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

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Teladoc Health names Chuck Divita (GuideWell) CEO.

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

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


Announcements and Implementations

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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  • 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


Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 6/10/24

June 9, 2024 News 5 Comments

Top News

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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  • 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


Contacts

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

News 6/7/24

June 6, 2024 News 5 Comments

Top News

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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  • 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


Contacts

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

News 6/5/24

June 4, 2024 News 2 Comments

Top News

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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

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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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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Health Recovery Solutions promotes Jason Comer, JD to CEO.


Announcements and Implementations

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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

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  • 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

Sponsor Spotlight

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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

June 2, 2024 News 6 Comments

Top News

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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

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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

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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

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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

May 30, 2024 News 12 Comments

Top News

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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

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


Announcements and Implementations

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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.

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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

May 28, 2024 News 1 Comment

Top News

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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  • 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


Contacts

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

News 5/24/24

May 23, 2024 News 4 Comments

Top News

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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

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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.


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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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

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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

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

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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

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  • 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


Contacts

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

HIStalk’s Guide to MUSE Inspire 2024

May 23, 2024 News Comments Off on HIStalk’s Guide to MUSE Inspire 2024

CereCore

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Booth 417

Contact: Jillian Whitefield, business development manager
jillian.whitefield@cerecore.net
248.891.5557

We get it. You need more from your EHR. Discover our full lineup of sessions and resources that can help you. Go beyond the basics by attending one of our seven educational sessions covering Expanse workflows, digital scheduling, charge reconciliation, rules-driven order screens, and much more. Moving to Expanse? Find guides and how we saved a hospital $115k in build costs with automation. Need a roadmap to the most productive optimization projects? Request a MEDITECH assessment and gain insight on immediate functionality and revenue cycle opportunities. Evaluating MEDITECH hosting and backup? The “Buyer’s Guide to MEDITECH Hosting” helps you compare the options. Need to streamline manual processes? Check out rules and worklists and our downloadable starter pack. Find CereCore MUSE 2024 session times, resources, or schedule a meeting here.


Healthtech

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Booth 218

Contact: Steve McDonald, MEDITECH practice lead
stephen.mcdonald@nordicglobal.com
617.777.3822

Healthtech, a Nordic Global Company, is thankful and proud of our 40+ year journey helping MEDITECH customers achieve their healthcare IT objectives while enhancing patient care and optimizing their performance. Our experience with MEDITECH clients has extended across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. By leveraging our deep clinical and operational knowledge, global reach, and the full suite of offerings from Nordic, our MEDITECH clients are achieving success at an exceptional rate. Some of our key offerings include: MEDITECH Expanse implementation with embedded performance improvement; MEDITECH MAAS implementation, training, and maintenance support; total cost of ownership comparisons and full planning engagements; complete managed services for MEDITECH – support and maintenance of all applications; legacy system support and maintenance; revenue cycle optimization; and digital health.

Nordic’s extensive knowledge of the patient experience and the healthcare ecosystem enables us to identify and deliver measurable outcomes for healthcare organizations. From initial assessment through design and implementation of customized solutions, we listen to understand strategic priorities and operational and technology needs. Clients turn to us again and again, because we share industry best practices and put partnership and collaboration first, all to improve quality of care and financial sustainability. Please visit us at Booth #218


DrFirst

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Booth 313

Contact: Erin Lease Hall, senior manager, events marketing
eleasehall@drfirst.com
216.650.7687

Since 2008, we have provided MEDITECH with innovative EHR enhancements, DrFirst’s e-prescribing and medication history are integrated with MEDITECH, giving clinicians access to best-in-class solutions. Adding SmartSig technology to safely translate and infer medication history data can streamline medication reconciliation by up to 50%. Other integrations that support e-prescribing include price transparency, electronic prior authorization, and controlled substance modules.

Don’t miss Ii: Wednesday, May 29, 2024, 2:20 PM MST. Ben G. Long, MD, and Brooke Brown, RN, Magnolia Regional Health Center. Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a significant burden on patients and health systems nationwide. Hear how Magnolia Regional Health Center’s Nurse Navigator program reduced prescription gaps in standard medication treatment for CHF and improved medication adherence using digital tools, clinical documentation, and report writing in MEDITECH Expanse.


Vyne Medical

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Booth 228

Contact: Meg Michael, chief client officer
meg.michael@vynecorp.com
336 254.2951

Is your health system struggling under the weight of a heavy administrative burden? Vyne Medical solutions can help. Trusted nationwide as a leading healthcare workflow tool for 25+ years, our software functions as a suite of products that can be customized to meet a health system’s unique processes and needs. By harnessing automation to complete the front-end’s mundane, manual tasks like capturing, managing, and exchanging disparate data, our software integrates with your EMR system to automatically index captured data directly to the patient record, providing significant time and money savings. Vyne Medical’s newest innovative tool, FormUSign Powered by Docubee, is digitizing and automating traditional form management in healthcare. By facilitating the creation of a reusable template that can be easily shared among multiple users, FormUSign allows users to choose specific fields for automatic population. Visit booth 228 to schedule a product demo or to learn more about our healthcare-specific solutions, plus get a preview of other exciting upcoming products.

News 5/22/24

May 21, 2024 News 5 Comments

Top News

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A Business Insider piece titled “Oracle’s deadly gamble” says that Oracle’s Larry Ellison had a vision that acquiring Cerner and then applying Oracle’s AI models to its data would create the EHR of the future, but found out afterward that “Cerner was a total mess.”

Points from the piece:

  • Cerner was receptive to the acquisition when approached in 2021 because problems with its architecture and software were piling up.
  • Oracle took a black eye when care lapses and deaths in the VA system were attributed to the Cerner system. One Oracle executive describes the VA contract as a “shackle” that distracts Ellison from his grander vision.
  • Oracle has stopped taking customization requests from the VA because every facility wanted the system to work exactly their way, which was a luxury they had with the VA’s custom-written VistA. VA officials hoped to force standardization by implementing Cerner.
  • Company executives admit that much of the client dissatisfaction was created when Oracle laid off experienced Cerner resources.
  • The article notes that Ellison’s big bet on applying AI to Cerner’s patient data is losing value as clients and their data move to Epic, including flagship accounts such as Intermountain and UPMC.
  • Providence’s chief strategy and digital offer says that people perceive that “Cerner is circling the drain.”

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.


Sales

  • St. Vincent’s Private Hospital in Ireland will implement Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging software.
  • Children’s Nebraska selects remote patient monitoring technology from Locus Health.
  • Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust, and Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust in England will roll out a shared Oracle Health system in 2026.
  • Centra (VA) will enhance its stroke care with Sevaro’s OneCall telemedicine service.
  • WakeMed Health & Hospitals will implement Regard’s automated clinical data review and insights software across its three hospitals in North Carolina.
  • University Hospitals (OH) selects insulin management software from Glytec.
  • Beacon Health System will implement Notable’s AI platform to reach out to patients who have had diagnostic procedures and tests ordered and then allow them to schedule their appointments digitally.

People

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CareCloud promotes Crystal Williams to COO.

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Apprio hires Srinivasan Krishnan, MS (Greenway Health) as CTO.


Announcements and Implementations

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St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute (MO) implements Story Health’s virtual and asynchronous care program for AFib patients.

WellStar Health (GA) co-develops and pilots patient check-in software that incorporates Clear Verification technology.


Privacy and Security

Ascension’s May 21 update contains no new information about the restoration of their systems from a May 8 cyberattack.

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The American Medical Association, state medical societies, CHIME, and AHIMA ask HHS to confirm that Change Healthcare and UnitedHealth Group, not providers, will be responsible for HIPAA breach notifications related to their cyberattack.


Sponsor Updates

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  • Impact Advisors donates $10,000 to the Midwest Health Foundation in support of its UChicago Medicine AdventHealth GlenOaks School and Transition Program.
  • AvaSure announces the winners of its 2023 AvaPrize Winners for Virtual Care Excellence.
  • Clinical Architecture sponsors the AMIA 2024 Clinical Informatics Conference May 21-23 in Minneapolis.
  • Nordic publishes a new episode of its “In Network” podcast titled “Designing for Health: Interview with Diana Anderson, MD.”
  • Divurgent will present at the E-Health Conference and Tradeshow May 27 in Vancouver.
  • Ellkay wins a KLAS Points of Light Award for its collaborative work on closing care gaps for HEDIS measures through natural language processing.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 5/20/24

May 18, 2024 News 1 Comment

Top News

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The all-important KLAS report on the US acute care EHR market finds that Epic gained 153 hospitals in 2023 while losing none, while all other vendors showed a net loss of hospitals and beds. Epic now holds a 39% market share of US hospitals, representing 52% of beds.

Oracle Health finished last in losing a net 71 hospitals representing 15,000 beds.

Most of Oracle Health’s wins since 2016 have been in standalone hospitals of under 200 beds. Those hospitals aren’t buying due to economic pressures.

Meditech, which enjoyed an all-time high customer retention rate of 84% in 2022, saw that drop to the lowest-ever 30%, with 25% of that due to M&A.


Reader Comments

From Benny Jets: “Re: article naming the top 10 healthcare AI companies. Most of the list is obvious, but the interesting name is Merative. This is the IBM Watson Health spinout that is led by Gerry McCarthy. In two years, they have reversed the ridiculous IBM strategy and have led each of the core solutions back to the top of their respective markets. Big tech shouldn’t be allowed in healthcare. It is just a matter of time before Oracle drives Cerner into the ground and Francisco Partners buys and fixes that too.” IBM sold the business – which includes the former Truven, Merge Healthcare, and Curam — to Francisco Partners for a reported $1 billion in 2022, after which it hired Gerry – who has spent nearly 35 years in our industry — and renamed itself. I’m not linking to the article in the UK-based magazine because that publication reeks strongly of pay-for-play, it does not include the criteria of how it chooses its many click-baity Top 10 lists, and nobody involved seems to have any experience or knowledge about healthcare. I also don’t know how much AI is used in Merative’s offerings or why even cursory research should have caught the May 2024 list’s inclusion of Babylon Health, a pretty scammy company that filed bankruptcy and died an ugly death last summer. But I agree that Merative is flying under the radar and seemingly shedding the Watson Health baggage.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Most poll respondents support the idea of a mandatory, government-issued national patient identifier, although thoughtful comments address the realities of making that happen.

New poll to your right or here: does your business card or email signature list a certification or fellowship credential?

I’m watching more YouTube videos as their quality has improved – documentaries, concert videos, and travel recaps. My use and satisfaction has always been limited by intrusive ads (not Ryan Reynolds again), but I wasn’t willing to spend $18.99 per month to avoid them. I was happy to find that I don’t need to since YouTube Premium is only $13.99 per month or $11.67 if paid annually, provided that you buy it from the website and not the IOS app, where Apple’s 30% skim will cost you an extra $5 per month. There’s also a 90-day free trial. I’m enjoying the ad-free experience, the ability to download videos, playing videos in the background, and the surprisingly strong Apple Music, which I would use constantly if I didn’t already have Spotify Premium. Dig beyond the narcissistic, TikTok style dreck that is good only for wasting time while stunting your brain and you’ll find some solid content out there. Not only that, the experience is stupendously better when played on the big screen.

I’m finding that I use ChatGPT more for web searching. It’s like a pleasant vacation from Google’s ads, spam, and SEO-juiced junk content. I see why Google started holding emergency meetings basically the day that OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5.

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Readers funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Ms. I in New York, who asked for STEM manipulatives for her class of three year olds. She reports, “I hope this note finds you well and filled with the same warmth and gratitude with which our classroom overflows, thanks to your incredible generosity. As a teacher, witnessing the excitement and enthusiasm radiating from my students as they engage with the STEM supplies you’ve provided fills my heart with. Your generosity has transformed our classroom into a dynamic learning environment where curiosity thrives, creativity flourishes, and innovation knows no bounds.”


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Waystar is reportedly considering a June IPO after tabling those plans last year due to market conditions.


Sales

  • Sturdy Health will implement Notable’s healthcare operations platform, integrated with Oracle Health, for patient outreach and self-service.

People

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Cleveland Clinic promotes Sarah Hatchett, MBA to SVP/CIO.


Announcements and Implementations

The Toronto newspaper covers the Meditech Expanse rollout in 23 hospitals in northeastern Ontario.

Epic issues a rare press release in recapping the 9,000-attendee XGM (Expert Group Meetings) that concluded on May 9. It seems like a university’s Alumni Weekend, where people flock back to campus to once again to reconnect with with the like-minded in the hallowed halls, sit around the campfire, and pose for treehouse pictures. All that’s missing is a football game.

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HCA Healthcare runs a Q&A with Chief Nursing Informatics Officer Sherri Hess, RN, MS-IS.


Privacy and Security

Ascension has issued no ransomware attack updates since May 15.


Other

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Therapists are making more money as influencers who crank out empathetic TikTok self-help videos than they made seeing patients, according to The Cut, which quoted the therapist above who is making $1 million per year via brand deals, selling merchandise, and charging for subscriptions. Still, that therapist still warns that he’s burned out from making videos, dealing with hate comments, and working under a system where “Daddy Algorithm is my boss and I get a performance review every single day based on an algorithm that’s mysterious and doesn’t make any sense.”


Sponsor Updates

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  • HCTec sponsors the AltaMed Foundation’s annual golf tournament, supporting patients of the AltaMed Medical and Dental Group (CA).
  • QGenda announces new and add-on customers of its enterprise credentialing solution, including UT Health San Antonio, Crouse Health, OB Hospitalist Group, and Parkland Health.
  • Availity wins two Bronze Stevie Awards for sales and customer service.
  • Wolters Kluwer Health launches Ovid Nutrition and Health, an exclusive interdisciplinary health research database.
  • Redox releases a new Diagnosing Healthtech Podcast, “Data interoperability now: Why healthcare can’t afford to wait.”
  • Hospital Universidad del Norte in Colombia selects Sectra’s enterprise imaging technology.
  • Spok publishes an e-book, “Six strategic advantages of consolidated contact centers.”

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

News 5/17/24

May 16, 2024 News 6 Comments

Top News

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The House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs committees introduce legislation related to the VA’s implementation of Oracle Health:

  • Rollouts will be paused until the facilities that are live on the system “have recovered to return to normal operational levels.”
  • The project and the VA’s Oracle Health contract will be cancelled two years after the bill is passed unless the VA can show metrics that prove overall improvement.
  • The metrics that the VA reports to Congress would be expanded to include user adoption, employee satisfaction, and employee retention.
  • The VA will be required to provide an additional report to Congress that provides the cost and module-by-module status of its legacy VistA system.

Reader Comments

From Slow Green: “Re: Greenway Health. Tiffani Misencik, chief revenue officer, has departed.” I compared the company’s executive page to the year-ago version and note these changes:

  • No longer listed: Tiffani Misencik, chief revenue officer; Terri Gonzalez, chief HR officer.
  • Newly added: Frank Piraino, chief of staff; Mark Goodwin, SVP of Greenway Revenue Services; Brandi Kline, VP of marketing; Nallajerla Murthy. GM of Greenway Health India.

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From Sprinter: “Re: Vince Ciotti’s HIS-tory series. Do you have a link to the file?” The 1,400-page file that the late Vince wrote for HIStalk over the years covering the industry from the 1960s to the 1990s is here. I ask him in a 2019 conversation what his epitaph would say, to which he replied, “If I could be remembered for anything, it would probably be my HIS-tory files, which I thank you for posting over such a long time, two and a half years. I hope some of the future CIOs read them and learn from them. I hope that’s what they remember me by, the guy that warned them about not repeating these mistakes of the past.”


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Wall Street Journal notes that hospitals raised prices 7.7% in April, the largest increase in 13 years.


Sales

  • Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin will offer 24×7 virtual urgent care visits via MyChart from KeyCare.

Announcements and Implementations

Epic will roll out a “patients like this one” type tool to its users in Indiana this summer. It will compare the active patient’s chart to Epic’s Cosmos database to help doctors make decisions about treatment options.

Meditech reports that its clients took three of the top five top digital maturity scores among NHS trusts and Integrated Care Systems.

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Get-to-Market Health announces Commercial Health Check, a fixed-price review of a client’s go-to-market efforts that details areas of strength and potential improvement. The company’s principals are Steve Shihadeh and MP Brock Zimmerman, who have spent their entire careers in digital health.

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MassDevelopment issues $400 million in tax-exempt bonds to fund Beth Israel Lahey Health’s real estate needs and its upgrades to Epic.

Transcarent adds AI-powered patient navigation to its system, which provides a single app and log-in for members to access their benefits, obtain medical advice, and initiate virtual care.

Athenahealth announces GA of AthenaOne modules for women’s health and urgent care.

Epic announces that two of its hospitals in the Netherlands are the first to use its AI-powered patient summaries, presumably in the Dutch language.


Privacy and Security

Ascension has posted no news on its Cybersecurity Event Update. Regional updates indicate that pharmacies still can’t fill prescriptions, patient care may be delayed, and results from imaging and tests may take longer. From press reports:

  • One patient whose doctor hadn’t seen her pulled out her own IV and left.
  • Another said they can’t get their scheduled chemotherapy.
  • A post-surgery patient couldn’t get pain meds because there’s no record of the procedure.
  • Patient class action lawsuits have been filed.
  • A family member of a patient who died at an Ascension hospitals says they can’t proceed with cremation because the hospital can’t access her cause of death.
  • An ultrasound tech says that some areas have working fax machines, while others don’t, adding, “We don’t really have a lot of direction from anyone in upper admin or management.”
  • A nurse at an Ascension hospital in Nashville describes the situation as “pure and utter chaos from the second you walk in the door.”
  • Ascension Via Christi sent several ICU nurses home after they raised concerns about inadequate staffing.
  • Some nurses worry that a mistake made due to the lack of electronic patient safety checks, such as those offered by drug dispensing cabinets and bedside barcoding, could jeopardize their licenses.
  • The local paper reports that Ascension Seton medical offices in the Highland Lakes area of Texas have had their systems restored.

Australia’s federal government investigates a ransomware attack of Melbourne-based MediSecure, which offers an e-prescribing system. The company says that it has been affected by a cybersecurity incident. Its website and phone lines are down. It suspects that the incident originated at one of its vendors.


Sponsor Updates

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  • Five9 employees volunteer in their local communities as part of Five9 Day.
  • First Databank expands its Meducation Solution medication instructions to include translations of Hindi and Punjabi.
  • Health Data Movers publishes a new episode of its “QuickHITs” podcast titled “Advancing Health Equity through Technology: A Conversation with Dr. Julia Skapik.”
  • FinThrive releases a new Health Rethink Podcast, “Health Equity is Earned, and Learned!”
  • Healthcare IT Leaders releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Building a Purpose-Driven IT Organization.”
  • Inovalon publishes a new case study, “Guardian Angels Senior Services Sees Overtime Drop with Smart Scheduling.”
  • The HITea with Grace Podcast features KeyCare Chief Medical Officer Carrie Nelson, MD, “Dr. Carrie Nelson Spills the Tea on Telehealth Patient Safety & Quality.” 

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

News 5/15/24

May 14, 2024 News Comments Off on News 5/15/24

Top News

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Ascension’s most recent update from Monday evening reaffirms that it will take some time – no timelines were announced — for it to return to normal operation following its May 8 cyberattack.

The update confirms that the attack involved ransomware.

Ascension also added region-specific updates for its patients. It warns that it is unable to accept credit card payments, wait times will be extended, and that some of its retail pharmacies cannot fill prescriptions.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Specialty care coordination company Switchboard Health raises $6.5 million in seed funding. Health IT veteran Derek Baird co-founded the company in 2022.

A Black Book survey of 30,000 physician office leaders and practitioners about their response to the Change Healthcare outage finds that 92% of medical practices are navigating short-term fixes and long-term vendor solutions. Nearly all complained that they first heard about the cyberattack from sources other than Change Healthcare. Black Book also notes that healthcare organizations that are negotiating new clearinghouse contracts should consider the value of the data that is contained in their claims, rights to which may have been signed over to their vendor in their original contracts. The top-rated competitors to Change Healthcare are Veradigm Payerpath, Waystar, Experian, and Availity.

Sturdy Health (MA) implements Notable Health’s AI-powered patient engagement, intake, and payments software.

Adam Selipsky, MBA, CEO of Amazon Web Services, will leave the company after three years. He will be replaced by AWS sales and marketing SVP Matt Garman, MS, MBA.

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CareCloud reports Q1 results: revenue down 13%, EPS –$0.02 versus –$0.28, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue, sending shares down sharply and valuing the company at $30 million.

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Augmedix reports Q1 results: revenue up 40%, EPS –$0.12 versus –$0.14, beating expectations for both. Shares dropped 51% as the company announced lowered revenue expectations, which it attributed to providers pausing to evaluate competing AI offerings. The company’s market cap is $56 million.


Sales

  • Elbert Memorial Hospital (GA) selects telehealth services from Equum Medical.
  • Meditech chooses Ellkay to provide interface services, including supporting the technical infrastructure involved in implementing Expanse as Meditech-as-a-Service.

People

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Alpha II promotes Ashley Womack to CEO.

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Censinet names David Woska, PhD (PHD Consulting Services) CISO.

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Justin Jacobson, MBA (Microsoft) joins Symplr as managing director/SVP of its contract and supplier management business.

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Suzanne Delbanco, PhD, MPH, founding CEO of The Leapfrog Group and co-founder and executive director of Catalyst for Payment Reform, has died of cancer.


Announcements and Implementations

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LG Electronics announces Primefocus Health, which offers digital health solutions for in-home care.

Nuffield Health, the UK’s largest healthcare charity, goes live on a new digital booking experience for health assessments with assistance from Lumeon.

Dandelion Health, which offers a real-world data and clinical AI platform, launches a clinical dataset of 200,000 patients who are taking GLP-1 drugs, as extracted from the systems of its non-academic health system partners.

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Researchers that include Eric Topol, MD introduce medical image interpretation dataset MedInterp, which contains 13 million annotated instances across three modalities. It will support the development of the “learnable orchestrator” that they call MedVersa.

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Meta will shut down its enterprise communication system Workplace and is recommending Zoom-owned Workvivo as its replacement.


Government and Politics

HHS offers new funding opportunities for projects related to accelerating the adoption of health IT in behavioral healthcare settings, and to developing novel ways to evaluate and improve the quality of health care data used by AI solutions.

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare will likely end its contract with the bankrupt Idaho HIE unless the exchange improves transparency over security, financials, and employees. The HIE has spent $94 million of mostly federal tax funds, but a watchdog found that the 10-year-old organization has instituted few accountability measures.


Privacy and Security

Johnson Memorial Hospital (IN) President and CEO David Dunkle, MD says that the hospital is still feeling the effects of the ransomware attack that crippled its computer network in 2021: “We are forced to spend millions on cybersecurity, and we’re still suffering from higher insurance rates because of our attack, and we pay more than our peers, our same size peers do, because we had an attack. We see what Ascension is going through. My heart breaks for them because I’ve been there.”


Other

OpenAI’s newly announced GPT4o includes integration with the Be My Eyes app for the vision impaired. The ability for a blind person to hail a taxi as shown at the 0:35 mark is spectacular.


Sponsor Updates

  • Availity and Waystar rank highest in physician customer satisfaction with clearinghouses during and after the Change Healthcare ransomware attack.
  • CereCore releases a new podcast, “Cybersecurity Expert from Defense Weighs in on Healthcare’s Opportunities.”
  • Consensus Cloud Solutions will sponsor the Colorado HIMSS Spring Conference May 15-16 in Denver.
  • CloudWave will exhibit at the HIMSS New England Spring Conference May 16 in Norwood, MA.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 5/13/24

May 12, 2024 News 5 Comments

Top News

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Ascension’s 140 hospitals in 19 states remain offline following a ransomware attack on Thursday. An unstated number of the facilities are diverting ambulances.

The health system says restoring the systems “will take some time to complete,” adding, “we will be utilizing downtime procedures for some time.”

Ascension advises patients to bring in their own appointment notes and prescription information. A hospital family nurse said, “Patients are getting harmed. No one can tell you otherwise.”

A patient who was hospitalized when the attacked started reports, “It was like 1980. Everyone’s running to get pieces of paper, charts, clipboards. They have no computers whatsoever. It was chaos.” The patient, a colon cancer survivor who was vomiting blood, left the hospital two days after admission because he still hadn’t been seen by a doctor.

CNN reports that the Russia-linked ransomware group Black Basta was responsible for the attack. The federal government issued a warning about its ransomware variant on Friday.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Here are the results from last week’s poll. For me, the convenience of co-locating a medical and dental practice with a big-box store doesn’t hold value since plenty of doctors and dentists have offices in easily accessible locations. Some respondent comments that I’m paraphrasing:

  • Walmart shut it down because they can generate higher margins elsewhere. The company benefits only from bringing in more dollars per square foot, not from supporting “healthier communities.”
  • Health systems know that primary care and pediatrics are loss leaders, but Walmart missed that fact. They can’t sell enough groceries and TV sets to make up the cost.
  • Walmart didn’t differentiate its services. It was just a bigger box with more expensive executives who were disconnected from any kind of healthcare transformation. Still, the company probably isn’t done with healthcare and an acquisition is likely.

New poll to your right or here: Should the federal government issue a national patient identifier?

I was pondering another poll: which platform’s users have the apparent lowest IQ or technical capability, Facebook or Nextdoor?


I always offer a Summer Doldrums Sponsorship Special, which usually involves some free months for the first year. Contact Lorre. Former sponsors also get a deal for returning. All gain visibility with the most influential people in the industry, who read HIStalk quietly but religiously.


Webinars

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


Sales

  • The Centers chooses Netsmart CareFabric, which includes the MyAvatar EHR.

People

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Industry long-timer Dann Lemerand (Navv Systems) joins Otter Products as healthcare vertical lead. Dann created the 4,200-member HIStalk Fan Club on LinkedIn many years ago, of which I can’t cite any specific benefits except to my ego when it gets bruised.


Government and Politics

Three members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee call for the VA to take advantage of its recently renegotiated contract with Oracle Health – which changed the contract’s five-year term to five, one-year terms – to strengthen accountability and oversight terms. They note that poor service delivery in the previous five-year period resulted in just a few hundred thousands of dollars in credits being extended toward the $10 billion contract.


Sponsor Updates

  • Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new “UpToDate Point of Care Report: An enterprise approach to unify healthcare.”
  • EVisit announces a business development partnership with digital consulting firm Monsterlab.
  • TruBridge announces Multiview’s cloud-based enterprise resource planning software as its preferred financial management solution for its customers.
  • Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Farhan Ahmad and Jon Keevil, MD.”
  • PerfectServe honors 150 outstanding nurses in its fourth annual Nurses of Note Awards program.
  • Sonifi Health will exhibit at the HIMSS Texas Regional Conference May 13-16 in Grapevine.
  • Tegria publishes a new case study, “Custom Demo Environment Accelerates EHR Adoption.”

The following HIStalk Sponsors are named MedTech Breakthrough Award winners:

  • Amenities – best online search and scheduling solution
  • Nym – health administration innovation award
  • Bamboo Health – best care orchestration platform
  • Artera- best patient communication solution
  • Elsevier – AI innovation award
  • Symplr – best provider data management platform
  • Inovalon – best data visualization solution
  • Waystar – healthcare payments innovation award

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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RECENT COMMENTS

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  3. SaaS makes sense to me as an option for small practices. As the businesses get larger it gradually makes less…

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