News 4/18/18

Top News

UNC Health Care (NC) announces that it has achieved HIMSS Stage 7 for inpatient, ambulatory, and analytics, of which neighboring Duke Health was the first trifecta winner.

The announcement includes a little dig at Duke, noting that UNC is “the only health system in the US to achieve Stage 7 status on all three HIMSS Analytics domains … and also honored as ‘Most Wired Advanced.” UNC is one of the 17 health systems (of which Duke isn’t one) to be so recognized in that latter contest.

UNC also announces UNC Urgent Care 24/7, which offers $49 video visits via MDLive’s service.

Reader Comments

From Private Privatized: “Re: Share Lab. The joint venture between HCA and Sharecare is shutting down and had layoffs last week.” Unverified. I didn’t get a response from Sharecare to my inquiries. The JV was formed in January 2015 to “create innovative digital patient engagement solutions.” Sharecare was founded in 2010 by TV huckster Dr. Oz and WebMD founder Jeff Arnold. Share Lab was working on enterprise scheduling and provider search. UPDATE: A Sharecare spokesperson confirms that the project is being placed on hold. More in the next HIStalk news post.

From Languishing Liz: “Re: MHS Genesis. DoD doctors prefer it over AHLTA,  according to this article’s headline. The story is ridiculous.” The health IT “news” site’s 17-paragraph story – illustrated with gratuitous clipart and crafted by a 2016 creative writing graduate – simply re-words a story from the Pensacola News Journal that was in turn syndicated by something called Military Update by Tom Philpott. Tom didn’t exactly knock himself out on research for this article, having interviewed a single, DoD-chosen doctor (yes, ONE, which is why I passed on the story) to conclude that MHS Genesis is experiencing “gains in user support.” Everyone involved in passing off this lazy fluff as news (including those who tweeted it out) should be ashamed. In addition, you would certainly hope that doctors like Cerner better than the bottom-ranked AHLTA (vs. the VA’s #1 rated VistA) given its many billion dollar price tag, a characteristic it shares with both AHLTA and VistA.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Pivot Point Consulting. The Brentwood, TN-based firm is a healthcare IT consulting leader that offers strategic advisory services, EHR and ERP implementation, training and activation, project management and PMO, optimization, technology services, managed services, and permanent placement. Clients range from large, multi-hospital networks to academic institutions, pediatric hospitals, and local community clinics. The company has earned industry and workplace quality recognition, including being the highest-rated vendor in KLAS Implementation Services Select Category (July 2017 report), #1 in KLAS for Epic Consulting in the Select Category in 2016, and #9 in Modern Healthcare’s Best Places to Work in 2016. Thanks to Pivot Point Consulting for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Livongo Health acquires 80-employee, Chicago-based Retrofit, which provides online programs for weight management and disease prevention. The company has raised $16 million, but its most recent funding round was in December 2013. It pivoted from a direct-to-consumer model to emphasize corporate programs in early 2015, although it still offers the consumer service starting at $248 per month (no wonder it needed to pivot at those prices). A 2016 company-sponsored study found that around half of participants had a clinically significant weight loss after 12 months, although that excludes the 40 percent of participants who dropped out.

Nokia is close to unloading the assets of France-based consumer connected health hardware vendor Withings, which it acquired for $190 million less than two years ago. The French government is pressing Nokia to find a buyer in France, reports say, which could box out Google, which has reportedly expressed interest.

Signify Research questions why it took GE so long to decide to unload its struggling health IT business, postulating that the company was unwilling to exit the population health management market. It notes that Project Northstar – which is developing an ambulatory PHM solution – is part of the package that is being dealt off to Veritas Capital, but Caradigm will remain with GE despite a puzzling fit that could make it next on the block if GE investors continue to press the company hard. I interviewed GE Healthcare VP/GM Jon Zimmerman about Project Northstar when it was announced in May 2016.

Amazon abandons its plan to become a drug distributor to hospitals, saying it’s too hard to convince hospitals to reconsider buying through their group purchasing organizations from traditional middlemen like Cardinal Health and McKesson. Drug distributor and chain drugstore shares rose on the news.

Greenway Health, spurred by $520,000 in state in local incentives, has added 104 jobs at its Tampa headquarters as it closed offices in Lake Mary, FL, Birmingham, AL, and Atlanta.

I’m not sure the “affordable” thing fits.

Sales

Puerto Rico Primary Care Association Network selects Health Gorilla as its clinical information exchange platform. The announcement notes that half of doctors in Puerto Rico don’t use an EHR and thus the platform has to manage faxes.

People

Michael Farrell (Cerner) is named SVP/GM of the hospital business of virtual visit provider MDLive.

Janet Moga (Genentech) joins Carevive Systems as VP of research operations.

Prime Healthcare hires Will Conaway (Dignity Health) as CIO.

Optum promotes industry long-timer Vito Augusta to VP.

Announcements and Implementations

A small KLAS study of medical staff credentialing services and software vendors finds that Verge Health, ASM’s MD-Staff, and HealthStream’s Morrissey (presumably not the English singer who recorded “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful”) lead the tiny pack. It’s written in a confusing manner, especially in intermingling product and company names, so my already slight interest was reduced quickly. Three of the six reviewed vendors declined to participate. On the plus side, KLAS provided the number of responses it received for each vendor, which ranged from six to 19.

A Black Book satisfaction survey of 19,000 ambulatory EHR users names AdvancedMD, Modernizing Medicine, NextGen, Epic, and Allscripts as vendor performance leaders. It also notes that smaller practices are the most dissatisfied with EHRs, but are also less likely to use advanced EHR tools. Nearly one-third of practices in the 12-and-over practitioner category say they’ll replace their EHR by 2021, hoping most for cloud-based systems that offer analytics, telehealth, and speech recognition.  

Government and Politics

The GAO previously placed the VA on its High Risk List of programs that are vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. The VA announces the five mostly vague improvements it will make, one of them being implementing Cerner to improve interoperability with the DoD and community health partners.

Interim VA CIO Scott Blackburn, who was heavily involved in its plan to implement Cerner, resigns for unspecified reasons.

Other

A JAMA op-ed piece looks smartly at the myth vs. reality of mentoring millennials.

A small study published in JAMA Internal Medicine finds that people with poorly controlled blood pressure who were sent medication reminders via the Medisafe smartphone app showed minimal improvement in medication adherence and zero improvement in systolic blood pressure. Even worse, study participants were chosen from a volunteers who were not only motivated, but technologically capable to use the app, which might not be generalizable to patients as a whole. Participants were also required to take their blood pressure “periodically” over the 12-week study using a study-provided home device, which in itself may have improved medication adherence. The listed study limitations don’t include what I would think is a considerable one: the short-term variability of medication effect on patients already known to have poorly controlled BP.

Michigan State University — reacting to the sexual assault conviction of its medical school professor Larry Nassar, DO — says in a board of trustees meeting that its MSU HealthTeam physician practice now documents in its EHR that a chaperone is present during sensitive examinations. The group has also updated its treatment consent form to notify patients that chaperones are permitted for adult patients and required for minors. That bit of news was overshadowed by an 18-year-old victim of Nassar’s, who claimed in a statement presented at the same meeting that MSU Interim President John Engler pressed her to settle her civil lawsuit without her attorney present. She also said Engler told her that the sexual misconduct arrest of Nassar’s former boss — resigned medical school dean William Strampel, DO — was “only just a slap on the butt” and that MSU’s osteopathic doctors are being unfairly lumped in with one bad one. She didn’t get to finish her statement to the board – Engler stopped her, saying her “time was up,” an unfortunate choice of on-the-record words given the existence of the celebrity #TimesUp movement against sexual harassment and assault.

Struggling Sonoma West Medical Center (CA) — which was making $1.25 million per month by performing mail-in toxicology tests for Florida-based rehab testing lab – says it needs to “increase revenue through extra lines of work” after insurer Anthem got wise to the scam and sued the ambulance-chaser lawyer who owns the rehab testing lab. The hospital was billing at hospital rates that were up to 10 times what a toxicology lab would have charged and Anthem wants its money back. Googling also turns up that the rehab testing lab’s owner bought Chestatee Regional Hospital (GA) for $15 million, ran the same billing scheme through that hospital, and is now shutting the rural hospital down. He also owns Jenkins County Medical Center (GA) and sends bills through it.

The Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital (TN) contracted window-washer who earned national attention in 2014 for dressing up as Spiderman to cheer up the children inside may have had a darker motivation – he’s been sentenced to 100 years in prison for molesting two children and posting photos of the attacks on the Internet, with prosecutors saying  his Spiderman garb was an attempt to “access other vulnerable children” at the same time the acts occurred.

Sponsor Updates

• Docent Health team members support Dignity Health’s Marian Regional Medical Center Foundation’s Day of Hope.
• AdvancedMD publishes a new e-guide, “5 Ways to Increase Front Desk Revenue.”
• Aprima will exhibit at the Colorado Rural Health Center Forum April 19-20 in Lakewood.
• Carevive co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer Carrie Stricker, RN talks about patient engagement at #AMCCBS.
• Change Healthcare will exhibit at the ACMA 2018 National Conference April 23 in Houston.
• CoverMyMeds will present at AMCP April 23-26 in Boston.
• CTG will exhibit at the Texas Regional HIMSS Conference April 26-27 in Dallas.
• Parallon Technology Solutions leads the Meditech Ambulatory 6.15 go-live of Cass Regional Medical Center (MO).
• Dimensional Insight will exhibit at the HIMSS Southern California Chapter’s Annual Healthcare IT Conference April 20 in Los Angeles.
• Elsevier Clinical Solutions will exhibit at the American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses event April 29 in Anaheim, CA.
• EClinicalWorks and IMAT Solutions will exhibit at the NAACOS 2018 Conference April 25-27 in Baltimore.
• Hyland Healthcare announces several recent go-lives.
• Healthwise will exhibit at the Healthcare User Group April 22-25 in San Antonio.
• OmniSys and Comprehensive Pharmacy Services partner to support the hospital outpatient pharmacy market.
• Wolters Kluwer Health expands the global reach of its Ovid Discovery with more multi-language search offerings.
• Casenet announces the speaker lineup and program for its Connect 2018 conference, which will take place April 23-25 in Boston.
• InstaMed will exhibit at Health Evolution Summit April 18-20 in Laguna Beach, CA.
• Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at the Allscripts Mid-Atlantic Client User Group Meeting 2018 April 19-20 in Baltimore.
• Kyruus will exhibit at the 2018 Texas Regional HIMSS Conference April 26-27 in Dallas.

Blog Posts

• How eForms Give Surgeons and Patients What They Want (Access)
• What’s the difference? See it for yourself: image processing, image quality and dose in neonatal radiography (Agfa Healthcare)
• The Value of Clinical Data Registries: Improving the Quality and Safety of Patient Care (pMD)
• 2018 Healthcare Trends Part 6: Beyond Digital Health Hype (Datica)
• 5 Dangers of Not Having Call Recording in Your Call Center (Spok)
• Artificial Intelligence as Solution for Physician Burnout (CareSync)
• Tips for Managing Coding Quality (Impact Advisors)
• Why Your Practice Should Be Embracing Digital Health (ChartLogic)
• Healthcare ERP Technology Talent Shortage (Divurgent)
• Petaluma Health Center: Unified Community Care (EClinicalWorks)
• Project Spotlight: Calderdale & Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust (UK), Part 1 – Owen Williams, Chief Executive (The HCI Group)
• Healthgrades and the Denver Tech Sector Are Attracting Talent from Silicon Valley (Healthgrades)
• Why Accuracy is So Important for Dominating Local Search in Healthcare (Influence Health)
• HIMSS18 in Three Quick “Bites” (InterSystems)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/16/18

Top News

Nashville-based hospital chain Community Health Systems lays off at least 70 corporate IT employees. Anonymous rumors say the data center and deployment areas were hit hard and the company may be looking to send data center support offshore.

Wayne Smith, CEO and board chair of the publicly traded company, was paid $5 million with an $812,000 performance bonus in 2017 even as the company lost $2 billion and share price dropped 52 percent. CHS has sold 40 hospitals recently as it struggles to absorb its 2013 acquisition of Health Management Associates for $7.6 billion that left the company $14 billion in debt.

Over the past five years, CHS share price has slid 88 percent vs. the Dow’s 64 percent gain, decreasing its market cap to just $466 million. 

Microsoft sued the company two weeks ago, claiming that CHS intentionally facilitated unauthorized use of its software in some of its divested hospitals and obstructed Microsoft’s ability to perform a full enterprise software audit as its agreement allows, claiming that limited information suggests that CHS’s enterprise size is at least six times what CHS had indicated. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Just 9 percent of poll respondents think their de-identified patient data is safe from being re-identified. One respondent recalls the 1990s brash assurance of Massachusetts Governor William Weld that the publicly released hospital records of state employees were safe because they had been de-identified. Graduate student Latanya Sweeney (now a computer science PhD and Harvard professor) easily found the governor’s hospital records, including his diagnoses and prescriptions, and sent them to his office. She knew he lived in Cambridge, so she paid $20 to buy the city’s voter registration rolls and matched up the records from the two databases – only six residents shared the governor’s birthdate, only three of those were men, and only one lived in his ZIP code. Sweeney later showed that 87 percent of Americans can be uniquely identified by just their ZIP code, birthdate, and gender. Imagine what Facebook could do with its technology, money, and huge store of personal information.

New poll to your right or here: How important is Twitter to your exposure to health IT knowledge, news, or opinions? Click the Comments link after voting to explain further.

Check out the responses to my question, “What I Wish I’d Known Before … Selecting a Consulting Firm for EHR Implementation or Optimization.”

Answers to this week’s question might help those trying to decide if taking college courses while working is doable and worth the effort.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Veritas Capital has arranged $850 million in leveraged loans to support its acquisition of GE Healthcare’s IT business for $1.05 billion.

Need proof that healthcare is a business rather than a compassionate service to humankind? Goldman Sachs warns gene therapy companies that “one shot cures” will not deliver sustained cash flow compared to the recurring revenue generated by treating — but not curing — chronic conditions.

CVS Health hires the chief medical officer of Iora Health as chief medical officer for its MinuteClinic division, perhaps signaling CVS’s interest in providing services to Medicare Advantage patients as part of its proposed merger with Aetna.

An LA Times article describes the lawsuit filed by California’s attorney general that claims that Sutter Health has used its market power to inflate Northern California inpatient costs to as much as 70 percent more than in Southern California. The article says:

• Prices rose 113 percent at Sutter and Dignity Health systems from 2004 to 2013 vs. 76 percent for all California hospitals.
• Sutter acquired Summit Medical Center in 1999 and raised prices by 72 percent, a practice that experts say allows all competitors to also raise prices.
• Sutter’s insurance contracts don’t allow any of its hospitals to be excluded or for patients to be charged a higher co-pay at specific hospitals regardless of their cost or outcomes. Sutter claims otherwise, but previous testimony showed that its conditions were that out-of-network visits – most commonly, ED visits where Sutter hospitals are the only option — would be charged at 95 percent of billed charges. Blue Cross estimated that Sutter’s profits on those visits would be 270 percent.
• Employers are forbidden legally from sharing cost information with third parties.

Sales

Drug maker Pfizer joins the global health research network of TriNetX, which will enable the company to access clinical, genomic, and oncology data for study design, site identification, and patient recruitment.

Decisions

• Hutchinson Regional Medical Center (KS) will switch from Philips Healthcare to Merge Healthcare cardiology information system in September 2018.
• Hannibal Regional Hospital (MO) is considering purchasing a new hemodynamic recording system.
• Pikeville Medical Center (KY) plans to switch from Philips to a Merge cardiology information system.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

Sound Physicians hires Lisa Shah, MD (Evolent Health) as chief innovation officer. The company provides hospitalists and other physician services.

Announcements and Implementations

WiserTogether adds risk warnings to treatment recommendation plans in its Return to Health platform that include opioids as a treatment option.

Memorial Hermann Health System (TX) joins the Greater Houston Healthconnect Network.

Privacy and Security

Judges in the UK and France order Google to remove search result links to old stories covering the criminal convictions of two executives. The men complained that laws don’t require them to report previous convictions to prospective employers and therefore Google is presenting irrelevant information that infringes on their “right to be forgotten.” 

Nova Scotia’s government charges a teen with unauthorized use of a computer after discovering that he had created a script to download all documents stored on a Freedom of Information Act portal, some of which weren’t supposed to be publicly available. The province had implemented no security on the site – documents were numbered sequentially, so the teen simply wrote a script to increment each URL and download the corresponding document, bypassing the site’s public page. Privacy experts say the government is looking for a scapegoat since the teen did nothing with the information he retrieved.

Other

Seventy-five-year-old Jeffrey Johnson, MD gives up his obstetrics privileges at St. Alexius Medical Center (IL) after refusing to take its EHR training classes. He said, “I can’t practice any more at our hospital because I don’t know how to do the computer efficiently. I don’t really give a damn. I care that I can’t practice any more and I care that the corporation who bought our hospital says that I have to know how to do the computer to continue to practice.”

India-based Apollo Hospitals develops a heart risk scoring tool that use Microsoft’s healthcare AI technology to analyze EHR data.

The New York Times exposes law firms that hire telemarketing firms to cold-call women who have received vaginal mesh implants and urge them to have them removed at company-hired surgery clinics. The reason: the law firms are pursuing mass tort lawsuits against the manufacturer and have realized that settlements are lower when the implant remains in place. The women were flown to Florida and Georgia, housed in motels, and sent to walk-up clinics for their procedures without meeting the surgeon first. Doctors who performed the surgeries made up to $14,000 per day, while the medical centers kept at least $15,000 per case even as some women experienced debilitating effects from the removal surgery. The patients sign a form binding them to pay back the surgery cost plus double-digit interest if their case is favorably settled, with upfront funding provided by firms that are backed by international banks and hedge funds.

I’ve been looking over Alex Scarlat, MD’s book, “Medical Information Extraction & Analysis: From Zero to Hero with a Bit of SQL and a Real-life Database.” It’s a hands-on clinician guide for using SQL (the database tools and de-identified patient database are included) to answer common clinical / informatics questions, such as, “What are the number of patients and admissions associated with sepsis-related diagnoses?” I think it’s important for clinicians to be able to do their own data discovery – sometimes you don’t realize what information is available or how it’s represented until you look at the underlying database, which often then leads to more useful queries. I’m pretty good with SQL and understanding data definitions and table relationships, but for those who aren’t and who learn best from hands-on experience (which is nearly everyone), then you’ll have fun with this book.

Banner Health will pay $18 million to settle False Claims Act charges, but HealthLeaders Media finds the most interesting aspect to the story – this is the third such lawsuit filed by the same whistleblower involving previous health system employers. Cecilia Guardiola has netted $6 million from filing her lawsuits after just 16, 19, and 3 months of employment at Christus Spohn, Renown Health, and Banner, respectively. She’s both an RN and a JD and appears to have worked for Optum as a clinical documentation improvement specialist. Banner must not Google prospective hires since her previous lawsuits were filed before they hired her in mid-2012.

Vince and Elise complete their series on 2018’s top health IT vendors by annual revenue by reviewing the companies in positions 7-10 – CPSI, Harris Healthcare, Medhost, and Cantata Health.

Odd: a couple in China dies days before their scheduled in vitro fertilizations, after which their respective parents sued each other hoping to convince a judge to give one of the couples access to the frozen fertilized embryos as “the only carriers of the bloodlines of both families.” The court agreed to release the embryos to a hospital, but since surrogacy is illegal in China, the four parents had to hire a woman in Laos to carry the baby. The baby boy was delivered on December 9, 2017, four years after his parents died.

Sponsor Updates

• The SSI Group will exhibit at the AL HIMSS Spring Conference April 18 in Huntsville.
• Huron will exhibit at the HCCA Annual Compliance Institute April 15-18 in Las Vegas.

Blog Posts

• Preventing the Next Cambridge Analytica from using your Medical Records (Redox)
• Smart Patient Access Reduces Hospital Debt & Improves Clean Claims Rate (The SSI Group)
• Do You Know Your Downtime Reporting System? (Summit Healthcare)
• Liberating Healthcare through Data Liquidity and Consumer Engagement (Medecision)
• Modern facilities are held back by old communication tools. (Voalte)
• Postcards from HIMSS18: Top Themes for Vocera Customers (Vocera)
• Playing for Keeps: The How and Why of Patient Loyalty (WebPT)
• Advance your referral intelligence (Philips Wellcentive)

Contacts

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

News 4/13/18

Top News

IDx receives FDA clearance to market its AI-based diabetic retinopathy diagnostic system to PCPs, giving them access to a tool that assesses patients without need for physician analysis.

The company received its clearance via the FDA’s Breakthrough Devices program.

Eric Topol noted in a tweet that only four AI medical algorithms – all of them related to pattern recognition – have earned FDA’s approval. Two are for imaging, one for is ECGs, and now IDx’s for retinal changes.

Reader Comments

From Rif’d Me a New One: “Re: Hitachi Vantara. RIF’d a number of us, with rumors of 800 to 14,000 globally. What amazes me is how they’ve been able to keep this out of the news. I’ve also found it interesting how certain executives have been getting promotions and pay increases, which might be better spent keeping a few more workers.” A Hitachi Ventara spokesperson responded to my inquiry with this statement: “As we continue to transform to help our customers unlock the value in their data, we must shift certain resources to best support our business. Hitachi Vantara is, in fact, growing significantly. In the past year we have hired more than 1,300 new employees to support high-growth segments of our business, with over 230 current job openings.” The digital tools company that focuses on IoT– a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Hitachi — was formed in September 2017 by combining Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho.

From Pleasant Valley: “Re: MModal. Has had stability problems nationally for the past couple of weeks with its software as a service product (Fluency for Transcription).” Several transcriptionists on the MT Stars forum have reported having problems, but only over the past couple of days. A company spokesperson provided this response to my inquiry: “As we experience ongoing growth, we continue to scale and have been upgrading our infrastructure to ensure further resiliency, high availability, and adequate capacity. We are proactively addressing any performance concerns to further support a consistent experience for transcriptionists who use top-ranking M*Modal Fluency for Transcription to improve their everyday workflows, quality, and productivity.”

From History Repeated: “Re: Epic and Meditech. As they approach their 40th and 50th anniversaries, respectively, it would be neat to see an article about how Judy Faulkner and Neil Pappalardo met. Ideally as a joint interview, but individual recollections would be fine. The stories I’ve heard are that Judy came to Neil seeking advice about starting a company. What did they think of each other then? Now? Epic uses MUMPS, which Neil invented – was that part of the conversation?” Those two folks are #1 and #2 on my most-wanted interview list, but both also decline every time I ask. It would be fun to capture their memories and, as always, I’m here to do so if they are willing. Above are early company photos of both from the sunny slopes of long ago.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week’s question of “What I Wish I’d Known Before … Selecting a Consulting Firm for EHR Implementation or Optimization” is still open.

Listening: new from Denver-based Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, big-sounding soul music recorded in Rodeo, NM. There’s also new music from a band I really like but forgot about, The Magic Numbers, whose new single more ballad-y hard rock than before. Their 2005 debut remains one of the best I’ve heard. To address my frequent need to hear the soaring virtuosity of progressive rock, I moved on to Kaipa, a Swedish band that’s been around since 1973 and that spawned the musical career of Roine Stolt, later of The Flower Kings, Transatlantic, and now The Sea Within (whose first album is due in June).

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Glen Tullman’s Livongo Health raises $105 million in a Series E funding round, increasing its total to $248 million. The company announces that it will work with Cambia Health Solutions to develop and market new consumer-friendly digital health offerings for people with chronic conditions.

Sales

• Peterson Regional Medical Center (TX) selects CloudWave’s OpSus Backup, Archive, and Recover services.
• Eleven-bed critical access hospital Munising Memorial Hospital (MI) chooses Cerner CommunityWorks.

People

Russ Johannesson (Sharecare) joins diabetes management platform vendor Glooko as CEO. Former CEO Rick Altinger will transition to EVP of corporate development.

Martin Tursky (Firelands Regional Medical Center), who spent a couple of years as VP/CIO at Aultman Health Foundation (OH), is named president and CEO of McLaren Central Michigan (MI).

Announcements and Implementations

MedData develops OneTouch RCM software to bring patient financial services onto a single platform.

PatientPing expands the availability of its real-time clinical and administrative data sharing technology for ED patients beyond Massachusetts to hospitals across the country.

CVS Health unveils a set of tools to help pharmacists, physicians, and patients make more cost-conscious decisions about prescription drugs.

Privacy and Security

St. Peter’s Surgery & Endoscopy Center (NY) notifies 135,000 patients of a January data breach in which its servers were hacked.

Philips warn that security vulnerabilities in its ISite and IntelliSpace PACS products could affect patient confidentiality and system integrity, some of which could expose systems to remote attacks using publicly available exploits. The company recommends enrolling in its ongoing patch program, which remediates all critical vulnerabilities, or upgrading to newer versions of IntelliSpace and Windows.

Other

At an AMIA briefing on Capitol Hill, Geisinger Health System (PA) Chief Clinical Informatics Officer Alistair Erskine, MD points out that Apple’s Health Record app initiative is more limited than headlines suggest, given that it excludes Android users and does not yet give users access to their full medical records. Geisinger was one of the original 12 beta testers of the app; 39 health systems have signed up to partner with Apple so far.

This article, highlighting the experiences of early adopters Penn Medicine (PA) and Johns Hopkins Medicine (MD), also presses pause on the Health Record app hype machine, pointing out that providers at non-participating organizations must proactively ask patients to share their data and are then faced with the question of what to do with it in its raw form.

A Black Book survey of health technology managers finds that hospitals that have implemented an enterprise master patient index have fewer duplicate patient records, reducing their cost, denied claims, and the number of repeated tests and procedures. QuadraMed’s product is #1 in user satisfaction and loyalty.

Sponsor Updates

• HIE technology provider Koble Group will integrate patient risk management software from HBI Solutions.
• Lightbeam Health Solutions will exhibit at CAPG April 19-21 in San Diego.
• LiveProcess will exhibit at the Preparedness Summit April 17-20 in Atlanta.
• MedData will exhibit at the HFMA Florida Space Coast Educational Event April 18 in Titusville.
• Navicure, a Waystar company, publishes “Easily Increase Patient Collections: Six Steps to Energize Front-Line Processes.”
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the AL HIMSS 2018 Spring Conference April 18 in Huntsville.
• Experian Health will exhibit at HFMA AR April 18-20 in Hot Springs, AR.
• Daw Systems adds electronic prior authorization technology from CoverMyMeds to e-prescribing functionality within its ScriptSure EHR.

Blog Posts

• Hospital versus Hospitality (Mobile Heartbeat)
• In Case You Missed It: Connections2018 Day 1, 2, and 3 (Netsmart)
• The Most Meaningful Work I’ve Done as a Healthcare Consultant (Nordic)
• Voice Your Concern to CMS About New MBIs (Experian Health)
• How Pharmacy APIs can Improve Patient Adherence and Outcomes (PokitDok)
• Managing the surprisingly troublesome impact of real-time healthcare on clinical decision-making (PerfectServe)
• Public Cloud Strategies (Huntzinger Management Group)
• How do eForms Improve the Patient Intake Process? (Access)

Contacts

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

News 4/11/18

Top News

The Coast Guard, which previously failed in its attempt to go live on Epic, will instead implement Cerner as part of the DoD’s MHS Genesis project.

The DoD will revise its contract with primary contractor Leidos to incorporate the Coast Guard’s requirements. It says it won’t know whether the contract cost will increase until that work is finished.

The Coast Guard spent five years and $60 million – vs. the original budget of $14 million – trying to bring Epic live, only to give up and go back to paper after retiring the systems it was supposed to replace in early 2016.

Reader Comments

From Chance the Rapper: “Re: VA’s VistA. They should keep it, according to this poll.” The HIMSS-owned rag’s poll suffers from a multitude of problems that make its “keep VistA” conclusion useless beyond its intended clickbait purposes. Polls covering a detailed technical topic that generate a small number of responses from unvetted participants are pretty much worthless and certainly not something I’d splash all over social media. Most sites that run health IT polls intentionally hide how poorly they were designed and thus how questionable their results are.

From Firehydrant: “Re: Ascension. Cerner is possibly a victim of Ascension incompetence and political back-stabbing. Ascension IT has eliminated 20+ CIOs and 30+ directors as they drive strategy from St. Louis. They’re focusing on talent from Express Scripts. A recent all-hands webinar was marred by heckling staff using pseudonyms, with executives threatening to eliminate chat tools if the staff can’t be trusted.” Unverified.

From Someone Formerly of NextGen: “Re: NextGen. Tweeting to hire new talent. Two days after they announced their $300 million credit with JP Morgan, they laid off 60 people, some of them key individuals in charge of implementing the new vision of NextGen. Depending on how they recovered from last year’s mass exodus of veteran sales professionals, this puts them at a 2-3 percent reduction of workforce.” Unverified. But I’ll say in the company’s defense that layoffs are common in health IT (especially the publicly traded ones like NextGen / Quality Systems) and companies are always cutting back headcount in some areas while expanding in others. It’s too bad that employees assigned to a particular project are often let go, but that’s the easiest way out for executives. QSII shares have lagged the Nasdaq for years, shedding 23 percent in the past five years vs. the Nasdaq’s 116 percent gain. The only QSII executive who’s been with the company longer than three years is the HR VP (who’s also the only woman among the six executives). CEO Rusty Frantz said in last month’s earnings call that “85 percent of our effort is focused on monetizing our existing client base” and that “the replacement market’s a tough place right now,” with obvious hope placed on the August 2017 acquisition of physician practice analytics vendor EagleDream Health as well as the new sales force he brought in.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts repositions its care and referral management system (the former ECIN, relabeled as Care Management) under CarePort, the outcomes technology vendor it acquired in October 2016. I interviewed CarePort co-founder and CEO Lissy Hu, MD in February.

Healthfinch raises $5.7 million in a funding round.

Theranos lays off most of its remaining employees following SEC fraud charges and ahead of a likely bankruptcy filing, leaving around 20 employees left vs. the 800 it had in late 2015.

Sales

HealthlinkNY selects the Quality product of Diameter Health, which is certified for more of NCQA’s e-clinical measures than any other firm.

Freeman Health Systems (MO) will conduct an extended pilot of Mobile Heartbeat’s MH-CURE secure smartphone platform after completing a pilot in Freeman Hospital West’s cardiology department.

Waverly Health Center (IA) will replace Allscripts Paragon with EClinicalWorks.

People

Omnicell hires Scott Seidelmann (Candescent Health) as chief commercial officer. He founded radiology workflow technology vendor Candescent in March 2015 and sold it to Envision Healthcare in August 2017.

Dennis Shin (The Advisory Board) joins oncology precision medicine software vendor Syapse as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Phoenix Children’s Hospital (AZ) reports that its use of Medicomp’s Quippe Clinical Documentation has increased clinician productivity and enhanced documentation quality while nearly eliminating its $1 million annual transcription costs.

Netsmart announces MyUnity, a cloud-based EHR for home care and senior living providers. It’s being demoed this week at the company’s CONN18 user conference in Phoenix.

Phynd integrates Healthwise’s clinical taxonomy into its Provider Information Management solution.

AMA and its Integrated Health Model Initiative launches an interoperability challenge – sponsored by Google – that calls for ideas on: (a) how patient-generated data can be moved from their mobile devices into physician workflow, and (b) how physician-generated data can be sent back to the patient’s device for action. Prizes are offered, but in the form of one-year Google Cloud credits instead of cash. Residents from anywhere in the world can participate except those countries labeled by the State Department as sponsoring terrorism (North Korea, Iran, Sudan, and Syria) and those in Canada, Mexico, and Brazil (I’m not sure how they got on the wrong side of the AMA to be lumped in with terrorist countries).

Video visit provider Doctor On Demand will enhance its lab ordering services via Change Healthcare’s network, which will allow patients to work with their doctor to choose the closest in-network lab location.

Inovalon launches services for clinical data extraction and natural language processing for its value-based care platform.

Government and Politics

FDA caved to pressure from emotional patients and families two years ago in approving the expensive new drug Nuplazid for Parkinson’s diseases psychosis despite several studies that showed it ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. Now the adverse events reports are piling up.

CMS issues its 2019 insurance exchange rules, with Administrator Seema Verma loading her quotes and tweets with political derision in referring to “the harmful impacts of Obamacare” and “the previous Administration’s one-size-fits-all approach.” States will be given more flexibility in defining Essential Health Benefits, insurer risk adjustment will be tweaked, states will be allowed to request a lower Medical Loss Ratio for insurers to stabilize their markets, and the SHOP insurance program for small businesses will be moved from the exchanges to individual insurance agents. Verma said in a tweet that insurance premiums doubled in states that participated in the federal exchange even as fewer choices were offered, requiring regulatory reform.

Privacy and Security

The congressional testimony of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg  suggests that Facebook’s platform is so complex that even the company didn’t know how it could be abused. He said:

• Facebook versions through 2014 allowed companies to create quizzes that would give access to the information of the quiz-taker’s Facebook friends even though those friends hadn’t given permission and weren’t alerted.
• Facebook learned from a newspaper story that a personality quiz developer had shared user information with Cambridge Analytica, after which that developer was banned and forced to delete the data.
• Just two weeks ago, the company found out that a feature that allows looking someone up by their phone number and email address “was abused” by linking public Facebook information to their phone number.
• Access to user data will be removed for apps that a given user hasn’t run for three months.
• Apps will only be able to see user name, profile photo, and email address.
• Users will see in their News Feed which apps they’ve authorized to use their data and whether Cambridge Analytica extracted their information.
• Facebook will restrict use of some APIs, such as for groups and events.
• Advertisers will have to confirm their identity and location before running political and issue ads.
• Zuckerberg vows that “advertisers and developers will never take priority” over “bringing the world closer together” even though they are Facebook’s customers.
• Some of the mostly elderly, non-technically savvy members of Congress seemed clueless about Facebook, with 84-year-old Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) asking Zuckerberg, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your services?” Zuckerberg couldn’t help smiling as he responded: “Senator, we run ads.”
• Zuckerberg had to explain several times that Facebook doesn’t sell data, it only uses it to target ads.
• Pressed hard on whether he would support a law requiring that users of any web service opt in before their data is used, Zuckerberg finally said yes.

As someone tweeted, above is a suddenly relevant 2003 article from The Harvard Crimson.

Other

A Black Book survey of 19,000 physician practices finds that small-practice doctors who use specialty-specific EHRs are the happiest EHR customers. Leading the satisfaction pack are AdvancedMD, Drchrono, Epic, NextGen, Netsmart, Modernizing Medicine, and SIS Amkai. Other satisfaction leaders are T-System EV (emergency medicine), Praxis EMR (family practice), Surgical Information Systems (general surgery), DocuTap (urgent care and occupational medicine), and PointClickCare (geriatric medicine). The survey also found that while most practices regularly use basic EHR capabilities, those with six or fewer physicians rarely use electronic messaging, clinical decision support, interoperability, and patient engagement.

Mayo Clinic offers voluntary separation packages to 400 transcriptionists as technology replaces them even before it goes live on Epic.

Scientists propose defining Alzheimer’s disease by biological signs that can be observed 15-20 years before the first dementia symptoms are seen, a change that will greatly increase the count of people with the disease. They’re hoping to improve outcomes by starting treatments before brain damage has occurred. The researchers hope to get more patients enrolled in pre-symptomatic stage studies, but don’t recommend that people get tested on their own since there’s no available Alzheimer’s treatment.

A Health Affairs blog post says that only 15-20 percent of Baby Boomers will be able to afford the long-term care services they will begin consuming on a massive scale in the next 10 years. It adds that Medicaid will be stretched as the default insurance for half those people, also noting that less-wealthy Boomers will have to get used to the idea of sharing rooms in old facilities.

This is the kind of careful editing that makes me comfortable sending $3,500 off to Pune to buy a Global Hospital Information Systems Market Report.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD will exhibit at ASCRS April 13-17 in Washington, DC.
• Agfa HealthCare acquires French e-health specialist Inovelan.
• Arcadia will host Aggregate2018 April 18-20 in Boston.
• Forbes names Direct Consulting Associates to its Best Professional Recruiting Firms of 2018.
• The Hospital Association of Southern California partners with Collective Medical to bring members cost-saving identification and support of frequent ED utilizers.
• CoverMyMeds will exhibit at the AAP Annual Conference April 12-14 in San Diego.
• Meditech certifies infrastructure provider SYSDBA as the only systems integrator for Africa and the UK.
• Spok executives will participate in upcoming events that include AONE, the AMDIS PCC Symposium, and the AHA Leadership Summit.
• Dimensional Insight will exhibit at the ACO & Payer Leadership Summit April 12-13 in Palm Beach, FL.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the AAOE 2018 Annual Conference April 14-17 in Orlando.
• Ellkay exhibits at the ACMG Annual Clinical Genetics Meeting April 10-14 in Charlotte, NC.
• The HCI Group publishes a new case study, “Luke’s Goes 7 for 7 on HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7.”
• InstaMed will exhibit at the Office Practicum User Conference April 12-14 in Orlando.

Blog Posts

• Successfully Moving from Best-of-Breed to an Enterprise Lab System (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• The Importance of Governance in Aligning the Financial with the Clinical (Leidos Health)
• Healthcare CIOs Say Lift and Shift to the Cloud Not on Their Radar (Datica)
• A Proven Program for Managing 3-Day Rule Waiver Patients (CarePort Health)
• What Inspired You to Become a Nurse? (CareSync)
• CIO Chat – Russell Branzell, CHIME (Huntzinger Management Group)
• Reimbursement for Care Plans: The Cancer Care Planning and Communications (CCPC) Act (Carevive)
• The Digital Conundrum (CTG)
• 5 Biggest Resume Mistakes (CTG)
• Dimensional Insight Book Club: The Digital Doctor (Dimensional Insight)
• A Holistic Approach to Relationship Management (Docent Health)
• 11 Ways to Make Sure Your Contract Management Process is Meeting Your Organization’s Needs (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Translate Social Determinants of Health into Actionable Intelligence (HBI Solutions)
• Embracing Technology 2.0 – Preparing for the Future that is Now (Huntzinger Management Group)
• How a content services platform improves your Five-Star Quality Rating (Hyland)
• Seeing Is Believing: Thoughts from a first-time HIMSS attendee (Meditech)
• Advancing interoperability in today’s healthcare ecosystem (Imprivata)
• Three CRM Trends Impacting the Healthcare Market in 2018 (Influence Health)
• Airline Pilots & Doctors: What Can We Learn to Decrease Burnout? (Kyruus)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/9/18

Top News

Facebook acknowledges that it deployed interventional cardiologist Freddy Abnousi, MD, MBA, MSc (who was then working at Stanford) to try to convince hospitals to give the company anonymized patient information. Facebook was planning to re-identify the medical information of those patients by matching their records to its own data trove, which it claims was to be used purely for medical research purposes.

Facebook has put the project on hold as it deals with its Cambridge Analytica privacy backlash.

The American College of Cardiology was on board, with its interim CEO explaining the research benefit of shipping patient data to Facebook. ACC was apparently aware that Facebook planned to re-identify its data simple database-matching  (“hashing”) techniques.

Abnousi’s LinkedIn shows that he spent 18 months as a Google Distinguished Scholar and remains an innovation advisor to the American College of Cardiology. It also says he has been “leading confidential projects at Facebook” since August 2016.

We can probably excuse Facebook for intruding on the privacy of its users since that’s what Facebook does. Who’s going to call ACC and Abnousi to task for trying to broker a deal for selling patient information knowing that it would not remain anonymous?

I couldn’t find anything online about whether ACC or its contributing hospitals inform patients that their data will be used or allows them to opt in or out, so I assume it falls under HIPAA’s “treatment, payment, or operations” free pass.

Reader Comments

From Apparent Irony: “Re: Ascension WI. Abruptly paused its Cerner OneChart implementation on Tuesday and let go all of the clinical associates on the project unless they can reclaim their former role. No severance and no word on when the project will be resumed.” Unverified.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents aren’t using LinkedIn to find employees or jobs, read/publish articles, or exchange messages, but rather to just see what friends and former colleagues are doing. Quite a few don’t use LinkedIn at all. A couple of readers find it useful to prep for the HIMSS conference (to see who works where) or for monitoring competing vendors. Another’s smart job-hunting strategy was to see who previously held the open position to gain knowledge about the company or to look up current and previous employees to understand the technologies they use.

New poll to your right or here: do you think your de-identified patient data is safe from being re-identified?

I received a few responses – some positive, some not — to What I Wish I’d Known Before … Serving on the Board of a Company or Non-Profit.

This week’s question involves choosing an EHR consulting firm.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Collective Medical. The Draper, UT-based company’s lightweight, interoperable PreManage platform for providers or health plans closes the communication gaps that undermine patient care. Care teams trust it to identify at-risk and complex patients, facilitate collaboration, and provide real-time event notification to improve their outcomes. Hospital care teams get actionable care plan information as well as workflow-driven, point-of-care insights for social determinants of health, prescription histories, and advance directives. Its EDIE (Every ED Instantly) presents information from all ED visits to avoid unnecessary work-ups, cost, and under-informed treatment decision. The company’s nationwide network is engaged by every national health plan, hundreds of hospitals, and tens of thousands of providers. The end result is streamlined transitions of care, improved coordination across diverse care teams, and fewer unnecessary admissions. Thanks to Collective Medical for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

April 10 (Tuesday) 3:00 ET. “Using Socioeconomic Data, Not Just Demographics, to Create a Healthier Patient Population.” Sponsor: LexisNexis. Presenters: Erin Benson, director of marketing planning, LexisNexis Health Care; Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions consultants, LexisNexis Health Care. Did you know that 25 cents of every healthcare dollar is spent on health conditions that are caused by changeable behavior? Use of social determinants of health (SDOH) — including information on households, neighborhoods, relatives, and assets — can directly improve care management and risk stratification. However, it’s important to first define what SDOH is and isn’t. A recent LexisNexis Health Care CIO survey found that only 50 percent of organizations are using SDOH data at all, and even then, they have only limited information from their EHR or from patient surveys. The question is: what are you going to do about it? This webinar will reveal the myths and truths that will help you avoid answering, “Not enough.”

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Here’s the recording of last week’s webinar titled “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach,” sponsored by Health Fidelity.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

An Alabama federal judge rules that 36 Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance plan licensees violated anti-trust laws in creating their longstanding agreements to avoid competing with each other in their respective geographic areas, thus using their clout to reduce competition and raise prices.

A Kaiser Health News investigation finds that drug companies are spending nearly twice as much on patient advocacy groups than direct lobbying, benefiting as group members testify before Congress, organize letter-writing and social media campaigns, and repeat company-issued talking points, all activities that don’t have to be reported as lobbying by the sponsoring company. The American Diabetes Association accepted $18 million of drug company money last year even as those companies repeatedly hiked the price of insulin, often in lockstep with each other.

Decisions

• Auburn Community Hospital (NY) went live with Philips Interspace Cardiovascular on April 7.
• Fayette Regional Health System (IN) will switch from Evident to Athenahealth in 2018.
• Enloe Medical Center (CA) will go live with Epic on April 29.
• Northern Inyo Hospital (CA) will switch from McKesson to Athenahealth in 2018.
• MultiCare Deaconess Hospital (WA) will go live with Epic in summer 2018,

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

Gillie McCreath (Oliver Wyman) joins Mazars USA’s healthcare consulting group as principal.

The White House hires Adam Boehler (CEO of investor-backed home care vendor Landmark Health) as director of the CMS’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.

Government and Politics

Texas Agriculture Commissioner and former rodeo cowboy Sid Miller appoints Rick Redalen, MD (self-styled as “The Maverick Doctor”) to the state’s Rural Health Task Force, about which the Austin newspaper observes:

• Redalen formed software companies ExitCare (patient education, sold to Elsevier in 2012) and Quest Global Benefits (healthcare cost control). He is an advocate for telemedicine, which is offered by the latter company and thus presents a potential conflict of interest.
• Redalen donated heavily to the campaign of Miller, who wrote, ““I want to thank my good friend, Dr. Rick Redalen (AKA Dr. Maverick) for the wonderful work he is doing in helping educate the people of our country about the threat of four more years of ObamaCare. Rick is recognized around the world for being an innovator in healthcare technology. He is an important advisor to me and my State Office of Rural Health and is a strong supporter of #DonaldTrump.”
• His medical license was suspended by the medical boards of three states, one of which cited his “psychiatric and drug problems.”
• Redalen married his 15-year-old former stepdaughter after his wife (her mother) committed suicide. He had pleaded guilty to hitting the mother with a rifle butt and pointing a weapon at deputies, then later was convicted of perjury for lying about the girl’s whereabouts.

Privacy and Security

Steve Long, CEO of ransomware-hacked Hancock Health, is hitting the speaker circuit to provide digital defense advice, presumably to hospitals that, unlike his, (a) haven’t been hacked; and (b) if they were, wouldn’t pay a hacker the demanded ransom and thus encourage further such activity. I might well have done the same if I were in his shoes, but I don’t think I’d feel qualified to advise others.

Other

Cardiologist, digital health expert, and HIMSS board member David Scher, MD weighs in on using digital health data for clinical trials, making these points:

• Some clinical studies have shown that using fitness trackers didn’t deliver the expected weight loss.
• Few new wearables are being marketed, but existing ones are being used more intensely, such as in his own practice, where Holter monitors have mostly been replaced with wearables.
• Wearables haven’t had much impact on clinical trials because the information they collect – such as vital signs –- is primitive and mostly irrelevant, not to mention that including wearables makes studies more complicated.
• Moving wearables into the clinical trials realm will require collecting more information, such as electrolyte levels, hydration, and body temperature.
• The massive amount of data created by wearables can cause the FDA to scrutinize studies more closely and it’s hard to apply analytics to sort out the data deluge.
• The cost of clinical trials (and thus the profit of clinical research organizations) will go down in the next 10-15 years as wearables will collect and report information in the background

Vince and Elise cover Athenahealth, EClinicalWorks, and Meditech, which occupy positions #4-6 in their list of top vendors by annual revenue.

Sponsor Updates

• Logicworks reports record revenue growth as the market for managed cloud services dramatically expands.
• MedData and PatientKeeper will exhibit at the Society of Hospital Medicine Annual Meeting April 9-10 in Orlando.
• OmniSYS will obtain access to immunization registries from Scientific Technologies Corporation that will allow pharmacy customers of its Vaccine Management System to improve vaccination rates.
• Magnolia Regional Health Center CMIO Amanda Finley explains how their Meditech EHR has helped care teams diagnose and treat ED patients.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the KY Bluegrass HIMSS Spring Conference April 12-13 in Florence, IN.
• News: OmniSys and Scientific Technologies Corp. announce strategic partnership
• Parallon Technology Solutions provides Meditech training and go-live support for Ohio Valley Medical Center and East Ohio Regional Hospital.
• Experian Health will exhibit at HFMA Oklahoma April 12-13 in Oklahoma City, OK.
• PerfectServe will present at AONE 2018 April 14 in Indianapolis.
• QuadraMed will exhibit at the 2018 ILHIMA & MoHIMA Joint Annual Meeting April 11-13 in St. Charles, MO.
• The SSI Group will exhibit at the Colorado HFMA Annual Conference April 11 in Westminster.
• Surescripts will exhibit at the OP User Conference April 12-14 in Orlando.
• Wellsoft will exhibit at the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals event April 10-12 in Dallas.

Blog Posts

• Interoperability 2.0 – Creating a Holistic Model of Care (Medicity)
• HIMSS hype or health IT promise: We had 500 people weigh in … (Medicomp Systems)
• Science Fiction Becomes Reality: Digital Pill Transmits Data via Phone App (Liaison Technologies)
• 6 Ways to Build Muscle Memory for Emergency Management in Healthcare (LiveProcess)
• Achieving the healthcare triple play: Improving clinician engagement, patient care and appropriate utilization – Part 4 (LogicStream Health)
• HITRUST on Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Logicworks)
• Liberation 2018: What We Learned From Today’s Healthcare Visionaries (Medecision)
• How new nursing roles are shaping the future of healthcare (Meditech)
• It’s Stress Awareness Month – Collect More, Stress Less! (Navicure/Waystar)
• Advances in Speech Technology (NVoq)
• Healthcare is personalized – your healthcare group’s software should be, too (Experian Health)
• National Doctor’s Day 2018: Saluting the Superheroes Who Wear White Coats (PatientSafe Solutions)
• Using Payment Plans to Accelerate Patient Revenue (Patientco)
• How Many Visits Does it Take to Get an ACL Done? (Redox)
• Moving From Clicks to Conversation: Finally Analytics You Can Use (Salesforce)
• Robots and AI in Healthcare Advancing Rapidly (The SSI Group)
• Improve lab efficiency and revenue following a healthcare M&A (Sunquest Information Systems)
• Surescripts to the Food and Drug Administration: Tap Into Tech to Hinder Opioid Misuse and Diversion (Surescripts)
• Internal care coordination is named a top patient safety issue. (Voalte)
• Ending Physician Burnout: It’s Time for Physicians to Take Back Control of Their Environment and How They Deliver Care (Vocera)
• What to Expect at Ascend 2018 (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 4/6/18

Top News

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon provides shareholders high-level details about the employee healthcare venture the company is undertaking with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway. He notes that “high deductibles have barely worked” to improve costs and outcomes.

A bipartisan group will “start very small” in working on issues that include:

• Aligning incentives since the US has the “highest costs association with the worse outcomes”
• Studying the cost of waste, administration, and fraud
• Giving employees ownership of their healthcare data to allow them to make better choices and offer them telemedicine options
• Developing wellness programs, especially around obesity and smoking
• Investigating why use of expensive drugs are under- and over-utilized
• Examining the cost of providing end-of-life care

Judging from these and prior comments, Dimon seems to be much less knowledgeable and motivated than Bezos and Buffett and his leg of the stool is the weak one with the most to lose from disrupting the status quo. I wouldn’t necessarily assume that his description of the plan is how it will play out, nor would I rule out Amazon and Berkshire going individually further than the combined venture.

Reader Comments

From Not from Monterey: “Re: GE exiting health IT. Does that mean that existing GE/IDX customers will now be dealing with Veritas Capital rather than GE? If so, what does that mean for the future of GE/IDX?” I would expect Veritas to create a new company and name for its acquisition like they did with the Thomson Reuters business (renaming it Truven Health Analytics). GE will surely want its name off everything and Veritas probably has equal but different incentive to downplay the GE connection (every year it’s GE Healthcare and Allscripts vying for “worst vendor” in the HISsies voting). I don’t see much future for the aging, GE-mismanaged product line, so I’m assuming Veritas will just milk the maintenance fees until everybody transitions off the products. The one bright spot is the former API Healthcare, which GE has had only four years to screw up. If I were Veritas, I’d make that labor management software business its own company since it’s the only part of the portfolio that’s likely to generate acquisition interest down the road.

Trivia: according to Vince, this is the second time that GE has bailed out of health IT, the first being in 1971. Some of its acquisitions – again, per Vince – were Loral (renamed to Centricity PACS), Marquette Medical (renamed Centricity Perinatal), Per-Se (Centricity RIS), ORMIS (Centricity Perioperative), BDM (Centricity Pharmacy), MedicaLogic (office EMR), Millbrook (office PM), Triple G (Centricity Lab), and IDX (Flowcast, Groupcast, Carecast, and Imagecast, all renamed to Centricity, including the former PHAMIS product that IDX had acquired). Vince called the shot in his 2013 review of GE Healthcare:

We estimate GE has fallen several positions since their post-IDX peak. They even sold their RX system back to BDM in March! Is it the start of a second retreat from the HIS biz?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s the wind-down of this week’s “Wish I’d Known” question, so answer now and you’ll see your comments in this weekend’s recap.

Webinars

April 10 (Tuesday) 3:00 ET. “Using Socioeconomic Data, Not Just Demographics, to Create a Healthier Patient Population.” Sponsor: LexisNexis. Presenters: Erin Benson, director of marketing planning, LexisNexis Health Care; Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions consultants, LexisNexis Health Care. Did you know that 25 cents of every healthcare dollar is spent on health conditions that are caused by changeable behavior? Use of social determinants of health (SDOH) — including information on households, neighborhoods, relatives, and assets — can directly improve care management and risk stratification. However, it’s important to first define what SDOH is and isn’t. A recent LexisNexis Health Care CIO survey found that only 50 percent of organizations are using SDOH data at all, and even then, they have only limited information from their EHR or from patient surveys. The question is: what are you going to do about it? This webinar will reveal the myths and truths that will help you avoid answering, “Not enough.”

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Welltok raises $75 million in a second Series E round, bringing its total to $252 million.

Care coordination software company SCI Solutions acquires patient engagement vendor DatStat for an undisclosed sum. SCI acquired competitor Clarity Health Services in 2015.

Virta raises $45 million in a Series B funding round. The San Francisco-based company has developed a clinical treatment and continuous remote monitoring technology for the prevention and reversal of type 2 diabetes.

Microsoft assures customers it will not engage in joint technology ventures with them and then set up competing businesses. It cites as an example 365mc Hospital in South Korea, which has partnered with Microsoft to develop motion-tracking AI software to improve surgeon performance.

A newly filed Allscripts 8-K SEC form seems to say that Netsmart will acquire Barista Operations from Change Healthcare for $168 million. I take to mean the former McKesson Homecare software system that was sent to Change Healthcare as part of McKesson’s technology business.

People

Diameter Health hires Kim Howland (Omnicell) as chief product officer.

Digital therapy vendor Vida Health hires Randy Forman (Livongo Health) as chief commercial officer.

Sales

Kern Medical (CA) chooses Cerner Millennium and HealtheIntent. I assume they are replacing Medsphere OpenVista.

Announcements and Implementations

Mercy Technology Services launches a VMware-powered healthcare cloud for hosting EHRs, imaging systems, and office applications. 

Government and Politics

Veterans groups voice their lack of confidence in acting VA Secretary Robert Wilkie and his ability to keep the yet-to-be signed Cerner contract on track.

ONC publishes a consumer-friendly guide to obtaining and using digital health records.

Privacy and Security

Virtua Medical Group (NJ) will pay $418,000 to settle allegations that it exposed medical records of 1,650 patients. Discovered during a patient’s Google search, the exposure occurred when the group’s transcription company, Best Medical Transcription, misconfigured its server, allowing the records to be accessed via FTP site without a password.

Other

A NEJM op-ed piece says we may be approaching the limits of how much impact changes in process, culture, and narrowly-focused technology can have on patient harm, suggesting that AI-powered computer vision – such as that used in Google’s experiments with self-driving cars – could improve the screening of medical images, evaluate patient mobility, and monitor handwashing compliance.

GPs in London protest NHS England’s decision last fall to offer patients text-based care via the Babylon Health-powered GP at Hand app, the use of which automatically de-registered users from their local NHS surgery. Patients are now attempting to re-register, creating extra work for clinicians who also feel the app “cherry picks” healthier, less-costly patients. Babylon Health, meanwhile, has signed a deal with Chinese Internet technology vendor Tencent to incorporate its virtual care tools into WeChat, a social messaging app with 1 billion users.

Sponsor Updates

• CoverMyMeds partners with McKesson Specialty Health to develop ExpressCoverage prior authorization and medication management services.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at ASCA 2018 April 11-13 in Boston.
• The HCI Group publishes a new white paper, “Managed IT Services for Healthcare.”
• PatientSafe Solutions will deliver infectious disease alerts from its integration with the technology of Merck subsidiary Ilum Health Solutions.
• Healthgrades partners with other Denver tech companies to launch the Colorado Technology Recruiting Coalition.
• Healthwise will exhibit at the EClinicalWorks Innovation Summit for Enterprise and Urgent Care Customers April 9-11 in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
• Paula Anthony joins Huntzinger Management Group affiliate Next Wave Health Advisors.
• InstaMed’s External Payment Page Integration is now available in the Epic App Orchard.
• InterSystems and Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at NetSmart Connections 2018 April 8-11 in Phoenix.

Blog Posts

• Eight Tips to Help Understand and Avoid Denials (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Prepare and Prevent Common Due Diligence Issues in Health IT Transactions: Intellectual Property Considerations (Part 5 of 6) (HGP)
• What National Doctors’ Day Means to Healthcare Professionals (Healthgrades)
• Acquiring OneContent increases our ability to deliver information (Hyland)
• Helping Boomers Let Go of the Paper Security Blanket (Access)
• Wake-Up Call: Sepsis Measure Performance Data Will Go Public on Hospital Compare in July 2018 (Iatric Systems)
• To meet state EPCS mandate in a timely and efficient manner, Hartford Healthcare goes with Imprivata Confirm ID (Imprivata)
• Quick Wins During Your Healthcare CRM Implementation (Influence Health)
• HIMSS on Four Wheels (InterSystems)
• A Consumer-First Approach to Bringing Provider Data Online (Kyruus)

Contacts

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

News 4/4/18

Top News

GE Healthcare will exit the health IT market by selling its revenue cycle, ambulatory care, and workforce management software business to Veritas Capital for $1.05 billion in cash.

Veritas Capital’s previous health IT acquisitions include Verisk Health (2016, renamed to Verscend) and the healthcare unit of Thomson Reuters (2012, sold to IBM for double its acquisition price in 2016).

GE Healthcare joins previous healthcare IT acquisition-fueled dabblers (McKesson, Siemens, Misys, Sage) in wrecking a bunch of acquired companies and then cutting and running when the expected massive profits didn’t materialize. Or as I wrote a long time ago, “conglomerate vendors that seem to be happy milking the wrinkled, desiccated udders of their thinning herds of malnourished and badly aging cash cows,” to which I added further back in 2006, “ Healthcare IT customers carry little weight with toe-dippers. Are GE brass more worried about the flatlining former CareCast or sagging toaster sales at Wal-Mart? Does patient safety come up in Siemens corporate meetings as often as power generators?”

Reader Comments

From Penultimate: “Re: EMRs as a research database. I looked at the article you linked to in your tweet about conglomerate vendors. That took me to the one where you predicted that EMRs linked to genomic data and social determinants of health would give drug companies valuable information they would be willing to pay for.” I forgot about that piece from 2006, in which I said, “Drug companies and device manufacturers need the data that lives in your clinical systems. How else will they be available to target research to a very narrow range of patient types, maybe even those with a rare genomic profile? It could help them identify appropriate research subjects, design post-marketing surveillance, study population-based outcomes, and catalog adverse events. The information you provide could either be de-identified or made available only if individual patients opt in. The benefit to patients is access to a wider variety of treatments and protocols, most likely free to them if tied to a research project.” Your inquiry led me to look at the other editorials I wrote long enough ago that I can enjoy them as something new.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Qventus. The Los Altos, CA-based company’s AI-powered technology – which serves as virtual air traffic control for hospital operations — helps healthcare teams turn data into action and action into results. Its real-time decision management platform improves efficiency, patient experience, and clinician satisfaction by predicting issues, recommending immediate actions, alerting the right team members, and coordinating response. Success stories include El Camino Hospital (reduced falls by 39 percent), Stanford Children’s Health (increased patient satisfaction by 18 percent), Mercy Hospital Ardmore (reduced patients who left the ED without being seen by 55 percent), and Mercy Hospital Fort Smith (reduced unnecessary lab tests by 40 percent). Hospitals have rolled out countless dashboards and analytics reports from competing companies without success because those on the front line still have to make operational decisions with incomplete insight. The company’s platform is quickly deployed, easy to use, and easy to integrate with EHRs. Check out your own hospital’s efficiency ranking. Thanks to Qventus for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a Qventus intro video I found on YouTube.

Listening (and watching): “Long Time Running,” an outstanding documentary streaming on Netflix that covers the bittersweet 2016 farewell tour of Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip after singer-songwriter Gord Downie was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer (he died a year later). The super-talented group has been intact since 1986 and the members agreed early on to share all songwriting credits (a la the Doors) to avoid dissent. The band’s love of country and affinity with their fellow Canadians (including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who appeared in the film) was a joy to watch, albeit with envy.

I had a routine appointment with a specialist today and saw the usual pointless form entry repetition first hand. They copied my insurance card, but I still had to manually write the information down on their paper form. Same with my referring doctor’s information. Every form asked me again for name, date of birth, age, and current date (apparently nobody was able to subtract B from D to calculate my C). Form fields weren’t big enough for the information requested. I had to sign in on the clipboard upon arrival, and of course I could see every person’s name and doctor. Then after filling everything out – medical history, family history, meds, social habits, etc. – the MA in the exam room asked me the same questions all over again so she could enter it into the EHR. However, healthcare is so defiantly and illogically inefficient that this process seemed streamlined and sensible in comparison.

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

Webinars

April 5 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach.” Sponsor: Health Fidelity. Presenters: Adele L. Towers, MD, MPH, senior clinical advisor, UPMC Enterprises; Adam Gronsky, director of advisory services, Health Fidelity. Success in value-based care requires a thorough understanding of how risk-based payment models work. To prosper in this data-laden era of care, providers need to manage their patient populateeions holistically rather than through a collection of individual episodes and be able to accurately identify, document, and report risk scores. Given the stakes, is your provider organization adequately set up to take on and succeed in managing risk? In this webinar, learn how technology-enabled risk capture optimization is helping providers succeed in risk-based payment models.

April 10 (Tuesday) 3:00 ET. “Using Socioeconomic Data, Not Just Demographics, to Create a Healthier Patient Population.” Sponsor: LexisNexis. Presenters: Erin Benson, director of marketing planning, LexisNexis Health Care; Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions consultants, LexisNexis Health Care. Did you know that 25 cents of every healthcare dollar is spent on health conditions that are caused by changeable behavior? Use of social determinants of health (SDOH) — including information on households, neighborhoods, relatives, and assets — can directly improve care management and risk stratification. However, it’s important to first define what SDOH is and isn’t. A recent LexisNexis Health Care CIO survey found that only 50 percent of organizations are using SDOH data at all, and even then, they have only limited information from their EHR or from patient surveys. The question is: what are you going to do about it? This webinar will reveal the myths and truths that will help you avoid answering, “Not enough.”

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Orion Health Group announces poor annual results and implementation of a cost-saving restructuring as it reorganizes into three business units – Rhapsody, population health, and hospitals. Share price hit an all-time low on the New Zealand stock Exchange following the financial report, reducing the company’s market cap to $100 million.

Ninety-two of the 104 doctors of Charlotte, NC-based Mecklenburg Medical Group sue Atrium Health (the former Carolinas Healthcare System) to leave the health system and operate independently following contract changes that reduced the practice’s RN staffing levels, centralized triage and reception functions at a call center, reduced compensation, and added a non-complete clause that prevents doctors from practicing with a 30-mile radius for a year after leaving.

Humana, MultiPlan, Quest, Optum, and UnitedHealthcare launch a pilot of a blockchain-powered project to improve provider directories.

Walmart to be in acquisition talks with PillPack, an online pharmacy that packages individual doses into reminder packs. The rumored price is in the $1 billion range.

The Nashville paper confirms an item a reader submitted a few days ago – Microsoft is suing Community Health Systems for breaching its software licensing contracts.

Hyland completes its acquisition of Allscripts OneContent (the former McKesson Horizon Patient Folders), transitioning its Alpharetta-based employees and 350 customers.

Sales

• Illinois Rural Community Care Organization chooses Cerner HealthIntent for population health management.
• Physicians’ Clinic of Iowa chooses the cloud-based EClinicalWorks v11 for its 84 providers.

People

McLeod Health (SC) promotes Matt Reich to SVP/CIO.

PatientPay hires Vikram Natarajan (Medfusion) as CTO.

Connected health technology vendor ResMed hires Bobby Ghoshal (Brightree, owned by ResMed) as CTO.

Susan Pouzar (Harris Healthcare) joins Genesis Automation Healthcare as VP of sales.

Neal Schwartz (Cerner) joins MedeAnalytics as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

ROI Healthcare Solutions launches a staffing and recruitment outsourcing organization called ROI Resource Group.

St. Charles Health System (OR) will go live on its $80 million Epic system next week, less than a year after choosing the company’s products. 

Population health management solutions vendor Casenet releases its TruCare Opioid Toolkit, which provides a patient assessment, an evidence-based care plan, and education materials.

Government and Politics

President Trump’s proposed CMS operating budget would eliminate funding for insurance exchanges.

Politico notes that the State Department has issued an RFP for a new EHR. It was previously collaborating with the Coast Guard to implement Epic until that project failed. The State Department is specifically interested in how an EHR would provide shared services opportunities with the DoD and VA, which would seem to point to Cerner as the most likely choice among the few capable vendors.

Kentucky passes a law prohibiting federally certified radiologists from interpreting X-rays in black lung compensation claims, allowing only pulmonologists to make those assessments. Of Kentucky’s six certified pulmonologists, four work for coal companies or their insurers.

Privacy and Security

Cloudflare launches 1.1.1.1, a brilliantly named DNS service that improves network performance and privacy (and maybe gain access to geo-blocked content, if that’s your thing). I’ve used DNS proxies before and they work fine, so I took a couple of minutes to set this one. It’s working invisibly, which is exactly what you would expect. 

Other

A Harvard Business Review article says the US spends too much of its healthcare dollar on low-value services that offer minimal clinical benefit, blaming: (a) limited effectiveness data for everything except drugs; (b) doctors make money from performing low-value services that they often can order themselves with payments protected by lobbyists; (c) patients lack the information to make their own decisions or to hold their doctors accountable. It notes that some high-value therapies are underused strictly because they are expensive, such as gene therapy and hepatitis C treatments. The authors propose using the capital markets to give insurers compensation when a patient’s early, expensive treatment results in savings for another insurer (like Medicare) down the road.

Sponsor Updates

• Medecision launches Aerial CarePlanner 360 that supports person-centric care.
• Meditech publishes a video in which hospital customers describe how they benefit from using Meditech.
• HCS will exhibit at and sponsor the NALTH Sprint Clinical Education & Annual Meeting in New Orleans on April 5-6.
• Aprima will exhibit at the OKMGMA Conference April 5-6 in Oklahoma City.
• Bernoulli Health will exhibit at SWUGM 2018 April 6 in Phoenix.
• CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at the ACMG Annual Meeting April 11-14 in Charlotte, NC.
• Everest Group recognizes Conduent as a leader in healthcare business process outsourcing.

Blog Posts

• HIMSS hype or health IT promise: We had 500 people weigh in… (Medicomp Systems)
• Center Stage Executive Spotlight: Shafin Kalyan, Executive Director, Ancillary Services (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Black Book recognizes Nordic for highest client satisfaction in Epic IT Advisory Services (Nordic)
• Save the Date for Connect 18: The New Frontier of Healthcare Communications (Spok)
• How new nursing roles are shaping the future of healthcare (Meditech)
• 5 Tips for Creating a Successful IT M&A Playbook (Impact Advisors)
• How Integrated Healthcare Systems Impact the Patient Experience (Access)
• The Calm After the Storm (AdvancedMD)
• #BTheBestUCanB – Supporting two talented athletes, showcasing integrated and connected care (Agfa Healthcare)
• Medical Practice Billing Challenges and Some Suggestions to Overcome Them (Aprima)
• Measuring Quality Measures (Arcadia Healthcare Solutions)
• Top 2018 Trends in the Use of Healthcare AI (CareSync)
• Innovation: The Key to Fixing Prior Auth (Change Healthcare)
• How Specialty Tailored Templates Can Help Improve Your Practice (ChartLogic)
• Healthcare Interoperability: Are We There Yet? (Clinical Architecture)
• Patient Engagement, Cybersecurity, AI and More: Health Themes at HIMSS18 (CoverMyMeds)
• Developing a Strong Workforce as We are Faced with Competing Priorities (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• Takeaways from the 2018 Gartner Data & Analytics Summit (Dimensional Insight)
• Navigating Healthcare through Today’s Cybersecurity Landscape (Divurgent)
• Switch Survival Toolkit – Part 1: Discovery (DocuTap)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/2/18

Top News

The White House insists that VA Secretary David Shulkin resigned, disputing Shulkin’s own account of being fired. Shulkin did not submit a resignation letter and wasn’t allowed to return to his office after being told he was being replaced.

The reason: firing Shulkin would have automatically made VA Deputy Secretary Thomas Bowman – with whom the White House has clashed over VA privatization– the VA’s acting secretary. Claiming that Shulkin resigned allowed the White House to hand pick the DoD’s Robert Wilkie as acting secretary.

There’s a health IT aspect in play. If Wilkie signs the VA’s Cerner contract as acting secretary, it could be challenged on the grounds that he isn’t serving in his role legally.

Shulkin said on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” “I came to fight for our veterans and I had no intention of giving up. There would be no reason for me to resign. I made a commitment, I took an oath, and I was here to fight for our veterans.” He was emphatic in saying on another Sunday talk show that, “I did not resign,” adding that he was told in a telephone call from White House Chief of Staff John Kelly shortly before President Trump tweeted that he was nominating White House physician Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, MD to replace him.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two readers responded to my Vietnam Veterans Day pondering if anybody still actively working in health IT was deployed there. Checking in were: 

• Navy Petty Officer John Humm
• Army Intelligence Specialist Vince Ciotti

The most common online sources used by poll respondents to find a doctor are their insurer’s provider list, Healthgrades, and Google Reviews (that last one was surprising to me), although “none of these” was the #1 answer. Commenters mentioned that most doctors have few reviews with relevant details, also noting that insurance company lists are outdated, fail to describe what types of patient that doctor sees, and are full of doctors unwilling to accept new patients. A reader suggests going the other direction – ask around for recommended doctors and then call them up to see if they accept your insurance. 

New poll to your right or here: what’s your most-valued use of LinkedIn, if any?

I received fascinating responses to my question about “What I Wish I’d Known Before … Retiring or Career Downsizing.”

My next question involves what you wish you’d known before serving on the board of a company or non-profit. I see quite a bit of the latter on LinkedIn profiles and I’m interested in how that works.

Webinars

April 5 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach.” Sponsor: Health Fidelity. Presenters: Adele L. Towers, MD, MPH, senior clinical advisor, UPMC Technology Development Center; Adam Gronsky, director of advisory services, Health Fidelity. Success in value-based care requires a thorough understanding of how risk-based payment models work. To prosper in this data-laden era of care, providers need to manage their patient populations holistically rather than through a collection of individual episodes and be able to accurately identify, document, and report risk scores. Given the stakes, is your provider organization adequately set up to take on and succeed in managing risk? In this webinar, learn how technology-enabled risk capture optimization is helping providers succeed in risk-based payment models.

April 10 (Tuesday) 3:00 ET. “Using Socioeconomic Data, Not Just Demographics, to Create a Healthier Patient Population.” Sponsor: LexisNexis. Presenters: Erin Benson, director of marketing planning, LexisNexis Health Care; Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions consultants, LexisNexis Health Care. Did you know that 25 cents of every healthcare dollar is spent on health conditions that are caused by changeable behavior? Use of social determinants of health (SDOH) — including information on households, neighborhoods, relatives, and assets — can directly improve care management and risk stratification. However, it’s important to first define what SDOH is and isn’t. A recent LexisNexis Health Care CIO survey found that only 50 percent of organizations are using SDOH data at all, and even then, they have only limited information from their EHR or from patient surveys. The question is: what are you going to do about it? This webinar will reveal the myths and truths that will help you avoid answering, “Not enough.”

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Japan’s Panasonic Healthcare Holdings renames itself to PHC Holdings.

Personalized health and benefits solution vendor Accolade raises $50 million in a Series F funding round, increasing its total to $217 million.

People

Consulting firm 314e hires Douglas Herr (Leidos Health) as SVP.

Government and Politics

California’s attorney general sues Sutter Health, claiming the health system violated antitrust laws in using its market dominance to force insurers to sign “all or nothing” contracts at inflated prices and to charge unreasonable out-of-network prices.

UK’s General Medical Council investigates 30 doctors for unsafe online prescribing after several patients died after being ordered narcotics from online visits. A recent report found that online doctors prescribed opiates and antibiotics without performing due diligence and failed to notify the patient’s PCP in some cases. 

Other

Patent filings from Amazon and Google suggest that their digital assistants could do a lot more than obey pre-programmed commands, suggesting their potential uses to monitor voice and telephone conversations to get ad-serving ideas for both parties involved and listen to body sounds to detect potential medical situations.

An HBR article by Bob Wachter, MD (USCF) and Jeff Goldsmith, PhD (University of Virginia) says the way to reduce physician burnout and increase quality of care is to improve billing-dominated, 1990s-technology EHRs that are “performing several tasks, badly.” They recommend that:

• Caregivers create a “portrait of the patient’s medical situation at the moment,” limited to a fix number of characters to force a concise recap similar to a tweet.
• The patient portrait is frequently updated under rules that also define who is responsible for doing so.
• The patient portrait is used as the patient’s “wall” whose updated information is used as clinician groupware.
• Data importing is limited to prevent chart bloat, with minute-by-minute comments automatically deleted a la Snapchat.
• Voice- and gesture-based interfaces should replace keyboards and mice, including voice-powered order entry and information recall.
• Order entry should provide clinicians with costs and risks.
• Patients should be able to enter their own information remotely.
• EHR value should be enhanced with artificial intelligence.

Readmissions dropped by half after Intermountain Healthcare implemented its “Partners in Healing” program, which places family members on a patient’s care team to prepare them to provide post-discharge care.

Epic did its usual home page makeover for April Fools’ Day (which I’ve spelled correctly).

Vince and Elise continue their look at 2018’s largest vendors by revenue and digging deeper into Cerner, Epic, and Allscripts. 

Sponsor Updates

• Research and advisory firm SiriusDecisions recognizes Huron Consulting, Imprivata, and Vocera as winners of the 2018 Return on Integration Awards.
• WebPT becomes the first rehab therapy EHR to achieve Platinum Standard ISO Certification.
• WiserTogether and Myewellness partner to provide wellness solutions to employers and employees.

Blog Posts

• Building a Brand with Creative Copywriting (Salesforce)
• Blockchain Healthcare Disruption in 2018? (The SSI Group)
• HIMSS18 Panel Gets Candid About Prescription Price Transparency (Surescripts)
• Ending Physician Burnout: It’s Time for Physicians to Take Back Control of Their Environment and How They Deliver Care (Vocera)
• More Than a Number: Personalizing Patient Care in Your Growing Therapy Practice (WebPT)
• What does the C-suite want? (Philips Wellcentive)

Contacts

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

News 3/30/18

Top News

President Trump fires VA Secretary David Shulkin, MD after a wave of negative press around questionable funding for Shulkin’s trip to Europe last summer. Shulkin believes the ouster came from political opponents who want to privatize the VA, a move he was quick to slam Wednesday in a New York Times editorial.

President Trump will nominate the White House physician, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, MD, as Shulkin’s replacement. Shulkin had reportedly recommended Jackson for a VA undersecretary position last fall, but the President wanted him to remain in the White House.

Though Jackson served as an emergency medicine physician during Operation Iraqi Freedom, veterans groups question his nomination, citing concerns over a lack of administrative experience. I tweeted on the news, “Choosing an unbeholden outsider in hoping for disruption or believing that character (good or bad) outweighs experience sounds good. But I’m not sure I’d want as my first management job to be running a $200 billion, politically microscoped organization. Whatever the VA pays isn’t enough.”

The status of the VA’s proposed no-bid contract with Cerner remains cloudy as Shulkin departed without signing it. Experts are expressing confidence that Acting Secretary Robert Wilkie – who has no VA or healthcare experience — won’t want to take on the responsibility of executing the Cerner contract, but I wouldn’t be so sure: Jared Kushner pushed Cerner in the first place and the White House may tell Wilkie to just get it done as a purely administrative chore that lets the White House take immediate credit. That’s the bet I’d make.

Reader Comments

From CanadaEh: “Re: Novia Scotia. Has released its provincial RFP to the two short-listed vendors, Cerner and Allscripts. Demos are planned for May and June.” Unverified.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thursday was National Vietnam War Veterans Day, honoring those who served and died in the conflict that ended 43 years ago. If you were deployed to Vietnam then and are still working in health IT all these years later, fill out my online form and I’ll list you in an upcoming post.

Webinars

April 5 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach.” Sponsor: Health Fidelity. Presenters: Adele L. Towers, MD, MPH, senior clinical advisor, UPMC Technology Development Center; Adam Gronsky, director of advisory services, Health Fidelity. Success in value-based care requires a thorough understanding of how risk-based payment models work. To prosper in this data-laden era of care, providers need to manage their patient populations holistically rather than through a collection of individual episodes and be able to accurately identify, document, and report risk scores. Given the stakes, is your provider organization adequately set up to take on and succeed in managing risk? In this webinar, learn how technology-enabled risk capture optimization is helping providers succeed in risk-based payment models.

April 10 (Tuesday) 3:00 ET. “Using Socioeconomic Data, Not Just Demographics, to Create a Healthier Patient Population.” Sponsor: LexisNexis. Presenters: Erin Benson, director of marketing planning, LexisNexis Health Care; Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions consultants, LexisNexis Health Care. Did you know that 25 cents of every healthcare dollar is spent on health conditions that are caused by changeable behavior? Use of social determinants of health (SDOH) — including information on households, neighborhoods, relatives, and assets — can directly improve care management and risk stratification. However, it’s important to first define what SDOH is and isn’t. A recent LexisNexis Health Care CIO survey found that only 50 percent of organizations are using SDOH data at all, and even then, they have only limited information from their EHR or from patient surveys. The question is: what are you going to do about it? This webinar will reveal the myths and truths that will help you avoid answering, “Not enough.”

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Intermountain Healthcare (UT) will shift 98 of its 358 IT staffers to employment with DXC Technology, an IT and consulting services company it has worked with since 2012. The health system previously announced plans to transition 2,300 billing employees to employment with R1 RCM beginning April 8.

The FDA approves Dexcom’s G6 interoperable continuous glucose monitoring system.

Mercy Health-Cincinnati invests in local startup Crosswave Health and its FindLocalTreatment.com addiction services look-up tool. Mercy Health formed an Addiction Treatment Collaborative in January to help its patients find longer-term treatment options.

Two hundred investors wonder how their lawsuit against Theranos and its founders will fare once the SEC is done with its criminal investigation. The investors, who bought shares through their investment funds, are looking to graze over the company’s remains, which include dozens of patents and potentially the personal fortune of former President Sunny Balwani, recently estimated by a magazine at $100 million.

Sales

• Tenet Healthcare (TX) selects Inovalon’s VantageCPS cloud-based analytics software for its post-acute care services.
• Western Maryland Health System chooses Artifact Health’s physician query software.
• Plum Healthcare Group will implement FormFast Connect Powered by Salesforce for resident intake across its 65 SNFs.

Announcements and Implementations

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (TN) integrates mobile voice, text, and broadcast functionalities from Mobile Heartbeat with its Rauland-Borg nurse call system and Epic EHR and goes live on the system.

Image Stream Medical develops EasySuite 4K imaging software for the OR.

VA Southern Nevada Healthcare System implements LiveData’s PeriOp Manager with EHR integration help from DSS.

Healthfinch announces GA of its Refills Lite prescription refill management app for practices using AthenaClinicals.

Apple moves its Health Records app out of beta. Thirty-nine healthcare institutions have signed up to make patient records available via the app.

The Patent and Trademark Office awards Glytec two more patent allowances for its FDA-approved EGlycemic Management System.

Privacy and Security

Northwell Health (NY) staffers help concerned citizens at DataBreaches.net and UpGuard alert a New York-based medical group with zero Web presence that it had left 42,000 patient records and millions of patient clinical notes exposed on a misconfigured rsync backup for over a month.

UnderArmour says the information of 150 million users of its MyFitnessPal app was exposed in a February breach, although the information it stores is minimal (username, email, and encrypted password).

Other

A new paper by Google Cloud researchers says that while AI can help radiologists do their jobs more efficiently, it can’t replace them, noting that it can only do a small part of their job.

The only newspaper article I could find is behind a paywall, but it appears that the new government of South Australia will follow through on its promise to halt the SA Health rollout of its over-budget, behind-schedule, Allscripts-powered EPAS system.

A NEJM Catalyst article says the “two-canoe system” — in which nearly all physicians work under both fee-for-service and value-based payment arrangements – encourages doctors to provide suboptimal care at a higher cost. Their moral dilemma of doing what’s best for their patient vs. what’s best for their wallets is contributing significantly to their burnout, the authors conclude, also noting that the public may start pushing back on their focus of generating revenue.

A study of VA facilities finds that reducing low-value EHR inbox notifications saved 1.5 hours per week of PCP time, although the information overload remains unmanageable and will require more work to fix.

Child protection workers across Montana are using Project ECHO’s telemedicine capabilities to compare notes and connect with child psychiatrists and other therapists at Billings Clinic (MT), which launched a Project ECHO hub several years ago.

An analysis of 7 million patient reviews on Healthgrades finds that patients place the most value on the amount of time their physician spends with them, particularly in the areas of their willingness to answer questions, listen to concerns, and ensure they understand their conditions or procedures.

A coroner’s inquest into the death of a knee surgery patient in a hospital in Australia finds that clinicians had a “persistent failure of critical thinking” when an anesthesiologist mistakenly ordered him a fentanyl patch and PCA that was intended for a different patient. The anesthesiologist noticed the PCA later but assumed someone else had ordered it, while nursing and pharmacy employees failed to catch his mistake. The doctor said he was distracted while trying to manage two patients and forgot which patient’s record was displaying on the EHR. He overrode system warnings for overdose, drug interaction, and duplicate therapy. It was his third time using the newly implemented system. The coroner recommend further training, changes to EHR screen and label layouts, and a hospital review of medication administration procedures.

Weird News Andy refers to this story as, “Not going, not going, not gonorrhea.” A UK man receives an unwelcome surprise after a sexual encounter in Southeast Asia – the “worst-ever” case of gonorrhea that is resistant to all common antibiotics.

Sponsor Updates

• CommonWell Health TV features Ellkay CIO Kamal Patel.
• Consulting Magazine recognizes The HCI Group CEO Ricky Caplin as a global leader in consulting.
• The local news interviews Imprivata CMO Sean Kelly, MD about the company’s palm vein scanner ID technology.
• Liaison Technologies partners with Tierion to extend blockchain capabilities to its Alloy platform.
• Black Book Research recognizes LogicStream Health for highest client satisfaction and clinical process improvement.
• HealthcareNow Radio interviews Medicomp Systems CEO Dave Lareau.
• Mobile Heartbeat will exhibit at the American Organization of Nurse Executives annual meeting in Indianapolis April 12-15.
• Nordic publishes a podcast titled “How to use change champions for a more successful go-live.”
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the annual IA Conference on Perinatal Medicine April 3-4 in West Des Moines, IA.
• Experian Health will exhibit at HFMA Hudson Valley April 5 in Tarrytown, NY.
• In the UK, St. Stephen’s Clinical Research implements Elsevier’s Macro electronic data capture solution.
• The US Patent and Trademark Office issues two more patent allowances for Glytec’s eGlycemic Management System.
• Medicision adds CarePlanner 360 to its line of Aerial care management solutions for payers and risk-bearing organizations.

Blog Posts

• Forgotten A/R: 3 Steps to Getting Beyond “Low Hanging Fruit” (Hayes Management Consulting)
• EHR Support and Optimization: How it affects Your Bottom Line (HCTec)
• Consumer-Friendly Approaches to Curbing Wait Times (Healthgrades)
• A Recipe for Healthcare Success (Hyland)
• Security and Patient Privacy: Just Like Peanut Butter and Jelly (Iatric Systems)
• PCI-DSS Compliance in the Connected Healthcare Environment (Impact Advisors)
• How to Use Relevance to Dominate in Local Search (Influence Health)
• CIO Chat – Jon Burns, University of Maryland Medical System (Huntzinger Management Group)
• Payment Device Questions – What Healthcare Organizations Need to Know (InstaMed)
• HIMSS on Four Wheels (InterSystems)
• New Feature: Intelligent Check-Out/Check-In When Editing Lab Instructions in IDLx (Learn on Demand Systems)
• MuleSoft’s Sale at a Thoroughbred Price is Good News for Data-Centric Companies (Liaison Technologies)
• What it Takes to Make a Sustainable HIE (Lightbeam Health Solutions)
• How Do You Communicate When You Can’t Communicate? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 3 Ways Collaborative Communication Improves Healthcare (Live Process)
• Achieving the healthcare triple play: Improving clinician engagement, patient care and utilization – Part 3 (LogicStream Health)
• Docker Orchestration Tools: A Comparison (Logicworks)
• HIMSS18 Wrap-Up: Key Takeaways for Payers and Providers (Medecision)
• 4 must-read blogs to help you avoid clinician burnout (Meditech)
• Dr. Dan Reidenberg Empowers Front Line Nurses with Mental Health and Suicide Facts (Netsmart)
• The key to being a great healthcare consultant: flexibility (Nordic)
• Managing Your Preferred Post-Acute Network (PatientPing)
• Patient Understanding – The Cornerstone of Adherence and Understanding (FDB)

Contacts

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

News 3/28/18

Top News

FDA will expand its digital health pre-certification pilot program by the end of the year, taking on more companies beyond the 10 current participants.

FDA says it regrets labeling the project as a “pilot” since it is more of a co-development project that will allow app vendors who earn FDA’s pre-certification to fast-track getting their products to market. 

Reader Comments

From Headcounter: “Re: your ‘People’ section. Today, 100 percent of those listed are men and your overall ration is about nine to one male. I can’t give you a pass any longer. Many women are powerful in this field, but for some reason don’t get the same recognition. Maybe your criteria are male-centric and you need to adjust them?” As the messenger you’ve just shot, allow me to explain my criteria for reporting job changes: (a) full-time VP positions and above, and (b) either the hiring company is one I’ve heard of or the new hire has enough industry history so that readers will likely know him or her (few readers would care about a health IT company hiring an HR VP from a local bank). My sources of information are press releases, someone notifying me directly, or LinkedIn if the person is connected to me. Any gender imbalance you see in the People section reflects the industry, not my coverage of it. That solution lives far above my pay grade.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

My favorite response so far to “What I Wish I’d Known Before … Retiring or Career Downsizing” notes the impact of “an insufferable department director and an incompetent CIO.” What say you on the topic of getting off the career treadmill?

I’m having a post-HIMSS swag fest in wearing a great Cantata Health sweatshirt and sampling Ellkay flavored honey (the chocolate is way dangerous, but I wouldn’t kick the cinnamon, vanilla, or Himalayan salt versions out of the kitchen either).

In another post-HIMSS moment, I now know what Brianne and Lorre were doing with the Polaroid cameras in our booth – inviting visitors to have their photo taken with the Smokin’ Doc and to write their messages to me on the result. Thanks to the 100 or so folks who participated. Lorre sent me the album in which she mounted the photos in and I’m pretty sure I’ll page through it often since this hobby (sitting alone trying to fill an empty laptop screen with something interesting while remaining anonymous) makes it easy to feel disconnected and to forget that actual people are on the other end. Now I can see them.

Here’s a fun fact told to me by a guy who has used repeated “trial subscriptions” to SiriusXM to get years of service for free (which I’m not advocating). Email servers usually ignore periods to the left of the @ sign, so you can sign up with “thisisme@myserver.com” and then sign up again later with “thisis.me@myserver.com” in looking like a new subscriber while still receiving the confirmation emails.

A fun item I found: Pushbullet, an app and Chrome extension (versions are also available for Firefox and Windows) that automatically mirror your phone’s notifications and SMS messages to your computer and also let you exchange text messages, links, and files right from your computer’s browser to a phone. I didn’t know I needed it as a minimal phone user, but since I’m on Android, I kind of do.

Webinars

April 5 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach.” Sponsor: Health Fidelity. Presenters: Adele L. Towers, MD, MPH, senior clinical advisor, UPMC Technology Development Center; Adam Gronsky, director of advisory services, Health Fidelity. Success in value-based care requires a thorough understanding of how risk-based payment models work. To prosper in this data-laden era of care, providers need to manage their patient populations holistically rather than through a collection of individual episodes and be able to accurately identify, document, and report risk scores. Given the stakes, is your provider organization adequately set up to take on and succeed in managing risk? In this webinar, learn how technology-enabled risk capture optimization is helping providers succeed in risk-based payment models.

April 10 (Tuesday) 3:00 ET. “Using Socioeconomic Data, Not Just Demographics, to Create a Healthier Patient Population.” Sponsor: LexisNexis. Presenters: Erin Benson, director of marketing planning, LexisNexis Health Care; Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions consultants, LexisNexis Health Care. Did you know that 25 cents of every healthcare dollar is spent on health conditions that are caused by changeable behavior? Use of social determinants of health (SDOH) — including information on households, neighborhoods, relatives, and assets — can directly improve care management and risk stratification. However, it’s important to first define what SDOH is and isn’t. A recent LexisNexis Health Care CIO survey found that only 50 percent of organizations are using SDOH data at all, and even then, they have only limited information from their EHR or from patient surveys. The question is: what are you going to do about it? This webinar will reveal the myths and truths that will help you avoid answering, “Not enough.”

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Announcements and Implementations

Gay dating app Grindr will send its male users reminders to get an HIV test every 3-6 months, give them directions to the nearest testing site and allow non-profit testing centers to advertise their services at no charge.

Apple announces a new 9.7” IPad that will start at $329 for the 32 GB model. It lacks some of the advanced features of the Pro, but still has the Retina display, the A10 Fusion chip, and Apple Pencil support. It appears to be targeted to schools since it was announced at an education conference and schools get modest discounts. The IPad Mini 4 — like the clearly obsolete Macbook Air — makes even less sense than it did before since its display is just 7.9 inches and it costs $70 more, although with 128 GB of memory.

Primary care technology vendor Canvas Medical announces GA of its EHR, claiming that its autocomplete-powered documentation is three times faster than the top three EHRs, requires 80 percent fewer clicks, and eliminates the need for separate population health management software. Pricing starts at $599 per month. CEO Andrew Hines used to work for Practice Fusion. The company appears to have about a dozen employees, which isn’t many when you consider ongoing support, further development, and keeping all those bosses of non-concierge doctors (insurers and the government) happy. Cascade Family Practice (WA) was quoted in the announcement, but I notice that its patient portal is still Athenahealth.

Privacy and Security

A fascinating article describes how scammers make a fortune using Facebook (and so does Facebook) by using Facebook’s targeting software to push affiliate ads based on location and language, often buying phony Facebook accounts to keep the ads going. The king scammer — a 31-year-old whose dubious career accomplishments have made him one of Poland’s richest people at a net worth of $180 million (and a billboard purchaser, above) — says Facebook sends a mixed message by claiming to shut down suspicious accounts while it also sends company reps to scammer conferences to encourage them to buy more ads. He admits that affiliates – companies that pay him a percentage of sales when his ad for their product is clicked — are stealing from the poorest people, but says the real problem is a capitalistic society that is based on convincing people to buy things they don’t need. His next idea is creating a cryptocurrency that will turn his business into a billion-dollar company.

I don’t know who Dylan Curran is, but click these links he provided in Twitter to see just how much Facebook and Google know about you:

• https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb (every place you’ve been with your phone turned on).
• https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity (your search history from every device combined).
  https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated (your profile as provided to advertisers).
• https://www.youtube.com/feed/history/search_history (every YouTube search you’ve ever performed).
• https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout (where you can download your entire Google history). Dylan’s 5.5 GB file contained bookmarks, emails (including deleted ones), contacts, Google Drive files (including deleted ones), photos taken, calendar, businesses from which goods were purchased and the items bought, websites create, phones owned, pages shared, and how many steps he took each day.
• Facebook also offers a download that includes every message sent, files sent or received, phone contacts, audio messages sent or received, a list of topics it thinks you’re interested in based on your Facebook interaction.
• Windows 10 enables by default tracking location, installed apps, when the apps were used, access to the webcam and microphone, emails, calendar, call history, files downloaded, photos and videos, and search history.

The Dallas paper profiles the regional security monitoring center of Blue Cross Blue Shield of IL, MT, NM, OK, and TX. The 200-analyst, 24×7 center looks for foreign access and unusual member activity. It’s run by SVP/CISO Kevin Charest, PhD, who held a similar job with UnitedHealth Group and was CISO of HHS. He was also previously a VP of Greenway Medical and a US Army captain. 

Finger Lakes Health (NY) pays an unspecified sum to to bring its systems back online after a week of ransomware-caused downtime.

Other

The CFO of Medical Center Health System (TX) blames its credit downgrade to a worsening local economy and the hospital’s Cerner implementation, which he says “has really hurt us from an accounts receivable standpoint.” The previous CFO attributed the hospital’s 2017 bond downgrade to the $55 million it spent on Cerner.

A poll finds that high costs caused 40 percent of Americans to skip doctor visits, prescribed tests, or treatments in the past year. Around 30 percent said they had to choose whether to spend their money on medical bills or on necessities such as food, heating, or housing, while respondents who faced with healthcare expenses used up their savings (36 percent), borrowed money (32 percent) or saved less (41 percent). Half said the were billed for services they thought their insurance covered and one-fourth of respondents had a medical bill turned over to a collections agency.

NC-based mental and behavioral services managed care provider Cardinal Innovations Healthcare sues former CEO Richard Topping for the $1.68 million he convinced the organization’s board to pay him in the severance agreement he drew up himself. Cardinal’s investigator also claims that former CIO Pete Murphy committed wrongdoing by helping Topping download 1.5 GB of confidential company information a few days before he was fired. The two were apparently planning to launch a privately backed competitor to Cardinal. “I can’t wait until we’re rich,” Murphy said in an email to Topping. The other fired executives who received severance were Murphy ($740,000), the COO ($690,000), and the chief medical officer ($684,000). Topping and Murphy have since started the DC-based Shao, described on LinkedIn as “a technology partnership between health plans and telecom carriers to provide plan members with digital connectivity and the tools to maximize that access for better health and wellness.” The most interesting aspect of this is that fired CEO Topping has impeccable credentials – he earned a JD degree, an MPH from Harvard, was a judge advocate in the US Army, served as legal counsel for Brigham and Women’s Center for Bioethics, and was a US Department of Justice trial attorney.

Belgium-based Materalise earns FDA approval for its 3D printing software that creates anatomical models for planning surgeries.

This offshore market research company’s $4,450 report predicts “incredible” (7.3 percent – is that incredible?) growth for the LIS market, although one might question its qualifications even beyond the fractured English — it lists products from McKesson (sold to Allscripts last year) and Eclipsys (sold to Allscripts in 2010 – Eclipsys had acquired SysWare in 2006 but its LIS seems to be defunct). You get the feeling that the report won’t actually be written until someone orders a copy.

A Brigham and Women’s ICU doctor observes in a New York Times article that patient end-of-life wishes are often not respected because clinicians don’t see them in the moment of need. Reasons: the advance directives are buried in the EHR progress notes and lack of interoperability means that the preferences won’t be seen if the patient falls ill away from home or after transfer to a nursing home. The author likes the idea of patients being able to maintain their own advance care planning documentation on a smartphone app, but wishes that “the EHR isn’t just a clunky online version of a paper chart but actually a tool to help us do our jobs better.”

A small interview study of patient portal users finds that two-thirds of them viewed test results that did not contain an explanation from their doctor, triggering frantic phone calls (sometimes after office hours) and online searches as the patients tried to get more information. The authors conclude that just posting test results on a patient portal without context isn’t adequate. A Kaiser Heath News article describes an internist who checked her husband’s patient portal with his permission and found from it that he had widespread metastatic cancer, after which she kept rebooting her computer and rechecking it in disbelief (he’s OK now).

Sometimes I run across bizarre items that earn the Weird News Andy seal of approval even though WNA didn’t send them to me. Here’s one: surgeons in India determine that a woman’s eye and nose pain are being caused by the wriggling of a 2.5 inch worm lodged right behind her eye, which they remove via nasal surgery. Larvae of the Lua Lua worm (also known as the African eye worm) are spread by biting flies and live under human skin. You can thank me later for not including the BJM Case Reports photos.

Sponsor Updates

• Boston Software System publishes a white paper titled “EHR Migration Guide.”
• Solutionreach integrates its patient relationship management system with Epic and adds its app to Epic’s App Orchard.
• CSI Healthcare IT employees volunteer with Habitat for Humanity as part of its Gives Back program.
• The Sequoia Project re-elects Surescripts Chief Administrative, Legal, and Privacy Officer Paul Uhrig to its board.
• Fortified Health Security partners with Beach Health System to strengthen its cybersecurity program.
• HealthcareNow Radio interviews Aprima COO Neil Simon.
• Chiropractic software vendor EZBIS will integrate Ability Network’s all-payer RCM application into its practice management system.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes an infographic titled “EHR Trends – Usage and Adoption.”
• CenTrak empowers IoT solutions in the Australian healthcare sector.
• CTG publishes a new case study, “Inova Health System Relies on CTG for Post-Implementation Helpdesk Solution in a Production Environment.”
• Heather Espino (Centura Health) joins Culbert Healthcare Solutions as Epic manager.
• Dignity Health features Docent Health on the cover of its Hello Health magazine.
• Meditech publishes a case study of patient engagement at Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences, which uses Meditech’s patient portal to improve recovery, improve patient self-assessment scores, and reduce appointment no-shows.

Blog Posts

• Keep Relationships from Going Stale (Access)
• Evolve Beyond Museum Relics in Your Practice (AdvancedMD)
• Make EPCS Compliance Easier, Protect Yourself and Your Patients (Aprima)
• How Digital Health Succeeds and Fails – Datica at SXSW (Datica)
• Refreshing Reads: 4 must-read blogs to help you avoid clinician burnout (Meditech)
• CarePort’s New Digs: Come Grow With Us (CarePort)
• Healthcare Advanced Computer Power: Robotics, Medical Imaging, and More (CareSync)
• HIMSS18: Wrap-Up and Charity Raffle Winners (Clinical Architecture)
• 3 Things Healthcare Organizations Can Outsource Now for Lower Costs, Better Care (Conduent Health)
• Meditations on HIMSS18 (Diameter Health)
• How Hospitals are Innovating and Adapting for the Future (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/26/18

Top News

Israel will spend $287 million to make the health data of its 9 million citizens available to researchers and private companies for work on preventive medicine and personalized medicine projects, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Sunday.

Most citizens of Israel belong to HMOs, whose EHRs will provide the electronic patient data to the government unless they opt out.

Concerns have already been expressed about patient confidentiality and whether the billions of dollars Israel could charge drug companies for using the data will trigger higher drug prices.

Reader Comments

From Imaginary Lover: “Re: Dr. Jayne’s comments about SteadyMD’s CEO declining to comment on its SEC-reported funding. It’s unusual, but understandable. Funding comes at a cost that includes loss of control and dilution (sometimes massive) of previous shareholders. The co-founder and CEO who declined to comment was probably a major shareholder before this infusion, but maybe not afterwards. New funding may save a company from certain death (bankruptcy) but can be the beginning of another kind of sickness – now the company has to pull a rabbit out of the hat for the new investors in short order to give them a return. If it can’t, investors may pull the plug or fire the CEO. The fellow who invested his time, sweat, money, and lifeblood is taking on risk and losing equity, all in one fell swoop. Trying to act like the belle of the ball in those circumstances must be a challenge. I feel for the guy.” I enjoyed the wit, warmth, and insight of this comment so much that I’ve asked the author to consider making further contributions. Sometimes you just read something that elicits a “I want to hear more from you” response.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Not only do we have much work to do in delivering a “comprehensive health record,” we can’t even agree on how far along we are. Reader comments note health system data hoarding, the lack of semantic standards needed to make exchanged data useful, and health systems that don’t fully populate what could be a complete medical record.

New poll to your right or here: what online sources have you used in choosing a doctor? I always pair up my insurer’s director with Healthgrades and haven’t used any of the other sources I listed.

Responses to “What I Wish I’d Known Before … Being Admitted to a Hospital or Being Seen in the ED” suggest that while hospitals provide many of us with our living, our experience as patients in them is frustrating and sometimes dangerous. One bizarre example: a hospital insisted on giving a newly-admitted patient the meal that the room’s since-discharged previous occupant had ordered (a fruit cup), so the famished poll respondent ordered a nice dinner on discharge day so the next patient wouldn’t starve.

Let’s hear from folks who have retired or downsized their careers – what do you wish you’d known?

Webinars

April 5 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach.” Sponsor: Health Fidelity. Presenters: Adele L. Towers, MD, MPH, senior clinical advisor, UPMC Technology Development Center; Adam Gronsky, director of advisory services, Health Fidelity. Success in value-based care requires a thorough understanding of how risk-based payment models work. To prosper in this data-laden era of care, providers need to manage their patient populations holistically rather than through a collection of individual episodes and be able to accurately identify, document, and report risk scores. Given the stakes, is your provider organization adequately set up to take on and succeed in managing risk? In this webinar, learn how technology-enabled risk capture optimization is helping providers succeed in risk-based payment models.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Regulators approve the merger of Advocate Health Care and Aurora Health Care that will create the country’s 10th-largest non-profit health system upon closing next week. Advocate Aurora Health will have 27 hospitals, 3,300 employed physicians, 70,000 employees, and annual revenue of $11 billion. The organizations predict that synergy will support the always-promised, never-delivered goal of higher quality and lower cost.

Wolters Kluwer completes its acquisition of 16-employee medical student learning platform vendor Firecracker.

Sales

USC’s Keck School of Medicine joins the global health research network of TriNetX.

Decisions

• MultiCare Deaconess Hospital (WA) will go live with Epic in summer 2018.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

The analytics-powered insurer that is being created in a joint venture between Sutter Health and Aetna hires Steve Wigginton (Valence Health) as CEO. Evolent Health acquired Valence Health for $219 million in October 2016, after which it replaced Valence’s CEO Andy Eckert with Wigginton, then Evolent’s chief development officer. 

Culbert Healthcare Solutions hires Wayne Thompson (Mount Nittany Health) as executive consultant.

Announcements and Implementations

Alex Scarlat, MD publishes “Medical Information Extraction & Analysis: From Zero to Hero with a Bit of SQL and a Real-life Database.” It gives clinicians an introduction to SQL using hands-on exercises running against a de-identified ICU patient database from BIDMC. It also helps IT folks understand the data elements that interest clinicians.

I also noticed when looking up Alex’s book on Amazon that Springer has published a review and self-assessment for the ABPM’s clinical informatics board exam. I can’t vouch for the ultimate outcome of improving test scores in return for your $125, but the material looks solid, the writing is meaty, and the sample test looks darned hard. The other available review book ($129) has just three Amazon reviews, but one titled “Not fit for sale” raises a red flag in noting that “clinical” is misspelled on the book’s spine.

Government and Politics

The federal government’s spending bill leaves ONC’s annual budget unchanged at $60 million – at least through September – instead of being reduced to $38 million as requested by the White House.

In Canada, New Brunswick offers a $2,500 bonus to doctors who start using its provincial EHR, hoping to entice the 400 of its 750 physicians who haven’t transitioned off paper charts to do so. The EHR was implemented in 2012. 

A surgeon in England believes that the Syrian military hacked his laptop to determine which hospital he was helping with video surgery consultations as featured on a BBC program, after which suspected warplanes destroyed the hospital with a bunker-busting bomb. A security expert suggests creating a VPN connection for secure laptops, but the surgeon has since stopped offering video help to doctors in war-torn areas.

Other

Harvard Business Review describes Mayo Clinic’s effort to reduce ICU clinician overload caused by a never-ending stream of data. They’re using “ambient intelligence” in applying NASA methods to identify clinicians whose workload requires them to filter vital information from data clutter, identifying the 60 data elements that are important for taking quick action. The end result was an EHR-connected, rules-based, color-coded dashboard that saves an ICU clinician an hour each day while improving outcomes and reducing costs. Mayo has licensed the technology to Ambient Clinical Analytics.

A North Carolina state legislator who used her background as a nurse to sponsor several health-related bills isn’t a nurse after all. The state’s Board of Nursing orders Beverly Boswell – whose only healthcare background is as a phlebotomist – to remove her claims of being a nurse from her website, which Boswell says was due to a campaign volunteer’s error. However, video shows her telling an audience in 2014 that her background includes “providing nursing skills and medical care.” The Republican lawmaker earned more attention last week when she called a school outside her district after believing a fake news report saying that students were being required to walk out to protest gun violence, posting on Facebook afterward, “So the students that were eating Tide Pods last week run your school this week?”

An addiction publication profiles OpenBeds, software developed by Johns Hopkins medical school faculty member Nishi Rawat, MD. Indianapolis social workers are using it to find available space in opioid addiction treatment facilities.

In China, a media company tells a woman applying for a live-streaming job that her appearance is “far from that of an Internet celebrity,” advising her to have cosmetic facial surgery at their expense. An employee went to the hospital with her on the day of surgery and told her she would need to borrow the $6,300 cost from an online loan company and would be reimbursed afterward. She wasn’t, and she was let go because she still didn’t meet appearance standards. She is suing the company. Such financing is called a “face loan” in China, where would-be Internet stars with poor credit histories often find themselves unable to pay the money back.

Vince and Elise pored over health IT vendor financial filings to name their Top 10 hospital system vendors by annual revenue. Most are unsurprising and the Top 3 hold a giant chunk of the total, but let’s hear it for those #7-10 companies that get less attention as significant players – Harris Healthcare, Medhost, and Cantata Health. Vince notes that Meditech is back in growth mode after four years of declining revenue and also observes that none of today’s top five vendors were on his 1998 version of the list at all. It’s pretty interesting that it took just 20 years for acquisitions (some of them ill-advised and three involving Allscripts buying its way into today’s Top 5) to decimate all of the 1998 Top 10 other than Meditech and CPSI. 

This is fantastic: a Columbia University surgery resident dryly analyzes the accuracy of ED and OR scenes from several dozen movies and TV shows in a  video that has earned 1.6 million YouTube views in barely more than a week. One of her many quotable lines involves her observation of Dr. House running around the OR in street clothes: “In real life, that guy would have been tackled by about six tiny perioperative nurses far before he got to the operating room.” She compares surgery to her hobby of running marathons: “You have to be a masochistic glutton for punishment with obsessive compulsive tendencies.”

Weird News Andy confidently labels this honey of a story as T63.442A, “toxic effect of venom of bees, intentional self-harm, initial encounter.” A woman dies of an allergic reaction caused by a bee sting intentionally administered in a cosmetic procedure called “apitherapy” that has been lauded by anti-medical Hollywood goofball Gwyneth Paltrow. WNA consulted the primary literature in noting the line, “after getting bee venom therapy from an unlicensed apitherapist in South Korea,”which he takes to mean that South Korea has actual, licensed apitherapists. He extends the nomenclature to counselors for software developers in suggesting that they call themselves “APItherapists.”

Sponsor Updates

• QuadraMed celebrates Health Information Professionals Week.

Blog Posts

• New R^ Data Model: Provider (Redox)
• Three Easy Steps to Increase Business Value (Salesforce)
• Outlook for 2018 Healthcare Trends: Value-Based Care and the ACA (The SSI Group)
• Progress of Interconnected Patient Care as Learned from Disaster Recovery Efforts (Summit Healthcare)
• HIMSS18 Wrap-Up: Key Takeaways for Payers and Providers (Medecision)
• Clinical Communication Moves to the Forefront (Voalte)
• A Fun Twist to Vocera Badge Voice Commands (Vocera)
• Referrals Run Dry: How Consolidation is Impacting PT Practice Revenue (WebPT)
• New certification furthers quality mission (Philips Wellcentive)

Contacts

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

News 3/23/18

Top News

John Bardis, the former MedAssets founder who as HHS assistant secretary of administration signed off on the charter flights of long-time friend HHS Secretary Tom Price, resigns effective April 6. He says he always intended to serve just one year. Bardis’s responsibilities include the HHS CIO office.

Second in command in HHS to Bardis — and presumably the frontrunner to replace him in overseeing HHS HR, the CIO office, and Equal Opportunity compliance — is former technology executive and Trump campaign worker Jon Cordova, who just completed his two-week HHS suspension for his pre-election social media posts.

The Facebook posts written or shared by Cordova include calling Hillary Clinton a “slimy trailer trash huckster;” accusing the Clinton Foundation of paying Gold Star parent Khizr Khan to criticize Trump; making up sex scandal stories about Senator Ted Cruz; and sharing a doctored photo of a black man holding a sign reading, “No mother should have to fear for her son’s life every time he robs a store.”

Reader Comments

From Cowtown: “Re: Microsoft’s March 15 copyright infringement lawsuit brought against Community Health Systems. Microsoft alleges that CHS stalled software audits for years and intentionally under-reported SQL Server usage by claiming only one-sixth of the production footprint. Maybe that’s not surprising when your CIO is Manish Shah, who was fired in 2002 from EMC for making his sales quota by falsifying invoices.” Shah joined CHS in 2013 after spending time at Aurora Health Care and no time in prison since he was never charged with a crime as far as I can tell and thus has never admitted guilt. I don’t have access to the filings to see what Microsoft is claiming.

From Clara Barton: “Re: the attached news item. This, apparently, is still a thing.” Indeed it is. An RN who presumably forgot to lock her car the night before wakes up to find her nursing license, laptop, and thumb drive with PHI on it missing.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Please tell me what you wish you’d known before being admitted to a hospital or seen in the ED. I’ve spent only one night in a hospital and that was a waste of time since nothing turned out to be wrong with me, but what I wish I’d known (not that it would have helped except as incentive to go elsewhere) is:

• That the ED person who reassured me that the hospital has only private rooms was either misinformed or lying since I was placed in a room with a guy who sounded like he was on death’s door.
• That I would lie for hours in the ED waiting for a bed, only to find when I got there that I had just missed dinner and nothing would be available to eat until breakfast. This was after being told that I missed lunch in the ED, being offered only apple juice instead.
• That I would be awakened all night by loud employees in the hall and by frequent vital sign and IV checks.
• That every med I received was late and some were never administered at all, including one that the ED insisted afterward was important.
• That the hospital would steadfastly refuse to give me an electronic copy of my information after my visit — they said they weren’t required to and would only give electronic information to doctors, not patients — and that my OCR complaint would be dismissed with no action taken against the hospital.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor OmniSys. The Dallas-based company offers innovative solutions for retail, outpatient hospital, and independent pharmacies. Products include an omni-channel patient communications platform; revenue cycle management for immunizations, DME, and prescriptions; patient engagement programs; and consumer engagement analytics. The company also provides domain expertise, market insight gained from serving 25,000 pharmacies, and proprietary SaaS technology that integrates with customer workflow. The company’s rules-driven OmniLink engagement platform improves vaccination rates, therapy adherence, and post-encounter follow-up, while its Fusion-Rx provides all-channel refill and pick-up reminders, manages refill requests, and offers an inbound IVR with automated attendant and voicemail. CEO John King is an industry long-timer going back nearly 30 years, starting with Shared Medical Systems. Thanks to OmniSys for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

April 5 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach.” Sponsor: Health Fidelity. Presenters: Adele L. Towers, MD, MPH, senior clinical advisor, UPMC Technology Development Center; Adam Gronsky, director of advisory services, Health Fidelity. Success in value-based care requires a thorough understanding of how risk-based payment models work. To prosper in this data-laden era of care, providers need to manage their patient populations holistically rather than through a collection of individual episodes and be able to accurately identify, document, and report risk scores. Given the stakes, is your provider organization adequately set up to take on and succeed in managing risk? In this webinar, learn how technology-enabled risk capture optimization is helping providers succeed in risk-based payment models.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

This seems to hit a lot of timely trends. SteadyMD raises $2.5 million for its online, concierge primary care practice. It runs eight practices, most of which are specialized (bodybuilding, LGBTQ, triathlon, etc.), but one of the practices addresses general health. SteadyMD patients meet their new PCP in a one-hour video visit, after which the company collects and stores all their medical records and makes the doctor available at any time via text messaging, phone calls, or video appointments. Membership costs $79 per month. The company says its doctors can prescribe, but doesn’t provide details of how that works.

Sales

• Washington Regional Medical Center (AR) selects Streamline Health’s cloud-based, automated pre-bill coding analysis technology.
• The Wyoming Department of Health chooses Medicity to power a statewide HIE that it hopes to eventually connect to that of neighboring states of Colorado and South Dakota, which also use Medicity.

People

Glytec names Ed Furlong (Kyruus) COO.

Robert Redfield, MD will become director of the CDC. A 20-year veteran of the US Army Medical Corps, Redfield has spent the majority of his career on HIV/AIDS research and clinical care.

Privacy and Security

Finger Lakes Health (NY) is still recovering from a ransomware attack over the weekend that forced it to revert to paper-based processes and EHR backups.

The 40,000 users in Australia of Telstra’s Argus healthcare secure messaging software are notified that their systems are vulnerable to outside attacks since the company always creates the same user account for remote access and then stores its static password in an unsecured text file. Telstra says hackers used the information to penetrate servers via Microsoft’s remote desktop protocol with full administrative access. One person who examined a breached server said it appears that medical information wasn’t stolen, with the hacker’s main interesting appearing to be using the servers to host dating scams and to buy items with stolen credit cards. I suppose Telstra is correct in calling its service “secure” even if its installation of it isn’t.

Other

The threat of a negative patient Yelp review seems to hold more sway with physicians than educational campaigns encouraging them to reduce unnecessary prescribing of antibiotics. Physicians Working Together has launched a petition asking Yelp to remove negative doctor reviews.

Danny Sands, MD, MPH assures his Twitter followers that the above fax from VNA of Boston to his practice announcing its transition from mail to fax is not an early April Fools’ Day joke.

This contraption looks downright frightening, perhaps something that Michael Myers might have created for his Halloween activities as a Shatner mask replacement. I’m willing to bet the mug that the patient is so tightly clasping is filled with either calming tea or spirits.

A survey that asked consumers to name a famous female technology leader resulted in 92 percent drawing a blank and half the remainder naming Siri or Alexa, fueling the fire under the question of why virtual assistant voices are always female.

Sponsor Updates

• Bernoulli Health publishes a new e-book, “Continuous Clinical Surveillance: A Business and Clinical Case for Creating the Foundation for Real-Time Healthcare.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new white paper, “Is Healthcare Preparing for a Cyberattack?”
• LogicStream Health releases a new podcast, “Improving care: The role of patients, technology and the art of healing with Archelle Georgiou, MD and Patrick Yoder.”
• MedData will host a job fair March 24 at its office in Grand Rapids, MI.
• Meditech AVP Cathy Turner, RN joins the HIMSS CNO-CNIO Vendor Roundtable as co-chair.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “World-Class Care in a Small Town,” featuring Pecos Valley Medical Center.
• National Decision Support Co. will exhibit at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Annual Conference March 22-24 in Orlando.
• Experian Health will exhibit at the MultiState Managed Care Meeting March 28-30 in Atlanta.
• PerfectServe’s Michelle McCleerey presents at the Population Health Colloquium.
• The Chartis Group publishes a new white paper, “Everyone is a Cancer Patient.”

Blog Posts

• Five Key Takeaways From HIMSS18 (Medicity)
• Top 9 Takeaways from HIMSS18 (Spok)
• The Artificial Intelligence Race and How CIOs Can Stay Ahead (Liaison Technologies)
• How finding your champion is key to a successful implementation (Meditech)
• Dissecting the HIMSS Blockchain Buzz (Medicomp Systems)
• The Torch is Passed (Mobile Heartbeat)
• Experts in Home Health Give Thoughts and Advice for 2018 – Part III (Netsmart)
• Regulator Submissions Using Only Meditech (CEHRT) (Parallon Technology Solutions)
• Collaborative onboarding for health information systems: How we help our partners get up to speed (Experian Health)
• Build a Preferred Post-Acute Network in Seven Steps (PatientPing)
• The Song of HIMSS (PatientKeeper)
• The Current State of Paper Record Digitization: How Do We Get From Here to There? (PokitDok)
• How Does Patient Satisfaction Impact Reimbursement? (Access)

Contacts

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

News 3/21/18

Top News

Houston-based RCM outsourcer Constellation Healthcare Technologies files Chapter 11 bankruptcy and will sell the business due to the servicing costs of the extensive debt it took on to fund its acquisition strategy.

The company says it fired unnamed executives who intentionally misstated its revenue and earnings.

A lawsuit filed in late 2016 claimed that CEO Paul Parmar masterminded a series of fraudulent acquisitions to allow him to falsify revenue numbers while misappropriating cash.

A private investment firm owned by former Blackstone executive Chinh Chu bought the company for $309 million in early 2017.

Reader Comments

From Stern Countenance: “Re: Tronc. Mike Ferro is out as chairman following allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior. Justin Dearborn, one of his cronies from his Merge Healthcare days, will replace him. Ferro was already a jillionaire with the sale of Merge Healthcare to IBM plus he was rich before he joined Tronc. Ferro gets a $15 million consulting contract as a farewell gift. Now Justin gets to be a jillionaire, too. These guys are no dummies when it comes to money, including running Merge into the ground by slashing and burning to make numbers that looked good enough to get IBM to buy the company.” There’s another healthcare connection – Tronc (the former Tribune Publishing) is selling the Los Angeles Times to NantHealth’s Patrick Soon-Shiong for $500 million in cash. I interviewed Justin Dearborn in early 2014; IBM bought Merge Healthcare for $1 billion in mid-2015 to expand its Watson offerings.    

From Obsidian: “Re: HLTH conference. Between JPMorgan and HIMSS I’ve seen 100+ billboards and ads for this new conference that’s supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. What do you and your readers know about it?” The conference, taglined as “The Future of Healthcare,” will be held in Las Vegas May 6-9. They expect 2,000 attendees and will offer a smallish exhibit hall. The guy in charge is money guy and conference organizer Jon Weiner, who has zero healthcare experience in advocating for “disruptive innovation.” He has raised $5 million in funding to launch the conference. Among HLTH’s handful of sponsors are Change Healthcare, Optum, and UPMC. The massive roster of 250+ presenters includes the CEOs of Allscripts, Geisinger, 23andMe, Optum Health, Change Healthcare, Sharecare, Intermountain Healthcare, and Athenahealth. HIMSS (and its newly acquired Health 2.0) seems to have most of the bases well covered and JPMorgan is where the money guys and CEOs hang out, so I’m not quite sure how HLTH will convince people to spend another $1,850 registration fee and four days away from work to go back to Las Vegas (assuming most of its attendees will have just returned from HIMSS18). However, I shouldn’t underestimate the willingness of healthcare people to spend their employers’ money on conferences with questionable ROI to anyone except the attendee, who gains validation for getting his or her employer to foot the bill. Readers: are you going, and if so, what’s the draw beyond the HIMSS and JPM conferences?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I get excited by two Northern Hemisphere calendar days – the winter solstice on December 21 (after which daylight lasts longer every day through the summer solstice on June 21) and the spring solstice equinox (thanks for the correction) Wednesday, which is when spring officially begins. Actually I should add a third celebrated date that I call the HIMSS solstice, the last day of the HIMSS conference in which the crazy-busy health IT period that starts January 2 ends, replaced by a relatively lazy summer that lasts until Labor Day.

Webinars

April 5 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach.” Sponsor: Health Fidelity. Presenters: Adele L. Towers, MD, MPH, senior clinical advisor, UPMC Technology Development Center; Adam Gronsky, director of advisory services, Health Fidelity. Success in value-based care requires a thorough understanding of how risk-based payment models work. To prosper in this data-laden era of care, providers need to manage their patient populations holistically rather than through a collection of individual episodes and be able to accurately identify, document, and report risk scores. Given the stakes, is your provider organization adequately set up to take on and succeed in managing risk? In this webinar, learn how technology-enabled risk capture optimization is helping providers succeed in risk-based payment models.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Parachute Health, which offers a durable medical equipment ordering system, raises $5.5 million in a seed funding round.

Sales

• Orlando Health extends its Affinity RCM contract with Harris Healthcare for three years with an additional one-year option.
• Piedmont Healthcare (GA) expands its use of Glytec’s EGlycemic Management System to all of its acute care facilities.
• Partners HealthCare expands its use Kyruus ProviderMatch patient access solutions.
• University of Maryland School of Dentistry will implement DrFirst’s mobility suite to help dentist prescribers meet the state’s July 1, 2018 prescription drug monitoring program mandate.
• Lawrence General Hospital (MA) will implement Meditech’s Expanse EHR.

People

Change Healthcare hires Fredrik Eliasson (CSX) as EVP/CFO.

UPMC Chief Innovation Officer Rasu Shrestha, MD, MBA will lead the VA’s API project that was announced at HIMSS18. The VA’s Lighthouse project involves standards-based data exchange via an open API framework. Organizations that have signed its Open API Pledge are UPMC, BIDMC, Partners HealthCare, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Fairview, Geisinger, Intermountain Healthcare, Jefferson, Rush, and VCU Health.

Steve Weichhand (Avaap) joins Divurgent as VP of professional services.

Charles Tuchinda, MD, MBA is promoted to the newly created role of EVP and deputy group head of Hearst Health and VP of Hearst. He will also continue in his role as president of Hearst-owned First Databank.

Announcements and Implementations

Diameter Health gives its clinical data management users the ability to track user-defined patient populations over time, with a sample use case being a health plan that wants to update its patient list with fresh HIE information on a specific schedule.

Healthcare sharing ministry Medi-Share will use payment processing systems from Liquid Payments. This is interesting mostly because of the business model of Medi-Share, which is run as a ministry but is effectively an insurer since its 375,000 members agree to share their healthcare bills that are discounted via Medi-Share PPO provider agreements. Faith-based plans, which don’t guarantee that they will cover medical bills and sometimes exclude preexisting conditions, require a pastor’s recommendation and the member’s pledge to avoid using drugs, smoking, and behaving immorally. The plans are not regulated.

Clinical Architecture releases Symedical on FHIR, a RESTful API based on the FHIR Terminology Service standard.

Government and Politics

The VA’s Cerner project will cost $16 billion instead of the previously hinted $10 billion, according to comments made in a House Appropriations Committee by Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL). Cerner will get $10 billion (which is probably where the earlier figure originated), the VA will spend $4.6 billion on infrastructure improvements, and another $1.2 billion will be budgeted for third-party project management (Booz Allen Hamilton has already been awarded $750 million of that). Another tidbit dropped in a House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs hearing: VA Secretary David Shulkin had planned to announce during his HIMSS keynote that the VA’s contract with Cerner had been finalized, although continuing delays took that topic off the table.

Former VP Joe Biden expands on the Seema Verma-Jared Kushner announcements at HIMSS18 in a Fortune opinion piece, recommending that:

• HHS should cite providers for data blocking if they don’t provide patients with an electronic copy of their EHR information within 24 hours of their request.
• The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation should create a uniform patient data portal for storing and sharing patient information.
• HHS should expand its Sync for Science program in which patients can contribute their medical records to research.
• The National Cancer Institute should create a cancer data trust to hold EHR, diagnostic, genomic, and outcomes data.

The New York Times reviews the NIH’s $1.4 billion project to collect genomic, medical records, blood, and wearables information from one million Americans. The “All of Us” research program – still in beta testing — hopes to uncover new diagnostic and treatment insights, but hasn’t made much progress in its first three years even though its 2017 budget alone was $230 million. Geisinger gave back its $50 million participation grant because endless meetings and conference calls weren’t going anywhere, while Kaiser Permanente felt NIH just wanted its data without its insights so it passed, too. Both organizations are creating similar systems and so is the VA, which is making good progress for a budget of just $250 million over seven years. Researchers also say it’s hard because patient information is scattered across multiple provider EHRs and the US doesn’t have enough DNA sequencing machines to handle the load. 

Other

The US News “top medical schools” for research are Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and NYU, while the top three for primary care are UNC-Chapel Hill, UCSF, and University of Washington.

Epidemiologists are being robbed of their ability to track infectious disease activity by the shutdown of US local newspapers, which provide higher-quality information than social media. 

Sponsor Updates

• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes an infographic titled “The Complex ERP Lifecycle.”
• Aprima will exhibit at the Association of Independent Medical Software Value Added Resellers Annual Conference March 23-24 in San Antonio.
• CoverMyMeds will host TechPint March 22 in Cleveland.
• Nordic publishes a podcast titled “How will transitioning to Nordic’s maintenance and support affect my internal teams? Q&A with Loma Linda University Health.”
• HCTec publishes a new case study, “Outpatient CDI Model Increases Revenue Opportunities and Positions Health System for Future Success.”
• Healthwise will exhibit at the 2018 Midwest ACE User Group Conference March 21-23 in Chicago.
• Image Stream Medical will exhibit at the AORN Global Surgical Conference & Expo March 24-28 in New Orleans.
• Kyruus will exhibit at the Cleveland Health IT Summit

Blog Posts

• Bermuda Hospital Board Deploys Access’s eForms Solution to Enhance Registration and Integrate Patient Documentation with Cerner (Access)
• Common Risks Areas of ERP Implementation (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Overview of the Current Administration’s Approach to HIT (Datica)
• Consultant’s Corner – Kathi Goovert (Huntzinger Management Group)
• HIMSS 2018: A Universal Agreement to Put Patients First (CarePort Health)
• The 3 Best Alternative, Non-Nursing Jobs for Nurses (CareSync)
• The responsibility of a leader (Meditech)
• Freezer Failure – How to Protect Critical Biomedical Materials (CenTrak)
• Framework for Success: Provider Workflow Optimization Hits New Heights (Crossings Healthcare Solutions)
• Have You Connected Your Patients to their Benefit & Estimate Information on your Organization’s Portal? (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• HIMSS 2018 Recap: By the Numbers (Direct Consulting Associates)
• 3 Takeaways from HIMSS18 (Dimensional Insight)
• Value-based Care Trends – What’s on the Horizon in 2018 & Beyond (Divurgent)
• Leaving Las Vegas: FormFast’s Recap of HIMSS18 (FormFast)
• 6 Questions to Ask When Preparing for a Legacy System Requirement (Hayes Management Consulting)
• What Patient Safety Means to Consumers and Hospitals (Healthgrades)
• Improving Patient Experience Through Innovation at HIMSS18 (Healthwise)
• What Works – IT Roadmap Providers Path to Operational Excellence (Huntzinger Management Group)
• Is your organization as healthy as you think? (Hyland)
• A Personal Story of Patient Safety from Impact Advisors’ President (Impact Advisors)
• Putting a Face on Effective Facebook Marketing Methods (Influence Health)
• Payment Device Questions – What Healthcare Organizations Need to Know (InstaMed)
• Health Systems Can Own the Customer Relationship (Docent Health)
• Nine Questions Urgent Cares Should Ask Before Hiring a Collection Agency (DocuTap)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 3/20/18

Constellation Healthcare Technologies Files Voluntary Chapter 11 Petitions to Facilitate an Orderly and Efficient Sale Process

Following earnings discrepancies, an executive exodus and investigation for fraud, Constellation Healthcare Technologies files Chapter 11 for several of its subsidiaries.

Joe Biden: To Save and Improve Lives Using Data, Details Matter

Former Vice President and founder of the Biden Cancer Initiative Joe Biden responds to the Trump administration’s MyHealthEData initiative with next steps that include mandating the provision of a patient’s digital health data within 24 hours of treatment.

Trump administration to seek stiffer penalties against drug dealers, reduce opioid prescribing

Trump administration officials share plans to fight the opioid epidemic, including the creation of national PDMP that would flag suspicious prescriptions.

Monday Morning Update 3/19/18

Top News

Despite technical problems that delayed business on the German stock exchange by an hour, Siemens AG raises $5.2 billion in its Healthineers IPO. Funds will be used to invest in molecular diagnostics and to acquire US-based health IT startups.

Reader Comments

From Lizzie Borden: “Re: Theranos board and advisors. It looks like at least one member of the infamous company’s scientific advisory board is getting proactive about making sure industry insiders know she’s distanced herself from the company.” The Washington University School of Medicine has indeed assured the media that professor Ann Gronowski left the Theranos board at the end of last year, even though the company’s website still lists her as a member. Sources report that two other advisers still remain on the SAB, which was formed in 2016 to lend credibility to the company’s under-fire efforts.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thanks to those who responded to “What I Wish I’d Known Before … Taking My First Hospital IT Executive Job.” I can’t say I’m surprised at how frequently hospital politics came up.

The next installment of the series is your chance to help future patients and caregivers learn from your past experiences in the hospital or ED.

Meditech was the favorite in a highly unscientific poll that mostly garnered votes from IP addresses associated with the vendors listed.

New poll to your right or here: How far along are EHRs in delivering a "comprehensive health record" that paints a full patient picture?

Webinars

April 5 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach.” Sponsor: Health Fidelity. Presenters: Adele L. Towers, MD, MPH, senior clinical advisor, UPMC Technology Development Center; Adam Gronsky, director of advisory services, Health Fidelity. Success in value-based care requires a thorough understanding of how risk-based payment models work. To prosper in this data-laden era of care, providers need to manage their patient populations holistically rather than through a collection of individual episodes and be able to accurately identify, document, and report risk scores. Given the stakes, is your provider organization adequately set up to take on and succeed in managing risk? In this webinar, learn how technology-enabled risk capture optimization is helping providers succeed in risk-based payment models.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Mazars USA opens a new office in Los Angeles.

Decisions

• Tri Valley Health Center (NE) will go live with Meditech on May 1.
• Morristown Medical Center (NJ) will go live with Epic in June.
• Northside Regional Medical Center (OH) will switch from Cerner to Meditech in June.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

CNBC reports that Amazon has hired Taha Kass-Hout (Trinity Health) to head up healthcare project business development on its Grand Challenge team. Also known as the 1492 Lab, Amazon’s team stealthily launched last year to focus on projects related to medical records management and access, though not much has been heard from them since. Much is being made of the fact that Kass-Hout was the FDA’s first chief health informatics officer.

Announcements and Implementations

In Bermuda, the Hospitals Board integrates eForms from Access with its Cerner EHR at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital and the Mid-Atlantic Wellness Institute.

Medication management vendor DrFirst deploys FDB’s new Opioid Risk Management Module as part of its support of Nebraska’s PDMP. In January, Nebraska became the first state to require tracking of all prescription drugs.

Other

This sounds a bit Big Brotherish to me: Herman Miller introduces a smart office chair that, when paired with its smart desk and app, gives employers insight into how long workers spend at their desks, times of highest productivity, and whether they’ve gone to the restroom or left for the day.

Sponsor Updates

• Parallon announces a reseller agreement with Cerner.
• CommonWell Health TV interviews Redox Chief Customer Officer Devin Soleberg.
• ROI Healthcare Solutions launches the ROI Resource Group.
• Santa Rosa Consulting adds an analytics migration program to its business intelligence and analytics services.
• Philips Wellcentive will exhibit at the Population Health Colloquium March 19-21 in Philadelphia.
• Wolters Kluwer publishes its annual report.
• QuadraMed will celebrate Health Information Professionals Week, March 18-24, by providing HIP swag to any healthcare organization registering for a Lunch-N-Learn by March 30.
• Maryland Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford visits DrFirst’s headquarters to learn how the Rockville, MD-based company is fighting the opioid epidemic with Maryland-based partners MedChi, CRISP, and UMSOD.

Blog Posts

• How Healthcare’s Digital Transformation Can Drive Better Patient Engagement (Salesforce)
• Ambulatory Surgery Center Industry Updates and New Analytics Tool (The SSI Group)
• What Keeps a Hospital CIO Up at Night? (Summit Healthcare)
• Next-generation sequencing at scale: Guided variant assessment (Sunquest Information Systems)
• Surescripts Commends Congressional Leadership as EPCS Act Gains Traction in Senate, Following House Bill (Surescripts)
• Healthcare Marketing with HIPAA (SymphonyRM)
• Presumptive Eligibility for Charity Care: The Risk of Presuming Your Hospital is Compliant (TransUnion)
• A Training Revolution: Visage 7 Powers UF Health’s SIMulation (Visage Imaging)
• Close clinical communication gaps and avoid risks. (Voalte)
• Strengthening Patient Safety and Engagement Through System Standards (Vocera)
• A 10-Point Plan for Smart and Secure Electronic Communications with Patients (WebPT)
• Less clicks and more data at the point of care? It’s true. (Philips Wellcentive)
• 4 Pitfalls of Searching the Internet for Health Answers (WiserTogether)

Contacts

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

News 3/16/18

Top News

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will pay the SEC $500,000 to settle charges that she and the company fraudulently raised over $700 million. Holmes will also give up majority voting control over the company, and some of her equity in it. She will also be banned from directing a public company for the next 10 years. Former Theranos President Sunny Balwani, who resigned from the company in 2016, also faces charges, which the SEC plans to litigate at a later date. None of the company’s star-studded board have been implicated.

Aside from the numerous alleged lies told to investors during presentations, media interviews, and product demos, Holmes and Balwani erroneously claimed that the company’s products were used by the DoD on the battlefield in Afghanistan and on medevac helicopters, and that the company would generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2014 – far above the $100,000 it actually pulled in. A separate criminal investigation is still underway.

My two cents: Investors should have done their due diligence instead of getting giddy from founder buzz. The Theranos hype machine, which the media dutifully fed on, made the company sound Silicon Valley hip instead of like a tiny-volume, would-be competitor to the fully-scaled big, national labs.

Webinars

April 5 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach.” Sponsor: Health Fidelity. Presenters: Adele L. Towers, MD, MPH, senior clinical advisor, UPMC Technology Development Center; Adam Gronsky, director of advisory services, Health Fidelity. Success in value-based care requires a thorough understanding of how risk-based payment models work. To prosper in this data-laden era of care, providers need to manage their patient populations holistically rather than through a collection of individual episodes and be able to accurately identify, document, and report risk scores. Given the stakes, is your provider organization adequately set up to take on and succeed in managing risk? In this webinar, learn how technology-enabled risk capture optimization is helping providers succeed in risk-based payment models.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Mediware Information Systems will build a new 66,000 square-foot global headquarters in Overland Park, KS that it expects to open in mid-2019. The company acquired Medicare billing company MedTranDirect in January.

NantHealth reports a 2017 net loss of $175 million, with revenue up 8 percent year over year to $87 million. Q4’s $22 million revenue fell a bit short of analyst expectations. No mention was made of its August layoffs or sale of its provider and patient engagement assets to Allscripts, aside from labeling them as discontinued operations.

People

Sir Andrew Witty (GlaxoSmithKline) will join Optum as CEO, replacing Larry Renfro, who will become a managing partner of Optum Ventures and its new $100 million fund for technology, data analytics, and healthcare companies. Witty was knighted in 2012 for his services to the British economy.

Divurgent brings on Jeff Sassenscheid to handle the expansion of its ERP, HRIS, and HCM service lines.

I missed this in the pre-HIMSS media frenzy: El Camino Hospital (CA) promotes Deborah Muro to CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Northwell Health (NY) will implement GMed’s enterprise endoscopy solution at 20 hospitals and ASCs. GMed was acquired by Modernizing Medicine in 2015.

Millennium Physician Group (FL) selects population health management technology from Lightbeam Health Solutions.

In Illinois, Community Partnership of the Ozarks prepares to launch a Mediware-based software project that will help to eventually connect 16 healthcare and social services organizations across the region.

WebPT and Modernizing Medicine develop an interface between their respective EHRs to enable better data sharing between physical therapists and orthopedists.

Salesforce adds care gaps and assessments functionality to its Health Cloud CRM.

Medicomp Systems adds care management capabilities for opioid addiction treatment to its line of Quippe clinical solutions.

Other

A VA study of 100 heart failure patients finds continuously streaming data from stick-on chest sensors to an analytics-based smartphone app is just as effective at preventing readmissions as a more expensive implantable device.

Patients at Danbury Hospital (CT) express frustration with scheduling and procedure delays resulting from a system-wide Cerner implementation earlier this month at Western Connecticut Health Network. Announced in 2015, the roll out included Cerner’s Millenium EHR, HealtheIntent population health management software, and a Soarian upgrade.

@Farzad_MD tweets out the results of an “aromatherapy” study that found alcohol prep pads were more effective at quelling nausea in ED patients than customary anti-nausea medication.

Weird News Andy wonders about the ICD-10 code for “airhead” after surgeons discover a giant air pocket where part of an 84 year-old patient’s brain should have been. The man sought care after suffering a mild stroke, but had otherwise lived a normal life.

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe creates an Apple Watch app to give end users easier access to its messaging technology.
• Learn on Demand Systems hires Laura Faughtenberry (Dude Solutions) as director of marketing.
• The Athena Breast Health Network (CA) selects LifeImage-powered Mammosphere to provide network management of medical images and associated clinical information to conduct the WISDOM breast cancer screening study.
• Meditech publishes a new e-book, “The Essential Guide to EHR Value & Sustainability.”
• LiveProcess will exhibit at the ANA Quality and Innovation Conference March 21-23 in Orlando.
• Loyale Healthcare rolls out its Patient Financial Manager solution to select Parallon clients including 170 HCA hospitals and EPs.
• The LiveHelpNow Challenge includes Vyne in its list of top companies providing exception customer service.
• Meditech will exhibit at the 2018 Home Care Optimization Symposium March 20-22 in Atlanta.
• National Decision Support Co. will exhibit at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Annual Conference March 22-24 in Orlando.
• Netsmart will exhibit at the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems March 19 in Washington, DC.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, achieves HITRUST CSF Certification.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new case study highlighting Rainbow Pediatric Center’s use of telemedicine to improve ADHD patient compliance.
• Black Book Research ranks Optimum Healthcare IT number one for enterprise EHR implementation and IT advisory and customer satisfaction.

Blog Posts

• #HIMSS18 at All Levels: International, National and Local (Liaison Technologies)
• LifeImage LITE: Building Your Own Health Provider Network While Easing Your Access to Data (LifeImage)
• Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning (Lightbeam Health Solutions)
• Healthcare Team Communication Tools to Reduce Nurse Burnout (LiveProcess)
• Achieving the Healthcare Triple Play: Improving clinician engagement, patient care and utilization – Part 2 (LogicStream Health)
• 3 Benefits of Participation in BPCI-Advanced (Medecision)
• Why FHIR, APIs, and Apps are the Future of Interoperability (Meditech)
• Quippe’s Clinical Data Relevancy Engine: the diagnostician’s easy button (Medicomp Systems)
• Searching for That Treasured Pot of Gold (Navicure/Waystar)
• What Does Behavioral Health Have to Do with Home Health? (Netsmart)
• So you’re a vendor now: How to set expectations with your EHR affiliates (Nordic)
• Data-driven technology will transform the health industry (Experian Health)
• Four Questions Series: Joshua Jacobs, VP at Windsor Health Communities (PatientPing)
• Using a “Cookie” Mentality to Increase Patient Satisfaction and Collect More Payments (Patientco)
• Sugar. Butter. Flour. (PatientKeeper)
• How Smart Contracts Will Make Care Accessible to Telehealth Patients (PokitDok)
• Part 2: The “C” in ITSM (CTG)
• The National Sepsis Crisis – And How Health IT Can Help (Spok)
• The responsibility of a leader (Meditech)
• Prepare and Prevent Common Due Diligence Issues in Health IT Transactions: Operations Considerations (Part 4 of 6) (HGP)

Contacts

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

News 3/14/18

Top News

A blog post from UCSF’s Center for Digital Health Innovation takes exception to Epic’s claim that it offers a “comprehensive health record.” The authors say EHR vendors are missing the point that no EHR can be comprehensive since important information is also generated by patients, families, and caregivers; includes genomic information, and is sourced from non-clinical settings. It concludes,

Interoperability is not and must not be defined by being able to pick up and move a giant digital stack of records from one hospital system to another, with the hope that the patient’s various providers will all be able to accumulate everything, like a cartoon snowball rolling downhill … interoperability is a national priority precisely because no single vendor EHR system is comprehensive… Given this, we say “connected health record,” not comprehensive health record, and we are not alone … a chorus of physicians and patients is crying out that EHR systems are already cumbersome and inefficient. Imagine how much worse this might become if EHR systems grow and grow to accommodate new use cases … technological advances have led other industries to adopt an API-based model, in which modules, devices, and software from different vendors can easily connect. That way, each vendor can focus on what it does best, and the user can benefit from an ecosystem of technology and software that work seamlessly together.

Reader Comments

From Jorge DiSelva: “Re: Cerner’s revenue mix. Did you notice how far it has swung from license fees to services? Pretty amazing.” It is indeed amazing. Annual revenue has nearly doubled in the past five years and 43 percent of software revenue is now coming from subscriptions. Services revenue is also huge at 72 percent of the $5 billion total, with 62 percent of Cerner’s annual revenue being recurring. Companies have chased the subscription-based revenue model with varying degrees of success to try to smooth out revenue swings due to the timing of contract signings, but Cerner has delivered. Customers could theoretically displace its products more easily under the subscription model, but few will do so given the lack of alternatives and the effort they expended to implement them in the first place. Investors aren’t loving everything about Cerner, though – the health IT market is changing pretty quickly, the company’s margins have slipped a bit, the VA deal hasn’t yet played out as expected, and the new CEO is an unknown factor. CERN shares are up 16 percent in the past year, which sounds great except that just investing that the Nasdaq composite would have yielded nearly double that.

From Math Challenged: “Re: HIMSS conference combo deal. They tweeted that a combo pass for HIMSS19 and Health 2.0 is a ‘2 for 1 Deal … for the price of 1 ticket.’ Not so – the website says the combo for HIMSS members is $1,799.” I don’t understand that claim either. The HIMSS early bird registration rate for members was $795 this year, so that means you’re paying $1,034 for Health 2.0 instead of its early bird price of $1,199, which isn’t much of a deal.

From Old Timer: “Re: open position at BIDMC. Is John Halamka leaving?” The job posting is for CIO of just the physician group from what I can tell.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Datica Chief Data Officer Mark Olschesky tweeted out a challenge at the HIMSS conference in which he offered to donate $1 to my DonorsChoose project for each attendee at his session on HIPAA and GDPR compliance for developers. His donation (and your attendance, if you were among the 300 there) along with matching funds fully covered these teacher grant requests:

• 12 sets of headphones, a microphone, and a barcode scanner for Mrs. R’s elementary school class in Tucson, AZ
• A document camera for Mrs. S’s second grade class in Charlotte, NC
• Two tablets for programming robots for Ms. C’s middle school class in Fresno, CA
• Two tablets and cases for robotics programming for Mrs. A’s elementary school class in Theodore, AL
• Speakers for Mrs. D’s elementary school class in Holyoke, MA
• Eight LCD writing boards for Ms. C’s elementary school class in Memphis, TN

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Hyland Software. The company combines information management and enterprise medical imaging with business process and case management capabilities to deliver a suite of unparalleled content and image management solutions to address the clinical, financial, and operational needs of healthcare organizations around the world. More than 2,000 healthcare organizations use Hyland Healthcare’s world-class solutions every day to become more agile, efficient, and effective. The product suite – Acuo by Hyland, Brainware by Hyland, NilRead, OnBase by Hyland, PACSgear, Perceptive Content, and ShareBase by Hyland – helps complete patient records, eliminate reimbursement delays, and enhance business processes. Hyland Healthcare is a part of Hyland, a leader in providing software solutions for managing content, processes, and cases for organizations across the globe. Thanks to Hyland Healthcare for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

April 5 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Succeeding in Value-Based Care Via a Technology-Driven Approach.” Sponsor: Health Fidelity. Presenters: Adele L. Towers, MD, MPH, senior clinical advisor, UPMC Technology Development Center; Adam Gronsky, director of advisory services, Health Fidelity. Success in value-based care requires a thorough understanding of how risk-based payment models work. To prosper in this data-laden era of care, providers need to manage their patient populations holistically rather than through a collection of individual episodes and be able to accurately identify, document, and report risk scores. Given the stakes, is your provider organization adequately set up to take on and succeed in managing risk? In this webinar, learn how technology-enabled risk capture optimization is helping providers succeed in risk-based payment models.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cognizant will acquire Louisville, KY-based RCM services vendor Bolder Healthcare Solutions, adding to its previous health IT-related acquisitions TMG Health and TriZetto.  

Greenway Health will close its Lake Mary, FL office in late April and lay off 27 employees who work there. The company had previously announced the closure of that office as well as those in Atlanta and Birmingham as it consolidates operations in Tampa, FL.

The White House kills Broadcom’s hostile takeover of Qualcomm, meaning that Capsule Tech will remain a Qualcomm subsidiary. Thanks to reader Dr. Trump, who reminded me of the healthcare IT connection. Qualcomm acquired medical device integration vendor Capsule Technologie in September 2015.

Sales

Virginia Hospital Center (VA) will implement the Spok Care Connect unified communication platform.

People

Former HIMSS President and CEO Steve Lieber joins association software vendor Next Wave Connect as executive advisor.

Advocate Health Care SVP/CIO Bobbie Byrne, MD is named CIO for Advocate Aurora Health once the Advocate-Aurora merger is completed in the next few weeks. Aurora CIO Preston Simons will “retire.” The CEOs of each health system will serve as co-CEOs of the merged organization, which never works even though it gets the deal signed in bypassing egos. I question the focus of a company that doesn’t have enough decisiveness to put one person in charge, although the co-CEO arrangement is usually abandoned fairly quickly anyway.

Intelligent Medical Objects promotes Matt Cardwell, PhD to chief product officer and Jose Maldonado to chief solutions officer.

Collective Medical promotes Andrew Reeve to SVP of sales.

Influence Health promotes Mike Oakman to COO.

Announcements and Implementations

GetWellNetwork adds Healthwise’s patient education video library to its patient experience platform.

Medable announces Insight, a blockchain-powered medical data exchange platform for research studies. The company offers tools for building secure data-related applications, analytics, alerts, and data visualization. It claims that researchers can develop a clinical study app in one day.

CompuGroup Medical launches a project to create new ambulatory products for several countries, with the US at its center. The core product can be customized to individual markets but will share a code base, tools, and processes.

DirectTrust’s board calls for nominations for new board directors and for the CEO position being vacated by David Kibbe, MD, MBA at the end of the year.

Datica launches a Kubernetes-enabled version of its security and compliance technology that will allow AWS and Microsoft Azure users to deploy Datica’s platform on their own cloud accounts.

Government and Politics

Media reports suggest that President Trump is considering replacing VA Secretary David Shulkin with Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who is a former Texas governor and Air Force captain and pilot. 

Other

ECRI focuses on diagnostic errors in its top 10 patient safety issues for 2018, with “incorporating health IT into patient safety programs” being the only pure IT item on the list.

FYI: the latest update to the Chrome browser adds the desperately-needed option to permanently mute a site, preventing the heart-stopping racket that some sites create with auto-play video (CNN and local TV station sites are the worst offenders). Right-click a tab and the “mute site” option appears.

A JAMA article says out-of-control US healthcare spending is driven by high prices and administrative overhead rather than overutilization. It notes in comparing the US to 10 high-income countries that the US:

• Spends twice as much on medical care, representing 17.8 percent of GDP vs. the next-highest 12.4 percent
• Covers 90 percent of residents with health insurance vs. the next-lowest country at 99 percent
• Has the highest obesity rate, the lowest life expectancy, and the highest rate of infant mortality
• Has about the same number of doctors, nurses, and hospital beds per 1,000 people , but pays clinicians a lot more
• Spends 8 percent on healthcare administrative costs vs. the next-highest 3 percent
• Spends $1,443 per person on prescription drugs vs. the next-highest $939, with drugs here costing up to 10 times what people in other countries pay

Epic’s Judy Faulkner tells Politico that the company won’t challenge the VA’s single-source Cerner contract choice (“we feel it’s the customer’s right to pick whatever they want”), but she estimates that Epic would have charged at least $3 billion less than Cerner and would offer more interoperability with providers who see veterans that seek care outside the VA system.

Sponsor Updates

• Formativ Health announces a patient engagement solution for Salesforce Health Cloud.
• Meditech will exhibit at the Texas Organization of Rural & Community Hospitals (TORCH) 2018 Conference in Dallas April 10-12.
• CareSync publishes a new report on chronic care management for rural health clinics and FQHC practices.
• Carevive will present and exhibit at the ACCC Annual Meeting and Cancer Center Business Summit March 14-16 in Washington, DC.
• Software Advice includes ChartLogic in its list of frontrunners in the EHR software market.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at Endo Expo 2018 March 17-20 in Chicago.
• Ellkay joins the CommonWell Health Alliance.
• Healthfinch receives an Innovation Award from Athenahealth for its Charlie Practice Automation Platform.
• Healthwise announces new health educational content partnerships with TeleHealth Services, and Mytonomy.
• InterSystems and Rhode Island Quality Institute deliver designee alerts for patient empowerment.
• IMO and Aorn Syntegrity partner to create a consolidated surgical scheduling procedure list.
• Kyruus integrates IBM Watson Virtual Agent with its ProviderMatch technology to enable AI-assisted patient-provider matching and scheduling
• Clinical Architecture CEO Charlie Harp discusses interoperability on CommonWell TV.

Blog Posts

• Revisiting Deconstructed PACS (Visage Imaging)
• Top 3 Trends to Improve Patient Experience With Healthcare (ChartLogic)
• Grocery store walkthroughs: One step toward improving health literacy (Meditech)
• 4 Questions with James Feen, VSP and CIO at Southcoast Health (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• What Steps are Involved in the EMR Migration Process? (Access)
• The Role of Practice Automation in Healthcare Communication (AdvancedMD)
• #HIMSS18: French delegation and Augmented Intelligence (Agfa Healthcare)
• Removing Friction from the Prescribing Process (Aprima)
• 2018 Healthcare Trends Part 4: Clinicians as Developers (Datica)
• When Strategy Meets Reality: Value-based Discharge Planning (CarePort Health)
• Deadline for Reporting MIPS Data and 10 More Facts for 2018 (CareSync)
• Top 3 Trends to Improve Patient Experience with Healthcare (ChartLogic)
• Federal movement around EPA (CoverMyMeds)
• Demonstrating the Value of the Health Information Exchange Through Qualitative Research (Diameter Health)
• Nine Steps to Getting Rid of the Urgent Care Waiting Room (DocuTap)
• HIMSS 2018 – A Nurse’s Retrospective Part 1 (Engage)
• Client Success: Better Care Management at Maine FQHC (HBI Solutions)
• Managed IT Services for Healthcare: 4 Considerations for Choosing the Ideal Partner (The HCI Group)
• For Physicians, a Little Investment in Patient Reviews Goes a Long Way (Healthgrades)
• What Works – Huntzinger Defines IT Merger, Acquisition & Affiliation Playbook (Huntzinger Management Group)
• Time Matters with Sepsis – Here’s One Minute That Really Counts (Iatric Systems)
• 5 Things to Consider Before Hosting Smaller Facilities on Your Shiny New EHR (Impact Advisors)
• Why patient identification matters more than ever in 2018 (Imprivata)
• Getting Executive Buy-In for Reputation Management (Influence Health)
• Four Tips to be a Better Steward of Opioid Prescriptions (Ingenious Med)
• Be a Better Communicator: How to Set Patient Expectations and Get Paid (InstaMed)
• Leveraging Community Data for Continuous Innovation (InterSystems)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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