News 4/17/24

Top News

Shares of UnitedHealth rise on the news that the company beat Q1 revenue expectations in spite of costs incurred by the Change Healthcare cyberattack. The company expects to lose up to $1.6 billion this year because of the hack.

It has advanced $6 billion in payments and interest-free loans to providers impacted by the February 21 event.

Its Optum solution dashboard shows 109 of 137 applications remain down.

Federal lawmakers, meanwhile, met with cybersecurity professionals, representatives from the American Hospital Association, and providers to hear how they have been impacted by the attack, and to gauge how the federal government should respond. UnitedHealth was not represented at the meeting, though CEO Andrew Witty is expected to make an appearance before the Senate Finance Committee at the end of the month.

Reader Comments

From peanutgallery: “Re: Epic/Particle Health/Carequality. This didn’t age well …” PG is referring to a guest post penned in February 2023 by Particle Health co-founder and then CEO Troy Bannister, who proclaimed, “I’m here to spread the news that information blocking is coming to an end.” Given the current data-sharing contention between Epic and Particle Health, his statement may have been wishful thinking. Bannister left the company in January, according to his LinkedIn profile, though the company’s website still lists him as its chief strategy officer. Current CEO Jason Prestinario joined the company in May 2023. Concerned Denizen’s comment at the time now seems prescient: “[I]nteresting to read about Particle’s reputation in adhering to regulations in the networks in which they currently operate, like Carequality and Commonwell. It seems that Particle’s strategy under Troy was to gain as much ground to sell the data across the market, while ‘claiming access for the benefit of consumers,’ with no regard to regulations; the same regulations he is now touting. Will be interesting to see how the new CEO, hired by their Board, is going to change their path to destruction. Judging by his background (selling data to Pharma at Komodo Health), not holding my breath.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kontakt.io raises $47.5 million in a Series C funding round led by Goldman Sachs. Launched in 2013, the multi-vertical company offers patient flow analytics and optimization software and hardware that leverages AI and RTLS technologies.

India-based private equity firm ChrysCapital considers selling HIM and RCM vendor Gebbs Healthcare Solutions, which it acquired in 2018 for $140 million. The potential deal could value the company at up to $1 billion.

In light of what it deems “inaccurate and incomplete announcements and reporting regarding its connection to Epic,” Particle Health issues a statement affirming that the vast majority of its customers have continued to actively receive data from Epic without interruption, and that it remains in good standing with Carequality.

Sales

• Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in England will implement EHR software from Insight Direct, which will subcontract services to Altera Digital Health.
• MemorialCare (CA) selects Abridge’s generative AI software for clinical documentation.

People

Darcy Corcoran joins CereCore as principal of its new cybersecurity advisory services.

Announcements and Implementations

Community Health Network implements Notable Health’s AI capabilities for automating chart review, care gap scheduling, and pre-visit planning across its 200 care sites in Indiana.

Lakes Region Mental Health Center (NH) will replace its Essentia EHR from Netsmart with the vendor’s MyAvatar behavioral health EHR June 1.

Government and Politics

Online mental healthcare provider Cerebral will pay $7 million to settle federal allegations that it shared the personal data of users with third-party sites for advertising purposes without their consent, and that it failed to honor company cancellation policies, among other sloppy practices. In January, the company agreed to pay $540,000 to patients in New York in a settlement with the state’s attorney general, who said the company intentionally made it hard for patients to cancel their subscriptions and instructed its employees to submit fake positive reviews.

Privacy and Security

RansomHub leaks several files stolen during the Change Healthcare ransomware attack on its dark web leak site in an effort to convince UnitedHealth to pay a second ransom.

Other

“The Pitch: Patient Safety’s Next Generation” premieres this week at the Cleveland International Film Festival. The documentary focuses on technology’s role in patient safety efforts, and features the impact UPMC Presbyterian’s Enhanced Detection System for Healthcare-Associated Transmission program has had on the hospital’s ability to identify and prevent hospital-acquired infections.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore becomes a partner in the Meditech Alliance Consulting Services Program.
• Clearwater names Angie Santiago manager, consulting services – resiliency solutions.
• AGS Health, Artera, Availity, FinThrive, and Vyne Medical will exhibit at the NAHAM Annual Conference April 23-26 in Dallas.

Blog Posts

• CIOs on Facing 2024 Challenges: Hire Contractors and Invest in Automation (Part 2) (CereCore)
• Improving patient experience through telehealth and digital education (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• AUR 2024 – Insights from Kyle Souligne (Agfa HealthCare)
• Maximizing CDI for Physician Queries for Accurate Reimbursement (AGS Health)
• A “peak” at Paragon Denali from the floor at HIMSS24 (Altera Digital Health)
• Data analytics platforms: The key to quality-of-care improvements (Arcadia)
• Leverage Consensus Unite with PointClickCare (Consensus Cloud Solutions)
• Solving Hospital CEOs’ Pressing Challenges with Analytics (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/15/24

Top News

Memorial Hermann – Texas Medical Center abruptly shuts down its abdominal transplant program after suspicious irregularities pertaining to patient eligibility criteria come to light. The hospital believes Steve Bynon, Jr., MD, head of the program since 2011, has been manipulating a federal transplant database to deny certain patients access to the potentially life-saving procedures.

His motive remains unclear, though plenty of speculation around bribes for higher-priority spots on the list have been suggested on Reddit.

Red flags have included donor criteria that mandate impossible ages and weights, such as a “300-pound toddler.”

A Redditor points out that, “A database for such a high criticality function should have several data validation measures. Preventing data like a 300lb toddler requirement should have been done at the design level. As appalling as the doctor’s behavior here is, it’s almost just as appalling how easy it was to inject bad data in the system. I can imagine scenarios where a well-meaning provider misses a decimal point for a 30.0lb toddler and now we’re in the same boat. Why were there no data validation and data review processes?”

HHS is investigating.

Reader Comments

From Lanman: “A provider is actually going to bet on Oracle Health (Cerner).” Lanman caught my mention last week of AtlantiCare’s decision to implement Oracle Health as a part of its Vision 2030 program. I didn’t find their current vendor with a quick search, but I think they may have already been using Cerner and maybe some old McKesson stuff.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Insurance companies lead the pack when it comes to frustrations with healthcare-related organizations. Feed up in Boston would have selected insurance company, specialist, and ambulance company given that all three enabled hackers to steal his personal data.

New poll to your right or here: Do you think high-profile CEOs or founders make their companies more attractive acquisition targets? What role, if any, have you seen the cult of personality play in healthcare M&A?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Epic informs customers that it has cut off its connection to Particle Health because it believes the company is using patient data in “unauthorized and unethical ways that have nothing to do with treatment.” Epic filed a formal complaint several weeks ago with Carequality, of which Particle Health is a member, over the same concerns. Particle Health insists the company has always acted in good faith, and is working with Epic to address its concerns.

People

Benjamin Gold (Optum) joins Nym as SVP of product management.

Announcements and Implementations

Newly opened Sarina Hospital in Australia goes live with Oracle Health as part of the state of Queensland’s facility-wide implementation.

Government and Politics

VA Secretary Denis McDonough says that the department will resume rolling out its Oracle Health-based EHR before the end of fiscal year 2025, despite the fact that the 2025 budget doesn’t include any funding for additional deployments. The department rolled out the technology to a handful of sites over a three-year period, pausing further deployments in 2023 while it worked with Oracle Health to address numerous patient safety, technical, end-user, and budget concerns.

A litany of patient safety concerns at Hampton VA Medical Center (VA) and allegations of leadership cover-ups prompt lawmakers to ask VA Secretary McDonough to look into the hospital’s lengthy, documented history of substandard care within its surgical department. Among its transgressions, many of which have been investigated by the Office of Inspector General, is the March 2021 failure of a primary care physician to correctly enter bone scan orders into a patient’s EHR, ultimately delaying results that indicated possible metastatic bone disease.

Other

An analysis in JAMA of 100 acute hospital websites finds that 96% share user data with third-parties. Seventy-one of those sites offer public privacy policies disclosing that practice. Of those, 40 disclose the specific third parties that receive that information.

UC Davis pilots a digital health program for colon cancer screening that uses text messages to remind patients of screening timelines, gauges their interest in and eligibility for Cologuard at-home screening kits, and gives them an opportunity to schedule screening appointments.

Tesla owner MaxPaul Franklin credits his car’s self-driving feature with safely getting him to a hospital 13 miles away while suffering from a mild heart attack. Other Tesla owners stress that the car’s new Full Self-Driving capability requires a certain amount of driver supervision, and thus should not be used in lieu of an ambulance. I have to wonder at what point during his day did Franklin don his Tesla T-shirt.

Sponsor Updates

• VieCure expands its implementation of DrFirst’s medication management platform to include DrFirst’s Rcopia e-prescribing capabilities.
• Netsmart will exhibit at NatCon24 April 15-17 in St. Louis.
• Vyne Medical will exhibit at the NAHAM Annual Conference April 23-26 in Dallas.
• Nym names Sheaira Williams medical coding and compliance auditor, Esti Kahanowich medical data analyst, Barak Golan dev ops engineer, Yael Golan medical data analyst, Ido Reiss NLP research engineer, and Elias Honegger EHR integration analyst.
• PerfectServe partners with TeamBuilder to offer its predictive staff scheduling platform in conjunction with its Lightning Bolt provider scheduling software.
• Sectra publishes a new white paper, “AI making its way into cardiologists’ hearts.”
• Upfront Healthcare will present at the Urgent Care Association Annual Convention April 16 in Las Vegas.
• Verato adds Smart Steward, a generative AI-based assistant for healthcare data stewardship teams, to its HMDM platform for healthcare identity data management.
• Trualta adds Caregivers Essential Certification to its caregiver education and support platform.

Blog Posts

• Medi-Cal Enhancements for at-Risk Populations: What Does It Mean for Providers? (Netsmart)
• Crafting an AI strategy in healthcare: A deep dive with Dr. Patrick McGill (Notable Health)
• 5 top tips for optimizing your workflow with Dragon Medical One (Nuance)
• The relationship Rx: Unlocking healthcare’s hidden superpower through human-centered design (Nordic)
• 4 Tips for Modernizing Healthcare HR Operations (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Shift Efforts from a Focus on Burnout to a Holistic Wellbeing Approach: Important resources from the CDC to address employee wellbeing (QGenda)
• After Leading Epic Go-Lives for Over 15 Years, Here’s What We’ve Learned. (ReMedi Health Solutions)
• Trust is Always the Foundation (Rhapsody)
• Overcoming Access: How Innovative Tech Can Streamline Enrollment and Reduce Adherence Barriers (RxLightning)
• Optimize your contact center with guidance from real-life success stories (Spok)
• Sig IQ Saves Prescribers from an Eternity of Mouse Clicks (Surescripts)
• HIMSS 2024: What You Missed & Why It Matters (Symplr)
• Reflections on HIMSS24 (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 4/12/24

Top News

Transcarent CEO Glen Tullman launches 62 Ventures, a $100 million venture fund that will focus on healthcare startups in the US and India. Its portfolio already includes BridgeHealthAI (health and social care), Khyaal (senior care), and Loop Health (care management and benefits).

Tullman is also the founder and managing partner of digital health fund 7wireVentures, which has invested in Transcarent and Tullman’s former employer, Livongo.

Tullman oversaw the $18.5 billion sale of Livongo in 2020 to now-struggling Teladoc Health during his tenure as executive chairman.

Reader Comments

From My2Cents: “Re: Epic interoperability. CEOs of technology companies that facilitate data exchange via Carequality claim that Epic has cut off their records requests. I think the issue is that they supposedly were sending data to companies whose Purpose of Use does not involve Treatment, Payment, or Operations (TPO). I wonder if those companies will incur HIPAA fines for knowingly providing inappropriate access to patient records?” Unverified, but being debated on LinkedIn, including by Particle Health founder Troy Bannister. He says that Epic stopped responding to certain medical requests in claiming that the recipients do not directly support treatment, which Bannister denies. Using patient data outside of HIPAA’s TPO definition requires individual patient consent. Also at issue is whether or not providers themselves asked Epic to stop sharing data with companies that they believe were misusing it, in which case Epic has to comply.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Tower Health (PA) will outsource its revenue cycle operations to Ensemble Health Partners this summer, transitioning 675 employees to the RCM company.

Sales

• AtlantiCare (NJ) will implement Oracle Health.

People

Jay Sultan (United Generations Capital) joins Tegria as its first chief data and analytics officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Inovalon announces GA of SDOH Market Insights for life sciences companies.

Government and Politics

ONC and SAMHSA will invest $20 million over the next three years to improve health IT in behavioral health and practice settings through the new Behavioral Health Information Technology Initiative.

Other

Cedars-Sinai (CA) expands the capabilities of its Connect virtual care app to include pediatric and Spanish-speaking patients. The app, which launched last year, uses technology from K Health.

UW Medicine (WA) launches a Cognition in Primary Care program to helps its primary care physicians better manage the care of patients with cognitive issues like dementia. Cognitive care protocols and shortcuts embedded in the health system’s Epic EHR have been especially helpful, according to early adopter Nina Maisterra, MD: “Until it became muscle memory, it was great to refer to dot phrases they built. In primary care, we don’t usually get content that’s this user-friendly.”

New survey findings from the American Medical Association reveal that 51% of physician practices have lost revenue due to an inability to process patient co-pays after the cyberattack on Change Healthcare, while 80% have lost revenue from unpaid claims. Though 55% have had to use personal funds for practice expenses and 31% have been unable to make payroll, only 15% have reduced operating hours.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore releases a new podcast, “When Healthcare’s Toughest Problems Need an Outsider’s Perspective.”
• Sonifi Health expands its support for virtual hospital care with telehealth partnerships and system optimizations.
• Healthcare Choices NY uses the EClinicalWorks EHR and Healow no-show prediction AI model to reduce its no-show rate, increase revenue, and improve patient care.
• Morris Hospital and Healthcare Centers (IL) recounts its successful Meditech Expanse implementation and resultant benefits.
• First Databank names Kristin Buechler clinical informatics pharmacist, Erin Gosney operations manager, and David Morris senior software engineer.
• FinThrive releases a new Healthcare Rethink Podcast, “How Do You Tailor Healthcare Affordability?”
• Healthcare IT Leaders releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Cybersecurity and Change Healthcare: Assessing the Impact of a Major Cyberattack.”
• New research from Inovalon and Harvard analyzes Medicare Advantage plan design’s impact on healthcare utilization and health equity.
• Black Book Research survey-takers rank Veradigm’s Practice Fusion EHR first in customer satisfaction with ambulatory EHR and practice management software.

Blog Posts

• Findhelp & the Dept. of Education Partner to Support Missouri Families and Children (Findhelp)
• Five9’s 10-year IPO Anniversary: A Journey of Growth and Innovation (Five9)
• Healthcare Cybersecurity Threats: March 2024 (Fortified Health Security)
• HIMSS 2024 Recap: AI, Personalized Care, and Facing Industry Challenges Head-on (Inovalon)
• Innovation is Brewing: How AI is Transforming Healthcare (InterSystems)
• How AI Can Help Prevent Hospitalizations by Detecting Diseases Early (Lucem Health)
• HTI-1 and the Future of Healthcare (Medhost)
• 4 Critical Steps to Achieving Data Interoperability for Health Plans (MRO)

Contacts

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

News 4/10/24

Top News

A second ransomware group – likely a disgruntled affiliate of the Blackcat/ALPHV group – threatens UnitedHealth Group with the sale of data that was stolen during the February ransomware attack on Change Healthcare if the company doesn’t pay up.

RansomHub claims to have access to 4 terabytes of data, though it hasn’t provided proof.

Cybersecurity analysts believe that RansomHub worked with Blackcat during the initial attack, but was cut out of the $22 million ransom that was reportedly paid by UnitedHealth.

UnitedHealth Group’s dashboard shows that one product has been fully restored (Reimbursement Manager), 12 have been restored with partial service, and six are being restored. The target date to have all services restored is the week of April 22.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I ran across stealth startup Photon Health, which seems to address my gripe that e-prescribing forces patients to choose a pharmacy at the time of prescribing, which means price shopping is nearly impossible and changing the pharmacy requires the prescriber’s involvement. The prescriber sends the prescription to the patient’s electronic wallet, from which they can then send it to any pharmacy after checking product availability and store hours and location. The app then gives the patient the expected availability time, or if they indicate they want to pick it up in the future, allows the pharmacy to queue filling. I tried the website option to send a sample prescription to my phone, which then allowed selecting a pharmacy, although I didn’t see an option to display pricing or use insurance information. I would also want to know how the app ensures that only one prescription copy is active if the patient controls its destination.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Vista Equity Partners will acquire life sciences revenue optimization vendor Model N in a $1.25 billion take-private deal.

Sales

• Boston Medical Center will use technology and services from Medically Home as a part of its new Hospital at Home program.
• Houston Methodist will implement Prolucent’s workforce platform and vendor management system.
• Community Health Network (IN) will implement Notable for chart review, care gap scheduling, and pre-visit planning.

People

Sean Henson (Wellvana Health) joins NantHealth as SVP and GM of NaviNet.

Announcements and Implementations

Overlake Medical Center & Clinics (WA) implements Nuance’s DAX Copilot automated clinical documentation software.

Verato adds AI features to its identity management platform, which makes recommendations for task resolution, clarifies patient matching decisions, and explains its recommendations in conversational language. The Smart Steward assistant is powered by Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

Privacy and Security

The American Hospital Association posts its second warning that hackers are calling hospital IT help desks to ask for password resets — providing personal employee information to answer security question and enrolling new cell phones to receive multi-factor authentication codes — then using the employee’s compromised email account to reroute vendor payments to their own accounts or to deliver malware. AHA recommends that the help desk call the employee’s call-back number before changing their credentials, verifying the change with the employee’s supervisor, and either verifying the requester’s identity via a video call or asking them to send a screen shot of their government-issued ID. AHA notes that one large health system is requiring employees to visit the IT help desk in person for password resets, although it didn’t say how they address remote employees.

Other

Patients who use the Pip Care surgical care app spend less time in the hospital and are far less likely to be readmitted within a week of surgery, according to a comparative study of UPMC patients who underwent certain elective procedures. Backed by UPMC Enterprises, the Pip Care app offers pre- and post-surgical instructions combined with telehealth coaching.

Black Book Research’s latest survey results rank Andor Health first in user satisfaction for AI-powered virtual care solutions.

Press Ganey will add nurse-sensitive indicators and outcomes from Epic to its National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators.

Kettering Health (OH) opens its Center for Clinical Innovation at its former headquarters, also the former home of inventor and engineer Charles Kettering. The center will focus on digital health, AI, clinical informatics, and other tech projects. Fun fact: Kettering, a General Motors executive, invented the electric starter for cars and Freon, the now nearly phased-out ingredient in modern air conditioning units.

Sponsor Updates

• AGS Health publishes a new whitepaper, “The RCM Maturity Framework: A 4-Stage Journey to Digital Transformation and Operational Excellence.”
• Availity adds Predictive Editing capabilities to its Essentials Pro RCM platform, giving providers the ability to identify potential claims denials prior to submission.
• Symplr expands its partnership with Visier, embedding its HR analytics into Symplr Performance software for improved data and decision-making to engage and retain employees.
• CloudWave and FDA renew their agreement to share threat intelligence related to medical devices.
• Wolters Kluwer Health makes its Ovid Synthesis evidence-based practice workflow application available for participants and mentors involved in two of the Association for Nursing Professional Development’s academy programs.
• AvaSure upgrades its Analytics portal, part of its AI-powered Intelligent Virtual Care platform, with Microsoft PowerBI tools to help providers conduct deeper analysis of critical metrics.
• Louisville Business First honors Bamboo Health Chief People Officer Annie Likins with its 2024 Enterprising Women Award.
• CereCore partners with Tennessee College of Applied Technology to equip its graduates with CereCore’s Clinical Support and IT Help Desk jobs.
• Net Health launches a digital musculoskeletal thought leadership program, Harnessing the Potential of Digital MSK Care, with the American Physical Therapy Association.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of The Informonster Podcast, “Data Quality in Healthcare.”
• Dimensional Insight will exhibit at the annual AMGA conference April 9-12 in Orlando.
• DrFirst will exhibit at the NAACOS Spring Conference April 10-12 in Baltimore.

Blog Posts

• The critical need for statutory reporting during EPR implementation (Altera Digital Health)
• Navigating the Path to Leadership: A Panel Event Recap (Artera)
• Transforming Prior Authorizations with AI-Powered Automation (Availity)
• Uncover Hidden Revenue and More with a Consultant’s Help (CereCore)
• Separating the Hype From the Hope in Healthcare AI Trends for 2024 (DrFirst)
• 6 Security Measurement Best Practices Every Healthcare Organization Should Know (Clearwater)
• Healthcare’s 2024 Imperative: a Pragmatic Approach to AI Innovation (Consensus Cloud Solutions)
• Guardians of the Digital Realm: Navigating Evolving Trends in the Cybersecurity Landscape (Direct Recruiters)
• Empowering Women’s Health with Digital Solutions (Divurgent)
• Leveraging AI: EClinicalWorks Reimagining Healthcare Delivery (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/8/24

Top News

The board of Teladoc Health fires CEO Jason Gorevic after 15 years in that role. CFO Mala Murthy will take over as interim until a permanent successor is recruited.

TDOC shares rose slightly on the news, valuing the company at $2.4 billion, but have lost nearly 50% of their value in the past 12 months. They are down 95% from their all-time high in February 2021, shortly after the company acquired Livongo for $18.5 billion and before Teladoc took a $13.7 billion write-down of that business in February 2023.

In related news, telehealth competitor Amwell risks having its shares delisted by NYSE due to low share price. They are at $0.72 after losing another 10% following the announcement, valuing the company at $208 million. AMWL shares have lost 67% in the past 12 months and are 98% off their all-time high from early 2021.

Reader Comments

From Bluebella: “Re: grammar. You need this shirt.” Actually not, since I am judgment-free on spoken grammar, and in fact I relish hearing (and using) regional accents, word usage, and unusual expressions. Those are real-time artifacts of our upbringing, over which we had no control. I am only annoyed by sloppiness in the written word, where people expect strangers to read their thoughts, but are too lazy or indifferent to edit or to even bother reading what Siri spat out. The first-impression distinction between looking unintelligent versus merely lazy and disrespectful to the reader doesn’t much matter. Hopefully the bar will be raised by AI tools, where even poorly expressed and error-ridden writing can be easily turned into polished prose as smoothly as Google Translate converts Spanish to English.

From Ormond: “Re: physicians. A doctor posted this email sent to PCPs by the local hospital.” I assume that the EORH identifies the source as 140-bed East Ohio Regional Hospital, which ironically is owned by a psychiatrist who bought the hospital after it was closed by a for-profit company that has since gone out of business. This memo, assuming it is authentic, could be interpreted as an order – unwisely documented in writing — to commit billing fraud by overriding medical needs and patient preference to book business for EORH’s specialists and to crank out follow-up visits. Patients must be no-showing those medically questionable follow-ups frequently if PCPs are expected to schedule 32 patients per day while seeing only 20-24.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Cash beats the touchy-feel stuff for employers who want to retain poll respondents as employees, although the ability to work remotely remains a hot button.

New poll to your right or here: What healthcare-related organization frustrated you the most in the past 12 months?

Forget ChatGPT – the most impressive AI product is Suno, which can generate amazing songs given the user’s specifications. I requested a dark, operatic metal song about a menacing stranger ringing the doorbell, which generated a really cool, Nightwish kind of Flying V head-banger that you can stream here. Musicians now get to join writers and artists in questioning their future given AI’s ability to create similar works at any user’s command, and given the huge financial stakes, musicians will be lawyering up to figure out whether Suno’s training used their work or creates music that sounds like theirs.

Thanks to these companies that recently supported HIStalk.

I asked what the #1 realistic first step should be for improving US healthcare outcomes, cost, and accessibility. Lots of folks missed the “realistic” part and went right for the healthcare Hail Mary, but I like that they were thinking big. Anyway, here’s what people said, with responses combined and the total count listed where appropriate:

• Single payer / universal coverage / Medicare for all / public option (33)
• Eliminate employer-sponsored health insurance (8)
• Full transparency / simplification of prices charged by doctors, hospitals, and clinics (4)
• Standardize claim format / implement uniform pricing / pay the same price for procedures and prescriptions (3)
• Set a higher tax on processed foods or improve food quality / offer incentives for maintaining a healthy weight (3)
• Increase payments to primary care providers  / add family medicine providers (3)
• Create national HIE that is run by CMS / increase interoperability (2)
• Get rid of insurance as the backbone of healthcare / require paying cash (2)
• Set Medicare pricing for all patients, adjusted regionally
• Expand VA eligibility
• Take the government out of the healthcare business
• Reform the tort system
• Add medical schools to increase the supply of physicians to lower salaries, which is the biggest cost
• Increase spending on primary care for children
• Remove payers from physician decision-making and workload
• Develop a plan and incentives to move from a sickness model to a wellness model
• Add more clinical hospitals in outer suburbs or rural areas
• More emphasis, access, and education on preventative care / pay physicians based on preventative care services instead of increasing payer profits as providers struggle (2)
• Increase accessibility to digital health products without a prescription
• Reduce documentation requirements
• Eliminate smoking
• Eliminate conglomerates and mergers / don’t allow for-profit entities and private equity to buy health systems
• Require private equity and publicly traded firms to divest all hospital / clinic assets
• Pilot virtual-first health plans
• Clean up and consolidate data for analytics and decision-making
• Remove CMS from HHS control and turn it into a public benefits corporation
• Mandate use of a consumer usage transparency tool with binding real-time estimates, insurance coverage details, and quality metrics for procedures
• Keep providers independent
• Make the entire healthcare industrial complex non-profit
• Create a national license for telehealth providers
• Implement and enforce mandatory staffing ratios
• Pay physicians based on panel size and management instead of RVUs
• Eliminate lobbyists and campaign contributions
• Eliminate direct-to-consumer drug advertising
• Better detection and prevention of fraud

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health exchange-traded fund lost 2.4% of its value in the past 30 days, 22% in the past year, and 42% since it was launched in mid-2020. A $10,000 investment at launch would be worth $5,680 now versus the $15,360 you would have earned by just buying the S&P 500 index.

People

Christine Swisher, PhD (Project Ronin) joins Oracle as VP of health data intelligence.

Announcements and Implementations

UnitedHealth Group hasn’t updated its Change Healthcare cyberattack update page since March 27. The Optum solution dashboard shows 23 of 137 applications restored. UHG got screwed if it actually paid the $22 million in speculated ransom that showed up on the hacker’s Bitcoin blockchain over a month ago. Meanwhile, the company sides with the plaintiffs in asking the court to centralize the cases in the US court in Nashville, which is Change’s home city, for efficiency.

A Kaiser Permanente study finds that AI triage of patient-sent messages allowed one-third of them to be diverted to other employees, saving time for the physician who otherwise would have had to read and route them.

A NEJM-published study finds that semaglutide — and presumably the other GLP-1 drugs that are best known for weight loss and Type 2 diabetes control – is effective for treating certain types of heart failure. A study published last week tentatively showed that the drugs may slow the advance of Parkinson’s disease symptoms, while previous research suggested their value in reducing inflammation. Interesting work remains to be done to determine whether the unexpected benefits are due to the intrinsic properties of the drugs or the improved general health of patients after they lose weight. I predict that barring any discovery of catastrophic side effects, GLP-1 drugs will be the most significant of all time in terms of life extension, or at least right up there with vaccines, penicillin, and insulin.

Government and Politics

The owner of two telemedicine companies pleads guilty to his involvement in defrauding Medicare of $110 million. Telemarketing companies generated lists of Medicare beneficiaries, then paid the telemedicine companies to find providers who would generate prescriptions for durable medical equipment without contacting the patient (seems like those providers should be charged as well, but DoJ didn’t say). The telemarketing companies then sold the orders to DME suppliers so they could submit false claims. The LinkedIn of Steven Richardson, aged 40, includes years running a South Florida “healthcare marketing group” whose work looks like a Medicare fraud keyword list in “assisting patients with their diabetic testing supplies, pain, and compound management.” I Google-stalked his Florida house, which looks pretty nice for spending time wearing an ankle monitor.

CMS drops the requirement that providers submit appropriate use criteria (AUC) as a condition of being paid for performing advanced diagnostic imaging. The long-delayed AUC program was implemented as part of the Protecting Access to Medicare Act in 2014.

Other

A major New York Times article looks at data analytics firm MultiPlan, which tells payers how much less than the billed price they should pay providers for out-of-network cases. MultiPlan pockets up to 35% of the savings, sometimes earning more than the billing provider, with the patient potentially on the hook to pay the difference. MultiPlan’s president and CEO as of March 1 is former Cerner executive and Oracle Health GM Travis Dalton. MPLN shares are at $0.84, down 27% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $550 million as it faces NYSE delisting. Dalton’s shares at signing were worth $13 million plus $2 million per year in salary and bonuses. MultiPlan went public via a SPAC merger in October 2020 at an implied valuation of $11 billion, with share price having dropped 91% since. Financials aside, I might have to side with the company on this one and instead blame self-insured employers and payers who create a network that has no available providers, sending desperate people to specialists who may well have sold their practices to private equity firms who love out-of-network billing.

Sponsor Updates

• Lotus Weight Loss & Wellness (KY) reports a 30% increase in new patient visits after implement EClinicalWorks EHR and Healow Open Access software.
• Experity will exhibit at the Urgent Care Association Conference April 13-17 in Las Vegas.
• Findhelp will present at the National WIC Association Annual Education and Training Conference April 7-10 in Chicago.
• FinThrive releases a new Healthcare Rethink Podcast, “Population Health is Becoming Precision Community Health.”
• Health Data Movers publishes a new “Cancer Data Abstraction.”
• Inovalon releases a new INovators Podcast, “AI in Healthcare: The Value of Innovative Technology, Paired with Clinical Expertise.”
• Mobile Heartbeat will exhibit at AONL 2024 April 8-10 in New Orleans.

Blog Posts

• 10 Essential Contact Center Metrics and KPIs to Measure in Healthcare (Five9)
• Cowboys and Clinicians: Enhancing Rural Healthcare with Freestone Medical Center (Medhost)
• Advanced analytics providers a real-time window into clinician behavior and insights to help reduce care variation (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Strengthen your workforce: How Logan Health retains home health and hospice staff (Meditech)
• MDS Changes: Why Section GG Does Not Equal Section G (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 4/5/24

Top News

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is reviewing a class action lawsuit that claims that New England Baptist Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center violated the state’s Wiretap Act by using undisclosed web visitor tracking technologies such as Meta Pixel to secretly intercept website user communications.

Key issues:

• Are web visitors who just look at web pages conducting a “conversation” that is protected by the Wiretap Act?
• Is the information collected secretly when visitors are notified that the website uses website traffic analysis tools?
• Are website warnings sufficient when they do not explicitly tell visitors that their medically-related search or form entry information is shared with third parties?
• Were hospitals misleading people by promising to protect their privacy when the technology was specifically designed to help identify them?

Reader Comments

From AI Ball: “Re: AI in healthcare. Are patients demanding more of its use, or are we again speaking on their behalf without actually asking them?” The latter. Surveys suggest that people are wary of sticking AI into a process that is already cumbersome and impersonal. Consumers will flock to Dr. AI as they did Dr. Google for looking up symptoms or conditions, generating plain English interpretations of medical gobbledygook, or perhaps even searching for providers. Otherwise, they have zero interest in AI-powered clinical documentation and literature searches unless it frees up doctor time so they can actually get an appointment or experience a less-rushed visit. I believe it’s also true that technologists who think doctors are desperate for AI-supported diagnosis, image analysis, or precision medicine help should probably actually ask those doctors. In the case of health systems, think of the most impersonal, maddeningly inefficient bureaucracies that you dread dealing with over billing or service issues – the DMV, a utility, an online merchant, or your local sprawling health system – and ask yourself if your experience is likely to improve if they add AI without changing anything else. Or, as a form of real-world evidence with earlier technologies, did you love it when those same bureaucracies hid their humans behind automated attendants or simply let the phones ring unanswered? TL;DR – companies do whatever benefits them most and customers win only if companies fear losing their business.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Venture studio Aegis Ventures will collaborate with nine health systems to co-develop and invest in health tech solutions, with a common theme of using AI and automation. The studio’s collaboration with Northwell Health resulted in the creation of four companies, including Optain (AI-powered retinal imaging) and Upliv (menopause virtual support).

Epic is developing an AI validation suite to help health systems evaluate and monitor the performance of AI models, both third party and self developed.

Manifold, which offers an AI-powered clinical research platform, raises $15 million in a Series A funding round.

AI-enabled workforce marketplace SnapCare acquires Medecipher, which offers a predictive analytics staffing decision support tool.

Investment firm Cerberus Capital Management tells a Senate subcommittee that it paid $246 million for Caritas Christi Health Care in 2010, didn’t invest a penny more as it turned it into for-profit Steward Health Care, and then sold it for an $800 million profit in 2020. A consulting firm says that level of return isn’t exactly a home run in private equity world of quick flips, although the partners usually get management fees on top of profits from the sale. Cerberus declined to tell the senators how much the firm and its executives made from its investment.

Sales

• Springfield Clinic (IL) expands its use of Health Note’s patient engagement and intake platform.
• Jordan Valley Community Health Center (MO) will implement Epic.

People

UK HealthCare hires Katie Dickens, MSA (Bronson Healthcare) as chief digital and information officer.

Imaging real-world data vendor OneMedNet promotes Aaron Green to president and CEO following the retirement of CEO Paul Casey.

Symplr promotes Allison Morin, RN, MSN to chief nursing informatics officer.

Andy Dé, MS, MBA (MedeAnalytics) joins Verato as chief marketing officer.

DrFirst promotes Irene Froehlich to chief brand officer.

Gary Hall, who retired as CIO of Estes Park Health (CO) in September 2023, is elected mayor of Estes Park.

Announcements and Implementations

A report by the American Organization for Nursing Leadership and Laudio looks at the impact of hospital nurse managers:

• The median span of control is 46 employees, with 25% of inpatient nurse managers having responsibility for 78 or more employees. Spans are largest in ED and ICU.
• A larger span of manager control is associated with higher rates of RN turnover, use of overtime, and burnout.
• While 56% of nurse managers have at least one assistant nurse manager, nurses almost always report directly to the nurse manager.
• RN retention is higher when managers have purposeful interaction with them at least monthly, most influenced by recognition and celebration.

HCA Healthcare integrates referrals to Talkiatry’s virtual psychiatry service with its EHR.

A new KLAS report on managed help desk and application management services names Pivot Point Consulting as #1 in performance, followed by CereCore. Nordic and Tegria were noted as being able to scale but with customer-reported problems with staff consistency. Most respondents plan to maintain or increase their use of managed IT services to mitigate cost and staffing challenges.

Government and Politics

Matthew Keirans, who worked 10 years for University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics as a network architect, pleads guilty to stealing the identity of an acquaintance named William Woods and using it for 30 years to take out loans and to obtain his remote hospital IT job. Woods visited his bank in 2019 to alert them that someone was running up debt using his account, but they became suspicious even though he showed ID. The police were called and they contacted Keirans, who faxed them phony documents – including one that included the wrong middle name of Woods — that resulted in the arrest of Woods, who spent the next 20 months in jails and mental hospitals. Once released, Woods notified the hospital that their $140,000-per-year employee was not him, which detectives proved using DNA evidence. Keirans faces up to 32 years in prison and a $1.25 million fine.

Privacy and Security

A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s medical school employee falls victim to a social engineering attack in which they clicked on a malicious link that was sent by a trusted contact, then were tricked into sharing their multi-factor authentication code, which gave the hacker access to their email account.

Other

Payers and providers have been slow to adapt biosimilar versions of the antinflammatory injectable drug Humira – which has generated $200 billion in lifetime sales for drug maker AbbVie – because pharmacy benefit management companies and specialty pharmacies would lose most of their profit by dispensing the less-expensive option. The report by the Biosimilars Council and IQVia found that only 1% of Humira patients have been switched to the cheaper alternative, with many of those associated with small payers that don’t have loyalty to the big three PBMs (CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx). The authors conclude that patients, employers, and health plans are paying an extra $700 million per month for sticking with the brand name.

An employee of Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix files a proposed class action lawsuit against the health system, claiming that the hospital provided such low-quality health insurance under its self-insured plan that some employees incur $10,000 per year in costs while others avoid seeking care entirely. Also included in the lawsuit is third party administrator Medica, which the plaintiff claims misstated the network status of providers in its member portal. Workers who were contacted by a news site said that Mayo’s remote employees struggle to find affordable care, also noting an insurer’s “phantom network” that lists dozens or hundreds of in-network providers who have retired, no longer accept the insurance, or aren’t taking new patients. The site also found that Mayo’s doctors and executives are reimbursed at up to $10,000 per year to cover the difference between in-network and out-of-network costs, but most employees don’t qualify.

Sponsor Updates

• Five9 celebrates 10 years on the Nasdaq stock exchange by ringing the opening bell.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Susan Snedaker.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT celebrates surpassing 400 go-live projects.
• SnapCare will exhibit at the Oregon Health Care Association Spring Expo April 11-12 in Salem.
• Symplr will exhibit at the Health Care Compliance Association’s Annual Compliance Institute April 14-17 in Nashville.
• Upfront Healthcare will present at the Urgent Care Association’s annual conference April 13 in Las Vegas.
• PSQH: The Podcast features Wolters Kluwer Health VP and GM of Clinical Surveillance, Compliance & Data Solutions Karen Kobelski, “Preventing Drug Diversion with Technology.”
• Zen Healthcare IT names Ryan Kopiske technical project manager.

Blog Posts

• Should you be worried about OpenAI’s new Voice Engine? (Nuance)
• AI Before AI (Netsmart)
• Five Proven Strategies to Improve Operating Margins: Part Two – Eliminate Costly Payroll Errors (QGenda)
• Redox hydrates new GenAI solutions from Google Cloud (Redox)
• No more on prem? How quickly is the NHS imaging moving to public cloud? (Sectra)
• TEFCA, QHINs & Surescripts: Our Commitment to Advancing Interoperability (Surescripts)

Contacts

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

News 4/3/24

Top News

Risant Health completes its acquisition of Geisinger, which will become its inaugural health system.

The non-profit Risant Health, which will focus on value-based care, expects to acquire up to five community health systems in the next five years.

Reader Comments

From Anonymous IT: “Re: Intermountain Health. Layoffs of 500+ last week in the Nevada Region, plus demotion offers to others.” Unverified.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Business Insider reports that Surescripts is exploring a sale of the business, which is 50% owned by pharmacy benefit managers CVS Health and Express Scripts and 50% owned by pharmacy trade groups. Insiders say the ownership structure could complicate the sale, adding that a private equity firm is the most logical buyer because of transaction’s expected high price and the need to balance the needs between the PBM and pharmacy owners.

Praia Health secures $20 million in Series A funding. The company, which was spun out of the Providence health system in October 2023, offers automated personalization of a patient’s care journey for improved engagement.

3M spinoff Solventum, which includes health information systems among its four business segments, begins trading on the NYSE.

Axios reports on the “economic and operational nosedive” of Amwell, whose valuation has dropped from $10 billion in late 2020 to $235 million now. The article says that Amwell overpromised, botched product rollouts at big clients like CVS Health and Memorial Hermann, and failed to develop a post-pandemic strategy. AMWL shares took another drop when the article ran, down 66% in the past 12 months.

Sales

• Intermountain Health (UT) will use Sensorum Health’s remote patient monitoring technology as part of a house calls pilot program for homebound seniors who have chronic conditions.
• Hartford HealthCare will implement Axuall’s clinician onboarding system.

People

Alan Tam (Actium Health) joins Reveleer as chief marketing officer.

Harmony Healthcare IT names Kelly Hahaj (Indiana Health Information Exchange) VP of corporate development.

Announcements and Implementations

Commure launches Scribe, a free ambient documentation tool for its users that integrates with EHRs such as Epic, Athenahealth, and Meditech.

Availity announces Predictive Editing, an AI claims denial prediction tool for its Availity Essentials Pro RCM platform.

Ascom launches RemoteWatch, a remote monitoring service for its Ascom Healthcare Platform that allows hospitals to identify technical issues.

Eko Health earns FDA clearance for its AI-powered heart failure detection for its stethoscopes. The technology — which will be added to the company’s Sensora Cardiac Early Detection Platform that diagnoses atrial fibrillation and heart murmurs — identifies low ejection fraction. Mayo Clinic developed the algorithm and is an investor in Eko.

Greenway Health integrates DrFirst’s RxInform prescription notification and patient engagement software with its Intergy EHR.

Connect Oregon, the state’s coordinated social care network, adopts payment software from Unite Us to improve Medicaid billing amongst its nine Coordinated Care Organizations.

Verato develops its Identity Data Management Maturity Model to help healthcare organizations assess, benchmark, and improve their identity data management processes.

Carium and CareDirections announce a commercialized version of StrokeCP, a post-discharge management system for stroke survivors that was developed by Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist.

Microsoft unbundles Teams from Office globally to address anticompetitive regulatory pressure. The company added Teams to its business software suite in 2017 and saw its usage soar in the pandemic’s early days, triggering a Slack complaint to the EU three months before Slack sold itself to Salesforce for $28 billion.

Change Healthcare has not updated its cyberresponse page since March 27. Its dashboard shows 117 of Optum’s 137 applications remain down from the February 21 cyberattack.

Government and Politics

The US Coast Guard hopes to finish scanning paper medical records into its MHS Genesis / Oracle Health system by the end of the year, but in the mean time, it is advising service members that obtaining medical records copies will take longer.

Other

Epic will probably never top the sheer cleverness or sassiness of its years-ago April Fool’s post in which it claimed to have changed its name to EPIC since people mistakenly all-caps it regularly, but this year’s spoof was pretty good:

• Epic gets construction approval for the Barbie Dream House campus.
• The company is chosen as the official EHR of “Grey’s Anatomy.”
• A recipe for a carrots and wings dish called Roots & Wings, which is a subtle reference to Judy’s charitable foundation Roots & Wings that will get the proceeds of her Epic shares.
• My personal favorite – MyHeart, a dating app that uses MyChart messages and patient history to suggest romantic matches based on clinical factors.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom launches RemoteWatch, a remote monitoring service for the Ascom Healthcare Platform designed to help hospitals proactively identify technical issues before they impact patient care.
• Findhelp and Uber Health support patients beyond the four walls of a medical office.
• Censinet offers NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 enterprise assessments, which include support for compliance with HHS Healthcare and Public Health Sector Cybersecurity Performance Goals.
• Artera adds dashboards for patient engagement benchmarking and no-show revenue recovery estimates to its Harmony Analytics solution.
• Spok’s mobile clinical communications software earns the top ranking for customer satisfaction for the seventh consecutive year in Black Book Market Research’s recent survey of 7,000 end users.
• Waystar extends its Accelerated Implementation Program through April to help healthcare organizations process claims in the wake of the Change Healthcare cyberattack.
• CereCore publishes a new e-book, “In Sync with Care: The Future of Clinical IT Service Desks.”
• Arrive Health sponsors the Health Evolution Summit April 3-5 in Dana Point, CA.
• QGenda, Wolters Kluwer, Elsevier, SnapCare, Symplr, and Care.ai will exhibit at AONL 2024 April 8-11 in New Orleans.
• AvaSure publishes a new Use Case Spotlight, “Expand the Reach of Care Teams with Virtual Nursing.”
• Clearwater names Jackie Mattingly (Coker Group) senior director of consulting, small and medium hospitals.
• The Pinnacle Take Podcast features Direct Recruiters Managing Partner of Health IT and Life Sciences Mike Silverstein, “A Network of Friendlies.”

Blog Posts

• Six Cybersecurity Points Healthcare CIOs Should Explain to Their Boards (CereCore)
• Capturing Medical Necessity in Ambulance Coding (AGS Health)
• National Doctors’ Day: Three Altera clinicians share their perspectives on designing for clinicians today (Altera Digital Health)
• SATRE: Standardised Architecture for Trusted Research Environments – Information Governance (Arhidia Informatics)
• The Referral Process: Closing the Loop on Patient Care (Artera)
• Introducing Availity’s Mission Moments Series (Availity)
• 10 Work Comp Did-You-Knows (Bardavon)
• The Making Care Primary Model: How it is revolutionizing primary care (CarePort Health)
• Takeaways from HIMSS24 (Dimensional Insight)
• Separating the Hype from the Hope in Healthcare AI Trends for 2024 (DrFirst)
• Boosting Billing Efficiency with the Clinical Rule Engine (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/1/24

Top News

Atlanta-based teleradiology vendor The Radiology Group pays $3.1 million to settle False Claims Act charges that its US-based radiologists rubber stamped draft image interpretations that were performed by India-based contractors who are not licensed in the US.

Highlighted in the complaint is Radiologist A, who signed more than 10,000 reports in a single month, approved drafts in as little as 16 seconds, and did not check the “critical” tag when it was indicated.

The company notes on its technology page that all of its software is powered by AI.

Reader Comments

From Bollinger’s Band: “Re: Oracle Health. You mentioned Larry’s age and his cheerleading for the former Cerner. They may be re-architecting the former Cerner offering and that will let them come roaring back.” I don’t see that happening, for these reasons:

• A key reason that Cerner was getting kicked out of hospitals was fallout over its deficient RCM product and its “solution” of rolling out a spiffed-up Soarian offering.
• I don’t think that most hospitals that moved to Epic did so because of Cerner’s architecture, so Oracle’s whiz-bang technology may not prove to be competitive differentiator.
• Epic is so far ahead of Cerner in customer KLAS rankings that Oracle Health will never catch up. I don’t see Oracle making the huge investment that would be needed to make their product more competitive.
• Layoffs and attrition has likely caused a big loss of industry knowledge at Oracle Health, and putting a bunch of hotshot technologists in charge of a complicated, industry-specific critical application has never worked that I can remember.
• They’re not getting all those former customers back from Epic, so there’s nobody left to sell to. The only potential greenfield is outside the US, and product localization is always a challenge even for more focused vendors.
• The DoD business isn’t as lucrative as it sounds since Cerner wasn’t the prime contractor, and the VA may or may not ever get widely enough implemented to unleash the gravy train.
• Oracle paid way too much for Cerner and expresses near-embarrassment about its latest jewel in every earnings call. Customers were already sprinting for the Epic door, and raising prices or lowering costs to increase margins to “Oracle standards” will only hasten the exodus.
• Oracle Health is lucky that the company is printing money overall from its cloud business and that Larry Ellison is still enamored with it. At some point, Safra is going to get tired of making excuses for Larry’s plaything, at which time Oracle could strangle it financially or sell it for parts, such as the government business. The Larry-funded Project Ronin had noble aspirations, but was shut down without notice in early March.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most of us who have posed health inquiries to an AI tool were just Dr. GPTing, but two poll respondents took its answer to their doctor who changed their advice or orders as a result.

New poll to your right or here: What single factor would be most attractive in considering a change of employers? I recognize the urge to check more than one option, but pretend you are reading a job posting – what would get your attention first?

Here’s a bonus survey, as suggested by a reader. What single, realistic first step would you take to improve US healthcare outcomes, cost, and accessibility? You get one sentence.

Webinars

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

Announcements and Implementations

A study finds that patients who were forced by their employer to switch to a high-deductible health insurance plan were more likely to experience diabetes complications.

Other

DrFirst gets the April Fool’s jump on Epic in rolling out the Magic Med Mash-Up, which squashes all your individual pills into one big capsule. Paging Martin Shkreli for the Daraprim play.

Sponsor Updates

• Vyne is recognized as a Becker’s Top RCM Company in 2024.
• Optimum Healthcare IT adds Mike Jackman (Leidos) to its boards.
• PerfectServe announces several 2023 milestones, including awards and recognition from industry analysts, 10% revenue growth, and a 107% enterprise net customer retention rate.
• QGenda will exhibit at AONL 2024 April 8-11 in New Orleans.
• WellSky launches a Medicare Certified Home Health certification for clinical teams.
• SnapCare and Incite Strategic Partners partner to provide clinical workforce solutions for the senior living and senior care segments.
• Waystar publishes a new e-book, “4 opportunities for healthcare revenue cycle improvement.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health launches Lippincott Ready for NCLEX to help prepare nursing students for the National Council Licensure Examination.

Blog Posts

• Aligning for change: Driving quality performance and risk management with AI (Notable)
• Population Health and the Power of Data (Netsmart)
• Five Proven Strategies to Improve Operating Margins: Part One: Optimize the Healthcare Workforce for Retention and Cost Savings (QGenda)
• The Rise of AI in Healthcare IT & Implications for Hiring Strategies (Revuud)
• Congratulations to all award winners recognized at HIMSS24 (Rhapsody)
• Reducing Pharmacy Costs with Innovative Enrollment Technology (RxLightning)
• Patient experience: the hospitality effect in healthcare (Sonifi Health)
• Helping Healthcare Heal Itself Starts with Collaboration (Surescripts)
• 5 Ways That Outdated On-Call Scheduling is Hurting Your Hospital (Symplr)
• The Outdated Practice of Security Questionnaires in Healthcare – Moving Towards a Real-Time Approach (VisiQuate)
• Revolutionizing Clinical Data Exchange: Healthcare Innovation 2024 Innovator Award Winner (MRO)

Contacts

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

News 3/29/24

Top News

An Optum dashboard shows that 115 of the 137 Change Healthcare applications remain down 37 days after the company was hit by a cyberattack.

Reader Comments

From Former Epic: “Re: Epic. There has always been a board of directors, which includes outside directors from the community. Judy has voting shares (51%) but the foundation has the stock cash value. The family will be comfortable, but not Walton or SC Johnson wealthy. The foundation will sell stock back to the company to distribute donations. No public sale.”

From Diatom: “Re: disruption. Three technologies could disrupt health services delivery – surgical robotics, AI-powered drug discovery and development, and FHIR as a technology enabler for innovators. However, I share your skepticism about technology’s potential. We will continue to have a low-value, intervention-based system unless we change our agricultural policies, education policies, taxation and subsidies, and cultural habits related to food and work-life balance. Also, even if technology could significantly improve healthcare delivery, it wouldn’t necessarily reduce the cost of our system, which is one of its greatest travesties. Blockbuster drugs and robots aren’t cheap.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Walgreens announces Q2 results: revenue up 6%, EPS –$6.85 versus $0.81, beating expectations for both. The loss includes a $5.8 billion impairment charge related to its VillageMD primary care business, which will close another 160 locations versus the previously planned 60. The company said when it invested $5.2 billion in VillageMD in 2021 that it planned to open 1,000 new locations by 2027 – VillageMD had 230 practices in 15 markets then — and that it expected the standalone VillageMD to conduct an IPO in 2022. From the earnings call:

• CEO Tim Wentworth says that US customers are seeking value due to inflation, depleted savings, and record household debt and delinquency, so its drugstore division is investing in key value items and pushing its own brands.
• The pharmacy group’s outperformance was led by its vaccine portfolio.
• VillageMD has issues with slower than expected patient panel growth, multi-specialty productivity, and Medicare payment changes.
• The company has decided not to follow through on plans to create a new pharmacy technology platform and instead will modernize its existing systems, leading to a $455 million impairment charge for software and development assets.
• The company will review its businesses and recommend to the board that they be sold if they don’t offer growth opportunities, with that work to be presented at the end of April.

Wound imaging vendor Spectral AI announces Q4 results: revenue down 13%, EPS –$0.22 versus –$0.13, beating expectations for both and valuing the company at $35 million. The company’s income came entirely from government research contracts, as commercial product sales launched in Q1 2024.

Toronto-based Healwell AI, which pivoted to AI-powered disease detection and changed its name from MCI Onehealth Technologies, announces Q4 results: revenue down 37%, EPS -$0.10 versus –$0.05. Shares are at $0.90, valuing the company at $129 million.

Financially teetering Steward Health Care sells its physician network to Optum pending government approval.

Sales

• Sutter Health chooses Abridge for drafting visit notes from encounter audio.

Announcements and Implementations

Five9 announces GenAI Studio, which allows organizations to apply off-the-shelf generative AI models such as OpenAI and customize them for use in their contact center.

Government and Politics

ONC releases the draft of the 2024-2030 Federal Health IT Strategic plan for public comment.

Privacy and Security

In England, computer systems at the University of Cambridge’s medical school remain down a month after an apparent cyberattack. The university’s systems previously went offline for a short time on February 19 from a hacker group’s DDoS attack.

in Scotland, hackers post sample data from the several terabytes they claim to have stolen in last week’s ransomware attack against NHS Dumfries and Galloway. 

Experts say that the technology of startup HeHealth, which claims that its app can diagnose sexually transmitted infections from penis photos, is a “privacy disaster.” The company – whose tagline is “your intimate bestie for unprotected sex” — markets one product variation as a sexual wellness tool for women, who are encouraged to submit photos of the genitals of their prospective partners in claiming to have their permission. Forbes also notes that the system was trained on just five conditions but the company lists 10 that it can diagnose, also determining that the source of the app’s reference data is free Internet pictures and those that early participants were required to provide. TechCrunch observes that most STIs are asymptomatic and calls out company disclaimers that its results should not be considered medical advice, with the author adding, “You should not take a picture of anyone’s genitals and scan it with an AI tool to decide whether or not you should have sex.”

Other

Eight physicians from Israel’s Hadassah Medical Center apparently didn’t bother to read their own radiology article, which contains nonsensical ChatGPT output, before submitting it for publication. The piece appears in Elsevier-published Radiology Case Reports, an open-access journal that charges authors $550 to run whatever they submit. Elsevier notes that 80% of submitted articles are accepted and are posted online in an average of 19 days, which isn’t exactly a bragging point given this example. The authors ignored publication guidelines that require that any use of AI to be disclosed as a footnote. Surprisingly, the uncorrected article remains online. Thanks for reminding everyone that you can’t count on clinicians to catch AI’s mistakes.

Sponsor Updates

• Findhelp’s Customer Success Division delivers 30 bags of food and hygiene items to the little free food pantry at Padron Elementary School in Austin, TX.
• Availity announces a comprehensive suite of technology solutions and services designed to assist health plans and providers with achieving compliance with the CMS Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule.
• Experity will exhibit at SPUC 2024 April 3-6 in Norfolk, VA.
• FinThrive releases a new Healthcare ReThink Podcast, “Trailblazing the Next Generation of Healthcare Analytics.”
• Healthcare IT Leaders releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Transforming Community Health.”
• Inovalon supports the California-based Integrated Healthcare Association’s Align, Measure, Perform Program with its Converged Quality quality measurement and improvement solution.
• Laudio will exhibit and present at AONL 2024 April 8-11 in New Orleans.
• Medhost will exhibit at the Texas Organization of Rural & Community Hospitals Spring Conference April 1-4 in Dallas.

Blog Posts

• 3 ways professional societies can boost impact through collaboration (Elsevier)
• Reflecting on HIMSS 2024: Key Takeaways from Orlando (FinThrive)
• Four Healthcare Contact Center Trends in 2024 (Five9)
• Hidden Signs of a Healthcare Data Breach (Fortified Health Security)
• Healthwise Education is Best in KLAS 2024! (Healthwise)
• Transforming Healthcare: The Benefits of Digital Image Sharing (MRO)
• Adding Stability Through Outsourcing in a Chaotic Healthcare Delivery Market (Impact Advisors)
• A fresh outlook on brain health (Linus Health)
• AI for Cancer Detection: A New Dawn in Healthcare (Lucem Health)
• How EHRs Elevate Rural and Community Nurses (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 3/27/24

Top News

Masimo considers spinning off its consumer business, which includes personal health and audio products, while retaining its healthcare and telehealth solutions.

Reader Comments

From Disingenuous: “Re: Judy Faulkner’s giving pledge. It’s shallow since she’s giving her share of Epic to a foundation that will still have majority control, someone who will carry on her legacy and maintain her vision from the grave.” I read that years ago, thinking that the question then becomes who’s on the foundation and how it interacts with a company that has always had one focused leader who is also the majority owner. Epic has always had a board, I hear, although I know nothing about its members and level of control.

From Psych MD: “Re: VA OIG’s report. The report identifies quite a few problems with the patient’s follow-up mental health care, but using root care analysis leads organizations to identify a single failure among several, to recommend corrective actions even when it seems likely that they would not have affected the outcome, and in this case looks to the EHR as a source of blame or a magical fix. I don’t know why root cause analysis has become ascendant over FMEA or other approaches to optimize care and safety.” The full VA OIG report puts a lot of blame for the patient’s death — which was not determined to be a suicide even though the patient had a history of suicidal ideation — on Oracle Health, but these points seem relevant:

• The EHR failed to issue the VA-specified number of staff reminders to schedule new behavioral health appointments for no-shows or cancellations. 
• The patient had changed their phone number and didn’t respond to appointment scheduling messages.
• The VA contacted family members, who told them the patient was doing OK and didn’t provide the new telephone number, at which time the patient’s flag for being at high suicide risk was turned off, which prevented ongoing suicide prevention reach-outs.
• The patient died of cardiac arrhythmia after using inhalants, of which they had a documented history but denied current use, two months after their most recent visit. 
• This  complex case resulted in some EHR changes involving missed appointments, but the patient was not cooperative despite VA employee efforts and no evidence exists that any changes would have improved this patient’s unfortunate outcome.

From AT: “Re: Epic’s succession plan. What’s yours? I’m hoping that you will post an obituary. My career and even my passion for health IT are forever indebted to everything you have provided me and the entire industry.” I appreciate that, but I want no part of limelight, prehumous or posthumous, for doing what I consider an empty-room hobby. You probably won’t even notice my bucket-kicking absence anyway since Jenn can keep the news coming until existing sponsorships expire and the site can go gracefully dark without stiffing anybody (no pun intended).

HIMSS24 Comments Review

Several folks have said it will be hard for HIMSS / Informa to figure out what needs fixing about the annual conference based on the comments that I received. I’ll take the counterpoint in summarizing the list as being mostly minor and personal gripes, with few underlying themes that indicate mass, irreparable dissatisfaction. My thoughts:

• Attendance and exhibitor count are the ultimate benchmark. Those were just fine for HIMSS24. Informa isn’t forced to rescue a conference whose relevance and reach has slipped beyond repair.
• HIMSS20 and the HIMSS23 carpet debacle soured a lot of people on HIMSS, so hopefully Informa’s acquisition cost reflected the value of the tarnished jewel and the company has the vast experience that is needed to improve it. It also means that Hal Wolf has relinquished a lot of power to Informa, which his critics will celebrate.
• HIMSS conference educational presentations and keynotes mostly draw yawns, but HIMSS can improve those now that Informa is managing the exhibit hall logistics.

My suggestions:

1. Steal ViVE’s “refreshments and meals included” idea, although that will be hard to scale up to a HIMSS-sized conference due to physical space limits. Requiring highly paid executives to fight for space to sit on dirty carpeted floor to dribble dressing from their $20 salad on themselves instead of networking with fellow attendees is absurd. If money is the problem, sell $50 daily vouchers for access to a private area near the exhibit hall that offers food (including fresher and healthier options) and coffee for most of the day, an expanded model of the now-dead HIMSS Bistro offering that I have always thought worked really well when I paid for a ticket. The other limitation here is that convention centers impose their monopoly powers on F&B to charge astronomical prices, such as $73 for a gallon of Starbucks coffee and $29 for a boxed sandwich or salad in Orlando, all plus a mandatory 21.5% service charge plus tax. 
2. Dial back the chirpy influencers and HIMSS Media cheerleading unless the target audience is non-decision makers who like that sort of self-aware gushiness. 
3. Limit the conference to three days and keep the exhibit hall open during all show hours. Nobody enjoys the last-day ghost town, and HIMSS could save money on facilities and let people get back to work by declaring that three days is enough. HIMSS25 will do exactly that, although HIMSS26 sees the return of Tumbleweeds Friday.
4. Get better keynote speakers, schedule them early in the week, and announce them before attendance decisions have already been made. Pay one celebrity speaker, if you must, who packs star power while knowing and caring nothing about the work of audience members (hello, Nick Saban), but otherwise get non-vendor insiders on the big stages.
5. Take advantage of ViVE’s weak spot of high registration fees by using HIMSS clout to lower them, attracting more provider-siders. That won’t necessarily stem the C-level migration from HIMSS to ViVE, but could correct the inflated vendor-provider ratio and draw in health system directors, managers, and clinicians who have influence on technology decisions but who have limited travel money. I would argue that HIMSS can do fine without CIOs since they rarely emerged from their HIMSS VIP sequestration to hit the show floor anyway.

Webinars

March 27 (Wednesday) 3 ET. “Houston Methodist: Deploying clinical AI at scale for improved outcomes.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. Presenters: Khurram Nasir, MD, MPH, chief of cardiovascular disease prevention and wellness, Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center; Brenda Campbell, RN, senior consultant, HM Health System Innovations; Nassib Chamoun, MS, founder and CEO, HDAI. The presenters  will share how an interdisciplinary team collaborated to successfully use predictive models and a novel AI-driven approach to address post-discharge mortality. They will also describe how they expanded use of the platform to reduce clinician time spent digging through the EHR with a one-page risk profile, including codes extracted from notes using generative AI, and targeting their highest risk patients for extra attention. They will speak to how they overcame barriers to bringing AI at scale to support clinicians across the care continuum.

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

Sales

• Nebraska Medicine will implement EVideon’s Vide Health smart room technology within its Innovation Design Unit.
• The Medical University of South Carolina will implement Flatiron Health’s Flatiron Assist oncology clinical decision support software at its cancer center.
• Prisma Health will extend its use of Bamboo Health’s Pings, Spotlights, and Discharge Summaries across its organization and InVio Health Network.
• Samaritan Health Services (OR) will provide virtual urgent care services via Epic MyChart from KeyCare.
• Children’s Hospital Los Angeles offers Nabla’s Copilot AI assistant to its pediatric specialists following completion of a pilot project.
• Community Health Network (IN) will use Ferrum Health’s reference AI architecture to deploy radiology algorithms.

People

CompuGroup Medical will promote Benedikt Brueckle to US CEO in January 2025. He will take over from Derek Pickell, who will retire at the end of this year.

Heather Dunn, MBA (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) joins The SSI Group as president.

Collette Health names Christine Gall, DrPH, MS, BSN (Gall Consulting) chief nursing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

OhioHealth Van Wert Hospital goes live on Epic as part of a system-wide transition that was first announced in early 2021.

Black Book Research announces winners of its awards for highest hospital user satisfaction and clinician satisfaction, as determined by 14,000 respondents.

Malaysia’s health ministry says that it will rejuvenate Selayang Hospital’s Cerner EHR, which was the country’s first paperless system, that has deteriorated to the point that the hospital went back to paper.

Amazon expands its same-day prescription delivery, which is already offered in five cities, to New York City and Los Angeles. The company also notes that it is using AI behind the scenes to prepare prescriptions for pharmacist review to increase efficiency.

A study by The Clinic by Cleveland Clinic finds that its virtual second opinions save the patient or their payer $8,705. Two-thirds of its second opinions recommend a change in diagnosis or treatment, while 85% of patients who had been told that they needed surgery were instead recommended an alternate treatment. The $1,850 program includes a video call with an RN, concierge collection of medical records, and referral to a Cleveland Clinic expert who provides a written second opinion.

A new KLAS report on clinical communications interoperability concludes that no vendor connects consistently across all use cases — which include communication with outside physicians; integration with staff scheduling; timely alert and alarm routing; integration with EHRs, dietary, and transport systems; and communication of after-hours needs — but deep adopters are starting to unify their communications.

Government and Politics

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) introduces the “Health Care Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2024.” If passed, the bill will enable eligible providers to receive advanced and accelerated payments in the wake of a cyberattack, provided they and, if applicable, third-party vendors meet certain cybersecurity standards. Warner launched the Senate Health Care Cybersecurity Working Group last November.

Privacy and Security

Petersen Health Care, one of the country’s largest nursing home operators, files bankruptcy due to a double whammy of cybersecurity incidents — an October 2023 ransomware attack that delayed bills and then the Change Healthcare cyberattack that reduced receivables. The company operates 90 nursing homes in the Midwest and reported $340 million in revenue in 2023.

Other

UK HealthCare’s Chandler Hospital (KY) opens a new ICU floor equipped with remote patient monitoring technologies, including bedside patient engagement software from GetWell and video monitoring from Caregility.

Forbes Hospital (PA), part of the Allegheny Health Network, will equip a 47-bed unit with smart patient room and virtual nursing technology in the coming weeks.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks becomes a HRSA-approved EHR vendor for UDS+ submissions.
• Availity and Bamboo Health will exhibit at the State HIT 2024 Connect Summit April 1-4 in Baltimore.
• Divurgent publishes a new success story, “Divurgent Consolidates Over 120 EHR and IS Applications After Hospital Acquisition.”

Blog Posts

• Addressing Epic EHR Support Gaps When Resources are Scarce (CereCore)
• How Happy Are You at Work? (AdvancedMD)
• HIMSS 2024 – Key Takeaways: Let’s Hear from Lenny! (Agfa HealthCare)
• The Win-Back: ApolloMD Learns There’s No Match for AGS Health’s A/R and Coding Services (AGS Health)
• Going on offense: Filling the gaps in healthcare cybersecurity (Altera Digital Health)
• How the zero-copy data lake will advance modern healthcare and data (Arcadia)
• Social Determinants of Health Tools: Context in Communications (Artera)
• Understanding the Change Healthcare Breach and What It Means for Your Healthcare Organization (Clearwater)
• Black Box for the Medical Industry Provides Unprecedented Data (Dimensional Insight)
• Retaining Excellence: Strategies for Keeping Top Talent in the Healthcare Technology Industry (Direct Recruiters)
• Generative AI Integration into the EHR – Welcome to the Healthcare Revolution (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/25/24

Top News

UnitedHealth Group posts target dates for restoring Change Healthcare’s systems following its February 21 cyberattack.

UHG says that it restored its electronic payments platform on March 15 and is proceeding with payer implementations, noting that “the actual cash flow timing is dependent on payers.”

The company says that its medical claims backlog is $14 billion. It has advanced $2.5 billion to affected providers.

Reader Comments

From Aging Out: “Re: Epic. What happens when Judy is replaced?” Judy Faulkner turns 81 this year and will have served 45 years as Epic’s only CEO. The company has always assured that it has a solid succession plan, and more recently, has allowed some of its executives to get more visibility. Epic says it won’t sell out or change its ways, but her Giving Pledge says that she will donate 99% of her assets, including all of the proceeds of her Epic shares that will go to a foundation. Meanwhile, Oracle’s Larry Ellison turns 80 this year, so should he exit the company vertically or otherwise, the former Cerner business will lose its only cheerleader, and Oracle’s lackluster loyalty could take a big hit. I commend Meditech for turning the reins over to a younger and more diverse executive team years ago, to which I attribute the remarkable move from the archaic Magic to today’s state-of-the-art Expanse in making the company relevant again.

From Buoyancy: “Re: fixing healthcare. I always like to push people to name the single best first step.” I would say decouple insurance from employment. Give every American at least basic coverage and limit patient-insurer churn as people change plans every year or two based on decisions by themselves, their employer, or their insurer in the antithesis of medical continuity and health maintenance. We all want health for a lifetime, not just for the next year, and everybody’s incentive needs to be longer term.

From Badman: “Re: Healthbox. It seems to have died in the HIMSS portfolio, as did Health 2.0.” I don’t recall HIMSS saying that they shut the Healthbox innovation consulting firm and accelerator down, but its online presence is outdated, and CEO Neil Patel – a former Chartis Group employee, like Hal Wolf — moved on in May 2021. I assume it was abandoned quietly like HIMSS Accelerate, which is an online ghost town. We can’t see much detail on any of this since HIMSS still hasn’t published an IRS 990 form since the end of 2020.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thanks to readers who provided feedback on HIMSS24, which I have posted.

Longtime HIMSS executive Elli Riley, who was moved to Informa Markets with the conference’s acquisition, says that HIMSS25 will be more of a “conference within a conference” that will be personalized to attendee focus. An executive of conference logistics operator Freeman says that HIMSS24 measured attendee sentiment using technology from Zenus, which uses anonymized “ethical facial analysis” and badge reading data from discreetly installed cameras to analyze attendee reaction for exhibitors and conference organizers. Other Informa-driven changes include greater use of digital signage, creating a new conference website, changing email marketing automation, and running new conference social media accounts. The article in Trade Show Executive also notes that while HIMSS creates the member-driven content part of the conference, “Informa is responsible for overseeing all content and programming development,” which makes it sound like Informa has more control over the entire conference than the initial HIMSS “partnership” announcements suggested.

Speaking of HIMSS, I noticed in Informa’s annual report that it paid $106 million in cash to acquire the HIMSS conference outright.

Most of us haven’t had a provider visit in which conversational audio was used to create documentation.

New poll to your right or here: Have you recently asked an AI tool a question about your health or medical care? Going beyond the scope of a poll question, I would appreciate hearing anonymously from anyone who has asked AI health and medical questions and received answers that changed their life significantly – maybe a new or corrected diagnosis, medication use or side effects, advisability of surgery, or a suggestion to seek medical attention that turned out to be fortunate.

Digital health vendors must be sweating that their sectors might be next up for a deep dive by the non-profit Peterson Health Technology Institute, which just concluded what we all suspected — that lifestyle-modification diabetes apps don’t deliver enough benefits to cover their cost. The organization noted in its year-ago report that digital health investments were ballooning with little proof that they improved outcomes or cost, calling for an independent authority to evaluate the value of digital health tools (note: PHTI reviews available public and private data and evidence, so it’s up to vendors to conduct studies). I checked the backgrounds of the PHTI’s key people and found little to criticize:

• Executive Director Caroline Pearson came from a research background at NORC at the University of Chicago and spent 13 years with Avalere Health in health policy consulting.
• Managing Director of Strategic Operations David Silk, MBA held marketing executive roles with two health tech companies and at Google Cloud’s healthcare and life sciences group.
• Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD held executive roles in provider groups and was a medical school and public affairs professor.
• Managing Director of Engagement and Outreach Meg Barron, MBA was a digital health VP for the American Medical Association.
• Assessment principal Vanessa Juth, PhD, MPH, MA was a digital strategy executive for two drug companies and was chair of CHOC’s biobehavioral oncology program.
• Senior policy advisor Mairin Mancino worked in innovation at NORC at the University of Chicago and VP of Avalere Health, with provider-side experience at Summa Health.

Listening: Boygenius, which I Shazam’ed in a store thinking sure the song I was hearing was new, hook-heavy Nada Surf. I liked it so much that I was sorry to learn that they’re hugely popular since I was hoping it was an obscure find on my part, but now I know it’s a supergroup of Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus, all in their late 20s, playing guitar-heavy, emotional indie.

Pondering: is anyone buying Apple Vision Pros? The photos that have been posted on X of people at conferences and on streets waving their arms like Bradley Cooper in “Maestro” makes me think it’s just a more expensive way to be a Glasshole, especially given the level of social anxiety among its target audience of trend-chasing nerds. Business and private use is the sweet spot, I assume.

Webinars

March 27 (Wednesday) 3 ET. “Houston Methodist: Deploying clinical AI at scale for improved outcomes.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. Presenters: Khurram Nasir, MD, MPH, chief of cardiovascular disease prevention and wellness, Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center; Brenda Campbell, RN, senior consultant, HM Health System Innovations; Nassib Chamoun, MS, founder and CEO, HDAI. The presenters  will share how an interdisciplinary team collaborated to successfully use predictive models and a novel AI-driven approach to address post-discharge mortality. They will also describe how they expanded use of the platform to reduce clinician time spent digging through the EHR with a one-page risk profile, including codes extracted from notes using generative AI, and targeting their highest risk patients for extra attention. They will speak to how they overcame barriers to bringing AI at scale to support clinicians across the care continuum.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Fortune reports that payment processor Global Payments is seeking a buyer for its AdvancedMD business at a reported asking price of $3 billion. Global Payments acquired the company in 2018 for $700 million.

People

Industry long-timer Kevin Soltysiak, whose career included roles at Shared Medical Systems, Healthtek Solutions, and Alora Home Health Software, died March 15. He was 62.

Announcements and Implementations

Montana HHS goes live on Netsmart’s electronic visit verification.

DrFirst launches TrueRx for pharmacies, which uses AI-enabled fingerprint technology and behavior outlier detection to protect against prescriber identity and prescription fraud.

Government and Politics

VA OIG issues three reports related to the VA’s implementation of Oracle Health:

• A patient died from an overdose seven weeks after missing an appointment at the Columbus facility because of EHR scheduling errors. The report notes that a nurse practitioner did not evaluate the patient’s medication refill request and the psychologist failed to thoroughly evaluate their depression and to consider related critical clinical information. The facility did not send “patient caring communications” because a high-risk flag had been inactivated.
• The Columbus facility went live on Oracle Health despite known pharmacy-related patient safety and usability issues, such as problems with sending newly entered allergy and medication information to VA facilities that are still running VistA. The investigators note that pharmacist burnout increased due to the EHR’s operational inefficiencies.
• OIG warns that the smaller VA facilities that have gone live had problems with patient scheduling that will probably be worse in larger centers, which will require higher staffing levels and overtime pay.

Sponsor Updates

• Experity migrates 300 urgent care practice customers to RCM vendor Waystar in the wake of the Change Healthcare cyberattack.
• Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new book, “A Practical Guide for Nurse Practitioner Faculty Using Simulation in Competency-based Education.”
• AdvancedMD renews its partnership with data automation platform vendor FrontRunnerHC.
• Availity partners with Zelis to streamline the end-to-end process between providers and payers, from administrative workflows through payments.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Joyce Lee, MD.”
• Consulting Magazine awards Pivot Point Consulting founder and President Rachel Marano its Leaders in Technology award in the Excellence in Leadership category.
• RxLightning now enables prescribers and their care teams the ability to enroll patients in Free-Drug and Patient Assistance Programs managed by KnippeRx.
• Sectra publishes a new whitepaper, “True SaaS or a cloudy promise?”

Blog Posts

• Social Work Month 2024: How AI-powered speech recognition can boost social worker productivity (Nuance)
• AI in Revenue Cycle Management: Three Key Areas Where Healthcare Organizations are Prioritizing AI Integration (Nym)
• How Technology Supports Value-Based Care in Home and Community-based Services (Netsmart)
• Beyond medicine: Envisioning healthcare’s role in fostering community and connection (Nordic)
• Finding Value and AI at HIMSS 2024 (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 10 must-know perspectives on digital transformation for healthcare IT leaders (Redox)
• Interoperability insights from Digital Health Rewired 2024 (Rhapsody)
• Achieving the right balance of human interaction and technology at your hospital contact center (Spok)
• ViVE 2024: Navigating Healthcare’s Complexities through Collaboration & Innovation (Symplr)

Contacts

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

HIMSS24 Comments

Responses were evenly split between vendor and non-vendor attendees. The average rating of HIMSS24 was 3.4 on a five-star scale.

What did you like best?

• Felt less crowded in a good way. Some education sessions were solid. Good networking with peers from other health systems.
• I didn’t see many double decker booths, which is perhaps a reflection of current fiscal climate.
• HIMSS tried to copy the Hosted Buyer format, but in a very limited way.
• Opening reception was too loud and there was no awards reception / banquet this year.
• Seeing and talking with current customers. That’s hands down the best part of HIMSS. The next best part was the puppy area.
• Always look for the first time exhibitors and visit their booths, to learn about their product offerings, and discern their rationale for paying the exorbitant fee for tiny space, travel, and lodging. Did they feel it provided ROI?
• Volunteered (did not take the gratuity) for focus groups to listen to vendor thoughts and attempts to discern the future. And to hopefully help them to understand my world, and that of my patients.
• The pre-conference workshops were well done and the new best part of my week.
• There seemed to be fewer attendees, which from an attendee standpoint, was good for me. Hotel rooms were more accessible — I heard people were able to book rooms only a few weeks before the conference.
• Better educational sessions.
• Loved the entrance to the floor with the tunnel and many photo ops. Need a photo booth where people or groups could take their photo and post on Instagram etc. The floor was beautiful, unlike Chicago, which had uncarpeted floors in the walkway, which was painful on feet and dirty feeling. It would be nice if there were a HIMSS person taking group photos or a standalone photo. Social media has improved. I liked how people had templates on their LinkedIn that they were going, but I never received instructions on how to do this.
• Better exhibit hall energy than last few conferences.
• The mobile app was helpful in sending reminders for appointments and announcements. Wayfinding also very helpful on the app.
• I really enjoyed the variety of speakers that were on the agenda. I also felt that the venue was better than Chicago, as there were more food options at the convention center, although the prices were outrageous. I also liked the private meeting areas that were available. It’s difficult to hold a meeting when there is so much noise and conversations taking place.
• Having carpet was a big improvement.
• Facilities and amenities. They’re feeling competitive pressure from HLTH and ViVE and it shows in their ice cream socials, puppy parks, and “fun” events.
• I like that the event has shrunken a little – it’s less overwhelming than it was in past years. Lots of food options in the exhibit hall, although expensive.
• I liked that there was a main stage on the exhibit floor like ViVE so people with booth meetings can go between them and educational sessions more readily. It’s also nice to see more clinical /burnout or hot issues addressed rounding out all the AI, cyber, and cloud topics.
• Great energy in the exhibit hall. Traffic was consistent right until Thursday afternoon, which is a first in my experience.
• It seemed smaller, so there were chairs available in sessions. Some years, rooms were so packed there were no seats. It was possible to get through the crowd without literally knocking into people.
• There seemed to maybe be more tracks this year, so the variety of sessions was good.
• Orlando is a better location as well than Chicago as you can walk more easily to and from hotels in Orlando.
• I was particularly impressed by the educational opportunities this year. A bit more practical.
• The app.
• Lobby looked good. Everything else seemed like it went backwards.
• Oddly enough, the government run talks were the most entertaining to me. Well thought out and with a bit of humor.
• Haha – there was edge to edge carpet throughout the exhibit hall, unlike last HIMSS. Seriously, there was good energy in the halls, attendance and interest was up over prior years.
• Still a boat/car show, but a little more manageable this year.
• My first HIMSS since 2019. The networks and meeting opportunities still valuable. Loved the booths that had AI displays.

What would you like to see changed?

• I would love to see floor hours shortened. The last hour is painfully slow while most people are either gathered around the booths with booze, or have already left.
• Coffee, water stations, and a food court, for the love of!
• Organize the floor or use some methodology for grouping solutions together. It is total chaos. People could evaluate and see more solutions quicker and might even learn about someone new. So many small companies (ours is very large) that do not even get seen.
• The Junior Wolf pack. Avoid Hal and his pontificating pals of their accomplishments.
• Have people who know what he hell they are talking about manning the booths. This was the exception vs the rule but I ran into so many CMF’s (clueless mf’ers) standing around playing pocket pool that it boggled the mind.
• Have no talks on Friday. Poor Nick Saban, although I don’t think he cared as long as he got paid.
• The educational sessions always seem to be better in title than they actually are. Not sure how to fix that other than move the submission date closer to the conference.
• Never do in Orlando. Too long and hard on the feet.
• The quality of the presentations. There needs to be more peer review of the content, perhaps fewer sessions with better content.
• Maybe a structured vendor list by hospital size. As my facility is a rural hospital, we are not going to take on new shiny object, but rather looking to optimize what we have an improve our current operations.
• Unlike other years, the lunch at the informatics symposium was disappointing. There was no coffee or refreshments later in the day, and it was very cold inside.
• There are not enough chairs, and we need bigger rooms for presentations and on the floor. Lots of standing.
• I had trouble with the app and loading sessions. Not all sessions were in the book, which was confusing. Because of this, I missed keynotes. Also, the app’s informatics filters were missing, so I could not easily find sessions I wanted to attend or specific vendor products.
• Speakers and panel discussions. Very little diversity in people and perspectives, seems to reflect the current leadership.
• Being bombarded by the same HIMSS “influencers.”
• Healthier food options or built in like VIVE would be nice.
• Stale content in sessions – seems to be the same topics and people reshuffled.
• Never use Orlando again. Ever. Worst location possible for HIMSS or any conference for that matter.
• Is still often difficult to stay focused on a booth presentation when a neighboring booth is using their sound system to reach a larger crowd. Maybe we should offer presentation audio via Bluetooth so we can actually hear the presenter.
• The traffic in Orlando is a nightmare. Taking the buses or Uber resulted in some long delays in reaching the convention center.
• I’d like HIMSS to condense the show floor when it doesn’t sell out. The Federal Government conference area was so far off the show floor it was difficult to get to. Once they didn’t sell the west end of the show floor, they could have moved things closer together.
• Better, healthier, and faster food options.
• More relevant keynote speakers, shorter exhibition hall hours.
• Bring HIMSS into the 21st century. Better formats, better lectures.
• Conference apps and networking lack other shows. It looks like only around 1,600 people opted in for connecting / messaging, while ViVE had almost 4,800, and I assume HIMSS has significantly more attendees.
• More depth and practical applications of AI. The entire conference and showroom were focused on AI,  but there was no real meat to the conversations, mostly that it’s new, we need to take advantage of it, we should be careful, need to use it responsibly – words without meaning. As physicians, we’re used to new tools and new drugs, for example, and I think this mindset helps us to better embrace AI, even accepting what we don’t understand. Additionally, adding salt to the wound, were folks claiming their product used AI, when it was a simple calculation or formula without any ML.
• Nothing. It will be my last after 20+ years.
• More reasonable food options cost-wise. Would like to see this smaller conference consider other venues such as New Orleans or San Diego because I bet it would fit now. I hate Orlando.
• There seemed to be blatant influence (paid) by big vendors doing “educational sessions” that were complete company product promotions, roadmaps with no third party or customer involved. Oracle Health was the worst! Other agenda items had good titles, but turned out invite-only, which drastically cut down options. As a person who has worked hard for years getting speakers on the agenda, something definitely seemed way off and commercially influenced.
• The HIMSS police called us out multiple times for overspill of our very expensive booth, but the anchor vendors did not get the same treatment. Surprise!
• HIMSS has completely lost touch with the provider community.
• More time between educational sessions. All sessions should be the same duration. Maybe after the first day, every session doesn’t need the intro about handout and eval in the app.
• More free food and drinks.
• Even less people.
• I did not like the keynotes. I think we need more healthcare people – yes, we had some, like the CEO of Hackensack Meridian – but I was not interested at all in Nick Saban, and granted it was Friday (so most people left), you might have gotten more to stay if you had a big name healthcare exec speaking then— Judy Faulkner, John Halamka, etc.
• Better process for main stage. Feel like much of core content is in interop showcase and not on main stages
• I ended up in a number of panel discussions. It’s good for different viewpoints, but I’m not sure that the format appeals to all subjects. I felt that some missed the main point/topic.
• Buy sessions too far removed.
• Floor on the far ends was a train wreck.
• Attempt at being cool on social media was cringeworthy. They need to figure out their lane, stay in it, and stop copying VIVE and their other event HLTH. They did it all first — puppy park, massage, stages on floor etc. It was not a good look.
• More subspecialty educational content. We’re an imaging IT company and there’s almost no relevant content to further attract the tribe of imaging IT professionals. This contrasts to the recent past, where there were always a handful of specialty talks to draw attendees.
• Continue the idea of co-locating vendors.
• Better food options and having it in different venue city rather than Orlando, Vegas, or Chicago if possible.
• The infrastructure in Orlando is terrible. Who planned this conference during spring break? It was pretty much impossible to get anywhere or meet anyone in a timely fashion, and the service at restaurant and other locations was slow and terrible. This conference cannot be held in Orlando any more.

For those who attended both HIMSS and ViVE, how would you compare the two?

• There was definitely more enterprise and implementation focus at HIMSS vs. ViVE’s partnerships and BD flavor with startups. More IT crowd at HIMSS vs. predominantly digital and innovation / investment crowd at ViVE. However, while ViVE has started bringing in CHIME crowd into its fold, HIMSS is increasingly becoming distant to innovation community.
• I like that I don’t have to bother about finding food at ViVE.
• ViVE in LA was just awful. Nashville was better. ViVe is trying to hard be too hip and let’s just forget the CHIME attendees actually visiting the floor except to get awards.
• VIVE resembles the HIMSS of years ago, before it decided HIMSS could be everything to every industry and needed a former vendor to be the Leader of the Pack.
• More entertainment.
• ViVE will replace HIMSS in the next three years. HIMSS has lost its appeal to me, I have been attending for 13 years, I am ready for a change, and ViVE is a refreshing change.
• This year’s ViVE in LA sux.
• Both have different value. I do feel that many of the hospital CIOs did not attend HIMSS24.
• Different energy and scale. HIMSS is bigger, ViVE is more personal.
• ViVE had much better vendors.
• ViVE makes the experience better as an attendee by providing food, drinks, and entertainment. However, from a work/business perspective, HIMSS is still the better show, and it’s not particularly close. There are just more people, more buzz, more product debuts, etc. ViVE is just a party.
• ViVE is far friendlier and feels less formal than HIMSS. It’s easier to see various speakers at ViVE with many of them right on the show floor. Included food and drink is also a nice touch that gives ViVE a relaxed atmosphere. HIMSS is the button-down business conference of yesteryear while ViVE tries to market themselves more like a music festival (with mixed results).
• They way they handle meals/food is so different. ViVE: Coffee stands and food spread throughout the exhibit hall, allowing many opportunities for networking. It’s very easy to grab something to eat or drink (which is built into the conference fees). Plenty of tables/spaces to grab a seat and meet others while getting something to eat. HIMSS: Coffee is $5+ and you need to wait in line in the hallway. Food is expensive and poor quality, typically far away from the events. You need to spend a bunch of time in line, then if you’re lucky you get a table but there’s a good chance you’re sitting on the floor in a hallway.
• ViVE is significantly better.
• ViVE is better. CIOs prefer it, so the power is shifting.
• Both are expensive and do not have the patient in mind. They’re both a money grab.
• They are very different conferences. At HIMSS, you have the advantage of having IT directors and clinicians (nurses and docs) talking about projects they did which, if you are CMIO/CNIO, might really help you as you work on your day to day issues. Yes, HIMSS has the tech companies, but it’s not the only group there. Also, the government track/ area at HIMSS had excellent presentations, but it was so far away (Hall F) if you were in another session you had to race, as most of these government presentations were only 30-minute “bursts” (but really good). ViVE was good too, but it’s really more tech people, companies, innovations, less clinicians (IMO). Yes. some government folks at ViVE, but not nearly as many. I think both are good meetings, but ViVE is SO expensive (the registration fee) that many groups, including mine, won’t send people. I only went as I was a speaker and got free registration.
• ViVE is spot on for the relationships I need to foster and HIMSS is where I go to partner with vendors or meet a bigger cross section of a customers.
• ViVE has grown, audience has evolved, and is for C-suite looking to make a difference and do business. HIMSS seemed much more mid-level in terms of the attendees. Different leagues. I will send a few (very few) from my team to HIMSS next year and my leadership team to ViVE.
• ViVE had more investors, HIMSS very very few. ViVE is more of a C-suite crowd.

Comments

• I miss HIStalkapalooza. The after-hours receptions hosted by vendors were a mixed bag.
• I was particularly disappointed to see a heavily inebriated vendor CEO (a serial entrepreneur, no less) behave very badly with a former health system executive at a networking event, berating them publicly for not giving business to the company while being employed. It was such an unfortunate event to witness and unacceptable behavior by any measure. Vendors need to understand that “No” and “Not Now” are perfectly good answers in current fiscal climate and that business decisions aren’t driven by individual event attendance but rather through stakeholder consensus in matrixed organizations.
• Having two shows so close to each other and SO similar is just a waste of limited resources for vendors and providers. Do we need one, let alone two?
• CHIME and its “leadership” have completely lost their way and ruined it. They don’t realize more people are actually laughing at them vs. looking up to them for guidance. Someone said to me they are more like ET (Entertainment Tonight) vs. 60 Minutes or BBC News. John Glaser must be sad to see what they have turned it into. Parties in Russ’s rooms, lavish all expenses paid board off-sites, international travel. Can someone say 503c3? cough cough audit? My company has more oversight on expenses!
• Both events took place while the US suffered arguably its worst cyberattack that directly impacted patient care. What did both organizations do to help educate? Why, they gave away even more trophies to each other, of course. Sad, frustrating, and vendors should demand an accounting of the foolishness taking place
• Based on what I spent to attend, I no longer think it’s worth attending.
• The people pic animes at ViVE are creepy.
• Being in Vegas back to back again, I might sit out next year.
• The overall feedback I heard from other attendees was that HIMSS was still where the “real” conversations were happening and VIVE was still more about the glitz and VC, aside from the CHIME Forum. There seems to be room for both, but it would be better if they weren’t so close together.
• I generally enjoy these conferences, but this year it just didn’t feel right. I think I’m getting too old (LOL).
• Would love to attend both HIMSS and ViVE, but simply cannot afford ViVE. It is above the limits of what my company will allow.
• AI seems to have given HIMSS a new life. Lots of serious and thoughtful discussions on how to find a way forward with this new technology!
• Other than reconnecting with peers from past conferences, HIMSS continues to struggle. Education sessions are stale. It’s more of a vendor conference. After more than 15 years of attending, I’m not sure I will continue attending. And I still miss HISTALKAPALOOZA. 🙂
• When do we move back to patients at the center of innovation, not PE, AI? Meanwhile, huge orgs cannot secure patient data.
• Likely to skip HIMSS because it is in Vegas. That is a negative, I think for many people.
• Conference has outgrown Orlando.
• Whatever opinion is on business model, HIMSS delivers people that want to connect either to see what is really going on vs hype, meetings with prospects, partners, and clients. As humans, we can filter out the BS. Foot traffic and talk tracks show quickly what is real and what isn’t. The AI hype, robot demos, and VR headsets are still more concept than actual real world applications. It seems like HIMSS HIT community is finally getting data quality matters.
• I left after a day and a half. Content was average and floor was much smaller. All in all an OK event, but not what it used to be. Good luck to Informa. They will need it.

News 3/22/24

Top News

Digital diabetes management solutions increase healthcare spending without delivering meaningful clinical benefits, according to a review of evidence by the Peterson Health Technology Institute.

The study found that the tools facilitate small, clinically unimportant and sometimes temporary reductions in HbA1c that have little impact on overall health.

The report concludes that the solutions “increase net healthcare spending for purchasers because the small, estimated savings are less than the cost of the solution.”

The authors also note that the solutions require patients to record their self-management activities, which may not happen regularly.

Their advice for providers: “Because these digital health solutions complement (rather than substitute for) usual care, they represent an additional cost. Furthermore, these solutions can be labor intensive for provider practices to set-up and document for reimbursement, and effort from the provider and patient is required for implementation. As a result, providers should be cautious when considering the patient benefits weighed against the spending impact of these programs”

Click to enlarge the above graphic for a list of products in the categories reviewed.

Teladoc Health probably didn’t need this reminder that paying $18.5 billion for Livongo the fall of 2020 was unwise, especially now that the entire TDOC business is valued at just $2.5 billion.

Reader Comments

From CPAhole: “Re: disruption. What do you see as the next disruption in the delivery of health IT?” This technology CEO wasn’t optimistic about technology-goosed disruption in the rest of his email to me and neither am I. I don’t think you can disrupt technology without disrupting the delivery of health services, and I see little to suggest that the powers that be, including the elected ones, have an appetite to kill the golden goose. People leave HIMSS every year buzzed on their annual Kool-Aid top-off that technology will improve our embarrassing standing among developed nations in health, cost, and lack of insurance coverage. I could have expressed optimism about AI like most uninspired pundits, but I don’t see how whiz-bang diagnoses and point-of-care research findings help people who can’t afford treatments or even get appointments. Those of us who spend our days in the carpeted parts of healthcare are jarred by reality when we, or our family members, become patients who have to deal with the infuriating system that we created and that lines our pockets. Still, technology can make some inefficient and ineffective parts a bit better – just don’t expect technology to fuel consumer-level disruption or to power big moves of our societal health needle. I am now successfully vented like a time-expired Instant Pot, thank you, so it’s your turn to tell me what you think. What technology could disrupt or at least markedly improve health services delivery? 

From No Cap (IYKYK): “Re: the quotes sent to Existential Dreadlocks about attending conferences. They are aren’t wrong. Conferences are a boondoggle, spurred by the FOMO inertia of company brass, salespeople, and marketers who want to be at the cool kids’ party. Thinking that the next $MM deal is there for the taking.” I’m picturing a “Self-Importance Summit,” where those industry gadabouts who are known for public displays of self-affection sit in their own booths, where they interview each other for podcasts, present each other with fake awards, and “network”at a never-ending happy hour by energetically exchanging business cards like jousting medieval knights.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Today I learned that you can send documents to Amazon’s Kindle reader app. An author sent me a PDF proof of their book, which I wanted to read on my IPad. I Googled and found Amazon’s Send to Kindle webpage, where you can send PDF and DOC files to your Kindle library and then read them pretty much like a normal Kindle book. You can also send files directly to the Kindle app on IOS and Android, export them to Kindle from Word, or email them directly to your Kindle account’s email address (who knew that it had one?) Amazon also provides a Chrome extension that can send full webpages to a user’s Kindle library. TL;DR – you can read most kinds of documents on your Kindle app or device.

Webinars

March 27 (Wednesday) 3 ET. “Houston Methodist: Deploying clinical AI at scale for improved outcomes.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. Presenters: Khurram Nasir, MD, MPH, chief of cardiovascular disease prevention and wellness, Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center; Brenda Campbell, RN, senior consultant, HM Health System Innovations; Nassib Chamoun, MS, founder and CEO, HDAI. The presenters  will share how an interdisciplinary team collaborated to successfully use predictive models and a novel AI-driven approach to address post-discharge mortality. They will also describe how they expanded use of the platform to reduce clinician time spent digging through the EHR with a one-page risk profile, including codes extracted from notes using generative AI, and targeting their highest risk patients for extra attention. They will speak to how they overcame barriers to bringing AI at scale to support clinicians across the care continuum.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Pocket Health raises $33 million in Series B funding. The company offers a patient-centric, subscription-based image exchange platform that explains medical terms, detects follow-up recommendations, and suggests questions that the patient should ask their doctor.

CareCloud reports Q4 results: revenue down 13%, adjusted EPS $0.30 versus $0.25, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. CCLD shares have lost 63% of their value in the past 12 months versus the S&P 500’s 27% rise, valuing the company at $20 million. The company said in the earnings call that it will implement a cost savings program and will introduce an ambient listening solution for visit documentation. It took a $42 million goodwill impairment charge in Q4 as a result of suspending the payment of dividends, resulting in FY2023 loss of $49 million.

Process automation vendor Syllable acquires Actium Health, whose system reviews EHR data to identify patients who may need specific medical services.

People

Optimum Healthcare IT founders Gene Scheurer and Jason Mabry return as CEO and president, respectively, and the company promotes Brian Symonds, MBA to chief digital officer and head of digital transformation.

Announcements and Implementations

Artera adds a referral service to its Harmony platform that automates outreach, appointment management and self-scheduling, and pre-visit communications.

A study of Stanford Health Care’s use of AI to draft responses to patient message finds that clinician adoption was higher than expected and assessments of burden and burnout were improved, but EHR audit logs showed no time savings even though study participants perceived that the process was faster.

An Optum insider says that executives at its financially underperforming eastern division planned to order nurses to find old medical conditions in patient charts, whether they remained active or not, to support increased billing. The plan was for the nurse to add detail that would bring those issues back into the active problem list, and when the chart was next updated with a new visit, offshore coders would bill Medicare for the nurse-created codes without the physician’s knowledge.

Privacy and Security

A British privacy watchdog is investigating reports that at least one employee of the London Clinic tried to read the medical records of the Princess of Wales during her January stay for abdominal surgery.

New HHS guidance reiterates that covered entities can’t use web tracking technologies that might result in PHI disclosure, but clarifies that webpages that don’t require users to log in and that don’t have access to PHI don’t fall under HIPAA’s purview even if the user can be tied to an IP address.

Other

Someone used AI to generate this graphic that I saw on Linkedin. Which is most bizarre — the missing and deformed fingers, the oddly designed stethoscopes, the faceless watches, or the guy at the top who is either missing his right hand or using it to violate his female colleague?

Boston surgeons transplant a pig’s kidney into a patient. They didn’t mention how the pig is doing.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new case study, “Cooper University Hospital of New Jersey achieves USP compliance success with Simplifi+.”
• FinThrive releases a new Healthcare Rethink Podcast, “Let’s Give Healthcare Consumers a Clean Slate!”
• Healthcare IT Leaders releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Technology Planning for Future Growth.”
• InterSystems announces that, as part of the 2024 Best in KLAS Awards, its HealthShare Unified Care Record has been named the regional winner in the Shared Care Records/HIE category in Europe.
• Neuroflow releases a new podcast, “Neuroflow NLP Technology Surfaces Suicide Risk That Assessments Alone May Miss.”

Blog Posts

• Medical Billing Best Practices for Optimal Revenue in Urgent Care (Experity)
• Fixing Inefficient and Costly Prior Authorization: A Path to Modernization (FinThrive)
• How Cyber Attacks Impact Patient Trust (Fortified Health Security)
• Themes on the path to revolutionize clinical trials at SCOPE Summit 2024 (Inovalon)
• How EHRs Elevate Rural and Community Nurses (Medhost)
• Connection Fuels Interoperability at HIMSS24 (Meditech)
• Unlock New Telehealth and Remote Therapeutic Monitoring Opportunities in 2024 (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 3/20/24

Top News

UnitedHealth Group reports in a March 18 status update that it has begun releasing medical claims preparation software as a part of Change Healthcare’s system restoration process. It expects the changes to be made available to “thousands of customers” over the next several days.

The company says it restored Change Healthcare’s electronic payments platform as scheduled on Friday and is proceeding with payer implementations.

UHG says it has advanced $2 billion in financial aid to cash-strapped providers who have been affected by the February 21 cyberattack.

Reader Comments

From Existential Dreadlocks: “Re: HIMSS. For the third year in a row, I have had several peers and clinical friends privately shame me for attending HIMSS and CHIME. Here are some of the emails and text. I never expected such reactions.” I’m wondering if others get comments like those that were sent to ED:

• You and your peers get to work remotely, seldom come to the hospital for meetings, and then find it OK to party while many of the hospital can barely make budget. You’re all out of touch with reality.
• We sent nobody this year. It sends the wrong message when the nurses see nothing but party pics and videos all lover social media. Insensitive. “Mad Men” lives on.
• Why are you still going to HIMSS? What is wrong with you? It is nothing but an excuse to mooch dinners off the vendors and party with hundreds of self-promoters. Loot at me. Look at me. Look at me.
• Bad idea. How do you reconcile attending the boondoggle when every week you see more hospitals failing? All the costs incurred by the vendors are being passed back to us. Not a good look.
• Nice to see your IT friends who never want to come into the office have no trouble hoping a plane to a conference.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Last chance: tell me anonymously what you thought of HIMSS24. Thanks to those who have sent me their impressions, which I’m pretty sure readers will find interesting when I recap them later this week.

Webinars

March 27 (Wednesday) 3 ET. “Houston Methodist: Deploying clinical AI at scale for improved outcomes.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. Presenters: Khurram Nasir, MD, MPH, chief of cardiovascular disease prevention and wellness, Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center; Brenda Campbell, RN, senior consultant, HM Health System Innovations; Nassib Chamoun, MS, founder and CEO, HDAI. The presenters  will share how an interdisciplinary team collaborated to successfully use predictive models and a novel AI-driven approach to address post-discharge mortality. They will also describe how they expanded use of the platform to reduce clinician time spent digging through the EHR with a one-page risk profile, including codes extracted from notes using generative AI, and targeting their highest risk patients for extra attention. They will speak to how they overcame barriers to bringing AI at scale to support clinicians across the care continuum.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nvidia invests an unspecified sum in conversational AI system vendor Abridge, which will expand its use of Nvidia’s technologies.

Hippocratic AI raises $53 million in a Series A funding round that values the company at $500 million. It also announced that it is performing safety testing of a healthcare staffing marketplace where AI software agents can be “hired” to perform non-diagnostic, patient-facing tasks.

Mayo Clinic Platform launches Solutions Studio to help digital health startups commercialize their software and services.

Augmedix announces Q4 results: revenue up 45%, EPS –$0.09 versus –$0.15, beating Wall Street expectations for both. AUGX shares rose 15% on the news and are up 137% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $190 million.

Patient intake software vendor Phreesia announces Q4 results: revenue up 23%, EPS –$0.56 versus –$0.72, beating expectations for both. PHR shares are down 25% in the past 12 months versus the S&P 500’s 28% gain, valuing the company at $1.3 billion. CEO Chaim Indig noted the company’s ongoing investment in security and compliance while referencing the Change Healthcare cyberattack:

There’s really no sugar coating that a major part of the healthcare infrastructure was attacked, and it’s pretty terrible.We’re doing everything we can to help our clients just collect dollars and making sure that they can they can keep running their businesses as they were. From what we can tell, almost all of them still are, although it’s really putting a strain on them …  we started moving to our backup and alternate clearinghouses to move the vast majority of our volume … this was a pretty big attack on the American healthcare infrastructure and IT. I think it’s pretty shitty.

Sales

• Texas based FQHC United Medical Centers chooses NextGen Healthcare’s EHR/PM.
• Banner Health will expand its use of Regard’s AI-driven EHR navigation and task automation system to all of its 33 hospitals in 2024.

People

Healthcare Triangle appoints Chief Revenue Officer Anand Kumar, MBA to the additional role of interim CEO.

Optimize Health promotes Ryan Clark to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital implements AvaSure’s Continuous Video Monitoring System within its Community Living Center for nursing home care and hospice.

Sunoh.ai releases its medical AI scribe app for IOS and Android smartphones and IPads.

Regional Medical Associates (DE) adds Sunoh.ai medical scribe technology to its EClinicalWorks EHR.

DeKalb Regional Medical Center (AL) offers virtual neurology and stroke diagnosis consults with specialists at Erlanger Health (TN).

MyMichigan Medical Center Sault transitions from Meditech to Epic.

An excellent JAMA op-ed piece warns that “humans are terrible at vigilance” in questioning the expectation that clinicians will double-check the output of AI systems that is often correct and always authoritative, especially as organizations push higher productivity to pay for their AI investment. They offer options that have worked in other industries:

• Color-code AI output based on its own assessment of certainty and whether the specific patient is representative of the population that was used to train the model.
• Flag clinicians who accept AI-generated recommendations or text nearly 100% of the time in exhibiting automation bias.
• Reallocate any AI-created time savings to address burnout and increase empathy rather than raising throughput expectations.
• Program the AI system to deliver “deliberate shocks,” similar to TSA airport screening systems that randomly add an image of a firearm to keep operators vigilant.
• Use AI like an after-the-fact spell-checker whose job is to highlight to clinicians when its conclusions differ from theirs.

A new KLAS report on ambulatory EHR/PM mindshare finds that Epic, Athenahealth, and Oracle Health are the leaders, with Epic’s Community Connect system being chosen most often across all practice sizes due to interoperability with hospitals and cost-effectiveness. Most often being considered for replacement are Greenway Health, Athenahealth, and NextGen Healthcare. (click graphic to enlarge)

Privacy and Security

Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago brings its MyChart patient portal back online after a ransomware attack took it and other systems offline six weeks ago.

Other

A Waystar survey of executives from 36 large health systems finds that while 73% work with four or more different RCM software vendors, adoption of end-to-end RCM platforms has increased significantly. All end-to-end technology adopters are already experiencing an ROI, or expect to within one to two years.

A UCLA study finds that sending influenza vaccine reminder messages to patients, using either patient portals or texting, did not improve vaccination rates.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Boosting Data Analysis in Healthcare.”
• Arcadia leverages Vim’s middleware platform to better enable healthcare organizations to install and reliably operate Arcadia’s Desktop and Inform solutions.
• Altera publishes “Building Success: Grand Lake Health System’s Journey with Sunrise EHR and Altera.”
• Agfa HealthCare receives Censinet’s Cybersecurity Transparent Leader Award for the fourth consecutive year.

Blog Posts

• CIOs Rank Top Healthcare IT Priorities and Pressures for 2024 (Part 1) (CereCore)
• Interoperability in Healthcare: Why It Matters (AdvancedMD)
• Five Steps to an Effective Physician Query Process (AGS Health)
• Announcing Paragon Denali: A true cloud-native SaaS EHR (Altera Digital Health)
• 5 Takeaways from the New York Care Coordination Summit (CarePort Health)
• Unique Risks in Managed Care Compliance (Clearwater)
• Total Experience Strategies for Improving Burnout and Patient Care (Divurgent)
• Revolutionizing Work-Life Balance with a Smart AI-Driven EHR (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/18/24

Top News

Veradigm’s presentation to an investor conference last week includes these items:

• The company sees itself as “a new leader in healthcare data intelligence.”
• MDRX shares have been delisted, but the company hopes to regain listing and notes that its fundamentals are healthy, which is rare for a delisted company.
• Growth initiatives include provider EHR modernization and cloud hosting, payer gap closure, and data and AI products. (click the graphic above to enlarge)
• Guidance for 2024 is a small growth in GAAP revenue and a small decrease in earnings.

Reader Comments

From Selfie Sticker: “Re: HIMSS24. We have exceeded the 50% threshold of photos in which the taker themselves is featured.” I estimate that 75% of the conference photos that were posted on X and LinkedIn involve combinations of the same 10 people, most of them mugging for selfies or a series of smiley group shots that show little about the actual event, which is apparently less important than their presence there. Still, I’ll take that over yet another cliche photo – HIMSS ran a lot of these — in which someone does the Taylor Swift heart-hand thing.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I might not have been specific enough in last week’s poll question since I’m wondering if the nearly three-fourth of respondents who said they scheduled an in-person visit using online technology alone (no phone call, email exchange, etc.) really did. Or maybe providers are further along in their self-scheduling rollouts that other reports indicate.

New poll to your right or here: In the past 12 months, has an in-person provider used conversational audio from the visit to create documentation? I’ve only seen my direct primary care doc and she types notes directly into the EHR, but she (and I) have the luxury of relaxed, one-hour visits that don’t need to feed billing or insurance, so she’s doing the listening rather than an app. 

HIMSS24 attendees, tell me anonymously about what you liked or didn’t like about the conference and I’ll summarize later this week.

Possible to-do items for supporting HIStalk:

1. Sign up for spam-free email updates.
2. Share news, rumors, and intriguing insights with me.
3. Get a perk or two as a former sponsor for returning to the fold by contacting Lorre. Not sure if you’ve sponsored before? Let me know and I’ll look it up.

Webinars

March 27 (Wednesday) 3 ET. “Houston Methodist: Deploying clinical AI at scale for improved outcomes.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. Presenters: Khurram Nasir, MD, MPH, chief of cardiovascular disease prevention and wellness, Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center; Brenda Campbell, RN, senior consultant, HM Health System Innovations; Nassib Chamoun, MS, founder and CEO, HDAI. The presenters  will share how an interdisciplinary team collaborated to successfully use predictive models and a novel AI-driven approach to address post-discharge mortality. They will also describe how they expanded use of the platform to reduce clinician time spent digging through the EHR with a one-page risk profile, including codes extracted from notes using generative AI, and targeting their highest risk patients for extra attention. They will speak to how they overcame barriers to bringing AI at scale to support clinicians across the care continuum.

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

Sales

• In Canada, Halton Healthcare chooses Sectra One Cloud for imaging.

Announcements and Implementations

UnitedHealth Group hasn’t updated their Change Healthcare restoration status since March 14. Its target for restoring electronic payments was this past Friday and testing of claims submission was slated for Monday, March 18.

Meditech adds integration with Nuance DAX Copilot to Expanse.

The American Hospital Association tells the Senate Finance Committee that it cannot support budget proposals that call for the federal government to impose financial penalties on hospitals that have been the victim of cyberattacks. The White House has asked for hospital cybersecurity funding, but with penalties to those that don’t meet requirements. AHA also notes that HHS has limited authority to offer financial assistance to providers who have suffered from the Change Healthcare cyberattack, and without Congressional approval, can’t help with denials of claims that involve Medicare Advantage, commercial insurers, and state Medicaid programs.

Other

A commercial real estate firm pitches its listing of a Collingwood, Australia office building that is home to anchor tenant Epic. It says that the building “has appealed to a younger generation who have ample building amenities plus access to Smith Street, which was voted by Timeout Readers as the coolest strip in the world. Sackville Street is all about working, living, and playing in the same area.”

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart sponsors the Kansas Mental Health Advocacy Day.
• Nordic Consulting debuts its Cloud Innovation Lab developed in partnership with Microsoft Azure and AWS.
• RxLightning names Erin Townsend senior reimbursement specialist and Jason Roberts technical support engineer.
• Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust in England becomes the first NHS organization to deploy Sectra’s enterprise imaging service using public cloud.
• SmartSense by Digi shares why Vail Health chose SmartSense for condition and environmental monitoring.
• Tegria publishes a new case study, “Strategic Revenue Integrity Improvements Generate $19.4 Million.”

Blog Posts

• Unifying the care continuum with market-leading solutions (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• ViVE 2024 Takeaways: The ‘Rebel Yell’ of AI and Cybersecurity (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Finding the future of interoperability with Redox: Part 1 – Bulk FHIR (Redox)
• Enabling your digital health innovation goals (Rhapsody)
• Leadership Spotlight: Kelly Boyd, General Manager (Sonifi Health)
• Urgency in Modernizing Credentialing and Provider Data Management (Symplr)
• How Healthcare Systems and Providers Can Help Caregivers to Provide Better Nutrition (Trualta)
• Adapting to Change: Best practices you can put into place today to help manage the Change Healthcare outage (VisiQuate)

Contacts

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

News 3/15/24

Top News

HHS OCR launches an investigation of the Change Healthcare cyberattack to determine if a PHI breach occurred and if owner UnitedHealth Group is in compliance with HIPAA.

HHS OCR also reminds the company’s partners to make sure they have business associate agreements in place and are prepared to file HHS breach notification if they are made aware of PHI exposure.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) pressed HHS Secretary Xaviera Becerra in a hearing Thursday to hold hospital and insurer executives accountable for cybersecurity.

The company said in a Thursday update that it has reviewed and protected most of its infrastructure and brought prescription services online. It said previously that it expects electronic payments to be restored on Friday, March 15.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The number of “that’s a wrap for HIMSS24” social media messages posted Thursday must be disconcerting to HIMSS given that two keynotes and some education sessions are scheduled for Friday all the way through 2:15 p.m., although many folks consider the boat show over once the exhibit hall doors close for the week. It was both relaxing and weird the one and only year I stuck around for the last day while most folks were back in their own beds. I notice that HIMSS25 in Las Vegas will be shortened a day to run from March 3-6, but will return to a five-day schedule for HIMSS26, which is also in Las Vegas.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor TruBridge. The Mobile, AL-based company has over four decades of experience in connecting providers, patients, and communities with innovative solutions that create real value by supporting both the financial and clinical side of healthcare delivery. It’s a trusted partner to healthcare organizations with a broad range of technology offerings that address the unique needs and challenges of diverse communities, promoting equitable access to quality care and fostering positive outcomes. The company’s industry leading HFMA Peer Reviewed suite of revenue cycle management (RCM) offerings combine unparalleled visibility and transparency to enhance productivity and support the financial health of healthcare organizations across all care settings. Its solutions champion end-to-end, data-driven patient journeys that support value-based care, improve outcomes, and increase patient satisfaction. It supports efficient patient care with electronic health record (EHR) product offerings that successfully integrate data between care settings. Above all, it believes in the power of community and encourages collaboration, connection, and empowerment with its customers. TruBridge helps clear the way for care.

Webinars

March 27 (Wednesday) 3 ET. “Houston Methodist: Deploying clinical AI at scale for improved outcomes.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. Presenters: Khurram Nasir, MD, MPH, chief of cardiovascular disease prevention and wellness, Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center; Brenda Campbell, RN, senior consultant, HM Health System Innovations; Nassib Chamoun, MS, founder and CEO, HDAI. The presenters  will share how an interdisciplinary team collaborated to successfully use predictive models and a novel AI-driven approach to address post-discharge mortality. They will also describe how they expanded use of the platform to reduce clinician time spent digging through the EHR with a one-page risk profile, including codes extracted from notes using generative AI, and targeting their highest risk patients for extra attention. They will speak to how they overcame barriers to bringing AI at scale to support clinicians across the care continuum.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Innovaccer acquires Pharmacy Quality Solutions, which offers a medication quality management platform for payers.

Healthcare IT and cybersecurity vendor Anatomy IT acquires Manta HealthTech, which offers managed IT services to medical, dental, optometry, and veterinary care providers.

Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital will combine their clinical departments and academic programs, with a single chair overseeing each one.

Sales

• In England, New Victoria Hospital chooses Meditech Expanse, hosted on Google Cloud Platform.
• Arkansas Heart Hospital extends its use of Oracle Health EHR and patient accounting to its ambulatory clinics and two hospitals.

People

Net Health hires John Gresham (ValueHealth) as president of its wound care division.

Frank Jackson, MBA (Verinovum) joins MRO as SVP of clinical quality and payer solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

A HIMSS session on Thursday covered the International Patient Summary, a standards-based method of giving clinicians access to a patient’s basic medical information by scanning a QR code.

Verato will incorporate Google Cloud technology in its enterprise identity management solutions.

Privacy and Security

Lurie Children’s Hospital is conducting an investigation into the claims by the hacker group that was responsible for its recent ransomware attack that it has sold the hospital’s data.

Other

A study published by Epic Research finds that people who were prescribed Eli Lilly’s tirazepatide (Zepbound, Mounjaro) lost a median of 15% of their body weight in one year, the highest percentage loss among five GLP-1 drugs.

Doctors and employees of Copley Hospital protest the termination of ED doctor Liam Gannon, MD, who says he was fired for warning hospital administration in 2020 that the EHR they were considering – and later bought – could compromise patient safety and care quality due to problems with reported delayed or missing orders.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health announces enhancements its clinical decision support solutions including UpToDate, UpToDate Lexidrug, UpToDate Patient Engagement, and UpToDate Digital Architect.
• Findhelp welcomes Essex Regional Educational Services Commission, Delta Population Health Institute, and Memorial Hermann Health System to its network.
• Forbes names Impact Advisors to its list of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms for 2024.
• FinThrive releases a new Healthcare Rethink Podcast, “Let’s Super Charge Care Management.”
• The Point-of-Care Partners Podcast features First Databank President Bob Katter, “Empowering Pharmacists: How Health IT Can Facilitate Seamless Data Exchange & Ease Workloads.”
• Healthcare IT Leaders names Shelley Simkins (ProNexus Advisory) Elite Advisor.

Blog Posts

• Empowering healthcare professionals with trusted and unified clinical decision support solutions (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Five Best Practices for Healthcare Contact Centers (Five9)
• The next rung up: Building organization-wide “Leadership Ladders” (Laudio)
• How Does AI SolutionOps Work? (Lucem Health)
• Preparing Your EHR for Disaster (Medhost)
• Becoming a master of change in a dynamic industry (Meditech)

Contacts

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

From HIMSS with Dr. Jayne 3/13/24

It was nice enough for people to sit out on the lawn on Wednesday. The giant HIMSS letters of the past have been replaced by this globe that proudly sports the Informa Markets branding.

The exhibit hall remained crowded this morning, with plenty of people feeling free to stop and have conversations in the main aisle, which at times made navigating difficult. Absent are the transportation carts that used to be present at previous HIMSS conferences, which also served to keep people moving. The exhibit hall begins to get thin around the 6500 aisle, which brings back memories of having to look for booths up in the thousands.

The public spaces were starting to show signs of wear by lunch time, with empty water coolers and overflowing trash bins as people took their lunches outside. I found a full water cooler over by the Government pavilion, which was in a separate exhibit hall that is unconnected to the rest of the show floor. The red, white, and blue ceiling décor was a nice touch.

Luggage storage areas began filling up in the morning, which is typically on a HIMSS Wednesday. As I visited my first booth, I noticed some weird orange spots on my name tag. It turns out that the bubbly fizzy drink of last night was responsible, leaving sticky dots as a reminder of the fun I had.

Nabla had a cool retro typewriter in their booth, which was inundated when I went by. I’m looking forward to learning more about their solution and how systems are implementing it.

This is the first time I’ve seen crepes at HIMSS.

Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO) brought their A game for both shoes and socks.

First Databank delivered with HIMSS-approved axe throwing to replace their carnival game. Attendees were really getting into it, and I saw a couple of serious contenders at the end of the day.

From Bill Spooner: “Re: HIMSS. It is 30 years since my first HIMSS and I’m happy to partaking vicariously. I’ll be interested in your assessment, particularly a good comparison with VIVE. Educational substance, provider attendance (especially senior leadership and docs), hyped vendor announcements, networking, extracurricular activity, etc. If you have to choose one, which will bring the greater value? If only one were to survive, which are you rooting for?” Vendor friends told me their numbers from HIMSS indicated that there were in excess of 8,000 provider-side attendees, but they weren’t feeling that during their interactions. Several said they felt that there was a lot of business-to-business activity going on, with people trying to sell solutions to each other or talking about partnerships. I didn’t attend ViVE this year, so my comparison is more than a year old, but people were certainly talking about the two events. ViVE leads in the hype department and there were plenty of comments about the fact that it has better food and that it is included in the price. ViVE also costs twice as much to attend, so I’m sure if HIMSS wanted to up their fees, they could do better with food choices. HIMSS has also put a main stage on the show floor similar to ViVE, plus smaller embedded theaters around the hall, so it is trying to adapt.

I saw few CMOs and CMIOs in my travels, with mostly director and VP-level folks from provider organizations. HIMSS has better Continuing Medical Education offerings, so it will probably win my vote since I pay out of pocket to come and have to see tangible value. My previous ViVE experience felt like it was a “see and be seen” situation versus trying to help providers meet their state and specialty-mandated educational needs. As far as keynote speakers, the last several years have been pretty meh, but there are so many talking heads in the industry that I’m not sure who it would take for me to find them exciting.

From International Women’s Day: “Re: HIMSS. I always appreciate your hot takes. Thought you might be interested in their nursing mother’s rooms. It’s sadly not surprising that the ‘wellness rooms’ in Orlando and pretty abysmal. I used the one in Lobby C – it has a chair, a table, and a plug in a dusty room that could use a good vacuuming. No sink or fridge (fridge is kind of understandable since I’m sure they don’t want to be liable for safe breast milk storage). I’m pleased that they at least have rooms and put them on the map, but it’s a bit ironic at a healthcare conference to not have better accommodations for nursing moms.” I had peeked into one of the rooms earlier in the week before the comment arrived and found it to be drab. The room is also a shared space that invites people for prayer and meditation, which from experience have slightly different vibes than those that are channeled while trying to pump breast milk. Anyone who needs to wash pump parts would have to go across the hall to the restrooms, which have been plus/minus this week as far as having adequate supplies of paper towels and general cleanliness. I haven’t been a nursing mother in recent years, but generally I think I would prefer one of the nursing pods that you see in airports to a dusty multi-purpose space.

I spent some time at the Epic booth today, learning about new offerings and how they are helping their clients make the most of multi-million-dollar investments. There’s a staff room behind the Epic booth where workers can get drinks and recharge, since they are on-stage with clients a lot of the time. Epic also manages their own connectivity and tech behind the scenes, and I caught a peek at the team sequestered in the back of the booth making the magic happen. I hope they get some rest after this busy week.

Shoes of the day are courtesy of Relatient’s always dapper Jonathan Shivers. The colored laces are the key.

Edifecs featured ballet dancer Misty Copeland on their annual inspirational t-shirt. Past tributes have included Dolly Parton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

As usual, the puppy park was hopping. Who doesn’t love a puppy?

Today, it was back to the virtual salt mines, and I started traveling at 6 a.m. Orlando is one of my least-favorite airports, and it didn’t do anything to redeem itself this morning. TSA lines appeared fairly short, but apparently I was there at shift change and they were moving slower than anticipated. Additionally, they have an uneven number of PreCheck lanes compared to the number of ID screeners, which resulted in some lines not being called and passengers becoming exasperated. They had clearly posted signage about putting your passport on the scanner, but I was yelled at for not putting my boarding pass on the scanner. I haven’t had to present a boarding pass at a US airport in more than a year, so who knows what’s going on with TSA and why they’re operating outside their clearly posted process.

How was your Orlando airport experience? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.