Morning Headlines 3/14/22

Oracle (ORCL) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Oracle reports Q3 results, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings, and announces that it will target the entire integrated healthcare ecosystem – a strategy that influenced its decision to acquire Cerner.

Avant-garde Health Launches Comprehensive Surgical Care Improvement Analytics Platform and Announces $12 Million of Series A Funding Led by Fulcrum Equity Partners

Avant-garde Health, which specializes in analytics for surgical and procedure-based care, raises $12 million in a Series A funding round.

Prenosis Announces Investment from PACE Healthcare Capital, bringing Total Funding to Over $20 million

Precision medicine and clinical dataset vendor Prenosis secures funding from Pace Healthcare Capital, bringing its total raised to over $20 million.

Monday Morning Update 3/14/22

Top News

From the Oracle earnings call on Friday, following Q3 results that beat revenue expectations but fell short on earnings:

• CTO and Chairman Larry Ellison says that healthcare is “the largest industry on Earth” and Oracle has as ERP/HCM customers Tenet, Kaiser, Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Northwell, Mount Sinai, and Atrium.
• He notes that Oracle is replacing Kronos in 83-hospital Community Health Systems.
• He says that hospitals are an Uber-like gig economy because doctors and now nurses are increasingly independent contractors, making workforce payment complicated.
• Ellison says that the company will be “going after the entire integrated ecosystem,” which influenced its decision to acquire Cerner. 
• He also called out connecting clinical trials with hospitals and tracking hospital supplies by RFID.

ORCL shares are down 15% versus the Dow’s 6% loss since the December 20 announcement that it will acquire Cerner for $28 billion

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

ViVE attendees sent me a few comments about attending. Feel free to send more thoughts, and for those who will have attended both ViVE and HIMSS22, to weigh in afterward on how the events compared.

Here’s what poll respondents said about their life now versus a year ago.

New poll to your right or here: What will you be doing at work this week during HIMSS22?

Last-Minute HIMSS22 Notes

• Don’t forget to set your clocks forward Sunday morning. Sunrise in Orlando each day will be 7:30 a.m. and sunset at 7:30 p.m.
• Expect warm but rainy and cloudy weather in Orlando, with daily highs around 80.
• Masks are optional for in-person attendees.
• Review the pocket guide to plan your days before you arrive.
• Download the HIMSS22 app for IOS or Android.
• Tuesday’s opening keynote is at 8:30 a.m. and the exhibit hall opens at 10:00 a.m.
• Dr. Jayne and I will report from the Orlando ground, while Jenn — atypically from my usual HIMSS week process – will publish daily headlines and news posts.

Webinars

April 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “19 Massive Best Practices We’ve Learned from 4 Million Telehealth Visits.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, founder, president, and CEO, Mend. Virtual visits have graduated from a quickly implemented technical novelty to a key healthcare strategy. The challenge now is to define how telehealth can work seamlessly with in-person visits. This webinar will address patient satisfaction, reducing no-show rates to single digits, and using technology to make telehealth easy to use and accessible for all patients. The presenter will share best practices that have been gleaned from millions of telehealth visits and how they have been incorporated into a leading telemedicine and AI-powered patient engagement platform.

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

Sales

• Genesis Physician’s Group (TX) will develop the GenesisLink HIE for the DFW area using KONZA’s national network.
• API platform vendor Particle Health will use Verato Univeral MPI to track patients and data flow.
• In England, Bedfordshire Hospitals chooses VitalHub’s Intouch patient flow solutions to help manage its elective care backlog.

People

Amazon hires Aaron Martin, MBA (Providence) as VP of health. Martin was Providence’s EVP, chief digital officer of Providence St. Joseph’s Health, and managing GP of Providence’s venture fund. He had been with the health system since January 2014. Before that, he worked for Amazon’s self-publishing business for eight years.

Relatient hires Craig McCoy (Ciox Health) as chief growth officer, names Josh Byrd (Savista) as VP of marketing, and promotes Emily Tyson, MBA to COO.

Eric Rose, MD (US Department of Veterans Affairs) joins precision medicine drug discovery TenSixteen Bio as head of clinical informatics.

University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and UC Health name Umberto Tachinardi, MD, MS (Regenstrief Institute) as VP / chief health digital officer and associate deal of health informatics.

Eric Sato, MBA (Baxter International) joins Symplr as VP of marketing.

Rauland hires Michelle Allen, MEM (Ametek) as division VP and business unit manager.

Announcements and Implementations

Vyne Medical launches Refyne Cloud Fax as part of its SaaS-based Refyne denials management platform.

WVU Medicine goes live on Volpara Health’s AI-based breast imaging software tools, which it will use to maintain and improve mammographic quality in its 24 facilities in four states.

Government and Politics

Congress re-inserts a ban on funding a national patient identifier in HHS’s proposed FY2022 budget.

Florida-based government medical contractor Comprehensive Health Services will pay $930,000 to settle false claims charges that it billed the State Department the $500,000 cost of developing a secure EHR,  but left paper record scans on a drive that non-clinicians could access.

Other

A Cedars-Sinai study finds that 0.25% of patients whose Apple Watch warned them of possible atrial fibrillation were candidates for starting anticoagulants. The percentage rose to just 36% even when AFib was positively diagnosed. The authors conclude that while the benefit of the Watch’s AFib detection was tiny, the combined Watch and EHR data could help target those patients with the highest potential benefit.

Sponsor Updates

• Olive adds expanded connectivity and integration features to its automation platform for healthcare processes and operations.
• Optum sponsors and will present during SXSW’s Health and MedTech conference track March 14 in Austin, TX.
• IDC’s latest Marketscape Report recognizes Symplr’s Payer solution as a Major Player for its comprehensive offering and product vision.
• Protenus publishes the “2022 Breach Barometer Report.”
• Sectra publishes its nine-month interim report, highlighting top rankings in customer satisfaction surveys in the US, Canada, and Asia/Oceania.
• Upfront Healthcare publishes an update on its growth in 2021, doubling in size and revenue for the third straight year.

Blog Posts

• Patient Journey Planning: Learn How to Make a Great First Impression for Your Brand (OptimizeRx)
• 3 Ways to Make the Most out of a Consumer Health Platform (PatientBond)
• HIPAA-Compliant Texting: Tips on Patient Communication (PerfectServe)
• How St. Luke’s University Health Network is Using Technology for Drug Shortage Preparedness and Response (Premier)
• Ensuring Compliance Policy Adherence with AI (Protenus)
• Overcoming Revenue Cycle Management Staffing Challenges (RCxRules)
• Six Tips for Remote Care Success (Redox)
• How can sentiment analysis improve customer experience? (Talkdesk)
• The Value of a Modern Resident Scheduling System (TigerConnect)
• Creating a Better Patient Experience for Urogynecologic Surgery (Twistle)
• Protect Safety and Well-Being to Retain a Vibrant and Engaged Healthcare Workforce (Vocera)
• 5 Front-Office Software Must-Haves (WebPT)
• Eight Ways to Reduce Patient No-Show Rates (Well Health)

Contacts

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

ViVE Conference Attendee Comments

I asked readers who attended the inaugural ViVE conference, offered by CHIME and HLTH, to give feedback about their experience.

CHIME Track

Even though this was a conference that was about innovation and transformation, the rest of the CHIME conference emphasized the focus groups that CHIME keeps pushing members to attend. If you decline after several attempts to bring you in at $100 each, they stick multiple sessions on your calendar anyway. I assume they promised the vendors that are paying that they would have a certain number of attendees.

CHIME Chief Analytics Officer Steve Lieber described how CHIME is now going to harvest all the information that its members submit as part of Most Wired for a new analytics service. If we want to do some benchmarking with this data, we can now pay them for access to information we handed over to them. Will make me now consider if Most Wired is really worth it, which I already had doubts about anyway. I think this recognition has run its course.

I actually spent less time on the CHIME stuff, other than the focus groups, and felt comfortable among the vendors, which is not usually the case. Perhaps that also is a comment on the CHIME topics for the larger sessions.

CHIME did a good job, but it felt more disjointed than previous spring CIO forums when it was the day before HIMSS.

Most of the CHIME general sessions had more people than seats available, so I suspect CHIME was pleased.

I enjoyed the combo of the two events and felt like I attended CHIME and HIMSS in one setting, which is a plus for me.

CIO Participation

There was little CIO representation on the exhibitor floor. It was easy to distinguish attendees as CHIME members, as we had a dark blue and black badge lanyard and everyone else had a neon green one. As I walked the floor, I was usually one of very few without a green lanyard. 

It was a nice effort to attempt to bring the startup community together with the CIO community. One would think that would be a good thing, but it I do not think it worked. From the outside looking in, it may have seemed to resonate with everyone buzzing around, but it was really what amounted to two separate conferences.

There were plenty of CIOs walking around the exhibit hall and the corridors. While chatting with a colleague for 20 minutes, I counted 15 other CIOs that walked past. The CIOs did not have a badge that stood out, so it might have been harder for those who don’t know faces.

Education Sessions

Some of the fireside chats and startup roundtables were really interesting. I have great respect for many of these founders who are putting a lot of effort into solving some very discrete health care problems.

Hosted Buyer Program

I paid the registration fee instead of agreeing to meet with eight vendors so I could control who I spoke to. Others may have found value in that program.

As an academic medical center CIO, I loved the hosted buyer concept and found it quite valuable. I received a registration rebate in return for having eight 15-minute meetings with vendors – both parties had to agree to meet in advance.

Exhibit Hall

It was low key on the exhibit hall floor since each booth has limited staff and most were approachable. I talked to many interesting companies, even if they did become repetitive. Established, non-startup vendors seemed underwhelmed about the value to them for attending. .

As an exhibitor, you’ll get zero out of it if you don’t do pre-conference prep make appointments. You can’t just show-up and hope that the CIO of a 17-hospital system takes time to pop into your booth just because they like the fuzzy socks you’re giving away.

You would have had a field day with all the booth workers in their phones as CIOs walked right past them.

Many of the CHIME CIOs were on the exhibit floor. Our booth was non-stop busy with questions and demos. Very happy with the experience and looking forward to next year in Nashville.

Overall Conference Reaction

There was little use for the CHIME side of ViVE. If you look at it as just a smaller HLTH conference, participating as if it was, it delivered.

I found ViVE to be very well done for a first-time effort.

The number of startups and PE firms was impressive.

As an introvert, I was on stimulation overload by the end of the day Tuesday and looking for quiet. I was out of practice for this type of event, and frankly have not stood so long over a two-day period in some time.

Smaller booths, fewer vendors, and the reverse trade show (Hosted Buyers) format were fresh changes from HIMSS.

I also love the smaller cities it can go to versus Orlando, Las Vegas, and Chicago.

I see it as my new choice over HIMSS.

The vibe of the event was very high energy. People seemed to feel paroled from COVID and I can say I saw and talked with many CIOs in the vendor area. Most of us were seeing vendors we knew, friends in the business, and some of us tried very hard to learn something new without being pressed for a sales commitment. The challenge, as the venue was so big and beautiful, was to timely get to all of your events.

I will certainly go back.

I will never attend HIMSS again. ViVE was everything I hoped it would be and more. It was not too big, not to small = just right. Kudos to CHIME + HLTH for an outstanding event.

As a 20+ year HIMSS attendee, I found ViVe refreshing and energizing. Fun touches like a DJ, Betty White tribute, bright signage and excellent navigation in the right-sized convention center were truly appreciated. I attended HLTH last Fall and felt the educational sessions included too much future casting, not enough real-world implementation. This was not the case at ViVe’22. The UC Davis Summit was particularly helpful along with sessions that included CIOs (like Vanderbilt’s CIO on obtaining ROI for IT investments). Great work to Team ViVE’22!

ViVE was exciting as it brought together health systems, vendors, and partners who collectively were looking for innovative ways to transform healthcare with technology. ViVE wasn’t the same old, same old HIT trade show with typical sellers, buyers, and tire-kickers. Rather, the content and interaction was fresh, with an intentional focus on digital transformation in healthcare.”

ViVE was great. It could be because it was in real life for the first time and without masks but they did a good job imho of balancing the various elements of a conference (education, fun, & networking).

Weekender 3/11/22

Weekly News Recap

• Symplr acquires GreenLight Medical.
• Oracle shares drop after earnings miss, questions about its healthcare ambitions tied to acquiring Cerner for $28 billion.
• EU will publish a governance framework for health data that will support cross-border health information exchange.
• Epic announces Garden Plot, an Epic version for independent medical groups.
• Former Livongo executives launch Homeward Health.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions acquires Summit Healthcare.
• Microsoft closes its $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance.

Best Reader Comments

I don’t think [telehealth] payment parity is a good idea. Payment parity is just going to drive more money to big regional health systems. They can manage physician recruitment to address supply, they can afford to buy the technology to do the visits and they can afford to buy the marketing to find those existing high spending consumers. Pairing telehealth visits with marketing materials makes a lot of sense, which is why you see health systems talk about telehealth in the same sentence as digital front door aka the health systems website. If you make telehealth pay less than in person visits, you’ll keep it cheaper and drive the organizations doing telehealth national. (IANAL)

My guess is large independents want an EHR that is a simple, cost efficient billing machine. They don’t want to take on a lot of overhead and their providers want a UI that they can use very quickly … I’ve watched some long-time users chart in the green screen Meditech. They’re so fast. They don’t lift their hands off the keyboard and they have the exact timing of when Meditech loads the next screen. I think of them every time I’m working on some feature that I know is going to get ingrained in business users’ hands. If I can get it to no clicks, then they’ll be able to work as fast as I can load the next screen, so it better be fast. (IANAL)

Frankly I’d rather Epic do more to help independents remain independent (but with fluid chart exchange through Care Everywhere). AFAIK Consolidation in the healthcare industry has not produced measurable benefits for health outcomes or patient costs, but it has certainly helped with profits for the large systems. (Elizabeth H. H. Holmes)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

HIMSS22 attendees – mask-wearing is now optional per revised CDC guidance. I would add that stiff business dress is also optional, so please bring some of that ViVE beach spirit to Orlando by dressing down a little and wearing comfortable shoes in testing your long-dormant conference muscles cautiously.

ViVE moves to Nashville’s downtown Music City Center next spring. Here’s my advice for HIMSS – if HIMSS22 attendance is as low as many predict, add the smaller, cooler, and more authentic cities back into the rotation instead of just tourist-overrun Orlando and Las Vegas (with the more interesting Chicago snuck in occasionally). A conference half the size of HIMSS at its peak has choices.

Lost in the nether regions that lie between ViVE and HIMSS is SXSW, which runs today through next Sunday in Austin. The health and medtech track is today through Tuesday. SXSW once seemed to be the up-and coming digital health conference, but I suspect it will be outflanked by ViVE, if for no other reason than health system executives don’t spend their own money to attend conferences and expensing ViVE sounds more justifiable than SXSW.

Meanwhile, HIMSS acquired the Health 2.0 conference in 2017 and said it would continue operating under that name, but I’m thinking HIMSS sold that name (or else Indian trademark law is opportunistically loose) because a Health 2.0 Conference website suggests no HIMSS involvement, an all-India based staff, and a home office in an Alabama outlet mall that is shared by similar conferences. They’re showing a US conference April 11-13 in Las Vegas, listing no speakers and a handful of exhibitors I’ve never heard of, claiming they expect over 1,000 attendees at $2,000 a head. The last HIMSS-owned Health 2.0 conference seems to have been in late 2020 and hasn’t been heard from since.

I wrote this week about the investor-backed Chief private network for C-suite women. I heard the next day from someone who had just received a response to her five-question application to join. She was first told that the company has a backlog of thousands of membership requests and wouldn’t be able to schedule the mandatory interview for many months. She almost immediately got another email saying that her qualifications were sound and the interview would be fast-tracked to the next few days. Right after that, the company sent her an email advising her that her job title wasn’t high enough to join (she’s an executive director with no “C” or “VP” in her title) and they wouldn’t waste time interviewing her. I think she expected more polish from a membership group whose dues start at $6,000 per year.

.

Two teenaged Harvard students, one of whom developed a COVID-19 tracking site two years ago, create an “Airbnb lite” type site that matches refugees from Ukraine with people in neighboring countries who are offering places to stay. They say government-run sites are too hard to use and feature little more than a text box entry form and a display of those entries.

In Case You Missed It

• News 3/11/22
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 3/10/22
• HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS22
• Readers Write: Reimagining Healthcare in 2022 with Personal Emergency Response Services
• HIStalk Interviews Sanjula Jain, PhD, SVP, Trilliant Health
• News 3/9/22
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/7/22
• HIStalk Interviews Anjum Ahmed, MBBS, Chief Medical Officer, Agfa HealthCare
• Monday Morning Update 3/7/22

Get Involved

Sponsor
Report a news item or rumor (anonymous or not)
Sign up for email updates
Connect on LinkedIn
Contact Mr. H

Morning Headlines 3/11/22

Symplr Purchases GreenLight Medical, Leading Provider of Healthcare Supply Chain Management Software

Symplr acquires GreenLight Medical, which offers healthcare supplychain management software.

UPMC and Kyruus Launch Strategic Partnership to Transform Digital Patient Access and Care Navigation

UPMC makes an unspecified investment in Kyruus and will collaborate in developing the company’s ProviderMatch patient access platform.

Colorado-based digital health leader launches new startup with $3M in seed funding

RxRevu founder Carm Huntress launches Credo, a Denver-based startup focused on digitizing and automating the medical  records retrieval process, with a $3 million investment.

Vivante Health Raises $16M in Series A Round Led by 7wireVentures; Adds Multiple Fortune 500 Clients

Vivante Health, which offers employers a digestive health management program, raises $16 million in a Series A funding round.

News 3/11/22

Top News

Symplr acquires GreenLight Medical, which offers healthcare supply management software.

The deal is Symplr’s 11th acquisition since November 2018, when it was acquired by private equity firm Clearlake Capital.

The company’s previous acquisitions include Conduent’s Midas solutions (a $340 million deal in January 2022), Halo Health, SpinFusion, HealthcareSource, Phynd, TractManager, ComplyTrack, The Patient Safety Co., IntelliSoft Group, and API Healthcare.

Clearlake provided Symplr with $1.6 billion of equity capital in January 2022 to purse its organic growth and acquisitions.

Reader Comments

From Hyaline Tissue: “Re: ViVE. It was entirely vendors – I don’t think any of the CHIME CIOs were on the exhibit floor, although I saw some floating around the events. It was focused on startups and people working on big problems, like interoperability, and trying to move the needle. Food, drinks, and events were incredible and Miami is a much cooler and fun location than Orlando. ViVE is clearly the replacement for Health 2.0 and its venture capital money and there’s a LOT of that floating in right now. HLTH obviously knows how to make an event that VC money wants to hang around. They were intentional about doing well those things that HIMSS has done poorly and I think they will get bigger very quickly.” Thanks for the report. I would enjoy hearing feedback from others and I’ll keep you anonymous. I will also ask for similar feedback after next week for folks who attended both ViVE and HIMSS22 – either as exhibitors or regular attendees — and thus can offer the inevitable comparison. The big marketing win for ViVE, other than HLTH and CHIME themselves, goes to Clearsense, which sponsored the apparently amazing performance of Wyclef Jean. It’s going to be tough for attendees of either or both conferences to return to staring at screens looking out windows at wintry monochrome. Maybe you can recreate the conference vibe at home by wearing a Hawaiian shirt with shorts, putting a box of sand underfoot, and standing in front of your coffeemaker for 20 minutes before pouring.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The impending presence of a bomb cyclone in the Northeast makes me think of previous HIMSS conferences, where the frazzled Meditech folks would show up a day or two late waiting for Boston to dig out. Orlando weather calls for mid-70s with clouds and occasional rain Monday through Thursday.

Here’s what my sponsors told me they will be doing at HIMSS22.

I see on LinkedIn that Hyland will once again feature “corporate magician” David Harris, aka Magic Boy, aptly described as “a skilled marketer in the body of an entertainer.” He’s my second-favorite HIMSS entertainer after the amazing magician, psychic, and comic Bob Garner, who I see from his Instagram has lost 69 pounds and a visual 30 years by moving to a vegan diet, embracing meditation, and exercising like a madman.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor TigerConnect. The Santa Monica, CA-based company offers the healthcare industry’s most widely adopted and integrated communication platform, bringing together all aspects of care collaboration, physician and resident scheduling, patient engagement, and alarm management into a single, scalable, and mobile solution. TigerConnect modernizes the way doctors, nurses, care teams, staff, and patients communicate – inside a facility, across multiple locations, and throughout the healthcare ecosystem. A cornerstone for digital transformation, the TigerConnect platform integrates with EHRs, nurse call, scheduling, and other systems to unify communication, streamline workflows, reduce costs, and improve patient outcomes. HIPAA-compliant and HITRUST-certified, TigerConnect delivers 99.99% verifiable uptime and is trusted by more than 7,000 healthcare organizations across the US and Canada. Thanks to TigerConnect for supporting HIStalk.

I found this new TigerConnect overview on YouTube.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Bravado Health of West Palm Beach, FL. Bravado Health’s award-winning designers created the dynamic patient engagement platform, Ayva, to simplify the care journey from preparation to recovery across the entire spectrum of surgeries, procedures, and disease management. Ayva packages care plans, educational videos, messaging, remote patient monitoring, and more into an accessible web-based experience that’s proven to engage patients, improve outcomes, and increase patient satisfaction. Ayva shares engagement data with the patient’s care team, helping clinicians make more well-informed decisions. Say hello to them next week at HIMSS22 in Booth 5349. Thanks to Bravado Health for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

April 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “19 Massive Best Practices We’ve Learned from 4 Million Telehealth Visits.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, founder, president, and CEO, Mend. Virtual visits have graduated from a quickly implemented technical novelty to a key healthcare strategy. The challenge now is to define how telehealth can work seamlessly with in-person visits. This webinar will address patient satisfaction, reducing no-show rates to single digits, and using technology to make telehealth easy to use and accessible for all patients. The presenter will share best practices that have been gleaned from millions of telehealth visits and how they have been incorporated into a leading telemedicine and AI-powered patient engagement platform.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Oracle shares were down 6% in early after-hours trading Thursday as the company announced Q3 results that beat revenue expectations but fells short on earnings. Some analysts noted before the announcement that the company’s pending acquisition of Cerner has caused investor consternation and urged the company to explain its healthcare vision.

Healthcare Triangle announces Q4 results: revenue up 2%, EPS –$0.12 versus $0.07. The company went public in October 2021 at an IPO price of $4.00. Share price jumped 13% to $1.03 following the earnings announcement, valuing the company at $36 million.

UPMC makes an unspecified investment in Kyruus and will collaborate in developing the company’s ProviderMatch patient access platform. The company has raised $148 million through a Series D funding round.

Vivante Health, which offers employers a digestive health management program, raises $16 million in a Series A funding round.

Sales

• Axia Women’s Health chooses NextGate’s EMPI. 
• UNC Health will implement Philips Oncology Pathways software that gives oncologists evidence-based treatment suggestions and matches patients to open clinical trials.
• Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare will implement Health Catalyst’s Data Operating System and DOS Marts.

People

LexisNexis Risk Solutions hires Kelly Thompson, JD (Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative) to lead its newly formed Government Health Team.

Wireless ultrasound vendor Clarius Mobile Health names Ohad Arazi, JD (Zebra Medical Vision) as president. He will take over as CEO later this year.

Announcements and Implementations

Google Health previews Conditions, an enhancement to Care Studio that extracts condition information from EHR data and organizes them by acuity with access to related labs, meds, reports, and notes. 

Health Data Movers announces the ACE Team of advisory consulting executives who will offer on-demand services such as interim C-suite, providers, analytics, data integration, and sales and marketing. 

Quil launches Assure, a connected home platform for seniors who are aging in place that monitors routines based on the individual’s privacy choices.

TigerConnect adds resident scheduling to its physician scheduling solution, which helps chief residents efficiently create schedules that comply with rotation time requirements.

Medhost launches a clinician-driven anesthesia management solution that provides medication documentation, vital signs graphing, anesthesia charting, and orders.

Orbic launches SmartWrist, a smart watch for Verizon / Android users that measures pulse oxygen, pulse, body temperature; tracks fitness goals and sleep; and offers SOS and fall detection with auto-dial of emergency contacts or services. It uses geofencing to enable alerts for when the wearer leaves a designated safe zone.

Healthwise announces Advise, which allows Epic customers to provide tailored, evidence-based health education to patients in 19 languages.

Sphere adds digital wallet support for Google Pay and Apple Pay for patient payments in its TrustCommerce platform that is integrated with Epic MyChart.

Anthem will change its name to Elevance Health, noting that its business extends beyond offering Blue Cross health plans to digital health and other services that involve 118 million consumers and 90,000 employees. The company was known as WellPoint before changing its name to Anthem in 2014. ANTM shares are up 39% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s flat performance, valuing the company at $113 billion. President and CEO Gail Boudreaux, MBA, who previously served as CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was an all-American in women’s basketball and shot-put at Dartmouth. 

NTT Data launches a Hospital at Home solution to help US health systems develop home-based care models. It includes a command center, acute rapid response, and support for advanced clinical tools such as virtual reality, remote imaging, and robotics.

Get Well enhances its digital engagement solution for payers to support digital member navigation, member experience and care gap closure, digital care management, and vulnerable population engagement. Sutter Health Aetna reported a 25% increase in member retention and a 10% increase in PCP visits from implementing its member navigation solution.

CareMesh launches a public developer sandbox to allow hospitals, physician groups, payers, and life insurance companies to find and contact providers using its national provider directory. The directory contains 20 million FHIR R4 records from 400 sources that are accessed via configurable APIs.

LG and Amwell will co-develop device-based virtual care solutions, starting with solutions for use in hospitals, where LG is the leading provider of smart TVs for patient rooms.

A new KLAS report on healthcare AI finds that previous market share leader Jvion has lost many customers who report financial constraints and lack of outcomes, ClosedLoop.ai scores highly in customer satisfaction, while Health Catalyst has seen satisfaction jump as it offers more analytics-powered prescriptive guidance. Customers of Cerner and Epic report struggles to get their published models up and running, and while Epic customers complain about nickel-and-diming since prebuilt models are priced individually, they are increasingly licensing its Cognitive Computer Developer Platform that allows them to deploy their own models. Respondents provided some tips:

• Start with analytics before jumping into predictive or prescriptive models.
• Identify the problem you are trying to solve, then decide whether AI is the right tool.
• Set clear goals for use cases.
• Don’t obsess with perfecting incoming data. The machine learning should be applied to data in its current form.
• Model testing takes longer than you expect.
• Focus on defining the intervention more than perfecting the model.

Government and Politics

The EU will publish a governance framework for health data that will affect EHRs, medical software products, and wellness apps, according to a news site that reviewed a draft. The goals of the regulation are to increase efficiency, advance scientific research, and foster the development of new digital health services and products. A proposed European Digital Identity Framework would establish cross-border functionality; individuals could restrict or share their data; the allowed secondary use of patient data would be explicitly spelled out; and a European Digital and Health Data Board of experts would foster cooperation among authorities. The proposal would require EHRs to be certified for interoperability and security and a common infrastructure called MyHealth@EU would be used to exchange health data across borders.

The VA says last week’s unplanned, two-day Cerner downtime at its only live site in Spokane – in which admissions were halted because patient screens were showing the information of different patients – was caused by a Cerner programming error . A review has found only a few corrupted records so far, some of those at its Columbus location where Cerner is not yet live. The VA admits that it probably shouldn’t have been making programming changes so close to the system’s next go-live in Walla Walla, WA on March 26.

Sixteen Midwestern defendants who worked for a chain of pain clinics, including 12 doctors, receive prison sentences for a $250 million healthcare fraud scheme in which they refused to prescribe opioids unless patients – which included addicts and drug dealers — agreed to being given high-reimbursing back injections. Their pill mill doctors worked just a few hours each week in hoping to avoid DEA attention, but even then were among Michigan’s highest prescribers of oxycodone at 6.6 million doses. The doctors bought expensive real estate, luxury cars, indoor basketball courts and swimming pools, and gold bars.

Privacy and Security

A TV station notes that The Work Number holds the payroll records of more than half the country’s workforce, as the Equifax-owned company is the payroll outsourcer for two million employers. They will, for $55, verify someone’s employment and provide their pay history. Equifax also provides Social Security number validation, education verification, property ownership verification, and IRS tax records. Chinese military hackers breached Equifax in 2017, compromising 150 million credit reports.

Other

I don’t usually post job openings, but I saw on LinkedIn that Walgreens is looking for a manager of clinical informatics to work remotely, which I though might interest someone. Job responsibilities included working with its Healthcare Clinic providers to optimize system workflow and use, perform release testing, and lead EHR training. Three years of health informatics experience and two years of direct leadership are required, while a graduate informatics degree and clinician experience are preferred.

A hospital in India draws review-bombing after someone claiming to be a surgeon there posts a Twitter video of himself performing surgery, complete with close-ups of the patient’s face and medical records, during which he also argued with gaming fanboys that PlayStation is better than Xbox.

Sponsor Updates

• Mach7 Technologies receives new orders from existing customers Trinity Health and Penn State’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
• KLAS recognizes PatientBond at ViVE for performance.
• Nuance expands AI-powered reporting features in its PowerScribe platform.
• NTT Data and Lirio announce a strategic alliance focused on enabling healthcare providers to deliver more personalized care.

Blog Posts

• How Partnerships can Transform Healthcare (Ft. Josh Sol & Nick Desai) (The HCI Group)
• How FHIR Solutions Do Double Duty for IT Teams and Clinicians (Healthwise)
• Extending an Analytics Program to Support the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) and Improve Outcomes (Impact Advisors)
• Inside the Cyber Insurance Application Process (Imprivata)
• Overcoming Revenue Cycle Management Staffing Challenges (RCx Rules)
• Healthy Databots: The Future of Healthcare Data Quality (InterSystems)
• Ontology’s importance in EHR workflows (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Do doctors really care about interoperability? … and other insights from Day 2 of ViVE2022 (Lyniate)
• Medhost at HIMSS22: Elevating the Digital Health Experience Through Innovation (Medhost)
• Physical Therapy Technology to Improve Your Practice in 2022 (MWTherapy)
• What is patient engagement for a VP of Patient Experience? A guide for CEOs (Nuance)
• Five healthcare interoperability myths debunked (Nordic)

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 3/10/22

Healthcare workers are still at risk for COVID infections. Even though vaccines have been proven to reduce hospitalization and death, there’s still risk of infection and the potential for subsequent disability. A growing body of evidence shows long-term cardiovascular and neurological complications from even mild cases of the disease, and an estimate of over 1.5 million adults in the US who are seeking permanent disability determination following infection.

During my recent visit to the hospital as a patient, I don’t recall seeing hospital employees wearing anything other than surgical masks. Some patients were wearing KN95 masks, but it made me wonder whether wearing surgical masks was an employee choice or whether there is still a supply shortage for respirators or other types of masks.

With that in mind, I wasn’t surprised to learn that OSHA plans to increase healthcare facility inspections to assess preparedness for the next COVID-19 variant that might emerge. The initial focus will be on facilities that were previously cited or had complaints filed against them. OSHA is supposed to be finalizing an infectious disease standard for worker protection, and for the healthcare workers who have been permanently impacted by the pandemic, it can’t come soon enough.

I’m a history buff, so was quite excited to see the announcement that Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been located nearly two miles below the surface of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. It’s remarkably well preserved due to the extremely cold waters and the lack of wood-damaging organisms. The technology needed to locate the wreck is pretty remarkable, but so is the determination of those who worked in difficult conditions to make it happen. The ship’s resting place is protected as an historic monument under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, so nothing was disturbed in the exploration of the wreckage. Kudos to the anonymous donor who financed the $10 million mission.

Healthcare news and announcements are at a minimum this week, other than Epic’s announcement regarding Garden Plot. My inbox is full of poorly worded but jargon-rich emails practically begging me to visit various HIMSS booths. Having more than three buzzwords in the first sentence dramatically lowers my chances of actually showing up.

I’ve also received some tips on pretty cool things that will be revealed next week but am sworn to secrecy, so you’ll have to follow along for the news as well as our on-the-ground reporting. Mr. H is doing the short version of the conference, but I’ll be there Sunday through Thursday, so we’re leaving a gap in reporting Friday’s keynotes. Both of them looked interesting, but I know from experience that by Friday I would be too exhausted to care and prefer to sleep in my own bed rather than dropping another $200 on a hotel room.

I’m experiencing a last-minute flurry of work prior to the conference, however. It seems my clients must have some kind of fear that I’m going to run away to Florida never to return, because a couple of them have decided they want to accelerate projects that haven’t been on their priority lists for weeks. I was able to accommodate some because they were close to completion and just waiting on a few details from the client, but others are just going to have to wait. I may address some of them on the plane, depending on my mood and the surroundings, but no promises were made.

The farther I get in my career, the more I’m likely to engage the rule that “no is a complete sentence.” I don’t mind going the extra mile when someone has an unexpected need or something out of the ordinary happens, but I don’t make a habit of running around crazy when it could have been avoided.

I’m also doing some last-minute shoe shopping, having decided that in 2022 footwear comfort is much more important than style. HIMSS was already becoming more casual the last time I attended in person, and based on the numbers of us who are used to working at home in hiking pants and pullovers, I’m sure the casual ethos will extend to the exhibit hall. I’ll still be looking for good shoe photos, though, so if your feet are young and you’re feeling sassy, I’ll keep an eye out for you.

As far as packing, it’s also a good 50 degrees warmer in Orlando than it is for me at home. Although I’m looking forward to breaking out the spring and summer clothes, I hope it’s not completely sweat-inducing next week in Orlando since I’ll be doing a lot of walking from my hotel out in the cheaper part of town. Maybe some day I’ll hit the big time and be able to stay right across the street, but that wasn’t in this year’s budget.

The biggest challenge of the week has been an issue with my Outlook calendar, which Microsoft assures me will be fixed once the time change actually occurs on Sunday. This week looks normal, as does the week following HIMSS, But starting Sunday, the system has gone wonky when converting between good old Chicago time and the East Coast. Fortunately, my administrative assistant is reconfirming all my meetings and creating a backup document in case things don’t go as well as we hope on Sunday morning.

I have a new friend joining me on the party scene this year and am looking forward to connecting with old friends as well. It’s been a long depressing winter for me, so if you see the blond-haired person in sunglasses sprawled out on the lawn in front of the convention center, it just might be me. I have to enjoy it while I can, since HIMSS23 in Chicago won’t likely lend itself to lounging on the grass.

Are you packed and ready for HIMSS, or still knee-deep in ViVE? Or are you just glad to be staying home in your yoga pants and quarter-zip while the rest of us head to the boat show? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 3/10/22

Cedars-Sinai Establishes New Division: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

The Department of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai (CA) has established the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine division to better understand how AI can be used to improve medical care initially related to cardiac imaging, sudden cardiac arrest, COVID-19, and clinical genetics.

Reproductive health startup readies for delivery

Noula Health, a reproductive support services startup with virtual care capabilities, has raised $1.4 million in pre-seed funding.

Omega Healthcare Acquires Reventics, a Physician Focused CDI and RCM Company

Medical coding and RCM vendor Omega Healthcare acquires clinical documentation improvement and RCM company Reventics for an undisclosed sum.

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS22

Arcadia

Booth 2711

To arrange a meeting, click here.

Contact: Jasmine Gee, VP of Marketing
jasmine.gee@arcadia.io

Arcadia (arcadia.io), the leading population health management and health intelligence platform, is hosting several informative forums focused on how to revitalize your organization’s care and research with data-driven insights.

Lunch and Learn: Data science for clinical impact – building a predictive analytics ecosystem. Arcadia’s director of data science, Michael Simon, PhD, will help attendees think through the best way to implement predictive analytics for their populations — from the use of a massive, diverse, longitudinal data asset to modern approaches to modeling patient risk to a case study on the development of a predictive algorithm for behavioral health. Thursday, March 17, 11:15 –12:15, Room 203B. Registration required – request a lunch invitation here.

Forum: Accelerate value-based performance — even when the low-hanging fruit is gone. Hear from leaders at Rush Health, Summit Health, Castell, and other pioneering organizations via case studies and interactive panel discussions. Wednesday, March 16, 11:15 –12:15, Room 202A, and 3– 5:30, Room 202A. Attendance limited to value-based care leaders – request an invitation here.

Forum: Achieving interoperability takes more than an envelope: Leaders from KLAS, Arcadia, Rush Health, Castell, and IMSNY will share strategies and how to void interoperability “gotcha” moments for effective, outcome-driven information-sharing inside and outside your walls. Tuesday, March 15, 11:15 –12:15, Room 202C and 3– 5:30, Room 203B. Attendance limited to information technology and analytics leaders – request an invitation here.

Bamboo Health

Booth 4115, Interoperability Showcase Booth 8240-75

Contact: Alison Matthiessen, senior communications manager
540.230.9021

Bamboo Health will present and exhibit our suite of digital health solutions for interoperable care coordination at HIMSS. As part of the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase, Bamboo Health Vice President, Strategy & Corporate Development Jitin Asnaani will present a session on “Harnessing the Power of Interoperability to Cultivate Whole Person Care Collaboration Across Providers, Patients, and Payers” on Tuesday, March 15 at 2:45.   

Visit the Bamboo Health booth 4115 to learn more about our progress against the behavioral health and substance use crisis through our Pings solution for real-time notifications whenever patients experience care events; OpenBeds provider-facing behavioral health solution for health systems, health plans, and state governments; and NarxCare analytics application and clinical decision support tool. Visit bamboohealth.com to learn more.   

Giveaway: Visit Bamboo Health booth 4115 to participate in our raffle for a chance to win an Oculus VR headset!

Biofourmis

To arrange a meeting, contact Sandeep Pulim.

Contact: Sandeep Pulim, medical director
sandeep.pulim@biofourmis.com
617.334.5441

Biofourmis is a global health technology company focused on leveraging software and data science to deliver virtual care and develop novel digital therapies. Their Care@Home solution utilizes medical-grade wearables to continuously collect patient data, which is analyzed by Biovitals, Biofourmis’ clinically-validated, AI-powered, predictive analytics engine. Additionally, the company discovers, develops, and delivers clinically-validated digital therapeutics to support payers and providers.

Bravado Health

Booth 5349

Contact: Shane Andreasen, VP of Marketing
561.232.9720

Visit Bravado Health at booth 5349 or schedule a meeting to learn more about Ayva, a patient engagement platform for every care journey.

Bravado Health’s award-winning designers created the dynamic patient engagement platform, Ayva, to simplify the care journey from preparation to recovery across the entire spectrum of surgeries, procedures, and disease management. Ayva packages care plans, educational videos, messaging, remote patient monitoring, and more into an accessible, Web-based experience that’s proven to engage patients, improve outcomes, and increase patient satisfaction. Ayva shares engagement data with the patient’s care team, helping clinicians make more well-informed decisions.

Clearsense

Meeting Place MP9101 

Contact: Leann Williams, marketing manager
lwilliams@clearsense.com
904.334.7500

Join our Lunch and Learn on “Advanced Analytics Empowering Change: Transform Your Data into Actionable Results in Real Time.” Join Michelle Reed, product manager of AI and analytics, and Patrick McDaniel, solutions engineer, strategy of AI and analytics, for this interactive session and learn how the Clearsense Data Platform takes your data to the next level with predictive analytics. Clearsense will present a use case around renal failure by creating a patient grouping and using advanced analytics tools.

Discover how powerful advanced analytics can be when in the hands of everyday users, including domain experts, clinicians, analysts, and researchers. This innovative, data-first approach offers the flexibility to learn and adapt. Dive into the functionality of the feedback loop, ask questions regarding a variety of use cases, and see real-time changes you can make today to impact tomorrow’s outcomes. Lunch and refreshments will be served. Registration is required to attend. Please visit https://bit.ly/3uR1WRp to learn more.

CloudWave

Booth 3633

Contact: Christine Mellyn, director of marketing
cmellyn@gocloudwave.com
781.636.8169

Visit CloudWave at HIMSS22 to learn how we help healthcare institutions architect, build, and integrate a personalized solution using managed private cloud, public cloud, and cloud-edge resources to guarantee uptime, easy access, and strong security.   

Join us for our brief educational presentation sessions at 11, 1, and 3 each day on the exhibit hall floor, in booth 3633, and earn a chance to win a pair of Apple AirPods. Topics include “Enterprise Imaging in the Cloud,” “A New Approach to the Cloud Edge,” and “The Value of Immutable Backups.”  

CloudWave’s team will be available to lead conversations around the relentless data tsunami that can either transform care for the better or threaten existing infrastructure if not handled correctly. Whether you want to operate your IT systems in your data center, in the cloud, or a combination of both, CloudWave can help. Learn how we deliver EHR and enterprise cloud services to over 235 healthcare organizations in six countries.

Current Health

Booth 4859

Contact: Lauren Levinsky, VP of marketing
lauren.levinsky@currenthealth.com
650.799.7315

Current Health offers an enterprise care-at-home platform that enables health systems to deliver safe and effective care from the comfort of a patient’s home. We bring together remote patient monitoring, telehealth, and patient engagement into a single, flexible solution that allows organizations to manage all patient populations within one platform. With our recent acquisition by Best Buy, we’re excited to be able to leverage their best-in-class supply chain, logistics, and in-home support to help deliver that last mile of care in the home. 

Visit our booth for an end-to-end demo of our solution, get a first look at our exciting new product features, and meet members of the Current Health and Best Buy team.

Diameter Health

To arrange a meeting, visit diameterhealth.com/events.

Contact: Josh Salazar, marketing manager
jsalazar@diameterhealth.com
765.409.4515

Diameter Health upcycles raw clinical data into a standards-based, interoperable asset using Fusion, our FHIR-enabled technology engine. Our comprehensive, automated data integration, normalization, and enrichment technology delivers high-quality data to streamline workflows, inform decisions, and accelerate interoperability, at scale.​

Divurgent

To arrange a meeting, contact Joe Grinstead.

Contact: Joe Grinstead, principal
joe.grinstead@divurgent.com
214.533.9313

Divurgent won’t be exhibiting, but we’re eager to meet up! We’ll have some of our most senior subject matter experts on technology, digital, and data innovation. Rather than giveaways, we’re opting for meaningful conversations – if you’re interested in solving problems and accelerating your business priorities, we’re here for that!    

Divurgent is a solutions provider focused on what matters most to our client partners. We disrupt the typical value equation by using data-infused, flexible, and scalable solutions that demonstrate and quantify value for our partners.

Ellkay

Booth 5645

Contact: Auna Emery, VP of marketing
auna.emery@ellkay.com
520.481.2862

As a nationwide leader in healthcare connectivity, Ellkay has been committed to making interoperability happen for nearly 20 years. Ellkay empowers hospitals and health systems, providers, diagnostic laboratories, healthcare IT vendors, payers, and other healthcare organizations with cutting-edge technologies and solutions. Ellkay is committed to ongoing innovation, developing cloud-based solutions that address the challenges our partners face. Our solutions facilitate data exchange, streamline workflows, connect the care community, improve outcomes, and power data-driven and cost-effective, patient-centric care. With over 58,000 practices connected, Ellkay’s system capability arsenal has grown to over 700 EMR/PM systems across 1,100+ versions. To learn more about Ellkay, please visit Ellkay.com.   

Start your morning off right by grabbing a complimentary cup of coffee with Team Ellkay the first hour each day at booth 5645. Ellkay will also host Happy Hour on Tuesday, March 15 and Wednesday, March 16 from 4:00-6:00. Stop by to discuss connectivity, interoperability, and strategies to reach your data management initiatives. And, of course, our popular LKHoney will be available at the booth!

Everbridge

Booth 821

Contact: Cristin Carr, senior marketing programs manager, healthcare
cristin.carr@everbridge.com
781.859.4129

Trusted by more than 6,000 global customers including 1,500 hospitals and healthcare organizations, the Everbridge Critical Event Management platform helps physicians, nurses, and emergency response teams overcome the challenges of clinical care communications by simplifying workflows, leading to faster clinical responses and improved patient outcomes. Similarly, during critical events such as active shooter situations, severe weather conditions, or critical business events including IT outages or cyberattacks, the CEM platform automatically gauges the severity and context of the situation, quickly activating the right staff and mitigating the risk of a disruption in hospital operations and patient care.

Stop by our booth or schedule a meeting with us here, and enter to win an Apple Watch. To learn more about CEM, visit everbridge.com.

EVisit

Booth 1909

Contact: Vanessa Sierra, VP of marketing
vsierra@evisit.com

EVisit, the leading enterprise care delivery platform built for modern health systems and hospitals, will announce the launch of EAnalyze at HIMSS22. EAnalyze is a powerful reporting dashboard that provides EVisit customers with valuable data insights, including usage, patient wait times, virtual visit traffic, duration and drop-off rate, and other key adoption metrics, prompting proactive changes that can improve the patient consumer experience and reduce costs. In addition, EVisit plans to reduce the burden on providers by integrating the most advanced medical diagnosis API into its end-to-end platform.

To learn more, please plan to attend: “Care Navigation: Getting Patients to The Front Door.” Presenter: Dave Lovecchio, product manager, EVisit. 1:30 on March 15 and 16. EVisit booth 1909

First Databank

Booth 3659

Contact: Steve Normile, director of strategic alliances
snormile@fdbhealth.com
503.598.9739

New Solution To Be Announced: FDB will launch an industry-changing new solution that touches every major segment of the healthcare industry on Tuesday, March 15.

FDB PatientFirst Solutions Yield Benefits: FDB will share how solutions within our FDB PatientFirst suite are delivering targeted and patient-focused context and drug information to help clinicians make precise, evidence-based decisions:

• How to Access Patient-Specific Medication Guidance When It Matters Most with FDB Targeted Medication Warnings.
  
• How to Leverage Actionable Insights to Boost CDS Effectiveness with FDB CDS Analytics.
  
• How to Provide Evidence-Based Drug-Gene Guidance Within the Workflow with FDB Pharmacogenomic CDS.
  
• Presentation: Anna Dover, PharmD, BCPS, director of product management with FDB, and Harvard-trained medical geneticist Marsha Fearing, MD, MPH, MMSc, with Meditech, will discuss why and how genomics is about to change healthcare in the near term. Meditech booth 3311, Tuesday, March 15 at 2 and Wednesday, March 16 at 11:30.

Additional Solutions:

• How to Tune Medication Alerts with FDB AlertSpace.
  
• How to Address Patient Medication Adherence and Understanding with Meducation.
  
• How to Combat Supply Chain Disruption with FDB Prizm.

Reception: Attendees are invited to attend FDB’s reception at our booth, 3659, for conversation and prizes on Wednesday, March 16, from 5-6. Co-hosted by FDB, Zynx Health, and MCG. Complimentary gourmet popcorn gift to all attendees Drawing for $1,000 Amazon gift card.

Fortified Health Security

Kiosk 300-26 in the Cybersecurity Command Center

Contact: Judy Cooper, director of marketing
jcooper@fortifiedhealthsecurity.com
615.600.4002

Fortified Health Security is Healthcare’s Cybersecurity Partner – protecting patient data and reducing risk throughout the healthcare ecosystem. As a managed security service provider, Fortified works alongside healthcare organizations to build tailored programs with high-touch engagements and customized recommendations that maximize the value of investments and result in actionable information to help reduce the risk of cyber events.

Stop by kiosk 300-26 in the Cybersecurity Command Center to find out how we have become healthcare’s best cybersecurity partner.

Medhost

Booth 3858

Contact: Holly Evans, SVP of customer success & marketing
holly.evans@medhost.com
615.293.0714

Medhost, a leading EHR and healthcare IT solution and service provider, will showcase key offerings from their enterprise, departmental, and digital health solutions catalog at the HIMSS22 Annual Conference and Exhibition in booth 3858, March 14-18.     

In addition to their full range of services and solutions, Medhost will showcase new offerings that will enhance hospital end-user experiences and help streamline hospital workflows. The three new solutions include but are not limited to Medhost Anesthesia Experience, Medhost Mobility Physician, and Medhost Cloud-Based Analytics. Built to complement the perioperative platform, Medhost Anesthesia Experience is a comprehensive, clinician-driven application that supports anesthesia providers. The mobile solution, Medhost Mobility Physician, provides a complete view of patients’ charted data and includes a HIPAA-secure messaging tool, all from a handheld device, offering physicians greater digital freedom and flexibility in their workflows. Medhost Cloud-Based Analytics is an out-of-the-box, browser-based analytics product that adds simplicity to capturing a holistic view of a hospital’s essential performance metrics with drill-through capabilities initially in financials, revenue cycle, and payor performance. Learn more about our solutions by visiting us at booth 3858.

Medicomp Systems

To arrange a meeting, visit: medicomp.com/himss22/ or email himss@medicomp.com.

Contact: James Aita, director of strategy & business development
jaita@medicomp.com
647.207.0080

Medicomp will showcase innovations in clinical usability and documentation workflow improvement, including clinical intelligence for EHRs to mirror the way clinicians think, enhanced FHIR/interoperability tools to make sense of incoming data by problem in health systems, breakthroughs in speech and NLP, taking “freetext” to structured data, and improvements in real-time compliance at the point of care.

Meditech

Booth 3311

Contact: Jason Patnode, marketing manager
jpatnode@meditech.com
781.774.5746

Meditech has driven EHR innovation during every stage of the industry’s evolution. Today, we’re helping healthcare organizations around the world expand their vision of what’s possible with Meditech Expanse. Meditech’s Expanse EHR delivers native, cloud-based mobility that keeps providers connected to each other as well as to their communities. See why KLAS rates Meditech Expanse the #1 EHR in three segments and a Top Performer in three others, including Overall Software Suite.    

Stop by Meditech booth 3311 to speak with fellow clinicians and Meditech executives, or to catch a demonstration of our latest solutions, including Expanse Genomics, Expanse Care Compass, Expanse Patient Connect, and Expanse Ambulatory — now available to independent physician practices. You can also find us at the Interoperability Showcase and CMIO Roundtable, which we will be moderating.

Nordic Consulting

Booth 3965

Contact: Gwen Cantarera, marketing director
gwen.cantarera@nordicglobal.com
484.678.0264

Interoperability continues to be top-of-mind across the healthcare industry, and Nordic would like to help you connect the dots to create a pathway to interoperability. Stop by our booth and let’s talk about the challenges you face with interoperability. With our deep expertise across all major EHR systems, we take a platform-based approach to enable connectivity. It’s time to turn your technology into an enabler, not a roadblock.

PatientBond

To arrange a meeting, contact Todd Helmink.

Contact: Todd Helmink, SVP of strategic partnerships
todd.helmink@patientbond.com
312.391.4233

The PatientBond patient engagement platform leverages healthcare consumer psychographic segmentation and machine learning to target interactions based on personal motivations and channel preferences that drive patient behaviors, delivering truly personalized, multi-channel engagement that drives better outcomes for health systems, payers, and life sciences vendors. We are the opposite of the one-size-fits-all approach to driving patient and member behavior.

Quil Health

To arrange a meeting, contact Ashley Stevens.

Contact: Ashley Stevens, VP of provider sales
sales@quilhealth.com

Quil is the digital health joint venture between Comcast NBCUniversal and Independence Blue Cross. We help people organize and navigate their health in partnership with their providers, health plans, and loved ones. We’re shaping the future, using technology to personalize and transform the experience of navigating health and care. The Quil solutions model best practices from the entertainment industry to revolutionize the way providers, patients, and loved ones are supported throughout their care journeys leveraging Quil Engage, the care engagement platform for health systems and patients.

Meet our team at HIMSS to get a live demonstration of the care engagement platform that informs, guides, and activates patients in their care, in partnership with their providers, payers, and loved ones. VP of Provider Sales Ashley Stevens will be taking meetings throughout the event to discuss Quil Engage and share demos of our patient engagement platform.

ReMedi Health Solutions

To arrange a meeting, contact GP Hyare.

Contact: GP Hyare, managing director
g.hyare@remedihs.com
281.413.8947

ReMedi Health Solutions is a nationally-recognized, physician-led healthcare IT consulting firm specializing in peer-to-peer, physician-centric EHR implementation and training. We’re a clinically-driven company committed to improving the future of healthcare.    

Our Physician Executive team is attending HIMSS to connect with fellow industry members and friends, and share more about our virtual solutions that have generated a major impact for our healthcare partners. Feel free to reach out and schedule an EHR strategy session with our team during the event.

RxRevu

To arrange a meeting, contact Ryan Smith.

Contact: Ryan Smith, SVP of business development
ryan.smith@rxrevu.com
440.708.3683

RxRevu will be at HIMSS to talk care access and how we help providers access reliable data at the point of care to make informed decisions. Join us on March 16 at “The Use of FHIR to Accelerate Innovation in Healthcare,” a panel moderated by Cerner that features our CEO with Microsoft and MU Health Care panelists. We’ll also discuss RxRevu’s solutions at the Cerner booth on March 15 and 16.

Sphere

Booth 1733

Contact: Ryne Natzke, SVP of growth & strategy
rynen@spherecommerce.com
657.383.7967

Sphere will showcase its digital-forward TrustCommerce end-to-end patient payments platform at HIMSS22, highlighting the solution’s new digital wallet support within Epic MyChart, and its expanding network of digital healthcare solution partners. In addition, Sphere will demonstrate new Advanced E-Billing and collections capabilities within its Health IPass platform. Stop by Sphere’s booth to enter to win an Apple Watch.

To learn more, visit trustcommerce.com/verticals/healthcare/.

Tegria

Meeting Space 9417

Contact: Kevin Kutz, VP of public relations & external communications
kevin.kutz@tegria.com

Tegria provides consulting and technology services to help organizations of all sizes humanize each healthcare experience. Founded by Providence, with teams throughout the United States and internationally, Tegria is comprised of more than 3,500 colleagues who help their customers integrate technology, transform operations, accelerate revenue, and optimize care. We meet you where you are in your journey to transform healthcare. Our team is ready to listen.   

Come and meet with the Tegria team at meeting space 9417 located in Hall F. For all inquiries, please reach out to Kevin Kutz.

We invite you to meet Tegria experts at their presentations on cloud strategy and patient access, growth, and retention. Breakfast Briefing: Thursday, 7:15-8:15. Topic: EHRs to the Cloud: Lessons from the Field. Speaker: Chad Skidmore, VP of managed services, hosting & infrastructure. Location: Room 203C, Orange County Convention Center.  

Industry Solution Session: Thursday, 8:30-9:30. Topic: Patient Access Growth and Retention. Speakers: Rodina Bizri-Baryak, director of patient access and technology, and Emily Tempels, director of patient access. Location: Room W208C, West building of the convention center.

Lunch & Learn: Thursday, 11:15-12:15. Topic: EHRs to the Cloud: Lessons from the Field. Speaker: Chad Skidmore, VP of managed services, hosting & infrastructure. Location: Room 203C, Orange County Convention Center.

TigerConnect

Booth 5959

Contact: Betsy Berken-Zaslav, senior content & event manager
bzaslav@tigerconnect.com
954.579.3934

TigerConnect offers the healthcare industry’s most widely adopted and integrated communication platform, bringing together all aspects of care collaboration, physician and resident scheduling, patient engagement, and alarm management into a single, scalable, and mobile solution. HIPAA-compliant and HITRUST-certified, TigerConnect delivers 99.99% verifiable uptime and is trusted by more than 7,000 healthcare organizations.   

Stop by the TigerConnect booth for demonstrations of how the platform integrates with EHRs and other systems to unify communication, streamline workflows, reduce costs, and improve patient outcomes. In addition to demos of its solutions, TigerConnect is offering pens, sunglasses, blue light blocking glasses, and bags to carry all your additional HIMSS giveaways!

TransformativeMed

Booth 3224

Contact: Robert Kerzman, chief growth officer
robert.kerzman@transformativemed.com
331.223.7840

TransformativeMed harnesses the data in your EHR to create an intelligent digital workspace that dramatically improves the usability of EHRs, with specialty-specific and disease-specific workflows embedded within the EHR.    

The Cores Work Manager Platform, Cores Notify, and Cores Diabetes securely synchronize clinical workflow, tasks, alerts, notifications, and messages to harmonize the care team and create seamless communication across all care providers, using any device, including mobile. We believe your EHR should work the way you always thought it would. Visit us at booth 3224 to learn more.

Upfront

Booth 6545

Contact: Patrick Dienes, VP of sales
pdienes@upfronthealthcare.com
504.214.8169

Upfront delivers dynamic, digital care navigation to improve patient experience, increase necessary visits, reduce no-shows, and improve population health performance. Its flexible, omnichannel communication capabilities, combined with personalized patient content and calls-to-action, eliminate common barriers to patient engagement and enable Upfront to support a nearly unlimited number of use cases and deliver a world-class patient experience while driving a significant return on investment for client partners.

Visage Imaging

Booth 921

Contact: Brad Levin, GM of North America
blevin@visageimaging.com
540.454.9670

Visage Imaging is a global provider of enterprise imaging solutions that enable PACS replacement with local, regional, and national scale. The Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform is proven, providing a fast, clinically rich, and highly scalable growth platform deliverable entirely from the cloud or on-premise. Visage 7 supports the simplicity of a One Viewer philosophy that enables diagnostic, clinical, specialty, research, and mobile imaging workflows from a singular platform. Visage 7 also offers modular scalability and future-proof flexibility with enterprise workflow (Visage 7 Workflow), vendor-neutral archive (Visage 7 Open Archive), and artificial intelligence (Visage AI Accelerator) solutions, all 100% native. Visage 7 can also be experienced in the Amazon Web Services booth 1041.

Zen Healthcare IT

To arrange a meeting, contact Dan Benson.

Contact: Dan Benson, client engagements coordinator
danb@consultzen.com
949.617.1797

Marilee Benson, president, will be attending HIMSS22 and is scheduling time to meet with folks in the Interoperability Showcase. Please email DanB@consultzen.com to request a meeting time.

Zen Healthcare IT is an Interoperability Solutions company focused on removing healthcare data exchange barriers for our clients. We provide a secure, enterprise-class interoperability platform used by a wide range of HIE, provider group, hospital, and HIT vendor organizations. Our platform enables faster and more reliable data exchange. We have an excellent reputation in the interoperability space – schedule a meet up with Marilee to find out why.

Readers Write: Reimagining Healthcare in 2022 with Personal Emergency Response Services

Reimagining Healthcare in 2022 with Personal Emergency Response Services
By Janet Dillione

Janet Dillione is CEO of Connect America of Bala Cynwyd, PA.

One of the most critical moments in healthcare is the 60 minutes after a catastrophic event, such as a sudden fall, when a person has the greatest chance of recovery if they receive immediate medical care.

Among older adult patients, falls are one of the biggest worries, and for good reason. Falls are the leading cause of fatal injury among older adults. Additionally, one-fourth of US adults aged 65+ fall each year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When stakeholders consider reimagining healthcare to address the challenges facing patients, they often think that innovation must be manufactured out of thin air. But increasingly, leaders recognize that it is usually the most tried and true technologies, like personal emergency response services (PERS), that deliver the most effective results for patients and drive innovation forward.

Given the lingering effects of COVID-19 on healthcare, including the growing preference among senior patients to utilize telehealth and other virtual care services from the comfort of their own homes rather than in a medical facility,these patients will need more than a sensor or button to keep them safe and healthy.

It’s incumbent upon healthcare organizations to develop connective care and digital health solutions for seniors living at home, to do right by the patients they aim to care for and create fail-safe services and technologies that operate consistently. These stakeholders must build reliable and flawless systems that seamlessly integrate non-intrusive services and technologies for aging individuals remaining at home.

One encouraging note is that the industry has a strong foundation of innovative healthcare services and technologies that allow older patients to safely live at home with dignity.

Look no further than PERS, which keeps patients independent by allowing them to push a button that instantly connects subscribers with highly trained emergency response operators. For these vulnerable patients, it’s a benefit to reach someone who can assess the situation and send help if needed, whether it’s caregivers, family members, emergency services, or neighbors. Some PERS devices can even detect a fall and immediately contact an emergency operator.

While these services are both essential and remarkable, PERS provides so much more for patients in need. Behind the button is a complex network of call centers connected to 911 that make sure emergency medical services (EMS) are dispatched to the home when required. These are significant advantages compared to an ordinary watch.

Despite realistic concerns about consumer health technology, as more technology companies enter the healthcare market space, it’s critical to emphasize that no single solution is enough to deliver optimal services and care to the growing population of older adults and vulnerable aging at home.

Subsequently, there must be a system of integrated technologies and services, including traditional PERS, medication management and adherence solutions, remote patient monitoring (RPM), and a fall detection system that all combine to feed a robust analytics engine delivering actionable insights. These include alerts and risk-scoring to payers, care teams, and caregivers.

Consider PERS as the foundation for a system bringing on an increasing number of essential technologies and services into the home. RPM and hospital-at-home models build on and integrate with PERS by allowing senior adults with chronic conditions, as well as more acute illnesses, to receive care at home. These care models use medical-grade wireless devices to transmit vital health information to a virtual dashboard and a medical professional who is monitoring in case of a need to respond. Simultaneously, RPM allows clinicians to analyze aggregated data from the patient portal and electronic medical records, thereby enabling them to monitor results and accordingly update care plans for data collection and analytics.

Healthcare executives understand the entire value chain: delivering products, care, and technology must work as an integrated service. When this occurs, older and vulnerable adults have the best chance of living safely and independently in their home while avoiding costly and disruptive facility-based care.

Most importantly, healthcare organizations don’t need to create new technology or put their trust in unproven solutions. PERS and its extensive technology, communication, and services have a highly reliable track record that can serve as the platform for additional technologies and services delivering consistent, safe, and proactive care within a patient’s home.

HIStalk Interviews Sanjula Jain, PhD, SVP, Trilliant Health

Sanjula Jain, PhD is SVP of market strategy and chief research officer of Trilliant Health of Brentwood, TN.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I am a health economist by training. I’ve spent my career doing applied research both in academia and supporting provider organizations. I’m chief research officer at a predictive analytics company called Trilliant Health.

Your recent analysis found that telehealth enjoyed a temporary COVID boost that was driven more by provider supply than consumer demand. What will telehealth’s long-term place be?

The supply and demand is pretty telling. Does telehealth have a role going forward? Absolutely. But its use cases as the system is currently designed — for incentive structures, payment models, and the consumers it is reaching — are pretty narrow. We need to zoom out to say, what is the intent of telehealth? We’ve talked about it as an industry as a tool to expand access, but the data is showing that it is expanding access for those individuals who already had access to healthcare. They are your proactive healthcare people who have more resources and are slightly more affluent.

If we want to move the needle in terms of who is using the technology, We have to think about payment parity. Who are the individuals we need to reach, and why are they not using telehealth? Is it a preference thing? A lot of the data right now suggests that they like the in-person interaction with their provider. The exception is behavioral health, which makes sense as a sensitive topic where it might be OK to talk about it with someone on a phone as opposed to in person.

Physician incentive structures and patient preference is a big part and it remains to be seen. Are there patients out there who are not using it today who actually want to use it? Once we start unpacking that, we will expose the market opportunity.

What is the impact of telehealth commoditization, where patients initiate the least-expensive visit with whatever provider is sitting on a couch somewhere waiting to pick up a call?

I’m not a clinician, but wearing my health policy hat, I have concerns that it could create waste in the healthcare system. Where does quality fit? Even if it becomes so ubiquitous the way you described, how do we know if it is actually delivering greater value clinically?

We are seeing cases like the COVID testing analogy, where you had to get the pass or appointment to then go get tested. You are being vetted in an additional step. I would argue that could be a sign of waste if that model applies going forward. It remains to be seen where that utilization comes from and how it’s being used.

From a clinical perspective, how many use cases are actually delivering value? So much of healthcare requires touch and running ancillary services to be able to evaluate a patient. That’s why behavioral health becomes an exception. But even if someone can quickly dial in, what will you be able to get from that interaction beyond a prescription refill or a very limited set of services?

An early concern about telehealth that it would create new costs or, at best, move the same care for the same people to a less-expensive venue. And in the US healthcare system, today’s insurer might be saving a competitor’s future cost of treating an avoidable chronic condition. How do you see telehealth impacting overall healthcare cost?

It is yet to be determined , but the initial data is a little bit skeptical. It goes back to the downstream cost of care looking at that patient longitudinally. What else are the individuals who use telehealth regularly doing in their care patterns? What is the lag time when they go see a specialist? What are their actual broader healthcare behaviors?

The initial signals don’t suggest that it is catching things earlier, therefore leading to early intervention. Behavioral health is once again the exception, and that’s maybe an opportunity to improve outcomes from that perspective. But from a cost savings, it’s hard to see where that proves to be true.

Telehealth has created a business model of healthcare convenience, where startup prescription fulfillment services will throw in a free, rubber-stamped telehealth visit to sell birth control and hair loss products. What does that say about how consumers value clinical evaluation?

There are two pieces to that. On the consumer point, to what you are saying and what our research shows, telehealth is being treated like a commodity good. We are in an era where many of us order our groceries online or do Amazon Prime, We like that instant access and convenience. Consumers, to some extent, want that in their healthcare decisions. Those individuals are not thinking about what that means from a quality of care perspective. They are looking at it from a convenience perspective.

But we see that some consumers make different healthcare decisions. A section of the report covers psychographics, a construct that there are five profiles, and each of us by the age of 18 formulates what that is. That defines how we make decisions. Some people are brand conscious and would drive an extra hour here in the DC area to go to Hopkins and bypass the five-minute drive to Inova or MedStar, because in their psychological profile, they have a different brand perception. Those consumers may be ones who don’t engage in some of these commodity-like services. It remains to be seen whether they perceive the quality of a telehealth visit or something like an Amazon Care service to be on par with a traditional visit.

Every consumer is different. With a grocery store analogy, some consumers shop at Whole Foods versus Kroger or Safeway. Everyone associates a different value to it and the outcomes that are associated with it.

To your second point, there just is no quality data out there yet. Consumers have always struggled to make informed decisions because our system makes that hard, where it’s different from shopping for a healthcare service or finding the price of a service. We are in early innings to expect consumers to think through the advanced quality pieces of that. But we as an industry have not even begun to scratch the service there. That’s going to be the next wave, the downstream implications of this new way of interacting with the care system in being able to call in and get a bunch of prescriptions.

Despite lots of chatter about consumerism, patients aren’t entirely free to make their own decisions because they are limited by insurance or geography. Is consumer preference and satisfaction really becoming more important?

I don’t think it’s that black and white. Consumer preference is certainly important, but the way to think about it is, how do you influence consumer decisions? Assume you have two diabetes patients in a given market. One has consumed information only via text messages and virtual modalities. How a provider or health plan encourages that person to to engage in A, B and C healthy behaviors is very different than with another diabetes patient who is old school and likely to respond to things sent in the mail.

We don’t think about our healthcare patients as people who make decisions, so when I’m talking about decision making, a lot of it is a product of the choices in your market and the financial incentives. But each of us weights factors differently — convenience, price, geography, location, and distance. That’s where some of those opportunities lie. The more you understand those and understand your market of individuals, the better you can cater your offerings to your population.

How do you react to investors putting a lot of money into digital health companies whose business model requires employers to buy their apps, chatbots, or coaching services for their employees in hopes of saving healthcare costs? 

I’m not as deep on the employer market, but looking at what the trends show, the employer market is the opportunity for growth within the telehealth opportunity. We are seeing that with existing players like Teladoc and others who are shifting their model from a direct-to-consumer sale to making it an integrated benefit. That is why we made the point in the study around the margin costs being effectively zero.

The opportunity is within that population, but let’s think about who the employer population represents. It still is your commercially insured, healthcare-proactive individuals, for whom it is just an additional service. Without going too deep in a rabbit hole, I think that will be the opportunity where people are focusing, but once again, who is your market and who was telehealth intended to expand access for? Is it those who have great coverage and have a lot of access to services, or the people who with not as great health outcomes and are not regularly seeing a provider who need to be seen them more?

Compared to typical disruption, how might telehealth change the value of brick-and-mortar healthcare locations that have traditionally provided competitive advantage?

Where that is intertwined is this concept of the digital front door. Particularly for a lot of these retail players, but also traditional players like hospitals and health systems, the operating assumption is that if we have a way to engage with individuals on the front end — whether in a retail store and they come into the health system for more serious conditions or they use a digital front door like telehealth – they are going to come to us. That’s usually the operating premise for making those investments.

Analysis that I’ve done previously looked at health system traffic for what percent of patients in their market engaged with them through a telehealth encounter, then continued by seeking downstream care services at that health system, such as specialty care or other services. It’s not actually that strong of a connection, meaning there is a fair amount of leakage. Consumers want choice and options in hybrid models of care, but the data doesn’t support the extent to which telehealth investment will bring more patients to my brick-and-mortar location.

As a health economist, what technology trends do you follow most closely?

I’m spending more time on home care and some of these ancillary services and therapeutic technologies, at-home testing and things like that. It will be interesting to see whether that changes the practice of care and how that the data coming out of those technologies for treatment changes the whole system.

But ultimately, what I think about from a macro perspective is what I call the healthy tension between technological innovation and the payment model and the policy to meet that where it is. The largest payer of healthcare services is the federal government, and that share is growing. We have a lot of private sector innovation, which is great, but how does the incentive structure and the payment model support that innovation? Where does quality fit in? Where do the outcomes fit in? How do we measure that it is working and are we reaching people? That will be, no matter what the technology, the heart of how we know if it’s transforming the system or not.

Morning Headlines 3/9/22

Epic Launches Garden Plot: A Shared Environment Where Independent Medical Groups Can Grow

Epic announces Garden Plot, an Epic version for independent medical groups that is offered directly from Epic instead of requiring a Community Connect agreement with a health system.

Health Gorilla Raises $50 Million Series C to Securely Enable the Exchange of Actionable and Aggregated Clinical Data

Healthcare API developer Health Gorilla raises $50 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $80 million.

Harris Acquires Israel-based 2Team Computers Ltd.

Harris acquires Israel-based insurance software vendor 2Team Computers.

News 3/9/22

Top News

Epic announces Garden Plot, an Epic version for independent medical groups that is offered directly from Epic instead requiring a Community Connect agreement with a health system.

Epic provides the system in a software-as-a-service model that includes hosting, support, updates, and integrated third-party products.

Integrated products that are included in the offering are from Availity, Biscom, Change Healthcare, Healthwise, Intelligent Medical Objects, Iron Bridge, Lyniate, OSG Billing Services, Solarity, Sphere, Surescripts, and Wolters Kluwer.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m fast-roping into HIMSS22, arriving Monday evening and heading out early Thursday. Two days in the exhibit hall is it for me, the shortest time I’ve ever stuck around. The asterisked HIMSS21 almost convinced me to skip this year’s version entirely, but I’m like a migratory bird that can’t stay home.

I appreciate the many folks who have connected with me on LinkedIn in the past few days, some of them adding nice comments about how long and/or enjoyably they have been reading HIStalk.  My only viewpoint of HIStalk is as an empty screen demanding to be filled from my frequently occupied chair, so hearing from actual humans boosts me. For those who ponder the advantages of connecting (can’t we just be ROI-free online pals?), it’s a short list:

• I’ll see your postings.
• LinkedIn will notify me when you change jobs and I will list your new gig in my “People” section if it meets my criteria, even in the absence of a an official announcement.
• You’ll be connected to thousands of like-minded people, although I confess that I don’t really use LinkedIn beyond superficially and thus I don’t really know what benefits that offers.
• You can send me messages via LinkedIn.
• You’ll make me feel more relevant, which makes me more confidently snarky if you consider that to be an HIStalk feature rather than a bug.

Speaking of LinkedIn, I keep seeing cookie-cutter messages from people who have joined Chief, so I had to look up what that’s about. I wish I had thought of its business model, which combines vanity, networking, and employer-paid expensive dues:

• It’s an investor-funded private network for C-suite females who have at least 15 years of career experience.
• The company has raised $40 million from investors.
• Annual dues are $5,000 to $9,000, usually paid for by the member’s employer.
• Chief says it has thousands of members and thousands more on the waitlist.
• It offers meetups, mentorship connections, online discussion groups, and physical clubhouses in four cities.

ViVE attendees seem to be having a ball, with most of the Twitter photo evidence being beaming party photos. Despite the fact that I’m a certified curmudgeon with a mild case of FOMO, I am glad to see people happily interacting face to face after the long COVID drought. Hopefully healthcare cost, quality, and patient experience will get at least passing attention among the glossy good times and startup salivation. I’ll also say this for the conference timing and location — it has sucked all the air out of the HIMSS22 room, made direct comparisons inevitable, and possibly consumed much of the energy of the overlapping attendees and exhibitors who will do it all over again upstate next week. I thought it was a mistake to schedule ViVE so close to HIMSS (although not as disastrous as the initial HLTH conference right after HIMSS18 in Las Vegas), but HLTH and CHIME might have been thinking more strategically.

Meanwhile, ViVE announces that its next iteration will be March 26-29, 2023 in Nashville, ending 19 days before HIMSS23 in Chicago. I hadn’t paid attention to the HIMSS23 location — HIMSS banned its home town from future conferences twice, once because of nasty exhibit hall Teamsters and once for hotels giving RSNA attendees better rates. I assume HIMSS will save some much-needed cash with the Chicago home court advantage, with a slight negative being the chance of a blizzard like at the HIMSS09 opening reception there.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Optum. Optum is a leading information and technology-enabled health services business dedicated to helping make the health system work better for everyone. With more than 190,000 people worldwide, Optum delivers intelligent, integrated solutions that help to modernize the health system and improve overall population health. Optum is part of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE:UNH). Thanks to Optum for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a recent YouTube video that describes Optum’s provider careers.

Webinars

April 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “19 Massive Best Practices We’ve Learned from 4 Million Telehealth Visits.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, founder, president, and CEO, Mend. Virtual visits have graduated from a quickly implemented technical novelty to a key healthcare strategy. The challenge now is to define how telehealth can work seamlessly with in-person visits. This webinar will address patient satisfaction, reducing no-show rates to single digits, and using technology to make telehealth easy to use and accessible for all patients. The presenter will share best practices that have been gleaned from millions of telehealth visits and how they have been incorporated into a leading telemedicine and AI-powered patient engagement platform.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Harris acquires Israel-based insurance software vendor 2Team Computers.

Former Livongo executives launch Homeward Health with a $20 million investment from General Catalyst. The startup aims to provide Medicare Advantage plan members in rural communities with primary and specialty care using local teams that provide in-person and virtual services and in-home remote patient monitoring. It is initially focusing its evidence- and value-based care model on cardiology.

Health data exchange company Consensus Cloud Solutions acquires Summit Healthcare, a health IT vendor specializing in data integration, care continuity, and workflow automation. This marks the first acquisition for Consensus, which became an independent business after parent company J2 Global split into two publicly traded companies last year.

Healthcare API developer Health Gorilla raises $50 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $80 million.

Pro Medicus co-founder and CEO Sam Hupert says that the Australian medical imaging software vendor, parent company of Visage Imaging, won’t bid for government work because of “too many gates and hoops” in the procurement process, which is led by “bureaucrats, with clinicians very much in the background. How would a bureaucrat know what makes a good clinical desktop for a radiologist?” The company recently expanded into Europe and has contracts with seven US hospitals, which provide the bulk of its revenue. Hupert and his co-founder Anthony Hall each hold nearly $1 billion worth of shares.

Sales

• The Social Security Administration’s Disability Determination Services will use Veradigm EChart Courier software from Allscripts to automate medical records retrieval.
• Johns Hopkins HealthCare Solutions will offer Glooko’s remote patient monitoring capabilities to diabetic patients who are enrolled in its Blossom diabetes management program.
• Integris Health (OK) selects population health analytics and data integration from Loopback Analytics to enhance its specialty pharmacy program.
• Northwell Health (NY) signs a 10-year agreement with Clinithink for its NLP-enabled Clix RCM technology.
• The US Defense Health Agency chooses MediQuant’s DataArk for archiving military health records as DoD transitions to Cerner.

People

ChartSpan promotes Christine Hawkins, MBA to CEO.

Stanford Health (CA) promotes Nigam Shah, PhD to the newly formed role of chief data scientist.

EHealth Technologies names Dan Torrens (ConnectiveRx) as CEO.

Virtual patient monitoring vendor AvaSure hires Adam McMullin, MBA (FDS) as CEO.

Health System Informatics promotes Stephanie Hojan to president.

Mitre hires Stephen Ondra, MD (Cygnus-AI) as chief medical adviser.

UnitedHealth Group promotes Cara Griffin to VP of marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

CloudWave announces GA of OpSus Vault, a cloud-based data storage service that is designed to protect backups from cybersecurity threats.

Tift Regional Medical Center (GA) integrates Wolters Kluwer Health’s POC Advisor sepsis monitoring software with Cerner.

Mount Desert Island Hospital and Health Centers in Maine implements Cerner.

Tausight announces a real-time detection platform to detect, track, and analyze PHI activity.

Allscripts renames its Application Store to Allscripts App Expo and opens it to all active developers with a certified solution.

Olive announces increased investment in interoperability and intelligence capabilities in its platform.

Other

I missed this a couple of weeks ago. Several states and CMS investigate Center for Covid Control, whose 242 locations tested 400,000 samples for COVID-19 using untrained workers who ignored the manufacturer’s instructions, stored and labeled specimens improperly, faked results, and told insured patients not to list their coverage on the form (they were billing the federal government for testing uninsured patients). Some patients received negative results before they were actually tested. Its associated lab – whose mailing address is a UPS store and which apparently is owned by the same couple — billed the federal government for $120 million worth of testing for uninsured people, posting “free COVID testing” signs in decrepit empty storefronts and at pop-up sites. Owners Akbar Ali Syed (35) and his wife Aleya Siyak (29) put the company together quickly in 2020 after operating a wedding photo business, a doughnut shop, and an axe-throwing lounge. They bought a $1.36 million mansion, a $3.7 million Ferrari, and several Lamborghinis. I suspect the already ample amount of healthcare fraud has been increased dramatically by the government’s frantic attempts to manage the pandemic using poorly vetted contractors and vendors.

Sponsor Updates

• Clearsense sponsors a pre-ViVE2022 golf tournament that has raised $42,000 for the CHIME Opioid Task Force.
• AGS Health and Clearwater achieve Cybersecurity Transparent certification through a voluntary risk assessment process and program from Censinet and KLAS.
• Baker Tilly will exhibit at the 34^th Annual Roth Conference March 13-15 in Dana Point, CA.
• Bluestream Health helps long-time partner MedStar Health deliver more than 1.5 million telehealth encounters during the pandemic.
• Ellkay partners with Astrata to help health plans improve quality measurement.
• Current Health expands its support for chronic care management by adding new features to its platform, including access to more integrated, third-party devices; a single platform across all populations; and new communication tools.
• Lumeon appoints former Partners, Cerner, and Siemens executive John Glaser to its board.

Blog Posts

• ViVE 2022 – Our obligation to caregivers and patients (Cerner)
• Healthcare IT Service Desk: Automation Strategies (CereCore)
• Common Prior Authorization Hurdles and How to Overcome Them (CoverMyMeds)
• Take the Worry Out of Healthcare Cloud Migration with CTG’s Cloud Solutions (CTG)
• International Women’s Day: Gender Equity in Healthcare (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 3 Ways That Healow Pay Helped a Growing Primary Care Practice (EClinicalWorks)
• 6 strategies on how to increase outpatient revenue (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 3/8/22

Homeward to Rearchitect Rural Healthcare for 60 Million Americans

Former Livongo executives launch technology-enabled care delivery company Homeward Health with a $20 million investment from General Catalyst.

Consensus Cloud Solutions, Inc. Provides Fourth Quarter 2021 Preliminary Results

Health data exchange company Consensus Cloud Solutions acquires Summit Healthcare, a health IT vendor specializing in data integration, care continuity, and workflow automation.

MDisrupt Lands $6 Million in Seed Funding to Build Its Digital Health Intelligence Platform

MDisrupt will use $6 million in seed funding to expand its service, which enables digital health entrepreneurs to connect with experts, and generate real-world data needed to commercialize and scale their solutions.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/7/22

As a CMIO, I spend a great deal of my time thinking about patient experience. Telehealth is a major focus for my organization, and in the name of patient experience, we worry about dozens of details:

• Are the colors on the website pleasing?
• Can patients easily figure out that we offer telehealth, and what hours?
• How patient-friendly is the registration process for the patient portal?
• Have we optimized the pre-visit check-in process?
• Are we asking enough questions to gather the information the physicians want, but not so much information that patients are frustrated by the questions?
• Is the connection to the telehealth platform seamless?
• Are there risks for a poor-quality visit?
• Are the post-visit instructions clear and delivered to the patient quickly?
• Is the communication back to the rest of the care team timely?

This week I had to put my patient hat on again, and it was an experience that made me wish that healthcare executives spent half the time thinking about the in-person patient experience that I’ve spent thinking about telehealth over the last six months. The opportunities for improvement spanned the spectrum of people, process, and technology.

For background: my visit was for a radiology procedure at a large academic medical center and had been scheduled six months ago. I transferred care there last year after some medical misadventures elsewhere and didn’t know exactly what to expect.

The first miss on their part was the fact that they don’t use the capabilities of their EHR and patient portal to manage basic pre-registration and appointment confirmation tasks. Instead, I had to start playing phone tag with the registration team four days prior to the procedure. I missed their first call because I was working, and then they called again before I even had a chance to listen to the voice mail. I couldn’t answer that call either, and then when I did have time to call back, I was routed through a complicated phone tree before I finally reached a human who was able to verify my insurance and demographics. I asked about arrival instructions since I hadn’t been there for this particular procedure before, and all they could tell me was to stop and ask at the information desk because the person on the phone couldn’t see what specific procedure I was scheduled for.

Two days prior to the visit, I got another call, this time with the pre-visit instructions I had been looking for earlier in the week. Because I use Google Assistant to screen calls from unfamiliar phone numbers, I could see the beginnings of the transcript and picked up. Fortunately, it was a long looping recording that I was able to listen to a second time to make sure I had all the information. It did give more information about the arrival process, including parking information and some additional details about where to arrive at the hospital. I’m not sure how the call would have worked out had I not picked up, though, since it would have rolled to voice mail partway through the recording and likely would have been cut off.

On the day of the visit, I left in plenty of time because I knew traffic would be dicey. It wasn’t as bad as I thought, but I needed every second of extra time because there was hardly any available patient parking at 8 a.m. I made it to the registration area 30 minutes before my appointment as recommended, then had to sit for another 20 because the registrars were on break.

In the mean time, I got to observe challenges other patients were facing. One gentleman was there for laboratory testing but didn’t know the name of his physician, so the staffer couldn’t figure out his orders. Apparently they can’t be looked up by patient, only by ordering physician. The patient knew the orders were from the urology department, but the staffer said they couldn’t do anything until he could give the physician’s name. The patient had to call upstairs to the office and find out what clinician’s name the orders were under, and then they could take care of him. It seemed a little ridiculous to me, but I don’t pretend to understand how their systems are set up.

Once the registrars were back from break  — which continued an extra 3-4 minutes while they watched TikTok in the waiting room right in front of me — I was called back. There must not be an indicator as to whether patients completed the pre-registration process by phone, because I was asked if I did it, and despite saying yes, I was asked all the same questions again. They asked me to sign several consents on a signature pad without offering a readable copy of the consent. Seriously, is it even a valid consent if the patient was never given the document to read? I think it’s unlikely.

The registrar handed back a blue ticket with my insurance card and photo ID, but didn’t explain what it was. I quickly figured out that it was for parking validation, but first-time patients might appreciate some explanation. I was sent on my way with a complicated set of instructions for finding my next destination deep in the radiology department.

There I was met by another receptionist who handed me two paper forms to fill out. Neither had been generated from the EHR, so they didn’t have any of my demographics or historical information. I had to fill out all the basics again, including name, DOB, address, medications, allergies, name of my PCP, name of the referring physician, and more. All of these things could have been handled through the patient portal they day before and placed into the system for the team to review had they not already existed in the EHR. At a minimum they could have printed a pre-populated form for the patient to just update in person rather than having to start from scratch.

When I turned in my clipboard, I got chastised by the registrar for not having a visitor sticker on. I had one when I initially arrived, but I guess it fell off after moving through multiple different stations and putting my tote on and off my shoulder repeatedly.

Once I made it into the actual MRI suite, I was taken to a set of lockers and verbally given a complex set of instructions on how to use the lockers, which had recently been made keyless. I was given gowns to change into, but no scrub pants like I was used to at my previous radiology department. The tech told me they quit using pants for cost reasons, and now they just give people two gowns. Having pants definitely makes for a more pleasant patient experience, so I asked about bringing my own next time. I was told that is not allowed.

After changing, I had to find my way to the IV station, where they reviewed my allergies. The screen still showed an allergy that had been retired almost a year ago during testing by an allergist at the same academic medical center, and which I had requested be removed via the patient portal as well. The nurse updated the screen (hopefully for the last time), got the IV going, and took me to an internal waiting room.

At some point in the pandemic, every other chair in that waiting room had been taped off by placing a banner around the arms to block the seat. The banners said something about social distancing, but I didn’t retain the message because I was too busy being floored by the amount of dust and dirt that had accumulated on the unoccupied chairs. We’re talking mini-tumbleweed dust bunnies here. I know people haven’t been sitting in the chairs, but I am guessing that no one has been wiping off any of the other chairs either, because I can’t imagine a worker who was tasked with wiping chairs ignoring something that looked like that. I would have taken a picture if my phone hadn’t been impounded in the locker.

I was finally taken back for my study,. After getting situated for the MRI, I had to specifically ask for a blanket to cover my bare and freezing legs. I wonder how many patients know to ask for that.

The MRI was not entirely uneventful, but I’ll leave that story for my closest friends over cocktails. After I finally made it out of the machine, the staff confirmed that I wasn’t having any other tests or procedures that day, so they could remove my IV. Good thing I wasn’t still dizzy and feeling crummy from the test because there were no chairs in the room. I had to bend over and rest my arm on a counter for the tech to pull the IV. Had I been an elderly patient or someone with a tendency to faint with procedures like that, things could certainly have gotten bad very quickly.

After that, I had to find my way back to the locker room area, where an older patient was struggling with the lockers because she couldn’t remember how to get it to unlock. There weren’t any posted instructions, so I coached her through it before retrieving my own clothes. I changed quickly because at this point, I just wanted to get out of there.

The staff had said there was no checkout process and I was free to go, but the signage didn’t clearly tell me how to get back to the initial waiting area. I made a wrong turn and wound up in a back corridor, where they were transporting an intubated patient in a hospital bed. I quickly turned around for privacy reasons and headed back into the maze of corridors, finally making it through the waiting area to the main hallway.

Upon turning left to exit, I ran into the same transport team in the main corridor wheeling the intubated patient (whose gown was hanging half off) through the main atrium, where I’m pretty sure there aren’t supposed to be patients in hospital beds. Maybe there was a broken elevator or maybe something else was going on, but I felt bad for the gentleman’s lack of privacy as well as the other patients and visitors who probably have never seen a gravely ill intubated patient and might have found it shocking. If that’s indeed how hospitalized patients are transported to MRI, then shame on the architects for their design.

After dealing with my parking ticket (the magical blue card covered only $1.50 of my fee) I was even more eager to just get out of there. There was a line at the elevator, so I took the open staircase in the elevator atrium. When a parking garage has closed-off stairs, I expect them to be a little grubby and usually poorly lit, but these steps in the open atrium were dirtier than any big-city subway station I’ve ever visited. There was trash on the ground, used masks, and enough road salt granules to make the stair treads somewhat slippery. It made me wonder when someone from hospital administration last used those stairs and what they thought about it. It also made me wonder what the big-time donors whose names are on the building would think.

Overall, I would give my patient experience no more than 3 out of 10. If I encountered the level of dirtiness I saw at the hospital at a restaurant, I’d walk out the door. As healthcare consumers, however, we are expected to tolerate it.

If you are a hospital or health system executive, I urge you to walk the proverbial mile in your patients’ shoes, in-person as well as virtually. Fix the little things like wayfinding signage and locker instructions. Offer blankets rather than waiting for patients to ask. Let patients bring their own scrub pants for MRIs if you’re not going to provide them. And for the love of all things, use the expensive EHR to the best of its capabilities rather than continuing decades-old processes. You can bet I’ll be sharing my experience fully when the patient survey arrives.

If you’re an administrator, have you walked in the patient’s shoes, and were you shocked by what you saw? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

HIStalk Interviews Anjum Ahmed, MBBS, Chief Medical Officer, Agfa HealthCare

Anjum Ahmed, MBBS, MBA, MIS is chief medical officer, clinical safety officer, and global director of AI and innovation of Agfa HealthCare of Mortsel, Belgium.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

Agfa HealthCare is a global solution provider of imaging IT solutions. It is part of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, which has been in the industry for over 150 years. Our prime focus over the last year has been transitioning our customers from the traditional PACS approach towards enterprise imaging. That strategy of consolidating imaging service lines has evolved across the industry. We launched our flagship platform for enterprise imaging few years ago. We were first in the industry to build a platform from the ground up. The company has R&D centers across the globe in Canada, Belgium, Austria, and China.

My role with the company is global chief medical officer. I’m also head of the portfolio for innovation, for artificial intelligence, and in making sure that we are successful in rolling out these new innovations to our strategic customers.

What maturity level does enterprise imaging have in the US, and what benefits does it offer?

The rest of the world is looking at what the US is doing. If you look back at how the consolidation of electronic health records started in the US — that transition from paper to digital and from digital to electronic health record – it made CIOs and hospital systems across the US realize that now is the opportunity to think about imaging as a service line. How the consolidation that they did with electronic health records could transform the care that they are delivering to their communities. That’s one of the reasons I would say that the US as a region was one of the early adopters of the enterprise imaging strategy. It made sense because they realized gains from electronic health record consolidation. 

The question was, why not when it comes to imaging? There were multiple approaches that the health centers and health systems in the US took. The initial approach was with vendor-neutral archives that could be a starting point for consolidating imaging from service lines that go beyond traditional radiology and cardiology into oncology, point-of-care ultrasound imaging, mammography, and breast imaging use cases. That was one aspect.

Here in North America, including where I’m based in Canada, there was also another aspect, which was that we have consolidated the imaging records, but our health systems or hospitals are on multiple PACS technologies. How do we go about bringing a uniform viewing layer? That’s where the universal viewing component for enterprise imaging also came about. We have the VNA and we have consolidated the archive of images, but how do you use or visualize that data? Besides VNA, universal viewer also became an important component for not only beginning the journey for consolidation, but also the visual layer in terms of consolidation of imaging and how you view those images.

The US is pretty mature, I would say, in comparison to what’s happening in the rest of the globe, where the enterprise imaging strategy may initially be focused on bringing the new technology into radiology or cardiology, point-of-care ultrasound imaging, and GI endoscopy. Multimedia images related to surgical procedures is also something that is being spoken about.

The next wave in enterprise imaging will be led by digital pathology. If you think about holistic clinical care in terms of oncology, and along with a lot of talk about precision health and precision medicine, bringing in histopathology, digital pathology data, and seamless collaboration with other imaging records is something that we are already hearing about in the US as a region when it comes to enterprise imaging adoption.

A recent KLAS report noted that Europe is leading the adoption of digital pathology. What are the opportunities and challenges of rolling it out in the US?

I have noticed that as well. We saw the rollout of digital pathology for certain use cases in Europe in 2015 or 2016. Obviously there are regulatory challenges when we compare North America to what was done in Europe, but the biggest challenge is that there are no standards that have been adopted for digital pathology, unlike what we had in radiology with DICOM imaging and all those standards.

The other challenge with pathology was the use of scanners to scan the glass slides and convert those glass slides into digital data. That is unlike radiology imaging, where you have modalities that are generating digital data. In pathology, you still use microscopes that are being read manually. Every scanner vendor generates proprietary formats for data ingestion. That was a challenge with some of these labs that were transitioning from glass slides to digital. Should they stick to one scanner vendor, or if they have multiple clinical use cases, they might be in a multiple scanner environment, which means multiple storage solutions for each of those scanners. That is where they started exploring whether a data management strategy would be an entry point into digital pathology with enterprise imaging. That is something that UK also took when these new RFPs or tenders were coming out over the last couple of years.

Data management became a very relevant ask. Rolling out enterprise imaging outside radiology, how would you manage data from these multiple scanners that generate proprietary data in the absence of DICOM standards? That challenge had to be addressed. VNA is vendor-neutral, so there must be a strategic approach in how that data could be managed with digital pathology acquisition.

Besides the data management aspect, there is also the departmental workflow when you go digital with pathology, similar to radiology and cardiology workflows. Pathology has its own requirement in terms of the departmental model. The question was, how are we going to develop these modules within enterprise imaging similar to radiology in the pathology workflow?

The third aspect is the visual layer. Should it be a universal viewing platform? Should it be a radiology desktop kind of a solution for pathology?

This is how the industry evolved. We have seen recently in our regulatory clearances that have been coming out in the US certain use cases to consider for digital pathology. That’s one of the reasons I’m saying that there are lots of lessons learned in how Europe started with their adoption of digital pathology based on certain clinical use cases, data management acquisition, and the visualization layer. Those are the three components that will help drive the adoption of enterprise imaging further into digital pathology.

EHRs made it possible for clinicians to work from anywhere. How is the profession of radiology changing as their work becomes digital and enterprise imaging becomes more prevalent?

We witnessed that during the pandemic. Enterprise imaging is a modular platform. As part of that modular platform, we have the image exchange portfolio. Besides image exchange, there is the federated image exchange network, so that you don’t need to physically move the data. Our customers started asking us when they started working from home how they could access this desktop on their home environment with the all the tools they require. Little did the customers realize that when they invested in that enterprise imaging platform, which brought them image exchange and collaboration capabilities, it took just a click of a button to enable those collaborative workflows.

When I talk about collaboration, I talk about real-time collaboration. One benefit of building that enterprise imagine platform strategy is that you’re not sending data across to external systems, where you could be exposed to someone interfering or accessing that information. Because you have created this secure system with enterprise imaging on a single platform, you are enabling access to your users if they’re at home to leverage the same capabilities with the same viewing platform on a thin client. We have Xero Universal Viewer, which is cleared for diagnostic reading. It has built-in capabilities and real-time chat collaboration similar to WhatsApp. Within this tool, you can see your colleagues who are online, you can share interesting cases with them, and you can share securely, including with other users who may not be part of your enterprise. It generates a secure image exchange kind of a workflow.

Another thing I spoke about was the federated image exchange. Federated image exchange means that you do not need to push and pull images from one storage to another archive. We could  set up Xero universal nodes so that users are able to view our stream images from an external, non-Agfa PACS, for example. That’s one of the benefits that we have seen our customers appreciating — they were able to build these networks of communication and collaboration not only within their Agfa enterprise imaging environment, but also outside Agfa’s enterprise imaging portfolio, so that they can view those images on a common viewing platform.

The clinical community, radiologists in this case, have realized that these tools are actually much more helping and facilitating in terms of how they view cases and how can they be more productive if they are not on premise. From an IT perspective, we have gone live at certain hospitals in the US during the peak of the pandemic in a rollout of the technology that was also managed remotely. That’s where we saw a lot of collaboration, not only from a clinical perspective, but between the IT segment of the community as well with our customers, where our IT and project management got involved with the customer IT to remotely deploy some of these solutions.

The hype a couple of years ago was that AI would replace radiologists, which has moderated into thinking about how AI can support radiologists. What is the most promising use of AI in imaging to improve patient outcomes?

We started working on AI in 2015 and 2016, when there was all this discussion about whether AI would be of any use in medical imaging. We partnered with some early adopters and explored certain clinical use cases. My first question to our customers was, what problem are you trying to solve? Let’s park AI on the side and first identify those clinical challenges that your healthcare organization is trying to address. Then we can decide whether it is AI or whether it is deep learning, machine learning, automation, or pixel intelligence. What kind of technology could we apply in helping you address those clinical challenges?

We identified certain use cases associated with chronic diseases such cancer care, where we thought — and customers agreed with us — that automation could perhaps help to them in early disease detection or even automating some of the manual tasks that radiologists are performing in some of these clinical applications. When we announced our AI strategy, we called it augmented intelligence, the intersection of machine learning and advanced applications where clinical knowledge and medical data converge on a common platform. AI replaces clinical knowledge or clinicians, while augmented intelligence works with the clinical audience and facilitates their work.

We worked with our clinical users and early adopters to say, let’s define KPIs and see what outcomes we are able to improve. At Agfa, we want to focus on the workflow side of the things. We are an enterprise imaging solution provider and our customers would expect us to use AI data from several AI applications that are being developed in the market and leverage that data to do something. Some of those companies that were creating hype around replacing physicians with AI have disappeared from the market because the claims that they were making were not addressed in use cases.

There are 100-plus AI startups out there. We decided to focus on workflow, because in developing our own AI applications, we realized that a lot more needs done than just reading pixels and images. An AI algorithm developer has developed something very nice, so how can we as Agfa utilize it? We developed this framework for AI that we call RUBEE, whose goal is to embed clinical intelligence into the user’s workflow from five perspectives.

Number one is that AI generates a lot of data. How do you utilize that data and how do you visualize it? How do you show it to the clinical user? Instead of having a radiologist or a clinician use multiple applications or viewers, we have embedded those visual findings from AI into the enterprise imaging portfolio, whether it is the desktop or whether it is the Xero Universal Viewer that I spoke about.

The second and third aspects are the workflow orchestration and triage. With workflow orchestration, AI generates abnormality findings, abnormality scores, measurements, or some other aspects. With the RUBEE engine, we are able to orchestrate certain workflows and automate certain tasks that radiologists are spending time today doing.

When we released our AI package to one of our first early customers, they said that reading a particular CT scan went from taking 15 minutes to being finished in seven to eight minutes. With RUBEE, all the tasks that they were doing have been automated. They know that at the top of the list, these are the abnormal cases that they need to start their work with, these are the measurements that the AI algorithm has generated. With RUBEE, they can see where those specific cases are. We can distribute some of those cases to certain groups of radiologists who are concerned about that specific clinical scenario. That’s where the visualization, workflow orchestration, and triage help achieve certain productivity.

The fourth aspect is automation of all hanging protocols. Radiologists spend a lot of time — when they are reading certain exams, currents, priors, and certain cases — going back and looking at certain prior scans in comparison with what they are seeing now. RUBEE, based on AI findings, automates certain hanging protocols so that radiologists do not need to find a relevant prior scan for this particular patient. Early adopters told us that this is useful and they have appreciated the time savings.

The fifth element of our RUBEE strategy is, how do you communicate reports and results? AI is generating visual findings and you are orchestrating and triaging. How can you save me some time in generating reports? That varies in North America versus UK and Europe, where the use cases are different. In the North American region, we have seen customers are using specific reporting solutions, so we can provide a feed from report that is generated by AI to the reporting engine. In Europe, where customers are using the built-in module for reporting with enterprise imaging, we have created structured reporting within radiology, so that we can extract certain drop-down menus within the report itself. It becomes then easy for radiologists to do a one-click signoff to agree with the report or disagree with the report and generate their own findings.

Morning Headlines 3/7/22

Microsoft + Nuance: Better together to transform business and healthcare outcomes with AI

Microsoft closes its $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance.

Athenahealth Whistleblower Wins Fees In $18M Kickback Case

A federal judge awards a whistleblower $390,000 for helping the federal government recoup $18.3 million from Athenahealth for paying kickbacks to doctors and other EHR vendors to recommend AthenaClinicals.

Philips and the Philips Foundation provide support for the people of Ukraine

Philips and its foundation will provide a 24-bed mobile hospital and mobile check-up units to Ukraine, and provide financial assistance to displaced citizens.