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Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 7/1/24

July 1, 2024 Dr. Jayne 1 Comment

This weekend was all about me fighting technology in its various incarnations and being philosophical about whether we are actually better off with all the bells and whistles that we have come to use in our daily lives.

My first struggle was prompted by the fact that I’m over a certain age and my vision prefers a large monitor compared to my laptop. I have a monitor connected via a docking station, so I really only use the laptop for its camera capabilities, along with being a separate screen for third-party messaging apps and other windows that I don’t want to inadvertently share while on a web meeting. Most of my clients prefer online meetings without video, so that wasn’t really an issue. However, I recently started collaborating with someone on a book (which is an interesting experience in itself) and she prefers on-camera interactions, so I decided to get a separate webcam to put on my primary monitor so I wasn’t always looking sideways on our calls.

After doing my usual comparison shopping and polling friends about their experiences, I narrowed it down to a couple of options that were available locally. One of the three was on sale at a shop a mile from my house, so I jogged over and had it in hand in short order. Everything I read indicated that I should be able to just plug it in to the docking station, tweak a setting or two on the laptop, and be on my way.

This was easier said than done. I struggled to get the camera to mount securely because my monitor has a curved housing on the back. It was downhill from there as I couldn’t get it to work using the docking station regardless of how many settings I tweaked. I resorted to connecting it directly to the laptop, which although functional, created a wiring mess that I was trying to avoid.

From there, I had a battle with some permissions on a client-provided laptop. The agent at the other end of the call was clearly following a script and didn’t fully understand what she was advising. She recommended that I “press and hold the power button for 60 seconds.” I attempted to clarify that she was asking me to restart the computer, therefore I would need to finish some work and get back to her. She advised that no, the computer was not going to restart, we were just “rebooting the power.”

I let her know that I would need to call back at another time and went about my business. I restarted after finishing my work and the problem was resolved so I didn’t need to call back, but it just emphasizes the importance of having people in your call center who actually understand the advice that they are giving and who aren’t just reading from a script.

The issues really hit the proverbial fan when my power had a momentary blip, knocking the internet offline close to midnight. I was half asleep reading a book anyway (“Project Hail Mary” in case you’re interested), so I manually turned off the lamp rather than having Alexa do it, and figured I would address it in the morning. My internet gateway rebooted without a hitch and my hardwired devices were back up, but the wi-fi had renamed itself and reset the password. That required tracking down the magical website where I should have been able to rename the network and change the password back, but I couldn’t figure out how to make my changes save. I’m stuck, in the short term at least, with a goofy 30-character password and a different network name.

Now I need to visit all my internet-enabled devices and get them reconnected, including my thermostat, a couple of Alexa devices, phones, a thermostat, and my smart TV so I can figure out how “Bridgerton” is going to continue to unfold without having to sit at my desk. I didn’t have time for that budgeted on my schedule today, so getting the phone connected was the best I could do for now.

With all that, I was more frustrated by my labor-saving devices than anything, and it was in that mood that I read Mr. H’s mention of the Sunrise EHR error in Australia that incorrectly calculated more than 1,000 pregnancy due dates. Regulators are investigating whether patients were harmed by the incorrect dates, which could have led to premature inductions of labor or mismanagement of patients who spontaneously entered labor well before their due date.

For example, when you’re concerned that a pre-term birth is imminent, there are treatments you administer to try to improve fetal lung function. Those are only indicated between very specific dates as far as fetal age. The issue affected public birthing hospitals in South Australia during the six months prior to June 5. SA Health is performing its own medical records review in parallel to the independent investigation. Approximately 100 patients have yet to deliver, so hopefully their dates are being appropriately updated. Patients have not yet been informed of the issue. 

Details on the incident are slim, with the article noting that due date fields in maternity notes were overridden by a calculation that was based on the last menstrual period. I haven’t used Sunrise since the late 1990s, but I’m guessing the system has a hierarchy for how it populates due dates, which might be determined from a last period, ultrasounds, other medical records such as assisted reproductive technology notes, patient-reported date of conception, or a combination of data available. However it manages those different data points, something went awry.

Back when I was delivering babies as part of full-scope family medicine, we would note all of those data points on this magical fold-out paper form and then document our final estimated date of delivery in a specific place on the form. It wasn’t sexy, but it was accurate, and the only way for it to be overridden involved a strike through and someone’s initials.

My question as a clinical informaticist is this: what happened six months prior to June 5 that caused it to be inaccurate? Was there an upgrade, an update, or some change to a template? What processes were in place (such as two sets of eyes checking on changes to critical patient care content) to prevent such an issue, and what went wrong?

If it is determined that patients were harmed by the issue, I certainly feel for them and for their families, because issues during pregnancy care can lead to a lifetime of “what if” questions that haunt parents. My experience transitioning obstetricians from the paper folding forms to EHR was that they planned to hold onto the paper until the last possible minute because it was a system that just worked. It would be interesting to see whether the benefits of electronic maternity documentation have been shown to provide improved clinical outcomes compared to paper documentation, but I doubt that study has been performed.

I could search for it, but instead I’ll be using my spare time to try to fix my household so that Alexa can once again turn on my bedside lamp.

What’s the technology you miss the most when it stops working? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 7/1/24

June 30, 2024 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 7/1/24

Lurie Children’s Hospital cybersecurity breach affected more than 790K people, including patients

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

Fabric Acquires MeMD, Expanding Virtual Care Services to 30,000 Employers and 5 Million Members

Care enablement technology company Fabric acquires virtual care service provider MeMD from the now shuttered Walmart Health.

Amwell Announces Reverse Stock Split

Telehealth vendor Amwell announces a reverse stock split in order to avoid delisting on the New York Stock Exchange.

Google, TikTok Ban Ads From ADHD Telehealth Company Amid Federal Probe

Google and TikTok bar Done Global from advertising on their platforms amidst a federal investigation that has expanded to include five additional people of interest.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 7/1/24

Monday Morning Update 7/1/24

June 30, 2024 News 12 Comments

Top News

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

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

The hospital finished restoring its systems on May 20.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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


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

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

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


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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


People

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Optum promotes Cara Griffin to SVP of marketing.


Announcements and Implementations

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


Other

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


Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 6/28/24

June 27, 2024 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 6/28/24

Walgreens Boots Alliance Reports Fiscal 2024 Third Quarter Results

Walgreens reports mixed Q3 results and announces that it will reduce its stake in primary care provider VillageMD so that it no longer holds a majority share.

Arcadia acquires CareJourney to enable high-performing networks and value-based care success

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

Hummingbird Healthcare Raises $10M to Address Persistent Barriers to Patient Access

Patient access technology vendor Hummingbird Healthcare closes a $10 million Series A funding round led by UCHealth.

Novant Health lays off 81 IT workers in Winston-Salem

Novant Health (NC) will lay off 81 IT workers in late August and shift some of their tasks to Deloitte Digital as part of a previously announced outsourcing plan.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 6/28/24

News 6/28/24

June 27, 2024 News Comments Off on News 6/28/24

Top News

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

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

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


Reader Comments

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

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

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

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


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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


Sales

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

People

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


Government and Politics

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

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


Privacy and Security

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


Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

Comments Off on News 6/28/24

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 6/27/24

June 27, 2024 Dr. Jayne 5 Comments

From Jaded CMIO: “Re your recent comments about the Medication Access and Training Expansion Act (MATE) and its 8-hour DEA education requirement being a time waster. I’m in the same boat – I don’t even see patients, but my institution forces me to maintain a DEA regardless. Did you see this commentary on Medscape?” The op-ed from Melissa Walton-Shirley, MD is subtitled “8 Hours of My Life I’d Like Back.” The author calls for reform of DEA regulation, including waiving the requirement for physicians who don’t issue prescriptions for outpatient narcotics (such as intensivists who might be giving controlled substances in the ICU) and issuing a nationwide DEA number instead of forcing providers to have separate ones for individual states. The piece has over 140 comments already and some of them are pretty entertaining. My favorite: “We should get 0.5 hrs just for reading this informative dragging of MATE. And Pharma should be forced to fund the DEA, not provider licensing fees – since when does the taxi driver pay your fare?”

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy penned a guest essay for the New York Times this week, calling for a “surgeon general’s warning label” on social media platforms and advising users that “social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” This would require an act of Congress that I doubt we’ll see anything about soon, however. Murthy issued an advisory last year with specific recommendations to make social media safer, and although there have been some interesting congressional hearings, I haven’t seen a lot of change. I’ve seen in my own community the level of peer pressure for young children to be on social media. I wish we could lure kids and their parents to consciously choose the outdoors and other activities rather than focusing on screens.

From Informatics Doc: “Re: patient portals. I just went to my mom’s Epic portal to see what meds she was currently on since there was some question about whether any of them were making her more confused and sluggish. When she first got her portal, I was impressed that it did a better job than the Cerner portal in terms of usability. It also had an option to print out a wallet card with an easy to read medication list, allergies, and problem list. Fast forward to today. Every option that I tried for getting a medication list showed the same cluttered view in which the info on each drug and its dose and times was interspersed with the pharmacy name, the prescribing doctor, the start date, and a refill button. Hitting the print button gave you the same thing in a PDF with slightly better layout. To get a medication list to send to my siblings meant taking an added 15 minutes to cut and paste into Word and clean out all the extras. Do the EHR vendors have something against a nice clear condensed med list? (I know Joint Commission contributed to the poor med list formats within the EHR by their dislike of Latin abbreviations, but have they caused this problem in the portals as well?)” I test drove this with a couple of organizations and it appears that it might be a setup issue rather than a vendor issue, but I’m not entirely sure. At the first system I logged into, the “current medications” page was cluttered up by information telling me how to request an amendment to my medical records for two of the system’s physician groups. The print version was a little better, but the entire first page was taken up by an inch and a half worth of text about the amendments, pushing the medications to another page. Only the first page had a patient identifier on it, which makes it a little less useful as something that you might take with you to a visit with a physician who uses a different EHR. The second system wasn’t displaying any of my meds, which is definitely unusual.

I’m not ready to blame the EHR vendor because I’ve seen enough client-inflicted setup issues in my career. One of the institutions in question clearly has a setup issue in another part of the system. My recent pathology results had a blank diagnosis (which to me should be a required field before they’re finalized) and also had a tagline at the top of my results that stated “EPIC results best viewed via link to PDF,” which I thought was odd since I had to scroll three times to find the link to the scanned document and it didn’t say anything about it being a PDF. I’m sure there are patients who might not know what they’re looking for or who might not have scrolled. My report was also missing important clinical information that I provided at the time of care (documented as “not provided,” which is simply not true). Sloppiness all around, but not necessarily the vendor’s fault. I think that a concise med list is important for patients to be able to put in a wallet, so if that’s an option, I hope our expert readers will weigh in.

The clinical informatics job market has been a hot topic in recent conversations with colleagues. I have several friends who are highly capable and genuinely nice people, but who have been impacted by sweeping layoffs at their organizations. Most have school-aged children, elderly parents, or both, so they are reluctant to relocate for a new position, which might get cut in a year or two just as easily as their previous one was. In a recent chat, one mentioned that they had made it through multiple interviews, but the companies in question had gone radio silent for a matter of weeks. That’s not only disheartening, but unprofessional. It takes a few seconds of a recruiter’s time to type an email saying, “Thank you for your time, but we will be moving in a different direction” or something similar. Another countered that although that experiencing is depressing, it can be a blessing in disguise when you figure out that the organizational was dysfunctional before joining it.

My favorite quote of the conversation says it all as my colleague described some of the organizational personalities he’s encountered in his job hunt process: “I feel like some of us spend so much time and thought honing our skills and presenting ourselves professionally and some others just Mr. Magoo their way from one executive role to another.” I think most of us have encountered leaders like that in our travels, bouncing from one unsuspecting organization to another. I’m grateful to have had at least a few experiences where I’ve worked with exceptional leaders, but that’s not the case everywhere.

How do you think the hiring process has changed over the last five years? Have things improved or are they only getting worse? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 6/27/24

June 26, 2024 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 6/27/24

CHAI Releases Draft Responsible Health AI Framework for Public Comment

The Coalition for Health AI publishes a draft framework for the responsible use of AI in healthcare and solicits public comment.

Form Health, The Leading Provider of Science-Based Obesity Care in the United States, Raises $38 Million Series B Led By Sound Ventures

Online medical weight loss clinic Form Health raises $38 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total raised to $65 million.

VA still dealing with fallout from Change Healthcare ransomware attack

The VA expects to have backlogs created by the Change Healthcare ransomware attack cleared by next February – a year after the hack originally took place.

CipherHealth Announces Capital Investment by Atalaya Capital Management, Setting Stage for Future Growth in Patient-Centered Communications

Patient engagement software vendor CipherHealth announces an undisclosed amount of new funding from Atalaya Capital Management.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 6/27/24

Healthcare AI News 6/26/24

June 26, 2024 Healthcare AI News Comments Off on Healthcare AI News 6/26/24

News

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The Coalition for Health AI publishes a draft framework for the responsible use of AI in healthcare and solicits public comment. CHAI also posted a draft document of Assurance Reporting Checklists for self-reporting and self-review for assuring that AI solutions meet criteria in five areas: (1) usefulness, usability, and efficacy; (2) fairness, equity, and bias management; (3) safety; (4) transparency and intelligibility; and (5) privacy and security.

In Japan, SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son will make a rare public appearance in a Thursday panel discussion on bringing AI to healthcare in his country. The investment group took a significant position in Tempus AI just before its recent IPO and has signed an agreement to set up similar services in Japan.


Business

Wolters Kluwer Health will add AI-powered adaptive learning to its nursing education products.

Oracle announces GA of Clinical Digital Assistant ambient documentation and voice command system for ambulatory clinics that use its EHR.

Solventum, formerly 3M Health Care, announces an AI-driven payment denials prediction solution.

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Real-world data vendor Atropos Health expands its Evidence Network to 300 million patients with the addition of two new partners. The company’s products can generate publication-grade, AI-powered observational studies from clinical questions with a two-day turnaround.

Shares in AI-enabled precision medicine vendor Tempus AI have lost one-third of their value since the company’s June 14 IPO. The company’s $8 billion pre-IPO valuation in 2022 is at $4.5 billion. Shares rose Wednesday on news that FDA has cleared sale of its atrial fibrillation detection algorithm for 12-lead ECGs.


Research

NIH awards Cleveland Clinic and other organizations a $2.8 million grant to study the use of AI to analyze MRIs to determine how rectal tumors are responding to therapy. Researchers hope to develop radiomic signatures using radiology and pathology images to identify dying tumors that have responded to therapy, which would allow those patients to avoid unnecessary further surgeries and complications.


Other

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Stanford Medicine develops Nuclei.io, which helps pathologists diagnose endometritis and metastatic colon cancer with higher speed and accuracy than pathologists alone. The AI system observes individual pathologist behavior – such as image clicking and enlarging —  to learn what they are looking for and which cells are important.


Contacts

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

Comments Off on Healthcare AI News 6/26/24

HIStalk Interviews Cyrus Bahrassa, CEO, Ashavan

June 26, 2024 Interviews 3 Comments

Cyrus Bahrassa is founder and CEO of Ashavan.

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Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’m somebody who would not have imagined being here talking to you. When I was a kid, healthcare IT was not on my radar. I’m not sure if anybody really does have it on the radar. I wanted to be a commercial airline pilot. In college, though, I found a passion for education. I thought I would be a teacher and eventually a principal or superintendent. But then a little company called Epic reached out to me in my senior year and said, you probably haven’t heard of us, but you should check us out. I did and I liked it enough to join the company, thinking I would be there just a couple of years. Instead, I stayed for seven, and somehow have been in the industry for my entire career.

Ashavan is a healthcare interoperability consulting company, or at least that’s what I tell people. But truthfully, that’s not the full story. Fundamentally, we are a company that is focused on choices. Our mission is to make the best choice the easiest one, and everything that we are trying to do is in service of that mission. Today, we’re focused on interoperability, and that’s going to be our focus for a while. But the pie-in-the-sky vision is that 50 years from now, we are helping people and businesses make optimal choices in other areas, things like sustainability and money. When we can make it easy to do the right thing, that’s where I would love or Ashavan to play a role.

Are the big non-healthcare companies surprised by the complexity of getting and using healthcare data?

Yes, especially the ones that are newer to healthcare. Maybe they have experience in technology in other ways, but they’re jumping into the healthcare side and saying, why is it so hard and complex and convoluted?  At the end of the day, it feels like a jungle. That’s what we see and hear from our customers. We are helping them carve a path through the jungle and helping them understand that this is the right way to go about this. You will be able to move as efficiently and practically as possible.

That doesn’t mean that it will be easy. It will still be hard. We can’t claim to have magic bullets that make everything push-of-a-button automatic, but at least we can help you move faster and more efficiently and have that certainty and that clarity that you might not have if you didn’t have that guide with you.

What is the incentive for a software vendor or provider to share information?

It’s a hard question to answer, because the incentives probably aren’t as strong as they could be. What I would preach in idealistic fashion is that we have to look at this from the perspective of customer service and doing the right thing for people and for their health. Sharing data and providing greater interoperability is an important piece of that. Do those entities have a vested interest in those things? Probably not, unfortunately. I hate to say that, but the reality is that they may not maximize their individual potential when we’re working in service of that common good. But that is a North Star that we have to have.

Unfortunately, that’s why government plays such a big role in healthcare IT and in interoperability. Sadly, the pace of innovation and interoperability is mostly dictated by the pace of change from the government side. You have USCDI, for example, and that’s a great thing. It allows for a certain floor in terms of API-based interoperability and retrieval of data. But that floor has remained stagnant for a while. It’s been at the Version 1 of USCDI for a few years now, and it won’t be until 2026 that that floor moves up to Version 3. Then it won’t move again until the ONC decides to make that change at some point in the future, which of course is dependent upon the circumstances in the industry, the political circumstances, and what kind of administration is in power. The challenge here is that we are working at the pace of government.

Where does the patient fit in?

The patient plays a huge role. First and foremost, they absolutely have a right to their records. They have a right to obtain records when they have the appropriate authorization for a family member. That is super important and something that has to be enforced strongly. 

I look at it like personal finance. We probably need to teach people to a level of literacy as they are growing up and as they are in young adulthood to help them be better healthcare consumers. More and more states are mandating education around personal finance in middle school and high school. Having individuals be knowledgeable of what their rights are, understanding the importance of having access to their data, and helping them understand the value of that access and that data exchange in practical terms.

When I explain interoperability to folks who don’t really know about it, I talk about smartphones. Imagine that you’re an Android owner, but you want to switch to an IPhone. You love everything about the IPhone, you can’t wait to switch, but then you find out that there’s no way to get all your photos, contacts, and messages pulled over automatically onto your iPhone. At best, you’ll have to manually key in everything, or at worst, you won’t be able to move some stuff at all.

That would be really, really bad interoperability. Thankfully, we don’t have that, but that’s a practical example of the power of data exchange and interoperability. Then, helping someone understand in the context of healthcare why that’s significant. You want to be able to switch your doctor, you’re moving to a new location, or you’re traveling and you need care in a new place. Having the ability to move that data and make things seamless, easy, and powerful is so important.

Apple Health was all the rage when it was announced, even though Google and Microsoft had failed in trying to do something similar. Has the uptake of Apple’s health-related capabilities proven that demand exists for patients to manage or transfer their own record?

There was a moment where personal health record apps had this big shining glow around them and everyone was pretty hyped about their potential. They are important, don’t get me wrong, but it’s this problem in healthcare and interoperability where you can get the data, but then how do you use it? It’s one thing to have it there, but it has to be usable and actionable. 

Allowing patients to pull their data through Apple and through other services is wonderful, but do they have that literacy and empowerment to use it? Do they have the ability to connect it somewhere else so that they can switch to a new provider or switch to a new location and have that data be equally understandable and actionable? 

The ability for these personal health record apps to pull in that data, showcase it, and surface it to the patient is good for them and for their ability to navigate the healthcare ecosystem.  But some folks are not going to pay attention to it as much, especially if they are relatively healthy or their health stays pretty constant and they don’t necessarily think about healthcare very often. Some folks, again, are just not going to have that literacy or that capability to be able to work through that. We have to do things as an industry, as a society, to help them navigate that better, to empower them, and to safeguard them.

My last thought here is that a lot of folks don’t understand what HIPAA truly covers and that some of these digital health applications — unless it’s as a business associate of a covered entity – aren’t subject to the HIPAA requirements. I’m not sure that most people will ever understand that. That means that it’s even more important for us to craft the laws and regulations that provide a suitable level of privacy protection so that the protection of their information is automated, no matter who the holder of it is. Again, this is all about choices and making the right thing the easy thing. If we can update those laws so that your information is protected in all these different situations and apps, that’s better for everyone.

Is the answer to update HIPAA or to implement general privacy protection?

It would be pretty comprehensive. I say that because of a couple of factors. What will prompt some sort of action from Congress, whether it’s in two years or 20 years, is these challenges around social media now also AI and the way that our data is used and monetized. I see that as being a big driver for some sort of action on privacy legislation. 

Unfortunately nowadays, there’s a tendency for Congress to take a long time and then do this big sweeping package when the time presents itself. I can see them getting to this point where privacy legislation is going to happen, and then healthcare and healthcare apps become a component of that larger bill. Like a lot of humans, I’m terrible at predicting the future, so I could very well be wrong and I’m going to be willing to admit that, but that’s what I see.

As someone who has worked both for and with Epic, do you see them as an interoperability friend or foe?

I see them as simply a self-interested player in the market, just like any other entity out there in our industry.

I believe a few things. Epic has a lot to offer when it comes to interoperability. They and Athena are at the forefront in terms of the different options you have and capabilities that you have for integrating with them, whether that’s HL7 interfaces, both FHIR APIs and proprietary APIs, Kit, etc. They have lots of available options that several other EHR vendors cannot claim to have.

At the same time, Epic is guilty of certain practices that are either common in the industry or that are unique to them. The common thing is high fees. I’m a big believer that we have to crack down on the fees and just charge for the cost of interoperability without making it a profit center, but simply a pass-through of the costs.

I also think that we need to address things like exclusive marketplaces and exclusive programs. You have the Epic Vendor Services program and Epic on FHIR, but you also have through Cerner what is now their Oracle Partner Network, which used to be their code program. You have the Athenahealth Marketplace. Similar to the Apple App Store and Play Store, those are the exclusive venues that you must go through to publish an app and use it with the particular EMR. I think that’s wrong. You should be able to have additional marketplaces. You should be able to pull down apps and list apps in multiple places. 

Those are the general things that I would say for Epic. A specific thing that I was concerned about was their Partners and Pals program. I spoke out about this several months ago when it was first announced. To me, that was the wrong move, because it at least implied — and no one ever denied this — that Epic was providing exclusive integration options to certain Partners and Pals that would not be generally available to everyone. I think that’s wrong and anti-competitive. For interoperability, the same capability should be available to all entities at the same time and at the same cost. That’s an important piece, because interoperability goes hand-in hand with competition, with a freer market, with allowing people to have better choices and to minimize the switching costs between those choices.

AI companies are desperate for data and will likely bring their own ideas about interoperability. How will that business need influence the technical side of interoperability?

It will increase the demand for sure. The key challenge is that when we’re talking about healthcare data, it doesn’t all live in just EHRs. We’ve got the ONC’s certified health IT program to ensure that these EHRs have this minimum level of data. Certainly they are a wealthy repository for that, but you’ve got data living in all kinds of other systems, whether it’s an uncertified EHR, a behavioral health system, a system used by a long-term care facility, PACS, and lab systems. It’s his big, hairy beast and the fragmentation problem in healthcare technology is a real challenge in interoperability, because you’ve got data that’s living in all these different places.

With regard to the business side, there will be demand, but the challenge is how you target that demand to the right entities. If you’re a pharma company, you will have to take it one by one in terms of where you want to get that data and get those capabilities to pull that data, because it’s not like there’s one source and one a one-stop shop.

When I explain interoperability to folks and some of the challenges, I talk about Uber. With Uber, you can see a map and a timing for your ride. Why is that possible? It’s because Uber has integrated with Google and their Google Maps functionality to be able to provide that information. Uber only had to integrate with Google and that’s it. They get everything that they might need.

But that’s not the same thing in healthcare. You can’t go to one single place and get everything you need, even as a patient. Our information is in the EMR, but also in the PCP’s EMR, the hospital’s EMR, in the Walgreens where we got our flu shot last year, and in the urgent care. Being able to source the data from all those different places is something that is going to be really challenging, whether you’re a business or a person.

How does Nashville’s innovation and digital health environment compare to that of Silicon Valley, Route 128, and Austin?

I’m biased. I love Nashville. I tell people that it’s the greatest city on earth. I’m sure lots of folks would disagree with me, but it is a wonderful place that I hope lots of people can at least come and visit, if not move to.

In terms of the entrepreneurial scene and the technology scene, it has really flourished. I’ve only been here five years, so I can’t say that I have a perfect window into everything that has gone on. But a lot of people are focused on making Nashville a wonderful place. There’s a lot of positive energy around technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship.  We have a really thriving entrepreneur center, a couple of them actually. We’ve got great programs and accelerators that support these different startups. There are certain people out there who are trying their best to attract investment, attract attention, and build that culture.

We’re a tightknit community in the way that we come together and support each other. I’ve always felt like people are out there willing to help, willing to lend a hand, and meet or introduce you to someone, which I think is really great. That supportive environment has made it a wonderful place to have a business and to live. We’re doing the right things.

It always helps when you have a big name who is drawn to the city, like Oracle. I know there was the announcement about moving the headquarters here. I’m interested to see how that plays out and what it looks like, but even just having that campus here and what they’re doing to build that up and build up the East Bank of Nashville is really special. That drives attention and creates that network effect, because more and more organizations will now take a look at us and say, this is a cool place, we should check it out, we want to be here.

What are the company’s plans for the next few years?

I have to get better as an entrepreneur. That’s the thing that’s top of mind for me. We are three and a half years in. It’s gone well, but I’m still learning. I’m still improving. I probably will be every day of my life. Even right now, I’m trying to figure out how to be a leader and not just a hero. That’s a really important thing on my mind.

In terms of the company, healthcare will always be a focus area, but we definitely want to expand beyond that. Interoperability is a big deal in a lot of industries. You’re talking financial technology, manufacturing, logistics, etc. I was at a conference recently on smart transportation and mobility. There’s a huge need for better interoperability so that the streetlights, stop signs, vehicles, and scooters can all talk to one another. That’s going to be important for a modern transportation infrastructure.

What we want to do at Ashavan is earn a seat at the table in those industries. We want to be a part of bringing about that change and bringing about better interoperability in those areas, because when we can make the best choice the easiest one for those consumers and those companies, we’re going to feel like we’re making a positive contribution to society, and that’s going to be really special.

Morning Headlines 6/26/24

June 25, 2024 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 6/26/24

EVisit Acquires UPMC’s Inpatient Teleconsult Technology and Secures Investments from UPMC Enterprises and MedStar Health to Expand Innovative Partnerships and Capabilities

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

Adonis Raises $31 Million, Led by Point72 Private Investments, to Improve Healthcare Financial Outcomes and Patient Experiences Through AI

AI-enabled RCM vendor Adonis raises $31 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total raised to $54 million.

Geisinger provides notice of Nuance’s data security incident

Nuance notifies Geisinger patients that a former employee accessed patient information two days after being fired by the company in November 2023.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 6/26/24

News 6/26/24

June 25, 2024 News 6 Comments

Top News

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

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

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

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


Reader Comments

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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


Sales

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

People

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

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

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

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Firasat Hussain (Arrivia) joins SnapCare as CTO.

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

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


Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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


Government and Politics

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


Privacy and Security

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

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


Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 6/25/24

June 24, 2024 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 6/25/24

Heyday Health Raises $12.5M to Scale “Virtual-forward” Value-based Care Model for Medicare & Dual-eligible Patients

Heyday Health will use $12.5 million in new funding to expand its virtual care and house call services for Medicare patients into new markets in Ohio and Kentucky.

Digital Health Company Pear Suite Hits 100-Customer Milestone

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

HHS Finalizes Rule Establishing Disincentives for Health Care Providers That Have Committed Information Blocking

HHS finalizes the penalties providers can expect to face if they engage in information-blocking activities.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 6/25/24

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 6/24/24

June 24, 2024 Dr. Jayne 3 Comments

I’ve spent the last couple of months mentoring a medical student who wants to include clinical informatics in their future practice. She’s doing an elective where she spends time with various physicians who hold informatics roles. She asked me to review a paper that she wrote about her experiences.

As part of the rotation, she worked with an optimization team that works with medical practices that are being acquired by the health system that is affiliated with the medical school. Her paper was about those experiences and how clinical informatics principles might be applied to scenarios that she witnessed during site visits.

First, I was impressed at her level of thoroughness. Despite not having a lot of formal experience in process improvement, she was able to document and categorize workflows and make suggestions about how they might be modified before the practice joins the larger system. She correctly identified that there will be a fairly steep learning curve, not just due to the EHR transition, but also due to operational processes that are outside what we would consider best practices. Some of the items she witnessed can make a big difference in a practice’s success.

Although I was surprised by some elements, others fell into the “no surprises here” category.

One of the first things she called attention to in her write-up were regulatory citations that were made by staff that didn’t actually align with the regulations in questions. These included telling patients they couldn’t give family members access to their records “due to HIPAA” even when patients were making HIPAA-compliant requests for information sharing. The office was also engaged in information blocking, telling patients they couldn’t see their own records. That will need to change, because I’m sure the health system doesn’t want the liability of someone creating a situation that results in a fine due to noncompliance.

Misinterpretation of the rules happens often, and the student listed the health system’s standardized annual training as a potential strategy for mitigation. I recommended that she also confirm that the optimization team planned to circle back after that training to make sure that any regulatory myths were fully debunked during the course of the training.

Another thing she noticed was physicians and other clinicians using EHR note templates, but not editing them to match the patients, such as including a bilateral lower extremity exam on a patient who had undergone a lower limb amputation. The clinicians claimed that they didn’t know how to modify the template, but the student was able to give some on-the-spot training.

She was shocked to see some physicians signing their notes without even reading them, and I hated to tell her that in some organizations, that is the rule rather than the exception. She was even more shocked to hear about the notes that I’ve seen where people add phrases like “Dictated but not read, signed to expedite communication,” which we both agreed is absurd as well as being a medicolegal risk.

She noticed that the practice was taking complete vital signs on all patients regardless of the reason for visit, and provided a nice discussion of why that might not be necessary. It turns out that the EHR was configured so that all vital sign fields were required, which is undoubtedly a huge time-waster for the practice as well as an inconvenience to patients. Examples provided included a patient having full vital signs documented for a suture removal, when really all that was needed was documentation of the procedure that was performed and the status of the wound in question. Knowing the EHR they will be converting to soon and how it is configured, this is a problem that will be easier to remedy once they’ve made their transition.

I chuckled as I read the portion of her report that dealt with prescribing habits. The physicians in the practice who complained the most about refill request volumes were, unsurprisingly, the ones who refused to follow processes that have been best practices for more than two decades, such as writing a patient’s prescriptions to cover the maximum duration allowable by law. For a compliant patient who is stable on medications, there is no reason not to write their prescriptions for 12 months if it’s legal. Not only do shorter refill periods require more work on the part of office staff as they process requests,they are also a risk to patients who might not take their medications as directed if there are delays in the refill process. She actually overheard one of the physicians tell a patient to “just call the office when you need a refill” despite the practice’s policy that refills should be requested through the pharmacy since the office receives electronic refill requests.

She had a question for me about how her paper should address the issue of physicians who are unproductive in the office yet blame the EHR even though they were doing a significant amount of non-work activities during office hours. She actually had observational data on how much time physicians were spending on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and other social media during times that they could have been documenting patient visits, addressing lab or diagnostic results, or managing the inbox. For one physician who the team shadowed, the number of personal phone calls made during the office day was quite high. It’s hard to avoid so-called “pajama time” documenting at home when you’re not making the most of the time available to you at work. I asked her to work with the optimization team to find out how they address these issues with the organization’s physicians and staff, and to provide a similar treatment in her final paper.

We had a good discussion about what life was like in the time before smartphones and how the constant connectivity to information and communication tools has changed how many people work, both inside and outside of healthcare. During a recent trip to the airport, I watched a member of the housekeeping staff hold their phone watching videos with their left hand while mopping with their right hand. If that’s not an example of the addictive properties of certain technologies, I’m not sure what is. We had some good conversations about work-life balance and how the habits she’ll be forming in residency will influence her later actions, so I’m hoping she’ll take a mindful approach to how she is managing her own time and activities.

Due to the nature of the shadowing experience, she wasn’t able to get into much EHR optimization, but I’m glad she had the opportunity to do a little teaching about templates. In a recent conversation with some other clinical informaticists, one asked if we thought our roles were becoming obsolete. As long as there are EHR (and other solution) features that aren’t being trained to end users or that aren’t being used to their fullest, there will always be room for informaticists to help improve the daily work experience.

What are the small improvements you help your users with on a daily basis? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Health IT from the Investor’s Chair 6/24/24

June 24, 2024 Investor's Chair 1 Comment

HLTH Europe 2024 Edition – Oops, I Did It Again!

When I learned that HLTH was launching in Europe, I was intrigued. So much of the HLTH vibe seemed particularly US-centric (seven-figure paychecks to hospital and payer employees being, after all, a strictly US phenomenon). But shortly after your humble Investor’s Chair relocated from Northern California to Barcelona, I realized that I simply had to attend and report back. Suffice to say, it did not disappoint.

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Having reported on all but the most recent HLTH events (three in Vegas, one in Boston), I found its Amsterdam incarnation remarkably similar to the others. HLTH and its creators’ prior conferences, ShopTalk and Money20/20, remain formulaic. The formula appears to work just as well in Europe. It was busy. There was a wide range of content (mostly panels, possibly to allow participants an audience, thus driving attendance) on the mostly predictable subjects (ChatGPT, investing, health equity, genomics, chronic illness, etc.) running across five concurrent stages.

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Needless to say, there were exhibitors (which are often the point of a conference), but it was fairly small scale, much like the first HLTH. In fact, I was told that attendance was roughly the same as HLTH’s inaugural session in 2018.

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One thing I noticed was multiple nation-specific pavilions, sort of like a World’s Fair for digital health. To be fair, HIMSS and other HLTHs have these, but given the size, they stood out better here. In addition to the photographed Israel and Spain, I observed UK, Australia, Holland (of course), and quite a few more.

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But the thing that makes HLTH the useful and fun event it works hard to be is not educating, and certainly not selling products (two aspects that I’d argue are secondary goals at best), but convening. That’s where the UI/UX that is inherent in the HLTH DNA shines clear. Inside and outside the exhibit hall were countless places to pull up a spot for a meeting or a chat. The VCs I spoke with all seemed to have remarkably full dance cards, meeting with either other investors or early-stage companies that are seeking capital (my sense is more of the former than the later though, and the event definitely trended towards earlier stage companies).

The HLTH app was mostly well designed and allowed users to search for, and even better, extend invitations to other attendees for networking chats. While I would have strongly preferred a document-based attendee list as well  since scrolling through an app gets old, I gather that privilege was reserved for sponsors, not mere attendees. After each meeting, the app allowed you to rate the person, fortunately only for your own use, and export a list for later follow-up, an extremely helpful feature.

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As with the other HLTH events’ user experience, in addition to all the seating you could want (just try finding that at HIMSS or JPMorgan), there always seemed to be food, drinks, and espresso drinks (drip is so American) readily at hand and usually sponsored. As I guess is becoming standard for HLTH, there was even a place for haircuts on the floor (I still get what’s left of mine trimmed before attending, but maybe next year…). And, as at previous HLTH’s, a place for new headshots – perhaps that is what drives the haircuts?

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One attendee I met with who works for an NGO likened it to “a festival atmosphere”, and I think that’s spot-on with the event’s goals. It’s a place where people can go and have a really good time hanging out with like-minded folks with similar interests.

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Do I need rock music blaring in the background? Not really, but it all seems to add to the vibe (or is it ViVE?) Finally, I’m reminded of what Mr. HIStalk told me when I first began writing this column back in 2009 – I should aim to entertain and inform. HLTH does both (and hopefully, so do I).

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Ben Rooks has spent over 30 years attending HIMSS, HLTH, JPMorgan and Health Evolution while covering and then advising the health care IT sector as an equity analyst, investment banker, and strategic advisor. In 2009 he formed ST Advisors to help companies buy, sell, or grow. He loves comments and questions, as well as food, wine, and musical theatre.

HIStalk Interviews Trip Hofer, CEO, Redox

June 24, 2024 Interviews Comments Off on HIStalk Interviews Trip Hofer, CEO, Redox

Trip Hofer, MBA is CEO of Redox.

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Tell me about yourself and the company.

I joined the organization in November of last year. I’ve been in healthcare for approaching 25 years now, and throughout that time, we’ve always talked about the ability to get data easily from one system to another, from A to B. A to B can be from an EMR to an EMR, from a digital health vendor to an EMR, from an EMR to a cloud, or from an ecosystem that has been built specifically in a payer environment. I’ve seen various A to Bs, but throughout my career, what seemed simple verbally and logically got complex and became undoable. That was always frustrating when trying to serve patients better. 

Especially at the time with value-based care, I thought that Redox could be interesting since it has been moving data for 10 years. Redox was primarily focused on enabling digital health vendors to interact with an EMR, to both read and write into and out of an EMR. That is incredibly important for digital health vendors and for the providers who are working with their EMR to have access to other methods for serving a patient.

The company has expanded to not only do that, but also to move data from anywhere, from point A to B. With AI and machine learning, an important need is to get usable data quickly in large volumes safely. We are at a remarkably interesting time for the company and for the industry as a whole.

How do you see interoperability evolving, specifically with FHIR APIs?

It will continue to evolve. It’s top of mind. I was at a health plan a week ago with a bunch of cloud vendors. FHIR usage is proliferating, being used and applied by any healthcare entity. That’s great. You wish it was like, “Just adopt FHIR, it will be easy, and we’ll move forward.” The fundamental challenge with healthcare data, which is unique to any other industry, is that the data is extremely messy and it continues to change. That is a symptom of workflow.

For example, follow a claim from initial generation all the way through adjudication. It goes through a ton of changes. You can call it maturations, but changes or evolutions or whatever the term you want to use through that process. It seems simple, but it gets updated, it could get rejected, more information might need to be added. It is messy. It could include the wrong diagnosis codes or the wrong name. That’s just a claim that flows through, and there’s a lot of discussion on prior authorization.

While the advent of FHIR is really important, getting data from point A to B in healthcare is difficult because it’s messy. FHIR helps with that by having a standard format that is being adopted, but it’s the workflow that makes it so complicated.

How does the company work around that messy data?

I’ve learned that the idea that you can just go buy a piece of software off the shelf and plug it in can be used for the simplest of of tasks. But getting more creative with data, or using it for other purposes — especially with large volumes of data — that’s not enough. We’re a technology company with services. We have people who work with each of our clients to make sure that the integration meets their needs. We apply use cases. What problem are we trying to solve specifically?

The beauty of Redox is that each integration implementation leverages usable technology, meaning that we don’t have to start from scratch. We have over 7,500 connections established across the country that we can leverage. Implementation can be extremely fast. The national plan that I just visited took three months. If you ask any health plan about how long a typical data integration takes, it’s not measured in months, it’s measured in years. We can  get stuff up fast, but we also apply a combination of usable technology and people who know what they’re doing because they live it daily. They help with that integration implementation and ongoing maintenance and monitoring of the technology.

What changes will 21st Century Cures and TEFCA require?

I am a fan of 21st Century Cures and TEFCA. Their general objective is to make it easier for patients to get their information. I don’t know how anyone isn’t a proponent of that. We all want it. I want it as a consumer. I want to be able to get my information as fast as possible during my care journey. It forces organizations to think about how they’re going to make that easily accessible.

The problem with TEFCA is that it’s optional. There are no incentives or penalties for organizations to adhere to TEFCA. You can if you’d like, but you don’t have to. You’ll see adoption without incentives or penalties, but not at the level there would be with a mandate. If there was going to be mandate around it, we would have to carefully think about what that means. How do you ensure that what is written and regulated or mandated is appropriate? If it’s going to be a true game-changer, especially TEFCA, you have to see incentives or penalties and take away the optionality.

We’ve seen controversy over companies using data for non-treatment purposes. How will that evolve?

That’s going to be very interesting. I’ve been following the same cases and situations and the companies that have been impacted by that. These are treatment use cases are flowing through here and ensuring what treatment means. An act like TEFCA or 21st Century Cures can be so good. But other organizations are bad actors in this environment who want to use that data for alternative purposes. You think that this is treatment, so it should be easy, but data has been leveraged for other reasons. 

When you  get into something around payment, that gets even more interesting when it comes to how people might inappropriately leverage that data. That’s the concern. I still think that those use cases should move forward and should get access, but it has to be in a way that ensures that those bad actors or actresses can’t perform the way that they want to, and that’s difficult. That’s really hard. I wouldn’t even have thought on the treatment side that you would have seen what you’ve seen, but I think I was being a little naive. 

People think about these things and figure out ways to exploit them. That’s what we have to be concerned about, especially when we get into the money side of things, beyond treatment use cases that will proliferate. How do you try your best to put measures in place to stop that from happening?

How will AI to affect your business and your customers?

It doesn’t come as any surprise that AI is discussed at every industry conference. When we talk to our clients, AI either comes up or is the focal point of the meeting. I was at one of the large cloud aggregators two weeks ago and their request of us was, we have a lot of tools that can consume information that can do some really interesting things, but we need that information in a way that we can consume it. That’s where we come in as Redox. How can we move data, and large volumes of data, securely?

I want to make sure that those two points aren’t missed. We aren’t talking about moving small amounts of data. These organizations are asking for a large amount of data, billions of transactions. We’re now moving over a billion transactions a month at Redox, and I’m thinking that by the end of the year, we will probably move up to a billion and a half per month. That’s a lot of data, and you must have a platform that can move that data. The platforms of some organizations have just not been able to do that. They can’t handle the data.

OK, you have to be able to handle data, but quickly on top of that, how can you handle it securely? Challenges around security and all the breaches are major concerns. How do you ensure that you have the security? It’s funny that when we get into AI discussions, we typically lead with how we think about moving secure data, and I had organization say that they appreciate that we talk security first because it is so top of mind.

But that’s what we do. We are an enabler. We don’t run the tools at the end of the pipe to take advantage of it. We pride ourselves on providing the data that is necessary to enable those tools. We are enabler of machine learning or of artificial intelligence, and as I continue to remind our team, we are also the enabler of value-based contracting and value-based pricing. Having been in healthcare for so long and seeing fee-for-service not work, we have to move more quickly to value-based arrangements. The only way you do that is to provide good, clean data to expedite that. That is top of mind for us as well.

When it comes to our own company, we actually just sat down and had this conversation, which is funny that you ask. I said to the team, not only how do we use AI, but if AI were to make Redox obsolete, what would that look like? The reality is that there are parts of the ecosystem where we perform — if you think about a pipe or a highway, what that looks like along the journey — where AI is very applicable, but there are other parts where it’s just not, not now at least. 

A lot of that has to do with the manual intervention based upon workflow, things that make AI something that you can’t put into that part of the ecosystem at this point. But we’re constantly looking at that, because we want to make this as efficient and effective for our customers as possible. Wherever we can leverage AI to do that, we will do that. Where it’s not leverageable, we won’t. We are truly trying to enable our end users with usable data, and if AI helps that, we will implement it, period.

Your other job as a venture partner gives you frontline exposure not only to AI, but to what companies and investors are doing and thinking. How would you characterize the health tech investment marketplace?

There’s a couple of things that will probably come as no surprise. The first is the general environment today, which really started last year or maybe a year and a half ago when venture capital money seized up and the spigot stopped flowing. There was a lot of what you would call tourist investment going on in 2022, where people who didn’t really know what they were doing in healthcare were throwing a lot of money into healthcare and into companies. It was great to receive the money if you were one of those organizations, but also now you’re feeling the effect of where it has seized up and you don’t have that money any more.

We face a lot of consolidation. In the industry where we sit, there are a lot of players where they are not 100% overlapping in what they do. There are concentric circles, but the overlap is not at 100%, meaning that there’s no real true competitor, at least in our case at Redox. Other organizations do some of what we do, but there’s no one that you would say overlap, where someone might say that they could pull Redox and and put in A and it does the exact same thing. What that suggests, if you look across the industry, is that there will be consolidation.

There will be forced consolidation, where companies will go to market because they literally run out of money and they can’t raise any more. Do they close up shop or are they able to merge with other organizations? You are going to see that. It’s a ripe time for companies to get together and start to talk, especially the companies that are in this space, these small fragmented companies, to come together. 

You’re not seeing a lot of these companies being acquired by health plans, payers, and providers like you were several years ago. The way to make yourself more enticing is to come together with somebody else and merge those capabilities that you could have if you think about ecosystem horizontally, where you add pieces to it so you become more desirable and you’re able to do more as an entity.

You will see this year that companies will come together and further their value proposition horizontally. There may be some vertically, but a lot horizontally. You’ll be able to do more across the data ecosystem because you’re bringing together different groups of people. I am 100% confident that you’ll see companies coming together, and a lot of that is a reaction to the VC marketplace, both the funding but also the acquisition, the buying of the assets by those who would behave that way.

What are the company’s priorities over the next few years?

The company has been in existence for 10 years. The vast majority of that time was establishing itself as the leader connecting digital health vendors to EMRs. In doing so, it created what I would say is a tremendous opportunity to to expand to other types of organizations outside of just EMRs and digital health vendors because of all the connections that the company made during those first, let’s say eight, years. Thousands of connections into healthcare organizations into EMRs, working with over 90 EMRs, for example, in 7,500 healthcare organizations, moving a ton of data. 

The priorities for us are moving agnostically. When a healthcare entity wants to move data from A to B, that could include the cloud, where we have relationships with the cloud aggregators. Those aggregators can then do advanced analytics for their customers. Over the next several years, a couple of years, it’s how we continue to evolve into the payer market, provider market, and life sciences market and complement what we’re doing today. What we do today, but do it for more and more entities and continue to scale. 

Then as we talked about that horizontal view of the ecosystem, how do we continue to build out capabilities, partner, or even acquire? That is the typical thing you think about as a leader, which for me, is build by partner. How do we continue to think about that and do that horizontally, so that when you come to Redox, we can do more and more for you? 

A lot of that will be driven by the ask of our clients. When one of our clients says, “I wish you could do X,”  that’s where I perk up. What would you like us to do? We consider that on our roadmaps about about how we move forward.

Our core DNA is that we enable. A lot of clients say, “You do this stuff that we just don’t want to do.” They want the data so that they can then go do something with it. We enable that. We are an enabler, and a very key enabler. We want to continue with that DNA, but enable more and more people with more and more data at a very secure and fast pace.

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Morning Headlines 6/24/24

June 23, 2024 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 6/24/24

Judge rules in favor of AHA vacating HHS online tracking ‘bulletin’ as unlawful and beyond agency authority

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

Sharecare enters into definitive agreement to be acquired by Altaris

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

Russian Hackers Of London Hospitals Publish Patient Data

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

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 6/24/24

Monday Morning Update 6/24/24

June 23, 2024 News Comments Off on Monday Morning Update 6/24/24

Top News

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

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

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


Reader Comments

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


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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


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

Here’s an intro video for Augmedix.


Webinars

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

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

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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


Privacy and Security

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

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


Sponsor Updates

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

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

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

Blog Posts


Contacts

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


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