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HIStalk Interviews Russ Thomas, CEO, Availity

January 19, 2022 Interviews 2 Comments

Russ Thomas, JD is CEO of Availity of Jacksonville, FL.

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Tell me about yourself and the company.

Availity is the largest network in all of healthcare, connecting 2 million providers and every health plan in the country and transacting 13 billion healthcare transactions a year. We have a broad scope and broad scale in driving a lot of cool impact in the transformation of healthcare. I’ve been the CEO since 2012 and have loved every minute of it.

To what degree do you see EDI, networks, and clearinghouses still being innovative and vital for digital transformation?

My buddy Sean Wieland, the analyst at Piper Sandler, told me a few years back that he would love to see how we make clearinghouses sexy again. I kind of laughed, saying, “I’m not sure clearinghouses were ever sexy, Sean, but I’ll do my best.” You have to be transformational and innovative. Otherwise, it’s a commoditized business where you are selling essentially transactions at fractions of a penny. If you don’t innovate and evolve, then you become irrelevant pretty quickly. That’s where we’ve been super successful. We have always focused on real time. The company was started as a real-time network.

When you say EDI, I think batch and days in transaction processing and transfer versus milliseconds. That’s a real opportunity for businesses like ours, to take what today is a large network of very important transactional activity and evolve it into a network of interactions between providers and health plans and make sure that, on a real-time basis, you’re serving up content. We’re in the information business. We have to be able to serve up content to the right provider, right time, right patient in ways that can meaningfully improve that patient experience. I think that 21st century clearinghouses and networks like ours have to be able to do that and demonstrate that value in order to thrive.

Your most recent investment was from Novo Holdings, which has life sciences connections. Do you see an opportunity to expand into real-world clinical research data?

That’s not where we’re headed, to be candid with you. We are in such a trusted place with our customers — our health plans, providers and ultimately the members and patients that they serve — that I don’t think we need to go there. Just being a data broker isn’t particularly exciting to me. What’s exciting to me is this evolution of transactional relationship between providers and health plans to an interaction, meaningfully moving to digital engagement, digital platform between providers and health plans.

Today we live in this pretty siloed transaction environment where you run an eligibility check and you get a response to that. It may tell you to do something else. You run an authorization, you get a response to that. Then down the road, you submit a claim, you get a response to that. That’s not how healthcare gets practiced. Physicians are practicing in real time, and they are making real-time clinical decisions about how best to treat their patients.

The administrative networks haven’t kept up with, or at least haven’t advanced, to support that type of real-world relationship between providers and patients. That’s where we are focused, moving to this intelligent network that discerns information from the very first encounter between a provider and a health plan around the patient and helps that provider think forward to what they need to know during the patient visit and when they are making the referral. We need to follow the trajectory of the patient visit more than some sort of made-up transactional flow that has persisted for decades and doesn’t support the workflow in the provider’s office.

Where do you see the line between provider and payer blurring and what are the transactional needs that are involved?

There’s this opacity in healthcare between providers and payers, between providers and their patients, and between payers and their members that just has to get fixed. Payers clearly have to continue to demonstrate value in that, for lack of a better term, the clinical decision process. But that ultimately is a provider’s responsibility as the professional who makes the decision about what’s best for the patient. Where I think we can help, and I don’t have the ultimate answer, is to be able to move that decision-making process to something that feels more like a real-time, intelligent workflow. That would be a great start.

We know from our providers and even our payers that authorizations are the bane of their existence. No matter how big of a smile you put on it, it’s still just seen as a brute force utilization management tool. But payers have information about a member that might not be readily available to a provider, and when that is served up in the context of a real-time workflow process — whether that’s an authorization or referral or whatever it may be – it can drive a ton of value in that overall patient experience. That’s where we are focused.

One of the things I’ve always said about Availity is that we’re not an arms dealer. We are not provider centric. We are not payer centric. We are solution centric, and f we can create more transparency in those complex workflows where both the provider and the payer are bringing value to the table, then there’s a lot of upside for us and a lot of growth potential. 

We can start to knock down some of these walls between providers and payers around who is bringing value and at what point in the cycle. Providers would say that, by and large, payers don’t bring a lot of value in a clinical review process. The payers would say they need to keep a close eye on these providers because in the absence of utilization management processes, you get a significant overutilization and abuse of the healthcare system. I don’t know that I believe that either one of those is true. Value can be delivered on both sides of the equation.

To what extent are providers using clinical information that they can get only from a payer?

Our model is that we sell products and solutions to payers and we sell products and solutions to providers. We sit in a unique place where we are able to grow our business through our relationship with both sides of the equation. The answer to your question is that is growing. We are seeing more utilization of clinical data going both ways. We are seeing more clinical data being served up to our provider network from our payers to help close gaps in care, particularly in the Medicare Advantage space to get to the right utilization for HEDIS and other scoring purposes. We are seeing more and more data flow to the providers and then come back.

We’ve done a lot of integrations into provider systems to be able to pull out clinical data, attachments, charts, other things that are then consumed within a payer’s system to try to help come to a better and faster solution to an authorization workflow, for example. We are doing real-time, automated authorization workflows where we are reaching into the provider system, extracting clinical data in the provider context, translating that to payer-speak, and using that to help automate the authorization workflow within the payer systems. That is a big area of growth in the market and for us.

What challenges remain with building a network and integrating with EHRs?

You have to look at the endpoints on the network, which in healthcare are its users. We have solved a lot of the core administrative network issues, getting to the right person within the billing office, the front office, or other places where historically the adoption of technology has been pretty high. But we are still not nearly 100% penetrated into the parts of the provider organization where clinical decision-making is being done. We’re not penetrated into the clinical coordinators, the nurse practitioners, and the folks that all day, every day are trying to help manage these more complex clinical workflows with unstructured data and that sort of thing.

As a company, we have 2 million connected providers into our network, but we haven’t gone deep and created connectivity to the right users in all of those offices and all those facilities. There’s a real focus on expanding the use of Availity within a provider organization to make sure that we are bringing value not just to the scheduling person, billing person, or front desk intake, but also to those clinically oriented professionals within the organization.To a large degree, we have only scratched the surface of the value proposition there.

I think you build that all from a single network. There’s no reason to have a clinical network, an administrative network, and a financial network. When you do that, you create silos that then create more opacity in the process. But there’s work to be done to get to that nirvana state of a true holistic network.

What is driving investor interest in companies that offer patient payments technology?

We’re pretty small in that space right now. We help a physician collect a deductible upfront, but it’s not a big piece of our business. The interest comes from the right place. What we’ve done over decades is fairly completely disconnected the consumer from the provider. It’s the only section of the economy where we’ve done it quite so thoroughly.You and I as consumers of healthcare are still mostly ignorant to what a service costs, what the options are, and what is being billed versus what is being collected. We’ll do $2.5 trillion of billed claims through our network this year, of which 50 or 60% actually gets reimbursed. Where did the other trillion dollars go? You and I as consumers certainly don’t know where it went.

The desire to move into the patient billing and patient reimbursement space comes from the right place of saying that to drive the demand-side healthcare economy, you’ve got to connect the consumer with the provider of a service and the cost of that service. Strategically, I think that’s where these companies are trying to go. I’m not sure that anyone has completely figured out the timeline the process to get there. But it comes from the right place, even if it’s just to create awareness with a consumer that even though my responsibility for the services is only $50 or $100, I want to know what it really cost and what the options are, because there may be an option where I don’t have any deductible or there may be a higher quality option. Today, it’s just so difficult for us to get any visibility into those choices.

What will the company’s focus be in the next few years?

We’ve built a great culture here as a company. By and large, people really like working here. We have a revitalized leadership team with some great new leaders who joined us over over the last year. One of the things we’ve learned is that COVID has changed the way we work, changed our business, and changed the way we run the business. I’ve been in healthcare tech for over two decades and the energy around change and faster evolutionary processes is higher than I’ve ever seen it. It has to be.

The move to digital should be user experience driven, not technology driven. This move to a digital platform and a digital experience for our users is going to be our top area of focus. Moving to this interaction-based workflow within both our products and the way that we serve up data to our B2B customers is a great place for us to be as a company and a place where we can both grow and bring a lot of healthcare system. As we sit here today, we transact, by our estimates, half or so of all the healthcare transactions in the country. We sit in a pretty interesting place to be impactful if we try. We are going to give it a hell of a try.

Morning Headlines 1/19/22

January 18, 2022 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/19/22

ONC Completes Critical 21st Century Cures Act Requirement, Publishes the Trusted Exchange Framework and the Common Agreement for Health Information Networks

ONC and The Sequoia Project publish the Trusted Exchange Framework and the Common Agreement (TEFCA) that will allow entities to apply for designation as Qualified Health Information Networks.

CliniSys acquires HORIZON Lab Systems and combines with Sunquest Information Systems to create one of the world’s largest organizations dedicated to diagnostics and laboratory informatics

England-based ordering communications and laboratory information management systems vendor CliniSys — which was purchased by Sunquest owner Roper Technologies in 2015 — acquires Raleigh, NC-based Horizon Lab Systems.

WebPT acquires Clinicient

Physical therapy software vendor WebPT acquires competitor Clinicient and its Keet digital MSK care subsidiary for an undisclosed sum.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/19/22

News 1/19/22

January 18, 2022 News 1 Comment

Top News

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ONC and The Sequoia Project publish the Trusted Exchange Framework and the Common Agreement (TEFCA) that will allow entities to apply for designation as Qualified Health Information Networks.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

YouTube has recently been suggesting to me videos related to ASMR — autonomous sensory meridian response — in which the sounds of whispering or nature cause some people to tingle or to relax. Camping, romantic role play, and cooking are common subjects of the audio-emphasized videos. They don’t do much for me, but I’m intrigued to learn that the name — and the attempt to apply science to the phenomenon — originated in 2009 with Jennifer Allen, an interface analyst with Allscripts (she’s now a cybersecurity expert) who thought the initially proposed term “brain-gasm” wasn’t optimal. Quite a few YouTube “personalities” or “ASMRtists” are making as much as $6 million per year each from their cut of ASMR video ad revenue, although you would think that the YouTube-inserted ads would disrupt whatever ASMR experience was in progress.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

England-based ordering communications and laboratory information management systems vendor CliniSys — which was acquired by Sunquest owner Roper Technologies in 2015 — acquires Raleigh, NC-based Horizon Lab Systems. The combined companies will operate as CliniSys, apparently retiring the Sunquest name. CliniSys’s president and CEO is industry long-timer Michael Simpson, who has held executive roles with McKesson, QuadraMed, GE Healthcare, Caradigm, and Sunquest.

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Digital mental health company Talkspace faces a class action lawsuit alleging that its proxy statement misled investors before its SPAC merger last year. The suit contends that the company hid its lower margins and higher customer acquisition costs and overvalued its accounts receivable from health plans. Husband and wife co-founders Oren and Roni Frank left the company in November ahead of disappointing third-quarter results. Talkspace found itself in hot water in August 2020 when reports surfaced that the company was mining session transcripts for marketing purposes and asking employees to create fake positive app store reviews. Shares that closed on their first day of trading in June 2021 at $9.19 are now at $1.58, valuing the company at $248 million. The company tried to soothe investors at last week’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference by saying that it hopes to increase the time users engage with the app, make it easier for cash-paying customers to use their insurance, find a CEO, and bundle its services.


Sales

  • Truveta will integrate a new Patient Centric Token from the healthcare business of LexisNexis Risk Solutions with its data platform, giving its 17 health system members access to a wide range of de-identified data sets that can be used for clinical research, and population health and health equity studies.

People

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Josh Byrd (Savista) joins Relatient as VP of marketing.

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Archana Dubey, MD joins AliveCor as chief clinical officer.

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Startup Health promotes Jamey Edwards to COO.

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Therapy Brands hires Mary Carol Morrissey, MBA (HMS) as SVP of sales; Jason McNeil (NextGen Healthcare – not pictured) as EVP of revenue cycle management; and Kevin Smith, MBA (Accenture) as EVP of substance abuse recovery solutions.


Announcements and Implementations

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The Orlando VA Medical Center implements WellHive’s ION scheduling software, enabling VA providers to more easily schedule patient appointments with non-VA physicians.

Premier leverages its PINC AI technology to develop on-demand, self-service health data analytics, queries, and visualizations.

ECRI lists its “Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2022”:

  • Cybersecurity incidents.
  • Supply chain shortfalls.
  • Infusion pumps that are damaged in ways that may not be apparent.
  • Emergency stockpile items that may not be ready for use.
  • Telehealth solutions that don’t meet patient and provider needs, aren’t easy to use (especially for patients), and create large volumes of irrelevant data.
  • Syringe pumps that deliver incorrect doses because of low-volume infusion rates.
  • AI reconstruction of images from MRI and CT that may be fooled by anatomic variation, patient movement, and device malfunction.
  • Insufficient cleaning and disinfection of duodenoscopes.
  • Misuse or mislabeling of disposable isolation, surgical, and cover gowns.
  • Wifi dropouts and dead zones that circumvent safety features, interrupt workflow, and don’t allow critical alerts to be delivered.

Government and Politics

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HHS signs a $12 million, 12-month extension of its contract with TeleTracking for its hospital bed and supply-tracking database. The database was originally commissioned in April 2020 as part of federal efforts to streamline hospital submission of COVID-related capacity, patient count, and supply information. The company came under Congressional fire several months later for the original no-bid contract, which prohibited it from discussing how it collects and shares data, the nature of its proposal to HHS, and communication it may have had with the White House or other government officials.


Privacy and Security

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Jackson Hospital (FL) recovers from a ransomware attack late Sunday night that infected its ER charting system. The 600-employee hospital took all of its systems offline and reverted to downtime procedures. IT Director Jamie Hussey and his 12-person team have since brought nearly everything back online. He expects the charting system, which is maintained by a third party, to be back up and running later this week. Hussey, a 26-year Jackson employee, explained to CNN, “It’s better to be down a day than be down a month. Lock it down and piss people off. It’s what you have to do just to secure your network.”


Other

Security researchers say that the smartphone app that China is requiring athletes to use for COVID tracking during next month’s Olympics exposes health data because of encryption shortcomings. The app also contains a dictionary of political terms that China censors, although it’s not clear that the app uses it. The security flaws theoretically violate China’s personal data protection laws and the app store policies of Google and Apple. The experts assume that the flaws were unintentional, but note that fixing them might interfere with the government’s online surveillance tools.

Topping Gallup’s annual poll of honesty and ethics are nurses, medical doctors, grade school teachers, pharmacists, and military officers. The bottom five are state office holders, advertising practitioners, members of Congress, car salespeople, and lobbyists.


Sponsor Updates

  • CloudWave recaps its 2021 achievements, including adding 50 hospitals to its OpSus Cloud, partnering with Vital Images, and expanding its engineering and cloud teams.
  • Optimum Healthcare IT celebrates its 10th anniversary and unveils a new company logo.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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Morning Headlines 1/18/22

January 17, 2022 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/18/22

ContinuumCloud Acquires CaredFor to Expand Solution Offering

ContinuumCloud, a cloud-based health IT developer focused on behavioral health and human services organizations, has acquired patient engagement app vendor CaredFor.

Rosen, Respected Investor Counsel, Encourages Talkspace, Inc. Investors to Secure Counsel Before Important March 8 Deadline in Securities Class Action

A class-action lawsuit filed in early January alleges digital mental health company Talkspace misled investors just before its merger with an SPAC that ultimately provided it with $250 million in capital.

Health Tech Startup Closes Seed Round

Radiology-focused analytics company Xillum raises $1.1 million in seed funding.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/18/22

Readers Write: Why 2022 Will Be the Year of Wide Adoption of Blockchain Technology in Healthcare

January 17, 2022 Readers Write 10 Comments

Why 2022 Will Be the Year of Wide Adoption of Blockchain Technology in Healthcare
By Stuart Hanson

Stuart Hanson, MBA is CEO of Avaneer Health of Chicago, IL,

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To all the HIStalk readers who are skeptical of blockchain in healthcare, this one is especially for you. I look forward to discussing further with each of you!

I believe the inability to lifecycle manage and effortlessly share data (with patient permission) is one of the biggest problems in our health system today. As an industry, we must be able to track clinical insights with administrative data together, in order to maintain a complete view of the individual and their specific needs. As we all know, there is no way to dynamically link data in joint processes with multiple parties at scale that is automated, permissioned, traceable, and highly secure. This must change.

The first step is to view healthcare data as a digital asset. Blockchain makes this possible.

Blockchain technology solves many of the challenges with digital asset management as we’ve seen with cryptocurrency. By viewing patient data as a digital asset, we can shift our view from the technology, processes, and workflows used to manage patient data and begin focusing on how blockchain can become part of the healthcare ecosystem.

While large organizations rapidly identified ways to use blockchain, the technology has shown itself to be disruptive to processes, business models, and competitive environments, resulting in a slow adoption of blockchain in healthcare. However, the industry is learning from its initial efforts and is ready to use blockchain as the following elements become more real:

  • Governance. Blockchain enables coopetition in a way that existing technology cannot. The idea of hospitals joining a community of trust with payers is unheard of, but is made possible with a governance structure that can be trusted and powered by blockchain. We’ve seen how Cleveland Clinic and Sentara Healthcare have teamed with payers like Anthem, HCSC, and Aetna to develop a blockchain-enabled network. They formed a consortium and spent several years developing the governance framework, then founded Avaneer Health to use the governance structure and develop its healthcare utility network infrastructure for accessing data, deploying solutions, and creating a marketplace.
  • Use cases for permissioned, nationwide blockchain are emerging. Administrative processes in healthcare are burdened with waste and inefficiency. In the midst of this challenge, a blockchain-enabled network eliminates the need for point-to-point connectivity by creating an environment of “connect once to many.” Also, a blockchain-enabled network functions as a verifiable trust layer for joint processes between participants on the network. Because of that agreed, verifiable trust function, counter-party risk of data sharing is significantly reduced. Each participant on the blockchain knows with a certified verification that the other partiers are “good actors” and agree to interact with each other using automatically enforced standards. No other middleman data processing entity is needed to guarantee the integrity of the data or transaction. Only once all the participants can verify trust against the others in how, why, and when they will interact, does truly continuous dynamic data updates and sharing becomes possible. This is the vision for the future state for all healthcare organizations.
  • Momentum creates more momentum. Many early blockchain healthcare initiatives struggled with adoption and languished in research and development. They seemed all but doomed because of the lack of collaboration. However, that’s no longer the case with the payers and providers mentioned above. Together, they have created a blockchain network with a collective 80 million covered lives and 14 million annual patient visits. And organizations like PNC Bank are now launching solutions that impact thousands of providers and numerous payers nationwide. This is what momentum looks like and it’s just the beginning as large organizations see they have a vested interest in participating.

Healthcare innovators have developed solutions using blockchain for medical supply chain, health credential validation, provider credentialing, patient data security, and life sciences. It’s time to broaden our scope to look at all healthcare processes as opportunities for transformation using blockchain. The train has left the station. Are you on board?

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/17/22

January 17, 2022 Dr. Jayne 1 Comment

I’ve done several projects in the last couple of years that involve health IT interoperability. Each has been challenging in its own way. There are varying state requirements for data exchange and those have been a factor in some of the projects, with lots of extra time and effort spent trying to obtain patient consent when an opt-in strategy is in play. There are also plenty of requirements about protecting information that has been identified as sensitive, including that related to mental health, reproductive health, and the care of minors. Given all those considerations, for most of the projects my consulting efforts have probably been 80% focused on the operational and governance aspects as opposed to the technical ones.

Not that I’m a stranger to the tech piece. I started working with my first health information exchange in the early 2000s and those days certainly were an adventure. We were using it to share records within our own organization due lack of institutional support for an enterprise EHR. Since a given patient might have three or four charts on the system depending on where they sought care, we were using the HIE to try to create some semblance of a comprehensive patient record. It wasn’t elegant, but it got the job done, and we managed to reduce some duplications and identify some controlled substance reconciliation issues along the way.

Fast forward. Although the information superhighway may have been smoothed with the technology equivalent of a new coat of asphalt, there are still some steep grades and dangerous curves. There is a tremendous amount of trust that when vendors say their solutions are interoperable that they truly are. However, as with nearly everything in the healthcare information technology world, the devil is in the details. A lot of organizations have consolidated their enterprise purchases around a handful of vendors under the assumption that such decisions would bring greater interoperability and easier data sharing. There is quite a bit of variation though as organizations might not be on the same versions of a given platform.

There is also a lack of attention to the operational differences between organizations that might choose not to share certain types of data for a variety of reasons. Business goals are high on this list – reducing patient leakage, trying to consolidate all of a patient’s care at a single health system, preserving high-margin service lines, and more. Often these issues don’t become hot topics until interoperability projects are well underway and they can essentially derail even the most well-planned technical project.

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association looked at the interoperability limitations that are found even when organizations have the same EHR vendor. Although overall data exchange is somewhat easier, there are still struggles with data normalization and reconciliation. The authors looked at nearly 70 oncology sites that were using one of five EHRs and calculated interoperability scores for sharing with the same EHR as well as scores for sharing with a different EHR. They included 12 specific data elements, equally split between medications and laboratory tests, which are standardized within oncology practice.

Not surprisingly, same vendor sharing had stronger interoperability scores than sharing between different vendors. However, the results should be enlightening for anyone who hopes to do these types of projects. The authors noted that, “Reliable interoperability requires institutions to map their data to the same standards and ensure that mapping practices are consistent across institutions.” They also noted the importance of looking at potential interoperability of specific data elements. For example, there may be different levels of interoperability when looking at medications as compared to lab results or imaging studies. Even within those categories, organizations need to look at how interoperability looks for common medications and laboratories versus less common or rare examples.

Although some might think that greater standards for interoperability measures might be the answer, the researchers are concerned that this might lead to vendors and their clients focusing their attention on those elements that are being monitored rather than the overall picture. They noted, “it will be important to ensure that certification does not replace poor interoperability with poor interoperability except for a few chosen data elements.” We certainly saw this type of behavior in the Meaningful Use era when there was a tremendous degree of focus on checking the boxes even if it was at the expense of quality patient care and user satisfaction.

I’d like to see a similar study performed looking at primary care interoperability as opposed to a subspecialty such as oncology. Primary care is the core of healthcare and where the greatest exists for interoperability so that we can use existing data, avoid duplicate and wasteful studies, manage overlapping medications, and provide a comprehensive plan of care for individual patients. I’d like to see how easy it really is for my Epic-using internal medicine physician to get information from the radiologist across town who is on a different instance of Epic, as well as from the surgeon who is using Cerner in the hospital and NextGen in their office, and the telehealth vendor I used when I was out of state and the county health clinic where I might have had a COVID test. Despite what integrated delivery networks are hoping for, many of us choose the best physician for our situation regardless of whose logo is on the door.

I’d also like to see how it plays out for emergency department encounters since patients don’t always get to choose which facility they’re taken to in an acute situation. In fact, COVID is running so rampant in my city right now that one municipal ambulance district is refusing to take patients anywhere but the two closest hospitals unless the patient requires specialized pediatric care. Given the time it takes to clean the vehicles after transporting COVID-positive patients and get them back into service, they’re trying to avoid long runs and decrease their turnaround time. There’s a tremendous number of patients that seek care at our city’s other major health system, which makes the need for solid interoperability even more important.

What has your experience been with interoperability, either with the same vendor or different ones? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 1/17/22

January 16, 2022 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/17/22

Digital Health Leader Verana Health Secures $150M Series E Funding Round

Verana Health, which sells real-world evidence data to life sciences companies, raises $150 million in a Series E funding round, increasing its total to $289 million.

MPulse Mobile Acquires HealthCrowd and Receives Growth Investment from PSG

Healthcare conversational AI vendor MPulse Mobile acquires healthcare communications vendor HealthCrowd and secures funding from PSG.

VA pushes back second EHR deployment, citing delays in training from COVID-19

The VA pushes back its second Cerner go-live from March 5 to April 30 at its Columbus, OH facility, which it says has experienced training delays because 200 of its 1,700 employees are absent.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/17/22

Monday Morning Update 1/17/22

January 15, 2022 News Comments Off on Monday Morning Update 1/17/22

Top News

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Verana Health, which sells real-world evidence data to life sciences companies, raises $150 million in a Series E funding round, increasing its total to $289 million.

The San Francisco-based company offered a tele-ophthalmology triage app under the name DigiInsight Technologies until 2018, when it signed a deal to commercialize the patient dataset of the American Academy of Ophthalmologists and pivoted into life sciences data.

The company’s real-world data network has 20,000 medical society member providers in ophthalmology, urology, and neurology.


Reader Comments

From Veteran of the Psychic Wars: “Re: HIMSS show dropouts. Will you be reporting them again this year?” I will when I hear about them, which really happened only during HIMSS20, when a company that decided not to attend was noteworthy enough to warrant issuing a press release or tweet. It isn’t in the best interest of HIMSS to announce pullouts, so the only surefire way to track dropouts would be if HIMSS religiously updates their conference exhibitor floor plan, in which case (a) it could be screen-scraped with the “not really exhibiting” vendors  who haven’t booked a 10×10 booth or larger could be excluded; and (b) the result could be exported to a database and compared with previous versions. The exhibitor count is at 640, up from 603 a week ago. Let me know if your company had signed up to exhibit but has decided against it. Still, I’ll offer the same advice as I did in 2020 and 2021 – exhibit or not based on your own comfort level, not on what everybody else is doing.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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About 20% of poll respondents have tested positive for COVID-19 at some point, with about 4% of those requiring hospitalization and the others evenly split between no impact or having some degree of symptoms.

New poll to your right or here: Which social networks are you using much less now than two years ago? I admit that I don’t use most of them and I’m weaning myself off Facebook because I feel worse after looking at it instead of better. I probably waste more time in the rabbit hole of YouTube than the others.

HIMSS isn’t the only conference trying to figure out how to implement safety protocols in Florida. Less than 50 days from its start in Miami Beach, the inaugural ViVE conference — put on by CHIME and HLTH March 6-9 — hasn’t announced COVID protocols, saying only that it hasn’t decided about requiring vaccination and hopes that “masking and social distancing can become personal decisions.” The conference expects 3,500 attendees, 300 sponsors, and 250 speakers.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare conversational AI vendor MPulse Mobile acquires healthcare communications vendor HealthCrowd. MPulse Mobile has raised $42 million through a Series C round, including a new investment that makes growth equity firm PSG its majority shareholder.

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A federal court orders former drug company CEO Martin Shkreli to repay $65 million and bans him from participating in the drug industry for life for his role at Vyera Pharmaceuticals, formerly known as Turing Pharmaceuticals, which acquired the exclusive rights to old toxoplasmosis treatment drug Daraprim and immediately raised its price by 5,000%. The New York attorney general declared him “a pharma bro no more.” He will complete a seven-year federal prison sentence for securities fraud in November. Shkreli’s swaggering, obnoxious personality and declarations that his actions were simply “capitalism at work” got him in trouble for doing pretty much what all drug companies do in monopolizing markets by buying off would-be competitors or burying them in legal challenges – he should have worn a suit, spoken soaringly about human health while quietly stuffing cash in the mattress, and jacked Daraprim’s price up steadily over a few years like insulin manufacturers have learned to do to prevent an immediate uproar for profiting on the backs of desperately ill people.


Sales

  • In England, five NHS trusts in Surrey and Sussex will implement Sectra radiology imaging.

People

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Hartford HealthCare names Joel Vengco, MS, MA (Baystate Health) as SVP / chief information and digital officer. He replaces Richard Shirey, who is retiring.

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Optimum Healthcare IT Chief Marketing Officer Larry Kaiser takes on additional responsibility in the same role with related company Clearsense.

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David McSwain, MD, MPH (MUSC) joins UNC Health as CMIO.

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Laboratory information management system vendor Ovation.io hires Curt Medeiros, MBA (Ontrak) as CEO.

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Matthew Anderson, MD, MBA (Banner Health) joins HonorHealth Medical Group as CMIO.


Announcements and Implementations

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CHIME launches the degree-granting CHIME University for digital health professionals, which will begin classes on January 31 for the 45 credit hour Master of Digital Healthcare and 60 credit hour Doctor of Digital Healthcare degrees. The degrees are self-paced and offered digitally, with a rolling enrollment allowing learners to start at any time. Each degree costs a flat $12,000 with discounts offered to CHIME members, CHIME Foundation members, and CHIME-affiliated organizations. CHIME University, which has not earned accreditation but will seek it, will initially offer its programs to residents of 21 states.

Kaiser Permanente joins member-led, non-profit digital health company Graphite Health, joining SSM, Presbyterian Health Services, and Intermountain Healthcare. The company offers a marketplace for digital health solutions.


Government and Politics

The VA pushes back its second Cerner go-live from March 5 to April 30 at its Columbus, OH facility, which it says has experienced training delays because 200 of its 1,700 employees are absent.


Privacy and Security

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File transfer software vendor Accellion reaches an $8 million settlement for a December 2020 breach that affected 9 million people, 3.5 million of them patients with Centene, Kroger, Trinity Health, and others. Hackers sent extortion emails to at least 100 companies, threatening to publish their sensitive data online. The company says in its settlement proposal that it did not guarantee the security of its software, adding that its license agreement disclaims those guarantees and includes a limitation of liability for breach-related damages. New sales of the company’s 20-year-old File Transfer Appliance software ended in 2016, but customers were allowed to renew their licenses even though the software’s final security update was in February 2019. The company now markets its products under the name Kiteworks.


Other

NPR covers the month-old ransomware downtime of Kronos Private Cloud, which has affected 8 million employees, including those of many health systems. AHA says that hospitals have been hit especially hard with the manual payroll work that is required as they deal with heavy COVID-19 workload. AHA says that hackers are obviously to blame, but it is disappointed with Kronos for a lack of transparency and its failure to protect its systems. The company said Friday that it has restored access for 1,000 customers, putting it ahead of schedule for its target of a complete recovery by January 28. Kronos also says that “a relatively small volume of data” was exfiltrated by the hacker in the December 11 attack and it has notified affected customers.


Sponsor Updates

  • InterSystems publishes a report, “The High Cost of Bad Data and Analytics on Strategic Healthcare Decisions.”
  • Wolters Kluwer Health and Laerdal Medical release the next generation of VSim for Nursing, which provides real-world, evidence-based training scenarios for nursing students.
  • OptimizeRx names Ash Roozbehani (Delta Dental) as senior counsel.
  • PatientBond joins Olive’s marketplace, The Library.
  • Premier’s Contigo Health business expands its provider-sponsored health plan offerings through a new partnership with OhioHealthy.
  • Talkdesk is recognized by TrustRadius with 2022 Best of Awards for Feature Set, Value, and Relationship in the Contact Center category.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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Comments Off on Monday Morning Update 1/17/22

Weekender 1/14/22

January 14, 2022 Weekender Comments Off on Weekender 1/14/22

weekender 


Weekly News Recap

  • Report says that a private equity firm is close to acquiring urgent care EHR vendor Experity for $1.2 billion.
  • Ambient patient-physician voice scribing solution vendor DeepScribe raises $30 million.
  • Data exchange platform vendor Avaneer Health raises $50 million in seed funding.
  • Hospital-at-home technology and services vendor Medically Home raises $110 million.
  • DexCare raises $50 million.
  • HIMSS announces that masks will be required throughout the HIMSS22 campus.
  • PerfectServe acquires AnesthesiaGo.
  • Transcarent raises $200 million in Series C funding.
  • Clinical collaboration platform vendor TigerConnect raises $300 million in funding.
  • Aledade acquires care planning solutions vendor Iris Healthcare.
  • R1 RCM signs an agreement to acquire competitor Cloudmed for $4.1 billion.
  • Qlik files for an IPO six years after being taken private for $3 billion.
  • Stryker will acquire Vocera for $3 billion.

Best Reader Comments

Algorithm-assisted decisions will reduce that systemic bias + noise and will lead to higher quality diagnosis (and do it with better predictive capabilities for more upstream care). Of course, nobody is denying that for this to happen at scale, data quality, transparency in algorithm development process, awareness of clinical applicability etc. will all need to improve and the industry will do well to stay clear of AI/ML snake oil peddlers. Thoughtful visionaries will create and own that future – just like they always have. (Vikas Chowdhry)

Thirty years in healthcare IT implementations has taught me that hospital ABC can implement BestEverSystem and have great outcomes and usage, and hospital XYZ installs same system, but is a colossal failure. Other countries have managed [COVID-19] testing quite well, according to family that has experience with it. I’m sad to see the missteps US has taken, but I don’t think it’s intentional, just lack of experience in true public / social health environment. It’s obvious when they say “every health insurer has to provide 8 tests per person per month” that they have no idea what they are doing. Insurers should have zero to do with it, in my opinion. (ABCs)

#America – where there is a need for a service that helps patients who have the audacity to try to not die from cancer a way to declare bankruptcy. (Dales Brian)

The “line of people” and the “something” in this statement are a generalization and assumption of context. The people may not have nor want a technology-based solution that delivers the “something” without participating in a line. If a technology has been applied already and that results in a line, is the line formed because of a new demand for the “something” that would not have otherwise been available without technology? It would be better to restate as a question; Does a physical line of people waiting for something present an opportunity for technology to meet a need? (Paul Klehn)

What gives us common cause? Why do we bond as human beings? Where does the impetus to cooperate come from? As long as the answers to those questions keeps coming back to “you have to,” “your employer says so,” and “your paycheque requires it,” there is an element of compulsion involved. It also encourages a transactional environment. You are now a replaceable (and optional) cog in a machine. Good teamwork is not based upon these elements. The odd bit is that, rationally speaking, almost any corporate life involves being replaceable. You are certainly performing a bunch of activities for money. However if that is all that you are, it’s demoralizing and dehumanizing. Most people perform better if they are not slotted into transactional boxes. (Brian Too)

It’s 2022. “Hallway interaction” happens via Teams, Slack, and other random interactions that didn’t exist even five years ago. Culture is built via action and example, and always has been – not dreary in-person meetings reciting corporate values. If you can’t manage without physically being able to walk to someone’s workspace to check up on your employees, you probably weren’t an effective manager. I may be biased as an under-40 executive, but the atmosphere and culture at a work from home-optional company has been way better than the billion dollar company that preached culture every day that I left a few years back when they couldn’t adapt.(Leonard Shelby)

Slack is a very poor substitute for hallways and water coolers. Social engagement between peers outside of a work context is very hard to nurture in a remote setting … The atmosphere and culture may be better in a remote company, but correlation is not causation. In my personal experience between an billion-dollar company and a remote company, confounding factors were that the remote-first company was younger, smaller, more modern, had a much smaller and easier to change product, and had an executive tier that was more accessible to the average Joe. Being remote may have positive impacts on culture directly also, as well as on equity. It may be harder to forge an old boys club when they can’t rendezvous at the golf course. (MoreNuancedRemoter)


Watercooler Talk Tidbits

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Readers funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Ms. T, whose Buffalo, NY first-grade class of 15 dual-language students is split into eight who are doing in-person learning and seven who are learning remotely. She reports, “This document camera has been a great tool for me to teach my students without having to share books and having students sit next to each other on this difficult time we are living with the pandemic and social distancing. Students have improved drastically because I can show not only one student, but the whole class how to solve math problems, write words, read spelling words, and practice all together by sharing the document.”

A UK doctor loses his license for using a cauterization tool to burn his initials onto livers he had transplanted.

Thirteen people, including two physicians, are arrested for their involvement in a $100 million insurance fraud scam in which 911 operators and hospital employees were bribed to provide information about car accident victims, who were then referred to doctors who ordered unnecessary treatments. The defendants took advantage of New York and New Jersey laws require auto insurance companies to pay all medical bills under their no-fault laws.


In Case You Missed It


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Comments Off on Weekender 1/14/22

Morning Headlines 1/14/22

January 13, 2022 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/14/22

Avaneer Health Announces $50 Million in Seed Funding from Healthcare Industry Leaders

Data exchange platform vendor Avaneer Health raises $50 million in seed funding.

Medically Home raises $110M to care for patients at home

Medically Home, which provides hospital-at-home support services and technology to health systems, raises $110 million.

DexCare Closes $50M Series B Funding Led by Transformation Capital to Advance Its Digital Care Operating System

Health system patient acquisition and capacity management software vendor DexCare, which was spun off by Providence, raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

HeyRenee Raises Another $4.4M in Oversubscribed Seed II Funding Round Led by Quiet Capital; New Capital Accelerates Mission to Enable Effective Whole Person Healthcare

Heal co-founders Renee Dua, MD and Nick Desai raise $4.4 million for HeyRenee, their new, app-based care coordination and concierge service aimed at seniors.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/14/22

News 1/14/22

January 13, 2022 News 1 Comment

Top News

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Axios reports that  private equity firm GTR is close to a signing a deal to acquire urgent care EHR vendor Experity for around $1.2 billion.

The company’s owner, private equity firm Warburg Pincus, formed Experity in May 2019 by merging DocuTAP and Practice Velocity.

Experity’s software is used by more than 50% of US urgent care clinics.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Ambient patient-physician voice scribing solution vendor DeepScribe raises $30 million in a Series A funding round. The company says it has 400 physician users and has integrated its system with Claimpower, Elation, AdvancedMD, Practice Fusion, Athenahealth, and DrChrono. It says doctors save an average of three hours per day at one-sixth the cost of human scribes. 

Telehealth system vendor Caregility raises $25 million in funding.

Mindfulness app vendor Headspace Health acquires Sayana, which offers an AI-powered self-help app.

Data exchange platform vendor Avaneer Health raises $50 million in seed funding.

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Medically Home, which provides hospital-at-home support services and technology to health systems, raises $110 million in funding from investors that include Baxter International, Cardinal Health, Mayo Clinic, and Kaiser Permanente. The company has raised $275 million. It says 7,000 patients have been treated using its offerings.

Health system patient acquisition and capacity management software vendor DexCare, which was spun off by Providence, raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.


Sales

  • Roche Diagnostics USA will offer Glytec’s Glucommander insulin dosing support system as the first software application to run on its just-announced Cobas Pulse point-of-care blood glucose system.
  • The VA signs a $13 million contract for Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform.
  • Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies chooses Microsoft as its preferred cloud provider for digital surgery solutions, which provide medical device insights about patients to surgeons to increase consistency.

People

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Patient engagement software vendor Tendo hires Bala Hota, MD, MPH (Rush University Medical Center) as SVP / chief informatics officer.

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Healthcare Triangle names Sanjay Dalwani, MBA (Capgemini) as chief revenue officer.

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Patient engagement software vendor Clearwave hires Saji Rajasekharan, MBA (Premier) as CTO.

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Mayur Yermaneni, MBA, MS (EQHealth Solutions) joins healthcare analytics and consulting form Blue Health Intelligence as chief strategy and growth officer.

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Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center hires Rémy Evard, MS (Flagship Pioneering) as chief digital officer and head of technology.

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David Wright, MPH (Get Well) joins Vital Software as chief growth officer.


Announcements and Implementations

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A JAMIA perspective piece says that health systems that switch EHRs – because they are acquired or want to replace their existing system – should apply the principles of Requisite Imagination in visualizing the desired future state to identify what might go wrong, especially with regard to patient safety. The authors make six recommendations:

  • Choose a leadership structure that includes technical and operational experts who encourage users to speak up about problems. Pay clinicians for content development.
  • Conduct a self-assessment of risk using ONC’s SAFER Guides checklists.
  • Standardize features, functions, nomenclature, and workflows to avoid unwarranted variation.
  • Create a standard taxonomy to track performance indicators from multiple sources, such as adverse event reports, help desk tickets, audit logs, and operational performance and patient satisfaction measures.
  • Import as much coded and free-text as possible from the old EHR, then provide an easily understood summary of the old chart for reconciliation with the new system during the first visit.
  • Communicate clearly to users what changes are upcoming, how quality care will be maintained, and how they will be supported. Offer workflow-specific training, dedicated practice time, and one-to-one support for clinicians who are struggling and consider reducing patient loads where possible in the first few weeks after go-live.

Atlantic Health System (NJ) expands its use of Kyruus ProviderMatch to offer online scheduling on its website.

HIMSS updates its HIMSS22 Right of Entry Protocols with two options for attendees, exhibitors, and speakers: (a) voluntarily provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination (boosters are not required) before badge pick-up; or (b) present negative antigen or PCR test results no older than the day before badge pick-up. Masks must be worn at all times while on the campus. The next update will be January 26, which will presumably provide details about how vaccination proof can be submitted before arrival.


Other

Drug maker and COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Pfizer will lay off several hundred sales reps in predicting that doctors will prefer drug company contact to be conducted virtually 50% of the time even after the pandemic ends. Competitor Amgen took the same action a year ago, eliminating 500 sales rep jobs as the pandemic limited in-person contact.

Commonwealth Fund President and former National Coordinator David Blumenthal, MD says in a Harvard Business Review piece that big corporations – CVS-Aetna, Walgreens, Walmart, Amazon, Optum – are hiring PCPs and buying primary care practices, which will have an unknown effect on the US’s failing primary care system, where many people don’t see the value of PCPs or can’t find one. He says those big corporations need to figure out how to pay PCPs, who make much less than their procedure-driven counterparts, more without burning them out, with three options: (a) treat primary care as a lost leader to draw customers in who will buy greeting cards or lawn chairs; (b) use physician extenders to increase productivity and therefore profit under the fee-for-service system, with the risk that corporations will create provider and patient discontent or add on billable services to the detriment of the healthcare system; or (c) allow health insurers to manage chronic conditions for which they already bear financial risk for unnecessary hospitalizations and ED visits, which can allow both lowered premiums and higher profits. Blumenthal says Option C is the most promising.

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Zus Health Product Manager Brendan Keeler provides an concise Twitter summary of the Big Three healthcare interoperability networks (Epic’s Care Everywhere, Carequality, and CommonWell):

  • Care Everywhere is CDA-based (not FHIR) and allows both querying and pushing patient-level summaries, encounter-level summaries, specialty CDAs, and non-discrete data such as PDFs. Epic turns it on by default so all Epic hospitals can share data with each other, but some of its customers block that exchange by turning it off.
  • Carequality is a distributed exchange (not a centralized HIE) and is roughly equivalent to Care Everywhere.
  • CommonWell uses a centralized record locator service and stores only the demographics that are needed to match patients. It is primarily based on CDA, but uses some FHIR APIs.
  • Carequality and CommonWell connected in 2018 to form a “somewhat comprehensive” national network for obtaining patient summaries, but it does not support pushing data like Care Everywhere does.
  • Epic’s EHR exposes more data via these networks than other vendor EHRs, which mostly provide just a patient summary and possibly encounter summaries.

I always enjoy scouring the exhibit hall rules of the HIMSS conference for nuggets like these, each of which must have been triggered by real-life violation:

  • Exhibitors cannot enter the booth of another exhibitor without permission. This is expressed in a badly worded rule that says, “Exhibitors are required to remain in their own booth space during exhibit hours and non-exhibit hours,” suggesting incarceration and the use of adult diapers.
  • “Sideshow tactics” such as using megaphones, clowns, flash mobs, dancing, body painting, and bungee jumpers aren’t allowed. In addition, “clothing must be worn at all times (including tops and bottoms).” I’m curious how the bungee jumping worked and who was guilty of exhibiting topless or bottomless.
  • “Special talent” is not allowed to walk the show floor, although the term was not defined.
  • Soliciting isn’t allowed in the convention center lobby, outside, or within any HIMSS block hotel.
  • Exhibitors can’t give away or sell marijuana or other controlled substances on the show floor.

Sponsor Updates

  • Everbridge appoints former Citrix president and CEO David Henshall to its board.
  • Redox doubled its network reach in 2021.
  • The HCI Group releases a new DGTL Voices Podcast, “How Cancer Transformed Us.”
  • Nordic achieves Select Partner and Public Sector Partner within the Amazon Web Services Partner Network.
  • Tidelands Health sees a 52% drop in inappropriate telemetry orders using Meditech’s professional services.

Blog Posts


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EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/13/22

January 13, 2022 Dr. Jayne 3 Comments

Mr. H recently threw out a challenge: “Discuss: a physical line of people waiting for something indicates a failure of technology to meet a need.” I’ll certainly take the bait on this one.

I recently needed to do three transactions at my state’s motor vehicle agency. The first involved renewing my car’s annual registration, and it was very straightforward online. Typically when you do this in person, you have to show at least four paper documents. For online renewals, though, the system is hooked up with the motor vehicle inspection sites as well as the taxation agency, to make sure everything is current. For the mere price of a $3 convenience fee, I had it completed in less than five minutes. The sticker that I needed to apply to my plates arrived in the mail less than a week later, and the emotional labor to complete the entire process was zero.

Contrast that with the other two transactions, which had to be done in person. Due to the explosion of COVID in my state, the office only allows a handful of people in the building at the time. The last time I had to go there in person was in August, and at that time I waited nearly 45 minutes outside before being able to enter the building and wait in line some more. Although they had appointments during the height of the first COVID peak, they no longer offer it, despite our current peak being significantly higher than the original.

Enter the emotional labor component of the exercise. I had to look at my work schedule, figure out when I could take off during normal business hours, and marry that up with the weather forecast to try to avoid being outside in sub-zero temperatures or freezing rain. I also had to move a couple of meetings and checked three different websites to make sure I had the correct paperwork for both transactions, because having to come back would be exasperating. On the appointed day, I dug out my heavy boots and heavy coat and decided to give it a go.

Usually there are two lines, one for vehicle-related transactions and one for driver licenses and ID cards. Likely due to the online vehicle process, there was no line for those transactions. Once I made it into the building, I found the vehicle side of the office, where three agents sat waiting. Everyone who walked in was handled in real time. When the vehicle agents had nothing to do, they would start a “pre-check” process for the people waiting in the driver license line, making sure they had all their paperwork in order to try to keep the process from bogging down. Several people were turned away from the line, which was for a while the only thing that made it appear to move. The office has two workstations that can take pictures, but one was unstaffed.

Once you got to the licensing workstation, you had to present the little paper slip that you received from the pre-check station, and the worker would key in the particulars and collect payment. Then you had to do a vision test followed by multiple computer screens that you had to validate and sign before the photo was taken. Finally, the worker printed a temporary license, punched a “void” marker on your old license, and you were done. The worker then sanitized the station and called the next person over. There were multiple delays for things like people removing coats, fluffing hair, reapplying lipstick that was smeared by masks, etc. In the time that a single patron was taken care of, the pre-check worker had reviewed at least the documents of at least four people.

I got to go through the whole scenario twice since I had two different renewals and there was no sharing of data from one transaction to another. I had to write two paper checks to pay for them. (This is sounding a lot more like healthcare, isn’t it?) In one photo, I look great, and in the other, I look like I’m on a wanted poster, so it didn’t work out too well for me (although if the process was more streamlined, I might have looked like a suspect on both).

I’m a serious process improvement nerd, so I’ll offer a couple of potential solutions. These processes have the same challenges that we have in the healthcare space, including patient / client registration, managing wait times, identify verification, demographic verification, payment collections and processing, photo acquisition, history gathering, and more. What if there were people who had dedicated their careers to improving processes like these? It’s a good thing I’ve worked with a couple of people like that. When you start thinking about solutions to these problems, they’re not always novel. Some are low tech and others are high tech, but to eliminate all the defects in the process, you could use a combination of solutions.

Let’s take a shot at it, shall we? Assuming a low staffing situation, if workers were cross-trained, they could have used the second camera workstation. Since agents on the other side had capacity, if they were able to run the slow process, it could have doubled throughput. Or, they could have used the available agents to add some additional flair to the pre-check process, asking people to remove their coats, organize their belongings, pre-write their payment checks, etc. so they would be ready for the next step in the process. If they really wanted to get fancy, they could have had the trained person run both camera stations (they were literally next to each other) and used the excess staff to assist by sanitizing the stations in between rather than it becoming a bottleneck. That person could also have voided the licenses and handed out receipts after they printed. I feel like just telling people what to expect and encouraging them to get their ducks in a row before they approached the station would have helped a lot.

On the technology side, they could dust off their appointment system since it worked during the early stages of the pandemic. Second, they could have a simple texting system that would allow people to check in and wait in their cars until they received a message that they were third in line or something like that, and to come in. If they wanted to get fancy, the state could develop an online portal where registrants could pre-submit their paperwork and have it approved remotely, verify all the information they would normally verify on the screens, and receive a confirmation ticket that they could bring to the office, eliminating the majority of the process for a subset of customers willing to start the process online (except for the vision test and photo, that is). Or, they could have a separate photo kiosk where customers could do their own photo, or have it taken by a less-trained person, so that it was already in the system and the staffer would just have to marry it up with the appropriate demographics.

Alas, though, my state is one of the last in the union to adopt such cutting-edge technologies as Real ID, immunization registries, and prescription drug monitoring programs, so I have little hope. I’m definitely keeping my eye out for consulting postings on the state procurement agency website. I might be able to monetize what feels pretty obvious.

What are your thoughts on other processes where lines of people are a failure of technology to meet a need? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 1/13/22

January 12, 2022 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/13/22

DeepScribe Raises $30M To Become First Widely Accepted Application of Voice + AI in Healthcare

DeepScribe, an automated medical transcription startup based in San Francisco, raises $30 million.

Caregility Secures $25 Million in Additional Funding

Virtual care company Caregility will use a new $25 million investment from Star Mountain to scale its team and develop a new inpatient offering.

GTCR nears $1.3 billion deal for electronic health records company Experity

Private equity firm GTCR is reportedly close to acquiring urgent care health IT vendor Experity in a deal that could value the company at up to $1.3 billion.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Partners with Google Cloud to Improve Veteran Access to Benefits and Services

The VA will leverage Google’s Apigee API management platform as part of a $13 million contract to help its developers create new digital health tools and services for veterans.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/13/22

HIStalk Interviews Guillaume Castel, CEO, PerfectServe

January 12, 2022 Interviews Comments Off on HIStalk Interviews Guillaume Castel, CEO, PerfectServe

Guillaume Castel, MBA is CEO of PerfectServe of Knoxville, TN.

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Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’ve been with PerfectServe two and a half years. We offer clinical communication collaboration software. We have put three main assets together covering optimized scheduling, clinical communication, and patient engagement. We believe that putting the three capabilities together three years ago is what the market needed to provide collaboration at scale the right way. Prior to PerfectServe. I spent time as an executive in a health system and then a few years with The Advisory Board Company, which was an amazing experience. I grew up in IBM and Cisco Systems.

How are health systems using your platform creatively to address clinician burnout?

This is a bit of an overused term that has lost a bit of its integrity, but we have been in a number of discussions with clients of all sizes about helping with the most important issue that health systems face today, which is to find good talent, retain them, and help them provide care for their patients. We help in a number of ways, but the most practical is probably through our scheduling capabilities. A fair, balanced schedule leads to a better work-life balance and a better disposition for clinicians to provide good care to patients.

We allow administrators and practice leaders to understand who has been on call more than others and who hasn’t received the schedule they wanted in the last 3-4 weeks and therefore is likely to be disappointed and at a high risk of burnout. We allow for that data and analytics piece to be available to the majority of our clients. We also do spot surveys for users of our technologies to say, are you happy or not happy today? We try to balance that in contrast that with the reality that is showing up in the data. We’ve been involved in not just diagnosing burnout, but also predicting it.

Your competitors Voalte and Vocera have ended up being owned by huge medical equipment companies. What drove that?

First, I have congratulated the Vocera team for their news last week. Vocera is a high-quality company, and I’m happy to be collaborating with them on a number of contracts, clients, and locations. 

A great deal of consolidation is happening. You’ve seen it in our space, and it’s happening in other spaces. Clients want to deal with enterprise-grade vendors. There’s this connectivity around patient care that stays in place and goes occasionally past the communication lens. What some are trying to do is connecting medical device with clinical workflow, which makes good sense. People have wanted to do that with beds for a long time. I suppose they are trying to connect it with other areas of the care continuum.

We believed that we had the right thesis three years ago. We believed and continue to be a strong proponent of the fact that collaboration at scale, no matter the care setting, is what is going to win the day. For that to be successful, you have to have intelligent scheduling. You have to have cloud-based, rules-based clinical communications. You have to have the ability to engage with patients wherever they are. We know that care has moved from mostly being inside the hospital to being in the outpatient setting, the ambulatory network, to now increasingly the physician’s office. More and more we are seeing that care is going to be done at home. We’re focused on ensuring that we equip and help all of our clients with the ability to seamlessly deliver good collaboration and good communication among their care teams, regardless of the care setting.

You told me last time we talked that your goal was to make acquisitions where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As someone who has done that, how hard is it to find complementary offerings, figure out how they fit, and then actually acquire a company? [note: PerfectServe announced the day after this conversation that it had acquired anesthesia staff case assignment software vendor AnesthesiaGo].

The hardest part by far is to have the right pieces. I can tell you that I’m grateful for the thoughtfulness we put into thinking about what pieces to put together. The second piece is integration, which is something that people don’t want to talk about a lot. It’s a lot more exciting to talk about deal terms and multiples, but the reality is you get true value by integrating the pieces properly.

In our case, it has taken us at least 18 months to get to a place where we could start to see the equation equal or exceed “one plus one equals two.” Now we are far in excess of that, and I think our clients see it. We are continuing to be focused on messages getting to the right person, care going faster, care providers finding happiness again, and being an element at the disposal of large health systems all the way down to small physician groups to allow them to gain productivity and anticipate the next phase of care delivery changes. We’re very happy that we made the acquisitions three years ago. It has taken real work to get them to work in a way that made a difference for our clients.

How do you see the company responding to market demand for remote patient monitoring and chronic condition management?

The way your platforms are architected will either help you be flexible and go beyond where you shine — either inside the hospital or in the ambulatory network — into the patient’s home, or not. In our case, our premise was to be present across the continuum. We had that ability to have a technology that was flexible enough to branch into areas that we weren’t known for. Our PFC, Patient and Family Communication offering, was put in a bright light during the early stages of COVID, where we engaged with patients wherever they were. We helped health systems deal with an onslaught of patients who were in the parking lots waiting to be seen because they thought they had COVID. I’m simplifying a situation that was dire, confused, and tricky for health systems to manage.

What we believe now is that it was easy for folks to say that telehealth really jumped through that period. Yes, virtual care visits increased. They’ve come back down a little bit, but we’ve made a lot of progress, all of us, in allowing care providers to do virtual visits and care delivery with patients wherever they are. That is good progress for our clients and good progress for society.

What we believe is happening now is that virtual care is just one aspect of changing the way care is being provided. Increasingly sophisticated and innovative health systems will want to actually touch patients in their homes to the extent possible. If there isn’t a reason for someone who is not well to get in the car and go back into the emergency room, the person should stay home. The health system and the care provider should be able to serve them and care for them in the safety and quality of their homes.

Remote patient monitoring — and it goes beyond that to the ability to do remote exams — is going to be core to the next level of delivery. We are deeply embedded in continuing to ensure that communications flow naturally with that new care model. It’s not just about engaging patients, it’s about ensuring that the engagement is routed properly, that care teams are aware of the feedback loop, and that actions are being triggered and taken. That’s what good care looks like. It’s much more than just a bunch of solutions that are solving very small problems.

How  do you see the industry and the company changing in the next 3-4 years?

We are committed to making certain that we have a very direct impact on accelerating speed to care. Everything we do at the end of the day is in a search to allow our clients to accelerate the way they provide care and improve the care they deliver to their patients. Full stop. There are adjacencies that we are very interested in that fit into that. We want collaboration among care teams to be increasingly more intuitive. We continue to believe that schedules and the routing of messages to the right person using the right channel in any care setting and at home is a differentiator.

We know that we’re having a good month when usage of our platforms is up. We track this religiously because it tends to be a good indicator. There are areas that we continue to track pretty closely. Extensions of our capabilities and our scheduling suite of products. Extension of our capabilities and our ability to engage with patients differently. Extension of our capabilities with our core clinical communication products, which could include the ability to track devices that are being delivered at patient’s homes so that we can enable this remote patient exam paradigm that is upon us. We are looking at a ton of stuff.

We are excited about where we are. We are grateful to have patient investors who like what we do and respect what we do, and we’ve done very well with it.

Comments Off on HIStalk Interviews Guillaume Castel, CEO, PerfectServe

Morning Headlines 1/12/22

January 11, 2022 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/12/22

PerfectServe Acquires AnesthesiaGo, a First-of-Its-Kind Solution for Auto-Generating Daily Case Assignments for Anesthesia Staff

Clinical communications, collaboration, and scheduling technology company PerfectServe acquires AnesthesiaGo, a developer of automated daily case assignment software for anesthesia staff.

Transcarent Raises $200 Million in Series C Funding Highlighting Growing Demand for a Different Health and Care Experience Aligned with the Needs of Self-Insured Employers

Transcarent, the employer health insurance cost management software company led by Glen Tullman, raises $200 million in a Series C funding round that values the company at a reported $1.6 billion.

Vista Equity invests $300 mln in telehealth software firm TigerConnect

Healthcare collaboration software vendor TigerConnect secures $300 million in funding from Vista Equity Partners, bringing its total raised to $400 million.

Aledade Acquires Advance Care Planning Company Iris Healthcare as Part of New Health Services Arm

Primary care enablement company Aledade acquires Iris Healthcare, which offers advance care planning solutions.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/12/22

News 1/12/22

January 11, 2022 News 11 Comments

Top News

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Revenue cycle technology and services company R1 RCM will acquire competitor Cloudmed for $4.1 billion.

R1 has made a handful of acquisitions over the last several years, including VisitPay for $300 million, Cerner’s RevWorks business for $30 million, Intermedix for $460 million, and SCI Solutions for $190 million.

The company made a comeback after several widely reported missteps under its former name Accretive Health – settlement payouts for aggressive patient collection tactics and lapses in data security, followed by delisting of its shares from the New York Stock Exchange – and was renamed to R1 RCM in 2017.

RCM shares trade on the Nasdaq, with a market capitalization of $6.5 billion.

CloudMed Solutions – sold to Revint, then named Cloudmed — was founded by Jason Merck, now EVP of Cloudmed, in 2015.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ve long wished for IOS-type capability in Chrome to be able to send a web page’s link (nearly always to myself) via Gmail, but somehow I never thought to Google a solution until today, when I found an ancient Chrome extension called Send from Gmail (by Google). It hasn’t been updated since 2013, but it seems to work fine, much easier than copying the web address and composing a new email and pasting it in.

Discuss: a physical line of people waiting for something indicates a failure of technology to meet a need.


Webinars

January 13 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Cultivating gender equity in STEM.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Laura Miller, CEO, TempDev; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC; Deidra Jackson, VP of IFP customer success, Bright Health; Sunita Tendulkar, VP of agile portfolio management, IMO. Despites strides that are being made, women make up only 27% of the STEM workforce. This panel discussion will cover mentorship, STEM education, pay gaps, and debunking stereotypes.

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Clinical communications, collaboration, and scheduling technology company PerfectServe acquires AnesthesiaGo, a developer of automated daily case assignment software for anesthesia staff.

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Multi-vertical analytics and data services company Qlik files for an IPO, with date, number of shares, and pricing yet to be determined. Thoma Bravo acquired Qlik in 2016 in a $3 billion deal, taking it private after facing pressure from activist hedge fund Elliott Management.

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Healthcare collaboration software vendor TigerConnect secures $300 million in funding from Vista Equity Partners, bringing its total raised to $400 million. Competitors Voalte and Vocera were acquired by medical technology vendors in 2019 and 2022, respectively, for $180 million and $3 billion.

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Transcarent, the employer health insurance cost management software company led by Glen Tullman, raises $200 million in a Series C funding round that values the company at a reported $1.6 billion. It has raised $300 million in just over a year. Transcarent inked a deal with Walmart last October to offer the retailer’s pharmacy services to its self-insured employer customers.

OR block time management technology vendor Copient Health raises $3.2 million in a Series A funding round. The co-founder and CEO of the Atlanta-based company is industry long-timer Mike Burke, who previously founded Dialog Medical and Clockwise.MD.

ASC revenue cycle management company National Medical Billing Services acquires MdStrategies, which offers medical coding services to ASCs.

Primary care enablement company Aledade acquires Iris Healthcare, which offers advance care planning solutions. It is the first acquisition for Aledade, which was co-founded in 2014 by former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD, MSc, who serves as the company’s CEO.


Sales

  • Baptist Health (KY) and Prisma Health (SC) select Well Health’s patient communication software.
  • Pullman Regional Hospital (WA) will partner with Providence to replace its Meditech Magic system with Epic by March 2023.
  • Grail will use Premier’s PINC AI clinical decision support technology to better identify patients eligible for its Galleri multi-cancer early detection test.
  • Meditech will integrate SecureLink’s critical vendor access management software with its systems.

People

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Availity hires Bobbi Coluni (IBM Watson Health) as chief product officer.

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Niall Brennan (Health Care Cost Institute), a former CMS chief data officer, joins Clarify Health as chief analytics and privacy officer.

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Revenue cycle technology vendor MedEvolve hires Branden Barkema, MBA (North Florida Surgeons) as chief revenue cycle officer.

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Kerri-Lynn Morris (Microsoft) joins The SSI Group as CTO.


Announcements and Implementations

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Wolters Kluwer Health announces GA of its Ovid Synthesis application suite, which includes Clinical Evidence Manager, its first cloud-based workflow management module.

Pivot Point Consulting’s “Healthcare IT Directions Report” highlights four trends for 2022:

  1. Healthcare and health IT will be challenged in unknown ways by job resignations.
  2. Telehealth and remote patient monitoring will cover a wide scope based on patient demand, patient population characteristics, and access enablers / limiters.
  3. Spending on public health infrastructure will ease data access and reporting while creating career opportunities.
  4. Deployment of interoperable EHRs to retail sites – such as Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart rolling out Epic – will allow retailers to compete with traditional healthcare providers, with the latter needing to embrace a digital strategy to offer a frictionless patient experience as a differentiator to offset the convenience of retail healthcare.

Other

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Healthcare visionary and cardiac surgeon Devi Shetty, MBBS, MS — chairman and executive director of India-based hospital operator Narayana Health — says that 95% of illnesses will soon be treated via telemedicine since healthcare requires only data, with few patients needing hands-on services such as surgery. He also predicts that EHRs will diagnose conditions better than doctors within five years, and that shortly after, doctors will be required to obtain a second opinion from software before initiating treatment.

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A non-profit consumer group publishes Upsolve, a free app that allows consumers to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy – often necessitated in the US by medical debt — without an attorney, paying only a $338 federal court filing fee (which the app also applies to have waived). The company’s mission is to destigmatize bankruptcy for consumers as has already happened with businesses, for which it is just a smart financial strategy to avoid paying debt. The group warns, however, that people can file Chapter 7 only once every eight years, so they should consider when to file if they are undergoing long, expensive cycles of chemotherapy.


Sponsor Updates

  • Meditech will offer Expanse users access to role-based, interactive online training courses from MedPower.
  • Clearwater publishes a new white paper, “Technical Testing and the HIPAA Security Rule: What’s Needed to Protect Your Healthcare Organization.”
  • Appriss names Annie Edwards (Luma) chief people officer of its Bamboo Health and Appriss Retail businesses.
  • Azara Healthcare will host its annual user conference May 2-4 in Boston.
  • Fortified Health Security CEO Dan L. Dodson is elected to the AEHIS Board of Trustees.
  • Delaware’s DHSS Division of Substance Use and Mental Health surpasses a milestone of 100,000 referrals through the Delaware Treatment and Referral Network, which is built on Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds platform.
  • Frost & Sullivan recognizes About as a patient access and orchestration leader with its 2021 Best Practices Customer Value Leadership Award.
  • Divurgent publishes its “2022 IT Trends & Insights Report.”
  • Elsevier adds its most advanced 3D full female model to its Complete Anatomy 3D platform.

The following HIStalk sponsors have achieved top rankings in Black Book Market Research’s latest population health tools and solutions report:

  • Population health AI tools: Olive AI
  • Population health/value-based care consultants: hospitals & health systems: Change Healthcare

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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Morning Headlines 1/11/22

January 10, 2022 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/11/22

R1 RCM to Acquire Cloudmed, Creating the Strategic Revenue Partner for Healthcare Providers

R1 RCM will acquire competitor Cloudmed for $4.1 billion.

BayMark Poised To Innovate Addiction Telemedicine Services Via Technology Company Acquisition

Behavioral health provider BayMark Health Services (TX) has acquired online addiction treatment vendor Kaden Health.

Celo Health Announces Opening of U.S. Headquarters in Seattle

Celo Health, a healthcare messaging app developer based in New Zealand, opens its US headquarters in Seattle.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 1/11/22

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