News 12/1/21

Top News

Greenway Health promotes President Pratap Sarker, MBA to CEO, effective January 1.

Sarker replaces Richard Atkin, who will take on the role of executive chairman.

Reader Comments

From Orion’s Roar: “Re: LinkedIn. A telehealth company sent me an invitation to become a strategic advisor, based purely on my profile. They offered the chance to buy shares, get stock options, and earn a percentage of revenue from B2B sales that I would help them earn. I’m sure they could find better advisors and this is just clever bait for investing in their company.” I see nothing impressive about the company (I’m omitting its name), which seems to be selling shares rather than product and recruiting sales affiliates rather than advisors. 

From DeeDee Centralized: “Re: closing the IT department. Is WSJ right?” The IT pendulum is always swinging from “let departments do their own IT work with their own people and budgets” to “we have to regain control of rogue departments whose mini-IT fiefdoms are spending even more money with less accountability and measurable corporate benefit.” Everybody is an IT expert until their cool tech stuff breaks or screws up a downstream department that they failed to consider in their on-the-fly design. The answer is always a less-dramatic compromise that won’t make management professors famous – centralize the technology rule-making to avoid an unreliable hodgepodge of faddish technologies, oversee the IT spend both centralized and decentralized so it can be understood and optimally deployed (in hospitals, failure to do this means the well-connected finance and patient accounting departments get about 70% of the total budget), and embed IT people on the front lines and vice versa to make sure everybody understands the current and desired future state. People who write “first kill all the IT people” articles are no different than those who can’t decide if outsourcing is brilliant or stupid — they just take the opposite position every few years to get press as contrarians despite having no experience running the organizations they advise.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thanks to ConnectiveRx for upgrading their HIStalk sponsorship to Platinum. They have supported HIStalk since 2012.

My Bitdefender Total Security 5-Device subscription was set to auto-renew at $90 for one year. As always, I cancelled the auto-renewal and found a better deal, in this case $30 for two years from Best Buy, saving me 83%. All I had to do was enter the new code into Bitdefender Central to pop the expiration date out 24 months.

I’ve decided that I’ll attend HIMSS22 after months of waffling about whether to go or not, motivated more by habit than desire or high ROI expectations. I compromised by choosing a short stay in which I’ll just go Tuesday and Wednesday.

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the most common clinical technology contributors to alarm fatigue and clinician burnout. They will describe how improving three clinical workflows can increase care team collaboration and reduce non-patient care workload and explain how a clinical communication platform simplifies finding care team members and pulling actionable information from the EHR.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Elsevier acquires digital healthcare educational content company Osmosis, which it will add to its Global Medical Education portfolio.

Analytics and data integration vendor Innovar Healthcare is among several companies that are purchasing the liquidated assets of Bridge Connector, a Nashville-based data migration startup that closed last year. The company, which had raised over $25 million several months before going out of business, and owes its creditors $5.4 million.

Babyscripts increases its previously announced Series B funding round with an additional $7.5 million investment. The virtual maternity care company has raised $37 million since launching in 2013.

Clinical task management software vendor CareAlign raises $2.3 million in seed funding. Former Penn Medicine associate CMIO Subha Airan-Javia, MD created the company in 2014, spinning it out of Penn five years later.

Sales

• UAB Medicine selects specialty pharmacy-focused analytics and data integration services from Loopback Analytics.
• Elsevier integrates Nuance’s PowerScribe radiology reporting software with its STATDx diagnostic decision support tool for radiologists.
• Phoebe Putney Health System (GA) will implement Wolters Kluwer Health’s POC Advisor for sepsis detection and patient management at three hospitals.

Announcements and Implementations

Nuance announces GA of its new Precision Imaging Network, cloud-based technology that transmits AI-generated data and analytics from diagnostic imaging systems to existing clinical and administrative workflows.

UC Davis Health (CA) and Amazon Web Services launch a Cloud Innovation Center that will focus on developing digital health solutions that are accessible and equitable.

Teleradiology service StatRad implements Change Healthcare’s cloud-based Stratus Imaging PACS.

Edifecs announces implementation of a work model that allows most of its employees to work from wherever they think they are the most productive – home, office, or a combination – while allowing them to reduce commuting stress and run personal errands.

Per-diem nurse staffing platform vendor IntelyCare launches a credentialing passport for uploading and providing licenses, screening test results, certifications, and employment eligibility verification.

NextGen Healthcare launches a benchmarking and analytics service for Community Health Centers.

Government and Politics

FDA forces Owlet to stop selling its smart baby monitoring socks that track vital signs and sleep patterns until it earns FDA approval. FDA did not require the company to recall the 1 million sock it has sold over the past six years. Owlet says it will soon launch a new sleep monitoring solution. 

The VA awards a five-year, $65 million contract to Caregility, ThunderCat Technology, Sterling Heritage, and Iron Bow Healthcare for remote patient monitoring software and services that it will roll out through its TeleCare Companion Patient Observation Support and Services Program.

The Pharmacy HIT Collaborative meets with ONC and pharmacy system vendors about pharmacy interoperability, including integrating the information in the Pharmacists ECare Plan with provider EHRs and payer systems, as required by the Cures Act.

HHS OCR settles with five providers that failed to give patients timely access to their records at a reasonable cost under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, with settlement costs ranging from $10,000 to $160,000. A cardiovascular disease doctor who ignored a patient’s request for a copy of their medical record and then ignored OCR investigators waived his right to a hearing in paying $100,000.

Other

Business Insider asks eight big health systems to describe the most interesting tech project they are testing (and in some cases, also investing in):

• Northwell Health: AI analysis of EHR data to identify pregnant women who are at risk for pre-eclampsia.
• New York – Presbyterian: EHR triggers to make sure orders are completed that would otherwise prevent a patient from being discharged as planned.
• Cleveland Clinic: optimize use of unnecessary lab tests and supplies based on historical patient data.
• Providence: allow behavioral health referrals to be ordered during primary care visits.
• LifePoint Health: remote patient monitoring.
• CommonSpirit: open a bricks-and-mortar women’s and reproductive clinic with telehealth startup Tia.
• Universal Health Services: notify providers of patient health or admission status using EHR data sent to a homegrown app.
• UPMC: remote patient monitoring.

Sponsor Updates

• The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust and Agfa HealthCare celebrate Enterprise Imaging’s 34^th UK go-live.
• PRWeek highlights Actium Health’s role in helping Virtua’s marketing team launch a campaign that successfully encouraged patients to come in for missed screenings.
• Intelerad launches a cloud-native disaster recovery solution.
• Cerner staff assemble 200 meal baskets for veterans and families supported by Veterans Community Project and Jackson County Family Court Services.
• Netsmart partners with the National Council for Mental Wellbeing to improve care coordination and use data to drive outcomes for certified community behavioral health clinics.
• A public regional hospital group in Italy will implement Ascom’s Digistat software in several of its facilities.

Blog Posts

• Vendor HIPAA Breach Affects 319K Patients & Their Providers (AdvancedMD)
• The Glidepath to Downside Risk: Future-Proof You Healthcare Business Through Value-Based Care (Arcadia)
• Embracing Interoperability with FHIR (Availity)
• Interoperability is Key to Care Coordination (Bamboo Health)
• The Path to Meditech Expanse: Where Should You Begin? (CereCore)
• Optimize Star Ratings in the Medicare Advantage Market: 3 Strategies for Payers (Collective Medical)
• Five powerful COVID-related shifts in patient care (ConnectiveRx)
• Driving Health Care 4.0 (Diameter Health)
• The Shift to Care-at-Home: Are You Ready? Why You Need to Be (Dina)
• The Future is Online Appointment Scheduling (EClinicalWorks)
• What does the connected generation (Gen C) expect from providers? (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 11/30/21

Elsevier acquires Osmosis.org, an innovative digital health education platform and enhances its global medical education portfolio

Elsevier will add newly acquired healthcare educational content development company Osmosis to its Global Medical Education portfolio.

New initiative to make UC Davis Health a leader in digital medicine

UC Davis Health and Amazon Web Services launch a Cloud Innovation Center to develop digital health solutions that are accessible and equitable.

Greenway Health names Pratap Sarker as Chief Executive Officer

Greenway Health promotes Pratap Sarker to CEO, effective January 1.

Readers Write: Filling the Healthcare Data Glass: The Glass Doesn’t Need to Stay Half Empty

Filling the Healthcare Data Glass: The Glass Doesn’t Need to Stay Half Empty
By Alex MacLeod

Alex MacLeod is director of healthcare commercial initiatives for InterSystems of Cambridge, MA.

In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about the unfulfilled promises of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare and concerns about how to effectively incorporate it into practice and realize immediate value. There is a real “glass half empty” mentality at play due to false starts and over-ambitious expectations for AI adoption and commercialization. But that doesn’t need to, and shouldn’t, be the case.

Google’s hospital partnership to collaborate on algorithm development using patient records for AI development is a strong sign of healthcare AI’s imminent proliferation. Gone is the barrier of highly fragmented patient data. This is a significant market shift, and other giants in tech and healthcare will follow Google’s lead. The question now is, what can and should the healthcare IT industry do to prepare? We will answer that by looking at three core areas – data, patterns, and areas of caution.

AI in healthcare has had positive growth in recent years, but the meaningful application of AI products (FDA-approved AI products) and the widespread application of data to the decision-making process has lagged, according to a recent study published in the Medical Futurist Institute. There have been major recent advances in sensor technology, allowing for a broad range of devices that help inform patients about their health or fitness and warn about risks. The sensors generate raw data, but the interpretation of it is based on AI analysis, which hasn’t developed at the same rapid pace.

IT departments, payers, providers, and patients are overwhelmed with the high volume of data generated on a daily basis and need to better articulate their end goal for its use. To do so, they need to pay close attention to their current processes and determine what can be done differently and what needs to change in order to be able to analyze data and apply it to future decisions.

The biggest questions those in healthcare face in regard to health information are:

• What do we do with all this data?
• What is most important to analyze?
• How can it be made actionable? (i.e. can it be used to become compliant with regulations?)

To answer those questions, we need to start by understanding what the data represents and asking a few more questions. Is the data set composed of lab results, physician-collected, or patient-submitted data? Why was it generated and collected in the first place?

The answers are typically more straightforward in other industries than healthcare. That’s why it is important to take a close look at the data and identify patterns and similarities. Analysis in healthcare AI is different from other consumer-facing algorithms.

Healthcare AI has less algorithm-friendly base data compared to social media or online shopping, for example. Healthcare algorithms work with complicated inputs of clinical notes, medical imaging, and sensor readings. Outcomes are relatively well defined in non-healthcare AI settings, most commonly in terms of attention or purchase. In healthcare, outcomes have time and severity dimensions on top of opportunity for interference with other effects, not all of which can be stratified through raw statistics.

Current effective applications of AI in healthcare include the use of ML tools in triage practices and administration. For example, what makes it effective in triage is how AI nuances the health system’s basic risk scoring systems as a way to identify patients who need immediate attention or who require higher acuity resources and pathways.

That said, patients must consent to their data to be applied to healthcare AI algorithms, and to provide value, the data must be made actionable. It must be clean, comprehensive, and normalized data where there are no duplicate records, formatting errors, incorrect information, or mismatched terminology. This gives those analyzing the data complete confidence in how and why it was curated.

Collecting data always introduces the risk of the information being “repurposed,” a possibility spotlighted when fitness tracking app Strava released a dataset of 3 trillion distinct GPS readings that inadvertently exposed US military bases in Afghanistan. Modern bots, and to some extent even legitimate social media marketing tools, are making efficient use of analytics and AI to game the platform’s algorithms in order to attract more views, clicks, and likes. But, when such technology ends up in the wrong hands, the focus may be on spreading misinformation rather than the intended use.

As with most technology, discretion is key. Collect and analyze only the minimum necessary. Don’t invite scrutiny over private data or enable access to it. Remain diligent in your data practices.

It’s understandable why people see the glass as half empty, but we have reached an inflection point in healthcare AI, a point at which we can add water to the glass.

To add to the glass and fully benefit from the anticipated results, we should embrace incoming regulation and think hard about self-regulation measures. Healthcare IT practitioners should closely monitor how laws and oversight will adapt in real-time, similar to as we have seen with the FDA Digital Health Innovation Action Plan. As Google’s big step forward in healthcare AI development signals a new level of digitization of health, we can expect changing attitudes towards healthcare AI, including an uptick in trustworthiness and increasing differentiation from other categories of consumer AI.

AI in healthcare has strong potential if we harness it correctly. In the right scenarios, AI augments the work of healthcare providers and doesn’t replace them as long as we maintain a little bit of human intelligence to complement the artificial.

Readers Write: Contactless Tech Surge Supports Healthcare’s Quadruple Aim

Contactless Tech Surge Supports Healthcare’s Quadruple Aim
By John Sola

John Sola is senior product manager for Ascom Americas of Morrisville, NC.

In a matter of months, the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated digital transformation across a wide swath of industries, driven by contactless operations that improve productivity and mitigate the need for physical interaction. Whether it’s curbside pickup, a digital guitar lesson, or delivery of lunch to your front porch with automatic digital payment on receipt, contactless service has become commonplace across so many areas of our lives. It has led to new business models that are yielding innovative and efficient products and services.

We have witnessed its significant impact on healthcare as well. Telehealth usage, for instance, has surged since the pandemic began, allowing providers to deliver safe and timely access to healthcare services.  According to a recent McKinsey & Company Telehealth report, “new analysis indicates telehealth use has increased 38X from the pre-COVID-19 baseline.”

Technology has been a key driver for health systems in attaining performance goals since the Triple Aim concept – patient experience, lower costs, better outcomes – was first developed by IHE in 2007. It was later expanded by many organizations to include a fourth (“Quadruple”) aim incorporating the importance of improving the work life of clinicians and staff.

To support the Quadruple Aim, healthcare’s utilization of technology is evolving rapidly.  Recent advances such as IoT, big data, AI, and wearables enable providers to transition treatment from passive and reactive to predictive and proactive.  The rapid pace of digitalization was aptly highlighted by Mayo Clinic’s Bart Demaershalk, MD: “The COVID-19 pandemic has essentially accelerated US digital health by about 10 years.” Contactless healthcare is positioned to support this shift in care delivery from the emergency room and hospital bed to the patient’s home, linking data-rich health observations to clinical knowledge and decision marketing.

One such example is ASL Napoli 1 Centro, a group of hospitals in Napoli, Italy. A remote monitoring solution for at-home COVID patients offers a level of service halfway between hospital care and the home. A package of wearable medical devices provides monitoring for oxygen saturation, heart rate, and body temperature, along with non-invasive spot-check blood pressure measurements. The service was managed by hospital general practitioners using medical device surveillance and clinical decision support system (CDSS) software. Of the 500+ patients monitored during a certain period, less than 10% required hospitalization. Based on the program’s effectiveness, the hospital intends to continue offering the contactless solution after the COVID emergency for managing patients with chronic conditions.   

As ASL Napoli 1 Centro shows us, the movement to prediction and prevention can be accomplished quickly and efficiently when it’s coupled with contactless technologies, such as wearable medical devices. Acquired vital signs can be analyzed in real time with CDSS-based early-warning scoring and other clinical measures to detect or predict patient deterioration. The data must be presented in a meaningful, understandable way if it is to be useful for decision-making and timely clinical intervention. Such solutions fit squarely in the objectives of the Quadruple Aim. It provides patients peace of mind that their condition is being watched closely.  It helps manage more patients with fewer staff. It improves outcomes by acting sooner.  It supports overburdened nurses by streamlining the process of data collection and validation.

As the way we approach healthcare continues to change, contactless technologies can help address existing and future care challenges, such as pandemics, the wave of aging Baby Boomers, and a looming shortage of nurses. Hastened by COVID, contactless care is here to stay, offering new and transformative opportunities for providers worldwide.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 11/29/21

The holidays are often a time for families to catch up and share recent happenings. Especially in the ongoing COVID-19 era, there is often a lot of catching up to do if people haven’t been seeing each other as recently as they did in the past, and if they haven’t been keeping up by other means. Although most of my older relatives are on social media (including one who has a Facebook account for each device she owns, because our attempts to explain how accounts work have not been well received), others spent the time catching up on their grandkids’ exploits. I always find it interesting to see how people in the same age bracket embrace technology differently.

In the early days of Facebook, I had avoided joining because I was super busy with a multi-hospital EHR conversion project and didn’t need one more thing to suck up excess time. I remember the night I finally signed up, sitting in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere during a hospital site visit. When it searched my contacts to try to find “friends,” the first person that came up was my then 88-year-old grandmother. It turns out that was the best way for her to see pictures of my cousin’s children, since they lived across the country. Even though she used a computer for little else, she saw the value in trying something new. She was also the kind of lady who spent part of her retirement auditing classes at the community college so she could learn new things, so I think that had a lot to do with it.

Fast forward to this year, and one of our relatives is struggling with a new iPhone that her son bought for her, seemingly without talking to her about it. She had been an Android user for years but her base model phone was low on memory and speed. Since she was on her son’s plan, he volunteered to help her pick out a new device, but it turned into him buying her what she thought she needed versus what she actually needed. Now she’s stuck with an expensive phone she doesn’t like, and the family dynamics make her not want to speak up about getting something else. The grandkids worked with her to do basic things such as connecting her phone to her house’s wi-fi network and doing some minor adjustments to voice-to-text settings, but I suspect she’s still going to struggle with it.

Most of my relatives don’t really understand what I do since I “gave up being a doctor,” so of course there were some conversations about that. I’ve given up on explaining how you can still be a doctor and not necessarily see patients. In the interests of simplifying the explanation, I’ve tried to explain that what I do is kind of like being a medical school professor who helps a resident learn a new surgical technique or a better way to treat a patient, and that sometimes I also work to help create the tools that doctors use to do their jobs. They still don’t get it, but that’s OK. I’m still the one they come to with all their medical questions, even in disciplines I know absolutely nothing about, so I guess I’m still a doctor after all.

There were of course the usual conversations about everyone’s chronic health conditions and the woes of choosing the wrong Medicare secondary policy. Since I’m working on a project that involves heavy use of a health system’s patient portal, I tried to get some information about whether and how my relatives might be using the ones they have access to. Use was all over the map, partly due to limitations in what their providers allow patients to access and partly due to lack of knowledge. It seemed like using it to send messages to the doctor was the most common, followed by prescription requests. No one was using it to read their visit notes, and none of them were aware of the ability to grant proxy access to a family member or caregiver.

The latter would be great for the other members of the family that are doing a lot of caretaking, so I hope they’re able to set this up in the near future. I’m not sure I would push them to read their visit notes since they would probably become aggravated by any inaccuracies or jargon. I recently had a visit at a large academic health system and there were at least five small errors in my note. I’m not going to get excited about it because it doesn’t change the treatment plan but I’m sure they would be less sympathetic if they saw something like that in their notes.

As with any technology, it takes time for adoption to occur, and I see wide variation in how different health systems are encouraging people to use their patient portals as well as in the support that they provide to users. Those that understand how much a well-configured patient portal can help office efficiency promote it more and are willing to spend more resources on development and configuration. Those that instead view it as something they have to provide and don’t want to cultivate likely have a lower return on investment as well as a less-fulfilling patient experience. This phenomenon shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has worked in healthcare IT, but I think sometimes people forget it as they’re planning projects.

Since I’m working on a project that assumes heavy use on the part of both patient and provider, I’m trying to learn everything I can about what works and what doesn’t work so I can help create the best solution for my client. In addition to talking to other CMIOs who have maximally leveraged their solutions, I’m taking some classes to really learn the details about what the system I’m working with can and can’t do. I’m working with some great analysts, but there’s always a chance they missed something or didn’t think about it in a way that a physician would, and my client is supportive of the approach.

In talking with a friend who does some clinical informatics work for his university, his institution restricts him from attending vendor classes. I think that’s absurd, especially if he planned to use his own continuing education funds to cover the cost of training. I get that they don’t want random people going to classes and demanding that they make changes that are problematic, but there’s a thing called “discussion” when people have ideas, and preventing staff from learning isn’t a good look for those in higher education. It’s also not a great recipe for stakeholder engagement, but I’ve known that his employer hasn’t cared about that for a very long time, so I’m not surprised.

I hope readers were able to at least get some down time this weekend, and that all the games of “refrigerator Tetris” were successful. What was the best thing you did over the holiday? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 11/29/21

The NFL Is Giving Players Sensor-Laden Mouthpieces Instead of Just Lip Service to Study Concussions; Four College Programs Join In

Several NFL and college football teams are collecting impact data from sensor-embedded player mouthpieces to test helmet effectiveness and to influence future rule-making to reduce concussions.

MIT Catalyst Program welcomes new VHA Innovation Ecosystem Fellows

The MIT Catalyst program announces a new group of VHA Innovation Ecosystem Fellows, who will work to improve veteran care through need-driven biomedical research and innovation.

New Exa Platform Functionality Automates Decision Support, Insurance-Related Tasks for Enhanced Productivity and Profitability

Konica Minolta adds Appropriate Use Criteria for advanced diagnostic imaging to its Exa Platform, in which orders placed through its physician portal will be validated electronically against CMS criteria using logic from LogicNets.

Monday Morning Update 11/29/21

Top News

Best Buy discloses in its quarterly earnings call that its cost to acquire remote patient monitoring technology vendor Current Health in October was $400 million in cash.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents feel pretty good about how their employers will fare in 2022.To what degree will resignations and hiring challenges affect your employer’s prospects in the next few years?

New poll to your right or here: To what degree will resignations and hiring challenges affect your employer’s prospects over the next few years? This in response to a comment on last week’s poll in which a reader predicted significant long-term impact of organizations losing experienced health IT employees.

Webinars

December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

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

People

Alexander Scarlat, MD (Codixim) joins Mitre as principal data scientist of its health IT group. He wrote the “Machine Learning Primer for Clinicians” series for HIStalk a while back.

Matt Lungren, MD, MPH (Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare) joins Amazon Web Services as principal for clinical AI and machine learning for worldwide public health.

Announcements and Implementations

Konica Minolta adds Appropriate Use Criteria for advanced diagnostic imaging to its Exa Platform, in which orders placed through its physician portal will be validated electronically against CMS criteria using logic from LogicNets. 

Government and Politics

The MIT Catalyst program announces a new group of VHA Innovation Ecosystem Fellows, who will work to improve veteran care through need-driven biomedical research and innovation.

Medical University of South Carolina sues six of its oncologists and HCA Healthcare, alleging that the doctors – who will leave MUSC on December 1 to take jobs at HCA-owned Trident Medical Center — stole confidential information such as case logs and patient lists to help their new employer create a competing head and neck oncology program. MUSC said the doctors used its email servers to send confidential preference card information to Trident officials.

Other

Several NFL and college football teams are collecting impact data from sensor-embedded player mouthpieces, pairing the force, speed, direction, and location information with video to test helmet effectiveness and to influence future rule-making to reduce concussions.

In Canada, Peterborough Regional Health Centre lays off 84 employees as part of its Epic implementation. The hospital says it is eliminating a “limited number of clerical roles.” The hospital is one of seven Central East Ontario health systems, representing 14 hospitals, that will go live on Epic on December 3.

A Wall Street Journal article titled “It’s Time to Get Rid of the IT Department” says that the typical IT department is a bureaucratic island that hinders innovation, digital transformation, and customer focus, making these points:

• Separating the IT department – both organizationally and physically – from the core business doesn’t make sense, even if the group is given a sexy new name like “global digital solutions.” Technology is no longer optional.
• Treating IT as a partner to the business encourages it to be judged using metrics that are often irrelevant to long-term business outcomes, such as budget, uptime, and project completion. “Meeting specs” doesn’t correlate with success, and businesses isn’t driven by owning, building, and managing IT systems.
• Business units can’t predict their technology needs months or years in advance as required by IT budgeting, making it impossible for siloed IT departments to meet expectations for being faster and more flexible.
• Most IT employees work there because they love technology rather than the company’s core business, creating a culture gap that ignores the fact that the business is the technology and vice versa.
• Some companies are moving toward focusing on realizing value from IT within business units instead of rewarding the IT department for centrally managing it. This makes more sense as cloud computing relieves IT from managing physical assets such as data centers and servers and low-code software development reduces the need for programming talent.
• Companies are organizing their missions around groups that include embedded technical experts, which encourages innovative thinking, deeper subject matter expertise, and fewer handoffs.
• IT decentralization comes with “freedom within a framework,” such as requiring use of standardized development tools, architecture, and security protocols.

RSNA expects 19,000 attendees to attend this week’s in-person conference at Chicago’s McCormick Place, with another 4,000 participating virtually. The exhibit hall will showcase 500 vendors. The last in-person meeting, RSNA 2019, drew 52,000 registrants, with exhibitor personnel making up nearly half of the total.

Sponsor Updates

• In England, North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust implements TrakCare electronic prescribing and medication administration technology from InterSystems.
• CHIME honors HCA Healthcare and Meditech with its Collaboration Award.
• OptimizeRx wins two Digital Health Awards.

Blog Posts

• Why a security component is as critical to your FHIR ecosystem (Infor)
• Is Your Digital Front Door Strategy Welcoming to All? (InterSystems)
• FHIR 101: Solving healthcare’s interoperability problem (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Infographic: Key Patient Access Journey Insights (Kyruus)
• The Evolution of SDOH and Health Data Exchange (LexisNexis)
• Is Staffing in Perioperative Care at a Crisis Point? (Lumeon)
• The unspoken courage of modern nursing (Meditech)
• How to Perform an Analysis on Competitor PT Practices (MWTherapy)
• RSNA 2021: Reconnecting, redefining, and recognizing the challenges and opportunities ahead (Nuance)
• These technologies stand to change healthcare forever, and they already exist (Olive)
• Understanding Psychographics: AJMC (PatientBond)
• Using Analytics to Unlock the Value of Social Determinants of Health Data (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How Nurse Leaders Drive Change and Affect Strategic Goals (Symplr)
• Physician burnout: a history of the not-so-recent phenomenon plaguing clinicians (Spok)
• Amazon and Vocera Elevate the Power of the Patient Voice (Vocera)
• 23 Patient Stories That Show Just How Amazing PTs Are (WebPT)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
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Morning Headlines 11/25/21

HHS Announces $35 Million for Telehealth in the Title X Family Planning Program

HHS allocates $35 million to help Title X family planning providers enhance and expand their telehealth infrastructure and capacity.

Peterborough Regional Health Centre lays off 84 as new digital records system rolls out

Peterborough Regional Health Centre, one of seven hospitals in Ontario preparing to go live on Epic in early December, lays off 84 employees in a move management says is necessitated by changes brought on by the new software.

Disclosures reveal Current Health was sold for $400m

Records reveal that Current Health, which offers remote patient monitoring, telehealth, and patient engagement technologies, was acquired in September by Best Buy for $400 million.

Morning Headlines 11/24/21

San Diego-based startup LifeVoxel raises $5 million seed funding for its AI diagnostic visualization platform

Remote diagnostic software startup LifeVoxel raises $5 million in seed funding.

Luma Health Raises $130 Million In Series C Funding To Unify, Automate, And Transform Patients’ Healthcare Journeys

Patient engagement software vendor Luma Health raises $130 million in a Series C round that brings its total funding to $160 million.

ImagineSoftware Announces Strategic Growth Investment from Marlin Equity Partners

Medical billing automation vendor ImagineSoftware secures an undisclosed amount of funding from Marlin Equity Partners.

News 11/24/21

Top News

Private equity firms Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman will acquire Athenahealth from Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital for $17 billion.

Veritas and Evergreen will retain a minority investment in the company. The management team will remain in place.

Hellman & Friedman’s health IT portfolio includes Change Healthcare and PointClickCare, while Bain Capital’s includes HST Pathways.

Webinars

December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health technology and services company Edifecs will acquire Health Fidelity, which offers natural language processing-enabled risk-adjustment technologies and consulting services. Edifecs will add Health Fidelity’s assets, along with similar offerings from recently acquired Talix, to its Encounter Management software for payers.

Digital musculoskeletal care company Sword Health raises $163 million in a Series D funding round, bringing its total raised to over $300 million at a valuation of $2 billion.

Remote diagnostic software startup LifeVoxel raises $5 million in seed funding.

Patient engagement software vendor Luma Health raises $130 million in a Series C round that brings its total funding to $160 million.

People

Cerner names Johnny Luu (Google Health) as chief communications officer.

Healthcare Triangle hires Jason Polli, MBA (Leidos) as VP of client success.

Albany Med (NY) promotes Kristopher Kuschem MEng to VP/CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Ascom announces GA of its Digistat clinical workflow software in North America.

Monument Health (SD) implements Healthcare Triangle’s Readable.AI technology for automated document processing.

The Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services launches TreatmentConnection.com, an online mental health and addiction treatment screening and provider locator available through technology developed by Bamboo Health.

Sponsor Updates

• Medcare Orthopaedics & Spine Hospital in Dubai goes live on InterSystems TrakCare.
• Jvion shares predictions for how AI will continue to shape healthcare in 2022.
• The First Coast Connect Podcast features Availity CTO Jack Hunt.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “What does it take to be a real-time health system?”
• CHIME’s 2021 Digital Health Most Wired Trends Report reflects the rapid digital transformation of and growth in patient engagement.
• AHLA’s latest Speak of Health Law Podcast, “Legal Liabilities of Enterprise Cyber Risk Management,” features Clearwater founder and executive chairman Bob Chaput.
• KLAS Research and Arch Collaborative release a case study featuring Baptist Health and Divurgent.
• Everbridge will exhibit at the National Healthcare Coalition Preparedness Conference November 30-December 2 in Orlando.
• Fortified Health Security names Audra Barnes security compliance analyst.
• FeaturedCustomer’s “Fall 2021 Hospital Communications Software Customer Success Report” includes Halo Health as a top performer.
• Healthwise wins several Digital Health Awards.
• Visage Imaging will introduce Visage 7 Video Reports at RSNA21.

Blog Posts

• How to Respond to Negative Reviews (AdvancedMD)
• Strategies for Successful Transitional Care Management Programs (Arcadia)
• Information Integration Delivering Personalized Long-Term Care (Ascom)
• Help! One Year of the New Improved DRVS Help Section (Azara Healthcare)
• The New CMS Rule – A Step in the Right Direction for Telehealth (Bluestream)
• Confessions of a Non-Visionary Leader (CarePort)
• 7 Cybersecurity Safeguards to Mitigate Ransomware Risks (CereCore)
• Reaching Patients Along the Specialty Medication Journey: Trusting Patients (ConnectiveRx)
• PDMP: Helping Ensure Safety in Prescribing (EClinicalWorks)
• Healthcare payment predictions for 2022 (Experian Health)
• An Empathetic Pediatric Nurse, a Double DAISY Honoree (Get Well)
• The Post-modern Healthcare CIO: What It Is and How to Become One (HCI Group)
• Deliver Better Population Health by Avoiding 3 Mistakes (Health Catalyst)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 11/23/21

Athenahealth, Healthcare Technology Leader, to be Acquired by Hellman & Friedman and Bain Capital for $17 Billion

Private equity firms Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman will acquire Athenahealth from Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital for $17 billion.

Edifecs Enters Into Definitive Agreement to Acquire Health Fidelity

Health technology and services company Edifecs will acquire Health Fidelity, which offers natural language processing-enabled risk-adjustment technologies and consulting services.

Sword Health Raises $163M and Reaches $2B Valuation as the Fastest Growing Digital MSK Company

Digital musculoskeletal care company Sword Health raises $163 million in a Series D funding round, bringing its total raised to over $300 million.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 11/22/21

As health systems continue to refine strategic planning for a potential upcoming influenza season or yet another wave of COVID-19 infections, telehealth is undoubtedly part of nearly everyone’s strategy. As a consultant, it’s interesting to see how different organizations have decided to use it.

For some, it’s strictly for acute visits and urgent-care type services that they can’t accommodate due to packed office schedules. For others, it’s an adjunct to their offerings for chronic care visits, which depending on the condition may be less likely to require a physical exam. Others are using it to grow their business by reaching out to previously untapped patient populations. A small number are using it as an option for physicians and other providers who may not be able to work in-person due to a personal health issue that precludes face-to-face contact with patients, or potentially having a family member at home who is at risk for infection.

I know a number of physicians who are going through cancer treatments or who are otherwise immune compromised and being able to practice virtually has kept them from going on disability or leaving medicine altogether. It’s an option that few physicians had previously and might be one of only a handful of good things that have come out of enduring a global pandemic. Not only is the option good for those individuals, but it’s good for care delivery organizations who would have otherwise lost capacity. When those physicians can keep their own panels it’s ideal since there can still be continuity, but I know that’s not always the situation, such as in the case of physicians who are in procedure-based subspecialties.

Still, there are growing concerns about how telehealth fits into the care landscape. Concerns with the cost of telehealth compared to in-person visits have been fairly straightforward, but questions about the clinical care provided have been less well defined. A recent report from Quest Diagnostics reviewed one of the concerns in more detail. The report, titled “Drug Misuse in America 2021: Physician Perspectives and Diagnostic Insights on the Drug Crisis and COVID-19,” found that almost 70% of physicians worried that signs of drug misuse were missed during pandemic-related care disruptions. The drugs in question include both prescribed substances as well as those obtained illegally.

Researchers looked at some 5 million test results performed by Quest Diagnostics, including 475,000 from the year 2020. They combined that data with survey results from the Harris Poll, which queried more than 500 primary care physicians. The report concluded that physicians are concerned about their ability to manage patients given the risks of drug misuse. In addition to worrying that they missed warning signs of drug misuse during the pandemic, 94% of primary care physicians state they are seeing an increased number of patients with mental health issues during the pandemic and “fear a correlation between rising mental health issues and prescription drug misuse.” Additionally, 98% of physicians are concerned about issues with controlled substances as a whole, compared to 75% who are concerned about opioid medications.

Specific to telehealth, 75% of physicians are concerned that telehealth visits limit their ability to identify whether patients are at risk for or already having issues with prescription drug misuse. Where 91% of physicians feel they can recognize warning signs during in-person visits, only 50% feel they can recognize issues during a telehealth visit. In my experience as a physician, most of the warning signs I’ve identified come from the patient’s history and discussion of their current situation rather than from the physical exam, so I find this phenomenon interesting. Beyond the information gathered from the patient’s story, I’ve used data such as refill patterns or information from prescription drug monitoring program records to identify potential misuse. Although I don’t question how some physicians feel, I’d be interested to understand more deeply why they feel this way and what they find lacking in a telehealth visit.

Another angle that was brought up was the idea that physicians are less willing to prescribe opioids during the pandemic, as well as the lack of alternatives for treatment for chronic pain. Nearly 80% of them are concerned that patients will turn to illicit fentanyl if they can’t get prescription medications, with 86% of them being concerned that illicit fentanyl will lead to higher death rates than prescription opioids. I totally understand not wanting to prescribe controlled substances during a non-face-to-face visit, especially since I was fairly strict in traditional practice as far as random drug testing during visits, and agree that we need better options for treating chronic non-cancer pain. The illegal drug crisis is real and it’s important for physicians to have strategies to identify such drug use, but I don’t think that a telehealth visit rules out that ability.

The report went on to look at drug testing as a component of treatment, with 81% of physicians seeing it as critical to prevent overdose deaths. However, more than half of physicians aren’t following up when presumptive drug tests are positive, and it’s not clear why. Given the capabilities of EHRs to include flowsheets for medication management as well as trackers and prompts for drug surveillance testing, I wish more of my peers would take advantage of those features so that they could more confidently care for patients. Additionally, only a third of physicians felt confident in prescribing naloxone to treat potential opioid overdose. It’s pretty easy to configure order sets that include both opioid pain medications and naloxone, so failing to do so is another missed opportunity to leverage technology. Existing clinical guidelines can be built into the EHR to help with clinical decision making and screening for changes in prescribing patterns.

I think it’s important to not overlook telehealth as a potential adjunct to pharmaceutical pain management. There are many providers out there who offer psychotherapy via telehealth, which could help as part of team-based care to identify patients who might not have their needs met with current pain management regimens. With the potential of using lower-cost resources such telehealth therapy versus in-person physician visits, patients could have more frequent check-ins about their needs as well as the ability to learn additional techniques to better manage their pain. Other options like telehealth-enabled physical therapy could be added for patients who might not be able to participate in traditional physical therapy appointments due to time or logistical limitations.

I polled a few primary care colleagues about the report, and their consensus opinion was that identifying drug misuse was more about having a relationship with the patient and ongoing contacts than it was about being in-person versus virtual. They were significantly more concerned about fragmented care as a risk factor for drug misuse as opposed to telehealth. I’d be interested to hear if any reader institutions are looking further at this issue, and whether they’re reaching different conclusions.

Have any thoughts on the connection between telehealth and prescription pain medication abuse? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Readers Write: Medical Devices are Evolving, and How They are Managed Needs to Evolve, Too

Medical Devices are Evolving, and How They are Managed Needs to Evolve, Too
By David Klumpe

David Klumpe, PharmD is president of clinical asset management of TriMedx of Indianapolis, IN.

Technological advancements in healthcare come at a rapid pace. While there are benefits to this, technological evolution can also bring challenges for healthcare systems that strive to run efficiently while maintaining quality care.

The management of medical devices is one such challenge. As devices become more complicated and increasingly get connected to the internet, how they are best managed becomes more complex. Optimum-use decisions are guided by lifecycle factors and cybersecurity risks, not the age of a device on a spreadsheet list or other simple factors.

To best meet the future of technology and retire inefficient practices, health systems can employ a clinical asset management solution to optimize their device fleets, increase staff productivity, and improve patient care.

Let’s talk about inventory accuracy and why detailed visibility into your fleet is the core element to driving efficiencies at scale.

The fundamental task of inventory visibility is knowing exactly what medical devices you have and where they are located. Healthcare staff lose valuable time and become frustrated searching for a device. Are the insulin pumps in this storage closet on this floor? Or on another floor? While caregivers search, patient care suffers.

But inventory visibility is at the heart of capital expenditure decisions, maintenance choices, and cybersecurity needs. A clinical asset management solution can provide real-time visibility and deep insights into the status of a healthcare system’s fleet. Software algorithms can help optimize asset life and disposal timing. By analyzing age, repair history, parts availability, amount of inventory, usage patterns, FDA recalls, cybersecurity risks, and other factors, clinical asset management solutions can establish the true useful life of a medical device and guide decisions on whether it should be replaced.

Perhaps instead of being replaced the device can be upgraded, typically a less-expensive choice than replacement. Clinical asset management teams can weigh factors such as device age, condition, and options for software and hardware upgrades to recommend options.

Visibility also gives insight into which devices should be disposed. Unused equipment still requires maintenance. A better option may lie in selling the equipment to other health providers.

Best use also entails making sure devices are available at the right place and at the right time, at the unit, hospital, and health system level. Meeting demand with existing assets maximizes revenue opportunities while avoiding additional capital expenditures such as medical equipment rental expenses.

Few recent technological advances present as much risk as the internet and the internet of things. The slew of rising cyberattacks with more profound effects is drawing the attention of consumers, businesses, and governments alike.

The threat to medical devices is intensifying as well. At first, the risk of connected medical devices was a vulnerable gateway into a health system where hackers could steal or hold ransom financial, patient, and other sensitive records. In recent years, the threat escalated to target medical devices themselves and render them inoperable. Worse now is the potential for far more maliciousness. Earlier this year, McAfee researchers discovered vulnerabilities in two types of infusion pumps that might allow hackers to deliver double doses of medicine to unsuspecting patients.

Cybersecurity provided by clinical asset management solutions can monitor, detect, prevent, and respond to cyberthreats in real-time. But what can be particularly valuable is a cybersecurity assessment for each device. Manufacturers at some point often no longer support a device, so a patch may be unavailable. What a clinical asset management team needs to know is the seriousness of the vulnerability. The cybersecurity assessment can evaluate the medical device profile, device behavior, and potential impact to patient safety and drive recommendations on whether to replace, upgrade, or dispose of the device to best prevent deadly cybersecurity downfalls.

A key component of the real-time status assessment of every medical device in a fleet is avoiding downtime. When equipment is down, hospital efficiencies suffer. When equipment is down, caregivers become frustrated because doing their job becomes more complicated and time-consuming. When equipment is down, patients grow more irritable with the delays, and quality of service suffers.

A modern clinical asset management solution uses powerful, real-time analytics to optimize device usage and prevent downtime. Spreadsheets or databases provide only a list, widening the risk that device upkeep falls through the cracks. A clinical asset management solution, on the other hand, provides a lifecycle and cybersecurity assessment of every device in the system to maximize device efficiencies in a fleet today and tomorrow.

Readers Write: How to Fill Staffing Gaps Without Hiring

How to Fill Staffing Gaps Without Hiring
By Hadi Chaudhry

Hadi Chaudhry is president and CEO of CareCloud of Somerset, NJ.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 500,000 workers have left the field since the start of the pandemic. Furthermore, burnout continues to plague the workforce. Clinicians and support staff are suffering, but administrative teams are feeling the stress as well. Jobs that were lost when revenues fell off a cliff are now hard to refill. Many furloughed workers have decided to explore other industries or leave the workforce entirely, either to stay home with their families or to avoid vaccine mandates.

As a result, back-office workers have become stretched thin. Claims processing, especially due to new challenges like COVID lab tests, number in the millions of extra claims every week.

New alternatives are helping to ease the two-sided problem of unfilled positions and overworked staffers. Robotic process automation (RPA) is one tool for offloading mundane and repetitive tasks that plague support and administrative workers. Robotic processes can handle everything from claims denials and payment processing to document management. On the clinical side, RPA can automate wellness checks, medical uploads, and CPT code verifications.

RPA can be immensely productive for any healthcare organization. The microbots in RPA solutions are capable of increasing revenue by working through backlogs of thousands of transactions or claims in a single day. Underpayments, appeals, and filing limits are all candidates for RPA automation.

Another solution to staffing gaps is temporary or long-term workforce extension services. These outsourced services take routine, repetitive tasks off the backs of existing workers, saving practices up to 80% in resource costs.

Many payers and revenue cycle companies already depend on workforce extension services, and their use in provider organizations is accelerating. Many workforce extension providers offer talented, highly trained staff that are fully trained in scores of EHR, billing, and practice management systems. Solutions can be very specific and quickly mobilized, with specialists available for a hospital’s specific host applications.

Automation and on-demand workforces perform best when organizations work collaboratively with consultants and service providers. When considering RPA, medical groups should work alongside service providers to address the most repetitive tasks, such as  checking claims status, pre-authorizations, and insurance discoveries.

Organizations can use RPA for the most mundane tasks, leaving on-demand staff to handle more complex duties where a human touch is needed. Oftentimes the 80/20 rule applies — automation can resolve 80% of all routine back-office tasks, while the remaining 20% may require involvement of skilled revenue professionals.

It’s critical that solutions are implemented earlier rather than later. Hoping that situations will resolve themselves is misguided. Both automated platforms and workforce extensions typically take two to four weeks to implement, but the timeline for workforce extension will depend on the size of the incoming team. The longer an organization waits, the more difficult it is to work through backlogs and prioritize results.

On-demand and automated solutions can help with many challenges healthcare employers face, from adequately supporting remote workers to reducing stress and enabling employees to concentrate on patient engaging and revenue-increasing tasks. Small practices, large medical clinics, hospitals, and health systems alike are aware that we’re in a challenging hiring environment. Filling gaps with automation and supplemental staffing is the best way for weary workers, as well as their employers, to succeed.

Readers Write: How Hospitals and Healthcare Systems Can Curb Violence Against Staff

How Hospitals and Healthcare Systems Can Curb Violence Against Staff
By Terri Mock

Terri Mock, MS, MBA is chief strategy and marketing officer of Rave Mobile Safety of Framingham, MA.

Hospitals and healthcare facilities are seeing an uptick in violence, no doubt attributable in part to frustration caused by the pandemic. Healthcare workers, lauded as frontline heroes 18 months ago, are now at higher risk of violent incidents. For instance, the National Nurses United found that 31% of hospital nurses have faced a small or significant increase in workplace violence, up from 22% in March 2021.

To prevent harm and abuse in the workplace, hospital and healthcare leaders must re-evaluate emergency response plans, adopt better mass communication tools, and support staff more effectively in dealing with abusive or potentially violent patients and aggressive visitors. These interventions are essential if we aim to keep healthcare professionals, especially nurses, from leaving the field.

On the emergency response front, leaders must ensure their teams are prepared and aware of the protocols that exist for dealing with violence in the building. If specific emergency response plans don’t exist for addressing violence, those should be created as soon as possible. If they exist within a bigger collection of emergency procedures and protocols, it’s worth considering when they were last updated and how easy it is for workers to access that information in the midst of a chaotic situation.

Emergency plans should be readily available and tailored to individual roles across the hospital or healthcare network. For larger organizations, it often makes sense to put emergency plans in a central digital repository that staff can access through mobile apps and online portals. That way, workers don’t have to chase down physical documents or navigate an unwieldy file system. They can pull up what they need, look up phone numbers, and take action according to their unique role.

Regarding communication tools, it’s time to go mobile and modern. Hospitals and healthcare systems today need to notify staff of critical incidents wherever they are located. Modern communication platforms enable staff, patients, and even visitors to collaborate in real time using two-way mass notification systems across multiple channels, including SMS, email and voice calls, anonymous reporting, push notifications, audience segmentation, and more.

These platforms also provide mobile apps for personal safety and secure communications. In an emergency, nurses or other healthcare professionals could easily alert security for assistance, give helpful details, and provide ongoing updates, if needed.

Finally, leaders must empower healthcare workers to improve their personal safety. We’re already suffering through a country-wide nursing shortage and burnout. By 2030, we may be short over one million RNs, according to a study conducted by Good Call.

Administrators have to educate staff on the importance of reporting violent incidents and follow through in taking those reports seriously. To carry out their responsibility for duty of care, healthcare organizations need the ability to locate and check on the wellbeing of their employees. Technology can be helpful here to solicit a healthcare worker’s real-time location and status when they may need help.

The ability to locate and contact a mobile, remote, and traveling healthcare workforce can be accomplished using a geo-polling feature available in a mass notification system. Healthcare organizations can require information from their workers with simple poll questions via SMS, email, and voice calls. The responses are collected to ensure every individual’s status and location is made known.

Should a nurse answer that they are in danger or need assistance, security personnel can identify who they are and where they are located, then trigger two-way communications to coordinate a response and facilitate their safety. A follow-up geo-poll can be sent to individuals who did not respond or to obtain further information to direct the appropriate response to their needs. With geo-polling, every healthcare worker’s status and location are known so you can protect and keep them safe.

Healthcare has always been a high-risk industry, and events over the past 18 months have exacerbated many of the challenges healthcare workers face. By updating emergency response plans, adopting better communication technology and giving staff more ways to report violence, leaders can protect the personal safety, decrease risk, and improve conditions for those on the front line.

Morning Headlines 11/22/21

Bain, Hellman & Friedman Near Deal to Buy Athenahealth

The Wall Street Journal reports that two private equity firms are close to a deal to acquire Athenahealth for $17 billion, including debt.

Nuance Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

Nuance announces Q4 results: revenue up 8%, adjusted EPS $0.09 versus $0.14.

Avodah Closes $7 Million Seed Round to Scale Digital Healthcare Platform with AI Capabilities

Avodah will use a $7 million seed round to further develop its AI-powered AvodahMed technology, which includes remote pre-visit administration, patient monitoring, and care management.

CenTrak Advances Managed Services with Infinite Leap Acquisition

RTLS vendor CenTrak acquires healthcare IT consulting and managed services company Infinite Leap for an undisclosed sum.

Monday Morning Update 11/22/21

Top News

The Wall Street Journal reports that two private equity firms are close to a deal to acquire Athenahealth for $17 billion, including debt.

Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman LLC are reported to be the high bidders in an auction of the company, which its owners planned to have completed in early 2022.

A private equity firm and hedge fund took Athenahealth private four years ago after they forced the ouster of CEO Jonathan Bush, combining the company with a GE Healthcare unit it had acquired and renamed to Virence Health. Their  total acquisition cost was $6.8 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The significant concern poll respondents have about remote patient monitoring is that they will need services that aren’t readily available, which explains why investor-backed companies are springing up to provide paramedics and other licensed people to visit patient homes for the hands-on component that would otherwise require a trip to a provider’s location. IANAL questions why a patient would choose care at home when it is perceived as inferior and may not save the patient money, while Paula says triaging will be important since not all recoveries or home situations support at-home care. I agree with both comments – it may be that at-home care isn’t appropriate for many or most patients and will never deliver on “hospital at home” expectations, but could provide a way to reduce the length of hospital stays and make some patients happier. Payment will likely drive adoption as it always does in healthcare, so the ball is in the hands of CMS and insurers.

New poll to your right or here: How are your employer’s 2022 business prospects looking compared to 2021?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

I was curious about the stock performance of digital health companies that have gone public in the last couple of years, so I asked Chris McCord of Healthcare Growth Partners – which is my go-to source for brilliant market analysis – if he could save me some legwork with a list of companies. I excluded those that I consider marginally tech related, such as Medicare Advantage insurers and primary care operators, which left me with this list:

• About half of the companies are trading at below their initial offering price.
• Companies that went public via a SPAC merger performed much worse than those that did an IPO. SPAC popularity as a mechanism to go public has plummeted in the last few months, with some of the shell companies failing to find acquisition targets within the required timeframe.
• Buying an equal number of shares of each company at their IPO price would have increased the investment by about 37%, but obviously over various time periods.
• While Phreesia is the big winner in price change, Doximity has earned the highest market cap at nearly $13 billion after just five months of public trading.
• Livongo fell off the list since it was acquired by Teladoc Health, whose share price has increased 516% since its July 2015 IPO even though share price is down 56% from its January 2021 high.

Nuance announces Q4 results: revenue up 8%, adjusted EPS $0.09 versus $0.14. The company’s acquisition by Microsoft is expected to close in early 2022.

People

Population health management platform vendor AssureCare hires Ankit Rohatgi, MD, MBA (Medpulse) as chief clinical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Vocera releases a skill for Amazon Alexa that allows patients to reach the right care team member and obtain stay information using voice requests made to an in-room Echo device.

Spok launches GenA, a one-way alphanumeric pager that includes a high-resolution display, advanced encryption, and over-the-air remote programming to provide reliable, survivable, and affordable critical communications capability regardless of cell coverage.

Sponsor Updates

• Clearwater publishes a new report, “Connecting the Dots Between Cyber Risk and Patient Safety.”
• PMD celebrates its 23rd anniversary.
• Sonifi Health publishes a new case study, “How technology can improve HCAHPS Scores: A 5-year impact case study.”
• Sphere releases the results of a consumer survey focused on the use of online payment tools for medical bills.
• HIStalk Sponsors exhibiting at RSNA November 28-December 1 in Chicago include Agfa HealthCare, Change Healthcare, Elsevier, Lyniate, Mach7 Technologies, Nuance, OneMedNet, Sectra, Visage Imaging, and Wolters Kluwer Health.

Blog Posts

• Be there when your ideal patient and provider meet (OptimizeRx)
• You can’t always get what you want (Nordic)
• 7 reasons payers should adopt AI and join the Internet of Healthcare (Olive)
• Just Say No to Drug(s) Discount Cards (OmniSys)
• How COVID-19 Impacted Timeliness of Care (PatientBond)
• 6 Questions an EHR Consultant Can Help You Answer (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Leveraging Supplemental Benefits: Moving from Extras to Essentials (Dina)
• Accelerating Speed to Care with Unified Healthcare Communication (PerfectServe)
• Benefits of Physician Peer Review (Symplr)
• Advancing Clinical Research with the PINC AI Research and Innovation Collaborative (Premier)
• 3 Steps to Elevated Diversion Monitoring: Takeaways from the 2021 NADDI conference (Protenus)
• How Leading NextGen Users Leverage Our Revenue Cycle Engine (RCxRules)
• ‘Tis the season. Reflections on 2021 and the storm brewing for health plans in 2022. (Redox)
• 7 Tips to Address Medical Practice Burnout (Relatient)
• Let Doctors Be Doctors with Better Patient Data (RxRevu)
• Sky’s the Limit! Two Nuance Managers Share Their Advice (Nuance)
• Why Pagers Still Matter: The History of Pagers (1921-2021) (Spok)
• Magic at the Hospital (Summit Healthcare)
• Nurses are Uniquely Positioned to Bridge Gaps in Care (Twistle)
• Breaking News: CMS Greenlights Automatic MIPS Flexibilities for 2021 (WebPT)

Contacts

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