HIStalk’s Guide to ViVE 2022

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AGS Health

Booth 657

Contact: Christina Cussimanio, SVP of marketing
Christina.Cussimanio@agshealth.com
802.777.4084

AGS Health is more than just a revenue cycle management company — we’re a strategic partner for growth. By blending technologies, services, and expert support, AGS Health partners with leading healthcare organizations across the US to deliver tailored solutions that solve the unique needs and challenges of each provider’s revenue cycle operations.

At ViVE 2022, we are excited to reveal our AGS AI Platform — a new technology solution designed to help simplify revenue cycle processes through automation with a human touch. Visit booth 657 to be among the first to see this new technology in action. While you are visiting, we welcome you to join our raffle contest for a chance to win a new Oculus Quest 2 VR headset.

Bamboo Health

Booth 326

Contact: Alison Matthiessen, senior communications manager
amatthiessen@bamboohealth.com
540.230.9021

Bamboo Health will present and exhibit our suite of care coordination solutions at ViVE. On Monday, March 7, from 2:00–2:50, Bamboo Health Chief Clinical Officer Nishi Rawat, MD, MBA will also participate in the “Whole-Person Care 101: CH. 1 Behavioral Health” panel, which will familiarize attendees with the current drivers around the increased prevalence of behavioral health conditions, barriers, and opportunities to integrate behavioral health and physical health; and initiatives on the horizon to support a better response.

Visit the Bamboo Health team at booth 326 to discuss our diverse set of solutions including OpenBeds, Bamboo Health’s comprehensive, provider-facing behavioral health solution for health systems, health plans, and state governments; Crisis Management System, which expedites access to assessment and treatment for those in behavioral health crisis, tracks their journey from call to treatment, and coordinates all stakeholders within a crisis management system; prescription drug monitoring solutions; and more. Find out more about our plans for ViVE.

Clearsense

Booth 604

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

Committed to leading transformation in healthcare, Clearsense creates a data journey, from data ingestion to management to consumption. Cloud-based, AI-enabled, and HITRUST-certified, the platform of data solutions ensures data governance, implementation, and analytics are rapidly mainstreamed while remaining scalable and secure. Driving faster outcomes in clinical, financial, and operational environments, Clearsense is powering the innovation of tomorrow — right now.

Visit us at ViVE in booth 604 for live demos to learn how to modernize your archive and application approach, create predictive analytics for all, and harness your healthcare organization’s data intelligence in a data hub built by us and powered by you.

Be sure to stop by on Monday, March 7 at 2:45 for a live podcast with Bill Russel from “This Week in Health IT,” Renown Health CIO Chuck Podesta, and Clearsense President Kevin Field.

Clearwater

Kiosk 1012-29 in the Cybersecurity Pavilion

Contact: John Howlett, chief marketing officer
john.howlett@clearwatercompliance.com
773.636.6449

Clearwater is the leading provider of cybersecurity, risk management, and HIPAA compliance software, consulting, and managed services for the healthcare industry. More than 400 healthcare organizations, including 70 of the nation’s largest health systems and a large universe of leading physician groups and digital health companies, trust Clearwater to meet their cybersecurity and compliance needs. Their belief in our expertise and capabilities has helped Clearwater earn recognition as healthcare’s top-rated Security Advisors and Compliance & Risk Management Solution in Black Book Market Research’s annual industry survey.

Join us in the Cybersecurity Pavilion at 2pm on March 8 as Clearwater CEO Steve Cagle shares insight on the steps that digital health companies need to take to demonstrate strong cybersecurity and HIPAA compliance programs and prevent concerns about their practices from becoming an impediment to growth.

CloudWave

To arrange a meeting, contact Tim Quigley.

Contact: Tim Quigley, chief client officer
tquigley@gocloudwave.com
508.251.8917

CloudWave is a cloud and managed services provider that delivers a multi-cloud approach, helping healthcare organizations with any EHR service architect, build, and integrate a personalized solution using managed private cloud, public cloud, and cloud edge resources. As the largest, most experienced, and trusted independent software hosting provider in healthcare, CloudWave delivers enterprise cloud services to more than 230 hospitals and healthcare organizations.

CloudWave CEO Erik Littlejohn (elittlejohn@gocloudwave.com) and Chief Client Officer Tim Quigley (tquigley@gocloudwave.com) will be available for meetings throughout the event.

CloudWave invites attendees to participate in a ViVE luncheon on Tuesday, March 8 at 12:30, co-sponsored with Canon Medical Imaging, in Room 229 AB – Level 2 MBCC.

Current Health: A Best Buy Health Company

Booth 846

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

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

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

Diameter Health

Booth 762 and the InteropNow! Pavilion

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

Diameter Health upcycles raw clinical data into a standards-based, interoperable asset using Fusion, our FHIR-enabled technology engine. Our comprehensive, automated data integration, normalization, and enrichment technology delivers high-quality data to streamline workflows, inform decisions, and accelerate interoperability at scale.​ Visit our kiosk to experience our product in action as a part of the interactive, connected-demonstration tour.

Divurgent

To arrange a meeting, contact Shaun Sangwin

Contact: Shaun Sangwin, SVP, business development
shaun.sangwin@divurgent.com
201.456.2558

We’re so excited to be participating in this season’s must-attend conference. We hope you are, too. Divurgent will be there in a big way. Look for our team out and about, in conference sessions, in our space in the Meeting Complex, CHIME programming, and more. We can’t wait to make new connections, catch up with our long-time partners, and talk about industry trends and innovations.

Ellkay

Booth 742

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

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

Start your morning off right by grabbing a complimentary cup of coffee with Team Ellkay the first hour each day at booth 742. During the Exhibit Hall Reception on Monday, March 7 from 5:30-6:30, Ellkay will host a Cocktail Mixer serving up mojitos and margaritas. Lastly, on Tuesday, March 8, we’ll have a full Happy Hour, so stop by and experience the power of true interoperability!

Fortified Health Security

Kiosk 1012-4 in the Cyber Pavilion

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

Fortified Health Security is Healthcare’s Cybersecurity Partner – protecting patient data and reducing risk throughout the healthcare ecosystem. As a managed security service provider, Fortified works alongside healthcare organizations to build tailored programs with high-touch engagements and customized recommendations that maximize the value of investments and result in actionable information to help reduce the risk of cyber events. Stop by Kiosk 1012-4 in the Cyber Pavilion to find out how we became the best healthcare cybersecurity partner.

Lumeon

Booth 422

Contact: Greg Miller, chief growth officer
greg.miller@lumeon.com
435.225.3057

Lumeon exists to help healthcare providers deliver care more efficiently, consistently, and safely, with higher quality and lower costs than ever before. We apply deep automation to care processes, so that the patient’s care journey is orchestrated across sites of care and care teams. Lumeon’s unique Care Traffic Control platform integrates with existing data sources and our real-time decisioning engine optimizes the care journey for each patient, with standardized and individualized care pathways, that have proven to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and patient satisfaction.

Lyniate

Booth 525 and the Interop Now! Pavilion

Contact: Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer
michelle.blackmer@lyniate.com
312.520.1873

Lyniate partners with healthcare organizations around the globe, delivering flexible interoperability solutions that connect people through increased access to data. As a trusted partner, Lyniate powers the applications and workflows that improve clinical, operational, and financial outcomes today while helping healthcare teams to understand, prepare for, and influence changes on the horizon. Lyniate is committed to empowering people with the best interoperability solutions for healthcare, from specialty clinics to large networks, from payers to vendors, and everything in between. Visit lyniate.com to connect.

Foundational products include Corepoint and Rhapsody interface engines. Stop by our booth for demonstrations, customer examples, and to learn about new product offerings that support healthcare’s cloud adoption and API adoption.

Medicomp Systems

Booth 618

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

Medicomp will showcase innovations in clinical usability and documentation workflow improvement, including: 

• Clinical intelligence for EHRs to mirror the way clinicians think.
• Enhanced FHIR/interoperability tools to make sense of incoming data by problem in health systems. 
• Breakthroughs in speech and NLP, taking “freetext” to structured data.
• Improvements in real-time compliance at the point of care.

Nordic Consulting

Kiosk 762-10 in the InteropNow! Pavilion

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

At the Nordic kiosk in the InteropNow! Pavilion, attendees will be able to see a demo of the Nordic Health Data Connector, a new Web application that enables low-code configuration of healthcare data connectivity. This Connector supports FHIR APIs, HL7v2 Messaging, SQL queries, and SMART-on-FHIR workflows, to name a few, and it allows consumers of health data to integrate with providers and payers using healthcare data standards without writing a line of code.   

On Monday, March 7 at 4:30 in the InterOp Theater, Nordic and Emory Healthcare will discuss their journey to modernize analytics at Emory leveraging the AWS platform and a modernized data and analytics strategy. Emory Healthcare Corporate Director of Data, Analytics, and Integration Matt Robuck will cover their current state of data and analytics, and the decision process leading to an investment in a modern data platform. Nordic Managing Director and Advisory Services – Digital Health Practice Leader Kevin Erdal and Robuck will also talk about the comprehensive strategy required to leverage operational analytics from EHRs while enabling innovation through a modern platform – reducing redundancy without losing the opportunity to innovate.

Olive

Booth 1250

Contact: Olivia Ohlin, senior manager, events
olivia.ohlin@oliveai.com
330.232.4346

There are many ways to connect with Olive at ViVE. Stop by the Olive booth (1250) to chat with a team that has identified thousands of use cases for automation and AI, and get a consultation based on your organization’s specific needs. Go1 – Olive’s mobile AI command center – will be parked outside of the convention center throughout the conference. Stop in to see how Olive realizes and tracks value for customers.

On Monday, Olive will take the Tech Talk stage from 12:30-12:40 to highlight a key partnership. Later that evening, join Olive at 6:30 for an unforgettable cocktail reception at The Temple House, Miami’s most unique event venue with projection mapping. On Tuesday, Olive will hold another Tech Talk from 12:45-12:55 about the Olive Platform. And then at 3:00, Olive’s chief medical officer, YiDing Yu, MD will speak on the panel entitled, “Tech-first or Bust: A Move to Modernized Operations.” For full information, visit oliveai.com/events/conferences/vive.

Optimum Healthcare IT

To arrange a meeting, contact Larry Kaiser.

Contact: Larry Kaiser, chief marketing officer
lkaiser@optimumhit.com
516.978.5487

Optimum Healthcare IT is a Best in KLAS healthcare IT staffing and consulting services firm based in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Working with healthcare providers, payers, software, and life sciences organizations, Optimum provides professional staffing and consulting services that support our clients’ needs through the continuum of care. Optimum’s comprehensive service offerings include EHR; technical; security; ServiceNow; ERP; and Optimum CareerPath, our talent and skill development program.

At ViVE, Optimum Healthcare IT will have speakers on the Techquity Track speaking about Optimum CareerPath and DE&I, as well as on the CHIME University Track. We will host a great focus group on EMR Support Through the Lens of a Managed Service. Additionally, we will host an invite-only reception with CHIME and an Executive Luncheon. Be sure to look for an invite coming to your inbox soon!

Quil

To get in touch or schedule a meeting with Quil at ViVE 2022, please email Justyna Evlogiadis at jevlogiadis@quilhealth.com.

We are beyond excited to attend, sponsor, and host activities at CHIME & HLTH’s inaugural event for digital health leaders: ViVE! ViVE 2022 will foster interactivity and collaboration amongst the digital health community for transforming health and care. If you are attending the event virtually or in-person, be sure to catch our activities! On Monday, March 7 at 3 p.m. ET, Quil’s Chief Digital Officer, Dwight Raum, and VP Product, Engage, Alex Harwitz, will host a focus group with The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) members. The focus group will cultivate thought leadership discussions surrounding digital patient engagement and effectively supporting patients beyond the hospital. On Tuesday, March 8 at 2 p.m. ET, CEO, Carina Edwards will speak on a panel with industry leaders about the integration of personalized digital healthcare solutions in the home to support caregivers and the aging population. Don’t miss “Track 2: Lights, Camera, Action: Home Care Takes Center Stage – Session 3: Tech-Enabled Chronic Care Anywhere”. On Wednesday, March 9, Carina and Dwight will host an executive brunch that fosters collaboration with a high-level presentation on “Insights from the home: Managing patient engagement beyond the digital front door”. Also, during ViVE Carina Edwards will be interviewed by Bill Russell, CEO and Founder of This Week in Health IT. The video interview will be available shortly after the event, so please stay tuned and be on the lookout for updates from Quil about its release.

ReMedi Health Solutions

To arrange a meeting, contact GP Hyare.

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

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

Our physician executive team is attending ViVE to connect with other industry members and share more about our virtual solutions that have provided a major impact for our healthcare partners. We will be sponsoring the CHIME Welcome Reception on Sunday and hope to see you there! Feel free to reach out and schedule a free EHR strategy session with our team during ViVE.

RxRevu

To arrange a meeting, contact Ryan Smith.

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

We’ll be at ViVE to connect with our current partners and clients, and talk with industry leaders about our solution, which provides reliable data to providers at the point of care.

Tegria

To arrange a meeting, contact Kevin Kuntz.

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

Come and meet with the Tegria team at meeting cube 1093. For all inquiries please reach out to Kevin Kutz.

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

We invite you to meet Tegria experts at their presentations on cloud strategy and patient access, growth, and retention. Please join us! We invite you to listen to Tegria’s Theresa Demeter alongside other great panelists at the Techquity Panel on Monday, March 7 at 3pm:

Catalyzing Health Equity through Data 
“We have the technology! New tools and approaches to data are enabling unique collaborations with potential to accelerate health equity, better protect patient privacy, and establish trust in healthcare among marginalized patients. Covering approaches such as edge computing, synthetic data, and federated learning environments, this session will explore data sharing options to fuel personalized medicine, develop predictions and upstream interventions, and close gaps in research for historically underserved populations.”​ Moderator: ​Ashish Atreja, MD, MPH; chief innovation and digital health officer, UC Davis Health.​ ​Speakers: Lu de Souza, MD, FAMIA, vice president & CMO, Cerner;​ Pierre Vigilance, MD, MPH, VP, population health & social impact, Equideum Health;​ Theresa Demeter, MHA, managing director, Tegria.

Weekender 2/25/22

Weekly News Recap

• Teladoc Health’s Q4 results beat expectations, but its share price takes a wild ride.
• Allscripts announces Q4 results that beat Wall Street expectations for revenue and earnings.
• A study notes that while telehealth visits spiked during the pandemic, the reason seems to be lack of in-person visits rather than patient preference.
• The DOJ sues to block UnitedHealth Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Change Healthcare, citing anti-competitive concerns related to UHG’s health insurance business.
• Virtual chronic care management company Omada Health raises a $192 million Series E funding round.
• WellSky announces its intentions to acquire TapCloud.
• Health Catalyst announces its acquisition of KPI Ninja.
• Cerner’s Q4 results beat analyst expectations for earnings, but fall slightly short on revenue.
• Spok announces layoffs, the retirement of its cloud-based Spok Go product, and its continuing search for an acquirer.

Best Reader Comments

Hats off to Epic and Judy for supporting their client and directly going after that patent troll. Too many companies just roll over as they don’t want to deal with the hassle, thereby leaving these patent trolls free to roam. (Trollbeater)

Neither Whole Foods nor Amazon has been greatly improved by the union. This would at least partly undermine Jain’s contention that Amazon entering the food business is some kind of model for tech in healthcare. (Brian Too)

I once had requested additional Epic certifications and had a manager tell me that the industry didn’t really look at Epic certifications. I really had to try hard not to laugh at her, but I’m sure she knew that I knew she was lying to me. Epic still makes certifications hard and expensive to get oth as revenue, and to try to support their Epic Boost boondoggle. Customers, meanwhile are okay with preventing the FTEs from getting additional certs because then they can go out the door for more money. (Fourth Hansen Brother)

[The CEO interviewing the final job candidate before they are hired] is to give all employees a personal face of the CEO. All companies, no exclusions, sometimes do stupid things. In a culture where employees do not dare to speak out to top management about this, it may linger for far too long. My idea is that if everyone has seen me personally, they will also dare to call or email me personally if there is something stupid going on that I need to know about in order to fix it. And lastly, it shows that we value all people in the company. (Torbjörn Kronander, CEO, Sectra)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Mr. E in Muskegon, MI, who asked for a digital microscope for his middle school charter academy class. He reports, “Thank you for your support of our science lab and for believing in our young scientists! Because of your support, our middle school science classroom is beginning to resemble a real science lab! Our scholars are loving the lab coats and the microscopes. They say things like, ‘When I grow up I’m going to get me one of these lab coats, with my name on it right here.’ They are learning all about lab safety and how to use science tools safely and accurately. Most importantly, their enthusiasm for learning science is growing more and more every day! THANK YOU!”

The parents of a newborn sue MercyOne Des Moines Medical Center after a stranger enters the NICU , feeds and changes their baby, and then asks nurses “inappropriate questions” about the baby’s care.

A Washington, DC program in which 911 medical calls are triaged by nurses has diverted 17,000 of 47,000 callers away from the ED, with 24×7 RNs reviewing their symptoms and offering to schedule a clinic appointment and arrange Uber rides both ways for non-emergent situations.

A psychiatric registered nurse practitioner faces 22 felony charges of prescribing prescriptions illegally and for billing an insurer for the time she spent having sex with a patient. And in Michigan, a prison nurse is charged with a felony for allowing inmates to touch her sexually while she provided medical services to them, which staff discovered from the number of inmates who requested her personally.

A New York ophthalmologist sues a meat shop that wouldn’t sell him a steak because he refused to wear a mask as state law required at the time. David Kwiat, MD also wants the store’s proprietor brought up on charges of committing a hate crime and practicing medicine and law without a license. Asked by a reporter if he wears a mask while performing surgery, the doctor admitted that he does, but it gives him a headache.

In Case You Missed It

• News 2/25/22
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/24/22
• HIStalk Interviews Patty Hayward, VP, Talkdesk
• News 2/23/22
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/21/22
• HIStalk Interviews Amihai Neiderman, CEO, Nym
• Monday Morning Update 2/21/22

Get Involved

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Contact Mr. H

Morning Headlines 2/25/22

Teladoc Health Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Results

Teladoc Health reports Q4 results: revenue up 45%, EPS -$0.07 versus -$3.07, beating Wall Street expectations for both.

Story Health Raises $22.6 Million in Series A Funding to Expand Virtual Specialty Care Platform Across Cardiology

Specialty remote patient monitoring vendor Story Health raises $23 million in a Series A funding round.

Allscripts Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

Allscripts reports Q4 results: revenue up 1%, adjusted EPS $0.79 versus $0.20.

Stryker Completes Acquisition of Vocera Communications

Global medical technology company Stryker finalizes its $3 billion acquisition of care coordination and communication technology vendor Vocera Communications.

News 2/25/22

Top News

Teladoc Health reports Q4 results: revenue up 45%, EPS -$0.07 versus -$3.07, beating Wall Street expectations for both.

TDOC shares dropped sharply on Wednesday following the announcement, then gained 12% on Thursday. They are down 76% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s flat performance, valuing the company at $11 billion.

Teladoc was touted in August 2020 as having created a $37 billion company with its acquisition of Livongo for $18.5 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m declining to speculate further on attendance at ViVE and HIMSS22 since they are just 10 and 18 days away, respectively. You’re either going or not at this point. The conference and healthcare attendee environment has been reset since the pre-pandemic, pre-virtual status quo, so it’s early days in figuring out what that market wants in education and networking.

Meanwhile, I received an email from HIMSS whose subject line suggests that the healthcare-irrelevant former occupations of its keynote speakers is the big draw.

Listening: video from the 2014 reunion concert – the surprisingly excellent first of many shows after a 16-year break – of one of my favorite bands, Failure. My favorite track: Daylight. The alt-rockers are touring this summer and my ticket procurement process is underway to make up for considering but not attending that 2014 LA show.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor VisiQuate. The Santa Rosa, CA-based company empowers healthcare organizations to achieve peak business health, through expert service-enabled technologies that dramatically improve performance and reduce process waste. They deliver optimized enterprise outcomes through a unique combination of complex data curation, deep AI & ML, advanced analytics, and intelligent process automation. Thanks to VisiQuate for supporting HIStalk.

An obvious core competency of VisiQuate is creating compelling and enjoyable videos, so instead of the usual explainer, I’ve chosen from YouTube a fun company overview set to the tune of “I Will Survive.” You may sing along.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts reports Q4 results: revenue up 1%, adjusted EPS $0.79 versus $0.20. 

Specialty remote patient monitoring vendor Story Health raises $23 million in a Series A funding round.

Omada Health, which offers virtual-first chronic condition care, raises $192 million in a Series E funding round that values the company at $1 billion.

Sales

• Northern Ireland’s Health and Social Care Board chooses medication ordering decision support from First Databank.
• Ciox Health will implement Diameter Health’s Fusion engine to transform patient medical record data into analytics-ready form.

People

Meditech adds COO to the title of 32-year company veteran EVP Helen Waters. The COO role was previously held by President and CEO Michelle O’Connor before her promotion in early 2021.

Patrick Murta (Humana) joins BehaVR as chief platform architect.

Umar Afridi, MPharm, co-founder and CEO of pharmacy fulfillment, telehealth, and diagnostic provider Truepill, is replaced by co-founder and president Sid Viswanathan.

Mark Citrone (Healthfinch) joins Doximity as AVP of national sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Medhost announces two solutions that address CMS’s Promoting Interoperability Program, a Cures 2023 Interoperability Solution and Electronic Case Reporting.

A economic study by healthcare market analytics company Trilliant Health finds that only about one-fourth of Americans have had a telehealth-based encounter during the pandemic and half of those had just one encounter (often to obtain a COVID-19 test), suggesting that people use it mostly when in-person visits aren’t available. The study says that the law of small numbers makes it seem that telehealth is enjoying accelerated adoption, but in reality it hasn’t impacted many people, especially those who need it most, and it hasn’t bridged the gap in available in-person primary care visits. Behavioral care is an exception, where many people prefer virtual visits. The study notes that while the marginal cost of offering a telehealth visit is effectively zero, the retail cost ranges from $59 to $75 and the patient’s payment portion increased by 110% from 2020 to 2021. 

A new KLAS report on medication inventory management (par levels, clean room, facility-to-facility transfer tracking, formulary management, ordering and receiving) finds that Epic has the top-rated functionality even though the company’s doesn’t specialize in pharmacy. Customers of Swisslog are least likely to achieve outcomes such as improved compliance, inventory transparency, purchasing efficiency, and usage efficiency and are also least-satisfied with their vendor relationship.

Government and Politics

The Department of Justice sues to block the $13 billion acquisition of Change Healthcare by UnitedHealth Group, saying that the deal would give the insurer details on how competing insurers bill and then undercut them. DOJ also says that UHG could withhold Change Healthcare’s products from its competitors, keep innovations for itself, and give UHG a monopoly in how claims are checked for errors.

Epic sues non-practicing entity (aka patent troll) GreatGigz Solutions for shaking down Christus Health to pay it licensing fees for its use of MyChart. GreatGiz bought some old online job recruiting patents that is says MyChart infringes on and is demanding that Christus buy licenses. GreatGigz has similarly sued Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Postmates, CVS Health, Subway, ZipRecruiter, Target, Freelancer, Robert Half International, and countless other companies in hopes that they decide that it’s cheaper to pay GreatGigz to go away than to shovel money into mounting a defense. Epic has historically been one of few companies willing to do whatever it takes to defend itself, and in this case, the involvement of one of its customers is likely to unleash its legal dogs.

Privacy and Security

Ireland’s health service says the cost of last year’s ransomware attack has reached nearly $50 million and could rise to over $100 million.

Other

A large Medscape physician survey looks at burnout:

• Nearly half of physician respondents said they feel burned out, up 4% from 2020, with female doctors reporting higher rates and critical care being the highest percentage specialty.
• Sixty percent of doctors say bureaucratic tasks, such as charting and paperwork, are the main issue, double the #2 factor of lack of respect. Computer issues rank #6, with about one-third of respondents naming it as a problem.
• Doctors say the three things that would most reduce their burnout are a better work schedule, higher pay, and more respect (I would say that “higher pay” was more of an aspiration since money isn’t likely to eliminate burnout, just make it more cost effective).

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe publishes a new report, “The Rise of Emoji in Healthcare Communication.”
• TransformativeMed launches its Cores Intelligent Care Platform on Olive’s marketplace, The Library.
• Get Well publishes a new white paper, “Today’s Health Equity Goal: Shifting from Headlines to Impact.”
• Imprivata has recognized partners Softcat, Conecto, Data#3, and SVA with its international IPartner Awards.
• The Engage Your Tribe Podcast features NextGate VP of Global Marketing Richard Dark.

Blog Posts

• Committed to Veterans: Get Well Government Services Year in Review (Get Well)
• CMS Has Decided to Put its Muscle Behind Glycemic Management – Why Now? (Glytec)
• Survey Illustrates Importance of a Strategic Approach to Healthcare Cloud Investment (Healthcare Triangle)
• Hiring and Coaching Leaders to Transform Healthcare (feat. Sarah Richardson) (HCI Group)
• The Benefits of Healthcare Revenue Cycle Outsourcing (Impact Advisors)
• From quality measurement to quality care (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Discussing top IT trends with a fellow innovation enthusiast (Meditech)
• What is patient engagement for a Chief Medical Information Officer? A guide for CEOs (Nuance)

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/24/22

Lots of activity on the HIMSS22 preparation front as people start to get serious about scheduling meetings, identifying sessions to attend, and attempting to draw people into their booths.

I’m often asked what would get me to come to a booth and look at a solution. First, I always remember that I’m primarily at HIMSS on behalf of my clients. It’s not just about the shoes and parties (and looking at HIMSS22, the schedule for the latter is decidedly lacking). I’m more apt to visit a booth for a vendor that has a potential solution to a client’s problems, or to a generalizable healthcare problem that’s important to me as a physician.

Second, companies need to consider the mechanics of how they let people know that they have a solution that might stimulate some interest. I at least eyeball the emails that come through from HIMSS vendors. If there’s a problem with the email formatting and the subject line doesn’t render correctly in the inbox, it goes straight to the trash. Marketing teams definitely need to be on top of testing this before they send their blast communications.

If the subject line seems compelling enough to open it, but I find formatting issues in the email itself (such as a poorly constructed salutation), it’s likely to go straight to the trash as well, since I find that highly annoying in addition to the fact that it conveys a message that a company isn’t attentive to detail. If they can’t manage the little things like formatting their communications, can I trust them with my clients’ outcomes? I understand that marketing is far from being considered a little thing and there’s a lot of complexity involved, but thousands of companies are able to do it right every day, so it can be done.

There used to be a lot of direct mailings to CMIOs in the weeks before HIMSS that included invitations from vendors to visit their booths and teased potential announcements. Some of the big spenders would even send goodies ahead of the meeting. Some would fall along the lines of “HIMSS survival kits,” including energy drinks and water bottles. Although eye-catching and fun, I’m not sure how much the average CMIO really used them or whether they thought they were a waste of money and postage.

I always liked hearing about the booths that were hosting events or activities to benefit a charity, such as “come by to stuff a backpack for a deserving school” or something similar. Those definitely got my attention because they were not only fun to do, but a good diversion from a long day at HIMSS.

Other mailings were a little kitschier, especially if the meeting was scheduled for Las Vegas. This includes vendor-branded casino chips to bring to the booth. I don’t know how many people actually carried those to the show, let alone took them to the booth, but I saw them year after year so they must have been effective, at least to some degree. Cards to bring for a drawing were also popular, and it’s been interesting to see how those drawings have evolved over the years. In 2011, it was IPad city, and I was lucky enough to bring one home. Over time, Fitbit devices became popular, then Bluetooth speakers, Apple watches, and more. I’ve seen a couple of vendors give away designer handbags, which is a fun twist. There was one company that gave away jet ski and one that gave away Vespa scooters. I’d definitely stop by to get a Vespa pic if someone offers one.

Mailings have definitely fallen off over the last several years. For HIMSS19, many of the mailings were late and were waiting for me when I returned home. Although HIMSS20 was a casualty of COVID, I received fewer than a dozen mailings. HIMSS21 brought less than a handful of postcards. I haven’t received any mailings this year, although it’s still early. I feel like physical mail is likely going to disappear, but would be interested to hear from any marketing professionals on whether they still feel there is a role for it. It’s certainly a differentiator if you’re one of the few vendors who does it and is likely to garner a little more attention than the flood of emails that we all receive.

In thinking about being actually at the show and what makes me want to visit a booth, my list is fairly well harmonized with what Mr. H publishes nearly every year. Friendly and engaged booth staff who are outward facing as people walk by makes the top of my list. Nothing says “we don’t want to talk to you” like being heads-down on your phone. Even the tiniest booths will get my attention if they look remotely interesting and the staff actively tries to engage clients. Hopefully the HIMSS badges will be printed this year in a way that booth staff can see our titles, because I think that helps a bit in the exhibit hall dance as well.

The booth needs to be clean and organized, with no clutter on tables and definitely no overflowing trash cans. If you have swag to give away, it needs to be organized and not look like a yard sale. Small tchotchkes that make the show easier are always appreciated – hand sanitizer, lip balm, Tylenol packets, etc. Little pieces of chocolate are always a fan favorite, especially if you need a pick me up after several hours of cruising the exhibits. I’m not a big fan of glossy paper take-aways simply because I don’t want to carry them around, not to mention the environmental impact of those. I might take a picture of materials to remind me of a vendor, so maybe having something that displays the vendor, its core offering, and its website in a way that can be easily captured would be useful.

Of course, I always make sure to visit the booths of our HIStalk sponsors and I’ve enjoyed seeing our signage over the years. I test drove my new HIMSS shoes last week so now all my boxes are checked and I’m ready to put my exhibit hall strategy together.

What are your plans for HIMSS22? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 2/24/22

Minded, a telehealth platform specializing in managing mental health medication, raises $25M

Medication-based mental health telemedicine startup Minded raises $25 million in a Series A funding round that the company will use to expand beyond the seven states it currently serves.

Omada Health Closes $192 Million Series E Financing to Bring Virtual-First Care to Millions

Omada Health, a virtual chronic care management company, raises $192 million in a Series E funding round, bringing its total raised to nearly $450 million.

OhMD Closes Latest Round of Financing, Led by FCA Venture Partners

Patient engagement and text-based patient-to-provider messaging vendor OhMD secures financing in a funding round led by FCA Venture Partners.

HIStalk Interviews Patty Hayward, VP, Talkdesk

Patty Hayward, MA is VP of strategy, healthcare and life sciences, of Talkdesk of San Francisco, CA.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’ve been in healthcare IT for the past 25 years. I’ve worked with several organizations to transform processes and procedures in areas such as medication safety and revenue cycle. I worked at Aetna, helping with the first ACOs. I’ve had a lot of stints in population health. Now I’m working with patient experience.

Talkdesk has been around for 10 years. It offers the first cloud-native contact center as a service. It was born out of a hackathon from Twilio. There was a niche in the market that needed to be worked on. The company has kept over 50% of its employees based in product and R&D, which is a huge commitment to innovation, looking at how we can transform and disrupt different areas.

About a year and a half ago, the decision was made to look at specific verticals, with healthcare being the first. That’s when they brought me and other folks on board. For us, it’s all about how to reimagine that patient experience, reduce friction, and help providers offer a different experience than is typical. We want to make sure that it is synchronized across multiple channels and is personalized and convenient.

How do large health systems tailor their digital health strategies in the face of potential competition, but while operating at capacity and with record profits?

Interesting and unique forces are definitely in play. There’s a lot of change in the market. Large retailers are jumping into the market, bringing their experiences to target areas such as primary care, population health, and chronic disease management. That’s going to give them a lot of ability to steer. Whoever you’re dealing with most — your primary care doc or someone who is working with you to manage your chronic disease — is who you will listen to on where you go. Younger generations are interested in different ways of doing business and thinking about healthcare in a different way. Record profits make it attractive for people to jump in, and you are seeing that.

Amazon has the luxury of catering to a self-selected customer base that is comfortable with an online-only relationship. Do providers have a different challenge in accommodating people who may prefer interacting in person or via telephone?

You are seeing this a lot with Medicare Advantage plans. They are obviously targeting the senior population, but they are tech savvy and tech forward in their approach and are using it in a smart way. They are giving a lot of choice and a lot of opportunity to utilize technology selectively, but also using care guides to guide folks through the system, which is much needed when you think about chronic disease patients in the Medicare population. It is difficult to navigate. They are allowing their members to come to them as they can, or as they would like to, whether that’s via voice or via technology. They are also using technology to make their agents efficient. So there are multiple ways to look at technology and how to implement it. It doesn’t have to be patient- or member-facing.

How are health systems using their contact centers differently?

Health systems are starting to look at their contact center as a strategic asset versus just the cost center it was in the past. It is the front door, typically the first touch that a patient has with their organization. We went the NGPX patient experience conference at the beginning of December and one of the things that struck me was that about 95% of the presentations were on HCAHPS scores. Those are acute focused, inside, did we do these certain things. When I had conversations with a lot of folks, the Mayo of course jumped out and started talking about patient experience in a very different way. They still do HCAHPS, because you have to, but they have jumped over to using Net Promoter Score as a measure of patient satisfaction. That’s unusual in the space.

People are starting to think differently about how they can transform to “how did we make you feel” versus “did we do the right things all the time.” A lot of forward-thinking folks are looking at how to do this differently. You are also seeing CMS start to push member experience as a huge piece of how they reimburse, making that one of the biggest metrics that they are using for star rating.

Providers used then-modern technology such as PBX systems or online contact forms to prevent people who needed help from easily accessing their employees. How are they thinking differently about tailoring communications using someone’s preferred method and personalizing the message?

People are talking about things like digital front door. Health systems, especially those that take risk or have their own plans, want more interaction with their patients in the right way. Being able to do things like send a text reminder that is interactive versus “say yes to confirm or no to cancel.” They want to keep that revenue stream going, because if you miss an appointment, that’s money out the door. They want to continue to have those record profits. There are a lot of ways that you can work through that whole aspect.

During COVID, the volumes that hit their switchboards were unmanageable. I talked to several health systems whose entire phone systems were taken down by the volume. People quickly automated as much as possible, standing up IVRs to give automated answers to quick questions, offering chats, and adding FAQs to their websites. Taking simple things that could be easily answered by automation off their switchboards to give their agents time to answer questions and have good interactions.

Forward-thinking ones are looking at the disruptors that are coming into the space and taking patients off of their books. How can we keep up with them? Amazon Care is going after employers, not necessarily patients themselves. Hilton was their first big one. There’s some big innovation in not only the care that is given, but in how they get patients on their rosters.

Most businesses assign a single customer identity and a defined way to interact with them. How well do health systems coordinate the many reasons they might be communicating with someone – clinical care, marketing, reminders, population health, billing – and give their employees a single view into every one of those communications?

The key is integrating with the system of record. If it’s the EHR, you want to make sure that you’ve got a connection to make the API callout so you can see snippets. You aren’t trying to duplicate the EHR – you want the highlights of things that are of interest. We are completely customizable, so we can build that to the experience that you would like. You may have different groups that need different visions. Someone who is in revenue cycle and billing wants a different look than those who work in patient access or care management.

You would want to be able to see if they started it off with a chat. You would authenticate to have a real conversation, be able to see who they are, and be able to do things like patient scheduling. Then if it is escalated, to be able to bring all of that information to that agent’s workspace so that they can see what’s happening and they don’t have to listen all over again. You see that in other verticals, where when people call in, they start with a discussion with an AI agent and then escalate to a human who says, “Give me a minute to get caught up on what you’ve said.” That’s an important aspect that we don’t tend to have in healthcare as much. It’s important to have that integration into the EHR.

Patient portals used to be viewed as consumer-unfriendly, but suddenly they are the well-received launching point for most interactions with patients. How do they fit into the ideal consumer experience?

Patient portals are not going to be real time. I just had my annual physical and it took a week to get a response from my physician. The patient portal can automate things that make sense for patients to do when they are on their computer, such as scheduling appointments, rescheduling, paying their bill, things like that. But a lot of times, people are on their smartphone and want to be able to start a conversation using the chatbot in the corner of the web page.  

Ideally, it’s all tied together and you can see the history. If there’s an interaction that’s recent, you want to be able to pull that in, create intents, and use AI to determine that the person is calling in because they’ve asked their question three times. You should see that as you’re answering the phone call. It’s important to be able to synchronize all these things, which typically doesn’t happen today. You call in and they have no vision into what you’ve been doing. I’ve been with my primary care provider for 19 years and it’s like I’m brand new every time I call.

Providers used to just hang out a shingle and people lined up, so nobody worked too hard to attract new patients. How are chief digital officers or chief experience officers who come in from other industries working with health systems who aren’t used to having to be consumer-friendly?

They are bringing in all sorts of people for these roles. It’s not just folks who are traditional healthcare. You have people coming in from Disney, Best Buy, the retail sector, and the entertainment sector with a viewpoint of what it could look like. They are bringing a different and unique lens to how you can capture more of the populations and become a destination place where people want to go. Mayo Clinic can dictate the kind of patients it wants, and other systems are, like you said, taking the approach that their shingle is out and people are coming.

Disruptors that are coming into the space are going to peel off those more valuable individuals, those who have more money to spend, and offer additional services that they are willing to pay for. If you look at that Amazon Care video, it’s pretty cool to be able to have a virtual visit, and if they can’t solve it on videoconference, they will send someone to your house or your place of work and then deliver your medications in two hours. There’s this full circle of care that can happen that makes it convenient and easy for you to seek the care you need.

Otherwise, folks will avoid doing that and then end up in a worse position or in the ER, which may be profitable if the ER isn’t taking risk. But if they are taking risk, all of a sudden the cost situation flips. That’s where the change is. Fee-for-service loves that ED visit, but with fee-for-value where you take on risk of the population, it’s a different discussion. We are seeing a lot of push towards fee-for-value. It has been going on for over a decade, but we are seeing more folks jumping in and offering different opportunities to grab onto that fee-for-value area and show value back to the government or to employers who are paying the bill.

What developments will we see with the company and industry in the next few years?

You will see AI take a bigger role, both in the things that are easy to automate and those that are not. It will take a huge role in helping the agents with their work, so that information is easily accessible and correct so that you can get it done quickly the first time. Agents will be able to spend more time and emphasis on that empathetic journey that you would like to show to your patients, at least those organizations that do it well.

You’re going to see a lot more emphasis on providing what in retail they call a delightful journey. Not too many people would call healthcare’s journey delightful. You typically come there stressed out and having a lot of interactions, so being able to deliver an experience like that is important. As we get folks to take care of themselves in the way that is prescribed, how do we activate the patient? How do we get them to think about how to take care of themselves and make the right choices? All of that will start to come together. Smart watches, devices, and different areas will allow you to get a lot more help and a lot more ability to, when you want, get guidance in real time.

Morning Headlines 2/23/22

Cerner Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Results

Cerner, whose acquisition by Oracle remains on track for sometime this year, announces Q4 results: revenue up 4%, adjusted EPS $0.93 versus $0.78.

WellSky® to Acquire TapCloud to Bolster Patient Engagement Technology That Improves the Patient Experience and Lowers Costs

WellSky will acquire TapCloud, whose patient engagement platform collects a one-minute check-in that asks about symptoms, concerns, and available support.

Health Catalyst Announces Intent to Acquire KPI Ninja

Health Catalyst will acquire KPI Ninja, which offers interoperability solutions and population health analytics.

Clinical Data Release Leader MRO Announces Acquisition of MediCopy

Release of information solutions vendor MRO acquires competitor MediCopy.

News 2/23/22

Top News

WellSky will acquire TapCloud, whose patient engagement platform collects a one-minute check-in that asks about their symptoms, concerns, and available support.

WellSky says the patient-generated data will expand its dataset to support the development of care models that predict patient risk factors for deploying interventions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Should we be talking about ICD-11, which is being used in 35 countries?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health Catalyst will acquire KPI Ninja, which offers interoperability solutions and population health analytics.

HealthStream announces Q4 results: revenue up 4%, EPS –$0.01 versus $0.03, beating expectations for both. HSTM shares are up 3% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 4% loss, valuing the company at $630 million.

Release of information solutions vendor MRO acquires competitor MediCopy.

Cerner announces Q4 results: revenue up 4%, adjusted EPS $0.93 versus $0.78. The company’s acquisition for $95 per share by Oracle remains on track for sometime in 2022. Shares closed Tuesday before the announcement at $91.83.

People

Nicole Rogas, MBA (Experian Health) joins Symplr as president.

Brian Silverstein, MD (The Chartis Group) joins Innovaccer as chief population health officer.

Global health pioneer, humanitarian, author, professor, and anthropologist Paul Farmer, MD, PhD died Monday at the university and hospital he had established in Rwanda. He was 62. The non-profit group he co-founded, Partners in Health, was an early proponent of considering social determinants of health, questioning why people were being treated for diseases and then returned to the same circumstances that had helped cause them.

Announcements and Implementations

A top pharmaceutical company deploys OptimizeRx’s digital therapy initiation workflow to streamline patient therapy initiation challenges.

DCH Health System (AL) implements real-time patient admission and discharge notification technology from Secure Exchange Solutions.

Windom Area Health (MN) rolls out telemedicine services from TeleHealth Solution for after-hours care.

Veriff announces GA of identity verification solutions for the healthcare industry that include digital health record protection, automated intake, and secure telemedicine and prescription delivery.

Government and Politics

NIH will require researchers to include a data management and sharing plan in their grant requests, which must include the software or tools that were used to analyze the data and a plan for publishing the data publicly. Information from failed or unpublished studies must also be published to potentially help other researchers. An estimated $10 to $50 billion is spent on US research whose data methods are insufficient, with most of the money coming from federal taxpayers. Experts note that most labs and institutions don’t have data managers and are likely to push the task onto trainees and early-career investigators.

A 33-year-old resident of Pakistan is sentenced to 12 years in prison and ordered to pay $48 million in restitution for submitting fraudulent Medicare claims for 20 home health agencies he had acquired in Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, and Texas using false names. Muhammad Ateeq was also ordered to forfeit a $2.4 million cashier’s check and $1 million in cash. Medicare paid his companies $40 million for services that had not been rendered, with DOJ noting that he had control of their billing and EHR systems.

Privacy and Security

HHS’s cybersecurity office publishes a report on EHRs in healthcare, which is mostly a glossy overview of the status quo. They urge healthcare organizations to  review Remote Desktop Protocol and consider protecting it with a VPN that uses multi-factor authentication, use endpoint detection and response, and implement email tools that filter URLS and move attachments to a sandbox.

Other

Some interesting thoughts on digital health companies from investor and former Livongo CFO Lee Shapiro of  7wire Ventures, interviewed by Marissa Schlueter of OMERS Ventures:

• Companies need a cash runway of 18-24 months to weather current market turbulence and should be prepared to describe their expected path to profitability to investors.
• Startups need a CFO, or at least an experienced controller, by their third year to prepare for the historical documentation that investors will want to review down the road in their C and D funding rounds.
• The market valuation of some publicly traded companies is less than the cash on their balance sheets and those could become acquirers or acquisition targets.
• Some companies suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome in expanding in too many markets or attacking multiple go-to-market channels.
• Companies whose revenue is less than $50 million will need to merge to attain the scale that is needed to address the challenges of health plans.
• Virtual-only companies could merge with brick-and-mortar companies to create an omnichannel brand.
• Shapiro recommends that investors should watch what hedge funds are doing, some of which are turning to the bargains that are available in the public market instead of private market investing.

Sponsor Updates

• Azara Healthcare has earned Certified Data Stream status for NCQA’s Data Aggregator Validation Program.
• Bamboo Health has joined the National Association of Mobile Integrated Healthcare Providers.
• Clearwater publishes a new white paper, “Keeping Patient Data Secure in the Cloud.”
• Change Healthcare releases a new podcast, “Enterprise Imaging in the Cloud: Adoption and Outlook.”
• Enlace Health will exhibit and present at the 2022 Healthcare Bundled Payments Conference February 24-25 in Nashville.

Blog Posts

• Value-Based Care Strategies: A Roadmap for Success (Actium Health)
• NCQA’s Data Aggregator Validation Program – What it Takes to Earn Certified Data Stream Status (Azara Healthcare)
• Important Activation Prep Activities to Ensure a Smooth Go-Live (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds Crisis Management Solution helping to support the New Hampshire Rapid Response System (Bamboo Health)
• Nurse Leadership Forum Middle East (Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the OBIX Perinatal Data System)
• CoverMyMeds Leaders Analyze 4 Key Trends from Medication Access Report (CoverMyMeds)
• Handling Hospital ADT Notifications with Direct Messaging (EClinicalWorks)
• Success at a glance: automating healthcare collections (Experian Health)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 2/22/22

VillageMD Acquires Healthy Interactions, a Patient Education Platform Proven to Increase Medication Adherence for Chronic Conditions

Primary care company VillageMD acquires Healthy Interactions, a developer of digital patient education programs geared toward increasing medication adherence.

National Medical Billing Services Announces Acquisition of National Billing Partners

National Medical Billing Services, an RCM company serving ASCs and surgical practices, acquires competitor National Billing Partners.

HerMD Adds $10M in Series A Funding to Scale Its Physical Clinics and Launch Virtual Services Throughout the US

Women’s healthcare provider HerMD raises $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Jazz Venture Partners

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/21/22

I’ve had a fair amount of work-related travel in the last few weeks and have noted the distinct lack of business travelers in the friendly skies. Others in the industry have noted the same, as companies have shifted away from in-person meetings in favor of ever-present videoconferencing software.

Airlines have been strapped for business during the pandemic and are trying to capture revenue from the pent-up demand of individuals wanting leisure and family travel. As a result, we’re seeing some overall changes in routes and schedules. We’re also seeing changes to flights after they’re already booked, which might be tolerated by leisure travelers, but which creates a mess for those of us traveling for work.

In the last week, I’ve received four flight change notifications that shift my departures or arrivals enough that I need to fly in a day early or stay a date later in order to meet the client’s meeting request. It feels like the days of being able to fly in and out of some cities on the same day are soon going to be over, if they’re not already. Even if the flight change notifications are acceptable, I’ve run into issues with airline websites not updating appropriately to allow travelers to update their Outlook calendars with the new flight information. It’s a small thing, but when you add up a number of annoyances, it definitely compounds.

With declining numbers of business travelers, the whole airline experience feels messier and more disorganized. I’ve been in several TSA PreCheck lines with people who don’t understand the process and start unpacking their laptops and liquids, which aggravates not only their fellow travelers, but the TSA agents, who seem a more aggravated than their baseline state. Boarding processes seem to take longer as people fumble with their phones and their overstuffed carry-on bags. People seem to be less attentive, probably more focused on their phones or music than on what’s happening around them.

I had to coach some newbie Southwest Airlines passengers through the fact that there aren’t any assigned seats on that carrier. Clearly, they missed the four different announcements that were made by various gate agents and flight attendants during the process and seemed upset that they didn’t have reserved seats. I’m guessing they didn’t make their own reservations since the lack of seat assignments is pretty obvious during the Southwest booking process.

I always joked about creating the all-business airline if I ever arrive at a position where I am insanely wealthy. I would pay more to fly with people who could board quickly, stow their luggage efficiently, and not act sassy to the flight crew. Being able to deplane quickly and move past the jetway exit without having to stop and adjust one’s overflowing open-top tote bag would also be a plus. After the things I’ve seen this week, I think zippers or some other mechanism of secure closure should be mandatory on all carry-on bags, but that would be asking a lot when we can’t even get people to exhibit civil behavior.

One of my flights this week almost had to go back to the gate due to a belligerent passenger who refused to wear his mask. Whether you agree with masking or not, thinking that you’re going to be able to bully a flight crew isn’t a good idea. Had we been forced to return to the gate, I think some of the passengers might have also considered taking justice into their own hands, given the number of short connections at the other end of this flight.

At least I’ve taken enough trips recently that I feel like I’ve got my travel mojo back and am back to my usual packing efficiency. I did somehow forget toothpaste on a flight earlier this month, but it was a good excuse to visit a local pharmacy and to also pick up some dark chocolate as well as the necessities. The workplaces I’ve visited are significantly more casual than they were pre-pandemic, with jeans being the norm at several places where we would have received glaring looks had we worn them before.

I’m working with a couple of companies that have embraced an outdoorsy vibe and I’m hoping for longer-term engagements where hiking pants can be a permanent part of my business travel wardrobe. I’ve had to make some adjustments in how many snacks I pack for a trip, though, because airport concession offerings remain significantly limited at most of the places I’ve been. My home airport still has half its restaurants and about a third of the newsstand shops closed, and you never know what you’re going to find when you arrive somewhere you haven’t been in a while.

For me, one of the biggest adjustments of traveling has been operating exclusively on my laptop. Over the last couple of years, I’ve apparently become spoiled by the setup in my home office, which includes not only a screaming-fast PC, but monitors that make me feel like I’m working at mission control rather than in a converted spare bedroom.

When I do have to do videoconference meetings with clients while I’m traveling, it’s a trick to balance the meeting software with any materials I might need to use while still being able to see the faces of the team I’m meeting with. I keep experimenting with different approaches and maybe something will stick, although it seems to be easier to get things the way I like them with Zoom than when I have to use Teams or GoToMeeting. I’d be interested to hear what usability experts think of the various conferencing software options – there are definitely some I like better than others, and of course a couple that I’d be happy never having to use again.

For those of you who are traveling again, what are the most striking changes you’re seeing with your clients and your travel patterns? Have you come up with new hacks that make things easier? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

HIStalk Interviews Amihai Neiderman, CEO, Nym

Amihai Neiderman is co-founder and CEO of Nym of New York, NY.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’m an engineer by training, in computer science. I did my bachelor’s in math and computer science when I was 14. Later on, I joined the Israeli army and did mostly cyberintelligence. After I left the army, I was influenced by my wife — she’s an MD-PhD ENT surgeon – and I started Nym. We do autonomous medical coding.

How do you distinguish autonomous medical coding from computer-assisted coding?

Computer-assisted coding is a tool that helps coders, giving them suggestions on the most appropriate code to use. It doesn’t make the final decision. Our fully automated solution requires zero human intervention. We code a chart in around two to two and a half seconds on average, then submit it directly to the billing systems in our clients’ facilities without anybody having to review those charts to make sure that the coding is correct. From there, it’s usually being sent directly to the payers. We completely remove the human from the loop.

Do payers trust the system’s consistent coding more than that of humans, where human coders may not all code the same way?

That was one of the reasons that it was hard to do automated coding until now. There was this lack of trust between the payers and providers, for obvious reasons, probably. The unique approach that we took when we started Nym is language understanding into clinical intelligence, what we call today clinical language understanding.

We can generate an audit trail that gives providers an end-to-end explanation of our entire thought process. If one of our clients ever gets a denial, an audit request, or even just during the onboarding process, they can assess and understand how we’re doing our coding. They can review those audit trails. We’re not hiding anything. We’re proud to show our internal thought processes and how we ended up deciding the right codes to use.

Payers who are receiving our audit trails are starting to become more interested in learning more about our solution, because we are not hiding anything and we have full transparency into our logic. They are usually afraid of fraud, waste, and abuse. We can show on the fraud part that we have nothing fraudulent in our process. It addresses that trust issue in a very interesting way.

Do you test in parallel with the customer’s human coders during implementation to measure the impact?

Yes. We know that our clients are moving something that is business critical for them. If we make a mistake, they could be exposed to compliance risk. They could lose revenue. We do a shadowing period, where when we do side-by-side coding for 30 or 45 days, depending on the client and the complexity of the project that we’re doing with them. During this shadowing period, we will have weekly or biweekly meetings with them and let the client choose choose any charts that they wish to review. They have access to our audit trails through a dashboard.

Sometimes they understand for themselves why we code something in a different way than their coders. Sometimes they’ll want to surface it up to us for an explanation of why we coded it this way when they might have done it differently. If we need to, we reconfigure our system based on their standard operating procedures.

How often do payers ask to review the audit trails, both initially and after they become comfortable with the system’s coding?

The payers don’t have direct access to the audit trails. It’s only if our clients decide to submit the audit trails as part of their appeal process if something was denied, or for an audit process that they have with the payers. Our relationships are directly with the providers who are our clients. But we do see from some of our clients in our periodic review that there is a significant drop in denials rates. Mostly because one of the things that we’re striving for is high coding accuracy, following the guidelines to the letter. You won’t see a lot of deviations.

That’s one of the beauties of using software to do coding. It is deterministic. You’re going to get the exact same results every single time. Once you become confident that you know that the results are up to your standard, you’re going to have reproducible results every single time.

Are issues with fraud, waste, and abuse usually caused by improper coding or are the provider’s notes themselves inaccurate?

We only code charts where we are fully comfortable with our understanding of those charts. If we see ambiguity, contradictions, or missing documentation, we drop those charts and let them go through the client’s ordinary process. Coders can reach out to the physicians if they need to. We code charts only when we are 100% certain that we fully understand everything in them. If there is any missing information, or if the chart might have any issues that will lead us to have wrong coding, we will just drop them. We are not taking any risk there.

Do clients implement your system primarily for efficiency or for accuracy?

Every organization has their own reasons for using our system. Sometimes it is speed. Provider groups that take five days to a week and a half to get their charts coded now see it happen in two and a half seconds. That reduces several days from their days in AR, giving them more cash on hand to operate their business.

Sometimes organizations, especially those who have tried outsourcing, usually offshore coding, encounter compliance issues and quality issues. Running an entire operation to try to reduce the compliance risk is expensive and not usually as fruitful as they believe. They are looking for a better solution to help them from a compliance perspective. This is where we come in.

In other cases, it’s reduced cost and improving their overall revenue cycle operations. We show the client that we are not just impacting directly their coding operations, but we will do it much faster than any one coder will do and we’re going to have a reduced number of denials, meaning fewer people that have to do scrubbing and running the appealing process. We affect the entire revenue cycle process downstream from us on the coding side.

Companies, including Google, are using natural language processing to support searching electronic charts and extracting data from free text notes. Will Nym use its experience in extracting chart information to extend beyond billing functions?

Definitely. When we started the company, we took a whole different approach into language understanding. What you see most of the bigger companies doing, almost all of them actually across the board, is using language models or AI solutions that weren’t tailored for healthcare, which has its own unique needs and problems. You gave Google as an example. They have an AI solution that solves their issues for search for understanding websites or news articles, but it’s not necessarily tailored for healthcare.

We built our own. We take a lot of pride in this. We built our own AI stack for language understanding, for clinical language understanding, and for coding that is specific for the healthcare domain. We’re a great coding company, but what we are really good at is capturing clinical narrative. Capturing the true clinical picture of what happened to a patient. Once you understand this, coding is a relatively easy thing to do. Because we built this strong technology and invested a lot of time in doing this, we can expand to other product lines or areas, using this technology to power new products.

Why does Israel produce so many successful entrepreneurs?

The vast majority come from a couple of well-known intelligence units in the army. One is the unit I served in, called 8200. It’s not the army that people envision or what they’ve seen in a movie. You get a lot of responsibility at the age of 18. You can become an officer when you’re 20, commanding soldiers and being tasked with some of the most complex things that could change the course of our history. They encourage you to do whatever it takes. 

There’s a mandatory army service, so people get replaced all the time. You come in, do your three years of service or four or five if you extend it. New ideas are being surfaced all the time. People come in and challenge what people have done before them. You have a huge number of new ideas coming all the time and people are energized to try them. I was lucky enough to serve in a place where I was constantly asked to innovate and was given the backing of my commanders to do it.

What parts of your background have been most relevant to being an entrepreneur? What do you find most challenging?

I was doing cryptoanalysis in the army. When we started the company, we knew that we were going to tackle a challenging problem that some of the largest healthcare key companies have tried and failed to solve for the better part of the last 20 years. We needed some of the best problem solvers in the world to work with us, so a lot of our R&D folks are people who we knew back from the army. My co-founder Adam Rimon and I both served in the cryptoanalysis department, which was a good place to find great problem solvers. That has helped us with the early work of trying to prove that the unique approaches that we took to solve the problem could actually work. We had the right people to do this.

The challenge is that the army doesn’t teach you how to manage a company. The army has a very different management style than what you’ll see anywhere else. I felt pretty relaxed because of the nature of the business that we were doing back there, but it’s still not very similar to what you’ll see in a company. We had to learn a few things the hard way, but we try to fail fast, learn from it, and not repeat the same mistakes again. As long as we have a smart team that can follow the same kind of principle, then it’s OK make mistakes. 

We just run, run quickly. We try to learn as fast as we can. One thing that we want to bring into the company and to the healthcare space is rapid prototyping. See if something works. If it doesn’t, you throw it away. If it does, great, you iterate over it and it creates value almost from Day 1 of the company.

Where do you see the company going in the next few years?

We are building great business in the coding space. The quality of our product and our results speak for themselves. We get our clients just from word of mouth, and our clients are highly referenceable. It sometimes amazes me that we are coding several million charts per year. We have three coders right now on the team who are serving as subject matter experts, but are not doing the coding itself. We are building a great coding company, bringing in work, adding to the client base, and expanding our footprint. We are going to be the top coding company in that area.

While we are doing this, we are also maturing our core technology. Our CLU engine gets better all the time. The more clients that we’re seeing, the more edge cases that we’re seeing, the better it gets and the smarter it gets. This allows us to take this unique core technology that we built and apply it in other areas that we’re still exploring. Coding is interesting because it sits between the clinical side and the revenue cycle side. We have the opportunity to influence the clinical side, to assist physicians both in the documentation side of the house and the revenue cycle process downstream from us.

Morning Headlines 2/21/22

Spok Announces New Strategic Business Plan

Spok reports Q4 results and announces that it will cut its management team by half and its workforce by one-third in the next 60 days as it continues to seek a buyer.

TriNetX Acquires Pharmacovigilance Leader Advera Health Analytics

Real-world data platform network TriNetX acquires Advera Health Analytics, which offers pharmacovigilance software for drug safety concerns.

Sirona Medical Acquires Nines and Key Personnel

Radiology workspace vendor Sirona Medical acquires the AI capabilities and related employees of Nines, which offers an AI diagnostic solution for respiratory diseases and a triage system for intracranial hemorrhage.

Monday Morning Update 2/21/22

Top News

Spok reports Q4 results: revenue down 8%, EPS –$0.86 versus –$2.44.

From the follow-up announcements and earnings call:

• The cloud-based Spok Go, which was introduced in February 2020, will be discontinued and the company will take a $15.7 million impairment charge. Spok says the product’s traction has been limited because of COVID-19, challenges in recruiting and retaining software engineers, and the company’s need to reduce costs and headcount.
• The company will maximize revenue from its legacy product, Spok Care Connect Suite.
• Spok will cut its management team by half and its workforce by one-third in the next 60 days.
• The company will increase its dividend and repurchase $10 million of its shares.
• The company continues to seek a buyer. One interested party is Acacia Research Corporation, whose primary business is buying struggling companies and then filing patent infringement lawsuits to force the purchase of licenses (aka a “patent troll.”) Acacia’s acquisition partner is activist hedge fund Starboard Value, best known in health IT circles for leveraging its tiny position in Cerner into board seats and a “cooperation agreement,” then selling off CERN shares as soon as the price went up as a result.
• Acacia proposed in August 2021 to acquire all outstanding Spok shares for $10.75 in cash. Shares are now at $8.65, valuing the company at $171 million. Spok turned down a $12 per share offer from B. Riley Financial two years ago.
• President and CEO Vincent Kelly says the board’s decisions were influenced by Oracle acquiring Cerner, Stryker acquiring Vocera, and Hillrom (and then Baxter) acquiring Voalte.

Reader Comments

From ViVE Sponsor: “Re: ViVE conference. The attendee list shows 3,000 people, only [low number omitted] of them providers.” Unverified, so I’ve omitted the number. I’ve emailed the conference’s generic email address for press inquiries since that’s the only contact I can find and will update with any response I get. The conference website says it expects 4,000 attendees (it said a year ago that attendance could top 5,500). Readers keep asking me about registration breakouts for ViVE and HIMSS22 that I don’t have, so tell me if you know or if you saw the same list. Meanwhile, the HIMSS22 exhibit hall is looking pretty full with about 800 “real” booths (excluding meeting place, pavilions, interoperability showcase, etc.) and 898 exhibiting companies. I’m hoping that, unlike HIMSS21, it will be worth my time and money to attend.

From TikTokDoc: “Re: videos. Doctors should use them for patient education. Good idea?” TikTok probably isn’t the ideal platform due to its limits on video length, but I can see doctors recording short, generic YouTube videos for patients who have new diagnosis or who need specific information about drugs, procedures, or lifestyle recommendations, then sending those patients a link after their encounter (the videos could be made private on YouTube or not, depending on practice’s goals). I like the idea of recording a quick video recapping the visit and to-do items for the patient’s later review, but malpractice fears probably make that unlikely. I wonder how many telehealth visits are recorded by the patient using screen-capture apps?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Few poll respondents include certification or fellowship credentials on their business cards or email signatures, including two-thirds of the folks who have earned them. LinkedIn is full of credentials that I would have to look up  (or in reality, ignore) – some that I’ve seen recently in profile titles (not just in a list) are CCEP, CHPS, CHC, FACP, CDH-E, CRCR, CVAHP, CHPC, GRCP, CSPO, NEA-BC, PMHNP-BC, LP/NREMT-P, and CSSM. I’ve hired and been hired based on minimum educational level, but I’ve never hired anyone or been hired because of a certification. Actually, that’s not entirely true – Epic certification is required for many health IT jobs and is harder to earn and keep than some of the credentials that are issued by member organizations. I’m curious to hear from readers – what health IT job descriptions have you seen in which a specific certification or fellowship is required? 

New poll to your right or here: What were the negative aspects of your most recent PCP visit within the past 12 months?

Best thing I saw in the internet this week:  “Everyone who confuses correlation with causation eventually ends up dead.”

Last chance – if your company is exhibiting or participating in ViVE, send me your information to be included in my conference guide. Some of the activities I’ll be listing for attendees to consider include sponsorship of the welcome reception, happy hours, live podcasts, presentations and demos, evening receptions, and strategy sessions.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Real-world data platform network TriNetX acquires Advera Health Analytics, which offers pharmacovigilance software for drug safety concerns.

Radiology workspace vendor Sirona Medical acquires the AI capabilities and related employees of Nines, which offers an AI diagnostic solution for respiratory diseases and a triage system for intracranial hemorrhage. Nines will retain its teleradiology business.

The Columbus business paper runs an excellent profile on AndHealth. I interviewed founder and CEO Matt Scantland last week.

Sales

• Emory Healthcare expands its Sectra enterprise imaging system by adding digital pathology.
• Rush University System for Health offers its employees the Transcarent app for finding health information and health coaching  as part of its medical plan.

People

David Pickering, MBA (Indiana University Health) joins St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as VP for clinical applications.

Announcements and Implementations

Cleveland Clinic lists its top 10 medical innovations for 2022, whose only health IT entries are AI-powered sepsis detection and analytics for early diagnosis of hypertension.

Government and Politics

The VA moves two of its 130 instances of VistA to AWS in a pilot project.

Stat reports that health tech vendors are worried about the trend of states enacting consumer privacy laws that, unlike HIPAA, give people control over how their data is collected and managed, which will increase regulatory compliance costs. The possible alternative outcome is developing a national standard for managing patient data. 

Other

The Atlantic looks at “Why America Has So Few Doctors” even as an aging, ever-sicker population now has COVID-19 to deal with few primary care doctors available to see them. Reasons:

• US medical education is the longest and most expensive in the developed world, with programs requiring a minimum of eight years of school (degree plus medical school).
• Those years in college leave graduates hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, encouraging them to pursue whichever specialty pays the most.
• Residency spots and federal funding for them are limited.
• Physicians and physician groups have an economic incentive to claim a physician oversupply to constrain the number of medical school seats.
• Physician groups fight proposals that would allow lower-level clinicians, such as nurses, to do lower-level tasks.
• The medical establishment has made it hard for foreign doctors to practice in the US, especially those from Mexico and Canada whose practice is limited by NAFTA.

Sponsor Updates

• USPTO awards Volpara Health a patent for its method of detecting and quantifying breast arterial calcifications in mammograms.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “WebMD’s Ann Bilyew on Why Scale Matters in a Shifting Market.”

Blog Posts

• 2022 Healthcare Consumer Acquisition Trends to Watch (PatientBond)
• The Importance of Interoperability Rules Compliance for Payers, Providers (Symplr)
• Healthcare: It’s Down to Our Genes (Premier)
• Building Confidence Around Using Helpful Technology (Quil Health)
• Overcoming HCC Challenges in 2022: Provider Burnout, Staffing Challenges, and Coding Gaps (RCxRules)
• 3 things to expect at HIMSS22 (Spok)
• How Accredo Shaved 2 Days Off Its Turnaround Time for Specialty Prescriptions (Surescripts)
• A force to be reckoned with: How Force Therapeutics uses engagement to improve patient care (Talkdesk)
• Do You Have a CAHPS Early Warning System in Place? (Twistle)
• 3 Big Tips for Running a More Organized Front Desk (WebPT)
• 3 Ways Health Plans Can Ensure Risk Adjustment Compliance (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• What Will 2022 Bring for Virtual Care? (VitalTech)
• New CMS 2022 Guidelines: Delivering SAFER Care to Drive Better Outcomes (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 2/18/22

Change Healthcare Falls on Report DOJ to Block UnitedHealth Deal

The Department of Justice will reportedly file a lawsuit to block the proposed $13 billion sale of Change Healthcare to UnitedHealth Group.

ModMed® Acquires Maker of the Klara® Practice & Patient Collaboration Platform

Specialty EHR, PM, and RCM vendor ModMed acquires Klara, which offers a virtual care and collaboration platform, for $200 million.

CompuGroup Medical Acquires Market Leading Laboratory Software Provider AP Easy

CompuGroup Medical acquires anatomic pathology system vendor AP Easy.

News 2/18/22

The Department of Justice will file a lawsuit to block the proposed $13 billion sale of Change Healthcare to UnitedHealth Group, a report says, citing two insiders.

Dealreporter says the sources told it that DOJ cannot identify any divestitures that would ease its anti-competitive concerns.

Change Healthcare reportedly considered selling its payment integrity business to avoid regulatory intervention.

Reader Comments

From Fungible: “Re: HIMSS Accelerate. I can’t figure out how to see the activity there. All I see is promotional posts from HIMSS. Can you ask readers if they are using it?” Same for me. It lists a ton of members, but I don’t see any posts, but then again I’m not following anyone and that might be limiting what I see. Still, even Half Wolf hasn’t posted much of anything. I checked maybe 100 user profiles and I would suspect they were auto-added or something since I didn’t see any that had completed their profile or posted any messages. If you’re using Accelerate, please explain what you’re doing on there. You would think it would be lit up given that HIMSS22 is 25 days away.

From Boris Badenov: “Re: [technology company name omitted]. Has cancelled all meetings and has asked all employees to turn over documents with [EHR vendor] screenshots and other IP by the end of the week. Apparently somehow the company has managed to delete records at an unspecified customer and has caused significant damage.” Unverified, so I’ve omitted both company names. The only way I see this happening is that the tech company was using some kind of scripting and screen-scraping tool that ran amok and deleted data by mimicking user interaction, which the original vendor would not be able to detect or prevent. Cancelling meetings and seizing IP seems odd.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Sponsor reminder: tell me what you’ll be doing at ViVE and HIMSS22 and I’ll include you in my conference guides. You’re spending piles of money to participate in the conference, so you might as well publicize it.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Specialty EHR, PM, and RCM vendor ModMed acquires Klara, which offers a virtual care and collaboration platform, for $200 million. ModMed is the former Modernizing Medicine, which eliminated and conjoined some of its letters in December 2021 in hopes of “capturing the company’s mission and reflecting its modern user experience.” I’m not sure it actually worked.

SimpleHealth, which offers subscription-based birth control prescribing services and products via a $15 annual online consultation and low-cost prescriptions, acquires birth control pill reminder vendor Emme. 

CompuGroup Medical acquires anatomic pathology system vendor AP Easy.

Medication and computer cart manufacturer Capsa Healthcare acquires mobile computer workstation vendor Humanscale Healthcare.

Sales

• Four companies choose Canvas Medical’s EMR and healthcare payments platform for digital health developers: Patina (primary care for adults 65+), Circulo (services for physical and behavioral health), UpLift (mental health), and Vivante (digestive health and wellness).
• Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center will analyze claims data from LexisNexis Risk Solutions to identify the needs of underserved communities and choosing optimal service locations.
• Vanderbilt University Medical Center chooses Biofourmis to support a study in which cancer patients will be monitored at home instead of the usual 7-10 day hospitalization following administration of an oncology drug. The system will continuously collect heart rate, temperature, oxygenation levels, and respiratory rate and will measure blood pressure every 4-6 hours, with the results presented on a notification-powered clinician dashboard.
• Healthcare API vendor Particle Health replaces its homegrown master patient index with Verato Universal MPI.
• NextGen Healthcare chooses Verato Universal MPI to incorporate patient matching into its Health Data Hub to integrate information from disparate EHRs.
• The US Social Security Administration contracts with Cerner to electronically transfer disability claims information the EHRs of its customers.
• Insurer Florida Blue, a subsidiary of GuideWell, automates prior authorization approval via AI-powered clinical reviews that are powered by Olive’s AI platform.

People

Industry long-timer Tomas Gregorio, MBA (University Hospital) joins Wellforce as SVP of IT operations.

Impact Advisors promotes Liam Bouchier to VP.

Streamline Health promotes Ben Stilwell, EMBA to president and CEO of ite EValuator Solutions business, also hiring Amy Sebero (NThrive) as chief growth officer for that unit.

Announcements and Implementations

Black Book names 50 recently funded emerging solutions that are challenging the healthcare technology status quo, evaluated by 4,000 healthcare respondents who scored 377 solutions on 18 KPIs.

The Marion County Health Department (WV) goes live on Epic. The health department first experienced Epic when WVU Medicine set up COVID-19 vaccination clinics in Marion County in early 2021.

The Hartford business paper profiles clinical data transformation platform vendor Diameter Health, which grew headcount by 25% last year and expects to hit 100 employees next year. I interviewed CEO Eric Rosow a couple of weeks ago.

Government and Politics

Politico reports that the VA’s pilot of a technology that speeds up benefits decision-making – cutting the average wait time from 100 days to 21 – is being criticized by labor unions that don’t want the jobs of 60,000 VA Benefits Administration placed at risk.

KHN reports that counties and cities that oppose COVID mitigation measures are forming their own health departments and contracting the work out to for-profit companies.

Other

Blind people who received a “bionic eye” implant from Second Sight Medical Products from 2013 to 2019 to gain a small amount of low-resolution vision see their world go dark as the company abandons the technology and approaches bankruptcy after an exodus of its executives and a sale of its assets at auction. Second Sight’s 350 users had its technology installed at a cost of up to $500,000, many of whom complained about poor results. The company is moving on to brain implants.

Sponsor Updates

• Availity launches Availity Essentials Plus, a low-cost subscription service that gives providers online access to more payers through its HIPAA-compliant Essentials platform.
• Fortified Health Security hires Sarah McNulty as executive assistant.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a case study in analyzing and streamlining EpicCare Ambulatory error queues at PeaceHealth.
• NeuroFlow creates a video describing how it helps health plans reduce the costs of care by giving them better behavioral health insights.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new episode of its Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring CEO Dave Lareau.
• RCx Rules recaps its 2021 success, which includes adding 25 customers and strengthening its HCC coding capabilities by adding Chart Prep Engine.
• Netsmart launches the EveryDayMatters Podcast.
• Meditech announces its HIMSS22 activities.
• Nordic releases a new podcast, “How interoperability and cloud transformations can support healthcare organizations.”

Blog Posts

• Importance of Nurses Recognizing Nurses – Today and Always (Get Well)
• Brush Up on Dental Health IT (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• 3 Ways That Patient Education Improves Safety and Quality of Care (Healthwise)
• An Epic Community Connect Program: M&A without the A (Impact Advisors)
• Continuing the power of One Word (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Important Promoting Interoperability Requirements for 2022 (Medhost)
• Overcoming HCC Challenges in 2022: Provider Burnout, Staffing Challenges, and Coding Gaps (RCx Rules)
• Healthcare in 2022: The fluid way forward (Meditech)
• PTA Reimbursement 2022: A Look at the Final Fee Schedule (MWTherapy)
• What is patient engagement to a Patient Access Center Manager? A CEO’s primer (Nuance)

Black Book Research’s list of the 50 top-rated emerging health IT vendors for 2022 includes the following HIStalk Sponsors:

• Bamboo Health
• Enlace Health
• Healthcare Triangle·
• Redox
• Symplr

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/17/22

I enjoyed this short piece on “Overrated tech: 5 tools execs think hospitals should skip.” Suggestions given by health system executives include proprietary technology, augmented / virtual reality, applications written for on-premises use, and niche technology. Rounding out the list was the undead of business equipment: the fax machine. I’m always amazed when hospital or medical licensing forms want a fax number. No matter how hard we work to get away from them, the little machines soldier on.

If I had to add a couple of overrated technologies to the list, I’d suggest the following: freestanding patient portals that don’t integrate with the EHR, home monitoring devices that don’t have a neat and tidy way of sending data to the responsible physician, and emergency department wait-time displays on billboards and websites. If you have time to compare wait times, then it’s less likely that the emergency department is the right location for your care.

The new calendar year has set my continuing medical education counter back to zero, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for good online presentations that also deliver CME hours. Despite the fact many of us have been working virtually for years now, I still see quite a bit of bad behavior on webinars. You would think that with all our collective experience, people would have gotten better at being professional when on large group webinars. I’ve seen enough annoying habits that I could write a “tips and tricks” document. The highlight reel:

• If you are a host or presenter and know you’re not going to allow verbal audience participation, please set up the webinar so that the audience is in listen-only mode. If you forget to do this, hopefully you know how to mute everyone. There will always be some person driving, making lunch, or taking their phone and the webinar to the restroom.
• For audience members, pay attention to what the presenters say about fielding questions. If they ask you to put your questions in the Q&A area as opposed to in the chat, please do so. As someone who runs a lot of webinars, it’s hard to manage multiple streams, so usually we pick one way to handle things. Our organization’s policies might keep us from locking down the other functionality or hiding it from you, but you’ll get a better response if you do as the presenter asks.
• Also for hosts, the whole idea of “we’re going to start about five minutes late to allow people time to join” is extremely disrespectful to those who were prepared and on time. Although you might think you’re doing us a favor and telling us that so we can multi-task for a few minutes, the reality is that a good chunk of your audience is aggravated by it, while another chunk will delve into email or texting and you won’t get them fully back when it’s actually time. If everyone started on time, maybe latecomers would learn a lesson.

Speaking of pushing deadlines, HIMSS has extended the registration discount for HIMSS22 through February 22, citing organizational budget and travel permission issues. I know a number of organizations that are still under no-travel restrictions. Although COVID cases are easing, hospital staffing is still a struggle. Teams are exhausted and there’s often no hope for replenishing the bench. I think leaders are increasingly aware of the optics of jetting off to Orlando while their teams are still underwater.

HIMSS also notes they are adding programming and speakers, including sessions on aging and loneliness, policy updates, and international perspectives. I’m not sure that the addition of those topics would make me want to go if I hadn’t already booked, so it also feels like a “registrations are low, let’s see how many other people we can drag through the door” type maneuver.

HIMSS also continues to send emails trying to get attendees to sign up for events that require additional fees, such as the Women in Health IT Networking Reception. It costs $55 for a 90-minute event, which despite the advertising, doesn’t seem like enough time to “share stories, recognize and celebrate your peers, and form valuable connections that will last a lifetime.” Maybe I’ll engineer my schedule to eyeball the event during peak entry and exit times, though – I’m sure there will be some outstanding shoes to be seen.

Thinking about these events makes me wish Mr. H would reconsider the idea of throwing an HIStalk kegger in some parking lot. There’s an undeveloped lot across the street from my hotel that would be perfect. That would be a real way to make memories that would last a lifetime, I’m sure.

A lot of my work as a CMIO revolves around using EHRs and related technologies, such as clinical decision support, to reduce variability in patient care. A recent piece looked at how physicians within a single health system often make different treatment choices for identical patient scenarios. Certain physicians were much more likely to use recommended standards of care than their peers, which can be concerning if not following the standards leads to variability that worsens outcomes.

The authors looked at 14 “straightforward” clinical scenarios (as opposed to complex cases) to score physician performance. Some of the scenarios looked at surgical procedures, where the top surgeons opted for non-surgical interventions at greater rates than their low-performing peers. This supports the idea that wasteful spending is often tied to inappropriate care. It will be interesting to see how hospitals respond to this since they make a good amount of money from the questionable surgical procedures compared to the non-surgical interventions.

An intrepid reader sent me this picture from a healthcare facility that should remain nameless. It looks like they’re having an issue with their emergency call system, so they hit the Home Depot and stocked up on stick-on doorbells. The handwritten label is a nice touch. I’m not sure what The Joint Commission or any other accrediting body would think of the solution, but it does have a certain resourcefulness to it.

What kind of entertaining solutions have you seen when your organization just needs to make do? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.