EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/14/21

I’ve been knee-deep in the Consumer Electronics Show the last couple of days. It’s a treasure trove of things you expected to see (smart home accessories, high-tech vacuum cleaners) and some you didn’t (high-tech sex accessories). Still, I’ve seen some cool things, and although some are not 100% healthcare related, they appear to have the potential to deliver solid benefits.

• Abbott predictably showcased its Navica mobile app, which pairs with its BinaxNow COVID-19 antigen testing cards. Its FreeStyle Libre 2 continuous glucose monitoring system may not have received top billing, but could be a game-changer for diabetes patients age 4 and up.
• Ampere offers the Shower Power hydropower Bluetooth shower speaker. It recharges via the water flow and is made of recycled ocean plastic. It’s pricey at $100, but the idea of having your own mini-generator to keep tunes playing is kind of cool.
• Butterfly showed off its handheld ultrasound units that integrate with smartphones for a portable and accessible experience. This would be great for organizations that don’t want to spend the money on traditional ultrasound machines or that need to be able to deploy on the go. I was disappointed to see that some features are only available for IOS devices since Android clearly dominates the world market.
• PenguinSmart offers individualized online speech and language therapy support for pediatric patients. It claims to be the first remote / teletherapy solution to serve developmentally delayed patients who have speech and language needs.
• Samsung offers an AI-powered JetBot 90 robotic vacuum which “identifies messes” and avoids them. Anyone who has ever experienced a pet-related “poopocalypse” with their Roomba knows what a nightmare this can be. Pricing is expected to be upwards of $900, but depending on how bad you’re scarred from past events, it might be worth it.
• Steri-Write is a UV-C sterilization unit that cleans and dispenses ink pens for patients or the public. An article on the device was published in the American Journal of Infection Control in 2020 and the device itself is pretty slick. It’s got a slot on the top for the pen to enter the machine, then it travels on serpentine belts while exposed to UV light. A hands-free dispenser finishes the process. Since our office has the front desk team sanitizing pens with wipes and constantly managing them throughout the office, it would save time and resources.
• Welldoc offers app-driven solutions for management of multiple chronic conditions, including diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, prediabetes, and behavioral health diagnoses. It reportedly can integrate data sets from payers, employers, and providers, but information on the actual solution was light unless you wanted to talk to a rep.

Other offerings include an AI-powered toothbrush (Philips Sonicare) that adjusts intensity based on user-applied pressure and has its own app to track effectiveness. There was also Heatbox: The Self-Heating Lunchbox, but honestly I’d rather have a self-chilling martini shaker that I could stick in the side pocket of my backpack for those particularly challenging days. Med:na from Medipresso is a DNA-driven solution that matches consumers with tea capsules based on their profiles. Not sure about the evidence-based background on that, but I bet someone will buy it. One thing I might consider buying is the Sniffy Personal Dog Trainer App, which is desperately needed by my neighbor since I get to hear her annoying dog barking outside my office window on a daily basis.

Procter & Gamble also featured a smart toothbrush, the Oral B iO. Its companion app provides feedback on brushing and offers tips for improving technique. I always love hearing German engineers discuss things like magnetic drive in the context of a “surprisingly enjoyable brushing experience.” Its AI brushing algorithms were trained with thousands of brushing sessions in the company’s labs.

I wanted to look at wearables and Garmin didn’t really have anything that caught my eye from a running and walking standpoint. Omron showcased its HeartGuide wearable blood pressure monitor that links with its HeartAdvisor app for BP, activity, and sleep monitoring. It also presented its VitalSight remote patient monitoring solution. MySize Inc. won the buzzword bingo challenge with its sensor-based measurement technology that allows for shoppers to have a contactless fit and style experience. They won by using “AI, Big Data, and Machine Learning” in a single sentence.

CES generated about 10x the email I usually receive prior to a HIMSS conference, and it shows no signs of letting up. I flipped through all the promotional emails I received, but if I couldn’t figure out what you were presenting, I didn’t do any further investigation.

The ones that were the easiest to figure out were those with COVID in the pitch. Their offerings were often straightforward, such as thermal scanners and social distancing accessories. Several vendors offered smart masks with various fans, filters, and monitors. Others weren’t COVID related but were clearly identified, such as Nexvoo’s ergonomic office chair with health monitor app. I’ll stick with my Ikea chair (which honestly is the best office chair I’ve ever had) for now.

If I had some advice to offer to the marketing teams that create the email, it would be to at least tell the reader something about the offering. For example, a company I’m already familiar with touted its “AI Powered Platform for Pandemic Response,” but the tagline didn’t really tell me anything, and it was frustrating to try to dig through press releases to see what the new or updated solution really offers. For example, Rise Gardens hit it out of the park with a single sentence describing their modular, WiFi-connected and app-guided indoor hydroponic garden for home use. I knew in less than a second that I wanted to check it out. Font and readability are also important in emails – if your font is unreadably small, everything you have to say is unfortunately a no-go.

Home bathrooms were a hot topic at both Kohler and Toto – touch-free commodes and faucets for the home were featured as a COVID-related solution. Bidet functionality was also prominent, especially with greater awareness of their existence following the Great TP Shortage of 2020. They’re also handy for postpartum and postoperative patients, but a good number of people might not have experienced either of those situations.

I have to admit I was captivated by Kohler’s Stillness Bath, which it describes as “an immersive bathing experience that uses light, water, steam, and aroma to transport you away from the everyday” and to simulate Japanese forest bathing. I’m definitely starting a list of things to purchase if I ever win the lottery.

The CES digital venue continues to remain open through the weekend, so I’ll still be hard at work plugging away through all the emails and the vendors I flagged to visit. Did anyone else attend? What did you think? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 1/14/21

Modernizing Medicine Announces Acquisition of Orthopedic Healthcare Technology Company, Exscribe, Inc.

Modernizing Medicine acquires orthopedics-focused EHR vendor Exscribe.

Developer of Popular Women’s Fertility-Tracking App Settles FTC Allegations that It Misled Consumers About the Disclosure of their Health Data

Period and ovulation tracking app developer Flo Health settles allegations by the FTC that it shared user data with third party marketing and analytics firms without user consent.

Mental health tech firm NeuroFlow raises $20M Series B, led by one of its customers

Mental health monitoring software startup NeuroFlow raises $20 million in a Series B round led by customer Magellan Health.

Readers Write: Healthcare Must Embrace Innovation Beyond the Pandemic

Healthcare Must Embrace Innovation Beyond the Pandemic
By Niko Skievaski

Niko Skievaski, MA is co-founder and president of Redox of Madison, WI.

It’s been said that necessity is the mother of invention. However, I’d say 2020 created a permutation of the adage, especially for healthcare: Necessity is the mother of adoption. The COVID-19 pandemic forced healthcare’s hand to embrace technologies that had been used sparingly, if at all, by many providers. While this sudden burst of adoption was positive, the pandemic showed that years of putting off innovation left many healthcare organizations unprepared to smoothly transition into the use of new technology.

The question is this. Will the innovation adoption momentum continue, or is this newfound appetite for tech solutions a bridge over the troubled water of the pandemic? The optimist and realist in me don’t always agree, but, in this case, they’re on the same page. I believe we’re headed toward not only embracing healthcare innovation, but also establishing a foundation to get ahead of demand. Let’s take a closer look.

How we got here

Few healthcare providers would argue against innovation, but tech implementation has typically been viewed as nice to have, as opposed to need to have. Cost, time, resistance to change, and administrative red tape are just a few of the big reasons a healthcare organization might have avoided adopting a particular technology.

However, some healthcare systems, like Providence St. Joseph, have taken a different approach, and had made huge bets on technology and partnerships in the years leading up to the pandemic. Such organizations have looked for experts outside of healthcare and targeted tech executives from Fortune 500 companies, developed innovative apps and funded startups, and created the necessary infrastructure that positioned them to operate in healthcare’s sudden new reality. Once the pandemic hit, these organizations only had to refine what was already in place, as opposed to scrambling to build from scratch.

Such foresight has proven extremely beneficial for practices transitioning to telehealth, as evidenced in a recent conversation I had with David Elkin, MDiv, PhD, founder and executive director of the Center for Advancement of Youth at University of Mississippi Medical Center. Dr. Elkin pointed out that videoconferencing has also allowed mental health providers to maintain regular visits with patients, which has been especially critical given the immeasurable emotional stress many patients are experiencing during the pandemic, especially those in underserved communities.

Many healthcare providers weren’t as prepared, and they found the pivot to telehealth challenging. That’s why, in March, the Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights loosened telehealth privacy restrictions to allow customer-facing platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, and FaceTime to be used for telehealth visits. Enforcement of potential HIPAA penalties was suspended for healthcare providers using what the announcement called “everyday communications technologies” to serve patients during the pandemic. Additionally, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expanded services to include telehealth.

This opened up the opportunity for many doctors to start offering video visits and telehealth visits, and, during the last week of March 2020, telehealth appointments increased 154% compared to the same period in 2019. The Zooms of the world served as an appropriate, quick fix to an emergency situation, but they aren’t likely to be viable, long-term telehealth solutions.

The pandemic also exposed the outdated nature of many legacy solutions, like EHRs. Many EHR systems struggled to quickly digest and share new data with disparate systems, as healthcare organizations experienced a dramatic increase in daily patient visits. Given the many benefits of interoperability during a pandemic, the burdensome interop approaches of many EHR systems were never clearer.

The lesson: Many healthcare organizations are realizing that staying ahead of the tech curve is a necessity, and they will take the steps required to integrate innovation.

The path moving forward

The sudden adoption of technology served healthcare well during the pandemic, as it addressed an immediate need. However, long-term success requires a new approach for how innovation will make the patient’s role easier and more in line with the expectations of living in a digital world.

Expanding telehealth services should be a top priority, especially for providers with patients in underserved and rural communities. It’s also time to refine the patient and provider digital experience. Using the mental health example from earlier, Dr. Elkin points out that there are aspects of an in-person visit that don’t currently translate via video, such as subtle movements and gestures that can offer deeper insight into a patient’s feelings. Reexamining the areas where telehealth falls a little short can help create a richer experience for the patient and empower providers to provide the most comprehensive care possible.

This doesn’t mean that such decisions are easy or inexpensive. However, organizations must create an environment where the innovators (software developers) can easily build and deploy the tools required to enhance telehealth capabilities. If rolled out in the spirit of the regulation, the 21st Century Cures rules are a big step in this direction.

One area of innovation that healthcare providers should give great consideration to is artificial intelligence. While the initial deployment of AI in the provider workflow didn’t take off, robotic process automation (RPA) is showing promise at an administrative level, as hospitals and physician practices are trying to do more with less.

AI is generating revenue and cost savings by taking on tasks like scheduling, benefit discovery, invoice processing, vendor management, and other duties, to free up staff to concentrate on more patient-facing needs. But AI also has the potential for helping value-based care and cost sharing efforts by identifying what each patient costs an organization, then identifying ways to keep them engaged in their healthcare.

Though many healthcare providers have been slow to adopt innovative solutions, the industry has reached a turning point for change. The motivation to implement cutting-edge solutions has never been higher, and there are more creative minds than ever before, standing at the ready to arm providers with the tools necessary to improve care and reduce costs. This preparation and approach will help healthcare further navigate the pandemic and position the industry to make unprecedented progress once things are back to normal — whatever normal may look like.

HIStalk Interviews Brian Schmitz, CEO, Clinect Healthcare

Brian Schmitz is founder and CEO of Clinect Healthcare of Charlotte, NC.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I have 20 years in healthcare IT and the company is 10 years young. With Clinect Healthcare, practices and health systems can collect, monitor, measure, and act on their patients’ experience throughout the cycle of care, pre-, during, and post-encounter. We provide an integrated mobile-first and fully automated approach for intake, patient-reported outcomes or PROs, and patient experience, as well as provide the tools to gain insight and to act on patient responses in real time.

What kinds of technology solutions have become important during the pandemic?

People ask me, how has COVID impacted your business? I say that it doesn’t matter. How has it impacted our customers’ business and what technology are they asking for that allows us to help them?

As a case in point, one of our intake and PROs customers is expecting to have north of 20,000 new patients during Phase 1B alone. The same customer will see 832 patients today because of the Pfizer vaccine compared to 184 new patients one year ago today. There is a wave of new patients getting ready to descend on practices. We’re talking about the largest scale vaccination attempt in modern history. A positive patient experience for that new patient could translate into a long-term customer, so I recommend measuring their patient satisfaction and giving them a chance to feel important throughout their vaccine journey. Patient acquisition is in play.

But anecdotally, we’re seeing more and more technology interest to measure the efficacy, measure the side effects within the practice, but oversight of those patients is key. Using a PROs type platform where providing the automation, integration, and outreach to follow the journey pre- and post-injection. A learning based on response thresholds is also  important. But the best part is that we have patients’ clinical artifacts — age, chronic conditions, medications, allergies, et cetera — from the EHR. Marrying up those with PROs feedback for analysis is priceless.

Suffice it to say, healthcare systems and practices will need to prepare for high patient volume with COVID and the COVID vaccine. Intake solutions will be convenient with the influx — I get it, we offer it, too — but PROs are critical to drive value-based change and increase revenue. That is true beyond COVID. It is diagnosis- and specialty-agnostic, but that’s the type of technology that we’re beginning to see from a remote patient monitoring perspective within COVID.

How are providers, especially the smaller and less sophisticated practices, managing COVID-required activities such as selecting patients for the vaccine, notifying them, reporting the injection, and following up for their second dose?

There’s a behavior change and heavy lift that’s going on, both within the electronic health record vendors and working with the providers to ensure that we are able to collect new information within the medical record chart and PM system, as well as report those that fit the criteria for that next phase. Working within those confines, and working with the reportability of those systems, is key for the reach-out of bringing those patients back into the practice.

How will the tracking of vaccine side effects work in terms of patient-reported outcomes?

The PROs, the patient-reported outcomes side of it, is driving the need to measure what’s going on. We are finding that there are a lot of unknowns out there as it relates to the efficacy rate of these particular vaccines. Being able to leverage technology to have touch points post-vaccination throughout the first shot — how are you doing, how are you feeling — past the second shot. Identifying side effect information is very important. Healthcare systems and provider practices are just now understanding that this is an important thing to measure, and they’re looking at technology in order to automate that process and to bring information back to them in real time so that they can act on anything or any threshold that is out of bounds.

What is the state of the industry in using patient-reported outcomes to drive follow-up workflow on the back end instead of waiting for them to call with questions or to make another appointment?

Taking a proactive approach and engaging the patient is the key to getting more real-time understanding of what’s happening with the patient. As an industry, we’ve done a decent job of creating point solutions for interacting with your healthcare providers on an administrative level – portals and online scheduling, web payments, and so on. That’s a reactive approach. It’s time for the patient to have the opportunity to have a discussion with their care providers that is a proactive approach into their world. We’ve shaped our platform to do just that. They will engage at the conversation feedback level, where questions can be asked and responses can be acted on, in and out of the examination and the procedure room.

Is the coexistence between EHR vendors and third party solution providers better defined than in years past?

It is. We have great partnerships, from a data integration perspective, with the top PM and EHR companies that are out there, and the working relationship has been great. In fact, with COVID, we’ve formed a strong collaborative with a top EHR vendor and the health system that we worked with to ensure that the integration is in place and the data collection that we are taking is being consumed by the electronic health records in a meaningful way. I think they know where their space is, and they recognize that our solution complements the ability to reach patients both in and out of the office.

COVID has shown how archaic the process is of stacking up patients in waiting rooms or in the checkout line. How well have we used technology to streamline that?

We have advanced it so much over the years because the nature of what we want to learn and collect is changing. Even when looking at COVID, for example, the waiting room has extended into the parking lot and into the cars of the patients. So the timing in which we collect information has shifted. The nature of what needs to be collected has changed.

This has allowed patients to become more comfortable using their devices. We subscribe to mobile-first, and I personally subscribe to the idea that the lowest common denominator of technology is a button click. Being able to provide an easy approach to documenting your health history and your insurance information, your demographics, as well as PRO information that is meaningful, scored and pushed back to the medical record chart has been adopted very well by patients. We’ve seen that over the years and certainly with COVID, it is becoming more and more accepted by patients to fill things out outside of the brick and mortar of a practice.

Is there a software opportunity in the higher abandonment rate of patients who get tired of waiting for their telehealth visit to begin?

There is. When we talk about telehealth, we’re talking about a remote encounter. We need to focus on is making the patient feel as though there’s an extension of that remote encounter. We want to capture information ahead of the visit that will be meaningful for the provider to have. W want to monitor that patient to follow up with the their diagnosis. A solution that can complement a specific telehealth visit allows us to provide more of a holistic approach for the patient, both pre- and post-telehealth visit, for better care overall.

Who will be the driver of tools and processes for that interaction – primary care doctors, hospitals, or insurance companies?

It falls at the provider level. We are seeing a lot of interaction right now with payers that are interested in gaining insight and learning best practices, best techniques that could then be relayed down to their provider base. But there’s a lot of specificity to what PROs provide. With value-based care, it’s going to be very important at the specialty, practice, and health system level to measure their patients to identify the best techniques and best practices that work for us, that we can then also educate the patient on so that they can be more engaged into their care. A healthy patient is a more profitable patient. It gives us an opportunity to measure that at the local level so that they can act, because that is their patient and the relationship is within that patient.

Do you have any final thoughts?

Given the state of technology, as well as the sudden shift where remote and electronic interaction is acceptable and required in some cases, the cycle of care can be even more continuous and less episodic. Sitting in an exam room isn’t the only place where critical feedback can be received any more, but it needs to be simple for patients and easy to access for staff. The use cases with a platform like this are endless.

Morning Headlines 1/13/21

ONC Releases Draft USCDI Version 2 and SVAP Approved Standards for 2020

ONC releases United States Core Data for Interoperability Draft Version 2 for public comment.

Amwell Announces Launch of Proposed Public Offering

Telemedicine vendor Amwell, which raised nearly $750 million in its IPO last September, files paperwork with the SEC for a public offering of 11.3 million shares.

Central Logic Acquires Acuity Link for Intelligent Transport & Announces New Bed Visibility Capability, Advancing Mission to Enable Health Systems to ‘Operate as One’ through Improved Access and Orchestration

Central Logic acquires Acuity Link, a developer of communications and logistics management software for healthcare transportation.

HHS Invests $8 Million to Address Gaps in Rural Telehealth through the Telehealth Broadband Pilot Program

HHS allocates $8 million to the three-year Telehealth Broadband Pilot program, which helps rural providers assess broadband capacity and implement virtual care.

News 1/13/21

Top News

ONC releases United States Core Data for Interoperability Draft Version 2 for public comment.

Reader Comments

From What the HIMSS?”: “Re: HIMSS21. Any idea of how it will look? I hear a hybrid in-person and virtual approach. I’m not sure what that would even look like or if it would be worth my time to attend.” I haven’t heard anything, but I am interested in what readers have heard, especially exhibitors who are usually the first to know. Big conferences seem iffy to me for 2021 given that:

• Our country’s vaccine rollout in a raging pandemic is plodding along, pushing herd immunity  far down the road, and that’s assuming that new virus variants don’t make the situation worse.
• Attendance, presentation, and exhibitor decisions will need to be made fairly soon even as attention and stretched cash are being directed elsewhere because of the pandemic.
• An unknown number of folks won’t be comfortable herding into crammed spaces of unknown ventilation any time soon, regardless of mitigation measures.
• Hospital employees are busy dealing with COVID demands that may or may not end by August.
• It will have been 18 months since HIMSS19 when HIMSS21 rolls around, so the bandwagon effect that has always guaranteed big registration numbers will be diminished.

From Listicle: “Re: Becker’s. Found this on Twitter.” The various Becker’s publications are mostly written by recent college grads (this one from the class of 2020) whose entire job is looking up stuff someone else posted online and paraphrasing it while applying no expertise beyond wordsmithing. Most “news” sites think their readers are too unmotivated to read a story that doesn’t have pictures, so they resort to using irrelevant stock art and photos when everything else is copyrighted by the original source. Adding insult to injury in this case is that the Tweeter declared the swap of the photo of a black doctor with a white one to be racist, failing to notice that the original one isn’t Adekunle Odunsi, MD, PhD either (Google would have saved her some embarrassment). Not to mention that it’s pretty obvious that these are stock photos. Anyway, that’s just how these sites work since news has turned into a zip-bang-pow comic book for people who can’t read more than three consecutive sentences without breaking for a fun video.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I might be the only person who didn’t know that several companies sell USB 3.0 flash drives that are equipped with a Lightning plug that lets you move photos off your IPhone, perform automatic backups, stream video, and exchange files with other devices. It’s probably worth a shot at around $40 for 128 GB, even with some user reports of buggy required software, but still frustrating that you just plug MicroSD cards into Android phones while Apple’s lack support for external memory requires after-market gadgets, cords, and adapters.

Listening: The Fly-Bi-Nites, a long-defunct psychedelic band from Atlanta that made the “Found Love” 45 single in 1967, sold 300 copies, then disbanded when its members went to college. Singer and co-writer Greg Presmanes still records occasionally (country music, though, in an interesting pivot) and is a 72-year-old partner in an Atlanta law firm who must have some great stories to tell his grandkids. I Shazam’ed the song while watching Season 1 of the pretty good “Hap and Leonard” series on Netflix and appreciating its bizarre soundtrack that ranges from the aforementioned psychedelia to hippie-hating, throaty country warblers that were all the rage in the Vietnam-divided 1960s.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “The One Communication Strategy Clinicians Need Now.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenters: Clay Callison, MD, CMIO, University of Tennessee Medical Center; Nicholas E. Perkins, DO, MS, hospitalist and physician informaticist, Prisma Health. Healthcare organizations are leveraging their current investments and reducing their vendor footprint, so there’s no room for clutter in healthcare communication. The presenters will describe the one communication strategy that clinicians and organizations need today, how to improve patient experience and protect revenue, and how to drive the communication efficiency of clinical teams.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Home care coordination software vendor Dina raises $7 million in a Series A funding round. The Chicago-based company has also developed an AI-powered virtual assistant for patients and software to help employers with staff availability tracking and automated COVID-19 screening.

Health data and analytics company Komodo Health secures $44 million in Series D funding and acquires Mavens, a cloud-based technology company that is focused on biotech, rare disease, and specialty pharma markets.

Central Logic acquires Acuity Link, a developer of communications and logistics management software for healthcare transportation.

Sales

• Community Health Network (IN) selects automated appointment scheduling and chatbot software from Loyal.
• Scripps Mercy Partners (CA) will implement Doctible’s patient relationship management technology across its practice network.
• La Rabida Children’s Hospital selects Emerge for clinical data access.

People

Jim Corrigan (ERT) joins ConnectiveRx as president.

SOC Telemed names Ron Egan (GE Healthcare) chief customer officer.

Heidi Kemp, MEd (The SSI Group) joins Medstreaming as VP of marketing and channel partners.

Announcements and Implementations

Dominion Radiology Associates (VA) implements Spok Go care team messaging software.

Nuance announces GA of its Patient Engagement Virtual Assistant Platform.

Prescription patient engagement service vendors Pleio and Medisafe launch GoodStart, in which patients who are starting new prescriptions are supported with live calls and digital nudges from Pleio’s concierge program, then transition to Medisafe’s medication management services.

Athenahealth will include health plan data in its display of patient medical records in a collaboration with insurer Humana.

Healthcare Growth Partners publishes its twice-yearly market review, which is so brilliantly written and admirably concise that any attempt I would make to summarize it would do more harm than good. It’s not a dispassionately nerdy investor view of obscure data points, but rather a big-picture view of our entire industry. I don’t strew editorial superlatives indiscriminately, but I can’t help but fawn over an investor-focused report that grabs me with this brilliant opening paragraph that is as close to poetry as you’ll get in a financially focused report:

The paradox of a raging bull market amidst a raging pandemic is a reality nearly impossible to reconcile. While health IT fundamentals are as  strong as ever, it feels cavalier to begin our market discussion without recognizing the toll of this pandemic. After all, we at HGP and readers of our research choose to be in healthcare because we collectively believe in the industry’s responsibility to serve the greater good. We know our industry is fraught with moral hazard, and while a few seek to exploit, most aim to solve. Fueled by low interest rates and stimulus, the pandemic has bolstered the investment thesis in health informatics, yet we know the gains will never atone for the losses.

Government and Politics

HHS allocates $8 million to the three-year Telehealth Broadband Pilot program, which helps rural providers assess broadband capacity and implement virtual care.

Banner Health pays $200,000 to settle HIPAA Right of Access violations involving five-month delays in giving two patients access to their records.

The owner of an Orlando telemarketing center is convicted of federal charges of healthcare fraud for cold-calling Medicare beneficiaries to offer them “free” cancer genetic tests, bribing telemedicine doctors to order the $6,000 tests without ever talking to the patient, and then selling the resulting orders to laboratories in return for kickbacks. Labs submitted $2.8 million of the claims, Medicare paid $880,000, and the call center owner made $180,000.

COVID-19

The latest COVID-19 statistics for the US as of Monday:

• 129,748 people are hospital inpatients.
• 1,739 people died.
• Deaths are at 376,000.
• States with the highest number of deaths per 100K population in the past week are Arizona, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
• 9 million vaccine first doses have been administered of the 25.5 million doses distributed, leaving two-thirds of available doses sitting in freezers.

US Representatives Bonnie Coleman (D-NJ), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Brad Schneider (D-IL) test positive for COVID-19 after sheltering in place in the Capitol last week along with several Republican colleagues who refused to wear the masks that they were offered. Congresswoman Coleman is a 75-year-old cancer survivor.

New York City’s comptroller says that online COVID-19 vaccine signup is so complicated that appointment slots aren’t being filled. He says that setting up an account involves a multi-step verification process, six more steps are needed to set up an appointment, and the user is required to complete up to 51 data fields and upload an image of their insurance card. A college professor says it took her 4.5 hours to find a location and make an appointment. The city has three sign-up websites, seven community clinics each have their own, four require calling them on the phone, and one involves email.

HHS will ask hospitals to submit weekly numbers on how many of their employees and patients have been vaccinated.

The family of a healthy, 50-year-old Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who died of COVID-19 says he was infected when a patient on whom he was performing a lip injection coughed on him, then called the office days later to let them know she had since tested positive for COVID-19.

Former White House coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas, MD deletes his Twitter after complaining that he lost 12,000 followers in a purge of accounts that were spreading misinformation.

A London-based mathematician-epidemiologist and public health professor illustrates the potential number of deaths from a more transmissible strain such as the B117 variant (yellow line) versus a strain that is 50% more lethal (red) or the original virus strain (gray). Ireland’s case count has jumped six-fold in just a couple of weeks as B117 became the dominant strain (9% of cases on December 27 versus 46% on January 10).

Beaumont Health (MI) CIO Hans Keil says the system tripled its server capacity over the weekend to better handle patient requests for COVID-19 vaccine appointments through its Epic MyChart patient portal. The system crashed Friday morning after nearly 9,000 patients — 10 times the usual number — attempted to access it at the same time.

WHO says that global COVID-19 herd immunity is not likely to be reached this year, making it critical that countries maintain mitigation measures, especially as poorer countries struggle to obtain vaccine whose supply is being bought up by wealthier ones.

Well Health develops a COVID-19 vaccine rapid deployment and implementation program that includes pre-appointment resources.

Other

An analysis in JAMA of medical fundraisers conducted on GoFundMe shows that users sought more than $10 billion and raised $3 billion in charitable contributions over an eight-year period. Treatment for cancer and trauma/injury were the top fundraising categories.

Sponsor Updates

• Santa Rosa Consulting staff donate toys and books to Toys for Tots.
• A local news podcast features Arcadia Chief Medical Officer Rich Parker, MD discussing Community Health Plan of Washington’s rollout of the company’s COVID-19 vaccination education and engagement platform.
• Artifact Health publishes a new case study, “OU Health standardizes physician query workflow and achieves positive results.”
• Vaco and Pivot Point Consulting launch a LinkedIn Live series that showcases female leaders across all industries.
• The Chartis Group unveils Next Intelligence branding.
• Ellkay features Meditech EVP Helen Waters in the latest installment of its Women in Health IT series.
• The National Quality Forum re-appoints Health Catalyst SVP of Professional Services Stephen Grossbart to its Primary Care and Chronic Illness Standing Committee.
• Change Healthcare helps providers comply with the CMS Price Transparency Rule with its Shop Book and Pay and Clearance Estimator Patient Direct solutions.
• Saykara wins a 2021 BIG Innovation Award for its AI-powered voice assistant that automates clinical charting, and the 2021 Sharp Index Award for “Best Health Tech Company to Reduce Burnout.”
• Central Logic adds Intelligent Transport and Bed Visibility capabilities to its healthcare access and orchestration technology.

Blog Posts

• Why It’s So Important to Perform Clinical Validation During EHR Data Conversion (314e)
• Top 10 Tips to Start Your Healthcare ESignature Project Now (Access)
• Prestera Health exposes 3,700+ patients’ info in email breach (AdvancedMD)
• Agfa HealthCare supports leading hospitals in Latin America (Agfa HealthCare)
• Differentiate Yourself: Upgrade Your Virtual Care Platform Strategy (Bluetree)
• The Hidden Benefits of a Legacy Data Management Strategy (CereCore)
• The Compelling Case for ‘Healthcare Access and Orchestration’ and Why It Matters (Central Logic)
• The 4 cybersecurity resolutions every care provider should make in 2021 (Cerner)
• Combating Ransomware: Preparation and Teamwork (Dimensional Insight)
• How HEDIS Analytics is Helping Healthcare Practices (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 1/12/21

Dina raises $7 million for its AI-powered at-home care platform

Dina will use $7 million in Series A funding to further enhance its AI-powered virtual assistant and home care coordination software, as well as its staff screening and check-in technologies.

Moxe Announces Funding to Accelerate Growth

Madison, WI-based payer-to-provider health data exchange vendor Moxe raises an undisclosed amount of funding.

Komodo Health Acquires Mavens, Creating the First Data-Driven Enterprise Platform for Life Sciences

Health data and analytics company Komodo Health acquires Mavens, a cloud-based technology company focused on biotech, rare disease, and specialty pharma markets.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/11/21

My weekend took a decidedly positive turn after I was able to get my second dose of COVID vaccine. The side effects were a little more noticeable compared to the first dose, with a brief temperature elevation and headache. Tylenol and a nap vanquished them both, although I felt a little more tired than usual, but it’s unclear if that was from finally being able to let go of the anxiety of whether I’d be able to get a second dose or not.

It is unreal that frontline physicians who are actively caring for COVID patients would have to worry about getting a vaccine, but that’s the reality in many states across the US. I’m active in several nationwide physician forums and the majority of states are having difficulty vaccinating all frontline healthcare workers, while others are already vaccinating the general population based on age and comorbid conditions. We certainly live in interesting times. Artwork credit: physician Cindy Hsu.

I received the Pfizer vaccine and should reach target immunity two weeks after the second dose. I still don’t get to change any of my habits since the vaccine is only proven to reduce the risk of severe disease and/or death – we don’t have strong data on reduction of transmission at this point, although those studies are ongoing. There’s still the risk of being infected with COVID. I’m just less likely to die, which is a good feeling to have when you’re exposed to 20 or more COVID-positive patients a day.

My area continues to be in a surge that is being fueled by mass defiance of the county’s “safer at home” order, which means I still get to deal with heartbreaking situations at the office as people infect their grandparents and other loved ones when we are so close to getting vaccines for them.

A non-medical friend wasn’t aware of the lack of transmissibility data and asked me how long I planned to continue strict masking. After explaining the limits of the vaccine, I mentioned that I’ll most likely be masking forever. It’s not due to a concern about disease or contagion, but the fact that I’ve lost all ability to control my facial expressions simply due to the volume of ridiculous statements I have to hear on a daily basis. Plenty of patients still believe that the vaccine contains microchips or has the capability to modify human DNA, science be damned. As a physician, the most effective treatment I have right now is education, and although I’m happy to deliver it, I miss the days when I could solve problems with a flip of my electronic prescription pad.

The best side effect of the vaccine was the fact that I received it at a facility where I hadn’t previously been a patient, which exposed me to their version of Epic’s MyChart platform. Compared to the version being used by Big Medical Center where I usually receive care, it was amazing. Clean lines, no clutter, no distracting colors, and a much cleaner view of upcoming and past appointments. The medication list was easier to read without distracting color as well. Knowing that Big Medical Center is typically reluctant to take upgrades or to stay current with general release versions of software, I can only assume my new access is to a later and greater version.

I also haven’t been overwhelmed with announcements and updates from the new platform, so perhaps their communication plan or governance is a little tighter as well. It will be interesting how these contrasts play out now that I have access to both systems. I’m also curious to see how long it will take my previous employer to upgrade to the latest and greatest.

I spent a good chunk of time preparing my plan for the Consumer Electronics Show. I’ve never been in person, but have seen a lot of media reports and the in-person version sounds pretty overwhelming. The online schedule is a full one, but I suspect that like HIMSS, most of the interesting finds are found by checking out the exhibitors, which is a bit of an interesting process for most of the virtual conferences I’ve attended. I’ve been poking around the website and haven’t found anything that looks like a virtual exhibit hall yet, although there are lists of exhibitors and I’ve been getting plenty of emails from them. We’ll have to see if new features go live once the show officially starts tomorrow.

I’ve already identified quite a few digital health, wellness, smart home, and lifestyle vendors that I want to check out. I’m involved in some efforts to promote aging in place for older patients, so I hope there are innovative solutions that won’t cost an arm and a leg but will give patients and families greater peace of mind. Based on the lockdowns of the past year, so many people are afraid of moving to retirement communities or assisted living facilities even when they could benefit from expanded services. Hopefully, organizations have moved to fill that need. Kohler is scheduled to debut some smart home kitchen and bath accessories, but I’ll also be looking for design inspiration to finally complete what is possibly the world’s longest bathroom remodeling project.

Of course, there are also cool things that are not directly related to healthcare, but may provide interesting innovations in a secondary capacity, such as the unveiling of the world’s first autonomous racecar at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There are over 500 university students competing to win a $1.5 million prize in what’s billed as “the world’s first high-speed, head-to-head autonomous race.” The engineering types in my household are particularly excited to hear what that’s all about.

Some of my show sessions start as early as 6:30 a.m. local time, so I’d better get my rest this week if I’m going to keep up. Unlike the typical Las Vegas show, though, I’ll be able to readily access snacks from my own refrigerator and won’t have to wait in an eternally long line for a bad cup of convention hall coffee. I’ve stocked in extra martini supplies so I can pretend like I’m actually at a trade show.

If you’re attending CES, let’s have a virtual cocktail together. You can find me on Twitter: @JayneHIStalkMD

Email Dr. Jayne.

HIStalk Interviews Drex DeFord, Healthcare Strategist, CI Security

Drex DeFord, MSHI, MPA is healthcare strategist for CI Security of Bremerton, WA.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’m a recovering CIO. I have been a healthcare executive for most of the last 30 years and an independent consultant for the past four or five years. I serve as the healthcare strategist for CI Security. CI Security is a group of world-class security professionals who provide managed detection and response and cyber consulting services, with a mission to secure critical systems. We specialize in healthcare, but also cover other critical infrastructure.

What are the takeaways from University of Vermont Health Network’s month-long downtime from a cybersecurity incident?

This is one of those situations where the breach occurred long ago. The bad actor was in the system for a long time before they ultimately wound up revealing themselves. That’s part of the challenge today.

Historically, we have worked hard to build high castle walls to keep the bad guys out. But what we’ve realized, at least in the last few years since ransomware became prevalent, is that all of your frontline employees are now frontline cybersecurity people, too. One wrong click going to the wrong website and you’ve been breached.

You feel like you have to meet this challenge of building a tall castle wall, but the real opportunity is to find those bad guys as soon as they’re behind the castle walls, catch them, and throw them out. That’s a lot of what managed detection and response is about. Whether you’re in a big place or a small place, rethinking the strategy around security is critically important.

Is it true that human hackers aren’t involved until sometime after the technology back door has been discovered or opened via mass Internet probing?

This is another way that cybersecurity and attacks have evolved over time. You can certainly have nation state attacks, but now there’s ransomware as a service. We often find that health systems or other organizations are hit by ransomware as an accident. They are just collateral damage. Somebody was trying to make a quick buck, punched out a bunch of ransomware, and somebody in the health system clicked on it. It wasn’t directed, it wasn’t intentional, and it wasn’t focused on that health system. It’s just one of those things that the organization found themselves wrapped up in. 

As the types of ransom market and attacks evolve, we will see more and more and more of that, where it’s not really aimed at a health system or hospital, but the cybersecurity posture of many health systems leave them vulnerable to these collateral damage attacks.

How can CIOs convey that threat to board members who might see it as theoretically possible but so unlikely that it doesn’t warrant funding and focus?

A lot of this is keeping your board informed and helping them see the negative results on competitors or other organizations. Boards and other executives are very involved in this now, from what I see as I talk to CIOs across the country. Every time there’s a SolarWinds attack or something like that, board members start sending questions about, are we covered? How are we doing? Is everything OK?

You are right that it’s hard to prove a negative. If you’ve been doing a good job in your cybersecurity posture and you haven’t been breached, there’s still plenty of story to tell about the number of taps you’ve forwarded and the number of ransomware emails that don’t get through. A lot of those things are still happening to you, but you’ve been doing a good job of catching them. Those are the stories you should be telling.

Is healthcare more at risk because the many hospitals that are outside of big cities won’t have a lot of local cybersecurity expertise available and might not have the money to develop it?

That’s a real challenge in most places, especially with small and medium-sized health systems. The talent problem is real. It’s tough enough to try to hire the hire the people and get them to move to these areas. But once you get them there and you start teaching them some of these cybersecurity tools, you’re apt to lose them quickly, too. Retaining good talent is tough.

The other challenge I see over and over is that lots of vendors have silver bullet products that they would like to sell to organizations. The organizations get them, install them, and run them, but then quickly start to realize that it’s going to take more than a fractional FTE to actually get value out of that product. After they have accumulated a whole plate full of these products, they realize they have created a situation where they are more exposed. They know about these things, but they can’t do anything about them, or they don’t have the talent to actually run those products.

Being able to bring somebody in and let them do management section of response for you, 24/7/365, is the other big gap that we see. But being able to do it 24/7/365 — and having wraparound professional services that can help you get started through things like security, risk assessments, and penetration tests and all the other things that can be combined into a single package — makes a big difference to small and medium-sized health systems. They just don’t have the people to handle the challenges that face them. It’s not a core business skill that they would normally have.

Have recent incidents raised an awareness that cybersecurity breaches aren’t just an IT annoyance but in fact could put a hospital out of business?

There’s a cybersecurity and risk continuum that ranges from not very mature health systems to mature ones. There’s an understanding, or lack of understanding, that it’s not just about being hacked, It’s about the impact to the business. Short term, you have to get the systems back up and running and help get patients get back in. But long term, there’s the reputational impact. Especially for not-for-profits that have fundraising arms, being able to instill confidence in your donors that you’re a good place to donate money to because you take good care of patients and families and you never let them down. That’s how cybersecurity is tied to everything else, because it really isn’t standalone.

A simpler, relatively modern infrastructure is way easier to secure than one that has been built haphazardly over a number of years. That includes even infrastructure projects, upgrading switches, and upgrading end-user user devices. It doesn’t have to be bleeding edge, but that maturity and understanding makes the difference between mature organizations and relatively immature organizations.

Attacks in the past were usually focused on widely present misconfiguration vulnerabilities in JBoss servers or Windows Remote Desktop, where if an organization was paying even modest attention it could protect itself. Have attack methods broadened, and how do healthcare organizations share information about their experience and actions?

Trying to protect yourself against yesterday’s attack is a good thing to do, but lots of new types of attacks happen every day. It also comes back to doing simple, straightforward things. If you’re a CIO, you need to make sure that your network, server, and application teams have the time to apply patches to reduce your vulnerability. Cybersecurity is connected to everything else, including operations. Healthcare has gotten a lot better at sharing information through organizations such as CHIME.

H-ISAC – the global, non-profit Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center that crowdsources cybersecurity — has become a critical component in the sharing of cybersecurity information. You do preparatory work, such as doing tabletop and full-blown exercises where you connect to the organizations that you may need help from. You want to have your connections – such as state police, the FBI, or other healthcare organizations in your area – in place and on speed dial so that you are ready to connect. That’s not something you want to figure out after you’ve been breached. More connections and more collaboration puts you in a better position from a cybersecurity perspective.

ISACs exist for different industries and healthcare has a great team there who are always looking and working closely with the FBI, HHS, ONC, and others. They log, catalog, make recommendations, and share information about the kinds of breaches that are occurring.

It’s another reason too think about managed detection and response, because if you’re a standalone medium-sized hospital, you’re working off only the connections that you’ve been able to make as a small shop without a lot of time. A professional service organization like ours has lots of connections, not only in healthcare, but in other industries. This is what we do every day, so we are more likely to be looking for problems or openings for the bad guys that you may not have even heard about yet

What are the security risks involved with vendors and providers making initial moves to the cloud?

A cybersecurity professional company can help you navigate these waters. We have seen health systems, time after time, assume that software as a service means that if I don’t run this on my premises, and instead have it run by a company who does it for a lot of other people, I should be more secure. Generally speaking, that’s probably true, as long as you’re doing all your due diligence with that third party to make sure that they’re doing all the things that they should do to be secure.

When it comes to the cloud, the true cloud, this is another one of those situations where there are opportunities to make mistakes. You’re probably going to be more secure than you are. If you try to do it yourself — especially if you’re a small or medium-sized health system — engage a professional to look at the vulnerabilities and make sure you’re covered for what you’re trying to do.

Do you have any final thoughts?

CI Security is happy that 2021 has arrived and 2020 is in the rearview mirror. Cybersecurity is in front of boards and healthcare leaders.We look forward to supporting the need for critical healthcare infrastructure with easy to understand, easy to consume cybersecurity services and managed detection and response that is packaged up to be delivered in a better, faster, cheaper way.

Morning Headlines 1/11/21

After SPAC merger, Clover Health president eyes membership growth this year

Shares in Medicare Advantage insurer Clover Health began trading Friday on the Nasdaq after it went public in a reverse merger with an SPAC.

CareDx Agrees to Acquire TransChart and Expands EMR Connectivity to Over 90 Centers

Transplant testing, lab, and software vendor CareDx acquires TransChart, which sells a transplant center EHR.

Carrum Health Raises $40 Million to Transform Healthcare Delivery and Lower Costs through First-of-Its-Kind Digital Marketplace

Carrum Health, whose marketplace connects employees of self-insured companies with company-screened, bundled-price surgery providers, raises $40 million in a Series A funding round.

Monday Morning Update 1/11/21

Top News

Shares in Medicare Advantage insurer Clover Health began trading Friday on the Nasdaq. The company, which went public in a reverse merger with a SPAC, is valued at $7 billion despite a low Medicare star rating, availability in just some counties of eight states, and 50,000 members.

Clover Health offers doctors the free, web-based Clover Assistant, which provides access to patient data, personalized care plans, and faster payment.

Clover Health’s leadership team with health IT connections includes CEO Vivek Garipalli (co-founder of Ensemble Health and founding investor of Flatiron Health); Chief Clinical Informatics Officer Sophia Chang, MD, MPH (CareMore Health Plan and VP/medical director at Accretive Health); and Calvin Chock (McKesson).

Reader Comments

From Plymouth Meeting:: “Re: hospital IT meetings. What would you do to improve them?” Ideas:

• Identify the one person who is in charge. They don’t have to actually run the meeting, but they need to state why the meeting is being held, explain why each attendee was invited, and make assignments. It’s common for a hospital meeting to start with, “Whose meeting is this?” and nobody can answer.
• Start and end on time. Do not wait for stragglers, which is almost everyone in hospitals, because that will encourage them and make the meeting seem less urgently important.
• Send out an agenda days in advance with assignments. If nobody can find the time to do that, then cancel the meeting.
• Implement a “no looking at electronic devices” policy.
• Assign someone to keep the meeting moving and to take notes. I used to scoff at needing to record minutes until I attended my first meetings where they were scrupulously maintained and distributed by someone, and it was eye-opening. And someone needs to muzzle the attendees who can’t shut up (which is often a reflection of job title) and engage those who have tuned out because nobody’s listening to them or they are intimidated by higher-ranking or more verbally aggressive co-workers. A junior person who has little knowledge of the meeting’s topic is ideal for recording minutes – they have no skin in the game, they will follow up, and their lack of the understanding of the specific issue forces them to ask basic questions that nobody else noticed weren’t answered.
• Don’t invite more than 5-10 people to a meeting where a decision will be made. Otherwise, the only decision that results will be to have more meetings.
• When making a decision, do a voice vote and record each person’s choice to make sure they aren’t just coasting on in-room dynamics and that they understand that their consideration of the issues has consequences.
• Don’t allow guests or uninvited add-ons. Hospitals are supportive democracies where most folks would never ask, “Why are you here, again?” and some people just love conference room gamesmanship.
• Groups larger than a handful of people will never be able to reach consensus among all the position-jockeying. Get the ideas on the table in one or more larger meetings, but don’t give those big groups voting power beyond making recommendations to the smaller group. Big groups should be for brainstorming only.
• Don’t make IT decisions without getting input from the users who will be most affected. Many IT attendees have quirky personality types, the inability see any nuance that isn’t black and white, and overreliance on either “I’ve been here a long time and that didn’t work when we tried it before” or “I’ve not been here long and I wish you would all stop living in the past and think boldly.” Make those users part of the brainstorming meeting, not the decision-making meeting, because they are seeing just a small part of the elephant at hand but will feel passionately that they are right.
• Make sure standing meetings are really necessary. Those often waste the most time in hospitals because the only expectation of attendees is to show up and share their feelings, which hospital people do readily.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

My once-yearly and newly shortened reader survey takes seconds to complete and will earn you my gratitude and possibly a randomly drawn $50 Amazon gift card. I don’t know who’s reading otherwise since I don’t require registration or hide articles behind a paywall. Thanks.

Less than one-fourth of poll respondents say their health is worse now than a year ago.

New poll to your right or here: Is more than 10% of your net worth invested in health IT-related company shares or equity? I make it a point to not hold any such ownership since I don’t think it would be right as someone who reports news and rumors, but I suspect it’s common and entirely reasonable for employees of publicly traded companies to hold shares in their retirement or incentive plans.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Sphere. The Nashville-based financial technology and software company’s cloud-based platform is used by the country’s largest health systems to reduce friction and facilitate better, more secure patient payments in a single platform. Its integrated payments offering supports the native workflows of leading EHRs such as Epic, while its Health IPass solution enhances provider revenue collection and a streamlined consumer experience from appointment to final payment. It includes security and fraud tools, API integration, robust reporting and reconciliation, support for billing plans and tokenization, and support for all payment types and flexible spending accounts. Thanks to Sphere for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “The One Communication Strategy Clinicians Need Now.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenters: Clay Callison, MD, CMIO, University of Tennessee Medical Center; Nicholas E. Perkins, DO, MS, hospitalist and physician informaticist, Prisma Health. Healthcare organizations are leveraging their current investments and reducing their vendor footprint, so there’s no room for clutter in healthcare communication. The presenters will describe the one communication strategy that clinicians and organizations need today, how to improve patient experience and protect revenue, and how to drive the communication efficiency of clinical teams.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Transplant testing, lab, and software vendor CareDx acquires TransChart, which sells a transplant center EHR.

Carrum Health, whose marketplace connects employees of self-insured companies with company-screened, bundled-price surgery providers, raises $40 million in a Series A funding round. The company supports orthopedic, spine, cardiac, and bariatric procedures.

Hinge Health, which offers employers and insurers sensors, apps, and coaching to prevent and treat chronic back and muscle pain, raises $300 million in a Series D funding round, valuing the company at $3 billion. The company plans to launch an IPO in 2022.

Announcements and Implementations

KLAS takes a look at the hospital EHR market in Canada, which in many cases involves group- or province-led collective decisions that are intended to keep costs down. Meditech leads Epic in hospital count, but has lost some market share as 88 big-system hospitals have replaced Meditech with mostly Epic from 2015 to 2019, while 31 legacy Meditech hospitals have upgraded to Expanse. Customers report satisfaction with Expanse, but say they could have used more guidance and best practices before going live and a better idea of the maintenance requirements afterward. Satisfaction with Cerner is stable, but customers say the Citrix-heavy client-server footprint requires a lot of maintenance, although experience with Cerner’s recently introduced remote-hosted option is good. Allscripts hasn’t had a new Sunrise sale in Canada in the past 10 years, Harris Healthcare is rarely considered in new deals, and Telus Health’s Oacis is rarely considered and hasn’t sold since 2015.

Government and Politics

The American Hospital Association lost its lawsuit challenging the federal government’s hospital price transparency rule last week, so it now asks HHS to not enforce it, saying that hospital IT employees are too busy with COVID-19 work.

COVID-19

Saturday’s COVID-19 stats: 3,500 deaths and 130,777 patients in hospitals. Last week was the highest number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths of any week in the pandemic.

CDC vaccination updates: 6.7 million first doses administered of 22 million doses distributed. At a goal of vaccinating 70% of Americans to reach herd immunity, we are less than 10% finished with first doses alone. Nursing homes have administered only 17% of the 4 million doses they have received.

Denmark’s CDC warns that the B117 variant is so contagious that it will become the dominant virus in the country and likely the world by mid-February. Even Tier 4 restrictions – stay-at-home requirements, closed shops, no public gatherings, no overnight travel – will not stop its spread, they say, as UK districts under Tier 4 stay-at-home orders are seeing a 10-fold increase in B117 cases every three weeks. US FDA says existing TaqPath and Linea tests can specifically identify the B117 variant and retesting previous positive samples to see whether B117 was involved does not require its approval.

The UK approves use of two rheumatoid arthritis drugs – tocilizubam and sarilumab – for treating COVID-19 patients in the ICU, where they appear to reduce the risk of death by 24% if given within 24 hours of admission.

California’s slow COVID-19 vaccine rollout is being partially blamed on problems with PrepMod, the state’s vaccine management system that coordinates waitlists, tracks inventory, and sends proof of vaccination to patients. The system, which is used by several states, appears to have been developed by the non-profit Maryland Partnership for Prevention. California’s COVID-19 testing program was hampered last year by problems with the CalREDIE results data collection system. The state says it knew that both systems weren’t ideal for their current use and is designing replacements.

A large study of discharged COVID-19 hospital patients in Wuhan, China finds that three-fourths still have symptoms six months later, including fatigue, insomnia, depression, anxiety, and lung problems. Excluded from the study were the sickest people, such as those who could not be interviewed or who were readmitted in the six-month period.

Experts question whether health systems and states that use online systems and other technology for COVID-19 vaccine administration are limiting access to elderly, low-income, and rural populations.

The city of Nangong, China will pay $75 to anyone who reports a resident who has not received a mandatory COVID-19 test. Areas with outbreaks of a few dozen cases are being locked down, every resident is being tested, highways have been blocked, and some cities allow only one member of a household to leave their homes every days to buy supplies.

Sponsor Updates

• OpenText donates $15,000 to the Manna Food Center in Gaithersburg, MD.
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces integration of its Health Language clinical interface terminology solutions with Henry Schein MicroMD’s EHR platform.
• Rush University Medical Center expands its deployment of Nuance Dragon Ambient Experience to 14 clinical specialties.
• OptimizeRx will present at the HC Wainwright Virtual BioConnect Conference on January 11.
• Nordic releases a new podcast, “Creating and leveraging a successful Super User program.”
• Pure Storage will participate in fireside chats during the Needham Virtual Growth Conference on January 11, and the Goldman Sachs Virtual Tech and Internet Conference on January 12.
• The local news features a story on how one family stayed connected to their hospitalized infant through Vocera’s Ease app.
• Saykara President and Chief Medical Officer Graham Hughes, MBBS publishes a guest article titled “Physician Groups Turning to AI for Relief from EHR Documentation Burden” in AI TechPark.

Blog Posts

• Worried Sick: 5 Major Risks with Telehealth Data Security and How to Mitigate Them (Spirion)
• Physician groups turning to AI for relief from EHR documentation burden (Saykara)
• Digital Front Door, Ambient Technology, AI, and the Revenue Cycle (Nuance)
• Cybersecurity in Conversation: Experts Answer Must-Know Questions (Netsmart)
• If You Choose Not to Decide, You Still Have Made a Choice (Nordic)
• Support COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts with Provider Data Platform (Phynd Technologies)
• Miscommunication in Patient Hand-Offs and Its Impact on Patient Care (PMD)
• How Two Health Systems are Carrying COVID-19 Innovations into the New Year (Premier)
• How to Design Products for EHR Integration Using Clinical Workflows (Redox)
• Improve Medication Ordering Workflows with Better Patient Data (RxRevu)
• Acute Telemedicine in 2020: A Wrap Up (SOC Telemed)
• Data Privacy and Security Trends in 2020 (Spirion)
• 8 lessons from the pandemic to guide us in 2021 (Spok)
• FHIR Power: Picture-Perfect for Patient Engagement (Krames)
• Scrambling to Complete High-Volume, Repetitive Data Entry Tasks Before Year End? (Summit Healthcare)
• Lessons Learned About Information Sharing During a Pandemic (Surescripts)
• The Complete Guide to Implementing a Physical Therapy Software (WebPT)

Contacts

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

Katie the Intern 1/8/21

Happy second week of 2021, HIStalk! It has proven to be interesting, in the least. I hope 2021 is treating you well so far. This column is a bit shorter than usual, so enjoy an easy read! 

This time around, I wanted to expand further on the conversation I had last week with TransformativeMed’s chief clinical officer, Rodrigo Martinez, MD. We talked about the concept of AI assistants, “spot solutions” in a clinical setting that aid in the treatment plan of patients. The idea for AI-powered assistants came first from a basic question — how can we help reduce some of the frustration that exists as part of the transcription process of being a physician? 

“The first phase for a lot of these [AI assistants] is that they are listening to the conversation between a physician and a patient,” Dr. Martinez said. “The ultimate intent of it is to transcribe that conversation, but also insert the different elements of text into the appropriate spot in the medical record.” 

That isn’t exactly easy to implement, though, as a large part of this AI software is reliant on machine learning. Say a patient and provider are both speaking in a room, and the AI assistant is listening through a microphone. In the initial phases of using this software, another person would have to be present to transcribe what is happening so that the machine can learn how to do so by itself. 

“It has to start to parse out, OK, when is the doctor speaking? When is the patient speaking?” Dr. Martinez said. “The machine learning over time starts to match and map and learn using natural language processing and converting a lot of those concepts. Rather, the algorithm starts to recognize it.” 

But the transcription doesn’t stop there. The AI assistant has to then learn how to place all of this information into a medical record correctly, learning where to place orders for future visits versus when the patient and doctor are talking about past symptoms. The software must take this information in in real time before converting it into orders. 

The concept of teaching AI to listen to a conversation and decipher it is not new. AI listening and problem solving software has been researched as early as the 1960s with Newell and Simon’s General Problem Solver. For healthcare IT, the application of AI-powered scribes has come leaps and bounds. 

A leading AI offering for this application is from Saykara, known as Kara the virtual assistant. Kara was developed to help eliminate charting and billing records after hours for OrthoIndy. Saykara works by pulling patient lists to capture, interpret, and transform data from conversation and summarization to then put it into the EHR. These types of services show a reduction in provider stress levels and eliminates after-hours charting. 

I asked Dr. Martinez if AI-powered assistants have helped relieve some of COVID-19’s burden. He said the potential to reduce contact with patients and provide hands-free care is promising. When it comes to telehealth and virtual appointments, AI assistants and scribes could grow to be the future of healthcare. 

“As more and more visits are moving to telehealth, there is a role for that AI-powered scribe to be recording that information and applying it,” Dr. Martinez sad. “I could see how the more and more you make things hands free, and make it easier to anticipate the next step that the nurse or physician needs to take, the better off folks are going to be.” 

The AI-listening concept may be off to a slow start, Dr. Martinez said, but the potential for outpatient treatment is more promising than in-person. In-person treatment usually has too many voices and people in a room for scribes to accurately transcribe. Ultimately, the future of these AI assistants lies in the hands of further development and machine learning.

Dr. Martinez said that the future of AI in medicine is promising, and that AI can be applied to a multitude of areas in healthcare IT and telemedicine. AI has the potential to make transcription and hands on care easier and safer, taking a weight off of healthcare providers in general.

“I think the concept of that is very fascinating and very interesting,” Dr. Martinez said. “I think there are a lot of potential applications to decreasing the administrative burden that is part of healthcare in the US.”

That’s it for this column! I hope you’re enjoying 2021 to the best of your ability, and stay safe out there! 

Katie The Intern

Email me or connect with me on Twitter.

Weekender 1/8/21

Weekly News Recap

• Optum announces its intention to acquire Change Healthcare.
• Harris acquires Obix.
• TigerConnect acquires Critical Alert.
• Intraprise Health acquires HIPAA One.
• Cedar Gate acquires Enli.
• Haven announces its shutdown.
• ONC publishes Cures Act developer resources.
• Hospitals begin publishing their negotiated rates and prices for shoppable services.

Best Reader Comments

This was the best hope for CHNG who hadn’t realized their IPO dreams, Optum was the only one that could afford them. For employees, the CHNG strike price for stock options was $18, so maybe some of the employees whose McK deferred bonus programs were transferred to CHNG stock options at the merger will be able to finally cash out 4 years later! (CHNG maker)

What users are GREAT at, is telling you that you did it wrong. Long after the job was done, and after the project stage that would allow you make it right. Mostly, the programmers are left to imagine the solution on their own. Some organizations employ systems architects, designers, and even plain managers who will do mock-ups, role-playing, workflow analysis. Not once have I ever had the opportunity with those people. They cost money and take a great deal of organizational willpower and discipline. Steve Jobs was famous for envisioning a finished system. He’d then follow the implementation to make sure the design & implementation followed the plan. He’d keep after managers and programmers, keep them on track. He’d even kill products that didn’t live up to his expectations. Steve Jobs was famous for being an exception, an outlier. In the real world, most systems go through a laborious process, slowly evolving from something terrible into something better. (Brian Too)

Community-based Pediatricians are also in vital patient-facing roles. I’ve heard too many reports of hospital billing staff and work-at-home admins getting their vaccines while non-hospital-employed primary care physicians are left to fend for themselves. (Chip Hart)

Online advertising is a massive industry, and healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies participate the same as anyone else. Websites and internet service providers can very easily identify who you are. They know your name, age, sex/gender, and where you live by the time the page finishes loading. They know what other websites you go to. They know what medical conditions you look for on search engines. They are all legally allowed to freely sell, exchange, and reconnect this data however they want. Your healthcare provider doesn’t need to sell identified data when your online presence is basically screaming out your name, everything post you’ve liked, the web pages you’ve visited, etc. (Elizabeth H. H. Holmes)

Despite all the talk about upcoming consumerism in health care, the reason for such dismal patient experience is precisely this. Patients don’t control the purse string (even though it is their forking money). All they can do is fill up a toothless HCAHPS paper survey three months after their encounter with the health system. And this is of course true not only for hospitals but for every single aspect of our medical care “system.” (Ghost_Of_Andromeda)

Healthcare organizations need to change how they proactively reach out and engage customers as we enter 2021. We all understand the value of precision medicine, but we now need precision engagement. Other consumer service industries have long employed sophisticated data science to predict and influence customer behavior. It has resulted in (1) more loyal customer relationships and (2) increased lifetime value. In healthcare, we are still relying on generic notifications. We need to be identifying our highest risk customers, prioritizing what we talk to them about, and then personalizing the channel selection, the message selection, and the time of communication. (Michael Linnert)

The same people who rant about freedom and tyranny would do well to read about the smallpox epidemic that began in 1775. We have direct insight into how the Founders acted during a disease outbreak, and I can assure you they did not act in the interest of individual freedom, because they were intelligent and principled enough to understand responsible population health management even then. The United States doesn’t have a COVID crisis as much as we have a selfishness crisis. (Elizabeth H. H. Holmes)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the teacher grant request of Ms. B in South Carolina, who requested 12 books for her kindergarten class. She showed her class the books on a day in March and stayed late to create a book bin, but in-person learning was cancelled that same day. She contacted the publishers and authors to seek permission to record herself reading the books for her class, sometimes getting approval and sometimes getting a firm “no” or no response. She filmed herself reading those books where she received approval and reports, “My students LOVED seeing me reading books that they had chosen. I even had a parent contact me to let me know that her son couldn’t believe he was seeing me on TV and shared a short clip she filmed of him watching me read. I was excited to see how excited he was. Parents started engaging more and looking forward to these read aloud followed by book discussions on Zoom. Many parents were surprised to learn how deeply their student could dive into a book and understand not just overall themes, but also underlying themes. These books have given my students and their families so much more than I could have ever imagined. Thank you for believing in the power of print and giving me the opportunity to make such a huge impact.”

In China, an ophthalmologist whose surgical career was ended a year ago by a patient’s knife attack gets a standing ovation from a TV audience after telling them that his injury was a “pleasant surprise” because it reinforced that his work is worth doing. He specializes in treating uveitis, working in a low-paying hospital job and often helping patients pay their medical bills from his own pocket and performing free cataract surgery. He joked that the patient was unreasonable because “there were so many people in the hospital at that time, yet you stabbed me with precision – doesn’t it show your vision has recovered well?”

In Australia, charity gift shop workers who called an ambulance and comforted a homeless man who showed up in distress and later died alone hold a funeral for him in a local cathedral. The presiding bishop said during the service, “He went with full honors. I asked those present to imagine their own funeral one day and what they would like people to say about them, and how that really affects how we live now. We choose to do what is good and loving and virtuous, rather than the opposite.”

A Pine Bluff, AR medical oncologist and UAMS professor who sold his clinic to the local hospital sends Christmas cards to 200 former patients to tell them that he and his family had decided in a Thanksgiving discussion to forgive their outstanding medical bills. Omar Atiq, MD explains that he wrote off $650,000 because, “I have never refused to see a patient for lack of funds or lack of insurance. To me, the highest honor comes when somebody puts his or her life in your hands. To be a physician or a nurse is, to me, something bigger than a transaction. But in the vast majority of the world, it is tough to be sick and it can be exorbitantly expensive to get the appropriate treatment … That people are interested in this story shows me that perhaps the less positive news we hear each day may just be a small part of who we are as humanity. Perhaps the larger part of humanity is just doing what they can to keep the world moving forward.”

In Case You Missed It

• News 1/8/21
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/7/21
• Readers Write: AI and ML – Help Change the Course of the Pandemic and Make Money
• HIStalk Interviews Diana Nole, EVP/GM, Nuance Healthcare
• News 1/6/21
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/4/21
• Monday Morning Update 1/4/21
• Katie the Intern 1/1/21

Get Involved

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

Morning Headlines 1/8/21

Harris builds its perinatal portfolio with the acquisition of Clinical Computer Systems, Inc.

Harris acquires Clinical Computer Systems, Inc., which offers Obix perinatal software.

Advanced ICU Care Announces Corporate Rebrand as Hicuity Health™

Tele-ICU services vendor Advanced ICU Care renames itself Hicuity Health.

Simplify ASC Acquires PhyBus Revenue Services

Ambulatory surgery center health IT company Simplify ASC acquires PhyBus Revenue Services for an undisclosed sum.

Rennova Completes Agreement to Separate its Software and Genetic Diagnostics Interpretation Divisions Into Innovaqor, Inc.

Hospital and practice operator Rennova Health sells its Health Technology Solutions and Advanced Molecular Services Group divisions to Innovaqor.

Computer Network Incident Update

Greater Baltimore Medical Center begins restoring its EHR after a December 6 ransomware attack forced it to take several systems offline.

News 1/8/21

Top News

UnitedHealth Group-owned Optum will acquire Change Healthcare in a deal valued at $13 billion.

Optum will combine Change Healthcare with its OptumInsight software and analytics business.

Change Healthcare President and CEO Neil de Crescenzo will become CEO of OptumInsight when the acquisition closes in the second half of the year.

Reader Comments

From Mandrake: “Re: Obix being acquired by Harris. What does this mean to the health system? Any key executives departing What was the cost of the sale? Who is the buyer since I’ve never heard of them?” Harris Healthcare Group is part of a Canada-based company that has done a lot of health IT acquisitions. I’ve included a partial list is further down the page. I’ll invite readers to provide answers to any of these questions, especially with regard to how customers fared after Harris acquired their vendor. KLAS data would be interesting.

From Barry Gibberish: “Re: health system IT strategy meetings. You’ve written about the psychology involved. Repeat, please.” I don’t recall what I wrote and I’m too lazy to look it up, so here’s my off-the-cuff list of what hospital meetings are like:

• Any hospital meeting will be full of people who are empowered to say “no” but nobody whose authority allows them to say “yes.”
• Ever-larger meeting rooms are needed because people keep inviting themselves or others to validate their importance.
• It’s almost guaranteed that none of the attendees have given the slightest thought to the issues at hand since the previous meeting, and any assignments they were given will be quickly thrown together while others are talking.
• Clinicians will either be uninvited or marginalized because they are seen by the suits as being untethered from reality and dangerously unfiltered.
• Nobody will argue for changing the status quo unless they see personal or departmental benefit. They are the people who thrive in the current state they built.
• Some people can always be counted on to say why any given action shouldn’t be taken, but they never have ideas of their own because that would be bold. This is the dynamic in which every mid-level attendee takes a position to set themselves apart from everybody else in asserting their contrarian thinking (you don’t get points for agreeing). I guarantee that some of those folks enter the room planning to take the “let’s do it” position, but finding it already taken, flip-flip equally passionately to “this is a terrible idea.”
• Hospitals are awkward, department-driven democracies where nobody except the million-dollar leadership club can be identified as inarguably in charge, so many meetings are free of agendas, objectives, facilitators, assignments, and conclusions. It’s fun talking about stuff, but the seriousness of actually making a decision and attaching names to it means it often doesn’t get done.
• Committees that spend great amounts of energy and research to reach a decision will often be overridden by an executive afterward who believes their superior analytical powers and gut instinct takes precedence.

From Be the Ball: “Re: price transparency. Some providers are live with consumer-friendly searches. Examples of our Change Healthcare customers are Rush Health Systems, Levi Hospital, and South Central Regional Medical Center.”

From Wooster: “Re: J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference next week. Usually there’s an entire subculture of meetings around the conference venue. What are everyone’s plans?” Readers are welcome to weigh in on how, if at all, they will participate in a virtual version of a conference whose biggest draw is what happens near but not actually in the actual conference venue.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I could really use your help in completing my one-yearly, eight-question reader survey that takes maybe 30 seconds. You’ll earn my appreciation, feel good about voting, and be eligible to win a $50 Amazon gift card. Thanks for helping me out.

Reminder: we have dedicated news history pages for Cerner and Meditech, as requested by readers and maintained by Jenn. If you read HIStalk in desktop mode (not the mobile format), links are under the Company News History menu item. Let me know if you find those useful.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “The One Communication Strategy Clinicians Need Now.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenters: Clay Callison, MD, CMIO, University of Tennessee Medical Center; Nicholas E. Perkins, DO, MS, hospitalist and physician informaticist, Prisma Health. Healthcare organizations are leveraging their current investments and reducing their vendor footprint, so there’s no room for clutter in healthcare communication. The presenters will describe the one communication strategy that clinicians and organizations need today, how to improve patient experience and protect revenue, and how to drive the communication efficiency of clinical teams.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Harris acquires Clinical Computer Systems, Inc., which offers Obix perinatal software. Other health IT brands owned by the acquisition-focused Harris – formally known as N. Harris Computer Corporation as an operating group of Canada-based Constellation Software – include Amazing Charts, Iatric Systems, IMDSoft, Just Associates, GEMMS, Picis, PulseCheck, and QuadraMed. The company looks for acquisitions that have a diversified customer base, offer mission-critical enterprise software, low customer attrition, leading or increasing market share, fragmented competition, and the potential to grow geographically or via product expansion.

Healthcare communication platform vendor TigerConnect acquires Critical Alert, which offers middleware for nurse call, alarm and event management, and medical device interoperability.

Cybersecurity services vendor Intraprise Health acquires HIPAA One, which offers HIPAA compliance automation software.

GE concludes that it has no legal recourse to try to reclaim the compensation it gave to former CEO Jeff Immelt, who disastrous operational and acquisition decisions left the company drowning in debt, selling off pieces and parts, and removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. GE says that independent counsel has advised that Immelt wasn’t guilty of misconduct, just incompetence (I’m reading between the lines here, and it should be noted that the board left him in charge for 16 years). Immelt, who was promoted from what was then GE Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare), was forced out in 2017, then spent a few months as executive chairman of Athenahealth in brokering a deal to sell the company to a private equity firm.

People

Halo Health hires Steve Smerz (NovuHealth) as CTO.

Carl Swart, MHA (Ensemble Health Partners) joins ApprioHealth as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Urgent care operator CityMD launches a virtual line solution using technology from urgent care software vendor Experity, hoping to eliminate hours-long lines of people waiting for COVID-19 tests.

Tele-ICU services vendor Advanced ICU Care renames itself to Hicuity Health.

Walgreens will open up to 700 in-store Village Medical primary care clinics in the next four years following its previous $1 billion investment in VillageMD.

Beebe Healthcare goes live with TransformativeMed’s Core Work Manager, which it will use to increase situational awareness of patients at both the employee and care team levels.

A new KLAS report on rapid telehealth uptake during the pandemic finds that few Amwell and Teladoc Health customers plan to use their solutions to meet all their telehealth needs. More focused solutions have high satisfaction, such as Caregility for teleICU (it has multiple capabilities) and Mend for virtual clinic visits. Videoconferencing platforms from Zoom and Doxy.me feature easy rollout and low cost, but 30% of users will replace them with products that offer better support, EHR integration, and a simplified clinical experience. Microsoft Teams performs well but falls short on patient experience, while more than half of Vidyo customers are unhappy. Telehealth solutions from Epic and NextGen Healthcare earn high customer satisfaction because of integration with their EHR, a feature that customers of other EHR vendors are hoping to get.

Another new KLAS report on credentialing during COVID-19 finds that Verge Health leads in remote credentialing; Verge Health, Modio, ASM MD-Staff score highly for emergency credentialing; and most vendors perform well at telehealth credentialing across state lines. 

Government and Politics

Cerner VP of strategic growth Amanda Adkins leaves the company after losing her bid to unseat Rep. Sharice Davids (D-KS) in the November US House election. She had been with Cerner for 15 years, but took a leave of absence a year ago to campaign. She lost by 10 percentage points as the Republican candidate.

COVID-19

Wednesday’s COVID-19 hospitalization set another record at 132,476. Nearly 4,000 new deaths pushed the US total to 361,000. States are continuing to catch up with posting holiday-delayed data. The worst spread of any area of the world is in Arizona, where hospitalizations are at almost 5,000 and 297 people died of COVID-19 on Wednesday.

Scientists warn that the US is not equipped to track mutated versions of coronavirus since no national surveillance program is in place, with genomic sequencing being performed on only 3,000 of 1.4 million positive samples each week.

The Surgeon General urges states to aggressively expand vaccinations to other phases if their vaccine supply exceeds Phase 1a demand (healthcare personnel and long-term care residents). Phase 1b includes frontline essential workers and those over 74. Meanwhile, NYC Health and Hospitals says it has given every public hospital employee shots who wanted them – 30% did not – but the city has not received state permission to start administering the vaccine to first responders, corrections officers, and people over 74.

Other

Weird News Andy intones mellifluously (in my mind, at least) that, “It is better to have loved and flossed …” in hair-balling up this story, in which a woman experienced gingival hirsutism, i.e. she sprouted hair from her gums.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Digisonics in its sale to Intelerad, PatientMatters in its sale to Firstsource Solutions, and HIPAA One in its merger with Intraprise Health.
• Health Catalyst will present virtually at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference January 11.
• The local news covers Cerner’s efforts to help Truman Medical Center (MO) streamline patient scheduling and registration for the COVID-19 vaccine.
• Everbridge surpasses 5 billion communications in 2020 from its Critical Event Management Platform, supporting healthcare, business, and government organizations around the world.
• Fortified Health Security will present at the ISACA Huntsville Chapter virtual meeting January 25.
• Goliath Technologies enters an equity partnership with Cloud-Oculus to expand its cloud-monitoring product portfolio.
• Healthcare Triangle publishes a new case study, “2020 Epic Program Spotlight: Tanner Community Connect.”
• With support from InterSystems and its Veterans Data Integration and Federation Enterprise Platform, the VA has launched its COVID-19 vaccination program, while treating 130,000 cases.
• Meditech adds the Northside Achievement Zone in Minneapolis to its charitable giving program.
• Medrah IT expands its reseller agreement with NextGate.
• Several HIStalk sponsors take home Best in Biz Awards: CoverMyMeds (Bronze, Most Innovative Product of the Year – Healthcare and Medical); Spirion (Bronze, Enterprise Product of the Year – Security Software); Lumeon (Gold, Best New Product of the Year – Healthcare and Medical); and Waystar (Silver, Best New Product of the Year – Healthcare and Medical).

Blog Posts

• 4 Lessons Learned from COVID-19 in 2020 (Halo Health)
• Provider Education: Comparative Billing Reports (CBR) and the MDaudit Platform (Hayes)
• Epic, Cerner, and Meditech Analysts in High Demand as Health Systems Prepare for COVID-19 Vaccines (HCTec)
• Three Analytics Strategies to Drive Patient-Centered Care (Health Catalyst)
• How Structured Content Powers Health Education at Healthwise (Healthwise)
• Recruiting is Sales (Impact Advisors)
• Imprivata named one of the IGA solution providers focused entirely on healthcare market in latest Gartner report (Imprivata)
• 2020 MIPS Relief for Extreme and Uncontrollable Circumstances (Ingenious Med)
• Lessons Learned in a Year Like No Other (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Jvion Looks Ahead to Tackle the Next Wave of Critical Healthcare Priorities Head On (Jvion)
• Planning for the ‘Next Normal:’ Insights from Kyruus Leadership (Kyruus)
• Level Up: How to Exceed Interoperability Expectations (InterSystems)
• Healthcare in the 2020s: The Consumer Rules (Loyale Healthcare)
• Decreasing Distractions in the Operating Room to Improve Patient Safety (Medhost)
• The Sun Never Sets at Newfire: Our 2020 Recap (Newfire Global Partners)

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/7/21

ONC announced dates for the 2021 annual meeting, scheduled for the end of March. You can subscribe to updates to make sure you’re in the know.

I have to say I miss big meetings and getting to connect with interesting people. I’ve done several virtual conferences and they just don’t provide the level of randomness that we were used to in person. I was going to attend the Consumer Electronics Show in person for the first time in 2021 and that didn’t turn out so well. The event is scheduled to run virtually January 11-14 and I’ve been approved to attend as a member of the media. If anyone can hit a virtual conference out of the park, it should be CES.

I’m looking forward to seeing what companies have come up with as far as expanding the utility of wearables in patients’ personal health journeys. Wearable devices seem to have plateaued the last few years, so it’s going to take something novel to get people re-engaged.

I also want to see what companies are doing to make tech more accessible. Although we may be used to the majority of people around us having a smartphone in their pocket or purse, there are plenty of people in the world that don’t have that access. I’m also looking forward to seeing first hand some of the wild and crazy things that will debut at CES, and following them over time to see if they take off or not.

Speaking of conferences, HIMSS is planning a meeting for August, but I wonder what it’s going to look like in reality. A recent article described the downstream impact of the February 2020 Biogen conference. Its 100 confirmed cases were identified as causing 50,000 cases in the US alone within the first two months following the super spreader event, nearly half of which were in Massachusetts. By November 1, the virus strain from the conference was linked genetically to over 330,000 cases in 29 states plus Sweden and Australia. Even for those of us that will (hopefully) be fully vaccinated by the time HIMSS rolls around, it’s important to remember that the vaccine has not yet been shown to prevent COVID infection — it just dramatically reduces the risk of severe disease and death.

Mr. H has already reported on the wind-down of Haven, which hoped to lower healthcare costs and improve outcomes. One of the key reasons cited for its inability to disrupt healthcare is that each company continued to deliver its own projects separately, which reduced the need for the joint venture. The inability of large organizations to work together is being seen everywhere in the US, particularly with vaccine distribution. Physician colleagues are reporting from across the US that hospitals that have been entrusted with vaccine distribution are refusing to vaccinate frontline healthcare workers if they’re not employed by that particular institution. This is often in violation of state vaccinator contracts and agreements, but no one wants to enforce it. Until we understand that we can be stronger together than we can be separately, we will all continue to struggle.

My state isn’t the only one struggling: New Jersey’s vaccine registration site launched this week but immediately experienced issues attributed to high volumes. It may not be perfect, but I at least give the state credit for trying to create a list and communicate with people, which is much more than many other states have done. My home county finally received vaccine and has no way to manage a list of Tier 1a providers who are trying to get vaccinated – the only way to get through is to wade through a maze of phone prompts and hope you reach someone who can add your name to a paper list.

JAMA Surgery published a piece this week looking at “the Empowerment/Enslavement Paradox” among surgeons and their personal communication devices. The authors note that “the same tools that empower people can also eliminate personal freedoms by increasing work pressure and blurring the boundary between work and personal life.” There are certainly benefits of being able to be continuously connected particularly with smartphones, such as being able to act quickly to care for patients and to be able to have the world’s medical literature literally at your fingertips. Unfortunately, technology can also function as an electronic leash, continuously tethering physicians to their work. I’ve experienced both extremes and it takes a tremendous amount of discipline to keep tech from taking over at times. It will be interesting to see if improvements in technology will help resolve this paradox.

Like many of us, I tend to multitask, and I have to admit I was surfing the internet while listening to the US Senate speeches as our Congress reconvened following Wednesday’s unbelievable events. In hindsight, I probably would have benefitted from drinking a strong martini and making sure to take a sip every time a particular Senator used the word “hooligans” or “temple of democracy.” During my surfing, I enjoyed learning about a set of lava lamps that are used to drive internet encryption. The lamps are located at the Cloudflare company headquarters in San Francisco. Cameras capture the changes in the patterns and transfer them to a computer that translates it into encryption keys. The randomness inherent to lava lamps reduces the chance that hackers would be able to break the key. The Cloudflare site offers a great primer on random numbers, cryptography, and entropy. At its London office, Cloudflare uses a slightly less-groovy method of random data generation, using a double-pendulum system, which seems a bit more classically British. The Singapore office uses radioactive decay from a uranium pellet as its source.

Given the events of the day, I could use some quality time staring at a wall of lava lamps since I’m not traveling to see a nice waterfall or sunrise anytime soon. There’s also always that stout martini. Who’s with me?

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 1/7/21

Optum Acquires Change Healthcare for $13 Billion

UnitedHealth Group-owned Optum will acquire Change Healthcare and combine it with its OptumInsight software and analytics business.

TigerConnect Acquires Critical Alert, Ends 2020 with Second Major Acquisition

Care team collaboration software vendor TigerConnect acquires Critical Alert, best known for its nurse call, alarm, and event management medical devices and software.

Intraprise Health Acquires HIPAA One

Cybersecurity and risk management software vendor Intraprise Health acquires HIPAA One, a Utah-based company specializing in security, privacy, and compliance software and services.

.