HIStalk Interviews Cyrus Bahrassa, CEO, Ashavan

Cyrus Bahrassa is founder and CEO of Ashavan.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where does the patient fit in?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning Headlines 6/26/24

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

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

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

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

Geisinger provides notice of Nuance’s data security incident

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

News 6/26/24

Top News

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

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

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

People

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

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

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

Firasat Hussain (Arrivia) joins SnapCare as CTO.

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Privacy and Security

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Blog Posts

• Customer Exclusive: My life in flow – Part 2 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Applying Technology to Mid-Cycle Operations (AGS Health)
• Collaboration between hospitals will get NHS back on its feet (Altera Digital Health)
• Impact and challenges of large language models in healthcare (Arcadia)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 6/25/24

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

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

Digital Health Company Pear Suite Hits 100-Customer Milestone

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

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

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

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 6/24/24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Email Dr. Jayne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Interviews Trip Hofer, CEO, Redox

Trip Hofer, MBA is CEO of Redox.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does the company work around that messy data?

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

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

What changes will 21st Century Cures and TEFCA require?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How will AI to affect your business and your customers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning Headlines 6/24/24

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

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

Sharecare enters into definitive agreement to be acquired by Altaris

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

Russian Hackers Of London Hospitals Publish Patient Data

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

Monday Morning Update 6/24/24

Top News

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

Here’s an intro video for Augmedix.

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

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

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

Blog Posts

• How healthcare leaders can turn the burnout problem into an opportunity (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Four EVV Challenges and How Addressing Them Can Improve Care and Operations (Netsmart)
• Best practices in enterprise care management for patient-centered care excellence (Nordic)
• Top Challenges for CNIOs: Governance, Priorities, and More (PerfectServe)
• From Aspiration to Achievement: Stacia Fredericks’ Educational Journey with the Assistance of the QGenda/AACN Nursing Scholarship (QGenda)
• Key takeaways from Snowflake’s 2024 Data Cloud Summit (Redox)
• How to Know It’s Time for a Security Best Practices Risk Assessment (CereCore)
• The List of Therapeutic Alternatives Makes Everyone Happy (Surescripts)
• Top Metrics for a Healthcare Quality Management Dashboard (Symplr)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 6/21/24

Prior Authorization Platform Humata Health Closes $25M Investment

Prior authorization technology vendor Humata Health raises a $25 million investment.

Change Healthcare to start notifying customers who had data exposed in cyberattack

Change Healthcare begins notifying hospitals, payers, and other customers that they may have had patient information exposed in a February ransomware attack, and will begin notifying individuals in late July.

ARPA-H enters $19M contract with Palantir for artificial intelligence, data software

HHS agency ARPA-H — the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health — will use Palantir software to support its healthcare R&D efforts.

Scaling maternal care that works

Virtual pregnancy and newborn care provider Pomelo Health raises $46 million in Series B funding.

News 6/21/24

Top News

An AMA physician survey finds that nearly 25% believe that prior authorization processes have caused a serious adverse event.

Two-thirds of respondents don’t believe that PA decision criteria are evidence-based. 

Nearly all of the respondents believe that prior authorization work increases physician burnout, with the average physician dealing with 43 PA requests per week that require 12 hours of physician and staff time.

One-fourth of respondents say their requests are often or always denied, while most believe that PA increases overall utilization as patients are forced to try ineffective treatments or to schedule more appointments because of PA-caused delays.

Reader Comments

From Former Nordic Exec: “Re: Nordic. I haven’t seen you report on the lawsuit that continues to impact the company’s leadership team.” I missed this item, although I admit that it doesn’t clear my interest hurdle. John Distefano sued Nordic Consulting Partners and now-retired CEO James Costanzo in February 2023, claiming that Nordic stole his software idea after he contracted with the company to develop and monetize it. The issue is murky because the parties signed various agreements as contractors and then with Distefano as an employee, which gives the company rights to anything an employee creates. Distefano created Wellward, which creates care plans from disconnected health and consumer information. The legal documents I’m able to view – as a litigation illiterate who doesn’t subscribe to PACER or other services – don’t paint a strong case, especially since it doesn’t seem that Nordic ever did anything with the software. I wouldn’t consider this item newsworthy unless a court rules against the company and mandates a big payout, nor would it seem to warrant a lot of executive concern. 

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Lifespan will rename itself to Brown University Health as part of a seven-year, $150 million Brown University investment in the health system.

Prior authorization technology vendor Humata Health raises a $25 million investment. Founder and CEO Jeremy Friese, MD, MBA, was co-founder and CEO at Verata Health. That company was acquired by now-defunct Olive AI in December 2020. Friese formed Humata Health to buy back the Verata PA assets from Olive in its wind-down.

Sales

• Deaconess Health System will provide 24×7 urgent care in all 50 states via virtual visits from KeyCare, which offers patients access from Epic MyChart. 
• HHS agency ARPA-H — the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health — will use Palantir software to support its healthcare R&D efforts.

Announcements and Implementations

An EY survey of 56 health insurance executives finds that most believe that member experience has become more personalized — partly due to mobile apps, member portals, and telehealth – and member satisfaction increases when they have access to their own information. Most respondents tout the value of medical device wearables. The majority believe that digital health solutions can help reduce costs, but few of them have seen ROI.

Government and Politics

California’s attorney general co-sponsors proposed legislation that would allow require the office’s approval to complete private equity and hedge fund transactions in healthcare. The law could upend the business model that is known as Captive Professional Corporation or Friendly PC model, in which a clinician forms a professional corporation for billing but contracts with an outside company to provide services, thus avoiding conflicts with state laws that address the corporate practice of medicine. The issue is getting significant exposure in the investment and digital health communities through the reporting of Christina Farr, who believes that the legislation would have a major impact on digital health vendors.

Privacy and Security

The Russian hackers who launched a ransomware attack against UK-based pathology services vendor Synnovis have demanded a $50 million payment.

Other

Bizarre: a doctor and former elected official in Kenya who became a billionaire by opening hospitals sees his hospitals and his personal mansion set for the auction block after he is accused of using the hospitals as a front for his involvement with an international organ smuggling syndicate.

A food vlogger’s video titled “The Most Expensive Restaurant in America” draws millions of views, as Trigg Ferrano parodies his hospital stay. I wouldn’t deem it particularly clever or funny, but I feel that way for most YouTube videos whose goal seems to give people yet another way to waste time. I imagine it’s worse on Insta or TikTok, which I don’t use and haven’t installed.

Sponsor Updates

• Surescripts will implement the NCPDP SCRIPT Standard Version 2023011, Real-Time Prescription Benefit v13, and Formulary and Benefit v60 standards upgrades following publication of the CMS final rule.
• AvaSure hosts its Chief Nursing Executives Advisory Board in Nashville to share best practices for leveraging virtual care delivery models.
• Vyne Medical adds FormUSign, a new tool for automating electronic forms, to its Trace data workflow platform.
• Ellkay publishes a new customer success story featuring Lehigh Valley Health Network.
• Findhelp announces that benefits screening platform and case management system vendor Single Stop will add Findhelp’s hundreds of thousands of locations to its community resources map.
• CereCore will partner with FinThrive to deliver Revenue Cycle Management Technology Adoption Model (RCMTAM) consulting and advisory services to providers.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new case study titled “Epic Go-Live Success: Navigating a Cyber Outage at Guthrie Lourdes Hospital.”
• RLDatix CEO Jeff Surges will speak at the HFMA Annual Conference next week.
• FinThrive joins the Meditech Alliance Program, giving Meditech Expanse end users access to its Claims Manager and Access Coordinator Insurance Verifier solutions.
• Linus Health announces recent industry recognitions for its efforts to develop better tools for assessing cognitive function.
• MRO CEO Jason Brown wins EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year 2024 Greater Philadelphia Award.

Blog Posts

• New Five9 Data: AI in CX – It is not replacing humans (Five9)
• How a Continuous SOC Protects Healthcare Data (Fortified Health Security)
• Are You Confident in Your Health System’s Business Resilience? (Impact Advisors)
• Evaluating Impact of Medicare Cost Cap for Insulin on Patient Treatment (Inovalon)
• Medhost Q&A: Blue Ridge Medical Center’s Transition to Rural Emergency Hospital (Medhost)
• How ServiceNow Can Disrupt Healthcare – In a Good Way (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Surveillance Collaborative breaks new ground with Meditech’s predictive analytics solution (Meditech)
• CMS Final Rule: Physical Therapy Medicare Guidelines for 2024 and Updates (Net Health)

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 6/20/24

The team at Geeks for Geeks has published its list of the 50 most common passwords, as identified through security incidents. I’m not surprised by entries such as 123456, password, admin, or 111111, but I was surprised to see these: monkey, dragon, princess, whatever, starwars, and startrek. My favorite from the list is trustno1.

At my most recent visit with a physician who I see annually, the office didn’t have her schedule template built for the coming year. They promised to send me a postcard when they open her schedule, but could not give an estimate of when that might happen. I don’t have a lot of faith in mailed reminders and my schedule is chaotic, so I put an appointment on my own calendar to follow up. I would rather receive a patient portal message that would alert me to the ability to schedule, as well as the ability to just schedule it myself.

A recent healthcare consumer preference survey showed that while nearly 40% of patients would like to schedule appointments online, 22% reported that their provider doesn’t offer that option. The report also addresses why patients are choosing urgent care over primary care, which is good food for thought for those who are trying to figure out the best ways to deliver care in their communities.

Miami Today reports that after 16 years, Miami-Dade County has agreed to sell naming rights to a transit station. The Civic Center Metrorail Station has been purchased by the University of Miami Health System for $2.9 million over 20 years. Starting in July, the station will be known as UHealth Jackson Station. Proceeds of the sale will go to the county for transit-related projects. Jackson Health System, which is owned by the county, was part of the initiative to gain the county commission’s approval. In additional to the ongoing fee, UHealth will pay for updated signage with the new name at the station and at other locations across the Metrorail system. The agreement also allows installation of digital displays to share branded materials.

MIT Technology Review ran an article last week about a new safety tool for operating rooms.AI-enabled “black box” devices are intended to capture information about surgeries. The idea comes from the black boxes that are found in aircraft, which allow investigators to review captured data following crashes or significant flight events. For operating rooms, data capture happens through audio/video as well as data from anesthesia monitors. Several medical device companies are working in this space, but a Stanford University surgery professor is looking at the entire operating room environment, not just the procedure itself.

This approach raises questions about patient and staff privacy, as well as legal issues. Surgeons have refused to work where systems are present, and devices have reportedly been sabotaged. The data that is captured can be compared against surgical safety checklists and other standardized measures of surgical proficiency. To train the models, surgeons or highly-trained technicians label items and actions so that the system can learn.

I reached out to a couple of surgical colleagues for their opinions. One feels that the technology would have been better received a decade ago, because physicians have increasingly come to feel like they “have a target on their back” for any perceived irregularities in the hospital, from their tone of voice to their leadership style in the operating room.

Speaking of workers worried that they are being monitored, Wells Fargo recently terminated more than a dozen workers after concerns of “simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work.” I bought my first “mouse jiggler” more than a decade ago to prevent my laptop from going to sleep while I was seeing patients. My health system had a lockout if the unit was idle for more than 90 seconds, and no one in IT would listen to a family doc who tried to explain that most physical exams take more than that brief time. Also, that it was ridiculous to lock out the laptop when it was sitting in the exam room in my direct line of sight. I’ve had corporate laptops where the USB ports were disabled, so I’m a bit surprised if a USB device was the approach that was used by the employees versus something more exotic. Wells Fargo has zero tolerance for “unethical behavior,” according to a statement, and the employees in question worked in financial management units, resulting in the situation being disclosed in a filing with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

Pharmacy Practice News recently ran a piece on hospitals using smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo Dot in patient rooms. One installation allowed patients to ask questions about their medications while allowing the pharmacy team to communicate quickly with patients. Patient questions that are beyond the system’s standardized content can be converted to EHR messages that are delivered to pharmacy staff. The system is designed to accept various drug pronunciations that patients might use, which is great since there is often confusion around medication names.

In a deployment at Houston Methodist Hospital System, the system can also be used to help pharmacists quickly respond to orders for drugs used to reverse bleeding. The pharmacy-side device announces an urgent order and its notification ring flashes. Teams at the facility are looking into other uses for the device, including capture of patient-provider discussions.

I was a guest lecturer at a local residency program this week and enjoyed chatting with young physicians who were about to mark another year of training complete. The educational year traditionally runs from July 1 through June 30, and a couple of the attendees have precious few days left before they’ll be expected to work on their own. My presentation was on topics related to the business of managing a practice. Most questions were related to the role of private equity in healthcare. I wish my lecture had been scheduled a few days later, because when I arrived home, I found an email about the newly introduced Corporate Crimes Against Health Care Act of 2024. The bill was introduced in the US Senate and specifically addresses abuses that have occurred under private equity ownership of nursing homes, medical practices, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations.

The Act provides for increased transparency around changes in ownership such as mergers and acquisitions; criminal penalties for executives when abuses lead to the death of a patient; the ability of state attorneys general and the Justice Department to “claw back all compensation, including salaries, that is paid to private equity and portfolio company executives within a 10-year period before or after an acquired healthcare firm experiences serious, avoidable financial difficulties” due to “looting” by those executives. A press release from the bill’s co-sponsor, Senator Elizabeth Warren, specifically addresses the “private equity greed and mismanagement” that pushed Steward Health Care into bankruptcy.

What are your thoughts on reining in the role of private equity in healthcare? Will this bill become law? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 6/20/24

California plans to enlist AI to translate healthcare information

The state of California seeks bids for an AI system to translate health and social services documents and websites as a first draft for human review.

We must fix prior authorization to protect our patients

A majority of surveyed physicians say that prior authorizations contribute to burnout, while 24% report that PAs have led to serious adverse events for their patients.

UK Hospital Hackers Say They’ve Demanded $50 Million in Ransom

Pathology services vendor Synnovis faces a $50 million ransomware demand from the Qilin group.

SDSU researchers develop AI robot hoping to help those with mental health concerns

San Diego State University researchers develop an AI robot called Pepper that can detect emotions from live video analysis, allowing it to detect mental health issues and to provide insights to clinicians.

Healthcare AI News 6/19/24

News

Republican lawmakers criticize the FDA’s partnership with the Coalition for Health AI for testing healthcare AI products, raising concerns that CHAI’s members include Microsoft and Google as well as large health systems that are incubating their own AI-related businesses.

The state of California seeks bids for an AI system to translate health and social services documents and websites as a first draft for human review.

The American Society of Nuclear Cardiology joins the AMA’s effort to prohibit the use of AI by insurance companies to deny coverage based on medical necessity. AMA’s policy would require prior authorization requests to be reviewed by a physician who is trained in the same specialty as the requestor.

Business

Cancer genetic testing vendor Color Health is working with OpenAI to use GPT-4o to identify recommended tests and to create detailed workup plans for human review. The company expects to generate personalized care plans for 200,000 patients through the second half of 2024. 

Cognizant launches its first set of healthcare solutions that use Google Cloud’s AI technology, including workflows for appeals resolution, contract management, marketing content, and health plan shopping.

Patient-centered communications technology vendor CipherHealth announces AI summarization capability for its rounding toolkit.

Sweden-based startup Tandem Health raises a $9.5 million seed funding round with investors that included OpenAI and Deepmind. The company, which was founded less than a year ago and has 50 providers using its system in Sweden, provides a clinician copilot that can transcribe visits and create medical notes. It is looking for partners to help it expand in Europe.

Research

San Diego State University researchers develop an AI robot called Pepper that can detect emotions from live video analysis, allowing it to detect mental health issues and to provide insights to clinicians. The device, which was funded with a $5 million grant, is being reviewed by local hospitals.

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 6/19/24

Google’s Verily to offer GLP-1 drugs through Lightpath, its retooled chronic care app

Alphabet’s Verily will reportedly pivot – for the second time in two years – by retiring its chronic disease management app Onduo and moving to a new one called Lightpath, which will focus on AI-sprinkled diabetes treatment and issuing prescriptions for GLP-1 drugs.

HHAeXchange Acquires Cashé Software, Strengthening Homecare Operations for Thousands of Agencies and Individuals

Home care management solutions vendor HHAeXchange acquires Cashé Software, which offers homecare operations and billing software.

Talkiatry Secures $130M Series C Funding to Mainstream Value-Based Behavioral Health Care

Telepsychiatry services provider Talkiatry raises $130 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $245 million.

News 6/19/24

Top News

Stat reports that Alphabet’s Verily will pivot – for the second time in two years – by retiring its chronic disease management app Onduo and moving to a new one called Lightpath, which will focus on AI-sprinkled diabetes treatment and issuing prescriptions for GLP-1 drugs.

Stat notes that selling weight loss prescriptions is quite a fall from Verily’s charter mission to “defeat Mother Nature” with moonshot ideas such as cancer detection, public health monitoring, and a smart contact lens.

Verily was launched in 2015 as part of Google X and raised $3.5 billion in funding.

Verily’s chairman, president, and CEO is Stephen Gillett, whose background is cybersecurity and executive stints with Best Buy and Starbucks.

Reader Comments

From Deadbeat Dasher: “Re: medical debt. This editorial says the credit reporting system shouldn’t punish Americans for getting sick.” Allow me to take the counterpoint to the article in asking, why shouldn’t medical debt continue to be included in credit reports?

• A lender should be able to see the total amount of debt that a consumer owes in assessing their ability and willingness to pay the new debt they request.
• Including medical debt on credit reports gives people an incentive to pay what they owe.
• Credit report omission argument is a convenient way to avoid addressing the real issues of out-of-control healthcare costs, provider billing errors, insurer foot-dragging, and lack of pricing transparency and the ability to shop around.
• On top of that, it’s really an indictment of the three credit reporting companies that don’t get paid for accuracy, keeping consumers happy, or responding to consumers who ask to have mistakes on their record fixed.
• My conclusion: omitting medical debt in credit reports is like excluding criminal history from background reporting using the reasoning that it is unfair, prejudiced, perhaps of limited predictive ability, and possibly erroneous without consumer recourse for correction. Hiding either type of information addresses the symptom, not the problems, and places companies at a disadvantage that make significant decisions based on the accuracy and completeness of consumer record. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Capital Rx. ‍Capital Rx is a full-service pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) and pharmacy benefit administrator (PBA), advancing our nation’s electronic healthcare infrastructure to improve drug price visibility and patient outcomes. As a Certified B Corp, Capital Rx is executing its mission through the deployment of JUDI, the company’s cloud-native enterprise health platform, and a Single-Ledger Model, which increases visibility and reduces variability in drug prices. JUDI connects every aspect of the pharmacy ecosystem in one efficient, scalable platform, servicing millions of members for Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial plans. Together with its clients, Capital Rx is reimagining the administration of pharmacy benefits and rebuilding trust in healthcare. Thanks to Capital Rx for supporting HIStalk.

I found this Capital Rx video on YouTube, titled “Meet JUDI — The Enterprise Health Platform For Commercial, Medicare & Medicaid Plans.”

Webinars

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Tempus AI, which specializes in precision medicine and intelligent diagnostics, raises $410 million in its IPO, giving it a valuation of $6 billion. Founder and CEO Eric Lefkofsky co-founded Groupon and remains its chairman.

Home care management solutions vendor HHAeXchange acquires Cashe Software, which offers homecare operations and billing software.

Sales

• Sage Memorial Hospital (AZ) will implement Sonifi Health’s interactive patient engagement technology when it opens later this year.
• Children’s Health Ireland selects Ascom’s Alerts and Notification Management System.
• Praia Health will use Clear’s identity verification capabilities within its patient-focused digital experience software for health systems.
• WakeMed (NC) will deploy Bamboo Health’s care coordination solutions.
• Virtual physical therapy provider Hinge Health will offer its members access to Upswing Health’s digital platform for musculoskeletal health.

People

AtlantiCare names Jordan Ruch, MBA (RWJBarnabas Health) as CIO.

Capital Rx hires Antonio Garcia Cueto, MBA (Eden Health) as CFO.

Acentra Health names Heather Adamson, MS (Integra Connect) as SVP of marketing.

Keith Belton (Symplr) joins Fluent Dental Market Insights as SVP of marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

Christus Health (TX) implements Abridge’s AI-powered clinical documentation software.

Health system-collective Truveta adds support for real-world evidence submissions to FDA.

Healthcare wearable safety technology vendor Canopy releases a wearable safety button and safety app for home health providers.

Government and Politics

New data from ONC finds that the number of hospitals that are routinely sharing health data grew from 28% in 2018 to 43% in 2023. Of those, 92% noted they had necessary clinical data available from outside providers at the bedside, improving continuity of care.

CMS will stop accepting new applications on July 12 for the advance payments program it set up in March to help providers impacted by the Change Healthcare ransomware attack. The program has made 4,722 advance payments totaling $717 million, and issued $2.55 billion in accelerated payments.

Healthcare privacy and policy experts Tina Grande, MHS and Deven McGraw, JD, MPH, LLM highlight in a Health Affairs editorial that entities are using interoperability technology and policies to seek patient data for non-treatment purposes. They say that companies are posing as providers or, in the case of law firms seeking malpractice information, as the patient themselves. They recommend these changes:

• Fund health information exchange to prevent participants from adopting business models that are based on selling de-identified data.
• Tighten rules for the business associates of organizations that aren’t their direct customer.
• Penalize data misuse with termination from the network, banning company officers from future health network participation, and imposing FTC fines for unfair trade practices.
• Create a safe harbor for trusted exchange participants which unknowingly provide data to a participant that misstates their intentions.
• Add a FAQ that describes how entities can decline to share data without violating information blocking regulations.
• Issue clearer guidance on non-treatment purposes.
• Extend health data privacy protections to entities that collect health information and share it with patients, which is not covered by HIPAA, and define expectations for obtaining patient consent and ID verification.

Privacy and Security

NHS England reports that London-area hospitals have had to cancel or reschedule 1,500 appointments and surgeries as a result of the June 3 ransomware attack on pathology services vendor Synnovis.

Other

A ProPublica report finds that “life coaches” are mostly unregulated compared to therapists, with no specified training, certification, or ethics pledge required. Anyone can hang out a life coach shingle, and some of those who do so are former therapists who got in professional trouble. A hotbed is Utah, which is known as the “fraud capital of the United States” because many multi-level marketing scammers are Latter-Day Saints who prey on other Mormons who trust them because of their religion.

Interesting: Wells Fargo fires more than a dozen work-from-home employees of its wealth and investment management business after finding that they were using widely available mouse-jiggling software to simulate work. Maybe they should have fired their managers for not being able to notice that they weren’t productive, but in fairness, that’s the case in every business that employs knowledge workers.

Sponsor Updates

• Waystar staff across the country celebrate the company’s Nasdaq debut.

The following HIStalk sponsors will exhibit at the HFMA Annual Conference June 24-27 in Las Vegas:

• AGS Health
• Alpha II
• Altera Digital Health
• Arcadia
• Availity
• CereCore
• FinThrive
• Inovalon
• MRO
• Nordic
• QGenda
• RLDatix
• TruBridge
• TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company
• VisiQuate
• Waystar
• Wolters Kluwer

Blog Posts

• Charge Capture and Reconciliation for Strong Revenue Cycle Management (CereCore)
• Encephalopathy Coding: Challenges and Solutions (AGS Health)
• Supply chain attacks: Understanding one of cybersecurity’s biggest threats (Altera Digital Health)
• What to Expect During an OCR Audit or Investigation and How to Prepare (Clearwater)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 6/18/24

Healthcare firm Concentra reveals quarterly revenue growth in IPO filing

Occupational healthcare provider Concentra files paperwork with the SEC for a $100 million IPO.

Raising the Bar on Interoperability – A Decade of Data Show that “Sometimes” Isn’t Good Enough

New data from ONC finds that the number of hospitals routinely sharing health data grew from 28% in 2018 to 43% in 2023.

US to shut advance payments program for Medicare providers hit by Change hack

CMS will on July 12 stop accepting new applications for the advance payments program it set up to help providers impacted by the Change Healthcare ransomware attack.

Cardamom Health Announces Investment by HealthX Ventures to Expand Advisory and Managed Services for Data, Analytics, and Applications

Cardamom Health will use new funding from HealthX Ventures to hire additional staff and further develop its services for revenue cycle optimization and value-based care.