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Morning Headlines 5/13/25

May 12, 2025 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 5/13/25

UPMC Enterprises and Redesign Health Launch Chronic Pain Management Company, Glimmer Health

Physician practice-focused chronic pain management startup Glimmer Health launches with support from UPMC Enterprises and Redesign Health.

Olio Raises $11M Series B Funding to Expand Product Innovation and Market Reach

Care coordination company Olio announces $11 million in Series B funding, bringing its total raised to $26.5 million.

Aranscia Acquires Spesana

Diagnostics holding company Aranscia acquires oncology-focused clinical workflow and precision medicine software vendor Spesana.

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Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/12/25

May 12, 2025 Dr. Jayne Comments Off on Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/12/25

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I had the privilege of spending Mother’s Day with some of the wisest women I know, including some who are in their 80s and 90s. As these events usually do, it included what I’ve heard jokingly referred to as “the organ recital,” when everyone tells everyone else about all of their recent health issues.

As a physician, they tend to expect me to have immediate knowledge of every condition that they discuss and every physician they see, despite the fact that we live in a major metropolitan area with literally thousands of physicians who are divided across a handful of highly competitive organizations. Even when I was in a traditional practice setting, I rarely got to know physicians who were outside of my referral networks. Still, they seem shocked when I say I don’t know one of their physicians.

One of my relatives had a recent hospitalization. Fortunately I had helped them set up their proxies in the patient portal prior to that event. Since I’m one of the people who have access to their data, it was good to be able to see the information myself when other relatives called to ask me what I thought about it. It was initially great to receive all the lab notifications, but as the hospital stay went on, it started to feel more disruptive.

I didn’t see any options in the patient portal to change those to more of a batch notification or to snooze them for a period of time, kind of like I can subscribe to an email digest with a daily update rather than receiving individual emails from some of the groups I’m in. Fortunately, the hospital stay was brief, but along with the appetizer course, I was treated to a tour of their patient portal with all their follow up items.

Having everyone together, we also used the opportunity to make sure that everyone around the table was set up for the two-factor authentication that will soon be required by the health system where most of them receive their care. It was a little tricky for the relative who didn’t have a cell phone, but we were able to figure something out.

Fortunately, they’ve all figured out that if I’m going to be their IT support person, they need to bring their devices when they see me, so we had a little bit of an assembly line going along with the after-dinner drinks. One of my relatives is thinking about upgrading to a smartphone that I think will be nothing but trouble for him, so I’m crossing my fingers that he sticks with what I’ve recommended and doesn’t drop more than $1,000 on something that’s just going to make him mad.

The only thing that threw a wrench in my plan for a lovely day was cooking a multi-course menu in a kitchen that wasn’t my own. I realized how dependent I had become on my trusty first-generation Alexa device to manage all my kitchen timers by voice alone. I immediately found out that asking one’s significant other to set a timer on their phone is definitely not the way to go if reliability is at stake. I couldn’t figure out the timer on the microwave and I know better than to punch any buttons on the high-tech oven other than the ones that control the temperature.

I was able to fall back on a pair of trusty “minute minder” analog timers, which helped a lot. Still, unlike with Alexa, I had to remember what the timers were for. At least I didn’t run the risk of someone turning them off without my knowing about it or accidentally setting the oven to convection when I didn’t want it.

I also had some time this weekend to hang out with some of my oldest and dearest healthcare IT friends. We started implementing EHRs together more than 20 years ago, and one could say that our friendships have been forged in the fire of adversity.

Bringing up systems in the early 2000s was very different than it is today. There was a lot more flying by the seats of our pants and a lot more scrambling at times, even with the best project plans in play.

One of my friends has a child who is now an EHR analyst at a large academic medical center, and watching the look on her face as we told some of our stories was priceless. Many of the things we did would never pass muster today, but honestly I think I’d be relieved if there were systems in place that kept us from doing some of the crazy things we did. It’s nice to have friends that you know are your “ride or die” friends, whether you need someone to help you dig up some revenue cycle benchmarking data or just to be a sanity check before you commit to a major project when you’re feeling a little uncertain.

Following that, I met up with a nurse who has been my friend for more than 20 years. She was regaling me with stories and pictures of the ridiculous things that her nursing friends received during the recent National Nurses Week observance. There were the predictable pizza parties and donut assortments, along with pet therapists and posters. Some of the nurse-themed cookies in her feed were amazing and I can’t imagine the hours that went into making them.

As for her hospital, it really classed it up by giving the nurses reusable utensil sets that fit into a toothbrush holder-like container. Although I appreciate their nod to sustainability, it doesn’t sound like the nurses thought it was that great, especially since the hospital recently announced that they were ending food service in the cafeteria during the night shift. Nothing says “Hey, pack your dinner at home and bring it with you, since there’s nothing for you here” like hospital-logoed flatware. Perhaps they could have also considered a lunchbox-sized cooler or a gift card to the local supermarket.

How did your organization celebrate Nurses Week? If you’re a nurse, what’s the most ridiculous work-related gift you’ve received, and what kind of recognition or gift would really make your day? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

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Executive Watercooler Bonus Question: Contrarian Beliefs

May 12, 2025 Advisory Panel 1 Comment

The HIStalk Executive Watercooler is a group of hospital CIOs, hospital CMIOs, practicing physicians, and a few vendor executives who have volunteered to provide their thoughts on topical industry issues. I’ll seek their input every month or so on an important news developments and also ask the non-vendor members about their recent experience with vendors. You are welcome to suggest an issue for their consideration.

If you work for a hospital or practice, you are welcome to join the panel. I am grateful for the help of members 

This question this time: What’s a commonly accepted belief in health IT that you think will turn out to be wrong?


The idea that having an EHR will improve care, enhance safety, and facilitate a “learning health system” has been widely promulgated. Although some improvements have occurred (primarily in legibility of notes and ability to access historical notes and notes from offsite), other results of this magical belief in EHRs include increased documentation requirements, bloated notes, deterioration of clinical decision making, and electronic data that is often inaccurate.

Burnout and clinical inefficiency is common because of the EHR and the bureaucratic requirements that it has facilitated. Staff don’t read much of what is documented. And “learning” from inaccurate data does not create valid conclusions. Requirements for different quality metrics are often conflicting. For example, our institution now has three different delirium screening tools in use because different certification programs require use of different tools.

In sum, we can’t go back, but the benefits of EHRs have been oversold. 


The  hope that AI chatbots will improve patient satisfaction and save the health system money. The “support” chatbots at airlines, e-commerce sites, etc. are uniformly dreadful and annoying. On many sites it’s almost impossible to get through to a live human to resolve a problem now.


  • Phishing drills are an effective way to educate the workforce to be diligent and cautious in opening/responding to emails.
  • Planned system outages are positive in the sense they force users to remember how to practice without support of technology.
  • Longer/more complex passwords result in greater system security.
  • Cloud-based solutions will be big wins for health care enterprises.

That IT serves the business. While that’s partially true, IT really should be actively involved in transforming the business with the use of technology. We all know that IT should have a seat at the table for overall strategy and capital projects, but IT needs to be integrated/embedded across the organization and should be active/proactive, not passive/responsive for ongoing business operations.


In my years in the business (just celebrated 20 years as a CMIO) I have come across many IT leaders that see their role is to meet the customer needs. They see IT as a support department meeting operations and business needs. Its about how we achieve that is where I disagree. One way to do it is deliver whatever the customer is asking for. If they ask for a bicycle, get them one. If they ask for a motorcycle, get them one without thinking through what the true problem that they are trying to solve and whether a car might be the better solution.

Early on in my career before we created out Informatics team, the same problem might have been solved in a few different ways depending on who the customer spoke to. If they ask a documentation analyst, they got a new form. If they asked the order set analyst, they got a new order set. The rules analyst, they got a rule or a report, etc. We still do this today in rev cycle and other operational areas that haven’t invested in an informatics-like infrastructure.


I’m generally skeptical of any AI claims. I do think we are reaching a tipping point with AI where applications of it will really jump start improvements, but there are so many AI experts on LinkedIn that they can’t all be right.

HIStalk Interviews Anthony Lucatuorto, CEO, Sphere

May 12, 2025 Interviews Comments Off on HIStalk Interviews Anthony Lucatuorto, CEO, Sphere

Anthony Lucatuorto, MBA is CEO of Sphere.

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Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’ve enjoyed a 25-year plus career in the fintech space, with leadership experience in embedded payments, digital engagement, and high-growth partnerships. I began my career working at Mastercard and American Express in the early 1990s and held executive roles at First Data, TransFirst, and TSYS before arriving here at Sphere, Powered by TrustCommerce in 2018.

TrustCommerce is a financial technology company that provides secure, integrated healthcare payment solutions to some of the largest health systems in the US. We’ve been doing this for over 25 years. More recently, we are proud to have launched our next-generation card present payment solution, called Cloud Payments, that advances our EHR integrations and continues to help make the patient payment experience more seamless, flexible, and secure.

How are providers supporting newer payment methods and technologies?

Collectively, the industry is on the right track. We need to implement it with what I always preach to my team, which is a quicker speed of play. The act of paying for healthcare is just different than in retail. We need to continue to ensure price transparency, educate patients on their responsibility prior to treatment, and provide patient billing plans. We need to capture cards on file, along with an account updater tool that helps keep our tokenized card information current.

Over 50% of private employees in the US who participate in medical care plans are enrolled in high-deductible plans, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These deductibles keep getting higher year after year. Embracing technology like digital wallets capabilities and recurring payment tools are great examples of ways that providers could help collect more of the growing patient responsibility.

How does healthcare compare to other industries in that regard?

If you or I have a retail-like experience, we take for granted that it comes with speed, convenience, transparency, and trust. The healthcare industry is catching up to this. The industry is a little bit behind, but is now providing more advanced omni-channel payment options, more payment methodologies such as Venmo and PayPal, and more digital wallet products like Apple Pay and Google Pay. These are great examples of ways to get closer to what the patient experience needs to be, which is what they are experiencing on that retail side.

Are providers generally accepting patient payments from Venmo and digital wallets? Is use of those methods skewed to a particular demographic?

It’s funny that you say that. I’m Gen X and I don’t know how many baby boomers are using these, but my generation certainly has embraced it. Millennials and Gen Zs are certainly embracing Apple Pay, Google Pay, and all of the digital wallet products very well. They are after speed, convenience, transparency, and trust.

From the provider side, you have to do that in all of the omni-channel payment options. Whether it’s at the point of sale, in front of your doctor’s office at a kiosk about to check in, or you go online, all of these omni-channel payment methodologies need to accept these forms of payments. More and more, they are.

How are virtual credit card numbers and tokenization being used?

More and more of our clients are capturing tokens. In fact, in our experience, over 70% of healthcare organizations offer patients the ability to store a payment method, and that’s super important. Providing an account updater tool is important, so as a card expires or gets lost, you’re constantly updating the information. Keeping that tokenized card on file helps the provider collect payments today for the future, post-treatment billing down the road, and recurring billing options.

There’s a wealth of opportunities for them. It’s a growing tool and product and providers are certainly starting to embrace it.

For that virtual card question, we’re discussing this a little bit more than we used to. It’s more on the insurance side at this point, where insurance companies send a virtual card to providers. It allows the provider to collect quicker and maybe with more enhanced data for their reconciliation. However, it comes with a cost, because now you’re introducing card brand fees and acquiring fees, which the providers wouldn’t have had with just an insurance payment. Providers absolutely have to weigh the cost benefit of these virtual cards.

What do pre-arrival financial activities look like?

We don’t see payments as a standalone event that always happens at a certain time. The payment needs to be woven in throughout the patient’s journey, complemented by all the tools that are available to help the patient know what they owe, why they owe it, and who they owe it to. Then, to set them up for the best chance of being able to pay their bills. Patients don’t know or care that the appointment reminder system might be a different company than the scheduling system or the patient billing system.

Providers that are being successful in this area are the ones that step back and think about the entire patient experience from beginning to end, giving the patients the right information at the right time to take the right action. That’s really the key.

How does EHR integration work?

We focus on helping our providers collect payments. We are super proud of the fact that we’ve been integrated into Epic, as a great example, for more than 15 years. We’ve done so in all of their native workflows. 

From a provider standpoint, we are embedded in all of the workflows of the EHR, Epic as a great example. They see that as a great experience and greater opportunity to collect payments. It becomes more streamlined workflows for the provider’s patients. It allows centralized reporting for analytics across locations. On the patient side, they have greater information, which is greater cost transparency, and simpler flexible payment options. It’s all within the native workflows, which helps make reconciliation seamless.

How are providers implementing propensity to pay and payment plans?

Most of all of those tools exist in the EHRs, so from my vantage point, I’m making sure that my solutions are embedded into all of those collection points. When they get that that pre-estimate, if they want to make a payment, I’m providing the tool and the access for that provider to collect that. If they want to wait until after service, I’m providing the tool in that omni-channel environment to make that payment. I’m making sure that all payment methodologies are captured, whether it’s Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, PayPal, or ACH.

How will AI impact your business?

It’s growing exponentially. I expect it to play a larger part, exponentially, quite honestly. We’ll see it in the service side. We’ll see it in our development side. It is exciting and we’re absolutely diving into it and analyzing everything we can.

What will be important to the company over the next two or three years?

We are going to continue to advance our products so that they remain on the cutting edge of being seamless and secure. It always starts with security. We’re going to make sure that we know where the puck is going as it relates to whatever is the next form of card payment. What’s the next Venmo or Apple Pay that’s coming around the corner that the next generation of payers want to use? We’ll make sure that we invest in that technology.

We see healthcare providers heading in the right direction. We’re happy to be a part of it. To summarize the ways that they could continue to help build a path to better collections of patient payments, continue to think of the journey from beginning to end of the whole patient experience. Provide those cost estimates upfront, support the flexible payment methods, provide those omni-channel payment options, ensure that the secure payment storage for future treatments and recurring billing, and continue to communicate early and often. That’s the best thing we can do.

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Readers Write: Healthcare Cyber Resilience in 2025: Why “Good” Isn’t Good Enough

May 12, 2025 Readers Write Comments Off on Readers Write: Healthcare Cyber Resilience in 2025: Why “Good” Isn’t Good Enough

Healthcare Cyber Resilience in 2025: Why “Good” Isn’t Good Enough
By Chad Alessi

Chad Alessi, MS, MBA is managing director of cybersecurity at CTG.

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Ninety-two percent of healthcare organizations have experienced at least one cyberattack in the past year. More than half saw disruptions to patient care, and nearly a third reported increased mortality rates as a result. These aren’t just statistics, they’re a wake-up call for the entire industry. The healthcare sector is under siege, and the stakes are nothing less than patient safety, operational continuity, and public trust.

Yet despite the relentless barrage of ransomware, phishing, and supply chain attacks, many healthcare leaders still describe their organizations’ cyber resilience as merely “good” or “average.” An April 2025 CHIME Executive Member Survey, representing 42 healthcare organizations across the US, reveals a sector that is investing more and learning fast. But they are still struggling to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated adversaries who continuously adapt and exploit new vulnerabilities.

While healthcare organizations are dedicating more resources to cybersecurity than ever before, increased spending does not always translate to greater protection. The data shows a sector that is reactive, not proactive, with stronger confidence in threat detection than vital capabilities in response and recovery.

Key findings from the CHIME survey include:

  • Most organizations consider their cyber resilience as “good,” but few report achieving excellence. A significant minority still self-identify as average or below average, especially in recovery capabilities.
  • Confidence is highest in IT teams’ 24×7 threat detection but drops sharply for non-IT staff and business leaders. This gap is critical when rapid, cross-functional response is needed.
  • Investment priorities are clear — AI-driven threat detection, incident response playbooks, modern Security Operations Centers (SOCs), employee training, and supply chain risk management.

Technology alone is not enough to secure healthcare’s digital front lines. The survey highlights how internal barriers, most notably persistent budget constraints, continue to hinder progress, even as the cost of cyber incidents rises.

Executive support and understanding of cybersecurity are often lacking, making it difficult to establish the governance and strategic direction that are needed for resilience. Many organizations also face a shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals, and legacy IT infrastructure further complicates efforts to modernize defenses.

The complexity of healthcare systems and associated data adds another layer of difficulty, as organizations try to keep up with a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Ultimately, these human and organizational factors can be just as critical as any technical vulnerability.

The future impact of these human vulnerabilities is impossible to assess as bad actors continue to evolve their attacks and new technologies create new opportunities for disruption. This uncertainty was top-of-mind for survey respondents who pointed to a new breed of threats that are rapidly gaining ground.

AI-powered cyberattacks — including deepfakes, generative phishing, and sophisticated social engineering — have emerged as top concerns, as attackers use artificial intelligence to automate and personalize their tactics. Supply chain vulnerabilities are also front and center, with organizations increasingly dependent on third-party vendors that may not have robust security measures in place.

Ransomware continues to be a major concern, especially as attackers shift to encryption-less tactics that threaten to expose sensitive data rather than simply lock it down. Meanwhile, advanced phishing attacks that are capable of bypassing even multi-factor authentication are making it harder than ever to protect critical systems and patient information.

The consequences of these attacks are not confined to the IT department. When hospital systems go down, the effects ripple through every aspect of care delivery. Delays in procedures and tests become common, and critical patient information can become inaccessible at the worst possible moment. The survey and supporting research show just how serious these impacts can be:

  • 69% of affect organizations reported disruption to patient care.
  • More than 50% saw delays in procedures and tests, while 25% linked attacks to increased patient mortality.
  • Supply chain attacks were most likely to disrupt care, with 82% of those affected reporting direct patient impact.

These results underscore the dire need for healthcare organizations to conduct more training to prepare all staff, not just IT, in the event of a disruption. While many organizations deliver basic training or tabletop exercises, few extend these programs beyond IT staff. This is a missed opportunity, as rapid, coordinated response across all departments is essential for minimizing the impact of attacks on patient care.

The survey also found ample opportunity to improve communications during disruptions, which also has a direct impact on restoring patient care. Confidence in incident response communications, both for staff and patients, is mixed, with many organizations expressing uncertainty about whether their plans are up to date, comprehensive, tested, and validated under real-world conditions.

What should healthcare leaders prioritize when it comes to addressing the potential impact of cyber disruptions on patient care?

  • Elevate cyber resilience to a board-level priority. Executive leaders must drive strategy, governance, and response readiness across the organization.
  • Invest in both technology and talent. AI-driven defenses and modern SOCs are critical, but so are skilled personnel and a culture of cyber awareness.
  • Expand training and incident response exercises to all staff, not just IT. Everyone has a role to play in defending patient safety.

Healthcare’s cyber battle will continue to escalate. While the sector is making progress, “good” is no longer good enough. To safeguard patients, protect data, and ensure operational continuity, organizations must adopt a proactive mindset and prioritize both technical innovation and human expertise to create truly resilient operations.

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Morning Headlines 5/12/25

May 11, 2025 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 5/12/25

Virtual chronic care company Omada Health files for IPO

Virtual care provider Omada Health files for an IPO, reporting a $44 million loss on $170 million in 2024 revenue.

FDA Approves Teal Health’s Teal Wand –The First and Only At-Home Self-Collection Device for Cervical Cancer Screening, Introducing a Comfortable Alternative to In-Person Screening

The FDA approves the Teal Wand, a prescription device that lets average-risk women collect a cervical cancer screening sample at home, mail it in, and review results via telehealth.

CompuGroup Medical and CVC plan delisting – public delisting offer announced by CVC

Global health IT company CompuGroup Medical will move forward with delisting from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange as part of investor CVC Capital’s take-private acquisition deal first announced last December.

Navy’s Military Sealift Command Upgrades IT to Ensure Health Care Continuity

The US Navy’s Military Sealift Command is in the process of upgrading its IT infrastructure, including linking the US Naval Ship Mercy to the federal MHS Genesis EHR.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 5/12/25

Monday Morning Update 5/12/25

May 11, 2025 News 3 Comments

Top News

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Virtual care provider Omada Health files for an IPO, reporting a $44 million loss on $170 million in 2024 revenue.

The company posted strong revenue growth and a narrower net loss compared to 2023.

Co-founder and CEO Sean Duffy has led Omada since 2011, following stints as a Medgadget blog contributor and developer of Excel training tools. He dropped out of Harvard’s medical and business schools in 2010.


Reader Comments

From Not Pratap Sarker: “Re: Oak Street Health. Moving away from Greenway’s EHR and RCM services. This is Greenway’s largest customer. Their EHR Canopy currently sits on top of GW.” Unverified. I’ve emailed Greenway’s media contact. UPDATE: Oak Street is moving to Epic. Thanks to Brendan Keeler for sending a link to details. Oak Street is also listed on Epic’s UserWeb.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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The top responses from last week’s poll suggest that the best sales and marketing activity is to let your product and support do the talking.

New poll to your right or here: For those over 50, what is the #1 thing you wish you had done differently? I’ve run this question a couple of times over the years, hopefully giving the under-50 folks time to replot their course if needed. I’m sure they would also benefit from an explanatory poll comment if you are so inclined.


Thanks to the volunteers who contributed to the first of my revived Executive Watercooler frontlines report. If you’re in a decision-making role at a health system, ACO, or hospital-owned medical group; serve as a CMIO, CNIO, or clinical informaticist; lead a health system IT organization; or work as a digital health executive, you’re welcome to join them. You’ll get a monthly question by email to which you just click “reply” with your answer.

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Alabama teacher Ms. H sent some photos from her elementary school class, for which reader donations funded STEM-based centers.


Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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The FDA approves the Teal Wand, a prescription device that lets average-risk women collect a cervical cancer screening sample at home, mail it in, and review results via telehealth. Shipping begins in June and the company is seeking coverage from insurers.

Kouper Health, which offers AI-powered tools to manage post-discharge care transitions and reduce readmissions, raises $10 million in funding. Co-founder and CEO Salman Ali, MBA, previously co-founded the at-home sleep apnea testing company GetSnooze.

Nordic-owned Healthtech opens Canadian offices in Halifax, Montreal, and Vancouver.

Definitive Healthcare reports Q1 results: revenue down 7%, EPS $0.05 versus $0.08, beating estimates for both. DH shares rose 31% on the news, valuing the company at $398 million. They’re down 29% in the past 12 months.

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Former Theranos CEO and current federal inmate Elizabeth Holmes is reportedly advising her partner Billy Evans – a hotel heir and father of their two children — on his new medical testing AI startup. The company is raising funds to develop what it calls “the future of diagnostics” and “a radically new approach to health testing” for “human health optimization.” A recent patent claims that the technology can analyze sweat, urine, saliva, and small blood samples. That’s the happy couple above in pre-incarceration days with their husky Balto, which Holmes insisted was a wolf and whose eventual disappearance she blamed on a mountain lion that carried him off.


Sales

  • University of Iowa Health Care will implement Visage Imaging’s Visage 7 in a $13 million contract.

People

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The FDA hires Jeremy Walsh (Booz Allen Hamilton) as its first chief AI officer.

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Intermountain Health promotes Tamara Moores Todd, MD to chief health informatics officer and Jason McClellan, RN, MBA to chief clinical informatics officer.

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Tiffany Hodgins, MSHI (Health Catalyst) joins Sacvalley Medshare as chief technology and quality officer.

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Jay Scholes (Veradigm) joins Advantmed as VP of sales.


Announcements and Implementations

Black Book Research overhauls its healthcare IT research model, adding AI-driven real-time sentiment analysis, redesigned KPIs, continuous survey pilots, and broader access to reports that are neither paywalled nor vendor-sponsored.

A year-long independent study finds that use of an AI assistant – Navina’s AI Copilot in this analysis – reduced clinical review time for complex visits by 40%, decreased physician burnout by 32%, and improved value-based performance as measured by Risk Adjustment Factor and Star quality ratings.

Nova Scotia Health delays the go-live of its Oracle Cerner Canada system until December, following its 10-year, $260 million agreement that was signed in February 2023. No reason was provided.


Sponsor Updates

  • Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new case study titled “Northeast Georgia Health System’s Cloud-First Transformation Journey.”
  • PerfectServe announces the winners of its 2025 Nurses of Note Awards Program.
  • RLDatix signs a Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi to develop a patient safety system using its technology.
  • Sonifi Health will exhibit at the Texas Regional HIMSS Conference May 12-14 in Grapevine.
  • TeamBuilder will present at The Millenium Alliance Transformation Assembly May 13-14 in Dallas.
  • A new Wolters Kluwer Health survey finds that nursing schools will more than double their use of generative AI over the next two to three years.

The 2025 MedTech Breakthrough Award winners include the following HIStalk sponsors:

  • Capital Rx’s Judi Health (best insurtech solution).
  • CliniComp (EHR innovation award).
  • Timely by DrFirst (best overall patient engagement platform).
  • Elsevier ClinicalKey AI (AI innovation award).
  • Inovalon’s Social Drivers of Health Market Insights (best data visualization solution).
  • Navina (best use of AI in healthcare).
  • SmarterDx (best overall healthcare operations solution).
  • Symplr (best healthcare big data platform).
  • TrustCommerce, a Sphere company (healthcare payments innovation award),
  • Waystar (best overall healthcare payments solution provider).
  • WellSky (best home healthcare solution).

Blog Posts


Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
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Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Executive Watercooler: Projects that Surprisingly Delivered Real Value

May 10, 2025 Advisory Panel Comments Off on Executive Watercooler: Projects that Surprisingly Delivered Real Value

The HIStalk Executive Watercooler is a group of hospital CIOs, hospital CMIOs, practicing physicians, and a few vendor executives who have volunteered to provide their thoughts on topical industry issues. I’ll seek their input every month or so on an important news developments and also ask the non-vendor members about their recent experience with vendors. You are welcome to suggest an issue for their consideration.

If you work for a hospital or practice, you are welcome to join the panel. I am grateful for the help of members 

This question this time: What technology project ended up delivering real value even though you were skeptical at first?


The availability of notes and results through the patient portal has been a major plus for many patients, particularly for those with significant health conditions. It’s not perfect yet, especially for people with limited health literacy and for adolescents, where access and/or parental access is often blocked. But with appropriate introduction to the portal and efforts to help engage patients to use the portal, it can be a big help in coordination of care, identifying errors in records, and reducing the need for phone contacts for normal results. 


Clinical pathways. I thought they would get ignored completely. I underestimated our system CMO’s drive to put it on the incentive compensation matrix. Now, it’s still a performance based metric as opposed to actually improving, say, mortality, associated with, say, a CHF admission. But it’s a start, and better than a lot of other things we take on.


Ambient listening scribes.


In the fall of 2019, we began to pilot video visits for our integrated Behavioral Health program. We licensed Zoom for 50 users and spent the time and effort to integrate it with our Epic system. We had a total of six completed virtual BH visits during the three-month pilot period, so we were very skeptical about the adoption of virtual visits. Fast forward three months when the governor announced the COVID-19 shutdown in March 2020. All we had to do was ask Zoom to apply a license increase for our account and then train providers and their support staff on how to use virtual visits to provide urgent medical care and some age-appropriate well visits. We were able to pivot to virtual care in two weeks and were ready to continue caring for patients and families when the shutdown took effect. 


Electronic whiteboards in patient rooms. We implemented them in a children’s hospital and saw an immediate increase in patient engagement with the care team via the whiteboard. Often parents are asleep or taking a break when the team arrives in the room. The ability to leave questions or requests for the team was an immediate win. Accurate reporting of the care team by shift, goals for the day and other information prominently displayed without to log into a portal allowed the less tech savvy easy access to information.


In the past year, we implemented a new AI tool to crawl through all types of data in Epic ( including PDFs in blob server and other external documents) and create a master summary of patient’s clinical history. Goal was to do a better job of exposing critical data from many external sources (unstructured) that might be missed in rapid review of the chart before and during clinical encounter. My organization was asked to be an earlier adopter of this technology. I was skeptical that if there was a tool that could do this efficiently, due to my belief that if such a tool existed and delivered on its promise, every Epic customer in the country would be clamoring for it and that was not currently the case. We proceeding with contracting and have been running the application for about seven months and it is performing as promised, bringing significant value to our clinicians, helping address burnout, and improving the care we are delivering.


Most recent would be ambient listening AI. We are an Oracle Health customer and I had concerns about their solution’s usability and acceptance by physicians. While still not perfect, we are seeing great results and receiving glowing reviews. We are still reviewing and measuring outcomes but expect to be able to tell a very positive story.


We had an AI/LLM project that was focused on evaluating the full reporting ecosystem and identifying redundancies and gaps as well as filling in any gaps. It was far faster and more effective than I originally thought it would be.


One thing that comes to mind is when we rolled out Ninjio cybersecurity training. I wasn’t skeptical of the technology, rather of user adoption. I was surprised how usually cynical clinicians responded to the short and entertaining videos and actually learned tactics to help keep us more secure.


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Morning Headlines 5/9/25

May 8, 2025 Headlines 1 Comment

Hinge Health says revenue increased 50% in first quarter — still no price range for IPO

Virtual physical therapy vendor Hinge Health updates its IPO prospectus with Q1 results, showing revenue up 50% to $124 million and a $17.1 million net profit.

Kouper Emerges from Stealth with $10M in Funding to Transform Transitions of Care

AI-powered care transition management startup Kouper launches with $10 million in funding.

Cedars-Sinai Launches Digital Innovation Hub to Advance Healthcare Solutions

Cedars-Sinai and Redesign Health launch an innovation center that pairs health system experts with startups to develop digital health solutions, with Cedars-Sinai serving as the first customer.

Israeli hospital to launch innovation hub in Mass.

Israel’s Sheba Medical Center will open a US office for its startup accelerator in Massachusetts, aiming for a Boston-area location.

News 5/9/25

May 8, 2025 News 4 Comments

Top News

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Persivia, a provider of data aggregation and AI-driven analytics, raises $107 million in funding.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: Foo Fighters, of which I’m far from a fan, but I’m obsessed with videos of Dave Grohl (also not a fan) bringing audience members up to play. Kiss Guy and Richard the Drummer will give rock star wannabes goose bumps. I’m also not a fan of sports, but I’m intrigued by YouTube videos and livestreams of the sports-adjacent antics of the Savannah Bananas


Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Virtual physical therapy vendor Hinge Health updates its IPO prospectus with Q1 results, showing revenue up 50% to $124 million and a $17.1 million net profit. The company announced IPO plans in March but hasn’t set a price range.

AI-powered clinical data abstraction vendor Carta Healthcare raises $18.25 million in Series B1 funding. Industry veterans who are on the executive team include Brent Dover (Medicity, Health Catalyst, and Commure) and Greg Miller (Healthlink, Medicity, and Health Catalyst).

WeightWatchers files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to eliminate $1.15 billion in debt. The company’s transformation plan includes creating a better digital experience for members and expanding its weight loss medication telehealth business.

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Cedars-Sinai and Redesign Health launch an innovation center that pairs health system experts with startups to develop digital health solutions, with Cedars-Sinai serving as the first customer. The focus will be specialty care access, personalized medicine, workflow intelligence, and provider-payer-patient coordination.

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Israel’s Sheba Medical Center will open a US office for its startup accelerator in Massachusetts, aiming for a Boston-area location. The accelerator has backed 100 startups, including three unicorns.

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Health and fitness wearable company Whoop releases new models that offer 14-day battery life, a heart screener with ECG whose data can be shared with doctors, daily blood pressure insights, and women’s hormonal insights. Membership costs $199 to $359 per year and includes the device and charger.


People

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Health Data Movers names David White (Nordic) business development executive.


Government and Politics

NIH will analyze Medicare and Medicaid claims data to study chronic disease, starting with autism.

President Trump’s replacement nominee for surgeon general has a health tech connection: Casey Means, MD — who dropped out of her residency and never practiced traditional medicine — is a co-founder of Levels, which offers AI-powered tracking of food intake, habits, and data from continuous glucose monitors for health optimization, weight management, and improving athletic performance. Subscription to the app is $199 per year, while adding the CGM and supplies adds $199 per month.


Privacy and Security

Masino discloses in an SEC filing that a cyberattack on April 27 is hampering its ability to ship orders.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signs an executive order that bans state agencies from collecting autism-related personal data unless it is required for care, compliance, or eligibility.


Other

An appeals court rejects the attempt by former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to have her 2022 fraud conviction overturned, leaving the Supreme Court as her last chance to reverse the 11-year sentence.


Sponsor Updates

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  • Clinical Architecture staff help sort 2,390 pounds of food at Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana.
  • Surescripts will present at Kroger Health’s Nourishing Change Conference May 13-15 in Cincinnati.
  • Black Book Research celebrates Women’s Health Month by releasing its free report, “Black Book of Women’s Health Information Technology and Software Innovations.”
  • Capital Rx releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “Empowering Plan Sponsors: Data Access & Analysis, with Bridget Mulvenna.”
  • Ellkay will exhibit at the 2025 MUSE Inspire Conference May 27-30 in Grapevine, TX.
  • Impact Advisors releases a new episode of its “Impactful AI” podcast titled “Synthetic Doppelgängers.”

Blog Posts


Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 5/8/25

May 8, 2025 Dr. Jayne 1 Comment

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Farewell, Skype, parting is such sweet sorrow. Not really, since I hadn’t used it in years. In fact, I had forgotten that I even had a Skype account and didn’t remember until I went to the website to try to grab a logo.

I exported my contacts and there were only three, which makes sense since it was a personal account and not the corporate one that I last used in 2018 or so. Supposedly all contacts and conversations were ported to Teams, but I didn’t see them there. Skype was founded in 2003 and headquartered in Luxembourg, which I don’t think I knew when I was a user. It just goes to show that no matter how cool you think your solution is now, there’s a chance that it won’t be around in a couple of decades.

I had a routine trip to the dentist recently and was pleased to see that they had incorporated some newer evidence-based recommendations into their treatment protocols. Apparently they have also upgraded their imaging system, because it’s now using AI to flag areas of concern on the images. I got a kick out of listening to the dental hygienist explain what the AI was doing and how the goal was just to draw the viewer’s eye to areas that needed additional attention and that the AI was not practicing dentistry.

She knows that I’m a physician, but probably not that I’m an informaticist. Regardless, I’m glad that she didn’t make assumptions about my knowledge and did the same educational talk she likely gives to all the patients. The AI flagged areas that I knew were already concerning, so at least it was concordant with my history. I enjoyed being able to see and discuss the images instead of how things used to be when x-rays were still on tiny pieces of film.

I also had a visit to a new consulting physician and was reminded how difficult it is sometimes to try to put yourself in a “just be the patient” mindset when you know what the best practices are in the industry. The receptionist was friendly, but jumped straight into some screening questions that were straight out of 2021, including whether I’ve traveled outside the US recently and whether I’ve been exposed to anyone who has been sick in the last 30 days.

The answer to the latter was, “I’m sure, given all the bugs that are going around,” but it’s really a nuisance question unless you’re asking about particular kinds of illness. I was around someone who later tested positive for Influenza B, but that was two weeks ago and I’m asymptomatic, but I doubt the receptionist wants to get to that level of history. I’m also sure I’ve been exposed to COVID-positive people given the wastewater numbers in my area, but it seems that no one is testing at home any more and people are likely just walking around with viral symptoms. She also asked if I had been positive for COVID in the last ten days, which was more relevant, but again if people aren’t testing, they’re unlikely to know.

The office visit was uneventful, although the practice could benefit from a few patient-centric tweaks. The exam room had a bulletin board with a handful of flyers attached, but it was across the room from the patient chair, so there was no way to read it without walking over to it. At that point, you would be behind the door if someone opened it. The flyers were also bad photocopies in small font, so they weren’t terribly welcoming to patients who need readers or other visual aids.

There was only one patient chair, leaving no place for family to sit and no place to put a purse or tote other than the floor, which I don’t like in a medical facility. The physician asked about my job, and once I said “clinical informatics,” I got an earful about his dislike for ambient documentation. Apparently he’s been burned by hallucinations and the need to spend excess time doing edits, so he is phasing it out in practice. He’s in a subspecialty where every detail can have meaning, so I’m not surprised that he’s meticulous as far as his note content.

After the consultation, I was sent across the hall to the hospital-owned lab and made a beeline for the “sign in here” poster that points to a clipboard. The receptionist interrupted her conversation with another patient, turned to me, and said “You can use the kiosk.” She pointed over my shoulder to a kiosk that was on the wall behind me, next to the door that I had just come through, but positioned in a way that I wouldn’t have seen it entering the room. I think a sign that says “please check-in on the kiosk behind you” might be in order, since I heard her do the same thing several times while I was waiting.

I was also unamused to see a dirty waiting room with crumbs and dirt on the floor at 7 a.m. If one were giving the benefit of the doubt, one could think there might have been a patient eating a messy breakfast in there. But based on the distribution of the mess, it’s more likely that whoever is mopping is just pushing things back under the chairs since it was also all over the waiting room. I guess I’m just a curmudgeon expecting healthcare facilities to be clean. Still, I know from my leadership roles that it’s difficult to hire these days and also difficult to ensure quality. Still, if I were this facility’s manager I would be embarrassed.

From there, I went to a non-medical appointment, where I was also asked to check in via a kiosk. This time it was more visible to the average customer. I got a kick out of the fact that the “title” picklist in their system included such options as “crown princess,” “baroness,” and “viscount” and was very much tempted to use one of them just to see if it would raise eyebrows. Since I’m generally a rule-follower, I went with a more appropriate choice.

By the time I finished that appointment, I was already getting lab notifications from my patient portal, which was pretty surprising given the kinds of tests that were ordered. Some of the more obscure ones actually resulted faster than the standard chemistry panels, which is unusual. I suppose the speed and accuracy of the results might outweigh the state of the waiting room, but I guess that’s just healthcare in today’s world.

What’s your definition of clean? Do your facility’s floors shine like the top of the Chrysler building? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 5/8/25

May 7, 2025 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 5/8/25

Carta Healthcare Secures $18.25 Million in Series B1 Funding to Accelerate AI-Powered Clinical Data Abstraction and Analytics

AI-powered clinical abstraction technology vendor Carta Healthcare raises $18.25 million in a Series B1 funding round that was led by UPMC Enterprises.

NIH, CMS Partner to Advance Understanding of Autism Through Secure Access to Select Medicare and Medicaid Data

NIH researchers will look at the Medicare and Medicaid data of patients diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder to better understand its causes and impacts as part of a previously announced research program that will ultimately gather data on a variety of chronic conditions.

Tellihealth Introduces New Brand Identity to Lead the Future of Connected Care

Chronic care management and remote patient monitoring company Accuhealth rebrands to Tellihealth following last summer’s acquisition of competitor Signallamp Health.

WeightWatchers Takes Strategic Action to Eliminate $1.15 Billion of Debt, Strengthening Financial Position for Long-Term Growth and Profitability

WeightWatchers files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in an effort to get rid of debt and ultimately expand its digital prescription weight-loss management and medication delivery business.

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Healthcare AI News 5/7/25

May 7, 2025 Healthcare AI News Comments Off on Healthcare AI News 5/7/25

News

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UTMB is running AI on all CT scans to generate cardiac risk scores, flagging 5–10 of the 450 monthly scans for follow-up intervention. Chief AI Officer Peter McCaffrey, MD, MS says,

What I love about this is that AI doesn’t have to do anything superhuman. It’s performing a low intellect task, but at very high volume, and that still provides a lot of value, because we’re constantly finding things that we miss. We know we miss stuff. Before, we just didn’t have the tools to go back and find it.

Nvidia releases Parakeet 2, a lightweight, open source transcription model that runs on just 2GB of RAM and is free for commercial use, making it ideal for building transcription tools, voice assistants, or real-time subtitles.


Business

UnitedHealth Group is running 1,000 AI applications in production that summarize data, help process claims, run customer-facing chatbots, and help its 20,000 software engineers write code. The company says it won’t use AI to deny claims.

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AI-powered clinical abstraction technology vendor Carta Healthcare raises $18.25 million in a Series B1 funding round that was led by UPMC Enterprises.

Hippocratic AI enters the Japanese market with a Tokyo-based partner, launching the first Japanese-language healthcare agent for non-diagnostic tasks like scheduling, follow-ups, chronic care check-ins, and med adherence.


Research

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An Oxford study finds that while LLMs perform well on medical quizzes, they aren’t much help to non-experts who are making decisions. Users who relied on chatbots fared no better than those who Googled or guessed, mostly because they gave the technology incorrect or incomplete information about their situation. The authors warn against using chatbots as the front line of care.


Other

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Purdue’s College of Pharmacy launches a $500 online AI certificate program for healthcare professionals, offering 42 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits for physicians and 42 contact hours for pharmacists.

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Fiverr’s CEO candidly levels with employees about AI’s threat to their jobs and his. Meanwhile, my TIL term of the week is “vibe coder,” which describes someone who designs software by telling AI what they need, then letting it generate the code.


Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Sponsorship information.
Contact us.

Comments Off on Healthcare AI News 5/7/25

HIStalk Interviews G. Cameron Deemer, CEO, DrFirst

May 7, 2025 Interviews Comments Off on HIStalk Interviews G. Cameron Deemer, CEO, DrFirst

G. Cameron “Cam” Deemer is CEO of DrFirst of Rockville, MD.

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Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’ve been with the company for 21 years, as CEO for the last two and a half years. I started my career in the ministry, where I worked many years with churches in Arizona and did some time in Papua New Guinea working with Bible translation. I got into healthcare IT totally accidentally during the recession in 1992, when I came back to the US. I grew up here in the PBM industry. I worked for the old PCS Health Systems in Scottsdale and then building what eventually became Surescripts while I was at NDC Health. I have been with DrFirst ever since.

DrFirst is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. It has been a really interesting ride. The company was originally founded to eliminate what I would call technology friction for the doctor. I was the first product manager for this little 30-person company when I came here. The CEO and founder, Jim Chen, sat down with me and said, “Look, Cam, you need to understand one thing. Here’s what I need you to do. I need you to make sure that DrFirst is number three in the e-prescribing space. That’s your target.”

I was like, “Why would you want to be number three?” He said, “Any industry always ends up with three players. I don’t care if we’re number one or two, I just want to be number three.” With that challenge, I started my career at DrFirst. 

We have developed a huge footprint over time. We are handling scripts for about 550,000 doctors a quarter. We provide the e-prescribing back end for 275 EHRs. We are actively engaging 6 million patients a week for various programs, most of them adherence related. We have always been an innovative company that is trying to solve what we think are the real, gritty problems in healthcare.

You said in a recent article that the pharmacist’s role in patient care was limited by the original design of the electronic prescribing network. Do you see that changing, particularly given the struggles of the drugstore chains?

When I joined PCS in 1992, the company was already experimenting with e-prescribing. They were doing some of the early seminal work of getting some doctors to use the system. I believe at the time that they were using email to send prescriptions to Walgreens, and then the pharmacist would pick it up from the email. In those days, there were a lot of early attempts to do e-prescribing in different ways and PCS wasn’t the only company involved. That was eventually all destroyed by a patent troll who went through the industry suing everybody. Then that industry had to reinvent itself. 

While that was all going on, PCS selected me to be their representative on the script task force at NCPDP when it was first put together. I was one of the three original co-chairs working on SCRIPT 1.0 and continued to be loosely involved with e-prescribing at PCS. I was thrilled to death when we announced the creation of RxHub in collaboration with ESI, Medco and PCS at the time. We built that system based on technology that already existed, the pharmacy claims switching technology. 

It made all the sense in the world. The PBMs had already transformed pharmacy, and healthcare IT around pharmacy, by fully digitizing the claims process. It worked great. We went from paper claims to terminals and then PC or mainframe-based transmission of claims through a central switch. It was great, so you can imagine that when they turned their attention to e-prescribing and said let’s digitize that, they had every belief they could do it. They had what they believed was the right technology, and they built it. 

When Surescripts saw what was happening, they decided they had to do the same thing and not let the PBMs cut them off from the doctors. So they also implemented e-prescribing based on claims switch technology, which I had been helping develop while I was at NDC Health. When I came to DrFirst, RxHub was already there. Surescripts was already there. DrFirst was working to get the doctors to adopt e-prescribing. None of us had any time to really think about it.

This just seemed like the right solution. It did what it was supposed to do. It let 600 participants on the EHR side talk to 600 participants on the pharmacy side and solved that many-to-many problem. It converted the prescription from writing into a digital format so it could be picked up on the other end and imported into systems. It accomplished its goals. 

We are 20 years down the road now, and it is just now that the cracks are starting to show, as people are saying, “This doesn’t quite work right. This isn’t quite what we need.” It has become a real cap on innovation in the industry, the way the e-prescribing network works. Fundamentally, the problem is that it’s a technology that was designed for pharmacy claims.

A pharmacy claim is a financial instrument. It’s a request for reimbursement from the pharmacy, an accounts receivable, essentially. It goes to a PBM, who runs it against a contract in the adjudication process and promises to pay. They send back an accounts payable transaction to the pharmacy so they can reconcile that to the accounts receivable that they sent forward. So it’s basically two participants, a pharmacy and a PBM. It’s based on a contract, and it’s a mathematical process. There’s nothing more to it than how it matches against the contract.

Prescriptions are totally different. A prescription is a clinical order, not a financial instrument. It is initially ordered by a highly trained clinician who has evaluated a patient, considered their current problem, their ongoing problems, their other treatments, and the other medications they’re taking and then making a decision based on what they know about that patient. Not just clinically, but also all the other factors, such as what they can afford and what they are willing to do.

Then they send that clinical order to another highly trained professional at the pharmacy, who would like to be able to evaluate that, add their thinking to it, and interact with the provider who wrote the script in case something needs to change. Eventually that’s filled by the pharmacist and the patient needs to pick it up, so the patient is another participant here who maybe doesn’t know whether their prior auth has been approved, whether it’s ready at the pharmacy, and how badly they really need it.

There’s a lot that the patient also has to think about through this process. There’s also pharma, who really, really, really wants the drug to be filled at the pharmacy once it’s written. And there’s of course the PBM, who’s interested in getting as clean a script that ideally matches what they’re trying to do with the patient as well. You have five key participants in this process, all trying to work around a transaction that is flowing through something that was designed for claims, and it just doesn’t work. 

The biggest failure point is that the script arrives at the pharmacy with no context. The pharmacist can’t really do their job, the job they’ve been trained for, because all they get is the digital version of the script. We’ve been taking a look at that for many years. It was the recent FTC settlement with Surescripts that opened the opportunity for other networks to enter the market, so we have introduced our version, which includes the ability to carry the extra data needed with the transaction to establish rule sets by which we can manage workflow issues.

For instance, some scripts get to a pharmacy that the pharmacist is never going to be able to fill, so they have to call the doctor to get clarification. We can handle that on the front end, just based on a rule that says if you get a script like this, ask the doctor to correct it in these ways before it actually goes pharmacy. It saves the doctor a phone call, saves the pharmacy a phone call, and the patient has access to therapy more quickly.

The solution is freeing up the clinical order to be a clinical order and to have everything it needs to be processed without a lot of friction at the pharmacy.

Early e-prescribing was done on a standalone PC or terminal. How has it progressed to integrate back into the EHR?

You raise a good point that initially e-prescribing was standalone. Now it’s fully integrated into the EHR. It’s just part of the standard EHR workflow. 

What’s been done over the last several years is bringing more of the information the doctor needs to make a decision into that system. One is real-time benefit check, where you’re doing a pre-adjudication of the script to give the doctor an idea of what the impact will be on the patient when they show up at the pharmacy and having to pay for that prescription. Also giving the doctor the same information on alternative drugs that would also be applicable under the therapeutic class so the doc can make a more informed decision based on plan design. That has helped people avoid prior authorizations, so that the doctor can see one drug that requires prior auth, so I’ll go with the one that doesn’t. Along those lines, information about the patient’s plan has been useful.

What’s coming now is more information about the prior authorization question sets that the doctor needs to answer ahead of time. The ability to grab that information from the EHR and send it along with the request for the PA so that you don’t have to have back-and-forth between the doctor and the PBM to get the PA approved. A lot of what’s happening now is pulling information into the doctor’s office that would avoid them having to have phone calls or electronic back-and-forth with pharmacies or PBMs.

How are you looking at AI?

We definitely don’t believe that just slapping a chatbot on top of our existing stuff counts as AI. We’re actually trying to take a much deeper approach to it and go at it from three levels.

Probably most important and foundationally, we’re trying to train every single person in DrFirst to be comfortable with the concepts of AI. Comfortable with interacting with it to help them develop individual visions around how AI can be used to automate processes at the company, as well as be incorporated into our products to improve workflow for other people. So we’re starting with our people first. We move it then into the feature set of our products to make workflow better for the folks who use what we do. In other words, it becomes a feature.

We are just now starting to work on an actual product that is completely AI based. For us, the most important applications of AI are practical. We’ve been using it, actually for quite a while, for interoperability solutions that are e-prescribing. We’ll continue to expand focusing on AI’s ability to help people get work done quicker with more information and fewer redos and stuff like that.

What kinds of medication-related engagement do patients want or need?

Some interesting things are happening right now. Consumer engagement is really hot in healthcare. It has been interesting to watch how that is expressing itself out in the wild. This is one of the areas that we’re intensely interested in, but I probably should have said this earlier. We like to think of ourselves as productively contrarian. It doesn’t matter to us so much what other models are being built right now. We are more interested in what’s the right way to handle the situation. 

If you think about what happens with patients today, there’s a lot of activity around patient choice of pharmacy. What if the script is written for a patient, and then for some reason, the patient wants to go to a different pharmacy? I’m going to be passing this pharmacy on the way home. I’d rather pick it up there, or I found that I can get a consumer card that would be cheaper at this pharmacy than that pharmacy. There’s a lot of talk of use cases like that that aren’t really all that interesting because they’re probably fairly rare based on how people tend to develop habits and how they pick their pharmacy in the first place. I usually think of that as trying to come up with a solution where there’s no problem.

But there are other more significant things. Patients who have important drugs that they need to receive, but the script has been written to the wrong pharmacy. For instance, a specialty drug that has a limited distribution network is sent to their regular retail pharmacy which may be reluctant to give it up, because if they can special order the drug, they can probably make a decent profit on it. But the patient’s going to have to wait much longer than they would if it just were going to the right pharmacy in the first place. Being able to alert the patient that the drug has been sent to a pharmacy that can’t fill it for them immediately is an issue.

Another example would be that the patient shows up at the pharmacy and the pharmacy says, “We don’t have that in stock. Give us until Wednesday and we’ll have it.” The patient may not want to wait till Wednesday and they need to have it filled at a different pharmacy if they can find one that does have it in stock. The ability to switch that script without having to rely on the pharmacy being willing to give it up, or a doctor being willing to rewrite the script to a different pharmacy, that’s all friction from the patient side.

You see a few different solutions in the industry. For instance, having the doctor write the script to a company that will then show the patient on an app that they’ve downloaded that a prescription has been written for them, then giving them a choice of pharmacies so the patient can pick a pharmacy. Another model might be to persuade the doctor to write the script to a non-dispensing pharmacy, which would then determine the best place for the patient to fill it and then reach out to the patient in different ways to give the patient the option of which pharmacy to use.

These solutions are pretty hot right now. There’s a lot of talk about those. But they suffer from the fact that they require everybody to be out of workflow. The doctor has to not use the default pharmacy, they have to write to a pharmacy that’s not actually going to fill the script, but it’s going to get the patient to fill the script. The patient has to download something and go through an extra step , where otherwise they would just show up at the pharmacy. The physician is out of the workflow and the patient is out of workflow. Typically the folks that are doing these kind of models struggle with volume, and no wonder since everybody’s being required to do something unusual.

Another dirty little secret is why, in the early days of e-prescribing, NCPDP picked this model instead of a more European model, where the script would go to the cloud, the patient would just show up at whatever pharmacy they wanted, and the pharmacy would pull it down from the cloud. That was actually considered in the early days of the SCRIPT standard, and it was promoted at the time by a representative from the University of Alabama.

I remember the meeting where this happened. Everybody else in the meeting disagreed with that approach because they were trying to solve for the adherence problem, that patients are given scripts and are then trusted to deliver that piece of paper to the pharmacy. That creates one more barrier for the patient actually getting the script filled. The pharmacist isn’t doing their job, the doctor’s not getting the results they want, and pharma certainly isn’t getting revenue from the drugs being filled.  So instead, they decided to have it sent to the pharmacy. That will set up an expectation in the patient. They need to go pick it up. It can create a little work for the pharmacist because if the patient doesn’t show up, they have to return it to stock, which is a pain in the neck. 

Nonetheless, it has worked really well. It did in fact improve adherence dramatically. Patients are much more used to picking up their drugs now than they used to be. When we go to a model where the patient becomes the delivery mechanism again, you’re just stepping back into the past to a time when compliance was happening at a lower rate. First-fill adherence was lower than it is today and patients weren’t getting on therapy. We believe the right way to do this is to keep it all in workflow. Let the doctor write the script and let the patient interact with the physician directly whenever the script can’t be filled for some reason. Don’t force the patient into making a selection if they don’t want to make a selection, because if they don’t make one, nothing happens. Make sure the script still gets to the pharmacy.

What will be most important to the company over the next two or three years?

Number one is that we are reinventing the e-prescribing platform. We’re going to give the industry what it deserves. Doing that is very important to us.

We are working to eliminate all the points of friction in the specialty drug workflow. That will become increasingly important with new developments in medicine.

Those are the two challenges we’re taking on right now.

Comments Off on HIStalk Interviews G. Cameron Deemer, CEO, DrFirst

Morning Headlines 5/7/25

May 6, 2025 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 5/7/25

Infinx Acquires i3 Verticals’ Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management Business

Patient access and RCM company Infinx acquires the RCM business of i3 Verticals, its second acquisition in two months.

CareCloud Delivers Growth and Strong Cash Flow in Q1 2025, Advances AI and Acquisition Strategy

CareCloud shares jump on the company’s Q1 results: revenue up 6%, EPS –$0.04 versus – $0.10.

HealthStream Announces First Quarter 2025 Results

HealthStream reports Q1 results: revenue up 1%, EPS $0.14 versus $0.17, falling slightly short of expectations for both and sending shares down nearly 20% Tuesday.

VA must ‘put onus back on Oracle’ to right EHR deployment, secretary says

VA Secretary Doug Collins tells lawmakers that he is working to streamline communication between the department and Oracle Health, citing the decision to condense the number of decision-making committees from eight or nine down to just one that communicates directly with the vendor.

LifeMD Reports First Quarter 2025 Results and Raises Full-Year 2025 Guidance

LifeMD reports Q1 results: revenue up 49%, EPS $0.01 versus –$0.19, valuing the virtual primary care company at $342 million.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 5/7/25

News 5/7/25

May 6, 2025 News 10 Comments

Top News

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CareCloud reports Q1 results: revenue up 6%, EPS –$0.04 versus – $0.10. Shares rose 26% Tuesday, valuing the company at $93 million.

The company said last week that its newly created, 50-member AI team will have 500 employees by the end of the year.


Reader Comments

From Nasty Parts: “Re: Epic. Are they getting too big, a la UnitedHealth Group? Smaller software vendors are constantly squeezed by Epic invading their solution, or telling prospects that Epic’s basic system is good enough or that they have a solution on the product roadmap. I think UHG will be broken up at some point and Epic will have 75% of the market in 6-7 years. Are we allowing a monopoly to be created?” Epic, unlike UnitedHealth Group, is giving the market what it wants. The alternative to “allowing” a monopoly is “disallowing” it, for which no legal or practical grounds exist. It’s hard to justify interfering with buyer preference in the absence of consumer harm. My take:

  • The acute care EHR market is a legal oligopoly, with Epic its dominant player that keeps increasing market share.
  • About half of US hospitals use Epic, which is not a monopoly and certainly not one that has provably competed unfairly.
  • Epic’s mega-suite strategy echoes Meditech’s early model: tightly integrated systems from a single vendor, which theoretically lowers both cost and risk.
  • That approach is now supercharged by Epic’s deep financial and engineering resources, which have allowed it to push into MyChart Bedside, the Cheers CRM, Hello World messaging, Secure Chat for clinicians, and its sprawling analytics suite. Each new product puts Epic head-to-head with a vendor who built it first and maybe better.
  • Beyond making its products attractive, Epic also controls the interoperability and app store access of its potential competitors.
  • Epic’s dominance, combined with the massive time, expertise, and capital that would be needed to build a competing system, makes new entrants unlikely.
  • There’s no sign that the federal government has an interest in challenging Epic’s position. Dominant players in other industries (Adobe, Intuit, Salesforce, Bloomberg, Shopify) have faced little pushback for similar market control.
  • I agree with your major point. Epic is not a monopoly and has done nothing illegal, but its dominance in a critical industry sector creates system risk in providing a single point of failure and a potential bottleneck to innovation if the company gets lazy or does something as a money grab, like going public.
  • Until regulators or customers decide to penalize popularity, Epic’s dominance is a feature of the landscape, not a bug.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HealthStream reports Q1 results: revenue up 1%, EPS $0.14 versus $0.17, falling slightly short of expectations for both and sending shares down nearly 20% Tuesday.

LifeMD reports Q1 results: revenue up 49%, EPS $0.01 versus –$0.19, valuing the virtual primary care company at $342 million.


Sales

  • MetroHealth (OH) will implement AI-enhanced inpatient and ambulatory clinical workflow solutions from Pieces Technologies.

People

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Revenue cycle solutions vendor Millennia hires Scott Pattillo, MS (Homecare Homebase) as CEO.


Announcements and Implementations

Wilson Health (OH) implements Epic.

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OhioHealth Southeastern Medical Center goes live on Epic.

A small Canadian study finds that the medical records ecosystem is a web of commercial data brokers, for-profit providers, and pharmaceutical companies, each of which helps turn patient records into profitable commercial assets. Notably missing from that loop are patients and their best interests. The authors warn that unsupervised distribution of data to drug companies could give them even more leverage to push high-margin, patent-protected drugs.


Government and Politics

Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-IL), the ranking member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Technology Modernization Subcommittee, warns that federal cutbacks could impact the project’s timeline and success. She notes that some of the VA’s recently cancelled projects are related to the EHR project and some EHR modernization staffers have been laid off or accepted a deferred resignation offer.

A poll finds that fewer than half of Americans have any confidence that federal agencies ensure that safety and efficacy of drugs and vaccines, while even fewer are confident that the federal government could respond well to infection disease outbreaks. The authors found that the level of confidence is shaped by partisan perspectives.


Other

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Dr. Jayne’s favorite celebrity-backed subscription lab test company, Function Health, acquires full-body scanning MRI company Ezra. Function will now offer a 22-minute full-body scan for the low, low price of $500 – a third of the cost of Ezra’s lowest-tier offering. A 47-minute scan costs just $2,000. Function co-founder and CMO Mark Hyman, MD says that “[w]hat used to be the domain of the wealthy is now accessible to everybody, including comprehensive imaging.”


Sponsor Updates

  • AGS Health will exhibit at CHIACON25 June 1-4 in Long Beach, CA.
  • DrFirst wins a Silver Stevie Award in the customer service department of the year category at the annual American Business Awards.
  • CereCore releases a new podcast titled “Why IT Governance Leads to Innovation and Growth.”
  • Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of “The Informonster Podcast” titled “How Velox Helps Payers Measure Data Usability.”
  • Cordea Consulting partners with Amazon Web Services to help healthcare organizations implement Epic’s Isolated Recovery Environment.
  • Crossings Healthcare Solutions parent company UHS names former Cerner executive Chris Vernaci associate VP of technology ventures.
  • Altera Digital Health announces the activation of Sunrise Surgical Care, its integrated operating theatre system, at Latrobe Regional Health in Australia.
  • Redox integrates IntelePeer’s AI-powered automation platform for medical and dental practices with its interoperability network.
  • Netsmart adds automated auditing capabilities to its Bells AI platform.
  • Capital Rx releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “What’s New with Medicaid PBM? With Jessin Joseph, PharmD, MBA.”

Blog Posts


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Morning Headlines 5/6/25

May 5, 2025 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 5/6/25

TeleMed2U Acquires Sigma Tactical Wellness, Expanding Virtual Specialty Care Access to Law Enforcement and First Responders

Specialty-focused virtual healthcare company TeleMed2U acquires Sigma Tactical Wellness, which specializes in cardiac risk detection for public safety personnel.

Weave Communications to Acquire TrueLark, Accelerating AI-Powered Front Office Automation

Patient engagement and payments vendor Weave will acquire virtual receptionist software company TrueLark for $35 million.

ENT Partners Acquires Currence Physician Solutions

Practice management company ENT Partners acquires medical billing and financial analytics company Currence Physician Solutions.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 5/6/25

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