Healthcare analytics and provider performance transparency company Embold Health increases its Series B funding round to $23 million, bringing its total raised to $53 million.
The Nashville–based company offers solutions for physicians, payers, employers, and benefits companies. Founder and CEO Daniel Stein, MD previously served as chief medical officer for Walmart Care Clinics.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Curation Health. The Annapolis, MD-based company was founded by a team of healthcare veterans and clinicians to help providers and health plans effectively navigate the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care. Its advanced clinical decision support platform for value-based care drives more accurate risk adjustment and improved quality program performance by curating relevant insights from disparate sources and delivering them in real time to clinicians and care teams. With Curation Health, clinicians enjoy a streamlined, comprehensive clinical documentation process that enables better clinical and financial outcomes while simultaneously reducing clinical administrative burdens on providers. The company takes pride in combining the flexibility and speed of a startup with decades of leadership experience and know-how from roles in leading services companies including Clinovations, Optum, Evolent Health, and The Advisory Board Company. Thanks to Curation Health for supporting HIStalk.
Webinars
April 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “19 Massive Best Practices We’ve Learned from 4 Million Telehealth Visits.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, founder, president, and CEO, Mend. Virtual visits have graduated from a quickly implemented technical novelty to a key healthcare strategy. The challenge now is to define how telehealth can work seamlessly with in-person visits. This webinar will address patient satisfaction, reducing no-show rates to single digits, and using technology to make telehealth easy to use and accessible for all patients. The presenter will share best practices that have been gleaned from millions of telehealth visits and how they have been incorporated into a leading telemedicine and AI-powered patient engagement platform.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Avive Solutions has raised $22 million in a Series A round of funding. The company has developed automated external defibrillator technology that wirelessly connects to local 911 and EMS services, and other medical professionals.
Sales
Baptist Health will implement PatientBond’s psychographic segmentation model and leverage its Insights Accelerator to enhance its patient engagement strategies.
The VA will use medical imaging workflow technology from Laurel Bridge Software during its transition from VistA to Cerner.
UNC Health selects Oncology Pathways software from Philips.
Newman Regional Health (KS) will connect its Meditech Expanse EHR to nearby Coffey Health System.
Cerner will integrate Nuance’s Dragon Ambient Experience voice-enabled automated documentation software with its Millennium EHR.
Novant Health (NC) will implement EVideon’s Vibe Health smart room technology, incorporating Caregility’s virtual care capabilities.
Announcements and Implementations
Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center has implemented Healthcare Triangle’s Elastic Recovery Service on AWS to ensure the stability of its Meditech system during a natural disaster or cyberattack.
Fisher-Titus Medical Center in Ohio has integrated RevSpring’s PersonaPay and IVR Advantage payment data and communications technologies with its Cerner system.
Government and Politics
Reynold’s Army Health Clinic at Fort Sill in Oklahoma will go live on Cerner this weekend as part of the DoD’s MHS Genesis deployment.
Other
Grant Memorial Hospital (WV) will launch a telemedicine cancer care program this summer using connected medical devices and technology from Elekta.
Sponsor Updates
Health Data Movers promotes Alex Janssen to senior consultant.
Healthcare Growth Partners has advised Symplr during its acquisition of GreenLight Medical.
Healthcare IT Leaders publishes a new case study featuring OSHU-Tuality Healthcare.
Intelligent Medical Objects publishes a new case study featuring its efforts to help HIE CORHIO standardize data from a variety of sources.
Kyruus will work with government-focused digital care navigation company WellHive to make it easier for veterans to find and schedule appointments with the Veterans Health Administration.
Mach7 Technologies will offer analytics from Biologics as part of its enterprise imaging solution.
Medhost publishes a new infographic, “An EHR Implementation Timeline Model: Layering for a Strong Foundation.”
Meditech releases a new podcast, “Preventing Violence Against Healthcare Workers.”
NTT will donate $2.5 million to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and other organizations to support humanitarian efforts for Ukraine.
Get Well, VitalTech, Current Health, Twistle, Biofourmis, PeriGen, and CareSignal earn spots on Avia Connect’s list of Top 50 Remote Patient Monitoring Technologies.
The latest release of the Philips Capsule Surveillance solution has received 510(k) market clearance from the FDA.
Today was a whirlwind of activity. I hit the exhibit hall as soon as the doors opened. I was looking for a few specific solutions for my clients, so I had to make the day count.
One of my first stops was eMedApps to check out their EHR archive solution. I think we’re starting to see a new wave of people migrating away from legacy EHRs who don’t want to tackle conversions. Archiving data but linking to it within the patient chart seems like a nice compromise.
From there, I visited First Databank for a deep dive into the FDB Targeted Medication Warnings solution. I had a great conversation with their experts about finding the balance between presenting adequate alerts to clinicians and not killing them with too many. Sometimes people think it’s a bad thing when alerts aren’t being surfaced very much, but their team brought up the fact that it’s a good problem to have – it means clinicians are doing the right thing the majority of the time, allowing the alerts to catch the edge cases where they really matter. Given the diversity of FDB’s products, the conversation was wide ranging, and we touched on pharmacogenomics as well. Finally, we talked a bit about FDB Vela, which was announced this week. It has the potential to shake up the world of e-prescribing and I’m looking forward to seeing how things unfold over the next few months.
Then I met up with Nordic Chief Medical Officer Craig Joseph, who is possibly one of the most entertaining booth crawl partners I’ve had in a while. He has so many funny stories and kept me laughing. We were distracted by this shirtless model at Butterfly and stopped in to learn more about their point of care ultrasound solutions. I didn’t know exactly why their technology was so affordable, but their rep Melissa explained it to us, then took us to a workstation for a deeper dive. She was one of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic reps I have interacted with the show and handled our wacky questions with ease as we put on our “cranky doctor” and “cranky CFO” hats to explore the solution. I wish I had been able to have one in my pocket when I was in the in-person urgent care trenches.
Juno Health had a booth with t-shirt artists printing creations that said, “Kiss me, I’m a Provider.” Not sure which audience I’d want to wear that around, so I took a pass.
Socks were a big giveaway in the exhibit hall this year, and I was trying to pick up a few cool sets for someone at home. I noticed the Skyflow booth, not only for their well-displayed socks, but also for their sales team, which was facing out and engaging the crowd. I loved their “excuse me, but could you tell me what that orange sticker is on your badge?” play as a way to start conversations. They gave me a straightforward rundown on their product and also humored me with some conversation about the cost of living in Palo Alto. Props to the team for a job well done.
From there, I learned about Prescription Digital Therapeutics courtesy of Pear Therapeutics. What they’re doing with substance abuse treatment is fascinating and they’ve also launched a solution for chronic insomnia. There is a huge need for the latter, especially with the small number of cognitive behavioral therapists who specialize in treating the condition. I was excited to see migraine therapy on their road map and will be keeping an eye on them.
Onward I went to Healthwise to check out the Healthwise Advise solution that they’ll be taking live this summer with their Epic clients. I’ve been a fan and a user of their products for quite some time and am an even bigger fan of solutions that make the clinicians’ lives easier while helping patients better manage their health conditions.
I stopped by the Epic booth for some conversation about telehealth solutions and patient engagement as well as to check out their Cheers customer relationship management system. The booth was smaller than previous years (as were many vendors’ booths) but the artwork was great as always, including a carousel-style unicorn covered in bottle caps and a supersized dog.
I always enjoy a spin through the innovation area and the team at Skedulo was spot-on at engaging prospects and getting them to stop and listen. They work in other industries beyond healthcare and made my list of companies to read about on the flight home.
I also enjoyed chatting with the team at VisiQuate and learning about their solutions. They were channeling blue and yellow in support of Ukraine, including both shoes and shirts.
Continuing to stroll the booths with one of my HIMSS BFFs, we stopped by the Arcadia “Sips and Socks” happy hour so I could complete my sock collection and learn about what they’re doing to support managed care. They’ve got some great success stories and serve a diverse client base, which always makes doing business more interesting.
The Wednesday party scene was a good one, starting with Redox at Taverna Opa. Attendees were greeted by performers in stilts wearing LED lights, which was a fun reminder of how HIMSS used to be. Years ago, you might see those kinds of antics in the booths. They also had a custom cocktail that was being poured through an ice sculpture, which was fun. We ended up there at the end of the night and the sculpture was ceremonially smashed, which was really something.
I also dropped in on the Lightbeam Health event at Cuba Libre, which featured hand-rolled cigars as well as the chance to visit with the team from CareSignal, which the company recently acquired. I’ve worked with both teams in a variety of capacities and it was fun to catch up.
From there, I met up with friends and we ended up splitting into two groups, those who headed out for karaoke and those who knew when to call it a night. The fact that today’s walking total was close to nine miles made a member of the latter, so I was glad to get back to the hotel, put my feet up, and start the mental game of Tetris as I contemplate repacking my suitcase.
What’s the best thing you’ve seen this week? Leave a comment or email me.
Specialty practice-focused House Rx, which offers technology that helps prescribers and pharmacists ensure patients have timely access to specialty medications, raises $25 million in a Series A funding round.
Avive Solutions, which has developed wirelessly connected automated external defibrillator technology, has raised $22 million in a Series A round of funding.
UK-based menopause care app developer Vira Health will use a $12.1 million investment to grow employer adoption in the US, and support clinical trials and the addition of telemedicine.
It was quieter and cooler in the exhibit hall today, which was more enjoyable to me. I expect it will be really slow and laid back Thursday, but I’ll remind booth reps that the last day is when decision-makers sometimes emerge to roam unfettered among the thinned exhibit hall crowds. Also, the HIMSS conference is a great place for companies to find partners, and that too is easier and thus possibly more likely on the last day. Don’t just pile up luggage and clock-watch.
I saw very few booth reps immersed in phone-land yesterday and today, which was encouraging. It felt like more reps were not only more heads-up in noting their surroundings, but also making eye contact and offering greetings. As basic as it sounds, sometimes you pass a booth and feel unwelcome because nobody looks up or acknowledges that you are standing there clearly waiting for assistance while reps look phoneward or gab with each other.
I realized today that I’ve yet to see even one instance of HIMSS22 fist- or elbow-bumping as handshaking is back as the standard. Also rarely seen is attendees picking up hand sanitizer giveaways. COVID-19 spread is almost entirely via the respiratory route, so it makes sense to worry less about spreading by touch. Wearing masks would be a theoretically good idea given that HIMSS didn’t require a negative COVID test, but sightings of those are rare.
Another item that is MIA – at least in my limited convention center travels – were those ball cap-wearing people sticking Healthcare IT News print copies in your face at every opportunity. Maybe they don’t do that any more.
I asked several exhibitors how the conference was going for them. Most common answer: “slow,” but they were trying to be upbeat about it. One exhibitor who was worn out from doing ViVE last week and said they didn’t feel that conference was worth it because few providers came to the exhibit hall, so they were a lot happier with HIMSS22.
I’ve heard from attendees of recent conferences that some people are annoyed with the member organization CEO inserts themselves into scripted entertainment or oratory in the opening session. I’ve also observed this over the years and have been kind of turned off. I think the CEOs of those member organizations forget that 99% of members don’t know or care who they are, so trying to serve as a highly visible host or presenter causes eye-rolling because that’s not why people attend. Certainly an organizational update or report is welcome if it’s short and not too “insider,” but the conference is a separate entity from the group’s leadership to most people and taking a self-congratulatory victory lap as the group’s executive doesn’t play well. I don’t go to a concert expecting to see the CEO of the band’s record label make a speech.
Curation Health was excited about becoming a new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor, so I feel bad that I forgot to mention them in Tuesday’s various posts because it was late and I was tired. Jenn will give them the full introduction in Thursday night’s news, but I’ll acknowledge them now with thanks. Curation Health was founded by a team of healthcare veterans and clinicians to help providers and health plans effectively navigate the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care. Its advanced clinical decision support platform for value-based care drives more accurate risk adjustment and improved quality program performance by curating relevant insights from disparate sources and delivering them in real time to clinicians and care teams. With Curation Health, clinicians enjoy a streamlined, comprehensive clinical documentation process that enables better clinical and financial outcomes while simultaneously reducing clinical administrative burdens on providers. The company takes pride in combining the flexibility and speed of a startup with decades of leadership experience and know-how from roles in leading services companies including Clinovations, Optum, Evolent Health, and The Advisory Board Company. Thanks to Curation Health for supporting HIStalk.
People from Mississippi-based Howard Medical were giving out Moon Pies in various flavors. My flavor choice was yellow.
Alan from EK USA explained that Cat Crap is a crazy good cleaner and anti-fogger for glasses that has boomed lately because masks-wearers always struggle with fogged-up specs. I checked out their website and an ingenious offering is Not A Lock, a massive padlock that doesn’t actually lock – bad guys don’t usually actually test a padlock and this fake one prevents the owner from locking themselves out. Problems will always encourage people to create interesting solutions.
The people at Kit gave me a review of their mail-out lab test offering, where patients are sent sampling kits that they then return for lab processing. The list of available tests is short since most labs require venipuncture, so until someone invents a “blood draw at home” technology, they can only go so far in eliminating that particular last mile problem. The company was acquired by Ro last year just 17 months after its founding, with one of the draws (no pun intended) being Kit’s procedure for monitoring the test process so that life insurance companies, for example, can use the results to approve policies without sending someone into the applicant’s home to verify that their testing process was followed.
Alpesh from Vayyar gave me a demo of the company’s senior monitoring solution, in which a small device is mounted to a wall or ceiling (it looks like a small smoke alarm) to monitor a patient’s movement without cameras or wearables. The radar-type device uses AC power, covers about 13×16 feet, and updates itself over the air. It can check for falls, room presence, in and out of bed status, and respiration (coming later this year). Providers or companies can design their own alerts and analytics per their specifications. I like this way, way better than phone-powered wearables.
I looked at Visier, which offers “people analytics” that can analyze various HR systems to answer questions about nurse retention, for example, to determine which employees are motivated by career advancement or educational opportunities instead of other benefits such as free parking.
I now know that Innovaccer’s name comes from “innovation accelerator.” It manages data for population health management and pay-for-performance programs.
EClinicalWorks has a new product called Prisma that’s like a search engine and singular view for patient records, including those collected through Carequality and claims data. It can also collect and display data from wearables.
ESRI has theater presentations that cover a wide variety of interesting use cases for GIS in healthcare.
I thought the Silex people were kidding with the “free beer” cooler since it was 11 a.m., but it was the real thing. The beer came from a microbrewery in the company’s Nashville home and the unfamiliar can design meant that one could (theoretically, you understand) roam the hall sipping a cold one around folks who still had egg on their breath. Silex was exhibiting with AbacusOne to offer RCM automation. They weren’t aware that ViVE is coming to Nashville next March and seemed pretty excited about it, as I kind of am since I’ve never been to Nashville except to visit one of my health system’s hospitals near there a few times many years ago.
SkyFlow explained its Healthcare Data Privacy Vault, a quickly implemented API solution that manages role-based and policy-based access, consent-based sharing, IP and geolocation controls, and time-based access.
That’s one big fireplace. Or being in the pun-heavy world of health IT, is that FHIRplace?
Maybe the two saddest days in health IT were Neal Patterson dying and now to see what is likely the final exhibit of Cerner as an independent company.
Day 1 is in the books, and let me tell you it was a blur like I’ve not experienced in a long time. I’m sure my conference attendance muscles have atrophied over the last couple of years, but it was good to be back in person. I’m pretty sure I’m going home with COVID, though – virtually no one is masked. There are a lot of comments about people doing ViVE all week and being OK, but usually their expressions change when I remind them that attendees at ViVE had to show a documented negative COVID test, unlike at HIMSS.
The opening keynote was moderately attended, with plenty of empty seats in the back of the room. Attendance figures were quoted at 26,000 but it wasn’t clear whether that included both in-person and digital attendees. After greetings from the HIMSS team and the mayor of Orlando, Jonathan Bush delivered a brief keynote. He had some great analogies about HIMSS being like Hogwarts of Harry Potter fame, as well as it being like “the savanna” where prospective customers visited a feeding ground where vendors could hunt them. He skewered organizations for how much money they spend on HIMSS, and putting on my patient hat, it’s entirely appropriate to question the funding. People forget that every dollar spent at or on this show came from a patient or a taxpayer in one way or another.
The main keynote speaker was Ben Sherwood of Disney fame. He gave a great history of Walt Disney World and what it did to the growth of the Orlando economy. As someone who does a lot of work on sustainability and the environment, I noted that he completely left out the impact on the land and other downsides of the vast growth of tourism. He also talked about the Battle of Trafalgar and how Horatio Nelson had the ability to see the world differently as he planned his strategy for the battle. Sherwood noted that Nelson was killed in the battle and his body was taken back to England in a barrel of spirits, which is a detail that always reminds me of my days in gross anatomy lab.
He closed with some comments on E. M. Forster’s novel “Howard’s End,” which happens to be not only one of my favorites, but one upon which I did some scholarly work during my undergraduate years. He urged people to heed the advice given at the end of the book, and in thinking of how we all need to work together to solve the many problems facing healthcare, I agree with the wisdom: “Only Connect.”
From there it was straight into the craziness of the exhibit hall. I stopped by to see the Dash offering by Relatient (booth 4879) and to catch up with the team about how the tool brings communication and scheduling solutions together for better patient care.
Bandwidth (booth 1927) caught my eye with their sparkly sequined jackets and their plush unicorn giveaways (also wearing sequined tops). Their staff was friendly and engaged, but I’m glad they turned away for a moment so I could capture the picture.
Pure Storage (booth 2421) kicked off the exhibit hall social hour with a fantastic bourbon tasting. I was happy that Dr. Nick van Terheyden @drnic1 spotted it during our first annual booth crawl. It certainly made the afternoon more smooth. He had a lot of great things to say about the newest evolution of DAX (Dragon Ambient eXperience) at Nuance (booth 1941). Apparently, it’s come a long way since the last time I saw it in a demo, so I’ll be sure to see it before the week ends.
There was a strong footwear game happening at Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO, booth 3849) during the social hour as well. IMO is one of my favorite companies and I was glad to see some longstanding colleagues for a catch-up.
I managed to score a Pink Socks scrunchie courtesy of my most longstanding HIMSS pal. Based on the humidity and the rain, I’ll need it tomorrow. Other giveaways that caught my eye included socks, cotton candy, and of course hand sanitizer. Less thrilling was the booth rep who was leaping at people in the aisles asking “would you like a light-up pen” and he asked me at least three times in the span of 10 minutes. There were of course plenty of disengaged booth reps, which is sad for Day 1 of the conference. If they couldn’t make it through 2 p.m., I have no idea how they’ll have the stamina to do it again tomorrow.
Edifecs (booth 5171) is again running their #WhatIRun campaign to support women in healthcare IT. The initiative highlights the fact that women are estimated to be involved in 80% of healthcare decisions but continue to be underrepresented in leadership roles. For each social share of the #WhatIRun hashtag, they’ll donate $1 to brightpink.org. I’ve been a long-time fan, so please stop by and give them a shout out. I met some fascinating women today, including some cybersecurity experts, and had the chance to learn about one’s experience with the Chief membership network. HIMSS is always a great place to learn things you never expected and to make new connections.
Tonight was my big dinner out for the week, courtesy of Nordic (booth 3965) at the Sharks Underwater Grill at Sea World. It was great to have the opportunity to talk with other CMIOs and people who are directly working in healthcare IT and to hear their experiences and challenges. The conversation was great and the drinks were flowing, and of course the sharks were fascinating. After dashing through the rainstorm at the end of the night and trying to find my Uber at the mysterious rideshare pickup point, I was starting to feel like these two chaps that I spotted at the bottom of the tank. My feet were done for the night, so I was glad to just head back to the hotel to recharge and prepare for Wednesday.
What were your personal highlights from the show floor? Anything particular I should check out? Leave a comment or email me.
From Fault Line: “Re: HIMS22. Not sure about others, but for me, it was 45 minutes for cab at airport, then and outside and inside line to check in at hotel. Why did we miss traveling again?”
Tuesday’s commingled lines for health check, registration, and badge pickup snaked forever through the convention center with nobody from HIMSS directing folks where to line up. It’s a rare logistical slip-up by HIMSS that caused folks to be late for their sessions or for the 10:00 a.m. exhibit hall opening. Someone behind me said the lines were like Space Mountain, snaking down the hall and around corners. I guess that’s a good thing for HIMSS, which supposedly announced in-person attendance of 26,000 in the opening session that I didn’t attend.
I secretly want to be a bus driver as my next job. Every time I attend a HIMSS conference, I’m envious of their bouncy seats and horizontal steering wheels.
It felt like a pre-HIMSS20 conference, as the exhibit hall was packed with no extra spacing, masks were optional and therefore rarely seen, and the booths featured snacks, performers, and throngs of people. I’m sure the exhibitor and square footage count were down from their pre-pandemic prime, but the energy was excellent. It’s like a band that could either fill a 1,000-seat theater or half-fill an arena – the theater wins on vibe and excitement.
I threw smoked brisket away for the first time in paying $19 for a horrible lunch from the 4 Rivers Smokehouse exhibit hall stand. I love barbeque in nearly every form, but this was inedible. I should have known this from the non-existent line and their use of homey skillets to hold badly prepared smoked meat and macaroni and cheese. I threw half away and still felt queasy for hours after.
Know what we have? A truck. A big one. So there.
Salesforce had an impressive booth. I don’t really understood its point, but it was like summer camp for technology folks.
I tend to like booths that while phony, imitate life. So I was more than OK with 3M’s.
And Intelerad’s, which was like a homey restaurant booth with cushions.
My favorite booth was that of McKessson-owned CoverMy Meds. It was beside the booth of Redox. I feel some parental pull toward both companies because they sponsored HIStalk before anyone had heard of them and are now a big deal. I don’t usually call out favorite companies, but CoverMyMeds is a spectacular success story and co-founder Matt Scantland has impressed me both times I’ve interviewed him.
Nice summary, Experian Health.
Tax-advantaged provider, investor in for-profit-companies, and vendor? Correct answer — all of the above. Big booth.
Epic claims to have no marketing people, but someone’s doing an excellent job regardless of their title.
The Epic booth person told me that its Cheers CRM is just the same old products like MyChart overarched with a new name. I’m not sure if that’s correct, but they would know better than I.
The Vocera booth was quite busy.
Change Healthcare was taking headshot photos, which judging from the LinkedIn profiles of some attendees, are desperately needed.
The nicest exhibitors are always the folks from the Philippines, who not only provide more nurses to the US than any other country, they offer advantages for outsourcing health IT companies in various forms. I have never been to that country in my somewhat limited world travels, but they always make a positive impression at HIMSS conferences.
I liked Glooko’s remote patient monitoring platform for diabetes.
The folks at Pro Forma were cool in describing their promotional products. They agreed with me in wondering where the out-of-the-blue trend came from of exhibitor employees wearing outdoor-type vests, which I saw all over the hall. Other sartorial trends – light brown shoes with suits of any color, tennis shoes with suits, and semi-dress shoes worn without socks.
I took a look at HPE’s Zerto ransomware testing and recovery tool.
UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group) had a big booth, which I would guess at times was invaded by customers irate at its weeks-long cloud payroll system downtime that left hospitals in endless arguments with employees who weren’t paid correctly.
Palo Alto Networks gave me a nice overview of their system that monitors the network, finds and fixes performance problems, and evaluates the network problems of individual users such as those trying to participate in a Zoom call. They’re giving away a home appliance that does the same thing while looking cool.
I don’t know if I detected any particular HIMSS22 trend, but candidates would be cybersecurity and interoperability.
I saw people riding on Segways who were not G.O.B. Bluth.
Vendors – make your booth people disperse within the confines of your booth. It is off-putting to have them talking with each other in a closed circle that is unwelcome for prospects to penetrate.
Sphere is giving away ring lights for those who don’t have them for their Zoom or Teams sessions.
I went to a session in which Meditech and Google Health laid out their partnership to make Google Health’s Care Studio search tool available in Expanse. Meditech EVP/COO Helen Waters suggested that perhaps EHR vendors should focus on their platform and assume that companies like Google Health are amply equipped to overlay their products with consumer-grade UI. Meditech is looking for Care Studio to integrate its legacy products with Expanse.
Pondering – are booth reps playing with their phones because nobody is there, or is nobody there because booth reps are playing with their phones? I didn’t see nearly as much “expensive phone booth” time as in years past, so good job, folks.
I tried to use the HIMSS22 app, but it kept freezing on the title screen.
I skipped out early because my regrettably untested shoes weren’t up to the carpet-trodding task and therefore my back and legs were paying dearly for exhibit hall miles, but I’ll be back Wednesday. If you’ve seen something amazing that I should check out, let me know.
Health data integration company Lyniate will acquire patient identity management vendor NextGate for an undisclosed sum.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Mr. HIStalk and Dr. Jayne are busy in HIMSS-land while I hold down the fort at the virtual HIStalk hacienda. Hopefully, Mr. H has finally made it through the registration and badge pick-up line, which, based on his tweet from earlier today, doesn’t seem likely. In lieu of show-floor convos with our wonderful readers that typically involve attempts to get me to divulge Mr. H’s true identity, I’ll instead reminisce about past HIStalkapaloozas. (Is there a better party band than Party on the Moon?) I’m still saddened by the fact that my footwear over the years earned me no HIStalk accolades, though I like to think it did help me make my case for joining the team nearly eight years ago. Help me stay busy this week by emailing me any health IT news you’re afraid might get lost in the #HIMSSanity.
Webinars
April 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “19 Massive Best Practices We’ve Learned from 4 Million Telehealth Visits.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, founder, president, and CEO, Mend. Virtual visits have graduated from a quickly implemented technical novelty to a key healthcare strategy. The challenge now is to define how telehealth can work seamlessly with in-person visits. This webinar will address patient satisfaction, reducing no-show rates to single digits, and using technology to make telehealth easy to use and accessible for all patients. The presenter will share best practices that have been gleaned from millions of telehealth visits and how they have been incorporated into a leading telemedicine and AI-powered patient engagement platform.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
OptimizeRx acquires EvinceMed, a Las Vegas-based company that automates specialty pharmacy transactions.
Avant-garde Health, which offers analytics for surgical and procedure-based care, raises $12 million in a Series A funding round.
Komodo Health will reportedly go public this summer. The offers de-identified patient data and analytics, has raised $314 million, and earned a $3.3 billion valuation.
Precision medicine and clinical dataset vendor Prenosis secures funding from Pace Healthcare Capital, bringing its total raised to over $20 million.
Healthcare payment analytics company Clarify Health acquires Embedded Healthcare, an analytics vendor focused on changing provider behavior to encourage value-based care. The acquisition comes a year after Clarify raised $115 million in a Series C funding round, and six months after its acquisition of Apervita’s value optimization business.
Drug knowledge and decision support company First Databank launches the Vela e-prescribing network, giving prescribers, payers, and pharmacies an additional industry option for medication eligibility and benefits information. FDB partnered with RxRevu and RxLightning to offer real-time pharmacy benefits and specialty prescription enrollment and processing functionalities as part of the new network.
Sales
EMC Healthcare in Indonesia will implement the InterSystems TrakCare EHR across its six hospitals.
People
Kevin Schweikert (Veradigm/Allscripts) joins Cota as VP of life sciences.
Announcements and Implementations
Clinical Architecture announces GA of SeekDX, a diagnosis search and documentation tool; and Nomad, a fully managed interoperability and data normalization solution designed to help organizations comply with the 21st Century Cures Act.
Leidos will integrate Clearsense’s health data archiving and management capabilities with its managed services offerings.
Caregility announces GA of its subscription-based Inpatient Virtual Engagement service, comprising an administration portal, access point of care system, and management tool for telehealth devices.
Cape Cod Healthcare (MA) will use $1.5 million in federal funding to connect 90 providers from independent practices and community health centers to its Epic system.
InterSystems releases a cloud-based version of its HealthShare Health Connect integration engine.
Consensus Cloud Solutions develops NLP- and AI-based technology that enables providers to convert unstructured clinical content into usable data for improved decision-making.
Meditech will pilot the FHIR-enabled integration of Google’s search and summarization capabilities within its Expanse EHR.
Main Line Health (PA) enhances its website with Yext’s Find-a-Doc search tool and Stericycle’s appointment-booking software.
Philips announces GA of cloud-based, interoperable, enterprise imaging technology, and performance analytics for radiology and cardiology.
Kootenai Health in Idaho has replaced 11 EHR systems with Epic.
Privacy and Security
Registered nurses file a class action lawsuit against their employer, University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center, for allegedly depriving them of accurate wages after last December’s Kronos data breach. The cyberattack on the payroll vendor led to a payment freeze for all UMass Memorial hourly workers, resulting in inaccurate or unpaid paychecks. The suit seems to be separate from a similar filing by RNs initiated in January. Update: UMass Memorial Health EVP and CFO Sergio Melgar clarifies that, “To avoid disruption during the Kronos issue, we used the previous week as a base for pay in order to provide our caregivers with some wages. We did not freeze wages nor miss a pay period. We communicated with our caregivers that their pay might not be accurate at the time, but that we planned to go back and adjust as we worked through this national issue.”
Other
Caledonia Health Center Office Team Lead Cassie Baker and Office Manager Amy DeGood win first place in the University of Michigan Health-West’s inaugural Big Pitch competition for their idea to use Nuance’s AI-powered documentation software to develop an automated prescription messaging and approval process for patients.
Apple’s latest Iphone software update enables masked Face ID users to unlock their phones.
Sponsor Updates
Surescripts has expanded its specialty medications solutions to enable more prescribers, pharmacists, and patients to benefit from the accelerated speed to therapy supported by these innovations.
Availity will donate $25,000 to the UN Refugee Agency to help Ukrainian refugees, and will offer to match up to the same amount on behalf of associates who donate.
Bluestream Health joins the N50 Project to provide virtual care and telehealth services to marginalized communities around the globe.
Change Healthcare expands its relationship with AWS to accelerate healthcare transformation.
Olive and NTT DATA will co-develop new Loops – applications that work on Olive’s platform to provide real-time intelligence – and new machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA) models, initially focusing on improving supply chain and IT efficiencies.
CoverMyMeds signs on as the first employer partner in Fortuity’s Pathways Workforce Development program, which helps prepare highly qualified candidates for call center employment with local businesses.
Elsevier Clinical Solutions publishes “Clinician of the Future: a 2022 report.”
End users give the following HIStalk sponsors top user satisfaction marks, according to a Black Book survey of specialty practices:
Netsmart (behavioral and mental health, home health large agency & hospice, psychiatry)
Cerner (colon and rectal surgery, general surgery, internal medicine, pediatric surgery)
They say travel is broadening. I’m not sure how much I learn from the travel experience itself, but lately travel has become an exercise in patience and trying to remain calm in the face of craziness.
My flight to Orlando was delayed, which wasn’t much of a problem because the airline alerted me early. I used the time to pick up a beautiful deli sandwich to enjoy in my car at the airport parking garage. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the check-in area, I immediately understood why flights were being delayed. The baggage system had malfunctioned, preventing agents from sending bags on their merry way down the conveyor belts. Instead, they were piled all around the ticket counters and spilled towards the TSA screening areas, making me wonder if my bag would ever make it onto the plane.
It seemed there were plenty of people around who are either new travelers or who haven’t flown recently. I watched two large families realize they had no luggage tags and have to scramble to fill out the flimsy airline ones. I was glad I was flying at a non-peak time, but as is typical with non-stop flights to Orlando, the gate area was full of fussy youngsters whose schedules were off due to travel. It’s par for the course with springtime travel and I’d rather be surrounded by children who might have a good excuse for their behavior rather than be surrounded by obnoxious adult travelers doing video calls without headphones or who insist on trying to convince the gate agent that their three carry-on bags are really only two. After more than a decade of being a road warrior, I’ve learned to tune most of it out, which I suppose is a useful life skill.
I’m staying at my usual hotel just a hop, skip, and a jump from the convention center and appreciate the predictability of the experience. The weather is also much appreciated, especially since it’s been sub-freezing the last week and I’m tired of dirty snow and salt everywhere. The week looks to be mild except for some occasional rain showers, which I think I can cope with.
I also spent some quality time with the ironing board since I opted for breezy linen shirts for this year’s conference. No more suit jackets for me, thank you very much. Hopefully there will be a continued move towards more casual dress, but regardless, I plan to be comfortable this week. The new normal has negatively impacted the hotel breakfast for sure. I’m usually fine with an English muffin or a bagel to get me on my way, and neither of those were to be found. My choices included a prepackaged gluten-free muffin, a prepackaged breakfast taco, some kind of baby quiche, or a bowl of oatmeal. Fortunately, there was yogurt available, which worked well with the trail mix that I always carry.
I also put the finishing touches on my plans for the exhibit hall. Some of the booths I have lined up for opening day include:
Healthwise (booth 2571) is launching its new Healthwise Advise solution at HIMSS22. Designed for Epic customers, it’s FHIR-enabled and reduces maintenance and content updates. As if the time savings wasn’t enough of a draw, it also has greater integration with Epic than the previous solution and allows easier selection of patient-specific information as well as information on how patients have engaged with the materials. It’s also designed to learn how clinicians select materials and to anticipate their needs, so I’m excited to see how it works in person.
Cisco (booth 1559) as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, is donating $5 to the Pediatric Cancer Foundation for every individual scanned in the booth or at their View from the Top session. They’re donating up to $10,000 so stop by and let’s see if we can max it out.
First Data Bank (booth 3659) is making a big announcement and I can’t wait to hear what they’re up to.
I picked up my badge at the Hyatt and the process was smooth because I had printed my vaccine validation and my HIMSS barcode. For those who didn’t have those documents, they had several workers checking vaccine cards and IDs to get them through the process quickly. SWAG was minimal and included the obligatory tote bag along with the conference guide, a pen, and a HIMSS mask. We’ll see how many people actually sport the HIMSS-branded masks since overall masking is pretty minimal and the majority of those who are masking seem to be wearing medical-grade ones.
HIMSS is all about networking, and I was happy to run into one former colleague at the registration desk and two more while I was poolside. We’ve all been on a long strange journey through the healthcare IT universe, so it’s good to see a friendly face.
From there it was off to the opening reception, where comfortable shoes were the order of the day for both ladies and gentlemen. Bar service was adequate, with minimal lines by the time we arrived. There were multiple food options, but vegetarian options were scarce except for the tofu and portabella mushroom kebabs and the ice cream bar.
From there, we were off to the ServiceNow/GDIT party, which had much better food options including a delightful goat cheese and pickled onion bruschetta as well as cheese pizza, lobster rolls, and sliders. Big thanks to the team working the door at one of the most sought-after parties of the night.
After that, I was able to connect with an old friend (and make a new one) followed by a trip to the Hyatt lobby bar, where I had a quick catch-up with Jonathan Bush. It felt like old times, although most of us were contemplating an earlier return to our hotel rooms than we have at HIMSS past. Tuesday’s keynote will come early enough, so it’s time to take out the contact lenses, drink some water, and get ready for another big day at HIMSS.
What’s on your list of must-sees at the exhibit hall? Leave a comment or email me.
Healthcare analytics company Clarify Health acquires Embedded Healthcare, an analytics vendor focused on changing provider behavior to encourage high-value care.
Ambulatory end users give ModMed, Cerner, and Allscripts top marks across multiple categories for user satisfaction, according to a Black Book survey of nearly 16,000 specialty practices.
Patients are more likely to disclose symptoms of depression, fall risk, or intimate partner violence when filling out a tablet-based assessment versus an in-person assessment, according to a study conducted at six Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist practices.
Oracle reports Q3 results, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings, and announces that it will target the entire integrated healthcare ecosystem – a strategy that influenced its decision to acquire Cerner.
From the Oracle earnings call on Friday, following Q3 results that beat revenue expectations but fell short on earnings:
CTO and Chairman Larry Ellison says that healthcare is “the largest industry on Earth” and Oracle has as ERP/HCM customers Tenet, Kaiser, Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Northwell, Mount Sinai, and Atrium.
He notes that Oracle is replacing Kronos in 83-hospital Community Health Systems.
He says that hospitals are an Uber-like gig economy because doctors and now nurses are increasingly independent contractors, making workforce payment complicated.
Ellison says that the company will be “going after the entire integrated ecosystem,” which influenced its decision to acquire Cerner.
He also called out connecting clinical trials with hospitals and tracking hospital supplies by RFID.
ORCL shares are down 15% versus the Dow’s 6% loss since the December 20 announcement that it will acquire Cerner for $28 billion
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
ViVE attendees sent me a few comments about attending. Feel free to send more thoughts, and for those who will have attended both ViVE and HIMSS22, to weigh in afterward on how the events compared.
Here’s what poll respondents said about their life now versus a year ago.
New poll to your right or here: What will you be doing at work this week during HIMSS22?
Last-Minute HIMSS22 Notes
Don’t forget to set your clocks forward Sunday morning. Sunrise in Orlando each day will be 7:30 a.m. and sunset at 7:30 p.m.
Expect warm but rainy and cloudy weather in Orlando, with daily highs around 80.
Masks are optional for in-person attendees.
Review the pocket guide to plan your days before you arrive.
Tuesday’s opening keynote is at 8:30 a.m. and the exhibit hall opens at 10:00 a.m.
Dr. Jayne and I will report from the Orlando ground, while Jenn — atypically from my usual HIMSS week process – will publish daily headlines and news posts.
Webinars
April 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “19 Massive Best Practices We’ve Learned from 4 Million Telehealth Visits.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, founder, president, and CEO, Mend. Virtual visits have graduated from a quickly implemented technical novelty to a key healthcare strategy. The challenge now is to define how telehealth can work seamlessly with in-person visits. This webinar will address patient satisfaction, reducing no-show rates to single digits, and using technology to make telehealth easy to use and accessible for all patients. The presenter will share best practices that have been gleaned from millions of telehealth visits and how they have been incorporated into a leading telemedicine and AI-powered patient engagement platform.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Sales
Genesis Physician’s Group (TX) will develop the GenesisLink HIE for the DFW area using KONZA’s national network.
API platform vendor Particle Health will use Verato Univeral MPI to track patients and data flow.
In England, Bedfordshire Hospitals chooses VitalHub’s Intouch patient flow solutions to help manage its elective care backlog.
People
Amazon hires Aaron Martin, MBA (Providence) as VP of health. Martin was Providence’s EVP, chief digital officer of Providence St. Joseph’s Health, and managing GP of Providence’s venture fund. He had been with the health system since January 2014. Before that, he worked for Amazon’s self-publishing business for eight years.
Relatient hires Craig McCoy (Ciox Health) as chief growth officer, names Josh Byrd (Savista) as VP of marketing, and promotes Emily Tyson, MBA to COO.
Eric Rose, MD (US Department of Veterans Affairs) joins precision medicine drug discovery TenSixteen Bio as head of clinical informatics.
University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and UC Health name Umberto Tachinardi, MD, MS (Regenstrief Institute) as VP / chief health digital officer and associate deal of health informatics.
Eric Sato, MBA (Baxter International) joins Symplr as VP of marketing.
Rauland hires Michelle Allen, MEM (Ametek) as division VP and business unit manager.
Announcements and Implementations
Vyne Medical launches Refyne Cloud Fax as part of its SaaS-based Refyne denials management platform.
WVU Medicine goes live on Volpara Health’s AI-based breast imaging software tools, which it will use to maintain and improve mammographic quality in its 24 facilities in four states.
Government and Politics
Congress re-inserts a ban on funding a national patient identifier in HHS’s proposed FY2022 budget.
Florida-based government medical contractor Comprehensive Health Services will pay $930,000 to settle false claims charges that it billed the State Department the $500,000 cost of developing a secure EHR, but left paper record scans on a drive that non-clinicians could access.
Other
A Cedars-Sinai study finds that 0.25% of patients whose Apple Watch warned them of possible atrial fibrillation were candidates for starting anticoagulants. The percentage rose to just 36% even when AFib was positively diagnosed. The authors conclude that while the benefit of the Watch’s AFib detection was tiny, the combined Watch and EHR data could help target those patients with the highest potential benefit.
Sponsor Updates
Olive adds expanded connectivity and integration features to its automation platform for healthcare processes and operations.
Optum sponsors and will present during SXSW’s Health and MedTech conference track March 14 in Austin, TX.
IDC’s latest Marketscape Report recognizes Symplr’s Payer solution as a Major Player for its comprehensive offering and product vision.
Protenus publishes the “2022 Breach Barometer Report.”
Sectra publishes its nine-month interim report, highlighting top rankings in customer satisfaction surveys in the US, Canada, and Asia/Oceania.
Upfront Healthcare publishes an update on its growth in 2021, doubling in size and revenue for the third straight year.
I asked readers who attended the inaugural ViVE conference, offered by CHIME and HLTH, to give feedback about their experience.
CHIME Track
Even though this was a conference that was about innovation and transformation, the rest of the CHIME conference emphasized the focus groups that CHIME keeps pushing members to attend. If you decline after several attempts to bring you in at $100 each, they stick multiple sessions on your calendar anyway. I assume they promised the vendors that are paying that they would have a certain number of attendees.
CHIME Chief Analytics Officer Steve Lieber described how CHIME is now going to harvest all the information that its members submit as part of Most Wired for a new analytics service. If we want to do some benchmarking with this data, we can now pay them for access to information we handed over to them. Will make me now consider if Most Wired is really worth it, which I already had doubts about anyway. I think this recognition has run its course.
I actually spent less time on the CHIME stuff, other than the focus groups, and felt comfortable among the vendors, which is not usually the case. Perhaps that also is a comment on the CHIME topics for the larger sessions.
CHIME did a good job, but it felt more disjointed than previous spring CIO forums when it was the day before HIMSS.
Most of the CHIME general sessions had more people than seats available, so I suspect CHIME was pleased.
I enjoyed the combo of the two events and felt like I attended CHIME and HIMSS in one setting, which is a plus for me.
CIO Participation
There was little CIO representation on the exhibitor floor. It was easy to distinguish attendees as CHIME members, as we had a dark blue and black badge lanyard and everyone else had a neon green one. As I walked the floor, I was usually one of very few without a green lanyard.
It was a nice effort to attempt to bring the startup community together with the CIO community. One would think that would be a good thing, but it I do not think it worked. From the outside looking in, it may have seemed to resonate with everyone buzzing around, but it was really what amounted to two separate conferences.
There were plenty of CIOs walking around the exhibit hall and the corridors. While chatting with a colleague for 20 minutes, I counted 15 other CIOs that walked past. The CIOs did not have a badge that stood out, so it might have been harder for those who don’t know faces.
Education Sessions
Some of the fireside chats and startup roundtables were really interesting. I have great respect for many of these founders who are putting a lot of effort into solving some very discrete health care problems.
Hosted Buyer Program
I paid the registration fee instead of agreeing to meet with eight vendors so I could control who I spoke to. Others may have found value in that program.
As an academic medical center CIO, I loved the hosted buyer concept and found it quite valuable. I received a registration rebate in return for having eight 15-minute meetings with vendors – both parties had to agree to meet in advance.
Exhibit Hall
It was low key on the exhibit hall floor since each booth has limited staff and most were approachable. I talked to many interesting companies, even if they did become repetitive. Established, non-startup vendors seemed underwhelmed about the value to them for attending. .
As an exhibitor, you’ll get zero out of it if you don’t do pre-conference prep make appointments. You can’t just show-up and hope that the CIO of a 17-hospital system takes time to pop into your booth just because they like the fuzzy socks you’re giving away.
You would have had a field day with all the booth workers in their phones as CIOs walked right past them.
Many of the CHIME CIOs were on the exhibit floor. Our booth was non-stop busy with questions and demos. Very happy with the experience and looking forward to next year in Nashville.
Overall Conference Reaction
There was little use for the CHIME side of ViVE. If you look at it as just a smaller HLTH conference, participating as if it was, it delivered.
I found ViVE to be very well done for a first-time effort.
The number of startups and PE firms was impressive.
As an introvert, I was on stimulation overload by the end of the day Tuesday and looking for quiet. I was out of practice for this type of event, and frankly have not stood so long over a two-day period in some time.
Smaller booths, fewer vendors, and the reverse trade show (Hosted Buyers) format were fresh changes from HIMSS.
I also love the smaller cities it can go to versus Orlando, Las Vegas, and Chicago.
I see it as my new choice over HIMSS.
The vibe of the event was very high energy. People seemed to feel paroled from COVID and I can say I saw and talked with many CIOs in the vendor area. Most of us were seeing vendors we knew, friends in the business, and some of us tried very hard to learn something new without being pressed for a sales commitment. The challenge, as the venue was so big and beautiful, was to timely get to all of your events.
I will certainly go back.
I will never attend HIMSS again. ViVE was everything I hoped it would be and more. It was not too big, not to small = just right. Kudos to CHIME + HLTH for an outstanding event.
As a 20+ year HIMSS attendee, I found ViVe refreshing and energizing. Fun touches like a DJ, Betty White tribute, bright signage and excellent navigation in the right-sized convention center were truly appreciated. I attended HLTH last Fall and felt the educational sessions included too much future casting, not enough real-world implementation. This was not the case at ViVe’22. The UC Davis Summit was particularly helpful along with sessions that included CIOs (like Vanderbilt’s CIO on obtaining ROI for IT investments). Great work to Team ViVE’22!
ViVE was exciting as it brought together health systems, vendors, and partners who collectively were looking for innovative ways to transform healthcare with technology. ViVE wasn’t the same old, same old HIT trade show with typical sellers, buyers, and tire-kickers. Rather, the content and interaction was fresh, with an intentional focus on digital transformation in healthcare.”
ViVE was great. It could be because it was in real life for the first time and without masks but they did a good job imho of balancing the various elements of a conference (education, fun, & networking).
Microsoft closes its $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance.
Best Reader Comments
I don’t think [telehealth] payment parity is a good idea. Payment parity is just going to drive more money to big regional health systems. They can manage physician recruitment to address supply, they can afford to buy the technology to do the visits and they can afford to buy the marketing to find those existing high spending consumers. Pairing telehealth visits with marketing materials makes a lot of sense, which is why you see health systems talk about telehealth in the same sentence as digital front door aka the health systems website. If you make telehealth pay less than in person visits, you’ll keep it cheaper and drive the organizations doing telehealth national. (IANAL)
My guess is large independents want an EHR that is a simple, cost efficient billing machine. They don’t want to take on a lot of overhead and their providers want a UI that they can use very quickly … I’ve watched some long-time users chart in the green screen Meditech. They’re so fast. They don’t lift their hands off the keyboard and they have the exact timing of when Meditech loads the next screen. I think of them every time I’m working on some feature that I know is going to get ingrained in business users’ hands. If I can get it to no clicks, then they’ll be able to work as fast as I can load the next screen, so it better be fast. (IANAL)
Frankly I’d rather Epic do more to help independents remain independent (but with fluid chart exchange through Care Everywhere). AFAIK Consolidation in the healthcare industry has not produced measurable benefits for health outcomes or patient costs, but it has certainly helped with profits for the large systems. (Elizabeth H. H. Holmes)
Watercooler Talk Tidbits
HIMSS22 attendees – mask-wearing is now optional per revised CDC guidance. I would add that stiff business dress is also optional, so please bring some of that ViVE beach spirit to Orlando by dressing down a little and wearing comfortable shoes in testing your long-dormant conference muscles cautiously.
ViVE moves to Nashville’s downtown Music City Center next spring. Here’s my advice for HIMSS – if HIMSS22 attendance is as low as many predict, add the smaller, cooler, and more authentic cities back into the rotation instead of just tourist-overrun Orlando and Las Vegas (with the more interesting Chicago snuck in occasionally). A conference half the size of HIMSS at its peak has choices.
Lost in the nether regions that lie between ViVE and HIMSS is SXSW, which runs today through next Sunday in Austin. The health and medtech track is today through Tuesday. SXSW once seemed to be the up-and coming digital health conference, but I suspect it will be outflanked by ViVE, if for no other reason than health system executives don’t spend their own money to attend conferences and expensing ViVE sounds more justifiable than SXSW.
Meanwhile, HIMSS acquired the Health 2.0 conference in 2017 and said it would continue operating under that name, but I’m thinking HIMSS sold that name (or else Indian trademark law is opportunistically loose) because a Health 2.0 Conference website suggests no HIMSS involvement, an all-India based staff, and a home office in an Alabama outlet mall that is shared by similar conferences. They’re showing a US conference April 11-13 in Las Vegas, listing no speakers and a handful of exhibitors I’ve never heard of, claiming they expect over 1,000 attendees at $2,000 a head. The last HIMSS-owned Health 2.0 conference seems to have been in late 2020 and hasn’t been heard from since.
I wrote this week about the investor-backed Chief private network for C-suite women. I heard the next day from someone who had just received a response to her five-question application to join. She was first told that the company has a backlog of thousands of membership requests and wouldn’t be able to schedule the mandatory interview for many months. She almost immediately got another email saying that her qualifications were sound and the interview would be fast-tracked to the next few days. Right after that, the company sent her an email advising her that her job title wasn’t high enough to join (she’s an executive director with no “C” or “VP” in her title) and they wouldn’t waste time interviewing her. I think she expected more polish from a membership group whose dues start at $6,000 per year.
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Two teenaged Harvard students, one of whom developed a COVID-19 tracking site two years ago, create an “Airbnb lite” type site that matches refugees from Ukraine with people in neighboring countries who are offering places to stay. They say government-run sites are too hard to use and feature little more than a text box entry form and a display of those entries.
RxRevu founder Carm Huntress launches Credo, a Denver-based startup focused on digitizing and automating the medical records retrieval process, with a $3 million investment.
Symplr acquires GreenLight Medical, which offers healthcare supply management software.
The deal is Symplr’s 11th acquisition since November 2018, when it was acquired by private equity firm Clearlake Capital.
The company’s previous acquisitions include Conduent’s Midas solutions (a $340 million deal in January 2022), Halo Health, SpinFusion, HealthcareSource, Phynd, TractManager, ComplyTrack, The Patient Safety Co., IntelliSoft Group, and API Healthcare.
Clearlake provided Symplr with $1.6 billion of equity capital in January 2022 to purse its organic growth and acquisitions.
Reader Comments
From Hyaline Tissue: “Re: ViVE. It was entirely vendors – I don’t think any of the CHIME CIOs were on the exhibit floor, although I saw some floating around the events. It was focused on startups and people working on big problems, like interoperability, and trying to move the needle. Food, drinks, and events were incredible and Miami is a much cooler and fun location than Orlando. ViVE is clearly the replacement for Health 2.0 and its venture capital money and there’s a LOT of that floating in right now. HLTH obviously knows how to make an event that VC money wants to hang around. They were intentional about doing well those things that HIMSS has done poorly and I think they will get bigger very quickly.” Thanks for the report. I would enjoy hearing feedback from others and I’ll keep you anonymous. I will also ask for similar feedback after next week for folks who attended both ViVE and HIMSS22 – either as exhibitors or regular attendees — and thus can offer the inevitable comparison. The big marketing win for ViVE, other than HLTH and CHIME themselves, goes to Clearsense, which sponsored the apparently amazing performance of Wyclef Jean. It’s going to be tough for attendees of either or both conferences to return to staring at screens looking out windows at wintry monochrome. Maybe you can recreate the conference vibe at home by wearing a Hawaiian shirt with shorts, putting a box of sand underfoot, and standing in front of your coffeemaker for 20 minutes before pouring.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
The impending presence of a bomb cyclone in the Northeast makes me think of previous HIMSS conferences, where the frazzled Meditech folks would show up a day or two late waiting for Boston to dig out. Orlando weather calls for mid-70s with clouds and occasional rain Monday through Thursday.
Here’s what my sponsors told me they will be doing at HIMSS22.
I see on LinkedIn that Hyland will once again feature “corporate magician” David Harris, aka Magic Boy, aptly described as “a skilled marketer in the body of an entertainer.” He’s my second-favorite HIMSS entertainer after the amazing magician, psychic, and comic Bob Garner, who I see from his Instagram has lost 69 pounds and a visual 30 years by moving to a vegan diet, embracing meditation, and exercising like a madman.
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor TigerConnect. The Santa Monica, CA-based company offers the healthcare industry’s most widely adopted and integrated communication platform, bringing together all aspects of care collaboration, physician and resident scheduling, patient engagement, and alarm management into a single, scalable, and mobile solution. TigerConnect modernizes the way doctors, nurses, care teams, staff, and patients communicate – inside a facility, across multiple locations, and throughout the healthcare ecosystem. A cornerstone for digital transformation, the TigerConnect platform integrates with EHRs, nurse call, scheduling, and other systems to unify communication, streamline workflows, reduce costs, and improve patient outcomes. HIPAA-compliant and HITRUST-certified, TigerConnect delivers 99.99% verifiable uptime and is trusted by more than 7,000 healthcare organizations across the US and Canada. Thanks to TigerConnect for supporting HIStalk.
I found this new TigerConnect overview on YouTube.
Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Bravado Health of West Palm Beach, FL. Bravado Health’s award-winning designers created the dynamic patient engagement platform, Ayva, to simplify the care journey from preparation to recovery across the entire spectrum of surgeries, procedures, and disease management. Ayva packages care plans, educational videos, messaging, remote patient monitoring, and more into an accessible web-based experience that’s proven to engage patients, improve outcomes, and increase patient satisfaction. Ayva shares engagement data with the patient’s care team, helping clinicians make more well-informed decisions. Say hello to them next week at HIMSS22 in Booth 5349. Thanks to Bravado Health for supporting HIStalk.
Webinars
April 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “19 Massive Best Practices We’ve Learned from 4 Million Telehealth Visits.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, founder, president, and CEO, Mend. Virtual visits have graduated from a quickly implemented technical novelty to a key healthcare strategy. The challenge now is to define how telehealth can work seamlessly with in-person visits. This webinar will address patient satisfaction, reducing no-show rates to single digits, and using technology to make telehealth easy to use and accessible for all patients. The presenter will share best practices that have been gleaned from millions of telehealth visits and how they have been incorporated into a leading telemedicine and AI-powered patient engagement platform.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Oracle shares were down 6% in early after-hours trading Thursday as the company announced Q3 results that beat revenue expectations but fells short on earnings. Some analysts noted before the announcement that the company’s pending acquisition of Cerner has caused investor consternation and urged the company to explain its healthcare vision.
Healthcare Triangle announces Q4 results: revenue up 2%, EPS –$0.12 versus $0.07. The company went public in October 2021 at an IPO price of $4.00. Share price jumped 13% to $1.03 following the earnings announcement, valuing the company at $36 million.
UPMC makes an unspecified investment in Kyruus and will collaborate in developing the company’s ProviderMatch patient access platform. The company has raised $148 million through a Series D funding round.
Vivante Health, which offers employers a digestive health management program, raises $16 million in a Series A funding round.
UNC Health will implement Philips Oncology Pathways software that gives oncologists evidence-based treatment suggestions and matches patients to open clinical trials.
Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare will implement Health Catalyst’s Data Operating System and DOS Marts.
People
LexisNexis Risk Solutions hires Kelly Thompson, JD (Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative) to lead its newly formed Government Health Team.
Wireless ultrasound vendor Clarius Mobile Health names Ohad Arazi, JD (Zebra Medical Vision) as president. He will take over as CEO later this year.
Announcements and Implementations
Google Health previews Conditions, an enhancement to Care Studio that extracts condition information from EHR data and organizes them by acuity with access to related labs, meds, reports, and notes.
Health Data Movers announces the ACE Team of advisory consulting executives who will offer on-demand services such as interim C-suite, providers, analytics, data integration, and sales and marketing.
Quil launches Assure, a connected home platform for seniors who are aging in place that monitors routines based on the individual’s privacy choices.
TigerConnect adds resident scheduling to its physician scheduling solution, which helps chief residents efficiently create schedules that comply with rotation time requirements.
Medhost launches a clinician-driven anesthesia management solution that provides medication documentation, vital signs graphing, anesthesia charting, and orders.
Orbic launches SmartWrist, a smart watch for Verizon / Android users that measures pulse oxygen, pulse, body temperature; tracks fitness goals and sleep; and offers SOS and fall detection with auto-dial of emergency contacts or services. It uses geofencing to enable alerts for when the wearer leaves a designated safe zone.
Healthwise announces Advise, which allows Epic customers to provide tailored, evidence-based health education to patients in 19 languages.
Sphere adds digital wallet support for Google Pay and Apple Pay for patient payments in its TrustCommerce platform that is integrated with Epic MyChart.
Anthem will change its name to Elevance Health, noting that its business extends beyond offering Blue Cross health plans to digital health and other services that involve 118 million consumers and 90,000 employees. The company was known as WellPoint before changing its name to Anthem in 2014. ANTM shares are up 39% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s flat performance, valuing the company at $113 billion. President and CEO Gail Boudreaux, MBA, who previously served as CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was an all-American in women’s basketball and shot-put at Dartmouth.
NTT Data launches a Hospital at Home solution to help US health systems develop home-based care models. It includes a command center, acute rapid response, and support for advanced clinical tools such as virtual reality, remote imaging, and robotics.
Get Well enhances its digital engagement solution for payers to support digital member navigation, member experience and care gap closure, digital care management, and vulnerable population engagement. Sutter Health Aetna reported a 25% increase in member retention and a 10% increase in PCP visits from implementing its member navigation solution.
CareMesh launches a public developer sandbox to allow hospitals, physician groups, payers, and life insurance companies to find and contact providers using its national provider directory. The directory contains 20 million FHIR R4 records from 400 sources that are accessed via configurable APIs.
LG and Amwell will co-develop device-based virtual care solutions, starting with solutions for use in hospitals, where LG is the leading provider of smart TVs for patient rooms.
A new KLAS report on healthcare AI finds that previous market share leader Jvion has lost many customers who report financial constraints and lack of outcomes, ClosedLoop.ai scores highly in customer satisfaction, while Health Catalyst has seen satisfaction jump as it offers more analytics-powered prescriptive guidance. Customers of Cerner and Epic report struggles to get their published models up and running, and while Epic customers complain about nickel-and-diming since prebuilt models are priced individually, they are increasingly licensing its Cognitive Computer Developer Platform that allows them to deploy their own models. Respondents provided some tips:
Start with analytics before jumping into predictive or prescriptive models.
Identify the problem you are trying to solve, then decide whether AI is the right tool.
Set clear goals for use cases.
Don’t obsess with perfecting incoming data. The machine learning should be applied to data in its current form.
Model testing takes longer than you expect.
Focus on defining the intervention more than perfecting the model.
Government and Politics
The EU will publish a governance framework for health data that will affect EHRs, medical software products, and wellness apps, according to a news site that reviewed a draft. The goals of the regulation are to increase efficiency, advance scientific research, and foster the development of new digital health services and products. A proposed European Digital Identity Framework would establish cross-border functionality; individuals could restrict or share their data; the allowed secondary use of patient data would be explicitly spelled out; and a European Digital and Health Data Board of experts would foster cooperation among authorities. The proposal would require EHRs to be certified for interoperability and security and a common infrastructure called MyHealth@EU would be used to exchange health data across borders.
The VA says last week’s unplanned, two-day Cerner downtime at its only live site in Spokane – in which admissions were halted because patient screens were showing the information of different patients – was caused by a Cerner programming error . A review has found only a few corrupted records so far, some of those at its Columbus location where Cerner is not yet live. The VA admits that it probably shouldn’t have been making programming changes so close to the system’s next go-live in Walla Walla, WA on March 26.
Sixteen Midwestern defendants who worked for a chain of pain clinics, including 12 doctors, receive prison sentences for a $250 million healthcare fraud scheme in which they refused to prescribe opioids unless patients – which included addicts and drug dealers — agreed to being given high-reimbursing back injections. Their pill mill doctors worked just a few hours each week in hoping to avoid DEA attention, but even then were among Michigan’s highest prescribers of oxycodone at 6.6 million doses. The doctors bought expensive real estate, luxury cars, indoor basketball courts and swimming pools, and gold bars.
Privacy and Security
A TV station notes that The Work Number holds the payroll records of more than half the country’s workforce, as the Equifax-owned company is the payroll outsourcer for two million employers. They will, for $55, verify someone’s employment and provide their pay history. Equifax also provides Social Security number validation, education verification, property ownership verification, and IRS tax records. Chinese military hackers breached Equifax in 2017, compromising 150 million credit reports.
Other
I don’t usually post job openings, but I saw on LinkedIn that Walgreens is looking for a manager of clinical informatics to work remotely, which I though might interest someone. Job responsibilities included working with its Healthcare Clinic providers to optimize system workflow and use, perform release testing, and lead EHR training. Three years of health informatics experience and two years of direct leadership are required, while a graduate informatics degree and clinician experience are preferred.
A hospital in India draws review-bombing after someone claiming to be a surgeon there posts a Twitter video of himself performing surgery, complete with close-ups of the patient’s face and medical records, during which he also argued with gaming fanboys that PlayStation is better than Xbox.
Sponsor Updates
Mach7 Technologies receives new orders from existing customers Trinity Health and Penn State’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
KLAS recognizes PatientBond at ViVE for performance.
Nuance expands AI-powered reporting features in its PowerScribe platform.
NTT Data and Lirio announce a strategic alliance focused on enabling healthcare providers to deliver more personalized care.
Healthcare workers are still at risk for COVID infections. Even though vaccines have been proven to reduce hospitalization and death, there’s still risk of infection and the potential for subsequent disability. A growing body of evidence shows long-term cardiovascular and neurological complications from even mild cases of the disease, and an estimate of over 1.5 million adults in the US who are seeking permanent disability determination following infection.
During my recent visit to the hospital as a patient, I don’t recall seeing hospital employees wearing anything other than surgical masks. Some patients were wearing KN95 masks, but it made me wonder whether wearing surgical masks was an employee choice or whether there is still a supply shortage for respirators or other types of masks.
With that in mind, I wasn’t surprised to learn that OSHA plans to increase healthcare facility inspections to assess preparedness for the next COVID-19 variant that might emerge. The initial focus will be on facilities that were previously cited or had complaints filed against them. OSHA is supposed to be finalizing an infectious disease standard for worker protection, and for the healthcare workers who have been permanently impacted by the pandemic, it can’t come soon enough.
I’m a history buff, so was quite excited to see the announcement that Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been located nearly two miles below the surface of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. It’s remarkably well preserved due to the extremely cold waters and the lack of wood-damaging organisms. The technology needed to locate the wreck is pretty remarkable, but so is the determination of those who worked in difficult conditions to make it happen. The ship’s resting place is protected as an historic monument under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, so nothing was disturbed in the exploration of the wreckage. Kudos to the anonymous donor who financed the $10 million mission.
Healthcare news and announcements are at a minimum this week, other than Epic’s announcement regarding Garden Plot. My inbox is full of poorly worded but jargon-rich emails practically begging me to visit various HIMSS booths. Having more than three buzzwords in the first sentence dramatically lowers my chances of actually showing up.
I’ve also received some tips on pretty cool things that will be revealed next week but am sworn to secrecy, so you’ll have to follow along for the news as well as our on-the-ground reporting. Mr. H is doing the short version of the conference, but I’ll be there Sunday through Thursday, so we’re leaving a gap in reporting Friday’s keynotes. Both of them looked interesting, but I know from experience that by Friday I would be too exhausted to care and prefer to sleep in my own bed rather than dropping another $200 on a hotel room.
I’m experiencing a last-minute flurry of work prior to the conference, however. It seems my clients must have some kind of fear that I’m going to run away to Florida never to return, because a couple of them have decided they want to accelerate projects that haven’t been on their priority lists for weeks. I was able to accommodate some because they were close to completion and just waiting on a few details from the client, but others are just going to have to wait. I may address some of them on the plane, depending on my mood and the surroundings, but no promises were made.
The farther I get in my career, the more I’m likely to engage the rule that “no is a complete sentence.” I don’t mind going the extra mile when someone has an unexpected need or something out of the ordinary happens, but I don’t make a habit of running around crazy when it could have been avoided.
I’m also doing some last-minute shoe shopping, having decided that in 2022 footwear comfort is much more important than style. HIMSS was already becoming more casual the last time I attended in person, and based on the numbers of us who are used to working at home in hiking pants and pullovers, I’m sure the casual ethos will extend to the exhibit hall. I’ll still be looking for good shoe photos, though, so if your feet are young and you’re feeling sassy, I’ll keep an eye out for you.
As far as packing, it’s also a good 50 degrees warmer in Orlando than it is for me at home. Although I’m looking forward to breaking out the spring and summer clothes, I hope it’s not completely sweat-inducing next week in Orlando since I’ll be doing a lot of walking from my hotel out in the cheaper part of town. Maybe some day I’ll hit the big time and be able to stay right across the street, but that wasn’t in this year’s budget.
The biggest challenge of the week has been an issue with my Outlook calendar, which Microsoft assures me will be fixed once the time change actually occurs on Sunday. This week looks normal, as does the week following HIMSS, But starting Sunday, the system has gone wonky when converting between good old Chicago time and the East Coast. Fortunately, my administrative assistant is reconfirming all my meetings and creating a backup document in case things don’t go as well as we hope on Sunday morning.
I have a new friend joining me on the party scene this year and am looking forward to connecting with old friends as well. It’s been a long depressing winter for me, so if you see the blond-haired person in sunglasses sprawled out on the lawn in front of the convention center, it just might be me. I have to enjoy it while I can, since HIMSS23 in Chicago won’t likely lend itself to lounging on the grass.
Are you packed and ready for HIMSS, or still knee-deep in ViVE? Or are you just glad to be staying home in your yoga pants and quarter-zip while the rest of us head to the boat show? Leave a comment or email me.
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I can read them fine by clicking and dragging them larger. Tested on desktop, iPad, and iPhone. Not perfectly sharp,…