News 8/20/21

Top News

Cerner hires David Feinberg, MD, MBA as president and CEO, effective October 1, 2021.

He has been VP of Google Health since January 2019. Before that, he was president and CEO of Geisinger from 2015 to 2019.

Cerner also announces that President Donald Trigg will leave the company.

Cerner’s board has separated the roles of chair and CEO with the hire. William Zollars will become independent board chair on October 1, while Feinberg will become a board member.

Reader Comments

From Inanimate Object: “Re: HIMSS. What does it mean that they said only three attendees tested positive? There was no contact tracing, random post-event testing, and no mass email asking people to let them know if they had symptoms or tested positive.” A HIMSS broadcast email says that three HIMSS21 participants have tested positive, one during the conference and two afterward. It was not a self-congratulatory email, so kudos for that, but perhaps naive in thinking that anyone would bother to notify HIMSS upon becoming symptomatic and/or testing positive. Some have observed that HIMSS, as a health technology cheerleader, should have encouraged use of a contact tracing app. I would add that some post-conference voluntary surveillance would be nice in considering upcoming in-person conferences, including HIMSS22, to determine how effective the HIMSS21 policies were in avoiding spread since it was one of the first big in-person healthcare gatherings since the spring of 2020. Of course for HIMSS, three is a good number that could only be spoiled by further review.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Here’s a Clearwater explainer video I found on YouTube.

I’ll wrap up my “HIMSS21 Attendee Feedback” survey soon, so spend a couple of minutes answering 10 questions and you’ll be part of the summary that will appear here soon.

This is from the self-laudatory “About” section of the LinkedIn profile of a guy I ran across. I can’t decide if the misspelling is more attention-grabbing than the the no-subject, third-party writing that brags about his generic attributes (“motivates and influences others to achieve.”)

Listening: drummer Aric Improta, recommended by Alex Scarlat, MD as “the best drummer still alive.” I’m not a big fan of drum solos since they often involve a lot of frenzied but musically pointless thrashing, but this guy is amazing. He plays for the wildly energetic Fever 333 as well as Night Verses. This reminds me of the Who’s Pete Townshend complaining that his live playing was limited to being an efficient rhythm guitarist because Keith Moon was drumming all over the place instead of keeping time and John Entwistle played “every harmonic in the sky” by treating his bass guitar as a lead instrument, making the deceased former members “f***ing difficult to play with.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare analytics platform vendor Inovalon will be acquired by an equity consortium at a valuation of $7.3 billion, a premium of 24% over the average share price through July 26 when media speculation surfaced the rumor. Founder and CEO Keith Dunleavy, MD will remain a shareholder, board member, and CEO after the take-private transaction. The transaction is expected to close in late 2021 or early 2022.

Healthcare connectivity platform vendor Commure will acquire mobile provider technology developer PatientKeeper from HCA Healthcare, which will make an investment in Commure. Commure will migrate PatientKeeper’s platform to its cloud infrastructure and will license it to continued customer HCA, which will participate in its further development. Commure is a portfolio company of General Catalyst. Commure founder and executive chairman is billionaire investor Hemant Taneja, a managing partner of General Catalyst who was the lead investor in Livongo when it was sold to Teladoc for $18.5 billion last October.

Verily acquires Raleigh, NC-based SignalPath, which offers a clinical trials management system. Co-founder and CEO Brad Hirsch, MD, MBA is an oncologist who formerly worked as a Duke informatics director and senior medical director of Flatiron Health. Verily president of clinical studies platform Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD – who until recently was FDA’s principle deputy commissioner of food and drugs and acting CIO – also is an oncologist who held leadership roles at Duke and Flatiron.

Workforce management systems vendor QGenda acquires CredentialGenie, which offers a provider credentialing system.

Apple is reportedly scaling back its HealthHabit app that allows its employees to track fitness goals, talk to health coaches, and manage hypertension, with the 50 Apple Health employees who are assigned to the project facing reassignment or layoff. A Wall Street Journal review from a few weeks ago found that the app’s employee users weren’t engaged and didn’t trust the health data from Apple’s clinics that was used to develop the product.

Sales

• Sentara Healthcare will contribute de-identified patient data to England-based Sensyne Health for AI life sciences research. Sentara will become a partner and shareholder in Sensyne Health, joining 11 NHS trusts, St. Luke’s University Health Network, and University of Colorado Health.

People

Hospital operational management software vendor Hospital IQ hires Nate Kelly, MBA (Cerner) as chief commercial officer and promotes Jason Harber to COO and chief strategy officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Harvard Medical School and Israel’s Clalit Research Institute establish a joint precision medicine effort, with the US arm being led by Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, chair of HMS’s Department of Biomedical Informatics.

Medical scales vendor Seca will deploy user authentication from Imprivata.

Healthcare Triangle announces a ready-to-deploy healthcare block chain network called Blockedge, which can operate on any public cloud.

Ellkay releases LKAggregate, a data aggregation solution, to Epic App Orchard. It sends data to Epic Healthy Planet from disparate EHRs.

Government and Politics

WEDI asks HHS to issue expedited guidance on how providers can submit a good faith estimate of their charges to health plans under the No Surprises Act. WEDI also asks for clarification on the compliance date, which transactions will be used to exchange advanced determination requests and responses, and how HHS will handle cases where multiple providers are involved.

Indiana’s health department notifies 750,000 residents that their COVID-19 contact tracing information was exposed in a security company’s “unauthorized access,” which the company says actually means that the state was storing the data unsecured on the Internet and took it offline when the company gave it a heads up.

COVID-19

CDC announces creation of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which will analyze and communicate data for public health decision-making to mitigate threats such as social and economic disruption. Experts have recently said that CDC is not equipped to provide the type of real-time data analysis that is needed to to make quick decisions in a fast-changing pandemic, so this is a significant change for CDC.

Florida’s COVID-19 hospitalization continues to climb far above previous pandemic peaks, as deaths also surpass previous highs and rolling seven-day test positivity is at 37%.

Seventy-three Mississippi hospitals ask the state for 1,450 healthcare workers to offset staff shortages, saying they could open another 1,000 beds if they had enough people. Mississippi has issued an order that allows EMTs to perform some in-hospital services. The state has the highest number of hospitalizations since the pandemic began and Neshoba County has the highest per-capita case count in the country at 263 per 100,000, which officials says is because the recent county fair had thousands of mostly mask-free people packed into events, some of them political, while the county has just 22% of its residents fully vaccinated. Mississippi hospitals had six ICU beds available Wednesday morning with a 46-patient waitlist.

The Texas Education Agency tells school districts that they don’t need to perform contact tracing or broadly notify parents when a student comes down with COVID-19. TEA says data shows that students don’t spread COVID-19 to other students at a significant level, although the public health data that was used to make that assessment predated emergence of the delta variant.  Schools are allowed to conduct rapid tests of staff and can also test students if their parents have provided written permission.

A survey of US nurses finds that 75% trust COVID-19 vaccines as safe and effective, but many have questions about duration of protection, whether boosters are needed, and long-term effects. While 88% say they are or will be vaccinated, the biggest questions among those who won’t involve long-term vaccine effects, lack of safety information, and mistrust about their development and approval process. Not many unvaccinated nurses say that FDA approval would change their mind.

Samsung and the Commons Project Foundation add SMART Health Cards that display COVID-19 vaccination status to Samsung Pay.

Washington state hospitals are reaching near maximum capacity, partly because many patients have no family members to care for them at discharge and understaffed nursing homes won’t accept transfers.

Other

AI expert Alex Scarlat, MD ingeniously applies an AI model to a Medicare claims database that he ran across that shows outlier claims or beneficiaries that suggest fraud. This is pretty brilliant – our “pay and chase” model results in the occasional high-profile arrest for something that should have been caught and stopped almost immediately, like a general practitioner who is mass producing prescriptions for expensive compounded scar cream or upcoding all visits to the most complex.

I’ve seen no photos from HIMSS21 sessions, so here’s one from LinkedIn user Les Jordan, chief product and strategy officer for MobileSmith Health. I would enjoy this open space since my biggest reason for not attending HIMSS educational sessions is getting trapped between seemingly miles of knees in a presentation that screams “dud” five minutes in. I’m guessing this photo isn’t representative of education sessions in general, but since I didn’t attend any, feel free to describe your experience. It will be interesting to see attendance numbers from the HLTH conference in Boston in October, especially since CHIME has shifted its HIMSS conference participation to the new ViVE conference with HLTH March 6-9 in Miami Beach, a week before HIMSS22 in Orlando. It’s a terrible time to be in the conference business.

UPDATE: HLTH and CHIME just opened their call for ViVE presenters, saying that the March conference will gather 5,000 attendees, 450 sponsors, and 300 speakers in Miami Beach. Some of the sponsors and supporters listed so far include Allscripts, Athenahealth, CereCore, Cerner, Clearsense, Divurgent, Ellkay, Fortified Health Security, Healthcare Triangle, Impact Advisors, Imprivata, InterSystems, KLAS, Lumeon, Meditech, Nordic, Optimum Healthcare IT, Pivot Point Consulting, Quil, and The HCI Group.

Sponsor Updates

• Vizient will offer its hospital members the remote patient monitoring and virtual care platform of VitalTech.
• KLAS Research’s First Look Report reveals that Redox’s EHR integration drives fast outcomes for its digital health customers.
• Lumeon wins two Bronze Stevie Awards in the 2021 International Business Awards.

Blog Posts

• 5 Key Components of a Digital Front Door Healthcare Experience Strategy (Avtex)
• PatientBond Named to Inc. 5000 for Third Year in a Row (PatientBond)
• MedAware Partners with athenahealth’s Marketplace Program to Provide Clinicians with an Effective Medication Safety Monitoring System (MedAware)
• ReMedi Health Solutions Ranks No. 165 on the 2021 Inc. 5000 List (ReMedi Health Solutions)
• Lone Workers vs. Remote Workers: Knowing the Different and Keeping Both Safe (Everbridge)
• Data Breach Lawsuits on the Rise: Is Your Healthcare Organization Prepared? (Fortified Health Security)
• Recognizing a Compassionate Advocate for Patients (GetWellNetwork)
• New CMS Rules Put Hospitals on Notice: Vigilance on Hyperglycemia and Hypoglycemia are Critical to Patient Care (Glytec)
• Data, Interoperability, and the Impact of COVID-19 (Halo Health)
• Hospital Price Transparency: Healthcare Consumers Have a Right to Know, Don’t They? (InterSystems)
• HIMSS conference conversations: Why did you join IMO? (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• HIMSS Day 2 and Day 3 Recaps (Lyniate)
• Tackling the Training and Education Challenges in Rural Healthcare (Medhost)
• 5 reasons to listen to Meditech podcasts (Meditech)
• How to Attract and Retain Talent in Your PT Practice (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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