I lived through the time period this happened (which is over now, although there was never a declared end to…
News 9/27/23
Top News
Release of information service provider Datavant acquires Healthjump, which provides health data exchange for value-based care organizations.
Reader Comments
From Lillehammer: “Re: the apparent end of Oracle Health’s code Developer program. I suspect they are taking a similar route to Epic and will pare down their value-added offerings for API integrations and perhaps shut down the Cerner App Gallery. Cerner never seemed to be committed to making interoperability easy, as evidenced by years-ago mentions of non-FHIR APIs that never came to fruition and lack of documentation and support for non-FHIR integration methods, such as HL7v2.”
From Birdie: “Re: Robin Healthcare. Investors pulled $$, doors shut, doctors cut off from service. Just an overnight flameout. Ambient documentation was never really gonna succeed, was it?”
Webinars
October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
People
McKesson-owned oncology real world evidence vendor Ontada hires Christine Davis, MS (Oracle) as president.
Clinical laboratory quality management software vendor MediaLab hires Tom Ormondroyd, MBA (Millennia Patient Services) as CEO.
Artera expands its executive team with promotions — Ashu Agte (CTO), Tom McIntyre, MS, MBA (COO), Adrianna Hosford (SVP of marketing and communications), and Zach Wood, MBA (SVP of product and partner ecosystem) – and hiring Nicole Ossey as VP of people.
Announcements and Implementations
Costco offers its members discounted, $29 primary care video visits from independent virtual provider marketplace Startup Health. Customers can also get a standard lab panel with virtual follow-up for $72 and book online mental health visits for $79. Sesame also offers virtual visits with specialists and a prescription refill service.
Open AI rolls out new ChatGPT capabilities for conducting voice conversations and analyzing photos.
Oncology data vendor COTA announces Vista, an EHR dataset for drug company research.
Tesla announces new capabilities for its Optimus robot, which can precisely locate its own limbs in real time and applies “video in, controls out” learning from its onboard neural network. The implication for industries that rely on an aging workforce that is trained to perform repetitive tasks in fixed environments using show-and-tell methods could be significant, as could the economic implications of relatively inexpensive 24-hour-per day employee replacements that have no geographic limitations. Elon Musk said in May 2023 that he expects the majority of Tesla’s value to come from Optimus, which he says could sell 10 to 20 billion units.
Privacy and Security
CommonSpirit Health, which operates 140 hospitals and 1,000 care sites, reports a $1.4 billion FY2023 loss, of which it attributes $160 million to its October 2022 ransomware attack. The organization acknowledges that it may face class action lawsuits related to the breach and does not yet know whether its insurer will cover some of the costs. CommonSpirit lost $1.2 billion in the previous fiscal year, when it paid its CEO $35 million.
Other
England’s Newcastle Hospitals blames its computer system for failing to send 24,000 letters to patients over several years that included test results, care needs, and discharge instructions that were never delivered. The trust says that drafts of the letters require a second clinician’s signature before sending, but the letters were stored in a computer folder that few doctors knew about. Officials didn’t name the EHR, but the trust is a long-time user of Cerner / Oracle Health.
Patients of hospitals in Pakistan complain that a shortage of X-ray film has forced hospitals to take phone pictures of their radiology computer screens to make copies for patients, which the patients note are still being charged to them at full price.
Sponsor Updates
- EClinicalWorks supports community health centers with its continued progress towards enabling UDS Patient-Level Submission (UDS+) reporting via FHIR.
- Nova Scotia Health in Canada upgrades to Agfa HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging Platform.
- Availity CEO Russ Thomas joins the Definitively Speaking Podcast.
- AvaSure publishes a new guide, “Fall Prevention in Hospitals: Key Results from Virtual Monitoring Programs.”
- Nordic releases a new episode of its In Network podcast, “Making Rounds: Under new (data) management.”
- Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Final Medicare hospital inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) and proposed outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS) changes for fiscal year 2024.”
- Bamboo Health CEO Jay Desai will present at Health Evolution September 28 in Nashville.
- Clinical Architecture will sponsor SNOMED CT Expo 2023 October 26-27 in Atlanta.
Blog Posts
- Meditech Expanse Pharmacy: Wins and Benefits of Formulary Service Vendor Changes (CereCore)
- Addressing Healthcare Staffing Shortages and Improving Productivity through Technology and Outsourcing (AGS Health)
- Generative AI at point of care (Arcadia)
- RDCA-DAP and the Aridhia DRE – A platform to accelerate rare disease therapy development and regulatory engagement (Aridhia)
- How healthcare providers can implement a denials management program utilizing internal audit (Baker Tilly)
- SNOMED CT Facilitates Public Health IT Initiatives (Clinical Architecture)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Who are the doctors doing $29 visits? Would be interesting to know what Costco’s cut is.
Yeah, if Costco is charging $29, there’s no way the providers are making more than $23 (which is the going rate for many telehealth vendors for 1099 contractors) which makes for some interesting economics for those delivering care. I suspect they’re careening through visits so they can hit their hourly earnings targets.
Re: “…suspect they are taking a similar route to Epic and will pare down their value-added offerings for API integrations…”
First I’ve heard of this. Does this impact App Orchard?
My organization made an announcement recently that they were going to “do something” with App Orchard. It would be simultaneously funny and deeply frustrating if, just as the Powers That Be adopted App Orchard, App Orchard was put in a tree museum!
App Orchard (renamed to App Market) was put on hiatus in January of this year, so there is no “doing something” with it right now. Epic said at the time they would relaunch it later this year, but TBD if that holds true. https://histalk2.com/2022/12/11/monday-morning-update-12-12-22/
They already replaced it with “Partners and Pals”: https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/epic-unveils-new-app-showroom-third-party-vendors
If Partners and Pals is a replacement of App Orchard, where is the publicly available page to sign up for it? What is the difference between this new program and the App Orchard program? For that matter, what is the difference between ‘Partners and Pals’ and ‘Vendor Services’? Why create these differently named programs and cause confusion?
Like I said in my other comment,
“Partners & Pals program is non-transparent and is designed to put their thumb on the scale for those vendors who agree to color purely within the lines defined by a diktat from Verona instead of having open and transparent rules of the play and let the market decide who the winners are.”
Epic is always looking to get whatever leverage that they can – through non-competes, by pressuring customers to not hire, by restricting access to their documentation on the UserWeb etc. Some of those levers might be legal but they are certainly unethical, specially for a company that is so dominant in a critical industry. It is high time that Lina Khan pays some attention to Verona as well.
Oracle and Epic paring down there developer/vendor programs without any feedback from that community is disappointing.
Unlike some of the other enterprise tech vendors (Salesforce, Microsoft, AWS), EHR platform vendors have never seen the developer community as partners/collaborators who can co-innovate and eventually help their mutual customers.
Epic for a while had started heading in the right direction with App Orchard and the App Orchard conference but in typical Epic fashion, they unilaterally discontinued it. Their Partners & Pals program is non-transparent and is designed to put their thumb on the scale for those vendors who agree to color purely within the lines defined by a diktat from Verona instead of having open and transparent rules of the play and let the market decide who the winners are.