News 10/13/23

Top News

FDA creates a nine-member Digital Health Advisory Committee that will advise it on topics such as AI, augmented and virtual reality, digital therapeutics, wearables, and remote patient monitoring technology.

Nominations will be accepted through December 11 online.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I have never listened to an industry podcast and don’t expect to, but chatty health IT celebrity-seekers are sure cranking out a ton of them. I don’t see how the pool of skilled hosts and expert guests is sufficient to fuel all of the amateur broadcasting that fills my X and LinkedIn feeds, but surely they wouldn’t bother if no one was listening. I can’t see spending 30 minutes listening to a conversation that could be distilled into a couple of sentences, especially if there’s a lot of self-promotion or vendor-paid endorsing going on.

Listening: Eloy, which turned up on a YouTube channel that covers rare progressive rock albums. That led me to happily discover that the band’s catalog is on Spotify. It’s fascinating to listen to music of the wildly creative and diverse 1970s, when bands focused on music rather than choreography, computer trickery, and marketing. The musical groups usually faded quickly into obscurity and unrelated day jobs, with their deepest and most creative thoughts from their teens and early 20s preserved on seldom-heard and rare LPs like insects in amber. The music can be wistfully naive and sometimes primitively executed, but it’s moving to hear knowing that their youthful creators have either died or are into their 70s and 80s.

Just about every social media post I’ve seen about HLTH involves parties, group hugs, and selfies. I’m wondering if anyone found solid business value from attending in lieu of doing actual employer work? It sits well down the list of “conferences I would pay out of my own pocket to attend” in my active poll. Conference attendees apparently set the ROI bar a lot lower than they would for a software purchase, requiring little beyond a target-rich networking environment.

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.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cigna’s Evernorth Health Services acquires the asynchronous virtual care assets of Bright.md, which it will incorporate into its MDLive virtual care service that it acquired in April 2021 for a reported $1 billion.

RCM vendor Access Healthcare acquires Envera Health, which offers patient engagement solutions.

Yale New Haven Health asks the state of Connecticut to provide financing for its acquisition of three hospitals that are owned by cyberattack victim Prospect Medical Holdings. YNHH also wants Prospect to lower the $435 million acquisition price of the hospitals, whose financial condition is dire to the point of not being able to buy supplies and pay physicians.

Epic offers SmartUser, the renamed Power User program whose website allows any provider to register for 17 free virtual efficiency classes that offer 1 CME credit. Epic says that attendees report that each course attended saves them one hour per week.

WellSky acquires Corridor, which offers coding and RCM services to post-acute care organizations.

People

Rick LeMay, MS (Clearwater) joins First Health Advisory as EVP of enterprise security and technology.

Announcements and Implementations

Lumeon announces Conductor for clinical workflow automation, which includes command center orchestration, digital rounding, and a campaign builder.

Wolters Kluwer Health announces Health Language Platform, a FHIR terminology server that works with Microsoft Azure’s FHIR service.

Sutter Health will create an innovation center by early 2024, for which it is seeking a San Francisco location.

Philips announces interoperability between its Capsule Medical Device Information Platform and its Patient Information Center IX.

Israel’s Soroka Medical Center is using facial recognition to match trauma victims that it is treating to photos that have been sent to a hospital-created email address by concerned family members. Tele Aviv-based Corsight AI provided the technology at no charge.

Microsoft introduces new healthcare-related tools to its Fabric analytics platform that can assemble and standardize data from multiple sources – such as EHRs, imaging systems, lab systems, medical devices, and claims data – and present it in a single view. The company also announced Azure AI Health Bot, which can answer staff questions about treatments and protocols and patient portal queries about symptoms and medical terms. Microsoft also announced a text analytics solution, along with generative AI models that create a patient history, simply medical reports into patient-friendly language, and help radiologists identify possible radiology report errors.

Government and Politics

California’s Delete Act is signed into law, requiring data brokers to delete all information they have on file pertaining to the person who makes the request. The state is required to create a single webpage that routes the individual’s request to all data brokers. It also requires companies to delete all information on file, not just the data they collected about the requester themselves.

Other

A Nature comment article says that use of AI in clinical practice may be limited because developers focus on population-level predictive accuracy while failing to take individual patient differences into account, causing the tools to sometimes offer unreliable advice in failing to answer the “are you sure” question. That leaves clinicians to assess factors that may be misleading the technology.

Sponsor Updates

• Valley ENT reaches 10,000 patients with its first Text2Pay campaign using Healow Payment Services from EClinicalWorks.
• InterSystems welcomes eight new companies to its Startup Program, bringing the total number of participants to 35.
• MRO announces that it has been recognized as the top-performing company for release-of-information digital technology and vendor efficiency in the latest KLAS Release of Information Performance Report.

Blog Posts

• Burnout’s triple threat: Compromising care, clinicians, and cash flow (Nordic)
• Funding Social Care: Streamline Payments to Community-Based Organizations (Findhelp)
• Customer Experience in the New Health Economy (Five9)
• Creating Effective Health Education Content at Scale (Healthwise)
• A No-Fail Guide to Minimizing No-Shows (Medhost)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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