I lived through the time period this happened (which is over now, although there was never a declared end to…
News 11/3/23
Top News
The American Hospital Association, Texas Hospital Association, Texas Health Resources, and United Regional Health Care System sue the federal government over an HHS rule that prohibits health system from using web user tracking tools such as Meta Pixel and Google Analytics.
The plaintiffs note that the federal government, including HHS, uses those same technologies. They also claim that the new rule oversteps HHS’s HIPAA statutory authority.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor DrFirst of Rockville, MD. Since 2000, the healthcare IT pioneer has empowered providers and patients to achieve better health through intelligent medication management. It improves healthcare efficiency and effectiveness by enhancing e-prescribing workflows, improving medication history, optimizing clinical data usability, and helping patients start and stay on therapy. In the last few years, DrFirst has won over 25 awards for excellence and innovation, recognizing its game-changing use of clinical-grade AI to streamline time-consuming healthcare workflows and prevent medication errors. The company’s solutions are used by more than 350,000 prescribers, 71,000 pharmacies, 300 EHRs and health information systems, and 2,000 hospitals in the US and Canada. Visit their website and follow @DrFirst. Thanks to DrFirst for supporting HIStalk.
I’m thrilled when readers comment on HIStalk articles, but I should explain a ground rule. It wouldn’t be fair for me to approve anonymous comments that make specific legal or moral allegations about people or companies who are named specifically. Comments such as “Company X is all smoke and mirrors and knowingly sells a product that doesn’t work” or “CEO John Smith has had affairs with three consecutive assistants” may well be true, but I have no way of knowing (and comfortably publishing) that.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Bloomberg highlights Apple’s unfulfilled health ambitions even as the company uses health-centric selling points for its Watch and the company’s 2024 roadmap that includes hypertension and sleep apnea detection, turning AirPods into hearing aids, adding health capabilities to its Vision Pro headset, and launching an AI-driven paid health coaching service. Apple’s core market remains the “worried well,” and venturing into medical domains and patient care could embroil it in global regulatory complexities. Insider accounts reveal that Apple has shelved various health projects in fearing that a subpar consumer experience would tarnish its reputation. Apple even flirted with running in-store clinics staffed by employed doctors and engaged in acquisition talks with Crossover Health and One Medical for staffing them, but abandoned the idea because the cost was competitive only for young, healthy customers.
Meditech announces a return to office plan that requires employees to spend 40% of each pay period in the office — spread among Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday as full-time days — beginning in March 2024. That seems entirely reasonable to me, although an employee tells me that it’s a big jump from today’s twice-per-month requirement.
AdaptX, which offers AI-powered EHR analytics tools, raises $10 million in funding. CEO Warren Ratliff, JD was a co-founder and COO of Caradigm.
AI-enabled radiology performance measurement software vendor Covera Health raises up to $50 million in a Series C funding round and finalizes its acquisition of CoRead, a hospital AI quality assurance company.
Ambulatory practice technology vendor IKS Health acquires coding and documentation outsourcer AQuity Solutions for $200 million, increasing its headcount to 14,000 and its annual revenue to $330 million.
Doximity launches DocDefender, a free service for physicians that removes their personal contact information from public websites.
Waystar will delay its IPO due to market conditions, pushing the offering back to December at the earliest but more likely into next year.
Sales
- Inland Empire Health Plan and Molina Healthcare of California will offer 72,000 teens in two counties access to BeMe’s behavioral health platform.
People
Walgreens Boots Alliance hires Neal Sample, PhD (Northwestern Mutual) as EVP/CIO.
Luke Bonney steps down from the CEO position at Redox, naming Trip Hofer, MBA (Optum Behavioral Health Solutions) as his replacement.
Matt Cardoso, MS, MBA (Quest Diagnostics) joins WellStack as VP of product management.
Announcements and Implementations
DrFirst launches Fuzion, an enterprise-wide, AI-powered, Epic-integrated platform to streamline medication reconciliation, prescription price transparency, and prescription reminders. Baptist Health says it saved 19,000 hours of clinician work by using DrFirst solutions to convert nine million medication instructions in multiple EHRs to standard sigs during its conversion to Epic.
Government and Politics
In Australia, Victoria’s health department reports dozens of doctors to the country’s practitioner regulator for failing to perform a mandatory check its SafeScript prescription drug monitoring program to detect doctor-shoppers.
Privacy and Security
A Massachusetts medical management company pays $100,000 to settle HIPAA charges that it failed to protect patient information from a December 2018 ransomware attack that came 20 months after the malware was installed. The breach affected the information of 207,000 patients of covered entities with which Doctors’ Management Services is a business associate. The settlement is HHS OCR’s first that involves ransomware.
In Canada, five Ontario hospitals confirm that patient data that was stolen in a recent ransomware attack against their self-created shared services organization has been published online.
Other
A UCSF Health study finds that physicians who conducted visits by telemedicine due to the pandemic spent one additional hour per day working in the EHR, both during and outside of normal hours, despite not receiving an increased number of patient messages.
The Miami paper delves into the thriving business of cosmetic surgery in South Florida, which has created an underground network of illicit post-op recovery centers for medical tourists that are nestled within suburban homes, some of them rented. A recent raid of one such home found 17 recuperating patients who were each paying at least $250 per night. Some centers employ registered nurses, but others opt for untrained, underpaid staff. Despite the modest risk of being arrested due to a thinly spread four-person investigative unit that also investigates Medicare fraud, the recovery center operations can generate up to $90,000 monthly from a single inexpensive house. A review of emergency calls that were linked to terms “lipo,” “plastic surgery,” and “BBL” (Brazilian butt lift) over six years yielded 2,220 records, of which 1,500 patients required a hospital trip, 200 were bleeding, 19 had experienced a heart attack, and five were already dead by the time an ambulance arrived.
Sponsor Updates
- Availity’s “Big Brothers” and “Big Sisters” meet their new “Littles” at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northeast Florida.
- Elsevier Health’s first “Clinician of the Future 2023: Education Edition” finds that most medical and nursing students are planning careers outside of patient care.
- Findhelp announces that Navigate has incorporated its social care referral capabilities into Navigate’s wellness platform.
- Nordic publishes a new episode of its Healthcare Chronicles series, “Maximizing your investment in the EHR | Solving tomorrow’s problems today.”
- Netsmart integrates RethinkFirst’s practice management software that was designed for Applied Behavior Analysis and pediatric therapy into human services workflows into Netsmart CareRecords.
- FinThrive will present at the Florida Association of Health Plans 2023 Conference November 8.
- Zoom recognizes AdvancedMD as an ISV Partner of the Year for innovative use of its videoconferencing platform.
- Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a case study titled “UHealth: Supporting the unique ITSM needs of an Academic Medical Center.”
- HCTec will host a CHIME Fall Forum cocktail hour November 10 in Phoenix, AZ.
- New research from Inovalon and Harvard University finds that Medicare Advantage beneficiaries have superior quality outcomes relative to traditional Medicare.
- InterSystems partners with analytics company BritHealth in Indonesia.
- JTG Consulting Group names Henry Ford Health System veteran Lisa Dwyer project manager.
Blog Posts
- Hospital-at-Home Programs Present New Opportunities & Risks (First Databank)
- How AI is Changing Contact Centers & How to Benefit (Five9)
- How to Successfully Navigate HIPAA Cybersecurity Requirements (Fortified Health Security)
- Your Guide to HIPAA Rules for Transferring Medical Records (HealthMark Group)
- Overcoming 5 Healthcare Marketing Challenges (Healthwise)
- Job Haunting: 5 Ways Candidates Scare Hiring Managers (Healthcare IT Leaders)
- Rely on Workday Releases to Advance Your Spend Management Capabilities (Impact Advisors)
- HBMA 2023 wrap-up: Top challenges and opportunities for billing companies (Inovalon)
- 8 Ways Your EHR Can Transform Healthcare Efficiency (Medhost)
- Deeper Connections: Reflections on the KLAS Interoperability Summit (Meditech)
- From Inpatient to Outpatient: 5 Ways to Enhance Your Hospital Therapy Operations (Net Health)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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I believe we need to have a conversation about a situation like Olive.
“It wouldn’t be fair for me to approve anonymous comments that make specific legal or moral allegations about people or companies who are named specifically.”
That cannot be the whole story. Why? Because there are different kinds of knowing.
I can “know” that the Toronto Maple Leafs are never going to win the Stanley Cup. Why? Because the ghost of Harold Ballard haunts them, and they need an exorcist. This is not a fact, but it has proven true every single year since 1967.
We see comments here that say things like “everyone knew that Olive was a scam” (sorry to single one out, but we have to start somewhere). And I was one of those who did not know.
The business value of HIStalk is to (among other things) give us an early warning system. By the time you can establish, to a legal or scientific standard, a corporate or product fact? Then we don’t need HIStalk (I exaggerate for rhetorical effect). We can get that news from any general-purpose news source.
We need a system of red flags and early warning systems. And every fraud out there will challenge you every step of the way.
What are we afraid of, exactly, that keeps us from achieving that? I can name a few things, but I want to leave space for others.
I have never had any direct knowledge of Olive, however I never considered them a serious company/ product, and the reason for that is … HIStalk.
Any time Olive has been mentioned here, I saw enough smoke to not be surprised that people who fell for the sales pitch didn’t get any of the supposed benefits. Apparently even Epic found necessary to tell them to stop using their name, and that was just one of the warning signs.
I think HIStalk perfectly did the job you accuse them of not doing.
It is perfectly possible that my B.S. detector malfunctioned. I’ll own up to that if true.
However I can name 6 companies off the top of my head that looked to me like Olive. Young companies, many of whom have grown rapidly (too rapidly to my eyes), then had a certain reckoning with ‘market realities’ as they say.
They all claim to bring some secret sauce to healthcare. And they may be right.
These companies tend to have one of the following trajectories:
1). They remain independent and grow organically, through their own capabilities. Epic and Meditech did this, but it’s actually kind of rare;
2). They are acquired. Very common;
3). They implode, usually due to their market disappearing or shrinking to the point of non-viability. IOW, a real market opportunity proves to be temporary;
4). They prove to be a smoke and mirrors show. Enron, Theranos, and now Olive come to mind.
I vividly remember a vendor we were interested in. Very interested!
Their product was definitely real and it was a great match for us. I thought this was going to happen…
Then Corporate did a financial due diligence and determined their fiscal position was too precarious. The entire deal was cancelled and I was greatly disappointed.
Within 2 years, that vendor went out of business. And I remember thinking and saying, “dodged a bullet there.”