Monday Morning Update 3/28/22

Top News

The US Department of Justice joins a whistleblower lawsuit brought against Modernizing Medicine (now ModMed) and its CEO Daniel Cane.

The lawsuit, which was filed in 2017 by former VP of Product Management Mandy Long, accuses ModMed of falsely attesting that its EHR met Meaningful Use criteria, which caused users to submit inaccurate reports to CMS in earning MU incentives.

The lawsuit claims that the company ignored patient-endangering software defects in favor of developing new products to increase revenue; illegally paid kickbacks; and sold systems with promises of increasing provider revenue that were enabled by inappropriately upcoding E/M codes and procedure code modifiers.

Reader Comments

From Friend to Nurses: “Re: burned-out nurses. HCIT needs people with clinical experience, not wild ideas from Silicon Valley, and I have several friends who are in their early 30s with 10+ years of nursing experience. Do your readers know of companies that are hiring nurses, or perhaps would companies step up here and say they want to hire nurses?”

From From Great to Horrible: “Re: Tegria.Laid off at least 50 people Friday with no warning or explanation. As someone who became an employee via the acquisition of Bluetree, it hurts to see an organization transform so quickly from having an amazing culture to one that most people dread working for.” A company spokesperson provided this response to my inquiry: “Tegria is implementing changes to better serve our customers and streamline our organization. Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis in response to ever-changing market needs, which can involve reductions in some roles and hiring in other roles.”

From Payola Pavlova: “Re: companies paying for running their own ‘news.’ Here’s a new example.” It’s not new that some industry sites are auctioning off their editorial space (and ethical principles) with the zeal of Nascar plastering ads on race cars. It doesn’t bother me in health IT as long as it’s made clear, as in this case with the prominent “sponsored” label, that objectivity was bribed to look the other way.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Three-fourths of poll respondents say that patients don’t get ROI in indirectly paying for attendance at industry conferences, including 58% of those who attended ViVE, HIMSS22, or both.

New poll to your right or here: What will your employer focus on most in 2022 to ensure long-term success?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Net Health. Net Health Employee Health and Occupational Medicine offers total compliance tracking and employee wellness oversight in one specialized and paperless documentation solution. Rely on integrated telehealth technology to provide care and services across locations. The Pittsburgh-based company provides EHR software and predictive, actionable analytics for medical specialties, including rehab therapy, wound care, home health and hospice agencies, and employee health. Its solutions are trusted by 23,000 facilities, including the nation’s leading hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, senior living facilities, home health and hospice agencies, and outpatient clinics. Thanks to Net Health for supporting HIStalk.

I found this Net Health explainer video on YouTube.

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.

On demand: “Cybersecurity Threats Facing Healthcare Today.” Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Jason James, MS, CIO, Net Health; Monique Hart, MBA, CISO, Piedmont Healthcare; Jeffrey Rosenthal, , MBA CIO, Reliant Rehabilitation; David Jollow, MBA, CISO, Healogics. The panel of CIO and CISO leaders will discuss the cyberthreats that healthcare faces today. They will review security priorities for the increasingly complex healthcare IT environment that includes cloud-based applications, an increased number of endpoints that include connected devices and patient wearables, and patient portals.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Tegria makes an unspecified “major” investment in England-based digital health consulting firm Cloud21, whose customers include several NHS hospitals.

Sales

• OmniLife chooses Redox for EHR integration of its newly developed referral and status update modules to its transplant center platform.

People

Canada-based Quinte Health Care hires Gina Johar (Brockville General Hospital) to the newly created position of VP / chief digital officer.

Paige Lisk, MBA (DrFirst) joins Verato in the newly created role of chief people officer.

Huron CEO Jim Roth will resign at the end of the year, replaced by President and COO Mark Hussey, MBA. The healthcare segment of the publicly traded management consulting firm generates 42% of its revenue.

Announcements and Implementations

Google recaps some of its health AI developments and projects in its “The Check Up” event that features Chief Health Officer Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc.

• Smartphone screening for diabetic retinopathy.
• Using a smart phone’s microphones to record heart sounds as a basic stethoscope.
• Applying AI to pregnancy ultrasound.
• Upcoming: Google Search will show provider appointment availability and allow booking a visit, starting with CVS MinuteClinic.

The VA launches its second site on Cerner as Walla Walla Health Care goes live.

Other

John Roach, who in the late 1970s turned Tandy-owned Radio Shack – mostly known for selling weird electronic parts and CB radios — into a pioneer of the home computer market as the company’s chairman and CEO, died last week at 83. The home computer industry was arguably born in 1977 with the introduction of the Radio Shack TRS-80 (the TRS stands for Tandy Radio Shack, but the system was widely panned as the “Trash 80”), the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and Digital Research’s CP/M operating system that paved the way for Microsoft’s MS-DOS and 1981’s IBM PC.

A former Vanderbilt University Medical Center nurse is found guilty of criminally negligent homicide for killing a patient by administering the wrong medication. RaDonda Vaught ignored several drug dispensing cabinet warnings and failed to perform basic medication checks in administering the paralyzing drug vecuronium to a 75-year-old patient instead of the ordered sedative Versed before an imaging procedure. A nurse colleague who worked in the same neuro ICU unit said that VUMC’s Epic conversion had caused delays in updating the drug dispensing cabinet information, forcing hospital administration to tell nurses to perform system overrides to obtain patient meds. The imaging area did not have a barcode scanner to verify the drug chosen. A nurse advocate says that medication errors are common and can be made by anyone, adding that a jury of Vaught’s peers would have been ICU nurses. Experts question whether VUMC’s systems and processes were at least partly to blame and ponder the potentially negative impact on error reporting of holding medical professionals criminally responsible for making mistakes. VUMC was not penalized even though it did not report the error as required by law and paid a settlement to the patient’s family that barred them from commenting public on the incident, which was revealed months later in an anonymous tip to CMS. VUMC also told the medical examiner that the patient died of natural causes.

Saint Francis Hospital (CT) stages a “clap out” for the departing team of 20 US Air Force personnel who completed a 30-day FEMA assignment to help with the COVID-19 surge. The hospital offered a similar welcome when the service members arrived in February.

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx will present during the virtual RWE Symposium April 11-12.
• Olive teams up with Akava through its Deploy Partnership Program to accelerate the delivery of cybernetic solutions to the healthcare market.
• PatientBond helps national PBM WellDyne boost member engagement to achieve increases in text message engagement, actions taken on text-based refill reminders, and medication adherence.
• Pivot Point Consulting publishes a new case study highlighting how long-time customer Indiana Hemophilia & Thrombosis Center has found strategic and operational value in interim CIO services.
• PerfectServe accelerates speed to care with faster delivery of critical lab results.
• Curation Health Chief Medical Officer Matt Lambert, MD writes a Physicians Practice article titled “No doctor is an island.”
• Spok has reduced the size of its board to six members to better align its size and composition with the company’s recently announced business strategy.
• Talkdesk introduces new mobile apps to its On-the-Go suite of contact center solutions.

Blog Posts

• 5 Tips to Increase Patient Engagement Through Personalization (PatientBond)
• Quality Measurement 101: Risk Adjustment Isn’t Risky Business (Premier)
• Preventive Compliance Monitoring: Why It Matters (Protenus)
• Key Takeaways from Rise National 2022 (RCxRules)
• Evolving Prescribing Practices and Payer Coverage Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic (RxRevu)
• Addressing the Burnout Challenge in Healthcare (About Healthcare)
• 4 ways interactive technology can help anxious parents (Sonifi Health)
• Affordable Medication and Adherence: Two Sides of the Same Coin (Surescripts)
• 3 key takeaways from ViVE 2022 (Talkdesk)
• HIMSS22: Connection, Equity, and The Patient Experience (TigerConnect)
• Healthcare Workplace Violence. Staffing Pressures. We Have Solutions. (Vocera)
• How to Tell if a Clinical Case Study is Bogus (WebPT)
• Like Everyone Else, Seniors are Texting (Well Health)
• One Year into Hybrid Work, the Digital and Talent Imperatives are Clear (West Monroe)
• SNOMED CT: Why It Matters to You (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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