Frank you have the right idea of a local hosted solution. There are eForms systems where you can view a…
Monday Morning Update 11/27/23
Top News
The Department of Defense completes the last of 23 MHS Genesis go-live waves.
The military’s final Oracle Health implementation is scheduled for March 2024 at Lovell Federal Health Care Center, which it jointly operates with the VA.
DoD says that its teams are anxious to move on to optimization and applying analytics at the site and enterprise levels.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Poll respondents aren’t optimistic that any of the usual suspects can disrupt healthcare, but they choose retailers as the best hope. I’m intrigued that they chose employers as the least likely given that they are footing much of the bill and have the only significant amount of clout, which they never seem to use.
New poll to your right or here: What is your single biggest frustration with your primary care provider? I’m allowing only one answer to hide the noise of problems that aren’t the main one.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
London-based Phare Health, which offers medical coding tools, raises $3.1 million in a seed funding round.
Sales
- Memorial Hermann Health System will implement Laudio’s worklfow automation tool for frontline leaders and has invested in the company.
Announcements and Implementations
Researchers develop a wireless acousto-mechanical system whose wearable sensors continuously transmit data about body movement sounds such as breathing, digestion, and cardiac activity.
London-based digital-first home healthcare provider Cera says it will provide 5 million care visits this winter to help address hospital capacity problems. Founder and CEO Ben Maruthappu, BM BCh. MPH was trained at London School of Hygeine and Tropical Medicine, University of Cambridge, Harvard, and University of Oxford.
A health official in China touts the country’s digital health success, listing online diagnosis and treatment, prescription services, fever clinic information, and hospital wait time.
A16z lists the jobs that AI could perform to reduce provider burnout and increase effectiveness, which it says should be supported by CMS in the form of increased payment for AI-assisted or augmented care (click the image to enlarge).
Privacy and Security
Saint Joseph’s Medical Center (NY) pays $80,000 to settle HHS OCR charges that it provided photos and information of three patients in April 2020 to the Associated Press for a COVID-19 story without their approval.
A notice filed by Virgin Pulse-owned Welltok says that the personal information of 8.5 million people was exposed in a breach of its Moveit file transfer system. Affected customers include BCBS plans, Sutter Health, Stanford Health Care, and The Guthrie Clinic. Virgin Pulse acquired the company in November 2021.
Other
Politico notes that a physician shortage will force the federal government to stitch together a primary care system that is delivered by nurses, physician assistants, and virtual visits, with no promise that people can get, much less keep, a regular doctor. Long appointment waits are sending sick people to the ED, urgent care, or pharmacy-located clinic where services are purely transactional with no promise of prevention or taking the patient’s personal or even medical history into account.
Cigna creates public outcry when it denies transplant coverage to a 47-year-old woman who was being prepped for a double lung transplant after being rushed to Vanderbilt University Medical Center when a matching donor had been found. VUMC sent her home and took her off the transplant waitlist. Cigna had previously approved the procedure, but found that the woman had the unapproved condition of terminal cancer. As is often the case, the insurer paid more attention to the bad press than to the patient and doctors in reversing its decision that it declared to have been an “error.” The patient now requires additional tests, the donor lungs are no longer available, and her only hope is to be placed back on the waitlist. Cigna got the black eye, while VUMC has drawn no public ire for declining to perform the transplant in the absence of Cigna’s willingness to pay.
Sponsor Updates
- Health Data Movers appoints Curtis Cole, MD (Cornell University) to its board.
- Through partnerships with Redox and Xealth, Tidepool develops EHR integrations for its diabetes data visualization software.
- Five9 will present at the UBS Global Technology Conference November 29 in Phoenix and the Barclays Global Technology Conference December 7 in San Francisco.
- Fortified Health Security names Kameron McNicholas senior SOC engineer.
- Health Data Movers names Curtis Cole (Cornell University) to its Board of Directors.
- Healthcare IT Leaders releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Leading Through Growth and Change.”
- Inovalon develops Converged Analytics Benchmarking to provide health plans with monthly determinations of their relevant national and state benchmarking for quality measurement and improvement initiatives.
- InterSystems launches its HealthShare Health Connect Cloud solution in New Zealand.
- A recently published study on brain health, “Using digital assessment technology to detect neuropsychological problems in primary care settings,” features Linus Health’s Core Cognitive Evaluation digital assessment technology.
- Nordic names Claire Staple VP of strategy and country manager in Ireland.
Blog Posts
- ECW – Your AI-powered EHR (EClinicalWorks)
- Tech-Enabled Health Equity: Bridging Language Barriers in Health Education (Healthwise)
- Prevention is Key: How AI-driven Early Detection Can Enhance Population Health Outcomes (Lucem Health)
- The Hidden Recipe for Successful EHR Implementation (Medhost)
- Expanse Genomics: How we’re extending our industry-leading solution (Meditech)
- New Policy Changing the Mental Health Landscape: Better Mental Health Care, Lower-Cost Drugs, and Extenders Act (NeuroFlow)
- How NTT Data & Carpl.ai are revolutionizing medical imaging (NTT Data)
- DSN: Healing the Healthcare System (OmniSys)
- How Patient Journey Mapping Improves the Patient Experience (PerfectServe)
- Optimizing Workflows: 8 Benefits for Faster and Easier Credentialing (QGenda)
- California says goodbye to fax machines. Hello to DxF. (Redox)
- 6 Reasons Your Risk Reporting System is Failing You (Symplr)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.
The KFF story last week, the Politico story this week, the Cigna fiasco at Vandy. Stuff seems to be seriously broken in the US healthcare environment right now, even more than usual. As a patient it feel like a third-world country where to get anything done you need to bypass the system – use Costco, get a DPC doc, go to some rando urgent care.
Seemed like coordinated care was kind of happening in the early 2010s. It’s failing massively now.
Could you be more specific in which KFF and Politico story you’re referring to? There has been a lot of news published by these orgs and I’m curious which stories you’re drawing parallels between specifically.
Re:. VUMC, Cigna, and denied lung transplant.
As much as i like to rag on insurance companies, maybe they have a worthy point here?
Terminal cancer does seem like a meritorious contra-indication. We don’t have enough donor organs and people die on the waiting lists. All the time. Mainly due to the excessive delays in getting a viable match.
And all efforts to increase organ supply have fallen short. Animal donors still cause massive rejection events. 3-D printing cannot handle either the biological building blocks, nor the organ complexity. All the ‘grow a liver using a scaffolding and stem cells’ are primitive efforts at best. Donor card signing rates are poor, to the point that some jurisdictions changed the laws. Now these few places assume consent and you have to opt out, rather than opting in.
If we had a surplus of organs, I’d drop my objection. In a heartbeat! But we don’t have a surplus.
Unless. Unless Cigna refused coverage, not for clinical suitability, but for cost reasons. An insurance company would never do that now, would they?
Excellent point
That was my initial thought also, but if Cigna originally approved it, then backed out at the last minute as she was being prepped, that’s just bad-bad-bad regardless of the utilitarian argument.
I guess people don’t read the articles, or I am missing something. The lung transplant was to cure the lung cancer – that is apparently an appropriate procedure in at least some cases:
https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/medical-advances/new-therapies-and-drug-trials/lung-transplant-for-advanced-lung-cancer
With the last minute flip-flop, Cigna has effectively reduced the chances of survival for the patient.
OK, so full disclosure, guilty as charged. Did not read the linked article.
However. There is no obvious connection, at all, between your link here in the comments, and the OP. What’s up with that?
Also, and at the risk of being a Grinch. If the non-small cell lung cancer the VUMC patient has, has metastasized? Then that patient’s survival chances with a lung transplant go down dramatically. And one has to wonder why the clinicians have gone for a lung transplant recommendation. It’s certainly possible but it also starts to look like a Hail Mary option.
Ah yes, here we go. “…patients whose conventional chemotherapy and other treatments failed.”
Whatever mess is going on with VA aside, DoD has demonstrated that Cerner can be deployed successfully at large scale.
Congratulations on their achievement – it’s a great thing for our soldiers.
…which is strongly suggestive, that the VA’s problem with Cerner implementation? It’s coming a lot more from the VA, than it’s coming from Oracle and Cerner.
And I’m perfectly OK with the idea that Oracle and Cerner have a lot of issues. In fact I’d count on that.
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm.