Monday Morning Update 12/19/22

Top News

The event that was formerly known as the Cerner Health Conference will move to Las Vegas next year as part of the Oracle CloudWorld Conference.

The 15-year-old CHC drew 14,000 attendees to Kansas City, MO each fall, generating $18 million in local economic impact.

Reader Comments

From AI Ball: “Re: ChatGPT. I was playing with it when I read your mention of sponsorship, so I had it write a marketing pitch for you. What do you think?” The writing and level of expertise is better than that on most health IT websites. Its marketing pitch was about as good as I could have written, which should make some folks excited (unmotivated, Wikipedia-powered college students and phishing email authors with limited English proficiency) and others scared:

There are a number of potential reasons why a company might consider sponsoring a website like HIStalk:

• Increased visibility and brand awareness: Sponsoring a website can help a company increase its visibility and reach a wider audience. This can be particularly useful for companies that want to reach a specific demographic or target market.
• Lead generation: Sponsoring a website can help a company generate leads and attract new customers. This can be especially useful for companies that offer products or services that are relevant to the website’s audience.
• Content marketing: Sponsoring a website can be a useful way for a company to share its content and message with a targeted audience. This can help a company build its brand and establish itself as a thought leader in its industry.
• Networking and partnerships: Sponsoring a website can help a company connect with other organizations and individuals in its industry or field. This can lead to new partnerships and opportunities for growth and collaboration.

Overall, sponsoring a website like HIStalk can provide a number of benefits for a company, including increased visibility, lead generation, content marketing, and networking opportunities.

I asked Chat GPT who is responsible for high US healthcare costs and it gave a detailed write-up that included these factors: high prescription drug costs, high administrative costs, high costs for procedures, lack of price transparency, limited competition, and the high cost of care for the uninsured and underinsured. Maybe that seems obvious, but remember that it’s a machine talking, and in a quite readable way.

From Dilly Pickler: “Re: Ascension. The NYT article has generated nearly 2,000 comments that have little good to say about the US healthcare system.” Few of the depressingly insightful comments say anything positive about our US healthcare-industrial complex.

From Licit Liaison: “Re: Slack. Ever considered starting a Slack or Teams channel for industry discussions?” I have, albeit briefly given the unenthusiastic reception to my previous similar efforts (my conclusion: everybody likes to read, few like to contribute). Send me your ideas.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Just over half of poll respondents think that networking is harder for women, but two-thirds of female respondents believe that’s the case.

New poll to your right or here, which was inspired by a comment to the New York Times article about Ascension: Can comprehensive, compassionate, and accessible healthcare be offered in a free market, for-profit model? Click the poll’s Comments link to expound further.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Lumeon. Health systems use Lumeon’s Care Orchestration platform to transform their care delivery processes into seamlessly orchestrated, personalized, virtualized care centered on each patient’s needs. With Lumeon, care delivery becomes frictionless, efficient, and effective, ensuring the best standard of safe care is delivered every time. With headquarters in the US and Europe, the company is proud to be working with over 70 leading hospitals, health systems, and specialist health providers as its clients. Thanks to Lumeon for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Sales

• Luminis Health (MD) will deploy VisiQuate’s denials management, revenue management, and reserve analytics solutions.

Privacy and Security

An NPR report says that recent hospital ransomware attacks in India suggest that the country’s weak cybersecurity systems and data protection laws threaten the prime minister’s plan to digitize the health records of all residents in its National Digital Health Mission. Experts also question whether its plan to share records with informed consent is likely to succeed given India’s lack of history with that concept.

Other

Zocdoc founder and CEO Oliver Kharraz, MD, PhD offers an explanation of why big tech companies “enter the healthcare space like lions, only to retreat like lambs”:

• The companies aren’t solving healthcare’s problems, but rather are seeking profit for their core businesses (hardware for Apple, supply chain for Amazon).
• Changing healthcare requires bringing existing participants and their inconsistent technologies together, which is hard, slow connective work that tech companies aren’t equipped to perform.
• Well-funded startups have failed because they avoid the complexity of the healthcare system and focus on fixing “the fragments of a fragmented system,” such as developing telehealth solutions even though it represents a tiny fraction of healthcare interactions, developing cash pay solutions when most transactions are paid via insurance, and serving only the “worried well.”
• The author agrees with Andreessen Horowitz’s conclusion that the company that solves these problems will be a unifier that could end up being the biggest company in the world, but it probably won’t be one that is on today’s list.

Advisory Board’s Paul Trigonoplos excerpts some interesting quotes from interviewing health systems and tech vendors about partnering with each other:

• (Health system exec) There are thousands of tech companies, and they all do the same thing. Can’t we just wait a year and see what fails or gets bought? There is value in waiting.
• (Health system exec) A lot of vendors came to me and said, “We want to be your partner.” But I always said, “I want you to be a good vendor, and then maybe over time we can become partners.”
• (Vendor) Once a health system has signed a sales contract, they and their subsequent requests are no longer our number one priority. It’s on to the next sale.
• (Vendor) It takes hard work to find a good match. The problem is that vendors these days are like squirrels — we chase any sale we can get our hands on. So, it is really up to health systems to scope us out.
• (Vendor) If I had one ask of health systems, it’s that they stop relying on vendors to run circles around their middle management to accomplish something.

A KHN report notes that unlike the US, where 100 million citizens have unpaid medical bills, medical debt is almost unknown in Germany even in the absence of a government health care system. Germany’s healthcare systems is similar to ours in relying on private doctors and insurers with policies issued through employers, but different in that it limits out-of-pocket expenses for each patient, with free physician visits and a $10 co-pay for most prescriptions and a day’s stay in the hospital. US health insurance often comes with high deductibles, requiring even insured patients end up in medical debt after paying their medical bills via credit card, family borrowing, or installment plans.

Florida’s growing demand for RNs and LPNs is being hurt by the low licensure exam passing rates of its for-profit nursing schools. The state has the highest exam failure rate in the US at more than one-third of graduates.

I saw and liked this on LinkedIn.

Sponsor Updates

• Memora Health and PeriGen will partner to offer hospitals a labor and delivery inpatient solution along with a post-discharge monitoring tool.
• Wolters Kluwer Health integrates BioDigital XR’s extended reality-based medical education solutions with its Wolters Kluwer Medical Education & Medical Practice.
• Upfront Healthcare updates its proprietary psychographic segmentation model.
• West Monroe names Laurie Lovett to its Board of Directors.
• Vyne Medical gives away 10 trees through Speak for the Trees to 10 winners who attended MGMA.

Blog Posts

• Maximize your Learning Management System for EHR Success (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Delivering Equitable Healthcare Through Technology (Bamboo Health)
• Unduly noted: Why EHR documentation is creating an informational quagmire (Nordic)
• Extreme Usability: Enhancing the User Experience (Netsmart)
• Nurses of Note Awards 2022: The Manager of Ambulatory Nursing (PerfectServe)
• How University Hospitals Saved $7.5 Million Through Pharmacy Operations Improvement (Premier)
• How RCxRules Crowdsources Content to Help You Stay One Step Ahead (RCxRules)
• Three ways healthcare automation puts an end to patient-provider phone tag (Relatient)
• The Future is Information: Enabling a Smarter, Swifter Process for Specialty Medications (Surescripts)
• HLTH conference 2022 takeaways: How the future of healthcare is taking shape (Talkdesk)
• What’s New with MIPS for PTs, OTs, and SLPs in 2023? (WebPT)
• Care Plans and Order Sets – the Apples and Oranges of Patient Care? (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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