This comment is SO CORRECT. My assessment? IT Security has been leveraged to the hilt. What can be done, has…
Monday Morning Update 3/18/24
Top News
Veradigm’s presentation to an investor conference last week includes these items:
- The company sees itself as “a new leader in healthcare data intelligence.”
- MDRX shares have been delisted, but the company hopes to regain listing and notes that its fundamentals are healthy, which is rare for a delisted company.
- Growth initiatives include provider EHR modernization and cloud hosting, payer gap closure, and data and AI products. (click the graphic above to enlarge)
- Guidance for 2024 is a small growth in GAAP revenue and a small decrease in earnings.
Reader Comments
From Selfie Sticker: “Re: HIMSS24. We have exceeded the 50% threshold of photos in which the taker themselves is featured.” I estimate that 75% of the conference photos that were posted on X and LinkedIn involve combinations of the same 10 people, most of them mugging for selfies or a series of smiley group shots that show little about the actual event, which is apparently less important than their presence there. Still, I’ll take that over yet another cliche photo – HIMSS ran a lot of these — in which someone does the Taylor Swift heart-hand thing.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
I might not have been specific enough in last week’s poll question since I’m wondering if the nearly three-fourth of respondents who said they scheduled an in-person visit using online technology alone (no phone call, email exchange, etc.) really did. Or maybe providers are further along in their self-scheduling rollouts that other reports indicate.
New poll to your right or here: In the past 12 months, has an in-person provider used conversational audio from the visit to create documentation? I’ve only seen my direct primary care doc and she types notes directly into the EHR, but she (and I) have the luxury of relaxed, one-hour visits that don’t need to feed billing or insurance, so she’s doing the listening rather than an app.
HIMSS24 attendees, tell me anonymously about what you liked or didn’t like about the conference and I’ll summarize later this week.
Possible to-do items for supporting HIStalk:
- Sign up for spam-free email updates.
- Share news, rumors, and intriguing insights with me.
- Get a perk or two as a former sponsor for returning to the fold by contacting Lorre. Not sure if you’ve sponsored before? Let me know and I’ll look it up.
Webinars
March 27 (Wednesday) 3 ET. “Houston Methodist: Deploying clinical AI at scale for improved outcomes.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. Presenters: Khurram Nasir, MD, MPH, chief of cardiovascular disease prevention and wellness, Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center; Brenda Campbell, RN, senior consultant, HM Health System Innovations; Nassib Chamoun, MS, founder and CEO, HDAI. The presenters will share how an interdisciplinary team collaborated to successfully use predictive models and a novel AI-driven approach to address post-discharge mortality. They will also describe how they expanded use of the platform to reduce clinician time spent digging through the EHR with a one-page risk profile, including codes extracted from notes using generative AI, and targeting their highest risk patients for extra attention. They will speak to how they overcame barriers to bringing AI at scale to support clinicians across the care continuum.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Sales
- In Canada, Halton Healthcare chooses Sectra One Cloud for imaging.
Announcements and Implementations
UnitedHealth Group hasn’t updated their Change Healthcare restoration status since March 14. Its target for restoring electronic payments was this past Friday and testing of claims submission was slated for Monday, March 18.
Meditech adds integration with Nuance DAX Copilot to Expanse.
The American Hospital Association tells the Senate Finance Committee that it cannot support budget proposals that call for the federal government to impose financial penalties on hospitals that have been the victim of cyberattacks. The White House has asked for hospital cybersecurity funding, but with penalties to those that don’t meet requirements. AHA also notes that HHS has limited authority to offer financial assistance to providers who have suffered from the Change Healthcare cyberattack, and without Congressional approval, can’t help with denials of claims that involve Medicare Advantage, commercial insurers, and state Medicaid programs.
Other
A commercial real estate firm pitches its listing of a Collingwood, Australia office building that is home to anchor tenant Epic. It says that the building “has appealed to a younger generation who have ample building amenities plus access to Smith Street, which was voted by Timeout Readers as the coolest strip in the world. Sackville Street is all about working, living, and playing in the same area.”
Sponsor Updates
- Netsmart sponsors the Kansas Mental Health Advocacy Day.
- Nordic Consulting debuts its Cloud Innovation Lab developed in partnership with Microsoft Azure and AWS.
- RxLightning names Erin Townsend senior reimbursement specialist and Jason Roberts technical support engineer.
- Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust in England becomes the first NHS organization to deploy Sectra’s enterprise imaging service using public cloud.
- SmartSense by Digi shares why Vail Health chose SmartSense for condition and environmental monitoring.
- Tegria publishes a new case study, “Strategic Revenue Integrity Improvements Generate $19.4 Million.”
Blog Posts
- Unifying the care continuum with market-leading solutions (Wolters Kluwer Health)
- ViVE 2024 Takeaways: The ‘Rebel Yell’ of AI and Cybersecurity (Optimum Healthcare IT)
- Finding the future of interoperability with Redox: Part 1 – Bulk FHIR (Redox)
- Enabling your digital health innovation goals (Rhapsody)
- Leadership Spotlight: Kelly Boyd, General Manager (Sonifi Health)
- Urgency in Modernizing Credentialing and Provider Data Management (Symplr)
- How Healthcare Systems and Providers Can Help Caregivers to Provide Better Nutrition (Trualta)
- Adapting to Change: Best practices you can put into place today to help manage the Change Healthcare outage (VisiQuate)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.
You’re correct that I don’t think your poll about scheduling was specific enough. The two major health systems in my area offer online scheduling but one only allows online scheduling with providers you’ve seen before. The other allows you to schedule online with any provider. The availability of scheduling at practices not owned by either of those healthcare systems vary in their availability for online scheduling. All of the systems I interact with have the ability to schedule online handle it through their portal.
I rarely comment on topics, but this topic does chap me a bit. I’ve read your blog since you started publishing it and our firm continues to support it. HIMSS, ViVe, the HLTH, and even the CHIME conferences are not all about self-promotion anymore, and if solving an issue or addressing a customer concern can be promoted then all the better, but that isn’t the focus, whether vendors are pushing their people as experts and thought leaders, it is funny how many of them have less than a decade of experience, or just appeared out of nowhere after the vendor bought the company but they have become experts, in the health systems themselves promoting their people who they want to be recognized as thought leaders and then you have the diehard folks who have made a career of being more than they are. And everyone knows who they are, it’s like a pack of them going from conference to conference, and between conferences, they have PodCasts, and other marketing pieces delivered and promoted by so-called media outlets.
Regardless being a CIO, Chief Digital Officer, or senior leader at a vendor today involves a lot of self-promotion. It’s incredible as a lot of these folks have their own image and persona marketing personnel or firms. I know this as several of them have approached me, and I’ve said no thanks. I find it incredible that a lot of these folks never seem to be at work, most are always a some conference sharing their insights. Not leading or setting an example in my eyes of what it means to be a servant leader. Not that they do any of the work, but they are happy to take credit for it.
It’s incredible how the use of social media has become the focus of the conferences in the last few years. I’m fine not having the spotlight on myself, and the focus on the issues and my organization where the focus should be. My question is do they really provide any value, in my estimates, not a lot to solving the issues healthcare is grappling with now and going forward? Just my opinion from being in this for 30+ years.
@SayCheese 100% agree – I think we’ve come to expect this behavior from vendors and consultants, for better or worse it comes with the business development territory, but I find it especially tacky when we see the leadership of organizations that serve underinsured or remote populations like FQHCs and rural hospitals exploit their positions for sake of vanity and self-promotion. In my own state I can think of one rural health CIO who seemingly spends most of their time flying from conference to conference to sit on panels and collect made up “leadership” & “trail-blazer” honors. It’s sad to see this behavior creep into an industry where I still believe many are in it to spend their days improving healthcare (after all plenty of other industries pay better IT wages!).
We live in the attention economy. Not saying that’s a good thing, but it’s a reality of life that the number of eyeballs you can get to point towards you/your company/your brand defines your (perceived) value, importance, success, and expertise. This is true not only in business but also politics, nonprofit work, and other industries.
Not sure if there’s a great solution, other than audiences getting so overwhelmed or exhausted with the noise and attention-seeking that they just tune people out. For those who want to truly be a servant leader and/or who want to help make those around them better, I think the takeaway is to never equate loudness with quality and to proactively look for those on your team, in your community, in your peer group, etc., who do good work regardless of the attention.
I have no problem with someone who was essentially hired to project an organization’s image and interests outwards, doing that work. There is a good case to be made for healthcare benefiting from industry organizations, benefiting from inter-organizational discussions, and benefiting from creation of community & society.
The problem comes when an employee needs to be working on their organization, and instead is investing time away from that organization. A CIO’s main job needs to be inward-focused. A CDO though? That could plausibly be outward-focused.
Taking credit for other’s work is never OK.
“Taking credit for other’s work is never OK.”
Twas ever thus, and ever thus shall be.
Re Poll question: Just today, my veterinarian asked permission to record our conversation to help him with his notes.
Animal health and human health have much in common. It’s the regulations that are different.