News 8/26/22

Top News

Amazon will close Amazon Care on December 31. It says that despite high patient satisfaction, the three-year-old virtual care offering did not provide a complete solution for its target audience of employers, concluding in an internal email that the business “wasn’t going to work long term.”

Amazon says it knew the business was not likely to be successful before it decided to acquire primary care chain One Medical, which was announced July 21. Some observers speculate that Amazon decided to focus on One Medical, which also sells to employers and offers telemedicine services. That acquisition has not yet received regulatory clearance.

Amazon had recently announced an expansion of Amazon Care locations and services for 2022.

A Washington Post article from last week quoted company nurses who questioned Amazon’s heavy-handed operation of the business despite its limited healthcare knowledge.

Shares in Medicare Advantage home care operator Signify Health, which is reported to be the target of acquisition interest by Amazon (along with UnitedHealth and others), jumped on the news.

Some of the online reactions:

• The company may have concluded that it makes more sense to work with providers instead of self-insured employers since the most expensive patients aren’t usually covered by employer insurance.
• Amazon Care may have hit a wall in hiring clinical employees.
• One Medical offers telehealth services, but also runs in-person clinics.
• Some speculate that Amazon is closing the business to ease any regulatory concerns that are related to its One Medical acquisition.
• The implications of Amazon not finding a go-forward path in telehealth may spill over into traditional providers.
• The failure of both Amazon Care and its Haven joint project may have caused Amazon to realize the challenges of building versus acquiring a healthcare business.

Webinars

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Sales

• Baptist Health South Florida will implement Innovaccer Health Cloud for population health analytics, provider engagement, and care management.
• Northern Ireland’s Department of Health chooses Lyniate to connect health and social systems to Epic, which goes live nationally in 2023.
• MedAllies will implement Lyniate EMPI by NextGate.

Announcements and Implementations

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner says at the company’s UGM conference that the records of 162 million Americans are stored in its Cosmos research database, which was used to author an article with the CDC that progressed from first draft to publication in one month. The company also announced a Cosmos feature called “Look-alikes” that will allow physicians to submit symptoms of a puzzling diagnosis to identify patients who have similar issues and to share information with their doctors . An Epic developer took the stage to lay out the benefits that are accruing from moving to a web-based platform, including easier upgrades and the ability to improve usability.

Pacific Dental Services completes the implementation of Epic in its 900 practices, which it says will support the role of oral health in overall health. The company trained 14,000 employees in converted the records of 10 million patients in the transition from its previous practice management system.

In England, the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Foundation Trust goes live on GE Healthcare Edison True PACS on Amazon Web Services, which it says allows continuous cybersecurity patching and reduced carbon footprint.

Cardiology virtual care vendor MediCardia Health and aging-related genomics company Human Longevity launch a platform that uses extracted EHR data for patient risk assessment and remote patient monitoring. MediCardia founder and CEO Indrajit Choudhuri, MD completed fellowships in nuclear medicine, cardiovascular disease, and cardiac electrophysiology before starting the company in 2020.

First Databank launches FDB Navigo, which provides retail pharmacists with the patient’s most important risks, as derived from the pharmacy’s computer system, to help determine the “next best step.” 

Google announces the next generation of Fitbit wearables that includes the advanced, $300 Sense 2 smartwatch, which includes continuous heart rate monitoring and tracking of sleep and stress.

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A new KLAS report on security and privacy consulting services finds high customer satisfaction with First Health Advisory and Impact Advisors, lowest overall scores for Intraprise Health and Meditology Services, and high satisfaction with managed services firms Fortified Health Security and CynergisTek (which will be acquired by Clearwater).

Government and Politics

The White House eliminates the optional 12-month journal article paywall embargo for federally-funded research projects, requiring journal publishers to make the articles and their associated data promptly available at no charge starting in 2026.

The Federal Trade Commission files a complaint about advertising technology vendor Kochava, saying that the company’s tools potentially violate the health privacy of consumers whose location and time are logged and then sold. The company denies the allegations, but says it will stop collecting mobile device user locations that involve health.

Other

A study of Epic Cosmos data finds that while 50% of suspected overdose patients are tested for opiates in the ED, only 5% of them are also tested for fentanyl, which was involved in 56,000 overdose deaths in 2020. The authors speculate that fentanyl testing is uncommon because it is usually not included in ED toxicology screening panels.

The New Yorker takes an on-the-ground look at what it’s like for residents of a nursing home that is acquired by a private equity firm. Spoiler: executives care only about cutting costs, always painfully and sometimes dangerously, and using complex corporate structures to protect the parent organization from the inevitable lawsuits over lower care quality.

Sponsor Updates

• NTT Data staff serve children and families staying at The Children’s Inn at the National Institutes of Health.
• Intelligent Medical Objects publishes a new case study featuring Piedmont Healthcare, “Optimizing OR scheduling and perioperative workflows.”
• Juniper Networks announces key milestones that highlight the company’s growth in the wired and wireless access space, including gaining the largest US healthcare provider as a customer.
• Nordic joins KLAS’s Arch Collaborative that looks at EHR best practices and clinician burnout.
• Surescripts joins interoperability organization Civitas Networks for Health.

Blog Posts

• Blessing Health targets smarter sepsis surveillance with Wolters Kluwer (Wolters Kluwer)
• How to Collect Patient Feedback in Urgent Care (Experity)
• The STAR Method: Four Steps to Make a Lasting Impression in Your Next Interview (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Leverage Your Hospital EHR to Reduce Medication Dispensing Errors (Medhost)
• The role of EHR extensions in enhancing patient care (Nordic)
• Keeping patients up to date on immunizations with patient registries (Meditech)
• Hold on Tight: Waves of Healthcare Regulations Ahead in Effort to Solve Prior Authorization Woes (Myndshft)
• Be Consistent, Focused In Your Rehab Therapy Marketing Strategy (Net Health)

Contacts

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