News 10/19/22

Top News

Minnesota-based Allina Health and Flare Capital Partners launch Inbound Health, which will help other health systems develop tech-enabled, home-based care programs.

The new company is backed by an initial funding round of $20 million.

Former Mount Sinai Chief Product Officer and Head of Consumer Digital Innovations Dave Kerwar, MBA joins Inbound as CEO.

Reader Comments

From Digital Triplet: “Re: SDOH platforms. Findhelp, the NC low bidder you mentioned, has been working to publicize apples-oranges comparisons to Unite Us and to influence procurement activities in several states (OH and NH come to mind). They even got NH policymakers to make the kind of information sharing that Unite Us enables illegal, the David in your David and Goliath metaphor throwing stones at the big guy.” Unverified. New Hampshire’s SB 423 addressed privacy issues with the state HHS’s choice of Unite Us. It limits its storage of information to residents who are receiving HHS-funded services who consent to each instance of a referral and also prohibits provider users from viewing the information of people who haven’t been referred to them. 

From Morpheus: “Re: SDOH platforms. Unite Us is already the market leader after its acquisition of NowPow. Potential competitors would need to offer these advantages.” The provided list includes:

• A better user interface, especially the use of smartphones as point-of-service data capture tools.
• Lower cost.
• Better interoperability for social care referrals and loop closure of documentation of services. This would need to come from the federal government and ONC, where any program that gets federal money should have software that complies with interoperability standards. It would not be necessary to have a single statewide or regional system if smaller systems could communicate.

Meanwhile, Forbes updates its article on North Carolina’s selection of Unite Us with a statement from the company, which insists that it won the state’s business competitively and refers to a 2020 press release from UNC Health that describes its reasons for joining NCCARE360 and its Unite Us platform.

Webinars

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient communication platform vendor Well Health changes its name to Artera, as celebrated by the privately held company’s Chief Revenue Officer John Knotwell and CEO Guillaume de Zwirek.

Infusion pump data management vendor Bainbridge Health, a spinoff of Children’s Healthcare of Philadelphia, raises $3.4 million.

Remote patient monitoring technology vendor BioIntelliSense acquires Alert Watch, which offers data aggregation for clinical monitoring. Alert Watch founder and CEO Kevin Trempher, MD, PhD, who is also a professor at University of Michigan Health, earned a Cal Berkeley PhD in chemical engineering, an MD from University of California Irvine, and residency in anesthesiology from UCLA Medical Center before changing his emphasis to perioperative care systems in the 1990s.

Calm, which offers sleep and meditation apps, will launch Calm Health, a mental health and provider-caregiver communication app. Calm acquired care coordination platform vendor Ripple Health early this year.

Ari Gottlieb of A2 Strategy notes that health tech companies have lost $215 billion in market value, 81% of their total, as investors continue separating real business prospects from hype. He identifies some of the worst-performing companies — Babylon (down 98%), Teladoc Health (which has shed $46 billion in value down to $4 billion), and GoodRx and Amwell (down 92% from previous highs). He says that the only digital and telehealth company that is up in the past nine months his Hims & Hers, which shows that “selling ED pills to college kids” may be a recession-resistant strategy.

Sales

• University of Rochester Medical Center (NY) will implement Sectra’s enterprise imaging technology via cloud-based subscription service.
• Redox selects IMO Precision Normalize from Intelligent Medical Objects to standardize health data for its customers.
• A new hospital in Germany will deploy Ascom’s Telligence patient call system.

People

Gerald Greeley, MHA (Lawrence General Hospital) joins Shields Health as CIO.

Thanh Tran (South Shore Health) joins MaineHealth as VP/CTO.

Hugh Cassidy, PhD, MBA (True Blue Partners) returns to LeanTaaS as chief data scientist.

Caryn Bremer (In Compass Health) joins Eagle Telemedicine as VP of licensing and credentialing.

Annexus Health promotes David Meier to CTO and names Katy Wile (Huron) VP of product delivery.

Cognizant-owned  TriZetto Healthcare Products promotes Michael Pierce to COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Fort HealthCare (WI) implements Fresenius Kabi’s interoperable Ivenix Infusion System. The drug producer acquired Ivenix in March for $240 million.

Kirby Medical Center (IL) goes live on automated medical documentation software and real-time clinical support from Augmedix.

Amazon Web Services launches Landing Zone Accelerator for Healthcare for customers to maintain security and compliance in the cloud.

Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia tells Oracle Cerner Health Conference attendees that healthcare is Oracle’s highest priority and primary mission. Oracle Cerner also previewed its Advance dashboard, says that its Seamless Exchange integration product is nearing release, and highlighted its RevElate patient accounting solution that will be released in the next few weeks.

GE Healthcare will integrate Tribun Health’s digital pathology solution into its vendor-neutral archive.

Digital patient prescription tools vendor Custom Health acquires Health in Motion Network, which offers pharmacy patient health recordkeeping app. Health in Motion’s CEO is Ray Shealy, who has held executive roles at McKesson and T-Systems.

A new KLAS report on credentialing solutions finds that users of ASM’s MD-Staff report a paperless process that has decreased FTEs and turnaround time, with customers also giving good marks to Modio Health’s OneView and RLDatix’s Verge Health solutions.

Government and Politics

A KHN article says that federal law requires that government resources be accessible to patients with disabilities, but the VA’s Oracle Cerner system doesn’t support blind or low-vision users with text enlargement or text-to-speech options. The VA has received over 1,000 Section 508 complaints about Oracle Cerner, of which 469 have been accepted by the company to fix. A VA anesthesiologist complains of small icons and the need for multiple high-resolution monitors to display a patient’s entire record, while  a team at one VA facility found that it doesn’t support text-to-speech. Unrelated to Oracle Cerner, a survey by the American Federal for the Blind found that more than half of respondents have struggled with using proprietary telehealth systems, especially hard-to-read chat sidebars, and some resorted to using FaceTime.

The Department of Justice sues Cigna, claiming that the insurer inflated the diagnosis codes of Medicare Advantage patients to boost payments. DOJ says Cigna’s contracted nurse practitioners did not order testing or imaging to support the complex diagnoses they submitted from home visits whose entire purpose was to increase billing for the most potentially lucrative patients rather than to deliver care

Consumers with mild to moderate hearing loss can buy hearing aids without a prescription in an FDA rule change that took effect Monday. Best Buy has already launched an online hearing test and sale of 26 hearing aid models at prices ranging from $199 to $2,950. The Bose-powered models above offer self-tuning via a mobile app, preset templates for specific environments such as TV watching or restaurants, and video or voice call support directly from the app.

Privacy and Security

Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (WA) works to restore IT systems impacted by the ransomware attack on parent organization CommonSpirit Health earlier this month. VMFH officials say providers are now able to access patient medical records, and that the patient portal should be back up and running in a few days.

Other

Yale New Haven Health System will spend $400 million to buy three for-profit hospitals with 700 total beds, citing the value of having all hospitals running Epic. Connecticut’s healthcare advocate says he hopes that YNHHS’s interoperability zeal will extend to having all of its hospitals participate in the new Connie statewide HIE.

A technology analysis firm predicts that Apple will partner with a US insurer in 2024 to offer health insurance that incorporates sensor data from its Watch. I see little connection with health insurance and Watch’s short list of minimally relevant physiologic measurements, but perhaps some insurer will offer Watches (especially to the Medicare Advantage audience that loves perceived freebies) as an inducement to sign up.

Sponsor Updates

• Surescripts awards its White Coat Award to 10 healthcare industry leaders in e-prescription accuracy.
• Clearsense rebrands its healthcare data management and analytics platform to 1Clearsense.
• Netsmart exhibits at the 2022 LeadingAge Annual Meeting and Expo through October 19 in Denver.
• Azara Healthcare releases a new case study, “Alaska Health Centers Improve Diabetes Care Through Data-Driven Healthcare Model.”
• The North Carolina Dept. of IT wins a State Government IT Award from the National Association of State CIOs in the Business Process Innovations Category for the healthcare outcomes it achieved with Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds platform.
• Biofourmis will present at the American Academy of Home Care Medicine October 28 in Orlando.
• Oracle Cerner debuts new patient accounting solution RevElate at its annual conference.
• Clearsense publishes a new case study, “Using Clearsense 20/20 to Predict Renal Failure.”
• CloudWave will exhibit at the HIMSS New England HIE Conference October 20 in Worcester, MA.
• Meditech expands its population health management offering with Expanse Population Insight, powered by Innovaccer’s data platform.
• Diameter Health will exhibit at the NCQA Health Innovation Summit October 31-November 3 in Washington, DC.
• EClinicalWorks announces that Advocare has achieved $1 billion in collections using EClinicalWorks RCM.
• Ellkay will exhibit at Athenahealth’s Thrive conference October 24-26 in Austin.

Blog Posts

• All-payer connectivity: 3 ways to close the gaps between providers and payers (Ability Network)
• Practice Management Software Market Insights: Boosting Healthcare Service Efficiency (AdvancedMD)
• Introducing ‘That’s life in flow’ at RSNA 2022 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Leveraging Your Revenue Cycle to Influence Health Equity (AGS Health)
• 3 reasons your organization needs an electronic attachments solution (Availity)
• 76% of Health Workers are Burned Out – How Tech Can Help Now. (CareMesh)
• Meditech Expanse Implementation: Use Automation to Win the Battle Against Time (CereCore)
• Lessons from Heathrow: A New Approach to Tech Preparedness in Healthcare (Commure)
• Optimizing EHRs from Implementation Through Post Go-Live (CTG)
• Using Analytics to Get a Pulse on the Health of Your Emergency Department (Dimensional Insight)
• How Leaders and Team Members Can Prioritize Mental Health (Divurgent)
• How a Remote Solution Keeps Patients Close (EClinicalWorks)

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