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June 23, 2022 News 6 Comments

Top News

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MemorialCare’s innovation fund makes an unspecified investment in IoT security vendor Asimily.


Reader Comments

From Pointy Solution: “Re: Cures Act vendor requirements. NextGen, at least, is reaching out to customers about their responsibilities.” NextGen reminds its customers via email that the Cures Act prohibits EHR vendors from enforcing “gag clauses” and reiterates that its customers are free to communicate about system usability, interoperability, security, and user experience regardless of what their contracts do or don’t say (the company says it does not believe that any of its agreements contain gag clauses). I’m not sure if such customer communication is required, but regardless, nice job by NextGen.


Webinars

July 12 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Digital Data Stewardship for Trusted, High-Quality Data Exchange.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. Presenter: Carol Graham, MS, RN, product manager, Clinical Architecture. Organizations face challenges in ensuring that the patient data they received and send is consistent, accurate, and usable. Use cases include receiving multi-source data across health information networks with variation in formats and content; merging and de-duplicating provider, payer, and research data; uplifting legacy data for current use cases and formats; and normalizing and formatting data for public health surveillance, quality measure reporting, and providing directly to the patient. This webinar will cover Pivot, a comprehensive Digital Data Steward solution that orchestrates format harmonization, content (vocabulary) normalization, de-duplication, and data quality validation into a single solution.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Ro, which offers telehealth visits for ED, hair loss, skin care, and fertility, joins an ever-lengthening list of formerly high-valuation digital health startups that are laying off employees. Business Insider reports that the company laid off 18% of its headcount on Thursday, four months after reaching a paper valuation of $7 billion.


Sales

  • Intermountain Healthcare goes live on Gyant’s asynchronous e-visit system Async, which provides AI-powered clinical assessment within the health system’s My Health+ app and routes patients to an asynchronous visit when appropriate.
  • Urgent care provider Innovative Care goes live on Nym Health’s medical coding technology for revenue cycle management.

People

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Signify Health hires Paymon Farazi, MBA (Tausight) as chief product officer.

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InstaMed, a JP Morgan Company, promotes Jeff Lin to president.


Announcements and Implementations

Global Healthcare Exchange launches a digital solution to support health systems capture, review, and report vaccination information.

Change Healthcare releases a patient engagement solution that incorporates its revenue cycle management capabilities with Luma Health’s patient engagement software.

Wolters Kluwer, Health and Laerdal Medical launch a VSim for Nursing simulation training course area for advanced medical-surgical and critical care scenarios.

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Optum develops a laboratory benefit solution to reduce unnecessary lab testing, which it saves could save health plans $3 billion per year.

WellSky-owned CarePort expands its care coordination data connections to 17 HIES and data sources.

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KLAS says that Oracle Cerner’s go-forward RCM product RevElate won’t necessarily solve the company’s high-profile revenue cycle problems, as customer experience with implementation and training of its underlying Soarian Financials product has been mixed. Customers say that Soarian Financials is a solid system that drives good outcomes despite usability issues, but requires more add-on products than expected, has exposed customers to more nickel-and-diming since Cerner acquired the product in 2015, and won’t solve Oracle Cerner’s challenges of hiring and keeping employees who can facilitate successful outcomes.  


Other

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North Carolina’s state treasurer says that pandemic-related federal hospital funding was a “huge wealth transfer to wealthy hospital systems,” noting that the state’s seven dominant health systems saw profits swell to $5.3 billion last year. Treasurer Dale Folwell – who notes that Atrium Health collected $719 million in provider relieve funds and then merged with a competitor, while Duke Health’s profit margin jumped from 11% in 2019 to 41% last year – says that big health systems “have turned into stock market, private equity, and real estate development firms” that “disguise themselves as non-profits.”

A KHN article ponders whether a small town is better off with a bad hospital than having none at all, describing two rural Missouri hospitals that were bought by a private equity-backed firm that collected federal relief money, hired directors with little hospital experience, stopped paying their bills, missed paychecks, ran out of supplies, and racked up a long list of CMS deficiencies before closing the hospitals 18 months after buying them. Noble Health Corporation, which operated Audrain Community Hospital and Callaway Community Hospitals, announced on March 18 that it would limit services and divert ambulances temporarily because of an unspecified IT issue with RCM and EHR systems that it said was causing cash flow problems, then locked the doors for good six days later.


Sponsor Updates

  • The Health Information Resource Center recognizes Healthwise with seven Digital Health Awards for its medical illustrations and health education videos.
  • FDB hires Christopher Marks (State Farm) as information security officer.
  • Jinuper Networks publishes an information sheet titled “Revolutionize the Network for Modern Healthcare.”
  • CarePort, a WellSky company, has expanded its data connections to 17 HIEs and data sources across the country to provide enhanced visibility into a growing number of providers and increased care coordination capabilities.
  • LexisNexis Risk Solutions publishes a new interoperability report, “Assessing the Evolution of Health Data Exchange.”
  • Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast, “On Innovation with Dr. Nick van Terheyden.”

Blog Posts


Contacts

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Currently there are "6 comments" on this Article:

  1. Does the Cures Act apply to Epic as well, or it is to be enforced only on weaker players in the market like NextGen?
    I always wonder whether Epic is so great that we hear no problems or issues with it, or their users are too bound and gagged by the 1,400 pages contracts signed by their administrators, so they can’t complain about it…

    • If you work for an Epic customer as an Epic analyst or IT leader type, it’s in your interest to not publicly criticize Epic. Your ability to perform within your org directly relates to your relationship with your Epic reps. If you go somewhere else and have another problem, your Epic rep will call the Epic rep at your previous customer to see what the story on you is. Compare that with the smaller Nextgen customers where you are often in charge of more non EHR things and the support is less embedded. Also Epic positions command a premium vs other IT positions of similar caliber. You have more to lose in income/employment prospects. Epic also keeps its ears open for these kind of things within your org. There’s other reasons but you end up seeing mostly public complaints about Epic outside of the IT/EHR org chart.

      • These things are all true.. but I’ll also say, as an Epic analyst who often has more mouth than sense, that generally it really is that great. I used to work for another vendor who occasionally shows up on this site, and it is somewhere between hilarious and horrifying how different the breaks are and, even more, how different the response is. Not to say we don’t find (99% relatively itty bitty) issues, and don’t regularly groan, “Thanks, Epic…”, but – it’s just a totally separate DIMENSION.

        • Agreed Epic puts a lot of time into these customer relationships while many other vendors hire a call center and an account manager and call it a day. That’s great honestly. A lot of that effort, like catching problems wary, keeps the temperature done on these types of things. But I do think the customers themselves and the niche Epic but not Epic employee industry also play a role in keeping things smooth to the point that going against the flow is unnecessarily hard.

          • Oh – I realize I should have worded that more specifically. Obviously Epic technical support is also in another dimension, but what I really was thinking of was *whether something got DONE about it*. My previous EHR had reported bugs that just sat there, some for literally years. The dev team had time for MU and a handful of bugs and enhancements each release, period. If it wasn’t on fire, you’d be living with it for a long time – none of this “do you want an off-cycle special update available for the last four versions because users don’t like the button changes in the Problem List” business, my god.

    • Mr. Histalk has asked many times for proof of an Epic contract with a gag clause, and no one has ever produced it, because it does not exist. Check Twitter for many many clinicians who complain about life as a daily Epic user. Epic has frequent webinars that cover a wide range of regulatory compliance topics to help customers prepare and comply with all manner of state and federal regulations, so it’s unsurprising that they are not mentioned specifically regarding Cures. Epic deserves many valid criticisms, but “gag clauses” and “escaping regulatory compliance” are not valid.







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