News 6/28/21

Top News

Nearly 500 One Medical employees (excluding physicians and other clinicians) announce their intent to unionize to address the mistreatment they suffered during the pandemic. Their complaints include:

• The company’s mismanaged COVID-19 vaccine program, which wound up making national news after company whistleblowers alerted the media to the fact that ineligible patients – some with ties to leadership – received the vaccine ahead of eligible patients, resulting in a congressional investigation.
• Denial of hazard payment to frontline workers.
• The wrongful termination of 19 employees.
• Hiring unlicensed and/or inexperienced phlebotomists.
• Sub-par care for community members who couldn’t afford One Medical’s typical membership fees.

One Medical went public earlier this year, and acquired senior-focused primary care company Iora Health several weeks ago for $2 billion.

Webinars

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kindbody raises $62 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $122 million. The New York-based company operates clinics in eight metro areas and offers virtual care. It will use the funding to further develop its proprietary EHR and patient portal technology and scale its offerings to employers.

Online health and wellness company Hims & Hers Health will acquire Apostrophe, which offers tele-dermatology and online prescriptions. Apostrophe CEO and co-founder Ben Holber will become CEO of the new Hims & Hers dermatology business line.

In Canada, CloudMD acquires occupational health clinic company Oncidium, including workflow management technology that will be rolled out across CloudMD’s network of providers. CloudMD has also acquired digital eyewear company VisionPros, which serves patients across North America.

CNBC profiles Doximity, the under-the-radar Silicon Valley company (often called “LinkedIn for doctors”) that went public last week to the tune of $500 million. Founder Jeff Tangney had previously co-founded Epocrates with Tom Lee, MD who would go on to found One Medical. (Epocrates was eventually sold to Athenahealth for $300 million.) Tangney looped Lee in on early phases of the Doximity network, using One Medical providers as beta testers. Tangney says its best advertising comes from Doximity’s 1.8 million users, and its best product ideas come from its annual medical advisory board retreat: “The best ideas come at cocktail hour on Saturday night.”

People

Remote patient monitoring program company Optimize Health hires Neha Ajmera (Lyft) as its first SVP of operations.

Jason Sears (Lockton Companies) joins Therapy Brands as SVP of IT and development operations.

Announcements and Implementations

Coastal Family Health Center (MS) selects remote patient monitoring technology and services from DarioHealth.

Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center, Hawaii’s largest FQHC, will implement an AI-based digital monitoring system from Foresight Health Solutions to track the health of COVID-19 patients.

Research and Innovation

PatientPop’s latest patient perspective survey finds that 61% of surveyed patients prefer digital methods for scheduling appointments, filling out forms, paying bills, accessing health records, and asking questions. Patients overwhelmingly prefer text messages for upcoming appointment and scheduling reminders.

Other

In Florida, Specially Fit Foundation owner and founder Mark Oliver launches Olive Health to provide house calls and virtual care for the disabled community he works with through the foundation. Oliver hopes to fill a gap in offering convenient care, particularly for developmentally disabled patients on Medicaid who often have to wait two months or more for an appointment with an appropriate provider.

Agilon health, Aledade, American Academy of Family Physicians, American College of Physicians, Catalyst Health Network, ChenMed, Elation Health, Everside Health, MDVIP, One Medical, and VillageMD launch Primary Care for America to drive policy change pertaining to patient access, workforce growth, and innovation in care delivery and payment models.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Record Retrieval Made Easy with Prisma.”
• Nordic and the American Medical Association publish a white paper titled “2021 E/M Transition: How Organizations Are Moving Forward Successfully.”

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

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News 6/23/21

Top News

NexHealth raises $31 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total raised to $46 million. The San Francisco-based startup offers small to medium-sized practices technology that encompasses patient engagement, intake, and relationship management, billing, and marketing.

The company, which has 120 employees, is especially focused on growing its engineering team from 30 to 120 within the next year.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Fifth Third Bank acquires Provide, developer of a digital finance platform for healthcare practices.

Bicycle Health raises $27 million in a Series A funding round led by Questa Capital. The company has developed virtual care technology and services for opioid use disorder treatment.

DrChrono will use a new $12 million investment from Orix to build out its telemedicine capabilities and enhance its existing EHR and practice management solutions. The company has raised over $60 million since launching 11 years ago.

People

Verana Health promotes Hylton Kalvaria to the new position of chief business officer, Sonja Wustrack to VP of commercial operations, Aracelis Torres to VP of quantitative sciences; and has named Lindsey Karberg (AbbVie) VP of marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

CarePort announces GA of referral management and care coordination software for ambulatory providers.

Omny Health aggregates normalized, de-identified EHR data from 1,000 providers to create a data repository for dermatological research.

Government and Politics

A state audit of Colorado’s decade-old PDMP finds a lack of compliance and effectiveness:

• Doctor-shopping has been prevalent, with 1,200 patients receiving prescriptions from 15 or more prescribers.
• Eighty-five providers have written more than 3,000 prescriptions in a two-year period – three times the national average, indicating the likelihood of pill mills.
• PDMP staff did not follow up on these problematic trends, nor report them to law enforcement.
• Deaths from prescription opioid overdoses have increased by 76%.
• Eighteen percent of the state’s prescribers had not registered with the program, as required by law, and pharmacies haven’t submitted their data in a timely manner.

Other

Virginia Commonwealth University shares the work researcher Rebecca Etz and her team at VCU’s Larry A. Green Center have done during the pandemic to gauge COVID-19’s impact on primary care physicians. Nearly 30 weekly surveys have been sent to thousands of providers, illuminating sobering statistics around the huge financial strains – personal and professional – PCPs suffered as they struggled to care for their patients without enough PPE, staff, cash, and other resources.

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• Scoring well in quality measures has just become more difficult (AdvancedMD)
• Improving Patient Safety Series: Data Truncation and Special Characters (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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News 6/21/21

Top News

NextGen Healthcare announces that President, CEO, and board member Rusty Frantz has agreed to a “mutual separation” and will step down from his executive roles immediately. Frantz joined the company in 2015 after a seven-year stint at Carefusion, taking over from retiring Steven Plochoki.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

OCS IT opens an office in Cape Coral, Florida. The company offers information security and technology services to a variety of customers, including over 60 medical offices across the state.

Canadian COVID-19 testing company Datametrex acquires telemedicine vendor Medi-Call for $9.7 million.

Announcements and Implementations

Palmetto Retina Center implements NextGen’s RCM services across its six locations in South Carolina.

Other

Center City Pediatrics (PA) owner Eric Berger, MD recounts the tough decision-making process that led to him mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for his employees: Four unvaccinated staffers who attended the same birthday party came down with the virus, prompting him to firm up a vaccine policy that had already been in the works. Seven employees quit rather than receive the vaccine. “I felt burned, because we had really gone over and beyond … through the entire epidemic to try to keep people safe,” said Berger. “We had just sent out [an email] blast, a week or so before, explaining why we were a safe place for you to bring your child.”

Sisters Gerdie Jean-Smith, MD and Samantha Jean, MD launch ReDefine Life, a concierge telemedicine practice caring for patients in four states. The sisters, who live within half a mile of each other in Fort Myers, Florida, plan on expanding beyond primary care.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new video, “EClinicalMessenger: Improving Healthcare Through Better Communications.”

Blog Posts

• Harnessing Healthcare’s Data Explosion with AI-based Natural Language Processing (Medicomp Systems
• Primary care is an essential part of a usable healthcare system (Nordic)
• Attract More Patients with Health Education – 4 Ways to Up Your Online Game (Healthwise)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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News 6/16/21

Top News

Walmart offers patrons who receive the COVID-19 vaccine at its pharmacies the ability to digitally store their vaccine records via their Walmart.com accounts. The secure digital wallet technology is based on the Vaccination Credential Initiative’s Smart Health Cards standard, meaning it can be securely shared with other apps like Clear’s Health Pass.

Walmart will soon roll out the feature to Sam’s Club members, and is working on functionality that will allow families to bundle their records.

HIStalk Practice Musings

Watching: Doctor Finlay, a mid-90s Scottish television series that chronicles the lives (and cases) of GPs working in a rural Scottish practice, just after WWII and right before the launch of the National Health Service. I’m one season in and it’s been a quaint look back at what primary care must have been like when house calls were common and record-keeping was strictly a pen-and-paper affair. The influence of the series was still being felt as recently as five years ago, with a local medical recruiting firm complaining that the show’s now outdated portrayal of the rural Scottish GP had hindered recruitment efforts.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Mr. HIStalk was recently required to purge inactive email subscribers from the HIStalk Practice Updates list. I’d appreciate it if you’d enter your email address again just to make sure you didn’t fall off the list by mistake (you won’t get duplicate emails regardless). You’ll continue to receive the latest ambulatory health IT news while inflating my fragile ego at the same time.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Greenway Health opens an office in Bangalore, India, with plans to hire 300 employees for that office by the end of the year. The EHR vendor also has offices in Tampa, Florida, and Carrolton, Georgia.

People

Varun Choudhary, MD (Magellan Health) joins Talkspace as chief medical officer.

Healthmap Solutions names Howard Shaps, MD (Centene) chief clinical officer.

Apollo Medical promotes Jeremy Jackson, MD to chief quality officer.

CloudMD promotes Karen Adams to president. She takes over from Amit Mathur, OD who will assume the new role of president of US operations.

Announcements and Implementations

Senior-focused primary care company Agilon Health implements care coordination and workflow management software from LeadingReach across its Pioneer Physicians Network in Ohio.

Government and Politics

Former practice office and payroll manager Shirley Taylor is sentenced to 33 months in prison and ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution for stealing the same amount over a four-year period. Taylor inflated her paycheck and wrote unauthorized company checks, none of which were noticed until a new office manager joined the August, Georgia practice in 2020.

Other

The local news covers the role pediatricians have been playing in vaccinating adults, typically – but not always – the family members of their younger patients: “The first week or so, I saw patients and their parents. Then I started seeing grandparents and neighbors,” says North Carolina-based Kidz Pediatrics physician Lourdes Pereda, MD. “Then there were people I’ve never seen in my life, and I was happy because that means we’re vaccinating more of the community.”

A local news site profiles dermatologist Christina Chung, MD and her journey to becoming a co-owner (along with husband Jeff George, MD) of the Philadelphia Phoenix ultimate frisbee team. George introduced her to the sport when they began dating, both eventually joining the Philadelphia Area Disc Alliance and co-captaining a team to top-place rankings. They bought the Phoenix in 2019.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Making the Most of EClinicalWorks Billing and RCM.”

Blog Posts

• An Authoritative Voice for Healthcare Documentation (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.

News 6/14/21

Top News

Behavioral health EHR vendor Kipu names Paul Joiner (Availity) CEO and Rick Pharr (WebPT) COO. The personnel news comes alongside an unspecified investment from TCV.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

People

Jonathan Fowler (Avance Care)  joins Cary Medical Management as VP of operations.

Mitesco names Bradley Case (SymphonyCare) president of The Good Clinic, which plans to expand beyond its flagship clinic in Minneapolis to a network of hybrid clinics leveraging nurse practitioners and telehealth capabilities.

Announcements and Implementations

Athenahealth, Cerner, DrChrono, and Meditech announce upcoming integrations with IOS 15’s enhancements to Apple Health, in which providers can launch a web-based dashboard within their respective EHRs to view the information that a patient has shared with them. (Fast Company published a well-written overview last week of Apple’s increasing presence in the health data-sharing space and what that means for patients and larger EHR vendors like Cerner and Epic.)

Radiology Inc., a radiology physician group based in West Virginia, implements Rad AI’s technology to generate custom radiology report impressions and consensus guideline recommendations.

Palm Beach ACO leverages ClosedLoop.ai’s Explainable AI patient risk stratification and forecasting software to help prevent readmissions, identify palliative care needs, and improve outcomes for patients with chronic kidney disease.

Pinellas County Primary Care (FL) adopts Carium’s remote patient monitoring technology.

Women’s Health Connecticut connects to the the Connecticut Medical Society’s CTHealthLink HIE.

Amazon opens three clinics for its employees and their families in Detroit. The clinics are operated by Crossover Health Solutions and offer extended hours to suit employee schedules. The Amazon/Crossover partnership also includes clinics in Arizona, California, Kentucky, and Texas.

Other

Westmed Medical Group develops an Amazon Alexa skill to help patients find and schedule appointments its facilities in New York and Connecticut, and access health and wellness tips.

The local paper highlights Hampton Roads Community Health Center (VA) and its COVID-19 nursing team, which, in addition to their typical full-time responsibilities, coordinated the FQHC’s COVID response. PerfectServe honored the team as part of its Nurses of Note 2021 awards program.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthwise has received seven Digital Health Awards for its patient education videos and content in the Health Information Resource Center’s 2021 spring competition.

Blog Posts

• Improving Patient Safety Series: Reducing Reportable Safety Events (EClinicalWorks)
• Polishing your portal to empower patients (Nordic)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

Get HIStalk Practice updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.