Population Health Management Weekly Wrap Up 8/7/15

Top News

Premier acquires supply chain and performance services vendor CeCity for $400 million. The company offers PQRS reporting, an educational platform, clinical data registries, and a performance and population health management system. CEO Lloyd Myers, a pharmacist, founded the Pittsburgh-based company in 1996.

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Webinars

None scheduled in the next two weeks. Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by Labor Day.

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare analytics startup Care at Hand raises $560,000 from financial management services firm PCG Public Partnerships. The San Francisco-based company’s mobile-friendly technology, geared towards home and community-based case managers, uses survey data from non-clinical workers to predict and prevent hospitalizations.

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Announcements and Implementations

Reid Health (IN) implements Influence Health’s Patient Engagement Cloud solution, including the Empower enterprise patient portal and Navigate population health management solutions.

The Delaware Valley ACO signs a five-year agreement with Wellcentive for expanded care management and population outreach capabilities, data aggregation, and analytic and workflow solutions. DVACO, which covers 65,000 Medicare patients, is owned by five Philadelphia-based health systems including Thomas Jefferson University Health System, Main Line Health, Doylestown Health, Holy Redeemer Health System, and Magee Rehabilitation Hospital.

Department of Vermont Health Access chooses eQHealth Solutions for population health management technology.

Inovalon signs a multi-year agreement with HP to provide quality analytics technologies to the State of Georgia Dept. of Community Health’s Medicaid and PeachCare for Kids programs. HP will integrate Inovalon’s iPORT cloud-based data integration platform and QSI healthcare data quality analytics platform into the enterprise IT services it provides to the department.

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People

Raymond Vogel, Jr. (VA) joins Phase One as director of healthcare development.

SRG Technology, which offers population health management technology it developed with Massachusetts General Hospital, hires Adrian Zai, MD as CMIO.

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Research and Innovation

Apple’s ResearchKit gets its first international use as Stanford’s MyHeart Counts app is made available to people living in Hong Kong and UK. The app asks participants once every three months to monitor a week’s worth of physical activity, complete a 6-minute walk fitness test, and provide feedback on their behaviors and risks. “Every type of research study is different,” explains Michael McConnell, MyHeartCounts researcher and professor of medicine at Stanford, “so this may not apply to all future research, but for studying population health and the impact of real-world, daily activities, a mobile research platform has many advantages."

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Government and Politics

HHS awards $2.2 million to the Community Health Peer Learning Program as part of a $38 million bundle of funding for three national health IT programs. (I covered the other programs in an update earlier this week.) The two-year CHPLP program will turn the funding over to health services and policy research organization AcademyHealth to work with 15 communities on population health strategies. Communities will be required to identify data solutions, accelerate local progress, share best practices and learning guides, and help inform national strategy around population health challenges.

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Other

The National Quality Forum releases “Multistakeholder Input on a National Priority: Improving Population Health by Working with Communities,” the latest version of its Community Action Guide. The 66-page report incorporates feedback from 10 field testing groups engaged in population health improvement work across the country.

Wired highlights the work of Danish researchers in collecting and analyzing the fecal emissions of global airline passengers in an effort to identify impending epidemics. As one of the researchers so succinctly put it, “DNA analysis of airplane poop could help flush out signs of emerging outbreaks.”

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Sponsor Updates

• Medicity CEO Nancy Ham co-authors the HFMA article “The Financial Impact of Population Health Analytics in the Shift to Value-Based Models.”
• Billian’s HealthData invites responses from professional marketers in a survey on marketing practices.
• Nordic offers the latest video in its “Making the Cut” series on Epic conversion planning.
• NVoq offers “Your iPhone has Good Dictation. Why Doesn’t Your Enterprise Application?”
• PerfectServe offers “Put down the phone, and other communication lessons from healthcare professionals.”
• EClinicalWorks offers “1.5 Million Referrals Exchanged via P2POpen.”
• Greenway Health offers “CMS Expands ICD-10 Grace Period Guidance.”

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Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

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