News 1/5/17

Top News

Arcadia Healthcare Solutions lands $30 million in growth capital led by investments from GE Ventures and the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund. The Boston-based company, which has raised a total of $43 million since launching in 2011, will use the financing to further develop its analytics offerings for providers and payers, and to grow its population health management presence across the country. It acquired EHR support services company Concordant in 2011, and managed care services firm Sage Technologies in 2015.

Webinars

January 18 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Modernizing Quality Improvement Through Clinical Process Measurement.” Sponsored by LogicStream Health. Presenters: Peter Chang, MD, CMIO, Tampa General Hospital; Brita Hansen, MD, CHIO, Hennepin County Medical Center. The presenters will describe how they implemented successful quality governance programs, engaged with their health system stakeholders, and delivered actionable information to clinical leadership and front-line clinicians. Q&A will follow.

January 26 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Jump Start Your Care Coordination Program: 6 Strategies for Delivering Efficient, Effective Care.” Sponsored by Healthwise. Presenters: Jim Rogers, RN, RPSGT, director of healthcare solutions, Persistent Systems; Charlotte Brien, MBA, solutions consultant, Healthwise. This webinar will explain how to implement a patient-centered care coordination program that will increase quality as well as margins. It will provide real-world examples of how organizations used care coordination to decrease readmission rates, ED visits, and costs.

Announcements and Implementations

Mutare Health upgrades its Vital Link secure messaging technology to include voicemail replacement capabilities. Voicemails can now be recorded, converted, and delivered to physicians via Instant Message, email, or text.

Ingenious Med develops a charge-capture app specifically for physician practices that also includes secure messaging, management reports, and dashboards.

People

The California-based Central Coast Medical Association appoints primary care internist David Dodson, MD president of its 2017 Board of Directors.

JC Muyl (Medivo) joins payer-focused behavioral telehealth company AbleTo as SVP of operations.

Laura Hobbs (Bausch & Lomb) joins patient registration kiosk company Clearwave as director of sales.

Government and Politics

New York lawmakers pass legislation giving physicians the ability to access the health data of patients between 10 and 17 through the state’s HealtheLink HIE. Parents must sign a consent form giving physicians permission. Though the new law will help make pediatric medical records more accessible, HealtheLink Executive Director Dan Porreca stresses that, “Participating providers need to be aware that it is possible that the minor patient’s record may contain sensitive information that is protected under New York state law and may not be re-disclosed to the minor’s parent or guardian without the minor’s written consent.” Such information could pertain to mental health or substance abuse treatment, reproductive health services, or STD treatment.

Telemedicine

White-label telemedicine vendor SnapMD joins Athenahealth’s More Disruption Please program. Athenahealth will incorporate the company’s Virtual Care Management software into its EHR and RCM products.

The Indiana Rural Health Association facilitates the launch of three school-based telemedicine clinics in Austin, Crothersville, and Southwestern Jefferson County. The program has avoided outsourcing clinical expertise thanks to employed nurses and specially trained teachers and secretaries. IRHA plans to open clinics in five more school systems by the end of the year. The association is particularly focused on launching the clinics in rural and underserved areas. As I briefly mentioned in yesterday’s post, Indiana does not yet offer Medicaid reimbursement for such visits.

Other

Family physician Henry Hochberg, MD laments the demise of the small, independent practice and the resultant lack of patient-provider relationship-building that such offices can typically provide:

“The reality is that medicine has become largely corporate and depersonalized. The office visit must be recorded electronically, often right in front of the patient. Metrics rule the day. Physicians now get paid and evaluated by codes. There are diagnosis codes, procedure codes and, to a certain extent, ‘time spent’ codes. We can be as precise as coding for a patient who was ‘sucked into a jet engine’ (V97.33X) or suffered from ‘water skis on fire’ (V91.07XA)!

But there is no diagnosis code for ‘loss of eye twinkle.’ And no time code for ‘needing to be heard.’ So, will you miss us when we’re gone? There may come a time in the future when you wave a Bluetooth device over your body, get a diagnosis on your computer and a drone drops a fix at your door. But who will listen to Ms. Smith?”

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Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

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News 1/4/17

Top News

Athenahealth will increase its Atlanta-based workforce to nearly 1,000 over the next 12 months alongside a planned office expansion that will double its footprint at mixed-use development Ponce City Market. The Watertown, MA-based company opened its Atlanta office in 2013 with 500 employees, and has since surpassed its initial employee growth rate by 40 percent. The news comes just a few months after the company laid off 40 employees in Atlanta and 102 in San Francisco.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

HIStalkapalooza sign-ups are open. The usual rules apply:

• Everybody who wants to come has to sign up on this form (even me) – nobody gets invited automatically.
• Each person who wants to come has to sign up separately even if they’re a guest of someone else (because we use an automated check-in system with individually barcoded tickets),
• Signing up doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get an invitation since that depends on how many people I can invite, which is based on how many sponsors I get. Invitations will be emailed in three weeks or so.
• We pay per click of the House of Blues turnstile and thus close the doors early in the evening since someone swinging by for a late-evening beer still costs many dozens of dollars. If you can’t attend the whole event, please don’t take up a slot.

Thanks to our HIStalkapalooza sponsors who are graciously making the industry’s most talked-about event possible. Mr. H needs need a few more to hit the break-even point. Contact Lorre if you’re interested and she’ll work with you to create a fun sponsorship package for the party.

Webinars

January 18 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Modernizing Quality Improvement Through Clinical Process Measurement.” Sponsored by LogicStream Health. Presenters: Peter Chang, MD, CMIO, Tampa General Hospital; Brita Hansen, MD, CHIO, Hennepin County Medical Center. The presenters will describe how they implemented successful quality governance programs, engaged with their health system stakeholders, and delivered actionable information to clinical leadership and front-line clinicians. Q&A will follow.

January 26 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Jump Start Your Care Coordination Program: 6 Strategies for Delivering Efficient, Effective Care.” Sponsored by Healthwise. Presenters: Jim Rogers, RN, RPSGT, director of healthcare solutions, Persistent Systems; Charlotte Brien, MBA, solutions consultant, Healthwise. This webinar will explain how to implement a patient-centered care coordination program that will increase quality as well as margins. It will provide real-world examples of how organizations used care coordination to decrease readmission rates, ED visits, and costs.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Several media outlets report that Walgreens is piloting a vision clinic at its flagship store on Chicago’s Miracle Mile. The Boots Alliance company is looking to replicate the success of its chain of 636 retail vision clinics in the UK, some of which operate as standalone businesses.

Rock Health releases its end-of-year digital health funding report. A record number of companies were funded in 2016, yet the total amount invested saw an 8-percent decrease to $4.2 billion. Most-funded categories included genomics and sequencing, big data and analytics, wearables and biosensing, telemedicine, digital medical devices, and population health management. Mergers and acquisitions were up 9 percent year-over-year, with Teladoc’s acquisition HealthiestYou and Allscripts’s Netsmart purchase likely being of the most interest to office-based physicians.

Telemedicine

The Pew Charitable Trusts looks at the expanding use of telemedicine in public schools, pointing out that nearly 20 states have authorized Medicaid reimbursement for such visits. Ninety-eight percent of students in Maryland’s Howard County schools, which began offering virtual consults in 2015 with the help of one local hospital and two private practices, have been able to immediately return to their classes after a telemedicine visit for non-contagious conditions during school hours.

People

Hoangmai “Mai” Pham, MD (CMS Innovation Center) joins the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy as a senior policy fellow.

Physician consulting firm Continuum Health Alliance hires David Kovel (Sage Growth Partners) as CIO, Andrew Christman (ZirMed) as GM/SVP of performance solutions, and John Juzaitis (Medfusion) as VP of commercial operations.

Announcements and Implementations

CompuGroup Medical US adds real-time genomic decision support tools from ActX to its WebEHR and Clinical EHR products. The addition will enable CGM users to check prescriptions for adverse reactions, dosing, and efficacy based on the full genomic profile incorporated into a patient’s chart. The only caveat seems to be the “affordable patient DNA testing” that would need to occur beforehand – a practice that will likely grow in popularity based on the success of consumer offerings from 23andMe and Ancestry.com. (My genealogy-obsessed mother literally screamed with delight when I gave her a DNA testing kit for Christmas.) As a patient, I’d be much more likely to engage in such a service if it were offered to me at the point of care.

Newly opened West Sacramento Urgent Care (CA) goes live on Practice Velocity’s EHR and billing services.

Government and Politics

AHRQ announces a new funding opportunity for research that shows how health IT can improve “patient-centered health outcomes and quality of care in primary care and other ambulatory settings through the scale and spread of successful, health IT-enabled practice models that use patient-reported outcome measures to achieve these objectives.” Interested organizations can start applying January 25.

Research and Innovation

I can’t believe it’s 2017 and we’re still talking about patient portal problems: A Black Book survey of just over 12,000 consumers finds that 96 percent of patients have left their office visit with patient portal instructions that were either poorly communicated or miscommunicated. Forty percent have tried to use their physician’s portal; 83 percent of those report finding it difficult to navigate from their home devices – a stat that in my mind points to the need for greater usability that caters to a wide swath of patient types. (Mr. H points out a number of other revealing health IT adoption stats here.)

Other

Scientific American makes the case for a cashless society, pointing out the many different types of bacteria found on bank notes and coins. American bills – a blend of cotton and linen – are particularly susceptible to picking up and carrying microbes from “a cocaine-sniffer’s nose to a waiter’s hands to someone’s back pocket.” Fun fact: Global studies of cash have found exceptionally high bacterial counts on money handled by food workers or on hospital grounds.

Sponsor Updates

• Aprima employees donate over nine tons of food to Dallas-area families in need through Metrocrest Services.
• AdvancedMD compiles its most popular e-guides and videos from 2016.

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Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

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News 1/3/17

Top News

Several trade associations quickly weigh in on the Senate’s introduction of a timeline to repeal the ACA. MGMA President and CEO Halee Fisher-Wright, MD assures incoming lawmakers that the association will work with them if the resolution introduced by Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) comes to pass. “Many elements of the ACA can be amended and improved with an infusion of new ideas,” she writes in what I assume is an unsolicited statement to President-elect Trump. “As Congress considers legislation that impacts the policies or financial underpinnings of the ACA, it should – above all – minimize disruptions to the nation’s healthcare delivery and payment system during any transition.” Minimizing disruptions is all fine and dandy, but I believe ensuring quality (and dare I add affordable?) patient care should be a Congressional priority – above all.

Not to be left out, AMA President James Madara, MD also penned a missive to congressional leaders stressing the need to clearly outline any steps being considered as part of an ACA overhaul, especially policies related to healthcare coverage. He stresses that, “Patients and other stakeholders should be able to clearly compare current policy to new proposals so they can make informed decisions about whether it represents a step forward in the ongoing process of health reform.”

Webinars

January 18 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Modernizing Quality Improvement Through Clinical Process Measurement.” Sponsored by LogicStream Health. Presenters: Peter Chang, MD, CMIO, Tampa General Hospital; Brita Hansen, MD, CHIO, Hennepin County Medical Center. The presenters will describe how they implemented successful quality governance programs, engaged with their health system stakeholders, and delivered actionable information to clinical leadership and front-line clinicians. Q&A will follow.

January 26 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Jump Start Your Care Coordination Program: 6 Strategies for Delivering Efficient, Effective Care.” Sponsored by Healthwise. Presenters: Jim Rogers, RN, RPSGT, director of healthcare solutions, Persistent Systems; Charlotte Brien, MBA, solutions consultant, Healthwise. This webinar will explain how to implement a patient-centered care coordination program that will increase quality as well as margins. It will provide real-world examples of how organizations used care coordination to decrease readmission rates, ED visits, and costs

Announcements and Implementations

India-based RCM vendor ITech Workshop adds patient appointment scheduling capabilities to its billing and PM software.

Cytta upgrades its remote patient monitoring technology to operate on the Oracle Cloud via the company’s VeriSmartPhone technology.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Charlotte, NC-based startup Tesser Health secures $470,000 in seed funding from a group of investors led by Cofounders Capital. The seven-employee company, which will use the cash to build out its sales team and move into new office space, has developed software that helps employee benefit companies identify cheaper prescription drug options. I’m especially interested in news related to prescription drug pricing thanks to a recent virtual consult that ended up with my MD prescribing $200-plus ear drops that had no generic version available. On the advice of my pharmacist, who also tried to help me find online manufacturer coupons for the drug, I called back to request a different, cheaper medication. The NP who facilitated the second, far less expensive prescription half-jokingly told me that doctors “sometimes have to be nudged” into prescribing generics.

People

Staffing company Supplemental Health Care hires Mary Lucas (Staffmark) as chief talent officer and Donna Carroll (North Highland) as chief sales officer. The Park City, UT-based firm has promoted Missy Blankenship to president of local offices; Monty Houdeshell to chief financial and administrative officer; and Chris Long and Linda McDonnell to SVP of nurse operations and travel nursing sales, respectively.

Telemedicine

EarlySense adds American Well virtual consult access to its wireless home-monitoring technology, which includes the new Live under-the-bed sensor that monitors and analyzes heart, respiratory cycles, stress, and sleep indicators.

New York-based payer MVP Health Care begins offering telemedicine services (including mental health consults) from American Well to its members in New York and Vermont this week. Chief Executive Denise Gonick believes the nonprofit is the only health plan that offers virtual visits to Medicaid beneficiaries.

Research and Innovation

A new survey from payer-focused health data company Healthmine highlights the ongoing disconnect between the plethora of digital health tools available to consumers and their ability to incorporate them into health and wellness programs. Of the 2,500 health plan members surveyed, 75 percent are willing to share health data collected via apps but only 32 percent report this happens automatically. Though 60 percent of consumers access their EHRs to stay informed, just 22 percent use that digital data to make healthcare decisions – a stat that belies the need for more discussion between physician and patient on the role, if any, such tools can play within a particular practice. Most surprising to me is the fact that 39 percent of those surveyed – all users of digital health tools – have never heard of telemedicine. Perhaps I have lived in my health IT bubble for too long …

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

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News 1/2/17

Top News

Walgreens Boots Alliance subsidiary Duane Reade closes its 11 clinics in New York City amidst “scattered closures” in other cities. While the number isn’t exorbitant, it’s a move that makes me wonder if the market has finally reached full walk-in clinic saturation. Walgreens already operates a national chain of 400 Healthcare Clinics within its eponymous retail pharmacies, and has made headlines recently through its clinic partnerships with local health systems. By comparison, CVS operates 800 MinuteClinics within its stores. Accenture predicts 3,000 will be in operation by the close of 2017.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

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Webinars

January 18 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Modernizing Quality Improvement Through Clinical Process Measurement.” Sponsored by LogicStream Health. Presenters: Peter Chang, MD, CMIO, Tampa General Hospital; Brita Hansen, MD, CHIO, Hennepin County Medical Center. The presenters will describe how they implemented successful quality governance programs, engaged with their health system stakeholders, and delivered actionable information to clinical leadership and front-line clinicians. Q&A will follow.

January 26 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Jump Start Your Care Coordination Program: 6 Strategies for Delivering Efficient, Effective Care.” Sponsored by Healthwise. Presenters: Jim Rogers, RN, RPSGT, director of healthcare solutions, Persistent Systems; Charlotte Brien, MBA, solutions consultant, Healthwise. This webinar will explain how to implement a patient-centered care coordination program that will increase quality as well as margins. It will provide real-world examples of how organizations used care coordination to decrease readmission rates, ED visits, and costs.

Announcements and Implementations

Ezderm adds MIPS-qualified registry reporting resources from Healthmonix to its EHR and PM software.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Automotive News profiles a new concept clinic built for employees of auto supplier and diesel-engine manufacturer Cummins. The LiveWell Center, which is run by healthcare management company Premise Health, offers up front pricing for traditional primary care plus chiropractic care and cooking classes. Its 46 employees – many who have come from private practice – are enjoying the move away from fee-for-service. “In private practice, it’s a diagnostic approach,” says Medical Director Jill Beavins, MD. “The tools we had in our toolbox were much more limited. When you’re in a high-volume private practice, it’s hard to do justice to some of these conversations around diet and exercise in a 10-minute conversation. At the LiveWell Center, we have a lot more time.”

People

Healthcare analytics company MetiStream adds Denny Lee (Microsoft) to its advisory board.

Government and Politics

A number of states are using healthcare data in their fight to keep Medicaid expansion efforts alive ahead of potential cutbacks to the $545 billion program. Several, such as Ohio and Alaska, have created dashboards to display the positive effects of Medicaid expansion on care quality and outcomes. Avid tweeter and Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt highlighted Louisiana’s encouraging statistics in an effort to highlight the state’s expansion success. 

NEPR looks at the impact a new law requiring Massachusetts providers to use HIE-friendly EHRs will have on private practices. The law’s “fully interoperable” phrasing has left some physicians scratching their heads. Massachusetts Medical Society President James Gessner, MD admits that it’s not “going to be easy at all, and it might be fairly expensive, and it might be prohibitively expensive for small practices.” Valley Medical Group President Joel Feinman, who admits he wasn’t even aware of the law before being contacted by the media outlet, echoes the time-honored frustrations of independent MDs everywhere: “There’s a gap between what the legislature thinks needs to happen and what’s actually possible in the industry in any given moment.”

Research and Innovation

Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology develop a breathalyzer test capable of diagnosing up to 17 diseases from a single breath. Early-stage testing of the device has led to accurate disease detection nearly nine out of 10 times.

Other

The Nevada Dept. of Health and Human Services confirms that an unspecified vulnerability in a website portal for residents applying to sell medical marijuana leaked the driver’s license and social security numbers of 11,700 applicants. The portal has been taken offline while the department attempts to fix it.

Did you feel it?: Citizens of the Western hemisphere experienced the world’s 28th leap second on New Year’s Eve. (You can read about the origins of the extra second here.) Those in the Eastern Hemisphere experienced the same phenomena just after the start of 2017.

And speaking of the New Year, my ears perked up when I heard that President-elect Trump celebrated the eve at an event headlined by Party on the Moon – a HIStalkapalooza favorite for several years now. Media outlets reported that tickets to the event rang in at $500 a pop. (That’s 100-percent more than what it costs for dedicated HIStalk readers to attend our HIMSS networking party thanks to Mr. H’s faith in the generous support of our sponsors.)

This would never fly in the workaholic USA: France passes a law giving employees the right to ignore work emails sent outside of typical working hours. Applicable to companies with 50 or more employees, the “right to disconnect” ruling is the country’s attempt to stem the tide of employee burnout and improve work-life balance. Compliance is voluntary, and no penalties have yet been associated with it.

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

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News 12/22/16

Top News

At the behest of Santa Claus, the American Telemedicine Association establishes a Telehealth Command Center at the North Pole. “Now that my husband spends most mornings in traction recovering from ‘excessive egg nog’ the night before, life now is about making things easier and more affordable,” explains Mrs. Claus. Fred Keebler, head of toy manufacturing, believes the access to virtual consults will especially help Santa deal with such chronic healthcare issues as obesity, sleep apnea, hypertension, and early-stage diabetes. The center’s services will be made available to the elves as an added employee benefit.

Webinars

January 18 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Modernizing Quality Improvement Through Clinical Process Measurement.” Sponsored by LogicStream Health. Presenters: Peter Chang, MD, CMIO, Tampa General Hospital; Brita Hansen, MD, CHIO, Hennepin County Medical Center. The presenters will describe how they implemented successful quality governance programs, engaged with their health system stakeholders, and delivered actionable information to clinical leadership and front-line clinicians. Q&A will follow.

January 26 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Jump Start Your Care Coordination Program: 6 Strategies for Delivering Efficient, Effective Care.” Sponsored by Healthwise. Presenters: Jim Rogers, RN, RPSGT, director of healthcare solutions, Persistent Systems; Charlotte Brien, MBA, solutions consultant, Healthwise. This webinar will explain how to implement a patient-centered care coordination program that will increase quality as well as margins. It will provide real-world examples of how organizations used care coordination to decrease readmission rates, ED visits, and costs.

Announcements and Implementations

Sentry Data Systems offers analysis of physician compensation reporting with the launch of Provider Analytics.

The Center for Rheumatology (NY) selects EHR, PM, and cloud hosting services and support from TSI Healthcare.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Alignment Healthcare launches Alignment Health Services to offer its partner companies access to the managed services company’s clinical model and population health technology. The California-based company serves over 40,000 patients through its work physician groups, hospitals, and payers in three states. The company has promoted COO Jenna Geiger to president of the new business unit, and hired Robert Lonardo (CareMore Health Plan) to take over the COO role.

Government and Politics

Perhaps taking a cue from IBM CEO Ginny Rometty, DirectTrust President and CEO David Kibbe, MD offers President-elect Trump several recommendations, including appointing a National Coordinator who exhibits strong leadership skills – “someone respected by the medical community and thoroughly versed in current and emerging healthcare technologies;” and avoiding “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” when it comes to EHR adoption and interoperability policies. “We’ve made significant progress in the areas of increased HER adoption and interoperability during the past four years,” Kibbe says. “Our hope is that the momentum established to this point will continue under the new administration.”

The HHS Office of the Inspector General highlights the need for IT systems development in an early-implementation review of Quality Payment Program management. The OIG specifically outlines the importance CMS should place on establishing individualized user accounts within the QPP portal, and the necessity of expanding the service desk. As one CMS official relates, “We understood early on that the portal was going to make or break the physician experience with the MIPS program. The way we communicate to them and how much of a hassle it is for them to communicate with us is important.” The review also stresses the need for backend testing of the new systems.

Other

‘Tis the Season: FDA Historian John Swann recounts a time when the FDA was affectionately known as the “Food, Drug, and Toy Administration,” regulating playthings akin to those sold by SNL toy salesman Irwin Mainway – flammable dolls; infant and toddler toys that posed serious puncture, laceration, and crushing risks; and the “infamous” lawn darts. Perhaps none made as much of an impression as “clacker balls,” which the FDA found in the early 70s could “rupture and spew fragments, or become wayward missiles through detachment from or fraying of the cord itself.”

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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