News 6/22/16

Top News

HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell and Attorney General Loretta Lynch announce that 301 people have been arrested in a national crackdown on Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Sixty healthcare professionals – including 30 physicians – were taken in for falsely billing over $900 million for medically unnecessary services, or services that were never provided. The takedown is the largest in the nine-year history of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, exceeding last year’s 243 arrests accounting for $712 million.

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel. Be sure to ask for her “Summer Doldrums Special” that we always run through Labor Day and you’ll get a great deal.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Durham, NC-based Eye Care Leaders Group adds consulting services to its line of EHR and PM software solutions for ophthalmologists and optometrists.

People

Brian Dillon joins OptimizeRx as senior vice president of product and strategy.

Telemedicine

The Maryland Health Care Commission awards $115,000 to help fund telemedicine projects launching this month at private practices Gilchrist Greater Living and MedPeds. Gilchrist, a geriatric care practice, will use the funds to provide chronically ill patients with in-home telemedicine monitoring, while MedPeds will use the resources to launch around-the-clock telemedicine services. The programs will run through November 2017.

Louisiana lawmakers pass telemedicine-friendly legislation, no longer requiring physicians to conduct an initial in-person/in-state patient history or physical exam before engaging in a telemedicine encounter. The revised legislation also changes the state’s definition of telemedicine to “interactive audio” without video if care standards are similar to those of an in-person visit.

Government and Politics

If you build it, they will come: ONC proudly announces that its Mobile Health Apps Interactive Tool has been viewed 12,000 times since launching in April. The interactive tool, built in collaboration with the FTC, FDA, and OCR helps app developers answer questions related to federal legal requirements.

We may no longer see federal employees standing in long taxi queues at HIMSS. Rumor has it a bipartisan Government Travel Modernization Act is being proposed that will allow government workers to take advantage of Uber and other ride-sharing services. I guess it’s not all that surprising that bureaucracy favors more expensive, potentially slower modes of transportation over easy and cheaper access.

Other

Georgia public radio looks at the reasons behind physician burnout in the US, which has increased by 10 percent in the last five years. Family physicians in private practice are particularly feeling the squeeze thanks to increasing patient loads, declining reimbursements, burdensome payer paperwork, and, of course, EHRs. PCP Lisa Robins, MD who has been practicing for 20 years, has experienced her fair share of burnout. “I think that medicine is all encompassing,” she explains. “It just takes up so much of your energy, your time, your whole self. It got to the point where there was nothing else in my life outside of medicine.” Instead of leaving the profession entirely, Robin decided to cut back office hours and take more time for herself.

National Cyber Security Alliance Executive Director Michael Kaiser believes passwords will soon be a thing of the past thanks to advances in biometrics like multifactor authentication incorporating live facial recognition (Blink, and your phone will unlock). Google is already working on such security measures to grant users access to apps. “Let’s work together to make passwords obsolete by embracing innovative techniques that increase our security,” Kaiser suggests. “The future of cybersecurity doesn’t need to be some deep dark secret code; it could simply be you.” 

Sponsor Updates

• E-MDs will host its annual User Conference & Symposium June 23-25 in Austin, TX.
• HealthGrid will deliver patient education content from Healthwise via its patient engagement solution.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at 2016 Optometry’s Meeting June 30-July 2 in Boston.

Blog Posts

• Advanced Practice Training: AdvancedInsight Visit Coding Graphs (AdvancedMD)
• A successful approach to making time for optimization (Nordic)
• The CIO of the Future – Long Live the CIO (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• The Top 10 Reasons Transformation is the New Normal for Healthcare – Reason 2 (GE Healthcare)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 6/21/16

Top News

American Well promotes Jon Freshman to CTO, the company’s first since launching 10 years ago. The telemedicine vendor also added a new floor of office space to accommodate its 270 employees. The Boston-based company expects to hire another 30 by the end of the year.

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel. Be sure to ask for her “Summer Doldrums Special” that we always run through Labor Day and you’ll get a great deal.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Dallas-based PediaQ raises $4.5 million, bringing its total raised to $6.4 million. The house call and technology startup will use the latest round of funding to expand services in Dallas and Houston, enter the Austin market, and add adult house-call features for licensees that want to use its technology.

Telemedicine

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research voices its support for telemedicine in a letter to the Texas Senate, which held hearings last week to better understand its telemedicine benefits. The foundation emphasized the role telemedicine can play in helping Parkinson’s patients access movement disorder specialists, many of whom are typically located in metropolitan areas. The letter also emphasized the need to eliminate provider requirements in state law that limit the ways in which physicians can serve patients. Teladoc has sued the state in hopes of halting regulations that would require an in-person visit before a virtual one.

Announcements and Implementations

Minnesota HIE Koble-MN selects Orion Health’s Amadeus precision medicine software. The HIE was established in 2015 with assistance from South Dakota Health Link.

Point-of-Care Partners expands its e-prescribing state law review resource to include new state mandates related to the dispensing of opiates and biosimilars drugs.

ChartLogic offers a medical billing analysis calculator to help practices better understand billing performance and peer benchmarks.

Alliance Oncology (TN) selects care coordination software from Equicare Health to assist with oncology patient management at 26 treatment centers.

Power2Practice announces Fitbit integration with its physician-built EHR for integrative medicine. A P2P survey found that 70 percent of such physicians already recommend wearable fitness trackers as part of a patient’s treatment plan. I’d love to know how many of those patients end up incorporating wearables and sharing that treatment data, and how those physicians deal with the data (not to mention get paid for dealing with it.)

Higi selects cybersecurity and compliance solutions from Washington, DC-based startup Ostendio. The digital health station vendor, which announced $40 million in funding early this year, has over 4,000 stations installed across the country at retailers like Rite Aid and Publix. 

Ten FQHCs in West Virginia enlist the services of Aledade and the West Virginia Primary Care Association to form an ACO. The only one of its kind in the state, Aledade West Virginia Health Center ACO will serve 13,000 patients, initially focusing on care coordination, population health management, and preventive services.

Government and Politics

CMS will update the HIPAA Administrative Simplification section of its website, promising streamlined content and easier navigation. Dr. Jayne shares her always astute thoughts on that process in this week’s Curbside Consult.

Research and Innovation

It seems pharma reps with at least $20 in their pockets stand a good chance of influencing physician prescribing patterns. An Open Payments data analysis found that physicians who received a single meal promoting the drug of interest had higher rates of prescribing that drug to Medicare beneficiaries. Prescription rates increased alongside dinner dates, though researchers note that the findings represent an association rather than a cause-and-effect relationship.

Other

See if you can follow this: Citrix-owned GoToMyPC resets all user passwords to stop hackers who breach other services from accessing the GoToMyPC accounts of people who reuse passwords. The remote-management service claims it was the victim of a “password reuse attack, where attackers used usernames and passwords leaked from other websites to access the accounts of GoToMyPC users.”

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 6/20/16

Top News

HHS announces $100 million in funding over the next five years to help qualified organizations assist small and solo practices implement value-based care programs (including health IT) under MACRA, especially providers in rural and underserved areas, and communities facing a shortage of healthcare professionals.

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel. Be sure to ask for her “Summer Doldrums Special” that we always run through Labor Day and you’ll get a great deal.

Announcements and Implementations

Panorama Orthopedics & Spine Center (CO) selects care coordination technology from PinpointCare to help oversee its OrthoPlus program, part of the Medicare Bundled Payments for Care Improvement BPCI initiative. (Check out my January 2016 interview with Panorama Orthopedics & Spine Center COO Lance Goudzwaard here.)

Kinney Drugs, the drug-store division of KPH Healthcare Services, joins the HealtheConnections RHIO in New York, linking medication prescribed with medications picked up at over 70 New York Kinney Drugs stores.  

The International Union of Engineers opens a clinic for its 4,500 Kansas City, KS members and retirees. Kansas City-based Cerner will run the clinic, one of 40 employer-based clinics it oversees across the country.

House call technology company TrueCare24 develops an AI-based messenger bot that can find and schedule healthcare appointments for users. Baymax (a nod to Big Hero 6, perhaps?) integrates with Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Skype to connect users with primary care.

People

Robert Cohen (Evolent Health) joins Appriss as president of its Healthcare Division.

Telemedicine

Columbia, SC-based Doctors Care PA develops and launches a direct-to-consumer telemedicine service to complement its chain of 55 urgent care practices. The company first began using telemedicine two years ago at several of its busiest locations to minimize wait times.

Government and Politics

HRSA will provide a $250,000 annual grant for up to three years to help state medical boards join and implement the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact. An initiative of the Federation of State Medical Boards, compact members will work to develop and implement an expedited licensing process for physicians looking to practice medicine across state lines. Seventeen states have joined the initiative thus far. Pennsylvania will likely make 18; legislation related to joining the compact passed the House late last week.

Athenahealth SVP and General Counsel Dan Haley explains why the company has not – and will not – sign ONC’s transparency pledge, which in Haley’s words, “requir[e] adherents first to promise to provide the free market with accurate and transparent pricing and functionality information; and second, to bury market-facing communications in mandatory disclosures intended to vindicate that first part.” Haley lists the bevy of government pledges that have conspired to force the industry to follow federal rules under the guise of positive PR, including the Blue Button Pledge and Interoperability Pledge, concluding that, “it might be time to draw a line by taking a Pledge Against Pledges.”

Yes, those hazy days of summer cookouts are upon us. In case you were wondering, Y93.G2 refers to “Activity, grilling and smoking food,” while Y93.G9 refers to “Activity, other involving cooking and grilling.”

Other

Google rolls out “symptom search,” a new smart phone feature for its Search app developed with help from Harvard Medical School and Mayo Clinic. Users will now see “digital cards” pop up below the search box with (presumably) more precise information relevant to their healthcare-related query. “A lot of times, what people find scares the daylights out of them,” says AAFP President Wanda Filer, MD “so if these Google cards can add context, that’s going to help doctors and patients out tremendously.”

Sad but true: Columbia University and French National Institute computer scientists discover that 59 percent of social media links have never been clicked, meaning that most people share content without ever reading it. While I’m a big believer in the power of Twitter, I do realize it can turn into a news-cycle vacuum, with one small group of [insert niche here] tweeters inadvertently controlling the type and volume of information shared. That being said, there’s only so much time in the day, and it’s far more convenient (though not necessarily prudent) to share content you think your network will like than to vet it beforehand. Researcher Arnaud Legout backs me up: “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.” That being said, I encourage you to click on the links in this post so that you can dig deeper via the original source.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic receives RightSourcing’s Gold Supplier Award.

Blogs

• Nurses need innovative care team collaboration technology (PerfectServe)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Contact us online.
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News 6/16/16

Top News

Apple furtively announces that HealthKit in IOS10 will allow users to request medical records that adhere to the the HL7 standard through apps on their phones. The apps (including Mail and Safari) will then “translate” the HL7-standardized documents into more understandable formats, which users can then send to other people in their caregiving circles. The new operating system is expected to launch this fall; the healthcare technology Twitterverse, however, is already getting excited about the notion that patients will have easier access to and control of their records.

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Announcements and Implementations

Medfusion adds its patient payment and portal capabilities to Meridian Medical Management’s VertexDr PM/EHR software. The Cary, NC-based company became the “Official Healthcare IT Provider” of the Carolina RailHawks soccer team earlier this month.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Xerox moves forwards with plans to split into two companies, announcing that its business process outsourcing company will be known as Conduent, while its traditional document technology business will retain the Xerox name. Announced in January, the split is expected to wrap up by the end of 2016. Conduent will include Xerox’s healthcare business (including its new telemedicine service line), plus customer care and transportation solutions.

Healthcare startups take note: Philadelphia-based private equity firm 1315 Capital launches a $200 million fund that it will use to invest in medical technology, healthcare services, and specialty pharmaceutical businesses. The company’s portfolio includes Encore Dermatology, JDS Therapeutics, and Onkos Surgical.

Government and Politics

The local paper looks at the underwhelming prescriber adoption of Minnesota’s statewide prescription drug monitoring program. Established in 2010, the program has seen only a third of eligible physicians and PAs sign up to participate. Over 60 percent of pharmacists have signed up; dentists lag behind at just 20 percent. As of July 1, 2017, every eligible prescriber will be required to maintain login credentials for the PDMP, though they won’t be required to check it before prescribing or dispensing controlled substances. The new requirement seems to cater to prescriber complaints that mandatory login would add to their workloads, compromise patient privacy, or get in the way of professional judgment.

Other

As someone who read Emily Post’s “Book of Etiquette for Young People” many years ago, I find this so refreshing: Google thanks 86 year-old May Ashworth for using “please” and “thank you” in a search request. The British grandmother was under the impression that a Google staff member would address her request, which asked for a translation of the Roman numerals MCMXCVIII.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

News 6/15/16

Top News

Emergency Care Specialists partners (though merge might be a better term) with Answer Health to form Answer Health Telemedicine, a Grand Rapids, MI-based joint venture that will combine the ECS MiDirectCare technology and expand it to include behavioral health, primary care, specialty care, and wellness programs. The collaboration will spur an August rebranding of the MiDirectCare product to Answer Health Care On Demand.

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

People

The AMA inaugurates orthopedic hand surgeon Andrew Gurman, MD as its 171st president.

Former Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak joins the Athenahealth Board of Directors.

Announcements and Implementations

Keystone HIE connects to the PA Patient & Provider Network (P3N). Five additional health information organizations are expected to connect to P3N by the end of the summer.

Government healthcare program services company SynerMed selects house call technology from MedZed for its Medi-Cal members.

Research and Innovation

A Peer60 report on payers finds that BCBS and Medicare are the ambulatory provider favorites by far, with UnitedHealthcare trailing the pack. Providers like payers that get them paid more quickly with minimal staff involvement, while their least-favorite attributes are time-wasting practices, denials, and poor customer service.

A Council of Accountable Physician Practices survey of 30,000 consumers and 626 physicians shows that half of patients are benefiting from coordinated care efforts, and that just one third have access to around-the-clock care outside of the ER. These statistics seem to directly correlate with the fact that only 20 to 30 percent of patients have used digital access tools like email or text reminders, and less than half have access to online health data.

Other

Facebook plans to offer users the ability to flag the posts of friends they deem suicidal or indicative of self-harm. The flags will then be reviewed by a trained Facebook team who will reach out to the person at risk with information on suicide prevention. Perhaps it’s too Big Brotherish, but what if these flags could also trigger some sort of alert in the user’s EHR or PHR? While a message from the Facebook suicide prevention team would no doubt be beneficial, outreach from the user’s PCP or caregiver could truly get the ball rolling on mental health help.

Sponsor Updates

Blog Updates

• 4 Reasons Private Physicians Should Be Thankful That They’re Self-Employed (AdvancedMD)
• Shift in Prostate Cancer Treatment has Roots in Foundation’s History (Healthwise)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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