News 4/18/16

Top News

AMA launches the Healthier Nation Innovation Challenge to encourage physicians, residents, and medical students to come up with game-changing ideas that use technology in the areas of education; helping people live healthier, longer lives; and improving physician practices. AMA will award prizes of up to $50,000 to help move the ideas from concept to reality. Submissions are due May 16.

Webinars

April 26 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Provider-Led Care Management: Trends and Opportunities in a Growing Market.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenter: Matthew Guldin, analyst, Chilmark Research. This webinar will provide a brief overview and direction of the provider-led care management market. It will identify the types of vendors in this market, their current and longer-term challenges, product capabilities, partnership activity, and market dynamics that influence adoption. It will conclude with an overview of key factors for vendors and solutions moving forward.

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

Announcements and Implementations

Allscripts integrates ClearWave’s patient check-in kiosk into its PM platform after certifying the tool through its developer program.

MiraMed Global Services makes available a Qualified Clinical Data Registry through its Anesthesia Business Consultants subsidiary. The registry will help anesthesia and pain-management practices report performance data to CMS.

Nashville, TN-based Urgent Team implements DocuTap’s EHR, PM, and billing software across its 21 urgent and family care centers in the Southeast.

Diversified Radiology of Colorado signs on with Zotec Partners for RCM services and analytical tools via its Medical Administrative Professionals managed services organization.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Madison, WI-based startup EnsoData raises $550,000 in a round led by venture capital fund Health X Ventures. The company’s flagship product, EnsoSleep, automates sleep study scoring for sleep clinics.

People

Jennifer “Jenna” Geiger (Accenture) joins Alignment Healthcare as COO.

Government and Politics

Happy birthday MACRA! CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt commemorates the act’s one-year anniversary, pointing out that one of its most significant changes has been working to pay physicians based on quality rather than volume.

ABC News digs into the “arcane” work of the six year-old Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, focusing on some of its more high-profile programs to date including the brand-new Comprehensive Primary Care Plus program. Hoangmai “Mai” Pham, MD director of the center’s seamless care models group, has the enviable task of helping physician practices transition to value-based care models like ACOs. “You have to build up a lot of trust,” she explains, adding that giving physicians access to Medicare data has gone a long way towards helping that relationship.

AAFP urges the House Appropriations Committee to restore AHRQ’s budget to its 2015 level of $364 million to support research vital to primary care. “Without AHRQ research,” the academy posits, “too little is known about appropriate care for real patients in primary care practices. More attention and research need to be directed to patients with more than one mental or physical health condition.” AHRQ’s budget, once thought to be entirely on the chopping block, was pared back to $334 million for 2016.

Telemedicine

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn keynotes the California Telehealth Network’s annual conference in San Diego, focusing on the commission’s work to decrease the digital healthcare divide and increase broadband access across the country. She highlighted the FCC’s Connect2Health Task Force and its efforts to develop a nationwide mapping tool that will integrate broadband and health data, down to the county level.

Other

The Washington Nationals win Fitbit’s Step Up to the Plate Challenge, which pitted seven Major League Baseball teams plus the commissioner’s office against each other during spring training. Minor league Nationals outfield/baserunning coordinator Gary Thurman logged one million steps alone.

The local paper profiles Ezdan Fluckiger, MD a former family physician who now toils in both the local hospital ER and at The Bread Doctor, the artisanal bakery he started with his family in Wyoming a little less than a year ago. Born out of a desire to create a long-term job opportunity for Eleanor, his teenage daughter with Down syndrome, Fluckiger also sees it as a nice foil to his typically stressful time in the ER. “(The bakery) is really fun,” he says. “It’s just positive. It’s like dispensing bread love all day long. People don’t come to the bakery to be mad. They come to the bakery to get something yummy.”

Now that you’re hungry, how about a little vino? Vital Wines gives back nearly all of its profits to SOS Health Services, a free clinic for the uninsured and underserved in College Place, WA. Wine industry veteran Ashley Trout spearheaded getting Vital Wines off the ground in order to better support the clinic, which serves a patient population largely made up of seasonal vineyard workers who speak English as a second language, if at all. She points out that, “It’s clearly not a problem 30,000 of us are going to solve in Walla Walla for the whole country. But if you can’t get something done in a small community, where can you?”

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• Large EHR implementations: two critical success factors (Nordic)
• A Patient’s Advocate: Nurses and Technology (PerfectServe)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 4/14/16

Top News

Athenahealth acquires physician scheduling startup Arsenal Health for an undisclosed sum. The four year-old, Boston-based company formerly known as Smart Scheduling made its way through the Healthbox accelerator program before joining Athenahealth’s More Disruption Please program in 2014. Athenahealth has added Arsenal’s technology to its AthenaNet platform, and hopes to take further advantage of its machine learning and predictive analytics capabilities. Arsenal CEO Chris Moses will take on the title of product innovation director; the Arsenal team will report to AthenaCoordinator General Manager Doran Robinson.

Webinars

None scheduled in the coming weeks. Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Venture capital funding in the first quarter of 2016 increases 27 percent over Q1 2015, totaling $1.4 billion via 146 deals. The top-funded technologies include wearables ($260M), data analytics ($197M), telemedicine ($171M), mobile health apps ($120M), and consumer health ($100M). Wearables, analytics, and consumer health also earned top spots on Rock Health’s recent list of top-funded digital health categories for the same timeframe.

Announcements and Implementations

Map Health Management launches a population health management platform for behavioral health and addiction providers that includes patient population analytics, and risk assessment and patient engagement tools.

Modernizing Medicine develops an EHR/PM/RCM software platform for pain medicine physicians.

Compass Chiropractic and Wellness (WI) selects EHR and RCM software and services from IPatientCare.

People

The Western North Carolina Medical Manager Association elects Sherry Davis (Midway Medical Center) to its Board of Directors.

Tarek Elsawy, MD (Cleveland Clinic) joins Reliant Medical Group (MA) as president and CEO.

Research and Innovation

An ACO study in the New England Journal of Medicine reveals that providers who entered the Medicare Shared Savings Program in 2012 saw greater savings than those that entered in 2013. The authors note that “if meaningful savings from the expanding MSSP materialize, our findings suggest that they may be slow to develop, because participants with less advanced systems for managing care may enter later and require more time to improve care efficiency.”

Canadian researchers develop a portable, paper-based method for diagnosing HIV and hepatitis C virus infections. The new low-cost, point-of-care testing platform is capable of wirelessly sending test results to a smartphone or computer for further relay to a provider or lab.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 4/13/16

Top News

CVS MinuteClinic partners with American Well to offer its Ohio-based patients access to Cleveland Clinic physicians via a new Express Care Online program. Cleveland Clinic Medical Director of Distance Health Peter Rasmussen, MD believes the three-way partnership is a logical extension of the clinic’s mission: “Our long-term view of telehealth is that it’s not only a new, welcome service that we can offer our existing patients, but it’s a way for Cleveland Clinic to extend our reach and serve more people who need help. We believe that it is important to remove barriers to great care like time, travel and distance, and we’re making that possible through this partnership in Ohio.”

Webinars

None scheduled in the coming weeks. Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Announcements and Implementations

Navicure develops Navicure Perform, an analytics solution that helps providers identify and rectify cash-flow bottlenecks from within the company’s claims management software.

Ogden Clinic (UT) collocates its IT equipment at two ViaWest datacenters. The multispecialty group practice will also take advantage of ViaWest’s HIPAA Compliance services.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Physician use of Toronto-based Figure 1’s app passes the 1 million mark. Medical images on the app, which has been compared to an Instagram-like clinical decision support tool, have been viewed 1.5 billion times. Figure 1 has raised nearly $11 million since it was founded three years ago, and counts two-thirds of North American medical students among its user base.

Telemedicine

Social services nonprofit Impower (FL) partners with health kiosk company Higi to give its Medicaid patients the ability to wirelessly send biometric and activity data to Impower physicians in real time at no charge.

MyTelemedicine.com develops an Advanced API, giving physicians the ability to integrate virtual visits into their organization’s applications.

Government and Politics

ONC releases a whopper of a report on the REC program, highlighting the fact that nearly 70 percent of EPs who received Meaningful Use incentive payments under Stage 1 were assisted by a REC, compared to just 12 percent of those that didn’t work with a REC.

Other

Buffalo Cardiology & Pulmonary Associates (NY) closes its doors after 40 years due to declining reimbursement rates; cost-inducing regulations; and the ACA-induced trend of private practice consolidation, acquisition, or closure. BC&PA Administrator Gina Gray explained the reasoning for the closure in a letter to patients and partners:

“When BC&PA formed in the mid-’70s, the large private practice model for physician specialists made sense. But it no longer does. We are in the midst of a new era of health care that forces specialists to link in practice with primary-care physicians, either employed by a hospital system, or at extremely large conglomerations of integrated care. This change in practice model allows the doctors to be "physicians first," caring for patients. We no longer have to handle a building, lease equipment, meet payroll, manage employees or administer human resources. We wish to sincerely thank everyone involved with Buffalo Cardiology & Pulmonary Associates over the years. We’ve come to think of ourselves as a family, and like any family, growth and aging leads to new directions and opportunities.”

Sponsor Updates

• Healthwise will exhibit at the Cerner Southeast Regional User Group Meeting April 20-22 in Charlotte, NC.

Blog Posts

• Practice Management Software: The Benefits of Integration (AdvancedMD)
• The Importance of Continuing Education (Aprima)
• New York Issues Electronic Prescribing Waivers for Exceptional Circumstances (E-MDs)
• Five Myths About Shared Decision Making (Healthwise)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 4/12/16

Top News

The State of Vermont signs a $1,008,500 contract with Boston-based PatientPing to help subsidize the company’s real-time care notification technology for all in-state providers. The notification program, which shares care data through Vermont’s HIE, pushes “pings” to providers any time their patients receive care at a facility within the national PatientPing community. ACOs OneCare Vermont and Community Health Accountable Care have already signed up. The news was received with much fanfare earlier today at the Blueprint for Health event in Burlington, though Vermont Medical Society EVP Paul Harrington did point out that the cost may be prohibitive for independent practices. The company will charge Vermont-based ACOs $75,000, hospitals $40,000, post-acute care providers $12,000, and other providers (presumably independent MDs) $5,000 annually.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

I had the opportunity to sit in on a very entertaining presentation on tradeshow hacks at last week’s Health IT Marketing & PR Conference. Presenter and Stericycle Marketing Director Colin Hung has tremendous event marketing experience, and, given that their subsidiary’s booth was next to ours at HIMSS, I was secretly hoping he’d mention the smart move we made in having a cardboard cutout of Mr. H. Alas, he did not; but he did offer at least 20 clever ways to ensure more traffic at your booth. They’re good tips to read through as we enter into the summer tradeshow lull (relative to the run-up to HIMSS, anyway).

Webinars

None scheduled in the coming weeks. Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Announcements and Implementations

Compulink Business Systems develops an EHR and PM solution for audiology practices.

Payspan develops a suite of patient financial engagement tools, giving physicians the ability to assess a patient’s up-front costs and to offer multiple payment options.

EClinicalWorks joins the National Patient Safety Foundation’s Patient Safety Coalition.

People

Patrice Pash, RN (Urgent Care Integrated Network) joins DocuTap as director of consulting services.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Livongo Health raises $44.5 million in a Series C financing round with participation from new and returning investors. The company, which has developed a diabetes management platform for employers, payers, and providers, will use the funding to launch new products and expand into new markets.

Predictive analytics technology vendor MediQuire secures a Series A round of undisclosed financing led by FCA Venture Partners. The New York City-based company will use the capital to add staff and further develop its data analytics tools for underserved patient populations.

Y Combinator graduate Weave expands from its dental office roots with the launch of patient communication software for optometrists.

Telemedicine

Users of Facebook’s Messenger app can now submit their healthcare questions to HealthTap free of charge. The Silicon Valley–based company is the first in healthcare to offer its services via the social media platform.

Research and Innovation

Kaiser Permanente recruits members to participate in its new Research Bank, which will offer disease-prevention researchers access to member EHRs after they donate a small sample of blood. KP aims to collect data from half a million members across its seven regions, making it one of the largest collections of environmental, genetic, and health data.

Other

Spotify releases the playlists of some of your favorite legislators. Of the 20 government officials, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) of 21st Century Cures Act fame is the only one with a direct connection to healthcare technology legislation. He seems to be quite the Springsteen fan.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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HIStalk Practice Interviews Bill Moreau, DC Managing Director of Sports Medicine, US Olympic Committee

Bill Moreau, DC is managing director of sports medicine for the United States Olympic Committee and CMO for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio.

Tell me about yourself and the organization.
My name is Dr. Bill Moreau and I am the managing director of sports medicine for the United States Olympic Committee, and I am the chief medical officer for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio. It is a privilege and tremendous responsibility to serve Team USA athletes. The USOC’s mission is to support US Olympic and Paralympic athletes to achieve sustained competitive excellence while demonstrating the values of the Olympic movement, thereby inspiring all Americans. The pathway through which sports medicine achieves this goal is to provide three pillars of support for Team USA athletes including clinical care, Games care, and through the USOC National Medical Network.

The world is a very competitive place when it comes to sports. The difference between earning an Olympic or Paralympic medal and just missing the podium is measured in hundredths of a second and the smallest fraction of an inch. My job is to lead high-performance sports medicine to protect and enhance the athlete’s health through the three USOC Sports Medicine Clinics, and at the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

How has Team USA historically incorporated healthcare technology into the games?
In the recent past, before the 2012 London Summer Olympics, we maintained paper records. These records were lacking in legibility, a poor resource for analytics, and unavailable for timely access for patient care. Team USA athletes travel the world and paper records made it essentially impossible to have one repository of the health records because there was no conduit to gather the medical records from all over United States and the world.

When we switched to GE Centricity Practice Solution (CPS) in 2012, we were driven by the need to engage healthcare technology to create a single medical record, and to provide the ability to perform analysis in regards to the prevention of illness and injury. CPS was the data repository that allowed USOC Sports Medicine analytics to become a reality. We now know so much more than we did before in regard to evidence-based care pathways and important data points that allow the USOC to really focus on the prevention of illness and injury in our athletic population. The application of healthcare technology is one large component of how USOC Sports Medicine meets our mission of “Providing the Edge” for competition through high-performance sports medicine.

What sort of criteria did the selection committee use when looking at EHR vendors?
GE has been and is a great partner to the USOC and International Olympic Committee. This EHR initiative was a great opportunity to leverage the GE relationship to the benefit of the athlete. USOC Sports Medicine requires proven highest-level security in order to protect patient data, and the ability to maximally customize our forms and GE’s CPS provided the solution.

Given that you’ve had used CPS since 2012, have you made any modifications to it to better suit the needs of athletes and their care teams?
Since implementing the EHR in 2012, Sports Medicine has made some changes to the system to increase functionality, efficiency, and output. We have customized all medical documents to meet the needs of a multidisciplinary clinic, assigning observation terms that allow for data collection and analysis. With a goal of onboarding our National Governing Bodies, we have created confidentiality levels specific to department and sport (i.e., Sports Medicine, Sports Psychology, the National Governing Bodies). Additionally, we have utilized the patient portal and DocuSign to create and distribute electronic health history questionnaires and medical consent forms. From BISCOM we have purchased eFax, an electronic fax system that allows athletes to fax their medical records into the EHR via DM Indexing Client from anywhere in the world. USOC Sports Medicine continues to research new ways to utilize CPS to increase functionality and use for both providers and athletes.

Why did USOC decide to open up the EHR to caring for both athletes and spectators?
USOC Sports Medicine’s number-one priority is to document medical encounters for Team USA athletes. We have shared how we do this with our IOC Sports Medicine partners as well as the next two Olympic Games CMOs. We shared that CPS allowed us to create one centralized database for medical records that can be utilized to also study the epidemiology of patient encounters to best prevent future injury and illness, and plan for future events. Our system is focused on the athletes, but we also register coaches and staff that have been treated for injuries while involved in athletic competitions and training at the Olympic Training Center. In doing this, we document the types of encounters as well as the assessment and management strategies.

Will the EHR offer any sort of interoperability in terms of sharing information with an athlete’s trainer or local physician?
The EHR has the capability of providing access to medical and non-medical personnel. Security rights can be adjusted to grant read-only access of charts and medical histories. The system also allows for downloading and printing of records if non-medical personnel need to view specific charts or documents. Medical providers can be given access to view athlete medical records and diagnostic testing. As with non-medical personnel, they can also be given PDF documents of specific charts and information particular to their needs.

How are you using the patient portal?
USOC Sports Medicine currently has a patient portal linked to our EHR through Surescripts. In the past, our CPS patient portal was used to distribute and collect health history and medical consent forms from our athletes competing at the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The portal also has the capability of viewing medical records, emails, and appointments.

How has EHR utilization helped improve outcomes over the last several Olympic and Paralympic Games?
Since we have implemented GE’s EHR, we have evolved from a reactive sports medicine clinic that treats injuries as they present to us to a data-driven sports medicine division with the ability to leverage real-time reporting and predictive analytics to improve long-term outcomes for our athletes. For example, we now better understand the true injury incidence of our patient population, and can identify risk factors for injury occurrence based on this data. During the Games, we now use live dashboards of injury occurrence and can use this information to help align the appropriate resources to keep an athlete in the field of play. These progressions give us an advantage over our competition – many of whom still use pen and paper medical records.

Are you aware of any other types of new healthcare technology that will be implemented in time for the Rio games – telemedicine, wearables, etc.?
Advances in wearable technology are changing the landscape of sports medicine and science. What was once only used and monitored in a lab a few times a year is now broadly available in real time. Our athlete population is very diverse, and each individual athlete’s needs, from a technology standpoint, differ slightly. During the lead up to Rio, our athletes will use dozens of different monitoring devices – measuring things like sleep quality, heart rate, heart rate variability, mood states, and distance traveled with GPS. How each athlete support team views and makes decisions on this data differs depending on the individual and their health and training needs.

Do you have any final thoughts?
The USOC is dedicated to providing the best opportunities to support and sustain high-performance outcomes for Team USA athletes who are working very hard, every day, to reach for Gold at the Olympic and Paralympic Games. One of Team USA’s best competitive advantages on the field of play is the high level of medical care made available before they reach the competition. Similar to the team of providers that rally to support an individual athlete, the partnership between the USOC and GE has been instrumental in allowing Team USA to “Provide the Edge” through leveraging our mutually supportive relationship in applying healthcare technology in new and innovative ways.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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