News 1/11/16

Top News

AMA invests $15 million to become a founding partner in Health2047 (a nod to AMA, which was founded in 1847), a for-profit company based in San Francisco that will develop new products and services to meet specific physician needs, most likely in the areas of chronic care, value-based care and payments, connected health, medical education, and networking technology. The startup will also assist other businesses, including pharmaceutical companies, in launching new products. AMA James Madara will serve as the company’s chairman, while Douglass Given (G5 Partners) will serve as CEO. The startup already has 15 staff working on potential partnerships with Silicon Valley tech companies; Given hopes that number will grow to 60 as the company matures.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Top 5 Benefits of Data as a Service: How Peace Health Is Breathing New Life Into Their Analytics Strategy.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenter: Erez Gordin, director of information management systems, Peace Health. Finding, acquiring, and linking data consumes 50 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Peace Health reduced the time analysts were spending on data wrangling, freeing them up to create new actionable insights.

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

Announcements and Implementations

Urgent care chain CityMD (NY) partners with New York City-based Zipdrug to offer drug delivery to its Murray Hill clinic customers. The company will likely expand the partnership to additional clinics next month. Zipdrug launched last summer and has raised $2.6 million. CityMD is its first “major” bricks-and-mortar partner.

Concentra expands its agreement with Allscripts to include roll out of TouchWorks to 2,000 providers plus remote hosting services from the new Allscripts facility in Kansas City, MO. The urgent care and occupational medicine company has used various Allscripts solutions like FollowMyHealth since 2011.

People

Stephany Verstraete (Truveris) joins Teladoc as chief marketing officer.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

GE Healthcare will relocate its headquarters from England to Chicago. The senior executive leadership team will move into office spaced already leased by its parent company within the next several months. CEO John Flannery attributes the move to GE Healthcare’s need to be closer to its US customers. The relocation news comes just a few weeks after the company announced that Lee Cooper will join GE Healthcare in January as president and CEO of its United States and Canada regions.

Apple acquires San Diego-based Emotient for an undisclosed sum. The San startup specializes in the development of artificial technology that analyzes facial expressions to identify people’s emotions. Primarily used by advertisers to gauge customer reactions, the company’s technology has been tested by physicians to interpret the pain levels of unresponsive patients. Apple has given no clue as to what they plan to do with Emotient’s assets, though keeping up with similar moves by Facebook and Google is probably reason enough. The company acquired another AI startup, VocalIQ, in October and filed for a related patent in 2014. 

Telemedicine

Preliminary 2015 revenue figures for Teladoc come in at $77 million – a 77-percent increase over last year’s total. Visits up by 53 percent, coming in at just under 900,000 consults. CEO Jason Gorevic predicts the company, which launched an IPO last June, will see a 50-percent increase this year in both categories. For those keeping track, Teladoc was smack dab in the middle (#10) of Mr. H’s year-end look at publicly traded health IT stock performance.

Meanwhile, American Well touts its App Annie ranking as the most downloaded telemedicine app for the second year in a row. Both news items bolster my belief that the increasingly competitive telemedicine market had a big part to play in HealthSpot’s demise.

The National Center for Policy Analysis rakes Texas over the coals in its latest report on state telemedicine policies. (As you may recall, Teladoc and the Texas Medical Board are still waging a litigious war over the company’s ability to operate in the state.) It points out that, “The protectionist policies of the Texas Medical Board threaten to undermine the effort Texas has made to increase access to medical care through telemedicine. With the population of Texas projected to double by 2050, attempting to limit telemedicine patients and providers is a dangerous bet against the future of health care in Texas.”

Mental and behavioral health telemedicine vendor Thera-Link launches an IPad app. The Dallas-based startup is planning an Android app release in the near future.

Government and Politics

CMS announces 121 new participants in its Medicare ACO program. Twenty one have joined the new Next Generation ACO Model, which offers participants the chance to take on higher levels of financial risk, while offering them prospectively set benchmarks from which to budget.

Research and Innovation

April Fool’s comes early: A new report from the Study of Maternal and Child Kissing (SMACK) Working Group finds that kisses from mom do not, in fact, alleviate the pain associated with the everyday “boo boo.” Researchers recommend a “moratorium on the practice” given that participant scores on the Toddler Discomfort Index “did not differ significantly between the maternal and sham kiss groups.”

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

Population Health Management Weekly Wrap Up 1/10/16

Medecision releases the Aerial Insights platform, offering aggregation of real-time data feeds across health facility clinicians, locations, medical groups, and conditions; plus analytics and automation. Data feeds are sourced from admission, discharge, and transfers; EHRs; remote-monitoring devices; and digital health technologies including wearables.

Altruista Health secures an undisclosed amount of financing from investment firm Capricorn Healthcare & Special Opportunities. Washington, DC-based Altruista offers population health management solutions for care management organizations, providers, and payers. Capricorn’s healthcare IT investment portfolio also includes Epic.

Northwell Health (the former North Shore-LIJ) (NY) and consulting firm Newport Health form Health Connect Technologies, which will commercialize population health management products. The joint venture was announced in August 2015, while a pilot of HCT’s tech at Northwell Health’s Lenox Hill Hospital seems to have begun sometime in 2014. “We have seen tremendous results since piloting Health Connect,” says Gus Costalas, ED at Lenox Hill, and CFO of Northwell Health’s Western Region. “In just over 18 months, we have successfully closed the loop for thousands of patients, dramatically increasing patient satisfaction.”

The CMS Innovation Center launches a five-year pilot program to determine whether helping people with social issues related to food, housing, and transportation can improve health outcomes and reduce expenses. The Accountable Health Communities Model will provide $157 million in ACA funds to “bridge organizations” that will work to identify the social needs of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries in local communities, and help connect them to best-fit programs. Initial evaluation will focus on reduction in costs, ER visits, and readmissions.

KLAS Research’s latest population health management report gives Enli Health Intelligence (fka Kryptiq) high marks for the Beaverton, OR-based company’s CareManager care coordination platform. 

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe CEO Terry Edwards is featured in a Global Big Data Conference article on health IT trends in 2016.

Blog Posts

• The Most Popular Nordic Blog Posts of 2015 (Nordic)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

News 1/7/16

Top News

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker announces big plans to create a “digital health care hub” in hopes of attracting more business to the state. The initiative, led by the Massachusetts eHealth Institute at MassTech, will provide office space, programming and networking support to digital health startups in Boston. The Massachusetts Competitive Partnership will offer early-stage companies funding, and assistance with developing licensing agreements that will make it easier for them to work with area universities.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Top 5 Benefits of Data as a Service: How Peace Health Is Breathing New Life Into Their Analytics Strategy.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenter: Erez Gordin, director of information management systems, Peace Health. Finding, acquiring, and linking data consumes 50 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Peace Health reduced the time analysts were spending on data wrangling, freeing them up to create new actionable insights.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, People, Business, and Stock

Johnson & Johnson Health and Wellness Solutions partners with Plug and Play Tech Center to launch a three-month technology accelerator in Sunnyvale, CA for startups looking to develop direct-to-consumer wellness solutions, especially those targeting nutrition, physical activity, stress, sleep, and alcohol and smoking cessation. The 12-week program will provide coaching and mentorship support for two groups of companies each year. Awards, possibly including seed funding, will be given to the three most promising companies in each group. Applications for the first group will be received through February 15.

People

Cognosante promotes Davis Foster to president of health data and communications.

Rita Bowen (Healthport) joins MRO as vice president, privacy, HIM policy and education.

HIMSS awards Brian Yeaman, MD its 2015 HIMSS Physician IT Leadership Award. Yeaman is founder and president of Yeaman and Associates consulting firm, and a practicing family physician at Yeaman Signature Health Clinic (OK).

Announcements and Implementations

CareCentrix, a home care company based in Hartford, CN, enters into an agreement with Athenahealth enabling Athena clients to send durable medical equipment orders to CareCentrix via the AthenaCoordinator platform.

Government and Politics

The National Association of Medicaid Directors calls on CMS to reassess the ways in which it measures access to Medicaid, placing special focus on keeping up with technology: “Measures should also allow states to incorporate telehealth initiatives, particularly for highly specialized provider types, behavioral health providers, and other state-identified provider types. Further, measures should be nimble enough so as to keep pace with evolving technology and innovations that states and providers may leverage to facilitate access, particularly for specialty services.”

FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez tells likely shocked CES attendees that she prefers a non-connected pedometer to flashier devices like the Fitbit because she doesn’t want “sensitive health information being shared.” Ramirez and several FTC colleagues attended the show to get a better handle on how companies are tackling consumer privacy, protecting information, and data security. She obviously doesn’t yet have much faith in their collective ability to protect consumer data.

Coinciding nicely with the start of many New Year’s resolutions, National Coordinator and Acting Assistant Secretary for Health Karen DeSalvo, MD co-authors a brief on the new dietary guidelines put out by HHS earlier today. The biggest sticking points for most Americans will likely be with the directives to consume less sugar, saturated fats, and sodium.

Telemedicine

Oakland, CA-based Dictum Health forms an executive team as it prepares to launch its telemedicine platform. The cloud-based tablet technology will be geared towards acute-care diagnosis for remote and home-based patients. The new, six-person team includes CEO Mory Ejabat (Ascend), CMO Chris Simmons, MD (John Muir Health) Vice President of Engineering Kim Hobbs (Zhone Technologies), Vice President of Product Management Elizabeth Keate (Allergan), Vice President of Quality and Regulatory Affairs Paul Landesman (Consult Wing), and Vice President of Marketing Deb Anderson (Abbott Laboratories).

Research and Innovation

The Wall Street Journal looks at some of the more novel “connected” concepts coming out of CES (and related patient privacy challenges), including the First Response Pregnancy Pro, L’Oréal My UVPatch, and Aterica’s smart EpiPen case. Of the three, I’m most interested in the patch and its accompanying app, which can tell me how much sun I’ve been exposed to throughout the day. I haven’t yet gotten into the habit of applying sunscreen daily, so a product like this might be just the wake-up call I need.

Other

Yet another reason I’m glad I don’t subscribe to cable: Time Warner Cable announces that the emails and passwords of up to 320,000 customers may have been hacked as a result of malware downloaded during phishing attacks. The company, alerted to the breach by the FBI, is still working to determine how the breach occurred. I suppose TWC wins the dubious honor of the first data breach of 2016.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

News 1/6/16

Top News

Reports swirl that virtual health kiosk vendor HealthSpot has closed its doors. Rite Aid, which installed 25 of the company’s kiosks in July, issued a statement notifying consumers of the change:

“On Monday, Dec. 28, Rite Aid was notified by HealthSpot of its intention to cease operations effective Thursday, Dec. 31. As a result, the 25 HealthSpot stations located inside select Rite Aid pharmacies in Cleveland, Akron/Canton and Dayton/Springfield will no longer be available to Rite Aid patients and customers after 5pm Thursday, Dec. 31. Rite Aid appreciated the opportunity to offer HealthSpot services to our patients and customers over the past year. We believe very much in the value of telehealth and will continue to explore options to offer such services in the future.”

The Dublin, Ohio-based company also seems to have pulled its kiosks from Cleveland Clinic facilities, notifying them that it will no longer focus on clinical operations. Its website functionality seems to be nil, though founder and CEO Steve Cashman’s LinkedIn profile still lists him as an employee. “We are disappointed to hear HealthSpot’s news,” says Tamara StClaire, chief innovation officer of Commercial Healthcare at Xerox, which provided health IT solutions and services for HealthSpot. “We remain committed to supplying a suite of telehealth services powered by Xerox infrastructure to the industry and will continue to work with startups and small companies to openly innovate and collaborate on new ideas for products and services that benefit consumers and deliver on our vision of anywhere care.”

My best guess as to why the company is sputtering is that it can’t keep up with the glut of more convenient  telemedicine apps nor the surge in retail and urgent care clinics, despite the better affordability of HealthSpot stations, as Cashman outlined in a HIStalk Connect 2013 interview.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

I finally got around to booking my flight and hotel for HIMSS. I hope my travel experience is smoother than last year, which saw United cancel my flight home and stick me at a HoJo’s out in the Chicago suburbs for the night. Despite the customer service rep’s assurance that the airline would reimburse me for the stay, I ended up with only a $100 credit for a flight I’ll never take.

Speaking of HIMSS, the flood of interview requests hasn’t started yet, though I have noticed several PR firms take a proactive approach in asking me what my show-coverage interests are. Extra points go to the team at Revive Health, who reached out with a series of fun questions. “What’s the worst experience you ever had with PR folks around HIMSS?” was my favorite.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Top 5 Benefits of Data as a Service: How Peace Health Is Breathing New Life Into Their Analytics Strategy.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenter: Erez Gordin, director of information management systems, Peace Health. Finding, acquiring, and linking data consumes 50 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Peace Health reduced the time analysts were spending on data wrangling, freeing them up to create new actionable insights.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, People, and Stock

Oncology software vendor Flatiron Health secures a $175 million Series C round led by Roche. The company will use the investment to continue development of its EMR, PM, analytics, and billing tools. It has also entered into a multiyear, non-exclusive agreement by which the biotech company will purchase some of Flatiron’s life-science offerings.

Chicago-based DuPage Medical Group receives a $250 million investment from growth equity firm Summit Partners. The sizeable infusion of funds will be used to help grow DMG’s PM company, DMG Practice Management Solutions/Midwest Physician Administrative Services,and its focus on population health and adding new lines of clinical services. Summit Partners Managing Director Darren Black will join the independent multispecialty physician group’s Board of Directors. I interviewed DMG CEO Mike Kasper just before its acquisition of Meridian Medical Associates last fall.

Announcements and Implementations

Covenant Surgical Partners (TN) selects PM technology and specialty-specific RCM services from gMed, which was acquired by Modernizing Medicine last fall. The network of ambulatory surgery centers and physician practices has been a gMed gGastro EHR customer for several years.

The Washington, DC Dept. of Parks and Recreation, as well as several local schools, roll out the InjureFree app to enable coaches, parents, and trainers to report and share suspected concussions and injuries. The app is the brainchild of the San Diego-based Agency for Student Health Research, which is in talks with Virginia and Maryland officials about similar implementations.

Research and Innovation

Seoul National University researchers create an extremely thin, stretchable electronic device using gold nanoparticles that shows potential as a continuous heart-rate monitoring device. The monitor, which attaches to the skin like a sticker, is made up of ECG sensors and amplifiers that monitor heart rate while adhering to the skin, and features heart rate and time data in binary and decimal numbers. Researchers have high hopes that the stretchable monitor will make a big impact in wearable health monitoring.

Government and Politics

An OIG audit finds that CMS does not have a process in place to ensure that tax credit payments are made only to health insurance exchange enrollees who have paid their monthly premiums. Apparently, CMS has been relying on insurance companies to make sure that eligible enrollees have been making timely payments. The audit also points out that, because the agency had not developed a computer system to enable marketplaces to share confirmed enrollment data, they could not verify that improper premium tax credits were returned to the Treasury. OIG’s findings follow up its report last year that found CMS couldn’t verify $2.8 billion in subsidies paid out in the first four months of 2014.

Other

Healthcare technology-related items feature in four of AMA’s top nine issues for 2016. Resetting the Meaningful Use program came in just behind Medicare reform, while telemedicine, health data security, and prescription drug abuse and associated drug monitoring programs round out the list. AMA President Steven Stack, MD shared his disdain for EHRs with the Chicago Tribune late last month: “[W]e have graduate-educated physicians who are being forced to use software that looks like it’s on an old-fashioned, DOS-based system, a Tandy, an Atari, the kind of software you can only see in a museum. And that’s the software we’ve been given to manage patients’ health and well-being. So you have physicians whose efficiency is decimated. Their ability to communicate with each other is completely crippled. And then they’re told you’re not doing a good job.”

I have zero experience with server logs, but I’d like to think I’d smile if I found the above poem mysteriously nestled in mine. Anonymous hackers Masspoem4u sent the creative missive to the public Internet in an attempt to hit all the IP addresses it could – potentially hitting tens of millions of machines. Its goal seems to have been to highlight the “importance of keeping the Internet free and decentralized,” adding that, “The Internet is ours and it is adorable.”

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD staff donates 4,402 pairs of socks to The Road Home, a social services agency that helps the homeless in Salt Lake City.
• Aprima Medical Software donates a record eight tons of food to needy families in the Dallas area as part of its annual food drive.
• E-MDs selects Dell Children’s Medical Center for its 2015 holiday giving program.
• The local business paper profiles new GE Healthcare CEO Lee Cooper.

Blog Posts

• ICD-10 Impact on Covered Preventive Services (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• Looking Back at a Solid 2015 (EClinicalWorks)
• Forty Years of Building Trust (Healthwise)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

News 1/5/16

Top News

Doctors Administrative Solutions acquires ConXit Technology Group for an undisclosed sum and rebrands as DAS Health. The newly combined company, now the largest reseller of Aprima Medical Software, will maintain its headquarters in Tampa, FL. ConXit founder and CEO Shawn Miller will join DAS Health as senior vice president of sales. The company has had a bit of a growth spurt over the last six months, acquiring Spectra Healthcare’s RCM product portfolio and doubling its office space with a move to new digs in Tampa.

Webinars

January 13 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Top 5 Benefits of Data as a Service: How Peace Health Is Breathing New Life Into Their Analytics Strategy.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenter: Erez Gordin, director of information management systems, Peace Health. Finding, acquiring, and linking data consumes 50 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time. Peace Health reduced the time analysts were spending on data wrangling, freeing them up to create new actionable insights.

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

Announcements and Implementations

Thousand Oaks, CA-based Compulink Business Systems develops EHR systems for ENT physicians and urologists.

The 14-physician Orthopedic Institute of Wisconsin selects a suite of RCM tools, including business intelligence reporting, from McKesson Business Performance Services.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Looks like Lyft is finally getting some love (and potentially giving Uber a run for its money): GM invests $500 million in the ride-sharing company, and will work with it to develop a network of self-driving cars. Uber, by contrast, already operates a research center for self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. No word on whether Lyft will also delve into the world of mobile house calls as Uber has attempted to do over the last several years. Both companies will vie for the business of 150,000-plus CES attendees this week, as they legally compete with the Las Vegas taxi industry for the first time. Hopefully they’ll iron out all the wrinkles before HIMSS opens in just under two months.

Government and Politics

HHS issues a final rule modifying HIPAA that allows psychiatrists to report potentially violent patients that should be prevented from purchasing a gun to the National Instant Criminal Background Check system. The rule, part of President Obama’s recent spate of gun legislation, does not allow providers to share diagnostic or clinical information with the NICBC system.

Presidential candidate/Governor Jeb Bush promotes the use of prescription drug-monitoring programs in his just-released drug-control plan, specifically focusing on the not-so-new need for PDMPs to share data between state lines.

Research and Innovation

Yale School of Public Health student Alex Rich develops the PillTracker to help improve medication adherence. The prototype, in use by several of Rich’s family members, lights up, buzzes, and sends users a text message when it’s time to take their meds. If a pill isn’t taken, the device will text message a care team member with a prompt to call and remind the patient. Rich, a former Air Force Major, hopes to market the finished product to ACOs.

A Journal of the American Osteopathic Association study finds that just over 8 percent of 60,722 eligible patients at 14 community health centers were screened for hepatitis C virus according to 2013 guidelines, which call for testing all patients born between 1945 and 1965. Researchers sifted through de-identified EHR data from a national chain of community health centers to identify the screening gaps, and now recommend an assessment of screening guidelines.

Other

Retired chronobiologist Robert Sothern looks back at the last 48 years he has spent quantifying himself on a daily basis. The 69 year-old, who started wearing a step tracker 14 years ago, takes almost obsessive daily measurements of blood pressure, respiration, and air flow, among other things, in hopes of finding patterns that reveal themselves over decades. “We are rhythmic creatures,"he says. "You look at this … data [and] you can see 10-year cycles in it. You can see daily cycles. You can see even men have something approaching a 28-day cycle in their beard growth, which I did measure for three years, too. By having a rhythm, it proves that you are alive.”

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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