News 11/23/15

Top News

In honor or National Rural Health Day, the USDA announces $23.4 million in distance learning and telemedicine grants for 75 projects in 31 states and Western Pacific territories. "Rural communities often lack access to specialized medical care or advanced educational opportunities necessary for stronger rural economies," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. "These grants will help increase access to healthcare and many other essential services."

Webinars

December 2 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “The Patient is In, But the Doctor is Out: How Metro Health Enabled Informed Decision-Making with Remote Access to PHI.” Sponsored by Vmware. Presenters: Josh Wilda, VP of IT, Metro Health; James Millington, group product line manager, VMware. Most industries are ahead of healthcare in providing remote access to applications and information. Some health systems, however, have transformed how, when, and where their providers access patient information. Metro Health in Grand Rapids, MI offers doctors fast bedside access to information and lets them review patient information on any device (including their TVs during football weekends!) saving them 30 minutes per day and reducing costs by $2.75 million.

December 2 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Tackling Data Governance: Doctors Hospital at Renaissance’s Strategy for Consistent Analysis.” Sponsored by Premier, Inc. Presenters: Kassie Wu, director of application services, Doctors Hospital at Renaissance; Alex Eastman, senior director of enterprise solutions, Premier, Inc. How many definitions of “complications” (or “cost” or “length of stay”…) do you have? Doctors Hospital at Renaissance understood that inconsistent use of data and definitions was creating inconsistent and untrusted analysis. Join us to hear about their journey towards analytics maturity, including a strategy to drive consistency in the way they use, calculate, and communicate insights across departments.

December 2 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Creating HIPAA-Compliant Applications Without JCAPS/JavaMQ Architecture.” Sponsored by Red Hat. Presenters: Ashwin Karpe, lead of enterprise integration practice, Red Hat Consulting; Christian Posta, principle middleware architect, Red Hat. Oracle JCAPS is reaching its end of life and customers will need a migration solution for creating HIPAA-compliant applications, one that optimizes data flow internally and externally on premise, on mobile devices, and in the cloud. Explore replacing legacy healthcare applications with modern Red Hat JBoss Fuse architectures that are cloud-aware, location-transparent, and highly scalable and are hosted in a container-agnostic manner.

December 3 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “501(r) Regulations – What You Need to Know for Success in 2016.” Sponsored by TransUnion. Presenter: Jonathan Wiik, principal consultant, TransUnion Healthcare Solutions. Complex IRS rules take effect on January 1 that will dictate how providers ensure access, provide charity assistance, and collect uncompensated care. This in-depth webinar will cover tools and workflows that can help smooth the transition, including where to focus compliance efforts in the revenue cycle and a review of the documentation elements required.

December 9 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “The Health Care Payment Evolution: Maximizing Value Through Technology.” Sponsored by Medicity. Presenter: Charles D. Kennedy, MD, chief population health officer, Healthagen. This presentation will provide a brief history of the ACO Pioneer and MSSP programs and will discuss current market trends and drivers and the federal government’s response to them. Learn what’s coming in the next generation of programs such as the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and the role technology plays in driving the evolution of a new healthcare marketplace.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Practice marketing technology vendor PatientPop secures a $10 million Series A round of financing from Toba Capital. The Santa Monica, CA-based startup, which secured $3.3 million in seed funding from Athenahealth in May, plans to use the new investment to scale from 65 employees to 200.

Primary Care Partners and South Metro Primary Care combine to form the largest group of PCPs in the Denver area. The new PHPprime will serve 375,000 residents via 320 physicians across 85 practices. The new organization has tapped Denver-based Physician Health Partners to manage its operations, including care coordination and analytics.

Announcements and Implementations

Nextech develops analytics and a data exchange platform for users of its MDIntelleSys EHR for ophthalmologists.

Osis migrates from Microsoft to VMware operations management software for greater IT scalability in light of business growth. The Cincinnati-based nonprofit provides NextGen consulting services to 38 health centers across 17 states.

Synergy Radiology Associates (TX) implements ScImage’s PICOM365 Cloud PACS.

Doctors Co. subsidiary Medical Advantage Group partners with the Ohio State Medical Association to offer independent physicians access to its consulting services.

Telemedicine

Telemedicine vendor Carena expands with the opening of an office in Nashville, TN. The company, which provides turnkey, white label telemedicine clinics for health systems, will share office space with Martin Ventures, which invested $13 million in the Seattle-based company earlier this year.

TriBridge adds Schmitt Thompson clinical content to its Health 360 phone triage tool to help providers better triage telemedicine interactions.

Government and Politics

EHRA warns CMS that vendors and physicians will need more time to develop and implement advanced payment model-friendly EHR functionality and reporting capabilities in light of the steadily approaching 2017 performance year. The association also cautioned against an “over-reliance on the use of EHRs and health IT for collecting data that is outside the scope of EHRs, or is not currently defined and implemented today,” and made clear its non-support of anew certification program for MACRA’s alternative payment model track or its new Merit-based Incentive Payment Program.

HHS seeks comments on guidance for implementing NIST’s cybersecurity framework in healthcare, released earlier this month. Comments, due by November 30, will help to shape a final draft that will be submitted to the Joint Healthcare and Public Health Cybersecurity Working Group for review before publication.

Research and Innovation

Over half of patients enrolled in a national trial of the Space in Depression online treatment program recover from their symptoms and/or go into remission, outcomes maintained at three- and six-month follow ups. The eight-module program was developed by Trinity College’s School of Psychology and SilverCloud Health.

Other

Adweek takes Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush to task for his colorful explanation of the company’s success on live TV. Surely anyone who books Bush for live appearances does a little digging into his on-air demeanor – a trait that has also translated a time or two to the HIStalkapalooza stage.

I find this hard to believe: Researchers discover that, with a little training, pigeons do just as well as humans in a study testing their ability to distinguish between cancerous and healthy breast tissue samples. Study co-author and professor Edward Wasserman explains that, “Pigeons can distinguish identities and emotional expressions on human faces, letters of the alphabet, misshapen pharmaceutical capsules, and even paintings by Monet versus Picasso. Their visual memory capacity is equally impressive, with a proven recall of more than 1,800 images."

I love to see public officials giving back with gratitude.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Population Health Management Weekly Wrap Up 11/22/15

An unnamed Texas ACO selects ZeOmega’s Jiva population health platform to better coordinate care for 50,000 lives 1,100 network providers.

Pennsylvania-based physician group Doylestown Health Partnership and Tandigm Health sign a collaboration agreement that will combine Tandigm’s analytics tools, real-time data, and clinical expertise with DHP’s capabilities in the management of chronically ill patients. Tandigm Health signed a similar agreement with Holy Redeemer Health System and the Innovative Wellness Alliance, both also based in Pennsylvania, earlier this year.

Radiology data mining and analytics company Montage Healthcare Solutions develops the Collaborative Research Network, a tool that will enable multi-site and cross-organizational research queries and analytics in the areas of population health, radiology research, and health policy. Developers believe the data-sharing network will better enable researchers to assess disease trends and variability, radiological findings, and report characteristics.

Physician-led New York State Elite ACO selects a combined population health management solution from LabCorp and HealthEC to help manage the rapid expansion of its Medicare Advantage Easy Choice Managed Care plan. The solution includes care coordination, practice transformation, consulting, data analytics and reporting, clinical nursing support, and clinical intervention for high-risk patients.

HRSA seeks performance-site applications for a new outcomes-improvement initiative that will support the electronic integration of housing and HIV care data systems with the coordination of care and housing. The program will award chosen applicants up to $525,000 between May 2016 and August 2018. Applications are due December 15.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
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News 11/19/15

Top News

Greenway Health announces that its Prime Suite customers can now use CommonWell services to exchange health data with other participants at no cost. The company is one of the health alliance’s seven founding members. “The Alliance gives our customers and other participants a more secure way to gain a more comprehensive view of the patient’s health history, regardless of the point of care or what information system was used,” says Greenway CEO Tee Green. “This will enable clinicians to make the most informed decisions possible.” Greenway will roll out CommonWell services to other product users at a later date.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

I had my first run in with what I can only assume was an identity theft scam. A customer service rep claiming to be from Dell called to inform me that the “Dell server inbox” had received several notices that my computer was experiencing suspicious, virus-like activity. His scripted conversation seemed shady, so I kept asking him to go into detail, which he didn’t. He asked if I was near my computer, which raised my shadiness alert factor even higher. I explained I didn’t have time to go through any sort of diagnostics, at which point he asked if he could call back at another time. The phone call ended rather abruptly, which I’m sure is not part of Dell’s customer service training. I had the presence of mind to call Dell and ask if they proactively call customers about suspected suspicious activity on their computers, which they don’t. I promptly reported the entire incident to the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer hotline – an action that made me feel better, but is likely just a drop in the bucket of preventing the proliferation of such illicit activities.

Webinars

November 20 (Friday) 2:00 ET. “The Athenahealth Leadership Institute Presents: Dr. John Halamka Interviewed by Jonathan Bush.” Sponsored by Athenahealth. Presenters: John Halamka, MD, MS, CIO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Jonathan Bush, CEO, Athenahealth. Providers are fed up with interface fees and the lengthy, fragmented narratives we’re exchanging today. But what is the right course of action to help deliver better care across the continuum? Bring your questions as we join Dr.Halamka and Jonathan Bush to discuss the current state of healthcare and how we can improve care coordination and interoperability.

December 2 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “The Patient is In, But the Doctor is Out: How Metro Health Enabled Informed Decision-Making with Remote Access to PHI.” Sponsored by Vmware. Presenters: Josh Wilda, VP of IT, Metro Health; James Millington, group product line manager, VMware. Most industries are ahead of healthcare in providing remote access to applications and information. Some health systems, however, have transformed how, when, and where their providers access patient information. Metro Health in Grand Rapids, MI offers doctors fast bedside access to information and lets them review patient information on any device (including their TVs during football weekends!) saving them 30 minutes per day and reducing costs by $2.75 million.

December 2 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Tackling Data Governance: Doctors Hospital at Renaissance’s Strategy for Consistent Analysis.” Sponsored by Premier, Inc. Presenters: Kassie Wu, director of application services, Doctors Hospital at Renaissance; Alex Eastman, senior director of enterprise solutions, Premier, Inc. How many definitions of “complications” (or “cost” or “length of stay”…) do you have? Doctors Hospital at Renaissance understood that inconsistent use of data and definitions was creating inconsistent and untrusted analysis. Join us to hear about their journey towards analytics maturity, including a strategy to drive consistency in the way they use, calculate, and communicate insights across departments.

December 2 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Creating HIPAA-Compliant Applications Without JCAPS/JavaMQ Architecture.” Sponsored by Red Hat. Presenters: Ashwin Karpe, lead of enterprise integration practice, Red Hat Consulting; Christian Posta, principle middleware architect, Red Hat. Oracle JCAPS is reaching its end of life and customers will need a migration solution for creating HIPAA-compliant applications, one that optimizes data flow internally and externally on premise, on mobile devices, and in the cloud. Explore replacing legacy healthcare applications with modern Red Hat JBoss Fuse architectures that are cloud-aware, location-transparent, and highly scalable and are hosted in a container-agnostic manner.

December 3 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “501(r) Regulations – What You Need to Know for Success in 2016.” Sponsored by TransUnion. Presenter: Jonathan Wiik, principal consultant, TransUnion Healthcare Solutions. Complex IRS rules take effect on January 1 that will dictate how providers ensure access, provide charity assistance, and collect uncompensated care. This in-depth webinar will cover tools and workflows that can help smooth the transition, including where to focus compliance efforts in the revenue cycle and a review of the documentation elements required.

December 9 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “The Health Care Payment Evolution: Maximizing Value Through Technology.” Sponsored by Medicity. Presenter: Charles D. Kennedy, MD, chief population health officer, Healthagen. This presentation will provide a brief history of the ACO Pioneer and MSSP programs and will discuss current market trends and drivers and the federal government’s response to them. Learn what’s coming in the next generation of programs such as the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and the role technology plays in driving the evolution of a new healthcare marketplace.

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

#HIStalking Tweet Chat – Ensuring the Patient’s Voice is Heard

Healthwise led the #HIStalking crowd through a great discussion on ensuring patient’s have easy access to their health data in formats they understand, plus the importance of end-of-life conversations, and potential impact of interoperability and related standards. Check out the recap here.

Announcements and Implementations

Springfield Clinic, a multispecialty physician group in Central Illinois, implements the ProviderMatch platform from Kyruus at its access center to better match patients with physicians based on condition and availability.

Referral coordination solutions vendor Infina Connect adds the ICC Direct referral automation tool to its Intelligent Care Coordination platform, connecting clinical information from a physician’s EHR to the referral workflow in ICC.

People

Reed Tuckson, MD (Tuckson Health Connections) joins The Foundation for the Public’s Health Board of Trustees.

Jeffrey Kang, MD joins ChenMed as president.

Telemedicine

Presence Learning, an online behavioral health, speech, and occupational therapy firm, secures a $25 million Series C investment from Catalyst Investors. The company, which also offers special education academic instruction and assessments for school districts and special-needs children, will use the funding to continue development of its services, including telemedicine consultations. “After starting with schools, where we are privileged to beneficially affect the lives of tens of thousands of children everyday, we are now expanding to hospitals and other places where people need professional care,” adds co-CEO Clay Whitehead.

Government and Politics

The Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health receives a $100,000 ONC grant to help connect its mental health IT system to the HealtHIE Nevada HIE. The division will work with Netsmart over the next year on connecting the two systems.

Other

Anyone take advantage of Uber’s flu shot delivery service today? The company, which piloted a similar program last year, partnered with Passport Health to offer vaccinations to 35 cities nationwide via its UberHealth service. On a related note, John Brownstein has joined Uber as its first healthcare advisor. Brownstein, director of the Computational Epidemiology Group at Boston Children’s Hospital, was instrumental in last year’s pilot.

Santa will definitely find this on my Christmas list: Lego launches a pair of slippers guaranteed to dull the pain of stepping on a Lego brick. As @shdw3a tweeted yesterday, “if @Lego_Group isn’t awarded a Nobel prize for this, then I just don’t know what to believe anymore.” If I could just get them in a cheetah print.

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.

#HIStalking Tweet Chat Recap

News 11/18/15

Top News

An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report finds that, while healthcare standards are improving across the board in OECD countries, the US spends more money on care per capita than any other OECD country – about $8,713 per person – and yet only averages a life expectancy of 78.3 years, just on par with Chile and below the OECD average of 80.5. The report also points out that the US wastes about $750 billion a year due to inefficiencies including poor administration, unnecessary services, and fraud. EHRs, HIEs, and interoperability were supposed to be this nation’s saving grace in terms of reducing this eye-boggling amount of financial waste, and yet the industry still finds itself stymied by Meaningful Use blowback and consumers that can’t afford quality care.

Webinars

November 20 (Friday) 2:00 ET. “The Athenahealth Leadership Institute Presents: Dr. John Halamka Interviewed by Jonathan Bush.” Sponsored by Athenahealth. Presenters: John Halamka, MD, MS, CIO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Jonathan Bush, CEO, Athenahealth. Providers are fed up with interface fees and the lengthy, fragmented narratives we’re exchanging today. But what is the right course of action to help deliver better care across the continuum? Bring your questions as we join Dr.Halamka and Jonathan Bush to discuss the current state of healthcare and how we can improve care coordination and interoperability.

December 2 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “The Patient is In, But the Doctor is Out: How Metro Health Enabled Informed Decision-Making with Remote Access to PHI.” Sponsored by Vmware. Presenters: Josh Wilda, VP of IT, Metro Health; James Millington, group product line manager, VMware. Most industries are ahead of healthcare in providing remote access to applications and information. Some health systems, however, have transformed how, when, and where their providers access patient information. Metro Health in Grand Rapids, MI offers doctors fast bedside access to information and lets them review patient information on any device (including their TVs during football weekends!) saving them 30 minutes per day and reducing costs by $2.75 million.

December 2 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Tackling Data Governance: Doctors Hospital at Renaissance’s Strategy for Consistent Analysis.” Sponsored by Premier, Inc. Presenters: Kassie Wu, director of application services, Doctors Hospital at Renaissance; Alex Eastman, senior director of enterprise solutions, Premier, Inc. How many definitions of “complications” (or “cost” or “length of stay”…) do you have? Doctors Hospital at Renaissance understood that inconsistent use of data and definitions was creating inconsistent and untrusted analysis. Join us to hear about their journey towards analytics maturity, including a strategy to drive consistency in the way they use, calculate, and communicate insights across departments.

December 3 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “501(r) Regulations – What You Need to Know for Success in 2016.” Sponsored by TransUnion. Presenter: Jonathan Wiik, principal consultant, TransUnion Healthcare Solutions. Complex IRS rules take effect on January 1 that will dictate how providers ensure access, provide charity assistance, and collect uncompensated care. This in-depth webinar will cover tools and workflows that can help smooth the transition, including where to focus compliance efforts in the revenue cycle and a review of the documentation elements required.

December 9 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “The Health Care Payment Evolution: Maximizing Value Through Technology.” Sponsored by Medicity. Presenter: Charles D. Kennedy, MD, chief population health officer, Healthagen. This presentation will provide a brief history of the ACO Pioneer and MSSP programs and will discuss current market trends and drivers and the federal government’s response to them. Learn what’s coming in the next generation of programs such as the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and the role technology plays in driving the evolution of a new healthcare marketplace.

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

#HIStalking Tweet Chat – Ensuring the Patient’s Voice is Heard

The next #HIStalking tweet chat will take place Thursday, November 19 at 12pm ET. Nonprofit Healthwise (@healthwise) will host. Check out topics here.

People

Paul Kleeberg, MD (Stratis Health) joins Aledade as medical director.

Announcements and Implementations

ZirMed reports a successful transition to ICD-10, with its clients achieving a first pass clean claims rate of 98 percent.

Silver Spring Dermatology Services (MD) selects RxOffice’s EHR and patient portal.

Colorado Springs Orthopaedic Group (CO) selects virtual EHR assistance from Skywriter MD. It will go live on the technology with its first three physicians early next month.

The San Antonio-based UPSA ACO selects TMA PracticeEdge’s turnkey ACO solution, including population health management tools, care coordination resources, and IT services. UPSA, which has 48 physicians from 32 different primary care practices, will use the new solution as part of a value-based agreement with BCBS of Texas that starts in January.

Medent integrates dashboard analytics and business intelligence reporting solutions from DashboardMD into its EHR and PM tools.

CVS launches a new app that generates medication reminders, and allows users to submit prescriptions and insurance cards by taking a picture of them.

Research and Innovation

MIT researchers attempt to give traditional wearable fitness trackers a run for their money by developing a smartphone that can capture similar readings while sitting near the user in a bag or purse. The BioPhone receives biological signals from its accelerometer, and can capture small body movements that result from heart beats and breathing. They haven’t yet cracked how to reliably measure heart and breathing rates when the phone is in different spots, such as a pocket.

Other

Crain’s New York looks at the business of CityMD, a New York City-based urgent care chain of 48 clinics that is on the cusp of expanding into New Jersey. While the article does spend some time focusing on the company’s use of healthcare IT (telemedicine and proprietary Aftercare software, to name a few), it was CEO Richard Park, MD’s quip about inner office communications that really grabbed my attention: “The crux of it is we love people. It’s trite, but it’s true. When we yell at people or our staff yells at each other, it’s because we’re upset when patients aren’t cared for, or when they wait too long.” Perhaps it’s the yelling that explains the “somewhat chilly reception from insurers and primary-care clinicians who have doubts about the chain’s ability to keep people healthy.”

And I thought Google Glass was dead: The local paper profiles Andrew Laster, MD the first rheumatologist in the country and first physician in the Southeast to adopt the technology. Laster uses the smart glasses in conjunction with real-time scribe services provided by Augmedix. “I would never go back,” said Laster. “In terms of dictating on the computer, it saves me easily an hour and a half every day. And it frees me up to go in the room, sit down and look the patient in the eye.”

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the New York Health Plan Association 2015 Annual Conference November 18-19 in Albany.

Blog Posts

• Measuring the Mission (Healthwise)
• Increase practice revenue through benchmarking, steps 1 and 2 of 5 (AdvancedMD)
• HIT Breakdown 12 – Healthy Planet: Opportunities and challenges (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.