HIStalk Practice Interviews Mansoor Khan, CEO, Persivia

Mansoor Khan is CEO of Persivia.

Tell me about yourself and your background in analytics.
In the late nineties, I had a company called Key Commerce, which developed software in the supply chain space. I’ve always been somewhat entrepreneurial, and that was the first big effort that I made. Key Commerce’s business changed significantly after 911, and so we decided to change directions. My wife Fauzia was getting ready to publish a textbook called “A Guide to Diagnostic Testing,” which included hundreds of algorithms drawn out in a traditional flowchart format. You could take your patient’s history, look through those algorithms and say, “This is where I am now,” and it would tell you what you ought to do next. When I saw that textbook in the early 2000s, my first thought was, this is nice, but it really needs to be in electronic form so that it can be injected into the clinical workflow without requiring the provider to go look up this information.

That was the genesis of DiagnosisOne. The concept behind it was that this would be a system built to help providers create a safety net under them so that they could ensure that at least a minimum standard of care was being met, and it would do so in a completely non-invasive manner. We developed a Web service that sits above watching the clinical workflow. Whenever it identifies a clinical event of interest, it will then take certain actions, such as injecting evidence-based knowledge into the clinical workflow. That’s where we started from. Unfortunately, for the first few years, the data that was available was very sparse and very, very dirty. It was really hard to get the kind of data that you could use to activate or trigger the bodies of knowledge that we had embedded in the system. We kept at it though, and then with Meaningful Use, it jumped up one level in its priority and the provider’s mind set. That priority kept moving up stream as the last five years of Meaningful Use have passed.

Our model was based on enabling EHRs to deliver our knowledge into the workflow. We would sell to the EHR vendor, they would embed it, and they would then resell it as part of their platform or make it available as part of their platform. Our biggest customer was Allscripts, and we had a number of EHRs all the way down to some fairly small ones like Polaris, which is no longer in business.

That’s where our interest in analytics came from. We started developing reports, charts, and graphs and then got into the business of reporting on quality measures. That’s what happened till 2010, at which point we raised our first round of funding with Edison Ventures, which allowed us to accelerate the business. Alere approached us two years later in 2012 and bought the entire company.

What was the relationship with Alere like?
We had an excellent relationship with the senior management team, as well as the other divisions of Alere. When Alere acquired DiagnosisOne, our analytics technology was well aligned with the company’s vision for creating a Connected Health platform. Alere wanted to do some really grand things with this new platform, such as working with the UK’s National Health Services (NHS) to take on chronically ill patients and help manage that significant population. However, in 2013, a private equity fund came in and started buying up shares of Alere with the thesis that the company was better suited to stick with its core expertise in rapid diagnostics and sell off the other divisions. The board decided to execute on this plan and they started selling off or shutting down the different assets.

What made you decide to stick with analytics and startups?
Obviously at that point we had a choice. I personally had a choice to take a few months off or do something new. As I thought of taking a few months off, it took me about half an hour to say, okay, I’m bored, now what do I do? My wife and I started thinking what the next evolution of analytics would be. We realized that this is all going to become a game of risk stratification. The ones who can develop really sophisticated risk stratification strategies so they can figure out how to deliver care to the highest risk patients, and how to apportion that care so that the right amount of care goes into each layer of risk … those people will be the ones that are going to succeed in this game.

From there, we launched into the precision medicine concept. Lucky for us that President Obama started talking about precision medicine at the same time, though his concept was a little bit different. When we say precision medicine, we’re talking more generally than that. If you look at diabetes, for example, it is essentially not just one disease. We’re where we were with cancer many years ago, when people thought cancer was one disease, and now we know that it’s literally hundreds of different diseases. Diabetes has a similar profile in that there are many different problems that a person can have. How do you deal with that? One way is to introduce genetic data. While genetic data for diabetics is not really available, we believe that incorporating that sort of data into the systems that are used to manage these patients will allow us and providers to really start bearing down on what sort of treatments need to be delivered to which specific subset of patients. Factor in the introduction of behavioral and consumer social data, and other types of data that become available, then you can really start to develop treatments. And by treatments I don’t just mean medication; I mean a holistic way of looking at the patient to try to impact not just the medication but their lifestyle, their eating habits, their social habits, all of those things that make up the set of circumstances which are going to make you either better or worse in whatever condition you have. That’s been our journey so far.

When you saw the writing on the wall at Alere, did you reach an agreement to purchase the assets of the analytics business as part of your departure?
It wasn’t quite that orderly. Alere was looking to dispose of the those assets, but there are customers that still rely on those solutions. You can’t just shut them down. Alere’s not an irresponsible company, and they don’t want to do something that may cause financial problems for their/our customers, let alone injury or care problems for patients. At that point, we approached them and bought the entire company. We bought the whole thing as a running concern. The employees are still there. The customers are still there. The systems are still there. Because we already had the vision and knew what everything meant, there wasn’t much due diligence that had to be done. The deal could be done very quickly, which was Alere’s big incentive to give it to us rather than to find some third party. Another company would have taken three months to do a deal that we could do in three weeks.

Are you going to rebrand the Alere Analytics assets?
Alere Analytics is going to go away and Persivia will be the only entity that’s left. There will be a certain amount of rebranding. The capabilities that are in analytics actually fit very well with the overall vision that we have with Persivia, and it gives us a set of customers and patients that’s a natural stepping stone for the next set of capabilities that we are now working on. As we deploy those, we’ll have an established customer base with which we can do alphas and betas and start rolling out these capabilities. It will be a very useful transaction for us. We’re not starting from zero again.

How do you feel population health management and precision medicine intersect?
The name of the game in carrying risk will be the ability to stratify your patients into much finer strata combined with very targeted treatment and care protocols. The new risk-stratification strategies being developed now, by companies like Persivia, will allow for a smooth transition from the present day to increasingly higher precision medicine, and eventually to fully personalized medicine, or personomics. We are already ahead of the curve in bringing genomics and personomics to point-of-care, and the new tools we are developing will make this a reality for the care provider.

How do the physicians you work with think about incorporating healthcare IT into their population health and precision medicine efforts? Is this something they’re just beginning to think about? 
Frankly, our health system still views population health at a very rudimentary level. Almost all providers, if they have a system, have a claims-based system that does not even take 99 percent of clinical data into account, let alone precision medicine. So we as an industry have to do a lot of work to do in educating and working with clinicians on how these new technologies can be deployed in an effective and meaningful manner.

What’s it like working with your wife? Fauzia Khan, MD was CMO at DiagnosisOne, and COO at Alere Analytics.
I was wondering how to answer that question. That’s got disaster written all over it. The partnership has been good. We’ve been working together now since 2005. She was working at Beth Israel hospital, and she decided to leave that and come work with us full time. As somebody once said, it’s like any other successful marriage – as long as she lets me think I’m in charge, everything goes smoothly.

I think one of the key things is that we are actually very good friends, so it’s not just a marriage, but an excellent friendship, too. We’ve been married about 23 years now. We are quite complementary. I have the IT ad finance background and she has the medical background. She’s very much a people person, so she’s the COO of Persivia and loves spending time with the team. Those are not my strongpoints. I’m much better at talking to customers, dealing with investors, lawyers … all those sorts of things. The division of duties and responsibilities comes quite naturally to us.

The downside, of course, is that work starts at 7:00 a.m. and doesn’t end until 1:00 a.m. It’s always there. Thank goodness we’re both very entrepreneurial. She is probably more of an entrepreneur than I am. We love it and it’s worked out well for us. Our kids also have grown up in this atmosphere. They tend to be very entrepreneurial.

What will the next five years bring for the company?
It’s going to be really exciting. As this world of precision medicine and big data merge, the ability to get patients to do the things that they ought to be doing is going to be where there’s tremendous focus and, I’m hoping, advances. I see two areas where there are really big changes occurring. On the provider side are tools related to new disease management protocols and programs that rely on much, much more sophisticated risk stratification strategies. On the patient side are tools that can take all of the different data that’s available about a given patient and identify the areas where you can have the biggest impact on that patient’s health. I think those are the two areas over the next five years that are going to be very, very impactful to our healthcare system, and that’s exactly where we are going to be focused. That’s where we’re going to be investing our capabilities and our resources over the next five years.

Do you have any final thoughts?
Our aim is to empower the patient to take much better care of themselves under the supervision of their provider. We’re looking to create new pathways and new tools that allow them to communicate with each other – truly communicate with each other in ways that have significant impact on the patient’s ability and, more importantly, their desire to do the things that improve their health. That would be my parting thought.

Contacts

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

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Readers Write: Laying the Foundation of Healthcare’s Next Generation of Care

Laying the Foundation of Healthcare’s Next Generation of Care
By Dana Alexander, RN

Population Health—it’s something we all talk about, and have for years. It’s the Holy Grail we’re all after, and just recently there’s been a glimmer of hope in the eyes of healthcare leaders everywhere that maybe managing the health of our communities is closer than we thought. As incentive programs and federal regulations push us towards a value-based service and payment reform, the motivation is stronger for more collaborative, integrated health management. Now more than ever is the time to start the discussion, which is what prompted my recent white paper, Population Health: Laying the Foundation of Healthcare’s Next Generation of Care.

A fair disclaimer for readers: This is not a rose-colored vision of providers across the country holding hands and solving all the health challenges patient populations face. Population health management (PHM) is not a system you can implement, or a program you can put in place overnight — it’s a lot of hard work, including technology challenges and culture shifts across providers, payers, and patients. But with all good things, the hard work pays off, resulting in better, safer, higher-quality, and more affordable care for our communities.

We all have different visions of PHM — for me, it comes down to four separate, but intertwined pillars: data management; population management and risk stratification; care management; and patient engagement. A lot has happened in a decade to make these four aspects come together, and we’re finally using data, technology, and legislation to lean a bit closer to the Triple Aim of better quality, lower costs, and improved health.

Data Management. The phrase “You’re only as good as your weakest link” couldn’t be truer than with healthcare data. In the era of Big Data, data analytics, and business intelligence, the data we use to make more informed decisions, better understand our populations, and predict health occurrences has to be rich, reliable, and, most importantly, standardized. Healthcare data comes in all different forms and fashions, EHRs only being one source (granted, a very important one). Standardization of data isn’t just important for using it, but also for sharing it. The secure exchange of population health data via HIEs is a critical and up-and-coming milestone for PHM.

Population Management and Risk Stratification. Provider registries, EHRs, etc. are already collecting data on our populations, and providers use this in smart ways to understand which patients need what treatment and at what levels of care. That being said, and going back to data management and sharing, this view of a patient population is limited, sometimes even within hospitals in the same health system. Disparate systems and siloed data leave providers to make encounter-based decisions versus patient-based decisions, holding back the potential of true management and risk stratification. The big picture of risk stratification takes health and demographic data and turns it into a large-scale view of a population’s health, plus provides the ability to drill down to at-risk subpopulations for targeted …. you guessed it:

Care Management. Targeted, proactive care management models, utilizing data sharing and risk stratification, offer patient populations care management programs that 1) address the health challenge 2) treat it 3) prevent it, and 4) communicate with and provide tools to specific groups that improve health moving forward. Telehealth strategies are quickly becoming the “go-to” care model, especially as our patient populations become more tech savvy. Care models that make sense for the patient (both for their health and their lifestyle) are the success stories. Engaging patients in their health … OH, wait ….

Patient Engagement. Like I was saying, engaging patients in their health in ways that touch their day-to-day lives not only opens up the lines of communication outside of a doctor’s office, but makes patients more engaged, and therefore accountable for, their own health. Patient engagement is the lynchpin of a successful care management model, but it starts with the organization understanding the patient, which comes from population management and risk stratification, which comes from standardized data management, which all comes together and succeeds with open, secure information sharing.

As you can see, each of these aspects intertwine with one another — each can be more successful with the advancement and fine tuning of the other. For a lot more on this topic, take a look at the complete white paper.

Dana Alexander, RN is vice president of clinical transformation at Divurgent.

Contacts

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

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News 6/3/15

Top News

Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt announces at Health Datapalooza that CMS data will become available to the private sector via the agency’s Virtual Research Data Center starting September 1. Slavitt also reiterated CMS’ commitment to prevent information blocking, offering an email address providers can use shame data blockers.

Webinars

June 9 (Tuesday) 11:30 ET. “Successful HIEs DO Exist: Best Practices for Care Coordination.” Sponsored by Medicity. Presenters: Dan Paoletti, CEO, Ohio Health Information Partnership; Brian Ahier, director of standards and government affairs, Medicity. Not all HIEs are dead – some, like Ohio’s CliniSync HIE, are evolving and forging a new path to successful care coordination. Brian Ahier will explain how HIEs can help providers move to value-based care models, emphasizing Meaningful Use Stage 3 and FHIR. Dan Paoletti will provide best practices in describing CliniSync’s journey to success in serving 6,000 primary care physicians, 141 hospitals, and and 290 long-term and post-acute care facilities. Attendees will learn how to use a phased approach, establish client champions, help providers meet MU Stage 2, create a provider email directory, deliver care coordination tools, and drive continued ROI.

Tweet Chat

Crohn’s patient and advocate Carly Medosch (@CarlyRM) will host the next #HIStalking tweet chat Thursday, June 11 at 1pm ET. You can brush up on her background here. Stay tuned for chat topics.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Fitbit looks to raise as much as $478 million in its IPO, according to a prospectus filed earlier this week. The company and its shareholders plan to offer 29.85 million Class A shares for $14 to $16 apiece. All told, the company’s valuation would be somewhere in the range of $3.3 billion. (Lt. Dan dissects the ways in which Jawbone’s lawsuit against FitBit could affect its IPO here.)

Cohero Health receives FDA clearance for its mobile spirometer, which automatically syncs real-time data to a patient’s smartphone, enabling them to review and monitor their medical history, records of medication adherence, and lung function. The device also integrates with the company’s mobile asthma and COPD disease-management platform.

Apple CEO Tim Cook calls for customers to be in charge of their own information during a presentation to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “We don’t think you should ever have to trade [your personal information] for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we’re storing data about our health, our finances, and our homes on our devices.” Cook seemed to avoid overt references to Google and Facebook, though he made it clear their data-mining practices are not something Apple’s interested in replicating.

Announcements and Implementations

Consulting firm National Endeavors launches a series of consulting services and cloud-based technology solutions for physicians interested in participating in a Medicare Shared Savings Program ACO.

Gastro Health (FL) implements theGIConnection, a virtual support community from Omni Health Media for patients with gastrointestinal conditions.

Solutions Recovery Center (FL) signs a three-year contract with ZenCharts for its behavioral health EHR software. ZenCharts was acquired last month by Sanomedics, best known for marketing and selling the Caregiver TouchFree Infrared thermometer.

People

David Fairchild, MD (UMass Memorial Health Care) joins BDC Advisors as director.

The AMA Foundation will award its Dr. Nathan Davis International Award in Medicine to Kent Brantly, MD the Texas physician who contracted and then overcame Ebola while working as a medical missionary at ELWA Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia. A snippet from his recent commencement speech at alma mater Indiana University School of Medicine sheds some light on his dedication to the art of medicine: “When everyone else is running away in fear, we stay to help, to offer healing and hope.”

Telemedicine

A smartwatch app designed to help people recover from depression wins the Innovative Solution Award from the Ontario Telemedicine Network during its Hacking Health Design Challenge. The Zuubly app sends users a few questions a day to monitor progress, and can message the user’s care circle, and link to them to a local crisis center, when support is needed.

Government and Politics

ONC releases a data brief detailing the disparities in consumer access and use of health IT in 2013. Just 15 percent surveyed consumers had looked at any part of their medical results online, while 23 percent had exchanged emails with their physician. Wide disparities were found across race and wealth. Two-thirds of respondents making over $100,000 a year noted use of a health IT product, and only 5 percent of Hispanic respondents viewed test results online.

CMS reports that 88 percent of claims were accepted during an April end-to-end ICD-10 testing run, a 7-percent increase over the previous testing period in January.

Other

It seems like Switzerland’s state-owned postal service is taking a crack at interoperability: Swiss Post will work with Health Info Net, a joint venture of the Swiss Medical Association and Ärztekasse health insurance fund, to securely send health data electronically between stakeholders through its Vivates e-health mail system. Swiss Post has signed a similar agreement with the Professional Association of Swiss Pharmacists for use of the platform, which will connect close to 70 percent of all Swiss pharmacies.

It looks like the drug wars have reached physician offices in Canada: Medical marijuana producer Tilray has accused competitors of offering physicians kickbacks for prescribing their products. Tilray has withdrawn from the Canadian Medical Cannabis Industry Association after unsuccessfully pushing it to adopt a code of ethics that would prevent such practices. Tilray CEO Greg Engel seems convinced the code wasn’t adopted because the majority of CMCIA’s 12 members are profiting from the scheme.

Contacts

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

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Readers Write: What Do Recent Legislative Changes Really Mean to Physicians?

What Do Recent Legislative Changes Really Mean to Physicians?
By Vicki Miller

At a recent appointment for my 90 year-old mother, her physician, charting on paper, said to me, “I met Meaningful Use and thankfully SGR reform eliminated the annual cuts to our fees.” Realizing he had not had the pleasure of reading all the various recent legislation, I resisted engaging in a discussion about the potential impact the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) and proposed modified Stage 2 and Stage 3 Meaningful Use rules could have on his practice.

While MACRA may have eliminated the potential annual cuts to Medicare, it has not stopped the movement to value-driven reimbursement or the requirements to demonstrate MU of EHRs and successfully report quality measures (PQRS). In fact, the proposed new legislation places greater emphasis on the use of technology to support care delivery activities and communication by tying 25 percent of the payment to MU of EHR technology. The charts below show the progression of the stages of MU required not only for MU but also to meet new payment model requirements under MACRA. You can download them as a PDF here.

What Does This Mean to Physician Practices?

* Sustained adoption of EHR and PM systems will play an increasingly important role. Today’s EHR and PM systems are expected to evolve to meet the changing requirements of the legislation. These systems will become more than the place to record the visit and generate a bill. They will become the “hub” for data collection and exchange. They will provide the secure framework to facilitate communication between physician, caregivers, patients, and their families. Practices should continually evaluate their workflows to ensure the technology and processes are integrated, streamlined, and standardized.

* Ability to seamlessly exchange, digest, and utilize clinically relevant data is essential. Electronic sharing of data between providers will be the expectation for coordination of care, engagement of patients and their families, and population health management. New technologies will expand this sharing of data to include non-clinical settings and patient self-reported data. Practices should consider whether existing processes need to be changed or new processes are required to capitalize on these data-sharing capabilities. With the right processes, data sharing has the potential to significantly improve efficiency and effectiveness of the practice.

* Availability of quality and cost data will influence selection of providers. The cost and quality rankings of physicians determined under new payment models will be now be publically available. Patients and referring providers may access this information to make decisions when selecting physicians. Payers may utilize this information to negotiate contracts and/or set physician-specific co-payment and deductibles based on the physician’s rankings. Practices will need to monitor and understand how physician cost and quality compare to peers to manage the potential financial and reputation implications to the physician and practice.

* Business Intelligence capabilities will be critical to sustained profitability and growth. The shift to value-driven reimbursement will require both management of the health of the patient and a deeper understanding of the business of the practice. Practices will need information to understand how resource utilization impacts profitability, know what services optimize revenue, and determine what quality-drivers produce the best outcomes. This requires analytics tools typically not available in today’s EHR and PM systems, and practice leaders educated in using information to drive decisions. Practices should develop a practice performance analytics plan to ensure the right tools, data, and training is in place to support data-driven decisions.

Yes, my mother’s physician was right. The annual stress of wondering whether a cut to the Medicare fee schedule is going to happen or not has been averted. And, we now have a better idea of what payments will look like in the future. However, practices are just beginning to understand payment adjustment impact under today’s PQRS, MU, and value-based payment programs. The passage of MACRA is not a call for business as usual but an acceleration of the transition of physician payments away from fee-for-service. Those practices that understand and react to the four areas outlined above will be better positioned to meet the challenges of the unprecedented changes facing practices today and in the future.

Vicki Miller is principal consultant and co-founder of Palm Key Associates.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 6/2/15

Top News

CVS Health partners with HHS to offer the myhealthfinder tool at MinuteClinic.com and www.cvs.com/myhealthfinder. The tool offers recommendations from government-recognized clinical experts for the personalized preventive services patients should receive based on their age and gender, many of which are conveniently offered at MinuteClinic. CVS is the first national partner to work with HHS on a technology project of this nature. In announcing the partnership, National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD noted that, “This tool supports physicians and the care team, and is an easy way to help people understand the recommended preventive services that are often available to them at no out of pocket cost thanks to the Affordable Care Act.”

Webinar

June 9 (Tuesday) 11:30 ET. “Successful HIEs DO Exist: Best Practices for Care Coordination.” Sponsored by Medicity. Presenters: Dan Paoletti, CEO, Ohio Health Information Partnership; Brian Ahier, director of standards and government affairs, Medicity. Not all HIEs are dead – some, like Ohio’s CliniSync HIE, are evolving and forging a new path to successful care coordination. Brian Ahier will explain how HIEs can help providers move to value-based care models, emphasizing Meaningful Use Stage 3 and FHIR. Dan Paoletti will provide best practices in describing CliniSync’s journey to success in serving 6,000 primary care physicians, 141 hospitals, and and 290 long-term and post-acute care facilities. Attendees will learn how to use a phased approach, establish client champions, help providers meet MU Stage 2, create a provider email directory, deliver care coordination tools, and drive continued ROI.

Tweet Chat

Crohn’s patient and advocate Carly Medosch (@CarlyRM) will host the next #HIStalking tweet chat Thursday, June 11 at 1pm ET. You can brush up on her background here. Stay tuned for chat topics.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HCA adds over 800 physicians to its network in the area of San Jose, CA through its acquisition of PM company Pacific Partners Management Services. Included in the acquisition is the Santa Clara County Independent Practice Association, which PPMSI manages. Both groups will be rolled into HCA’s Physician Services Group.

Announcements and Implementations

Hughston Clinic (GA) implements the TrainerRx software platform throughout its network of orthopaedic and trauma facilities. The consumer-facing app provides physicians treating musculoskeletal injuries with diagnosis-specific and individualized step-by-step rehabilitation and recovery treatment plans using audio, video and text-driven computer algorithms.

Practice Fusion incorporates the TrialCard copay savings and free trial offers solution into its EHR, enabling users to transmit savings offers to pharmacies along with prescriptions.

People

Fred Mindermann (FlexLife) joins Solekai Systems as vice president and general manager of its Connected Health practice.

Government and Politics

ONC releases a nine-page data brief on patient perceptions of the privacy and security of medical records. Among the findings:

• Less than 1 in 10 individuals would withhold information from their providers because of privacy and security concerns.
• Privacy and security concerns are no different between individuals whose providers have paper medical records and those whose providers have an EHR.
• Patient concerns regarding sending medical records between health care providers do not differ by whether they are sent electronically or by fax.
• Patient support for EHRs and HIE is high despite potential privacy or security concerns.

Members of the House Ways and Means health subcommittee write to CMS recommending ways to smoothly transition to ICD-10, including expanding end-to-end testing beyond the current 2,500 providers, developing a back-up plan for how CMS will process claims if it can’t handle the new codes, and clarifying whether or not less granular codes will be accepted after October 1. “With the Healthcare.gov debacle a vivid reminder of how technologically complex projects can go wrong despite assurances,” wrote the committee members, “we urge the agency to make information available to providers and the broader public that helps to address concerns.”

Research and Innovation

Researchers with the National Bureau of Economic Research find that EHR adoption is not associated with EHR-driven upcoding, a conclusion at odds with industry assumptions that physicians will go with the most profitable code for a given procedure if given the chance by their EHR.

The inaugural Healthcare Consumerism Index from Alegeus Technologies finds that nearly 80 percent of the 5,000 consumers surveyed were more “engaged and thoughtful” about buying a TV than they were about making healthcare decisions. The results lend some credibility to ONC’s decision to potentially scale back patient engagement thresholds as part of Meaningful Use, but also highlight the work all industry stakeholders will need to do in order to educate consumers about their increasing healthcare responsibilities.

Telemedicine

An Israeli business website reports that American Well has received tens of millions of investment dollars from Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, marking the Israel-based company’s first official foray into digital health. American Well was founded by Israeli brothers Ido and Roy Schoenberg, MDs, and a connection was made to Teva when the sons of Ido and a Teva executive traveled to the U.S. as part of a university delegation. It was either serendipity or pure coincidence that led the delegation to tour American Well’s offices. (You can read my recent interview with American Well CEO Roy Schoenberg, MD here.)

Maven, a digital health clinic for women, completes its Surescripts certification through DoseSpots, a Massachusetts-based company that offers white-label e-prescribing solutions.

Net Medical Xpress Solutions proudly announces that one of its physicians performed several telemedicine consults while on vacation in the Himalayan foothills of northern India. The phrase “remote consultation” has finally been validated.

This article highlights the difference telepsychiatry is making in Idaho, which has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. The state passed legislation this year requiring its medical licensing boards to develop rules for providing telemedicine. Close to 7,000 physicians are licensed to practice telemedicine in Idaho, but only about a 100 psychiatrists are located within the its borders.

Other

A study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine finds that employees who tap away at their keyboards all day should stand and/or stroll at least two hours during the workday, ideally working up to four hours each day. The effects of too much sedentary living even have researchers advocating for standing desks, mandated breaks, and discussion about it between physicians and their patients. Perhaps we’ll see it pop up as a box to click in future EHRs. 

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.