News 6/6/22

Top News

Primary care-focused practice management and value-based care transition company Aledade has raised $123 million in Series E funding, bringing its total investments to nearly $420 million.

The company, which also offers technology optimization, works with more than 1,000 independent practices across the country.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Thanks to these companies for recently supporting HIStalk Practice. Click a logo for more information.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual women’s healthcare company Visana Health raises $2.6 million in a seed funding round. Founder and CEO Joe Connolly launched the Minneapolis-based company in 2019 after watching his mother struggle with undiagnosed endometriosis and fibroids for 25 years.

I missed the April news that Nudj Health raised $10 million in a Series A funding round. The company has developed app-based programs to help patients with chronic conditions maintain or improve their health and wellness in between office visits.

Announcements and Implementations

Greenway Health announces GA of Greenway Secure Cloud, a cloud-based EHR and practice management platform that manages provider data in a maximum security data center with annual data uptime of 99 percent.

Professional Park Medical Services (GA) implements CareTrack’s patient care plan adherence software.

Government and Politics

A federal judge sentences Joshua Maywalt to five years and five days in federal prison for healthcare fraud, aggravated identity theft, filing a false income tax return, and failing to file an income tax return. Maywalt had been working at an unspecified medical billing and coding company in Clearwater, FL. He committed his crimes through the office of a physician client, fraudulently billing services to Florida Medicaid and funneling the money to a personal account. He has also been ordered to forfeit $2.5 million and personal property in Tampa.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “A Bridge to the Future of Behavioral Health.”
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “How Online Booking is Helping a Cardiology Practice.”

Blog Posts

• 3 Technologies for Health Education Explained (Healthwise
• An ounce of prevention (Nordic)
• Nurses of Note Awards 2022: Retired Interior Designer Embarks on Second Career as a Nurse (PerfectServe)
• What’s cloud got to do with it? (Nordic)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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

News 6/1/22

Top News

Hint Health, a tech company focused on better enabling direct primary care practices, has raised $45 million in a Series B funding round.

HIStalk Practice Musings

Summer is unofficially here, and with it comes the need to compile vacation-worthy reading lists. I’m indulging in a re-read of “Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife” by Linda Berdoll, a bodice-ripper that pays cheeky homage to Jane Austen’s original work. The more professionally-minded may want to check out the AMA’s “8 great books hand-picked by doctors for your reading list.”

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CloudMD, a Canadian software, services, and clinic operations company, reports a jump in Q1 revenue to $41.4 million CAD. The company attributes the increase to its 2021 acquisition of MindBeacon, a developer of white-label virtual cognitive behavioral therapy software.

Announcements and Implementations

CVS Health develops a virtual primary care service for payers that gives their members access to virtual primary care, on-demand care, chronic condition management, and mental healthcare from a dedicated care team via a single digital resource. Members will also have the option to seek in-person care at in-network providers, including CVS Health’s MinuteClinic.

Bellevue Pain and Wellness (WA) selects Kareo and PatientPop’s EHR, practice management and growth, and billing technologies.

Rite Aid will connect its Medicare pharmacy customers in Michigan with virtual, mobile, and in-person care from Homeward, a tech-enabled healthcare company focused on helping patients in rural areas access care.

Apricity Health, an oncology-focused care management and remote patient monitoring company, selects Health Gorilla’s Health Interoperability Platform and Patient360 health record software.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story featuring Provida Family Medicine, “How the EClinicalWorks EHR Integrates Data from Other EHRs.”
• Nordic will present at the EHealth 2022 Virtual Conference + Tradeshow June 1-2.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Advocate Aurora Health: Helping a Regional Nonprofit with Population Health Solutions.”

Blog Posts

• How a digital, all-in-one software solution helps you grow your practice & refocus on patient care (AdvancedMD)
• The Best of Healthcare IT in the Heart of America (EClinicalWorks)
• Nurses of Note Awards 2022: The Dynamic Nurse IT Leader (PerfectServe)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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

News 5/25/22

Top News

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD releases an advisory on addressing and combatting health worker burnout. The advisory offers fairly in-depth action items for stakeholders across the care continuum including provider organizations; federal, state, local, and tribal governments; payers; and healthcare technology vendors. Sadly, it seems that, according to Murthy, health IT companies are still struggling with:

• Designing technology to serve the needs of health workers, care teams, and patients across the continuum of care.
• Designing platforms with the goal of interoperability at the outset.
• Strengthening integration of data across different platforms and health sectors.
• Improving seamless storage of and access to health data.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Well Health Technologies combines its EMR Group, billing and RCM, and several digital application businesses into its new Provider Solutions Business Unit.

People

Elation Health names Amanda Melander (Athenahealth) SVP and head of marketing.

Scott Weingarten, MD (Cedars-Sinai) joins Vytalize Health as chief value officer.

Other

Drummond Group launches a pediatric health IT certification and pilot initiative that will help vendors comply with the ONC’s voluntary EHR certification requirements. Pilot participants include NextGen, Office Practicum, and PCC. The pilot will wrap up in July, after which Drummond Group will finalize test scripts based on recommendations from ONC, HL7, and ARHQ.

Marketplace looks at the increasing urgency with which healthcare practices are messaging patients to leave online reviews. “Tone-deaf timing,” as one patient put it, is a big turn off, as is the feeling that patients are being badgered to do a practice’s marketing for them. Zen Media CEO Shama Hyder advises practices to wait one to two days before sending review requests: “You don’t want to go so long that a patient has completely moved on with their life and forgotten about their experience. Or worse yet, had a rough experience and already decided to share that on a public forum.”

Brian Wedgeworth, aka the “Casanova Scammer,” pleads guilty to 25 counts of wire fraud, mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering after a five-year stint of swindling money from more than 30 women. Wedgeworth’s schemes involved posing as a doctor and convincing his victims he needed money to pay off his medical practice’s debts.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic posts another episode of its monthly “DocTalk” series titled “Soft Interoperability.
• Nordic publishes a video titled “Modernizing Healthcare Data Infrastructure with the Cloud.”
• Nordic transitions the Tasman brand, and its presence in Europe and the Middle East, to the Nordic global brand.

Blog Posts

• Nurses of Note Awards 2022: The Nurse Informatics Team at Mecklenburg County Public Health (PerfectServe)
• Two Ways to Increase Your Patient Engagement (Healthwise)
• Essential ephemera: The sad, over-too-quickly life of a wearable datum (Nordic)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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

News 5/18/22

Top News

Care coordination software vendor ThoroughCare secures a $3 million investment from Cypress Growth Capital.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

National Medical Billing Services, an RCM vendor focused on the surgical market, acquires Medi-Corp, which offers RCM services for anesthesia, ASCs, and pain management providers.

Healthcare continuing education company HealthStream acquires CE application vendor CloudCME for $4 million. HealthStream acquired a majority interest in CloudCME in 2019.

Greater Good Health raises $10 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total raised to $13 million. The tech-enabled company is working to develop primary care networks anchored by nurse practitioners.

NextGen Healthcare reports Q4 results: revenue up 5%, EPS $0.19 vs. $0.21, missing analyst expectations for both.

People

Fred Divers, MD joins American Oncology Network as CMO. He will continue to practice as a medical oncologist at Genesis Cancer and Blood Institute (AR).

Announcements and Implementations

US Radiology will implement Volpara Health’s breast density assessment, mammography reporting, and patient communication software at its Charlotte Radiology practice in North Carolina.

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• HEDIS: Completing the Picture of Patients’ Health (EClinicalWorks)
• Honoring the Role of Nurses in Empowering Patients (Healthwise)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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

News 5/16/22

Top News

Skylight Health Group, a multi-state practice management company, attributes its 18% dip in revenue from the previous quarter to implementation of Athenahealth’s EHR across its practices, and a dip in COVID-19-related urgent care visits. The company noted in its earnings statement that is has recently developed a centralized dashboarding and reporting platform that pulls data from its Athena system and other platforms..

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

People

Specialdocs Consultants promotes Andrew Bonner to VP of business development.

Announcements and Implementations

In Wisconsin, Wood County Human Services Behavioral Health and Long Term Support Division has implemented on the SmartCare EHR from Streamline Healthcare Solutions.

NextGen will offer FQHC customers access to clinical trials through Circuit Clinical, which handles patient recruitment, referral, and enrollment services.

Raleigh Neurology Associates (NC) selects AthenaOne EHR, billing, and patient engagement software from Athenahealth.

Connecticut Cardiology Center implements Cranberry Peak’s EZCDS clinical decision support service via its EHR from Advanced Data Systems.

Other

The local news profiles the success The Salvation Army has seen with offering telehealth services at its women’s and family shelters in Madison, WI. The organization originally partnered with Nurse Disrupted and Conduit Health Partners two years ago to screen its guests for COVID-19 before checking them into the shelter. The Salvation Army has since expanded the service to offer 24/7 care. Nurse Disrupted founder Bre Loughlin says the service has worked so well across the state that it has helped prevent 1,250 emergency room visits since the start of the pandemic.

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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