News 10/20/21

Top News

Walgreens launches a health division and announces that it will spend $5.2 billion to open 1,000 Village Medical at Walgreens primary care practices by 2027. The VillageMD-staffed practices will open across 30 US cities, primarily in underserved areas.

The retailer’s relationship with VillageMD began in 2019 with the piloting of five co-located clinics in Houston; and strengthened a year later with new clinics, a $250 million investment, and news of a longer-term expansion plan that is now being fully fleshed out.

Walgreens has increased its ownership stake in the company from 30% to 63%. VillageMD, which has developed proprietary technology as part of its value-based care offerings, remains a standalone company with plans to IPO sometime next year.

Webinars

October 28 (Thursday) 1 ET. “A New Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. IMO and Cerner announce the launch of the IMO Core CSmart app, an in-workflow offering to improve clinical documentation and problem list management in Cerner Millennium. The presenters will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management, discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can reduce clinician HIT burden, and demonstrate how IMO Core CSmart can help clinicians document with ease and specificity, improve HCC coding, and make problem lists more relevant. Additional sessions will be offered on November 17 and December 1.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

GoCheck raises $10 million in a funding round led by Hatteras Venture Partners and Pisgah Fund. The company’s digital vision screening technology is used globally by 6,500 pediatric teams.

Leonard Green & Partners sells membership-based healthcare provider network MDVIP, which it acquired four years ago, to Goldman Sachs and Charlesbank Capital.

Amazon Care Director Kristen Helton tells HLTH attendees that the online retailer will expand its Amazon Care service for employers to several new cities. Patients can access virtual primary and urgent care, as well as several in-home services. The company plans to expand to 20 cities by 2022.

Announcements and Implementations

Occupational healthcare company Marathon Health launches a virtual primary care service for employees that includes telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and care navigation and coordination.

Puerto Rico-based telemedicine company Tu Salud Virtual adopts GenieMD’s white-label remote patient monitoring technology.

GeniusRx adds telemedicine and cost transparency and savings capabilities to its online prescription delivery service.

Other

Fitness company CrossFit will launch Precision Care, a subscription-based telemedicine service that offers its members access to physicians and health coaches. CrossFit is working with personalized medicine company Wild Health to launch the program. The new service is the brainchild of new CEO Eric Roza, who is looking to help the company add healthier elements to its brand of hard-core workouts.

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

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News 10/18/21

Top News

Marley Medical announces the launch of its membership-based virtual primary care clinic for patients with chronic conditions alongside a $9 million seed funding round.

Company co-founders Chris Hogg, David Hubanks, and Joe Slavinsky (not pictured) all spent between five and 10 years in executive leadership positions at Propeller Health, a developer of smart inhalers acquired by ResMed in 2019 for $225 million.

Webinars

October 28 (Thursday) 1 ET. “A New Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. IMO and Cerner announce the launch of the IMO Core CSmart app, an in-workflow offering to improve clinical documentation and problem list management in Cerner Millennium. The presenters will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management, discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can reduce clinician HIT burden, and demonstrate how IMO Core CSmart can help clinicians document with ease and specificity, improve HCC coding, and make problem lists more relevant. Additional sessions will be offered on November 17 and December 1.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Announcements and Implementations

A $2.1 million grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism will enable Jaspr Health to pilot its digital suicide care platform in primary care clinics, including patients with alcohol use disorders. The company’s technology is already in use in Allina Health’s emergency departments across Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Groups Recover Together, an opioid addiction treatment services company, develops an app to enable its members access to online appointment scheduling, educational content, treatment planning, group therapy, payment capabilities, and forms, and outreach.

Research and Innovation

An NPR poll conducted in August and September has found that 42% of respondents said someone in their household had used telehealth, and 82% of those patients were satisfied with the online appointment. Despite the high level of satisfaction, however, 64% would have preferred an in-person appointment. Providers like concierge medical practice owner Rebekah Bernard, MD prefer in-person appointments, too: “You may be missing that opportunity to be talking with the doctor who’s going to say, ‘Hey, by the way, I see you haven’t had your mammogram or you haven’t had your pap [smear].'”

Other

HLTH is in full swing in Boston. I think it’s interesting that Walmart EVP of Health & Wellness Cheryl Pegus, MD took the stage. You have to wonder if she’s also interested in shopping around for add-on solutions or outright acquisition targets. The Jonathan Bush / Glen Tullman session, “A Tale of Two Health Tech Mavericks,” seems to have generated the most buzz thus far.

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• Why we do what we do (Nordic)
• Dynamic Intelligent Routing Delivers the Right Message to the Right Person at the Right Time – No Matter the Setting (PerfectServe)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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News 10/13/21

Top News

Pediatric behavioral healthcare company Elemy raises $219 million in a Series B funding round, bringing the startup’s total funding to $323 million and its valuation to $1.15 billion. Elemy, which specializes in autism, has developed software to help match pediatric patients with therapists who provide in-home and virtual care, and for those therapists to track care progress.

HIStalk Practice Musings

First spell check, then auto correct, now this: Perhaps I’m late to the AI-enabled writing party, but when Microsoft notified me of an extension that could help me strengthen my spelling, grammar, and style across documents, e-mail, and the Web, all I could think of was how homogenous writing styles will become if users lean on these types of crutches. Not to mention the fact that this tool will only hasten society’s text-enabled tendency to eschew proper spelling and grammar. End rant.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

NowRx, which boasts same-day telemedicine and online prescription delivery services, hopes to raise $73 million using SeedInvest’s equity crowdfunding capabilities. The company will have raised over $100 million once the Series C round closes.

Government and Politics

ONC expands its United States Core Data for Interoperability standards program to enable federal partners like CMS and CDC to establish and use interoperable, agency-specific datasets beyond those available through the initial USCDI program.

Research and Innovation

Consumer preference for online appointment booking continues to increase year over year, according to the latest Patient Access Survey Report from Kyruus, as does consumer propensity to research healthcare organizations and providers online before scheduling visits. When considering providers, consumers place the most importance on insurance acceptance, clinical expertise, organization reputation, and appointment availability.

A study of 314 physicians working in an ambulatory care network over a two-year period finds that they were more likely to leave their jobs if they spent less time in the EHR than their presumably more satisfied peers, particularly on inbox management. The study’s authors suggest further study is needed to understand this counterintuitive result. (I’d add that if a physician is spending less time in the EHR than his or her peers, perhaps he is less engaged with patients, colleagues, and company culture, which makes his departure not that surprising.) They also recommend that prospectively tracking EHR use metrics may help to identify physicians likely to depart who would “benefit from early, team-based, targeted interventions.”

Other

Premier Patient Healthcare notifies the state of Maine’s attorney general’s office of a data breach that occurred in April when a formerly employed executive accessed its computer system and obtained a file containing PHI. A separate notice on Premier’s website implicates technology vendor Wiseman Innovations, implying that a former executive and vendor employee were involved in the illegal file access.

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

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News 10/11/21

Top News

Brave Care raises $25 million in a Series B funding round led by Mednax, bringing its total raised to nearly $50 million. Founded in 2019, the startup offers in-person and virtual pediatric care enabled by proprietary technology.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Carbon Health acquires Central Jersey Urgent Care, a chain of 10 clinics that will transition to Carbon Health’s proprietary EHR. Carbon Health acquired remote patient monitoring company Alertive Healthcare last week.

The local business paper looks at the steps physician groups like Buffalo Medical Group and Primary Care IPA in New York are taking to prepare for competition from retailers like CVS Health, Walmart, and Walgreens. Some physician executives believe retail care can take the pressure off of primary care practices in terms of offering COVID-19 testing for school and routine treatments for minor acute ailments, offerings that are in such demand they sometimes preclude a practice from being able to offer well visits and other immunizations in a timely manner. They are concerned, however, with the likely lack of health information exchange between the retailers and their offices: “We have to do a good job of making sure that health care is available in all our communities,” says Bassett Medical Group’s Joseph Sellers, MD. “The practice of medicine may be more difficult, but I don’t know that the retail clinics are going to be filling those gaps.”

People

Mat Varghese (R1 RCM) joins Agilon Health as chief people officer.

Andrea Marks (UnitedHealth) joins Walmart Health & Wellness as VP of clinical performance.

Announcements and Implementations

Community Health Center of Snohomish County (WA) implements NextGen’s full range of health IT including EHR, practice management, and patient engagement solutions across its FQHC network.

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• Informational parity is the key to better value-based care agreements (Nordic)
• How the Right Health Education Can Save Money and Improve Outcomes (Healthwise)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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News 10/6/21

Top News

Less than three months after raising $350 million in a Series D funding round, Carbon Health acquires remote patient monitoring company Alertive Healthcare.

HIStalk Practice Musings

Just in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month: The local news profiles the Ya-Yas, a group of six friends who get their yearly mammograms together, always followed up by a post-mammogram celebration. The group of gals took their name from the 2002 movie “Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood,” based on a book of the same name. (A great read with a just-as-good prequel, “Ya-Yas in Bloom.”) Their motto, according to member and family physician Siena Alford, MD is “live longer together.”

Webinars

None scheduled in the coming weeks. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

People

Health Plus Management names Walter LeStrange (Nuvance Health) COO.

The Garage names David Smeltzer (Adaptable Health Solutions) VP of data engineering and Sarah Bauer (Trella Health) VP of customer success.

Announcements and Implementations

Wolfe Eye Clinic will implement Modernizing Medicine’s EMA EHR, practice management, and patient engagement software across its 21 facilities in Iowa.

Telemedicine vendor Anytime Pediatrics develops a virtual nurse triage service to help practices offer better access to after-hours care.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Using Prisma to Help Staff and Close Care Gaps at Centerpoint Health.”
• EClinicalWorks will host its national conference virtually October 7-8.

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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