News 3/10/21
Top News
As first alluded to last October, Outcome Health has merged with competitor PatientPoint to create PatientPoint Health Technologies. Earlier estimates have valued the combined company at $600 million. The new company will continue to offer digital pharma advertising and patient engagement messaging at the bedside and in waiting rooms.
PatientPoint leadership will head up the new company, while Outcome Health executives Glenn Keighley and Sean Barden will lead software and engineering efforts.
The deal, the terms of which weren’t disclosed, is perhaps the best possible route for Outcome Health, whose co-founders await trial in a $1 billion fraud case initiated by a 2017 Wall Street Journal expose.
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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Babylon Health acquires the Fresno and Madera operations of FirstChoice Medical Group, a California-based practice management company that partners with local physicians to offer concierge care for Medicare patients. Babylon will roll out its app-based healthcare services and access to its care advisors to FirstChoice patients in the coming months.
People
AristaMD hires Neal Reizer (Homecare Homebase) as chief product officer.
Announcements and Implementations
Walgreens leverages Nuance’s intelligent, conversational voicebot to help customers who call its retail clinics schedule COVID-19 vaccine appointments in English or Spanish. The technology also sends automated appointment reminders via text.
Henry Schein Medical Systems will integrate Yosi Health’s cloud-based patient intake and engagement software with its EHR and practice management technologies.
Fox Rehabilitation (NJ) implements MTBC’s PrecisionBI analytics and business intelligence software.
Research and Innovation
Athenahealth’s new Telehealth Insights Dashboard shows that mental health, primary care, and pediatrics were the top type of virtual appointments between November 2020 and January 2021. Visits were more likely to occur after hours or on the weekends, and were twice as likely to be scheduled on the same day as in-person appointments.
Other
Heal co-founder Nick Desai shares why the time was right for him to step down as CEO, and what he expects the company to achieve under more strategic leadership in the coming months. A few highlights:
- The company began ramping up its telemedicine capabilities in December 2020 as news of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China began to break.
- Desai is looking forward to getting back to his entrepreneurial roots, and is already looking at how virtual care can be made truly accessible to those who need it: “If I do something else in health care, it’s going to be 10x the size, or 100x the size, and solve the chasm of equality of access, which is huge.”
- He sees tremendous market opportunity in house call-based senior care, which Heal has already delved into through its agreements with several payers.
Robert Purbeck is indicted for cyber crimes that included purchasing user names and passwords on the dark web; and then hacking into and stealing patient data from two medical clinics, one orthodontics practice, and the City of Newnan in Georgia. He also attempted to extort the owner of the orthodontics practice, threatening to sell the Social Security number of the owner’s child if he didn’t pay a Bitcoin ransom.
Pediatricians at The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore (NY) take to Zoom to hold virtual “read-alongs” with their patients, whose opportunities to focus on health literacy in the classroom may be hampered by the pandemic. Typically held during school breaks, the read-alongs supplement the books typically given to each Montefiore patient at the end of their in-person visit.
Sponsor Updates
Blog Posts
- 3 Actionable Tips for Reducing Claim Rejections (AdvancedMD)
- A Critical Moment in the COVID-19 Fight (EClinicalWorks)
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The article about Pediatric Associates in CA has a nugget with a potentially outsized impact: the implication that VFC vaccines…