News 12/2/20

Top News

Ambulatory health IT company Das Health Ventures acquires Randall Technology Services and its portfolio of Allscripts EHR and practice management solutions.

The acquisition is Das Health’s second this year: It acquired managed IT and cybersecurity services company Technology Seed in August.

Webinars

December 3 (Thursday) noon ET. “Why Patient-Centered Billing: How University Physicians’ Association Increased Revenue and Reduced Days to Pay.” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Christy Bailey, VP, University Physicians’ Association. Financial recovery calls for a better patient financial experience as providers drive revenue, engage patients, and reduce costs and bad debt. The presenter will talk about patients as payers and how delivering a financial experience that meets their expectations can improve the financial outcomes of providers, hospitals, and health systems.

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

People

Direct primary care company Crossover Health hires John Hallock (Livongo) as SVP of corporate communications.

Brian Wilson (Ascentis) joins urgent care software vendor Experity as its first chief customer officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Hutchinson Clinic (KS) goes live on ERad’s radiology image and data management software.

Mosaic in Omaha implements telemedicine capabilities from StationMD. The company offers healthcare to patients with behavioral and mental health needs, autism, and intellectual disabilities.

Best in Class Medical Doctors launches an orthopedic telemedicine service. In additional to their hospital work, co-founders and orthopedic surgeons Benedict Nwachukwu, MD and Riley Williams, MD are both affiliated with minor and major league sports teams.

Other

TechCrunch inadvertently discovers that NTreatment, a psychiatry and therapy-focused EHR and practice management company, left a cloud-based server unsecured for an unspecified amount of time. The server, which has since been encrypted, contains 109,000 files with lab results, doctor’s notes, claims data, and other PHI.

The local paper profiles Texas native and AMA President Susan Bailey, MD highlighting the impact COVID-19 has had on her priorities for the organization. Bailey originally planned to focus on helping members overcome administrative and regulatory burdens and physician burnout, but has since pivoted to advocating for telemedicine policies. Her practice, Allergy & Asthma Associates in Forth Worth, flipped to virtual visits earlier this year due to a lack of PPE.

Sponsor Updates

• Digital.com includes AdvancedMD and EClinicalWorks among the best medical billing companies of 2020.

Blog Posts

• Are You Managing Your Practice’s Revenue Cycle, or Optimizing It? (Part 2) (AdvancedMD)
• The Continuing Influence of Telehealth (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

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News 11/30/20

Top News

CBS Insights rebrands to Skylight Health Group. The company, with offices in Massachusetts and Ontario, operates over 30 clinics in the US and has developed EHR and telemedicine technologies, which it uses to power a virtual visit subscription service.

HIStalk Practice Musings

Well, I finally did it. It took me two library renewals and a day’s late fee, but I finally finished Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. It was a challenging read, and I have to admit that my eyes glazed over during some of the pages-long descriptions of Hamilton’s treasury and national banking strategies. I learned many things about our Founding Fathers; perhaps the most revelatory being that that there’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to political machinations, intrigue, conspiracies, and the like. It was certainly a timely read for me, as I read the final chapters just as election day loomed.

I will not be attempting “First Principles” by Thomas Ricks, though I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the Founding Fathers’ educations and penchant for relying on the logic of Greek and Roman philosophers as they shaped the federal government.

In comparison, I practically flew through “The Secret and the Vile” by Erik Larson last week. If you’ve read his “The Devil in the White City,” you know he has a brilliant knack for making a non-fiction book read like a novel. Churchill buffs (or those, like me, who don’t know much about him aside from what they’ve seen in “The Crown”) will especially enjoy the recounting of England’s valiant two-year effort to wage war against Germany while waiting with bated breath for the US to join the fight.

I’d love to hear about the books HIStalk Practice readers hunkered down with over the Thanksgiving break. Please email me with your favorite post-feast reads.

Webinars

December 3 (Thursday) noon ET. “Why Patient-Centered Billing: How University Physicians’ Association Increased Revenue and Reduced Days to Pay.” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Christy Bailey, VP, University Physicians’ Association. Financial recovery calls for a better patient financial experience as providers drive revenue, engage patients, and reduce costs and bad debt. The presenter will talk about patients as payers and how delivering a financial experience that meets their expectations can improve the financial outcomes of providers, hospitals, and health systems.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Greenway Health CEO Richard Atkin tells the local (paywalled) business paper that employees will be able to work remotely long after the pandemic ends. As of last year, the Tampa, FL-based company had around 1,400 employees.

Announcements and Implementations

Med Smart Wellness Centers will implement EHR and billing software from AdvancedMD at its first facility in Aventura, FL.

Other

US Fertility notifies customers of a ransomware attack that resulted in hackers gaining access to PHI between August and September. The company, which operates 55 clinics, was created in May through the partnership of Amulet Capital Partners and Shady Grove Fertility.

Local artist Ted McElhiney presents a painting to the staff at the Davenport VA clinic in Iowa. McElhiney, who has been a patient at the clinic for 40 years, says the artwork is his way of “saying thank you for all the hard work all the team does. … Anytime I ask them for a hand to help a veteran, they come with a smile and that is what impresses me.”

Kaiser Permanente pediatrician Rahul Parikh, MD writes about the changes COVID-19 has wrought on his practice, focusing on everything from the fall and slowly escalating rise of in-person appointments, the impact of putting off care, worries about overprescribing antibiotics during virtual visits, and missing out on truly socializing with patients and colleagues. He does point out, however, that COVID safety precautions have forced the practice to think more innovatively about the ways in which they provide care, such as offering drive-thru testing, blood draws, and vaccinations; and developing best practices for video visits. 

ThereCare announces GA of its No Contact Urgent Care kit, which includes Bluetooth diagnostic devices, wireless otoscope, blood pressure wrist cuff, finger pulse oximeter, thermometer strips, and an Iphone(!). Customers order the $300 kit online (which includes a refundable $100 deposit); virtually visit with a ThereCare provider using the smartphone, presumably pre-loaded with some sort of accompanying app; and then return the kit via mail. The concept strikes me as a strange one, given the ubiquity of telemedicine at this point, and the price point for cash-paying customers, though ThereCare does have an option for the insured.  I wonder how long you’re allowed to keep the kit before losing your deposit.

A friendly warning to those readers who are seriously considering applying for clinical jobs on Prince Edward Island in Canada (per my recent post about its dearth of providers): Health officials there have postponed the implementation of an enterprise EHR due to COVID-19-related vendor delays, pushing the project to 2021-2022.

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News 11/25/20

Top News

After five years in bankruptcy, telemedicine kiosk vendor HealthSpot has just $47,000 left to distribute to creditors. It had raised $47 million and entered into a seemingly promising partnership with Xerox before falling into insolvency in 2015. Xerox went on to launch a Virtual Health Solutions service line in 2016. I haven’t heard much about it since.

Webinars

December 3 (Thursday) noon ET. “Why Patient-Centered Billing: How University Physicians’ Association Increased Revenue and Reduced Days to Pay.” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Christy Bailey, VP, University Physicians’ Association. Financial recovery calls for a better patient financial experience as providers drive revenue, engage patients, and reduce costs and bad debt. The presenter will talk about patients as payers and how delivering a financial experience that meets their expectations can improve the financial outcomes of providers, hospitals, and health systems.

December 3 (Thursday) noon ET. “Unlocking the Power of Data: How HIEs Can Better Support Their Participants.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Jaime Bland, DNP, RN, CEO, NEHII; Naresh Sundar Rajan, PhD, CTO, NEHII; Matt Cardwell, PhD, VP of client services, IMO; John Laursen, VP of business development, IMO. HIEs need accurate, actionable, and normalized EHR data to unlock its analytic power to support alerting, regulatory reporting, interoperability, and clinical surveillance. The presenters will describe how to interpret the descriptions and standard code sets that health system partners send, how leading HIEs use normalized data to improve their client and community offerings, and how a new normalization approach may provide operational savings.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

In Arizona, the local paper looks at the impact COVID-19 has had on community health centers. Over 560 have closed nationwide, while those in Arizona have seen visits drop between 35% and 80%. A switch to telemedicine, plus federal funding, have helped many across the state to stay in business, with visits now back up to 70% to 80% of pre-COVID levels.

Announcements and Implementations

Rejuvenating Fertility Center implements Meditab Software’s FertilityEHR at its clinics in New York and Connecticut.

The Rhode Island Quality Institute leverages technology from Get Real Health to integrate a COVID-19 symptom-checker with its HIE, and provide underlying population health analytics.

Hackensack Radiology Group (NJ) adopts patient intake, engagement, and payment software from Royal Solutions Group.

Upper East Side Cardiology in New York City launches a remote patient monitoring program using RPM devices and software from Claris Healthcare.

Thanksgiving Eve Musings

The local paper recounts the journey Julianne Thomas, MD has taken to definitively determine the truth behind family rumors of ancestors aboard the Mayflower. After combing through family documents and doing some sleuthing in the archives of various historical societies and centers, Thomas was able to prove to the General Society of Mayflower Descendants that she can trace her ancestry back to 20 passengers – one of whom was one of just four women to survive their first year in the settlement. As the first female pediatrician in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the first female president of the Iowa chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Thomas believes her ancestors’ pioneering spirit has helped her break through a number of barriers: “I’m a Puritan through and through and through. I think the crazy work schedule as a pediatrician, sometimes 60 hours a week, that hard work ethic — I think I’ve always had that work ethic and pioneering spirit.”

And speaking (indirectly) of Thanksgiving, Ancestry is offering free access to its StoryScout tool this holiday weekend. After entering in a grandparent’s name, the tool sifts through millions of records to serve up “stories” with no research required.

Finally, for any bibliophiles looking for that perfect Thanksgiving centerpiece, check out “15 Gorgeous Fall Table Decorations Inspired by Books.”

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• 4 Workflow Tweaks that Can Increase Total Revenue in Your Clinic (AdvancedMD)

• A better way to navigate EClinicalWorks (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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News 11/23/20

Top News

Through its US subsidiary, Germany-based health IT company CompuGroup Medical will acquire ambulatory-focused health IT vendor EMDs for $240 million.

EMDs, which acquired competitor Aprima nearly two years ago, employs 1,400 people in the US and India to serve 60,000 practice-based end users.

Webinars

December 3 (Thursday) noon ET. “Why Patient-Centered Billing: How University Physicians’ Association Increased Revenue and Reduced Days to Pay.” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Christy Bailey, VP, University Physicians’ Association. Financial recovery calls for a better patient financial experience as providers drive revenue, engage patients, and reduce costs and bad debt. The presenter will talk about patients as payers and how delivering a financial experience that meets their expectations can improve the financial outcomes of providers, hospitals, and health systems.

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

Here’s the recording of last week’s webinar, sponsored by Mend, titled “Do You Really Have a Telehealth Program, Or Just Videoconferencing?”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Telemedicine and online prescription delivery company Ro opens its seventh prescription fulfillment center. The Texas-based operation will also serve customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Mississippi. The company, which raised $200 million in July, plans to open three more centers, which employ between 50 and 100 people, by the end of next year.

CentralReach acquires Cartocal and will incorporate its automated scheduling technology into its EHR, practice management, and billing software for providers specializing in applied behavior analysis.

Announcements and Implementations

California-based FQHC TrueCare implements Epic at its 12 clinics through a partnership with nonprofit health IT organization OCHIN.

Diagnoss announces GA of an AI-based coding assistant for medical billing that offers real-time feedback on documentation and coding. Co-founder, lawyer, and Fulbright Fellow Abboud Chaballout’s background includes stints with Imaging Advantage and Partners HealthCare, and the co-founding of finance-focused Optimal Healthcare Recovery.

Orthopaedic & Sports Medicine Center (KS) selects NextGen Enterprise with Orthopedic Suite.

Government and Politics

Jacksonville, FL-based radiology practice Mori, Bean and Brooks will pay the federal government $1.4 million to settle allegations that it knowingly submitted false Medicare and Medicaid claims over a seven-year period for images that were ineligible for reimbursement because they were, in fact, read by professionals outside of the US.

Other

The Washington Post looks at the ongoing PPE shortages many smaller healthcare facilities are facing as COVID-19 cases continue to increase across the country. Unlike their hospital counterparts, which have bigger budgets and stronger and more reliable supply chains, clinics like the Codman Square Health Center in Boston are dealing with a dearth of supplies: “What we’ve realized is there is no cavalry coming,” says Director Genevieve Daftary. “We’ve learned to triage, not just the patients, but triage the PPE.”

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• Why healthcare needs a Dewey Decimal System for Data Governance (Nordic)
• Improve Patient Experience Before, During, and After Care (PerfectServe)
• 5 Questions to Ask When Creating Custom Health Education (Healthwise)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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News 11/18/20

Top News

COVID-19 continues to have a detrimental impact on small primary care practices in Los Angeles and surrounding areas – a trend seen nationwide that shows no signs of slowing. Nearly 10% of such practices in Los Angeles County have already closed, and another 20% to 25% are at risk of shutting down, according to Los Angeles County Medical Association Secretary and board member Jerry Abraham, MD.

Economists point out that, in addition to reduced patient volume and reimbursement (even with expanded telemedicine regulations), small practices have faced many of the same financial challenges as any small business during the pandemic, creating a perfect recipe for permanent closure.

The association is doing its part to help struggling practices stay afloat, setting up a loan program and freely distributing $1.3 million worth of PPE. Abraham stresses that, “Anybody who is doing things the way they used to do it … is not going to stay open.”

Webinars

December 3 (Thursday) noon ET. “Why Patient-Centered Billing: How University Physicians’ Association Increased Revenue and Reduced Days to Pay.” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Christy Bailey, VP, University Physicians’ Association. Financial recovery calls for a better patient financial experience as providers drive revenue, engage patients, and reduce costs and bad debt. The presenter will talk about patients as payers and how delivering a financial experience that meets their expectations can improve the financial outcomes of providers, hospitals, and health systems.

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

The recording of this week’s webinar, “COVID-19 and Beyond: A CISO’s Perspective for Staying Ahead of Threats” by Everbridge VP/CISO Sonia E. Arista is live on YouTube.

Announcements and Implementations

StrideCare (TX) transitions from multiple EHR systems across its practices to Athenahealth’s cloud-based EHR and practice management software.

Clinical and imaging data-sharing company Life Image develops the Network Connector solution to better enable smaller healthcare organizations to digitally exchange information with other facilities within the company’s network.

Speech-to-text software vendor Athreon launches AxiScribe, a virtual scribe service that captures, transcribes, and reviews clinical conversations, and then inputs them into the EHR for physician review.

Granite Wellness Centers (CA) selects SmartCare EHR software from Streamline Healthcare Solutions.

Solutions Outpatient Services in Dallas pilots ViviHealth’s Vivi360 app and clinical dashboard software to help patients in recovery adhere to their treatment plans.

Pfeifer & Associates (OR) will replace its two EHRs with EnSoftek’s DrCloudEHR.

Other

Walmart partners with Quest Diagnostics to launch pilot programs in Texas and New York that offer what appears to be free drone delivery of at-home COVID-19 test kits.

The local news profiles Ben Marble, MD founder of MyFreeDoctor.com, a free telemedicine service (powered by Medici) launched at the beginning of the pandemic. The service started with Marble serving a few patients and has since expanded to 13 physicians seeing hundreds. Patients are asked to give a donation at the end of their virtual visit, with average donation rates of $65 reaching as high as 97%.

Semi-retired, 84 year-old Cheston Berlin, MD stays up to date on healthcare best practices through The ECHO Project’s COVID-19 program offered through the Penn State College of Medicine, where he has worked for the last 50 years. He has attended 33 of the virtual program’s 35 sessions, a routine that not only has helped him attain CMEs, but has helped him to advise his fellow retirement community residents. Berlin’s only criticism of the sessions has been “an excessive use of acronyms.”

Sponsor Updates

Blog Posts

• How to Automate Your Behavioral Health Practice Operations (AdvancedMD)

• Show Me the Money Methods! (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

Jenn, Mr. H, Lorre

More news: HIStalk.

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