Top News
Care enablement vendor Fabric acquires TeamHealth’s 50-state virtual care service.
Fabric’s other three acquisitions in the past 18 months include Walmart-owned virtual care provider MeMD, conversational AI solution vendor Gyant, and asynchronous virtual care solution vendor Zipnosis.
Reader Comments
From Another Oracle Bytes the Dust: “Re: Inspira Health. Dropping Oracle Health in favor of Epic. Announcement called out attrition rate post-Cerner-acquisition as one of the reasons.” Unverified since they haven’t posted Epic jobs and aren’t yet listed on UserWeb.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Mrs. H had a miserable (and ultimately final) experience with Walgreens this week. They were out of her thyroid med, they capitulated after she pressed them by telling her that they had arranged for her to pick up an emergency supply at another Walgreens the next day, and of course it wasn’t ready when she got there and the pharmacy people were equally balanced between cluelessness and indifference in telling her to sit there for an hour while they tried to figure it out. She called a mom-and-pop independent pharmacy whose folks were friendly, efficient, and on the ball as far as getting the prescription transferred and her insurance set up nearly instantly. My direct primary care doctor emailed all of her patients that Walgreens and CVS regularly tell patients that she didn’t send the prescription even though she has the electronic receipt proving that they received it up to half a dozen times. I’m not shocked that shares of these two chains have tanked. Independent pharmacies need to tell their story better. In fact, independent everything in healthcare needs to tell their story better.
Webinars
October 3 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Navigating AI-Powered Medical Interpretation: Insights for Health Leaders.” Sponsor: Globo. Presenter: Dipak Patel, CEO, Globo. AI is redefining how providers can communicate with patients who speak limited English. However, not all LLMs are created equal, and their potential and limitations need to be examined further. Globo has published its results from testing several LLMs. This webinar will address the promises and perils of AI-enabled medical interpretation in summarizing that research in four key domains: the process of AI interpretation, how to measure it, the state of AI tools today, and the areas where AI falls short with interpretation.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Analytics platform vendor MedeAnalytics acquires healthcare procurement marketplace company SubPop Health.
Healthcare governance, risk, and compliance solutions company RLDatix acquires SocialClimb, which specializes in provider reputation management and patient satisfaction data.
Reuters reports that providers who temporarily signed contracts with Waystar, Availity, and Inovalon during Change Healthcare’s February downtime are extending their agreements with those smaller competitors, suggesting that providers see the benefit of using multiple claims processing companies to avoid a single point of failure.
People
Elsevier Health hires Omry Bigger, MBA (LexisNexis) as president of clinical solutions.
Nias Puthenveettil, MBA, MS (Litmos) joins Azra AI as CTO.
Announcements and Implementations
DirectTrust will deploy public key infrastructure that will support TEFCA Facilitated HL7 FHIR.
A Portland, OR TV station profiles the patient monitoring command center of Oregon Health & Science University, which monitors patients in 61 Oregon hospitals.
This is a great story. InterSystems founder and owner Phillip “Terry” Ragon and his wife Susan donate $400 million for a “Manhattan Project on HIV” that will fund early-stage HIV vaccine research. The 74-year-old billionaire said in a rare interview that he hoped to become a rock star following his graduation from MIT, and when it became obvious that Cream wouldn’t be calling him to replace Clapton any time soon, he took a job with Meditech even though he knew next to nothing about computers. He learned the MUMPS programming language, left Meditech a year and half later to co-found a MUMPS-based medical billing company, then launched what became InterSystems in 1978. The database company grew slowly in serving its two largest customers the VA and Epic, finally hitting $1 billion in annual revenue in 2023. The Ragons have signed The Giving Pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to charity upon their deaths.
Government and Politics
Healthcare AI company Pieces Technologies settles State of Texas charges that it deceptively marketed its patient summary products to Texas hospitals by making misleading statements about their accuracy and safety. The company agreed to increase customer transparency about how its data models work, the areas in which they are not as reliable, and how its metric for system hallucinations is determined.
CVS Health-owned primary care clinic operator Oak Street Health will pay $60 million to resolve federal False Claim Act accusations that it paid kickbacks to insurance agents to recruit Medicare Advantage patients.
Veterans will resume paying prescription co-pays at the five VA facilities that are live on Oracle Health / Cerner after a two-year suspension that was implemented due to software problems.
Privacy and Security
Microsoft warns that a ransomware-as-a-service hacker group called Vanilla Tempest is using a new ransomware strain to target the healthcare sector.
Other
Madison’s weekly paper describes how COVID-19 spurred Epic’s medical research work in offering anonymized health data from participating health system customers. CDC contacted Epic Research to help answer questions about the effectiveness of mpox vaccine, when went from getting the CDC’s call right before Thanksgiving and having a publication-ready manuscript ready by early December.
A Commonwealth Fund report finds that “the US continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its healthcare sector” that differs from comparable countries in failing to meet basic healthcare needs, including universal coverage, despite the highest level of spending.
Sponsor Updates
- Ellkay sponsors the Auxiliary of Emerson Health 25th Annual Golf Tournament in Hudson, MA.
- Health Data Movers posts a new episode of its “QuickHITs” podcast titled “Transforming Healthcare with Data & AI: A Conversation with Dr. Michael Pfeffer.”
- Nordic will partner with Microsoft and CHIME to establish the Rural Health IT Community at the CHIME Fall Forum November 6.
- Consensus Cloud Solutions will offer Olah Healthcare Technology customers its EFAx Corporate cloud fax platform.
- Findhelp welcomes New Jersey Prevention Network, Fairfax County Government, and Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center (CA) to its network.
- Inovalon, Surescripts, and Wellsky will exhibit at NACP 2024 October 6-9 in Nashville.
- Konza National Network will present at the HEDIS & Quality Improvement Summit in Las Vegas September 29-October 1 in Las Vegas.
- Meditech will exhibit at the TORCH Fall Conference & Trade Show September 23-26 in Round Rock, TX.
- The WellSky Foundation donates $100,000 each to five non-profits that offer programs in the Kansas City area.
Blog Posts
Contacts
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