This blog is totally independent, unpaid and has only three major objectives.
The first is to inform readers of news and happenings in the e-Health domain, both here in Australia and world-wide.
The second is to provide commentary on e-Health in Australia and to foster improvement where I can.
The third is to encourage discussion of the matters raised in the blog so hopefully readers can get a balanced view of what is really happening and what successes are being achieved.
Quote Of The Year
Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"
or
H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
The Aged Care Transfer Summary will be an
addition to My Health Record and enable residential aged care providers to
digitally capture residents’ health information for transfer to another health
facility, such as hospitals.
Aged care providers will be able to send and
receive documents through secure messaging.
Australian Digital Health Agency branch
manager of program and project delivery Laura Toyne said the transfer summary
aimed to minimise “pain points” when sharing residents’ health information.
“We know that the yellow transfer envelope
that often accompanies patients or residents as they move between settings
doesn’t always get to the right place at the right time. And we have heard as
well from particularly in the hospital sector, they’re often ringing back
residential aged care facilities.
“So
that missing bit of information they need, which causes administrative issues
in the hospital, [can] compromise patient care at the point of that transfer,”
Ms Toyne told Australian Ageing Agenda.
ADHA
program director of aged care Carolyn Brown said an Aged Care Transfer Summary
in My Health Record would reduce instances of missing information.
“It’s
clear that having a standardised way of approaching that will improve the
situation,” Ms Brown told AAA.
Ms
Brown said work on the development of the transfer summary is in the early
stages.
New initiatives in response to royal
commission
The
digital health agency has launched an industry offer estimated at $100,000 to
$150,000 for aged care software vendors to enhance My Health Record
functionality in separate and combined clinical information systems and
medication management applications.
Phase
one includes enhancing software to include the ability to view the My Health
Record for a specific care subject and the capability to create, upload and
download advance care plans and directives and medication prescription and
dispense records to the health record.
The
second phase enhancements include the ability to create, upload and download
aged care transfer summary documents and pharmacist shared medicines lists with
My Health Record and send and receive via secure messaging.
In
phase three the software must be installed and activated, operating as a
clinical information system, electronic medication management system or both in
at least five distinct aged care homes.
The
industry offer is part of the agency’s response to the recommendations of the
Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, Ms Toyne said.
I really
never cease to be amazed at the ADHA’s hopefulness that Aged Care Facilities
will find the staff and time to use the #myHealthRecord rather than just using
a quickly written note to transfer a patient. It really feels pretty
impractical and naïve to expect this level of change without a huge funding
injection which we know has many other worthy destinations and is unlikely to
be in the amount needed!
Note: Each
link is followed by a title and few paragraphs. For the full article click on
the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links
may require site registration or subscription payment.
November 05,
2021 - EHR vendor Cerner has partnered
with health IT company Transplant Connect on an EHR integration that aims to
streamline data exchange for organ donor referrals.
The health IT
company expedites potential organ, tissue, and eye donor referrals to boost
recipient matches and promote timely organ donation.
The EHR
integration is also expected to decrease clinician
burden by reducing the number of hours spent on the donor referral
process.
"This
integration is a prime example of how health systems can talk to one another,
which helps eliminate manual bottlenecks that drain time and resources,"
Sam Lambson, vice president of interoperability at Cerner, said in a press
release.
NHS saves more than 2 million hours using Microsoft Teams
More than
two million hours of staff time have been saved since the NHS rolled out
Microsoft Teams, a new survey has found.
Andrea Downey,
02 November, 2021
In the first
six months, the communications platform was used across the health service as
it replaced 14.5m phone calls and hosted more than 32m virtual meetings.
NHS Digital rolled Teams out to 1.3million users with NHSmail accounts
between 16-20 March 2020. The roll-out was accelerated to help NHS staff
better communicate and collaborate around their responses to Covid-19, and
counter the increased risks associated with the virus.
It is
estimated Teams has saved 2.9m hours for NHS staff in the six months between
April and September this year, which NHS Digital said have been put to “better
use”.
In one week
alone nearly six million messages were sent between NHS staff and more than
1.3million meetings were held.
Babylon and Microsoft join forces to improve healthcare through AI
Babylon
and Microsoft have teamed up with the aim of using artificial intelligence and
machine learning to improve accessibility of healthcare worldwide.
Andrea Downey
02 November 2021
The new
partnership also aims to address affordability issues and improve the quality
of healthcare. Through exploring opportunities to enhance current artificial
intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools the tech companies aim to shift
focus “from sick care to preventative healthcare”.
The first
stage of the collaboration will see Babylon Cloud Services, the company’s
digital health software solution, made available on Microsoft’s Azure
Marketplace.
This will
allow payers and providers to access Babylon’s AI-powered symptom checker and Healthcheck
services via the marketplace, which current reaches more than four million
monthly users across 140 different areas.
Tom
McGuinness, corporate vice president of global healthcare and life sciences at
Microsoft, said: “This collaboration will allow us to build on our existing
capabilities so we can proactively support patients through the devices they
already own, and shift the focus from reactive to proactive healthcare.
Access and Action: Healthcare Systems Put Big Data to Work
Innovative
data management technologies help organizations improve patient care and
operations.
by Melissa Delaney
Melissa
Delaney is a freelance journalist who specializes in business technology. She
is a frequent contributor to the CDW family of technology magazines.
From patient
questionnaires to Internet of Medical Things devices, healthcare systems
collect, store and rely on massive streams of data to deliver care, especially
as they undergo digital transformations.
In North
Carolina, Chapel Hill-based UNC Health responded to the pandemic in 2020 by deploying
new telemedicine capabilities, an online symptom-checker chatbot and automated
models to create forecasts on hospitalizations. UNC Health then integrated the
information generated from those technologies into its data warehouse.
“It helped us
make daily operational decisions to support the breadth of the system as we
were facing the pandemic,” says Brent Lamm, senior vice president and deputy
CIO at UNC Health. “Even now, our healthcare leaders have access to a dashboard
with a weekly forecast of COVID-19 hospitalizations. We’ve been able to give
them a head start on planning that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
Across all
industries, organizations are now managing more data, nearly 14 petabytes on
average, according to Dell Technologies’ 2020 Global Data Protection Index (1 petabyte is just over
1 million gigabytes).
ONC: EHRs need better sex and gender inclusion standards
Katie Adams –
Clinical data
collection is being hindered by EHRs' failure to represent sex and gender
diversity, according to Steven Posnack, the deputy national coordinator at the
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
In
an Oct. 27 blog post he wrote for the ONC, Mr. Posnack said relying on
a single, oftentimes binary sex and gender categorization can hamper
interoperability and lead to suboptimal care outcomes. He called on the
healthcare industry to eliminate ambiguities surrounding the meaning, context
and expected use of sex and gender data.
"This
ranges from missing preventative screening notifications to inaccurate
reference ranges on lab tests all the way to denied claims because the
patient’s 'administrative sex' on the clinical side didn’t match their 'gender'
on the health insurance side," Mr. Posnack wrote.
Enovacom
and Medanets join forces to provide mobile first health data
A
partnership between global interoperability firm Enovacom and Nordic nursing
app specialist Medanets will enable nursing staff to access patient data
through their mobile devices.
Medical
device data will be automatically gathered using Enovacom’s Patient Connect
interoperability platform and fed through to the hospital’s electronic health
record (EHR) and to the Medanets’ mobile nursing app in real-time.
Juha-Matti
Ranta, Medanets chief executive officer (CEO), said: “By helping nurses with
tools that are the most time-saving, such as observations, our app becomes an
integral part of their workflow.”
France
announces €650 million boost for digital health
French
health minister Olivier Véran has announced an investment plan of €650 million
to accelerate the country’s digital health strategy.
The
360-bed Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, New Jersey, has always been keen
on using technology to enable its mission of providing compassionate and
personalized care to a diverse population of patients.
THE
PROBLEM
Nearly
30 years ago, the hospital developed its own electronic health record – long
before they were prevalent or mandated in the industry. But times change, and
the organization realized the need to be more efficient and use technology to
enable and streamline processes. It was time to update the EHR.
The
question was: Buy or build?
"Holy
Name believes in a healthy mixture of build and buy, but we did not have faith
that any of the 'big box' EHRs would be able to address our need for a truly
person-centric approach with technology-enabled workflows," said Jessica
Cox, RN, director of product solutions at Holy Name Medical Center.
November 03,
2021 - A recent KLAS Research report used analytics to evaluate which
vendors deliver the best risk adjustment.
According to
the report,
there is a growing interest in adopting risk
adjustment solutions. While many vendors claim they can provide desired
solutions, the KLAS report examines which can deliver on that promise. Using
the feedback of 163 respondents, the report evaluates vendor performances
across key customer experience metrics and validates customer adoption across
risk adjustment capabilities.
The report
examines vendors based on customer experience pillars. These pillars include
culture, loyalty, operations, product, relationship, and value.
“In addition
to the questions in the standard evaluation, KLAS also asked respondents to
answer two supplemental questions specific to the risk adjustment market,” the
report stated.
Walmart’s recent decision to enter into a
partnership with Epic, the Verona, Wis.-based electronic records system vendor,
hints at efforts by the nation’s largest retailer to play a bigger role in
healthcare delivery and mesh with other organizations in the ecosystem.
Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart announced
the agreement in late September, saying it expected to begin the rollout of an
Epic-developed system in early 2022 in four new Walmart Health Centers in
Florida.
The retailer said it picked Epic so it
could be a single unified records system to simplify healthcare customers’
efforts “to live healthier.”
The Epic platform will support all of
Walmart’s health and wellness lines of business, and through the use of the
records system “Walmart Health will engage patients, healthcare professionals,
insurance carriers and other stakeholders while enhancing communication,
personalization and information sharing amongst healthcare professionals,
utilizing a patient portal.”
Biden nominates new CIO for VA, could help lead EHR modernization
Former
Microsoft exec Kurt DelBene, who helped right the course for Healthcare.gov
eight years ago, could be tasked with enabling a bigger turnaround job at
Veterans Affairs.
On
Wednesday, the White House announced its nomination of Kurt DelBene as chief
information officer and assistant secretary for information and technology at
the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
WHY IT
MATTERS
DelBene, who served more than 25 years at Microsoft in two different stints,
could take an active role in VA's ongoing $16 billion electronic health
record modernization if he is confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
He'd
bring deep technology and management experience to the job. He retired from
Microsoft just two months ago, after serving as executive VP of corporate
strategy, core services engineering and operations. He was in charge of the
planning and execution of the tech giant's cross-engineering and cross-business
initiatives. He also served many years as president of the Microsoft Office
division.
Between
those two jobs, DelBene spent a crucial several-month stint as part of the
Obama-Biden administration, signing on as a senior HHS advisor and joining a team
tasked with fixing the problem-riddled rollout of Healthcare.gov, the
Affordable Care Act's enrollment website.
RPM will be the new standard of care, a new study says
WebCareHealth
CEO Dr. Teresa Sieck unpacks the results of the
report about remote patient monitoring's abilities to find gaps
in care, improve patient engagement, enhance the provider experience and
boost revenue.
Sixty
percent of healthcare C-suite and clinical leaders see remote patient monitoring
becoming a new standard of care over the next two years, according to a new study released today by WebCareHealth, a company that
delivers solutions to remotely monitor patients managing chronic illnesses.
Further,
66% of survey respondents at provider organizations say RPM helps identify gaps
in care for 10% of patients. This could be a boon for telehealth technology
that could lead to better patient outcomes.
Dr.
Teresa Sieck is CEO, president, cofounder and chief medical officer at
WebCareHealth. Healthcare
IT News interviewed her to get her to dig into the most significant
results of the study.
Q. The
survey suggests that 40% of physician offices leverage RPM today, with nearly
70% of those practices reporting improvements in patient engagement,
satisfaction and increased revenue associated with ability to create capacity for
higher intensity office visits. What will it take for more providers to adopt
RPM?
A.
Remote patient monitoring adoption has historically been slow, cost and change
management being the top two barriers to RPM usage today. Despite innovations
in care delivery during the pandemic, some providers and patients are still
resistant to change.
November 03,
2021 - At a House Veterans Affairs Technology Modernization Subcommittee hearing
on November 2, members of Congress said they fear VA is moving on to the next
site for its EHR implementation before fully addressing patient safety and
training concerns at the pilot site.
The
department is planning to deploy the Cerner EHR at a VA facility in Columbus,
Ohio in February of 2022, but VA Deputy Secretary Donald Remy said that that
doesn’t mean VA will go live with the new EHR at that time.
“We’ll have
sandbox exercises to make sure that the facility is ready to receive and that
we’ve provided them with the tools to be successful,” Remy said.
However,
members of Congress on both sides of the aisle said that incoming data from the
pilot site in Spokane, Washington is too concerning to ignore.
Governmental
public health, which in the United States has long been relegated to the
periphery, has returned to center stage because of COVID-19. Because of funding
for a national forecasting center and a federal mandate for public health data
modernization, among other public health steps taken to control the pandemic,
there is now unprecedented awareness about the vital role of public health in
all sectors of society. Yet in this moment of crisis, it is imperative that
policymakers and practitioners avoid reducing the work of public health to
pandemic preparedness alone. Health is driven by communicable and chronic
diseases as well as social and environmental determinants. Addressing all
drivers of health requires relying on governmental public health in
collaboration with other sectors, because “public health is what we do together
as a society to ensure the conditions in which everyone can be healthy.”1
THE
NEED FOR PUBLIC HEALTH
AJPH’s special issue “COVID-19, Racism, and Public
Health Infrastructure” sounds the clarion call for dealing with the crisis of
conditions facing the public’s health. The disparate impact of the pandemic on
communities of color and low-income populations highlights generational
inequities institutionalized in the US health system and broader society. For
example, variation in COVID-19 infections and outcomes across the boroughs of
New York City, a pandemic epicenter, reflects the profound role that zip codes
play in determining the health of people in the United States.2 Likewise, disparities in COVID-19 mortality between Black
and White Americans are a shameful manifestation of the racial/ethnic gaps in
life expectancy that have existed since the country’s founding.
During
his first earnings call since taking the reins at Cerner, David Feinberg, M.D.,
a former executive at Google Health, said the health IT company will narrow its
strategic focus to "high-value areas" with a particular focus on
making medical records systems more reliable and usable.
"In
the past, Cerner has simply tried to do too many things by ourselves. Going
forward, we are going to change our approach and only focus on a small number
of important high-value areas—some of which we plan to achieve by partnering
with highly capable organizations we believe can help us achieve our mission,
which is to improve the lives of others," Feinberg told investors and
analysts during the company's third-quarter earnings call Friday.
Cerner
tapped Feinberg, who spent the past two years at Google leading the tech
giant's health efforts, to lead the health tech company back in August after a
three-month CEO search.
Chief
Financial Officer Mark Erceg said the company will take Feinberg up
on his challenge to focus on the patient and plans to "stop or jettison
side pursuits” that, in many cases, have proven to be nothing but
"resource drains and distractions."
Feinberg
said Cerner will focus on enhancing capabilities to the electronic health
record (EHR) system to help patients avoid unnecessary tests and
medications and help clinicians avoid errors and suggest what treatments may
work best.
Accuracy of voice assistants for medical information varies
Researchers
found distinct differences between popular digital voice assistants when they
were used for information about cancer screening.
“There
is room for improvement across all assistants,” the researchers wrote in Annals
of Family Medicine.
Google
is asked more than 1 billion health questions daily, Steven
Lin, MD, co-author of the new study and head of technology
innovation for the division of primary care and population health at Stanford
University School of Medicine, told Healio Primary Care.
“Since
nearly one‐half of US adults use a voice assistant, most commonly through their
smartphones, we decided to examine how popular voice assistants respond to
questions about cancer screenings, one of the most important preventive
services that patients are missing due to the pandemic,” he said.
For
the study, researchers asked Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant and
Microsoft Cortana whether they should get screened for 11 different types of
cancer.
The
following is a guest article by Dan Mirsky, Vice President of IT, and Benjamin
Walling, Vice President of Intelligence at Sage Dental.
Historically,
experts have argued that dentistry lagged 10 years behind the medical industry
in terms of adoption of cutting-edge technology such as electronic patient
records, practice management solutions, patient portals, etc. However, for many
standout dental practices, that simply is no longer the case. Many leaders in
the dental field are evolving rapidly and are now on equal ground with the
standard medical practice, but in some cases are even embracing and leveraging
technology solutions faster than the medical field can. For patients and
providers alike, this digital transformation is exciting because it offers
unmatched benefits, from convenience to cost savings.
On
Equal Ground
Dental
leaders who are committed to technological innovation have caught up to the
standard medical practice in crucial ways already, but especially in their use
of data management solutions both in and out of the exam room. Modern dental
practices are avid users of digital dental records, as they give practitioners
easy access to patients’ dental history and previous scans, and they can
quickly take notes during exams on tablets or smartphones. The front desk is
plugged into these platforms as well, enabling them to follow up with patients
for additional treatment, schedule appointments and otherwise automate
communication, billing, record sharing and CRM strategies – capabilities that
are common in medical practices today. These adoptions bring patients,
providers and administrative staff increased efficiency, which means clinicians
can spend more time with patients, and patient histories are more accessible
and reliable going forward.
One
of the most interesting conversations I had at the HLTH conference in Boston
this month was with Bevey Miner from Consensus.
She has quite the history in healthcare and so she has a ton of experiences and
perspective to draw on. Plus, she’s leading the charge for the newly
branded Consensus suite of solutions which is a break off of J2Global and eFax
that is just focused on healthcare.
While
many government officials are calling for things like #AxtheFax, Miner gave me
a number of perspectives on why the fax of today isn’t the same as your
grandma’s fax. We’ve come a long way from thermal paper and physical fax
machines.
This
was best illustrated by a chart she showed me which illustrates how far a “fax”
has come. At its most basic level, a home health nurse is sending a fax
to a doctor. However, as you can see in the chart below, there’s a lot
more happening behind the scenes of this digital “fax” to make it so much more
useful.
When
you see the details happening here, you can see how Consensus has taken faxing
a document to the next level. Instead of it just being a document,
they’re applying things like OCR and NLP on top of the document to create files
like CCDA and FHIR that accompany the document so it can be added to something
like an Epic EHR with the granular data. That’s much different than a
piece of paper lying on a fax machine.
November 02,
2021 - While the federal government has committed $16 billion to the
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) EHR implementation project so far,
officials must consider whether the health IT will improve clinical quality for
veterans, according to a Federal News Network op-ed
written by Ed Meagher, former VA Deputy CIO.
The electronic
health record modernization (EHRM) project, which aims to connect VA,
Department of Defense (DoD), and Coast Guard health records, has faced a
plethora of roadblocks since its inception. Challenges include inaccurate cost
estimates, delays, and patient safety concerns at EHR implementation pilot
sites.
Meagher said
that replacing VA’s legacy Veterans Information System Technology Architecture
(VISTA) system with the proposed Cerner EHR
implementation is “a self-inflicted wound that if allowed to proceed will
fester, degrade, and ultimately critically damage the VA’s ability to meet its
mission.”
Meagher noted
that Denis McDonough, VA secretary, sits at perhaps the most obvious yet
challenging inflection point for an incoming cabinet secretary.
November 02,
2021 - Telehealth interoperability with EHR systems is key for delivering
high quality care, according to guidance
published by the Michigan State Medical Society.
COVID-19
accelerated efforts to connect patients and providers virtually. Now, providers
are looking to single-source telehealth
solutions that integrate with EHR systems to maintain telehealth visits on a
large scale.
The article,
authored by Sue Boisvert, BSN, MHSA, patient safety risk manager II at The
Doctors Company, noted several benefits to telehealth interoperability
with EHR systems, including patient engagement.
When
surveyed, providers have reported that easy access to the EHR during a
telehealth visit facilitates better care and rapport with the patient, Boisvert
noted.
November 02,
2021 - Using data analytics, Pennington Biomedical Research Center,
Louisiana State University (LSU), and Tulane Health Science Center researchers
will investigate prevention and treatment methods for “long COVID” under a
National Institutes of Health award.
The new award
is part of the National Institutes of Health’s Researching COVID to
Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, which is enrolling 30,000 to 40,000
participants over the next 12 to 18 months to study the long-term impact of COVID-19
infection.
“Pennington
Biomedical, through the Louisiana Clinical and Translational Science Center, is
one of 25 research hubs that will study why some people are still sick many
months after being infected by the virus and how these lengthy illnesses affect
a person’s body,” said Pennington Biomedical Executive Director John Kirwan,
PhD, in a press
release.
The term long
COVID covers a wide range of physical and mental health side effects, such as
shortness of breath and brain fog, that some patients experience after the
illness.
November 02,
2021 - Telehealth company Teladoc Health launched a virtual primary care
model and saw an increase in revenue and visit volume during the third quarter
of 2021, according
to its recent earnings report.
The company
produced $521,658,000 in total revenue in Q3 2021 compared to $288,812,000 in Q3
2020, amounting to an 81 percent year-over-year growth. The company saw a 37
percent year-over-year growth for total visits in Q3 2021, going from 2,835,000
visits in Q3 2020 to 3,885,000 visits in Q3 2021.
Teladoc also
saw growth in US paid membership and US visit fee-only access numbers, with
52.5 and 23.6 million members in Q3 2021, respectively.
The company
credited its virtual primary care service Primary360 with helping to influence
the 2021 earnings.
November 01,
2021 - The cybersecurity workforce gap narrowed for the second consecutive
year, but the global workforce still must grow by 65 percent in order to
effectively defend critical assets and data, according to analysis from (ISC)².
(ISC)²
collected survey data from over 4,500 cybersecurity professionals. Only 4
percent of respondents reported working in healthcare, which validates previous
findings of inadequate
IT staffing within the sector.
Lasting
Consequences of a Cybersecurity Workforce Shortage
The
cybersecurity workforce gap, which (ISC)² defines as the number of additional
professionals that organizations need to adequately defend their critical
assets, decreased from 2.12 million last year to 2.72 million this year. The
study also revealed that in 2021, over three-quarters of respondents reported
being satisfied or extremely satisfied with their jobs.
While this
improvement in numbers and job satisfaction shows promise, increasing the
workforce by 65 percent is not an easy task. As current cybersecurity
professionals continue to work in the middle of the workforce shortage,
negative consequences may emerge.
A freer flow of health information holds promise of achieving ROI
ONC’s
National Coordinator Micky Tripathi contends that the ability to share health
data and include more information from other sources can aid industry
efficiency.
Data sharing
across the health ecosystem has the potential to improve industry efficiency
and get more bang for the buck invested in information systems.
Micky
Tripathi believes that’s one of several important realizations that can help
get the industry enthused about new federal regulations. He came to the lead
role in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information
Technology earlier this year, and has worked hard to advance the use of IT to
improve healthcare delivery and consumer engagement.
Tripathi
heads ONC as the agency looks to implement provisions of the Cures Act Final
Rule, widely known as information blocking provisions. He wants to put a
positive spin on the rules, preferring to call them information sharing
regulations. Improving the flow of information will be important as patients
seek more access to their medical information from providers to use as they
choose.
In this, the
second of a two-part interview with Health Data Management Editor in Chief Fred
Bazzoli, Tripathi discusses the promise he sees for data sharing, and gathering
and analyzing more data – particularly information on social determinants of
health.
HL7 International
is taking steps to counter concerns that the Fast Healthcare Interoperability
Resource (FHIR) standard and application programming interfaces that use it are
a security weak link.
The standards
organization leading the development and promulgation of FHIR standards and
implementation guides, issued a statement late last month to push back on
concerns raised by a white
paper based on research looking at shortcomings in basic protections in FHIR
API implementations.
While the
white paper by Alissa Valentina Knight at Las Vegas-based Knight Ink focuses on
security challenges of data aggregators and intermediaries using FHIR to enable
their access to data, the research has led to some carry over concerns about
whether FHIR itself has security flaws.
HL7’s
statement highlights that Knight’s white paper “represents a continuation of a
project that previously pointed out vulnerabilities in mHealth and telemedicine
in the United States, a topic that should concern us all.”
More than 230
organizations want state governors to preserve and expand state medical licensure
flexibilities for telehealth
until the public health emergency ends, according to a letter
led by the Alliance for Connected Care, ALS Association and National
Organization for Rare Disorders.
Nearly 30
states have allowed their emergency declarations to lapse in recent months,
according to the Alliance. That’s led many people to suddenly lose
access to telehealth services delivered by out-of-state providers as
exceptions to state medical licensing rules expired alongside the emergency
declarations.
It can be
especially challenging for people at high risk for COVID-19, those who require
specialized care, people with mobility issues and those living in rural areas
or areas with provider shortages, the letter said.
“Given the
urgency of the times as more states consider rolling back flexibilities enacted
at the start of the pandemic, states must act now to ensure patients can access
the care they need where they reside and when they need it, without having to
choose between cancelling an appointment or traveling long distances and
risking potential exposure to the COVID-19 virus for an in-person visit,” the
letter said.
AWS physician expert talks new use cases for telehealth, machine learning,
cloud
Dr. Rowland
Illing, director of international public sector health at Amazon Web Services,
offers a tutorial on some leading-edge technologies, and how they're being
deployed across healthcare.
Over
the last almost two years, healthcare has seen organizations rely on technology
and the cloud to get accurate, trusted information to patients and direct them
to the appropriate resources and care at scale.
From
chatbots and remote patient monitoring to telehealth, the industry worked
quickly to adapt and find new ways to care for patients. But what does all of
this mean for the future of patient care?
Healthcare
must look at how access to the right patient data, paired with advanced
analytics and machine learning, can enhance medical and scientific insights
tied to patient outcomes in an accurate, scalable, secure and timely manner,
says Dr. Rowland Illing, director, international public sector health, at
Amazon Web Services.
By
eliminating barriers and providing greater visibility into a patient's medical
history and then providing bespoke recommendations or materials to support
their care, interoperability and tech stand to provide a better patient
experience anywhere as well as empower patients to take greater control over
their healthcare journey, he said.
Over
the past several years, the number of ransomware attacks on healthcare
organizations has continued to grow. Worse, these attacks are beginning to impose
direct harm on patients.
Despite
the critical nature of these threats and the intense need to shut them down,
healthcare IT leaders have been struggling to keep up.
Now,
with COVID-19 having imposed a heavy burden on healthcare IT organizations,
they seem even less certain that they can beat back ransomware. According to a
new study
by Ponemon Institute that was commissioned by Censinet, the number of health IT leaders
who don’t feel confident that they can fight ransomware adequately is growing.
To
conduct the study, Ponemon surveyed 597 IT and IT security pros working in
health care delivery organizations, which the researchers define as being
entities that deliver clinical care and rely upon the security of third parties
with whom they contract services and products. These include integrated delivery
networks, regional health systems, community hospitals, physician groups and
payers.
November 01,
2021 - An mHealth application could help identify pregnant people at-risk
for preeclampsia and increase prophylactic low-dose aspirin intake through improved
patient-provider communication, a study
from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) revealed.
Preeclampsia
is a pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure and is
associated with maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. Taking low-dose
aspirin during pregnancy has been shown to prevent preeclampsia in patients who
are at moderate or high risk of the complication.
However, the
efficacy of low-dose aspirin is dependent upon three factors. At-risk patients
must be identified early in the pregnancy, as prophylaxis works best if started
before the patient is 16 weeks gestation. Low-dose aspirin use is also only
successful if there is adequate, clear patient-provider communication that
outlines the recommendation. Following the recommendation, patients must also
show adherence to taking the aspirin daily.
UPMC’s
MyHealthyPregnancy mHealth application aimed to address these factors and
improve patient education about and adherence to using low-dose aspirin to
avoid preeclampsia.
The
U.S. Supreme Court this past month invited the top attorney for the United
States federal government to weigh in about a case involving the Epic electronic
health record vendor and Tata Consultancy Services.
After
the case was distributed for conference in early October, the nation's highest
court invited Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar to file a brief expressing
the views of the United States.
Attorneys for
Mumbai-based Tata did not respond to requests for comment; Epic
representatives declined to comment.
WHY IT
MATTERS
As
noted this past week in Trade Secrets Trends, Epic filed a petition asking
the U.S. Supreme Court to review its case in April 2021.
President and CEO David Feinberg,
MD, MBA says that EHR vendors have done a good job of automating processes
and digitizing medical records, but their products haven’t reached their
potential to allow caregivers to spend less time on the computer. He says
one of his top priorities will be to improve system usability, a theme he
repeated several times in the call.
Feinberg says that Cerner has
historically tried to do too many things, often without involving other
companies. He says the company will focus on high-value areas, sometimes
in partnership with others.
The company says it is making
end-of-life decisions for some less-profitable products. It will also end
some low-value partnership arrangements.
Client satisfaction that has “not
been as high as it should be” has limited Cerner’s ability to pass along
the Consumer Price Index escalators that many of its customer contracts
allow.
Cerner’s data business that is now
known as Enviza is generating $130 million in annual revenue.
Feinberg says that while health
system mergers and acquisitions may create customer attrition, losing a
customer who is disappointed with Cerner’s products and services “is
something that is completely unacceptable to me.” He will meet with any
customers that have been identified as unhappy in his first 100 days.
Feinberg said in response to an
analyst’s question about layoffs that companies can’t shrink their
way to greatness. He said, “I think it oftentimes is a reflection of
management not predicting where the business is going and getting folks
retrained for areas of growth so that this stuff doesn’t happen. We need
to right the ship, and I think that’s part of the process here. But in
some ways, to me, it’s been lack of discipline and lack of focus.”
Cerner’s employee count dropped by
1,000 from the end of Q2 to the end of Q3, equally split between layoffs
and managed attrition.
Asked about revenue cycle product
consolidation, Feinberg said that it should have been done earlier, but
the mindset was that anything built outside of Kansas City couldn’t be the
best.
Feinberg says that HealtheIntent
offers a good strategy for population health management, but it needs to
be streamlined and some of it is falling behind competing systems.
Northwell Health and Aegis Ventures
create what they say will become a multi-billion dollar program for
investing in seed-stage AI-driven healthcare companies.
Pharmacy fulfillment, diagnostics,
and telemedicine company Truepill raises $142 million in funding at a
valuation of $1.6 billion.
RCM platform vendor NThrive and its
financial backer Clearlake Capital Group will acquire TransUnion
Healthcare for $1.7 billion in cash.
Cerner launches Enviza, an operating
unit that combines expertise from Cerner and its acquired real world data
vendor Kantar Health.
Amazon launches Alexa Smart
Properties for healthcare facilities.
Britain’s finance ministry will
allocate $2.9 billion for technology improvements across the NHS.
Consumer DNA testing company 23andMe
will acquire telemedicine and online pharmacy vendor Lemonaid for $400
million.
Medicare primary care provider Oak
Street Health acquires RubiconMD, which offers PCPs electronic patient
consults with specialists.
Shares in London-based digital
health tools vendor Babylon Health closed their first day of trading
Friday up 18% following its SPAC merger.
Recent times have seen a devaluation of big
numbers to the point where you have to remind yourself that dollar figures with
nine digits remain a big deal.
Back in August, Telstra Health revealed it
was buying MedicalDirector, reportedly for a cool $350,000,000.
The subsidiary of Australia’s biggest telco
has been a presence in the health system for some time now and it had
previously shown interest in MedicalDirector before — at least until it was
snapped up by private equity a few years ago.
But its purchase is still a big splash into
general practice.
So why does medical prescribing software, the
mechanism underpinning so much of a GP’s clinical life that it can often be
overlooked, attract that level of big business interest?
Professor
Mary Foley is managing director of Telstra Health. She arrived four years ago
following a distinguished career which included a long stint as director
general and secretary of health for NSW.
“We want to look at how we can support general practice to better
connect with the rest of this health system, given that general practice is a
linchpin in the delivery of health care across the country,” she told Australian Doctor shortly
after the buyout was announced to the media.
She
talks about her company’s “deep, deep knowledge and expertise” of health IT
across pharmacy, hospitals, aged care and Aboriginal medical services.
“We
are hoping to connect across those domains and learn across those domains so
that we can deliver innovation faster.”
MedicalDirector’s
general practice footprint remains significant, although there has been a
vigorous debate about the extent to which it has been eclipsed by its
rival Best Practice, the other software vendor Telstra Health once considered
buying.
Professor Foley
doesn’t explicitly outline the commercial opportunities she sees. She
wants to consult with MedicalDirector staff.
But
she says the cost-benefit calculations were straightforward in terms
of identifying returns.
“On
top of that, any acquiring organisation will say that if a business is
part of us, what else is the value we can see from it,” she added.
But
various commercial opportunities do get touted when it comes to any GP practice
software.
MedicalDirector
is the sort of product, it is argued, that could be exported overseas to the
bigger and lucrative UK market, possibly even the El Dorado that exists
for any vendor that succeeds in the US.
Professor
Foley is quick to stress that general practice in Australia has been at the
“vanguard of digitalization in health”, not just in this country,
but compared to countries around the world.
The
industry commentators will also refer to the masses of de-identified data
generated by prescribing software. It creates an unprecedented picture of the
health system - its success and failures.
And
pharma is also keen to track the post marketing fate of its products, both
in terms of their clinical and market impact. As such all software has
value.
And
then there is that idea, which seems close to Professor Foley’s vision, of
healing the communication fractures.
It
is worth stressing the scale of GP consults in the nexus of care. Based on
Telstra Health's numbers, MedicalDirector's software is used to deliver more
than 80 million consults a year, supporting the practice of 23,000 medical
practitioners.
It is clear that Telstra Health
understands the General Practice is a key gateway to the health system in OZ
and having one of the central applications that is widely used in that sector
can only improve their influence and penetration in the overall Digital Health
domain in Australia.
With this purchase Telstra Health
will be able to offer connectivity to is applications in other areas such as
aged and community care as will as its secure messaging solution.
There is also the possibility of
offering some package solutions in the GP space to simplify and support GP
operations etc.
I am not sure about the price paid
and – while Telstra has deep pockets – I am not sure if they will turn a profit
on the deal – time will tell. Strategically it seems like a good move!
