Top news
In England the General Practice Group of the British Medical Association warns members of possible unintended consequences of NHS England’s Data Save Lives programme, which comes into force on 1 November. Patients over the age of 16 will automatically have access to all their digital medical records stored in TPP and EMIS. The same functionality is being developed for practices that use Cegedim.
The BMA GPC suggests that practices use a designated SNOMED code that allows them to protect the information of patients whose relationships put them at risk.
They also note the “poor functionality of current software” that allows redacted records to be automatically activated when a patient changes doctors.
The group says a media campaign is needed to warn the public that their family members can access their records if they know (or can find or guess) their password.
HIStalk messages and requests
The FOMO in me calls for experimentation with the Meta Quest 2 VR headset, though the miser in me counters with (a) the strong possibility that I won’t achieve ROI because I’ll lose interest; (b) waiting for the release of the follow-up product next year at approximately the same price; and (c) my unwillingness to support Facebook with eyes or dollars.
Webinars
None planned soon. Previous webinars are on ours YouTube channel. Contact Lore to introduce your own.
Acquisitions, financing, business and shares
Google acquires Five-employee Sound Life Sciences, which offers an FDA-approved breathing app for smartphones and smart speakers.
Walmart Health will open 16 new health centers in its Florida supercenters next year.
Sales
- PerfectServe chooses Lyniate Rhapsody as a Service Integration.
- AtlantiCare chooses Orbita’s virtual health assistant and conversational AI platform for digital gateway and outbound communications, such as post-discharge follow-up and care reminders.
people
Everbridge rent Sheila Carpenter (Zix) as CIO.
Karen Luk (AbleTo) joins Vivante Health as SVP of Product.
InteliChart rent Anthony Carter, MSEE, MBA (CloudFran) as COO.
Victor Bagwell, MPH, MAS, MBA, MSc (Optimal Analytics) joins the FDA as Division Director, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Office of Regulatory Operations.
Avicena hires Tesia Folse (Gainwell) as VP of Marketing.
Announcements and Deployments
UCLA Center for SMART Health and Heart Health I announce the finalists for their $100,000 prize for using data science to manage or improve health:
- Constant Therapy Health (speech, language and cognitive therapy at home).
- Geisinger (linking people with chronic illnesses to clinical services).
- Prenosis (assessing hospitalized patients for risk of sepsis).
Examination of the Black Book of Hospitals and Medical Practices names AQuity’s solutions are top-ranked in virtual scribes, medical transcription and document capture.
Massachusetts Medical Society opens applications for its IT in Medicine Award Program for medical students and master’s residents.
Healthcare Triangle started a service to help healthcare and life sciences organizations deploy Metaverse environments.
Get well will improve its inpatient offering as a user-centric solution, including a new user experience, mobile solutions, automated workflow and caregiver communications, and further EHR integration.
Net health integrates its EHR with PointClickCare to support the exchange of clinical records with post-acute healthcare facilities.
New KLAS report on home health technology find that Homecare Homebase is the preferred provider for large independent organisations, although user satisfaction is average and innovation is lagging, largely because it offers broad, well-integrated functionality. Independent agencies rated MatrixCare the top, while health system-owned agencies ranked Epic and Meditech the highest.
Government and politics
VA employee says that the 12,000-employee National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may join the VA’s Oracle Cerner project.
A politician notes that many state Medicaid programs refuse to pay for remote patient monitoring either because they question its effectiveness in managing chronic disease or because they are unwilling to spend the money.
Privacy and security
Australian MediBank says that its Oct. 12 breach was worse than initially reported by the insurer, which now acknowledges that the hacker accessed all of its 4 million customers’ personal data and significant amounts of their health claims data.
Meta spokesperson says that using its pixel user tracking tool to send sensitive information to advertisers, as several leading health systems appear to have done, violates its policies.
others
Vanderbilt University Medical Center Informatics Professor Allison McCoy, Ph.D questions why practices require long-standing patients to enter information already documented in their EHR. I’ll join the bandwagon in noting that providers have always pushed the same literal or virtual clipboard full of poorly designed forms to every patient, long-term or otherwise. In addition to having the patient input information that is already on file, this raises the question – how do the two sets of information reconcile and by whom? Electronic questionnaires, or more precisely their misuse by practices that fail to tailor their messages, may have made the practice even more annoying. Healthcare interactions are among the most important and most expensive for many of us, so to greet loyal customers with blank faces and blank forms is inexcusable, especially when pharmacies, dental offices, accounting and law practices, banks and even veterinary offices always make customers feel known and valued.
Entertainment edition profiles retired ICU nurse Amy Loughren, who helped convict friend and colleague Charles Cullen of murdering hospitalized patients by adding lethal drugs obtained from Pyxis drug dosing cabinets to their IVs. The story is dramatized in the new Netflix crime film The Good Nurse. In 2002, Loughren became suspicious of several mysterious patient deaths at Somerset (New Jersey) Medical Center. She looked at Cullen’s activity log at Cerner, which showed that Cullen was seeing patients who were not under his care, and some of those patients had died unexpectedly. Cullen eventually admitted to killing dozens of patients by moving from one job to another at hospitals that refused to notify authorities of their suspicions or give him a bad job referral for fear of being sued. In another health IT perspective, investigators were initially told that the hospital’s Pyxis system only kept records for two months, but a detective found that the information was actually kept indefinitely, which convinced Cullen to confess to the 40 murders. that he could recall (the actual number of patient deaths is speculated to be as high as 400).
Sponsored Updates
- Smart medical objects will expose at NextGen UGM November 6-9 in Nashville.
- Loyal health will expose at the Healthcare Internet Conference Nov. 7-9 in Miami.
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