This week was the HIMSS Annual Conference, the biggest week in Health IT. We’ve been covering some of the major digital health news from the conference right along, but today we’re bringing it all together in one wrap-up of the event.
We started off the conference with our own event (in partnership with the Personal Connected Health Alliance), the Digital and Personal Connected Health event, where we heard from a number of providers working on digital health projects. Read all about that event below, and then read on for a roundup of more news from the show.
Digital and Personal Connected Health
Adrienne Boissy, Chief Innovation Officer at Cleveland Clinic, kicked off the event talking about her approach to patient engagement, giving several specific examples of how Cleveland Clinic is realizing those ideas.
“Patients should be defining their own engagement,” Boissy said. “If you are designing technology that doesn’t capitalize on patients’ own values and preferences, we’re going to miss the mark." More
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Walgreens Digital Division Vice President Greg Orr and Michael Taitel, senior director of health analytics at Walgreens, shared data about Walgreens’ Balance Rewards for Healthy Choices program, a set of web, app and text-based programs designed to improve medication adherence, activity and immunization, among other things.
“Every second we fill a prescription from a mobile device scan, we get 8- to 10,000 pharmacy chats through the smartphone and we have over 40 partners on the platform,” Orr said. “We’ve now had over 3 billion points awarded and over 1.25 million connected apps and devices and about $3 million in discounts given out to people purely from tracking their behavior.” More
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Pamela Landis, VP of Information and Analytics Services at Carolinas HealthCare System shared data from four small studies of the MyCarolinas Tracker remote patient monitoring platform for diabetes, heart failure, cardiac rehab, and whipple surgery recovery. Most of the studies were on small groups of 8 to 11 patients, but the diabetes study looked at a group of 39. In that study, patients were enrolled and were given no devices -- they could either enter their blood sugar manually or bring their own connected glucometer. Just from three months of monitoring, 81 percent of the group reduced A1C and the average reduction was 17 percent.
The cardiac rehab trial -- which used a connected blood pressure cuff and scale -- found that most patients lost weight, their blood pressure and heart rate stayed in recommended ranges, and only one of the 10 patients was readmitted, and that was for a non-cardiac reason. The whipple surgery study, using Fitbit Flex devices, found that the more steps a patient got, the fewer complications they experienced. They also found that the Fitbit was motivating to patients. More
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On a panel discussing the business case for digital and connected health, speakers from various backgrounds and specialties shared how their organizations approach, implement and evaluate such technological infusions into their work. Bringing digital tools into health systems may be welcomed for the improved continuity of care and patient engagement, the panel opined, but adding value in a way that improves the financial bottom line is an unavoidable necessity as well.
“When we look at business models for digital health, there is the obvious idea of putting sensors on people and trying to do something valuable with that data, but the cost and the roadblock of trying to imagine all the massive amounts of data is a barrier,” said Medtronic General Manager Chris Landon. “So, if we can make an additional, up-front investment that allows us to scale the monitoring infrastructure of multiple streams of data coming in, we can re-leverage that investment by creating more services and value on top of each data stream.” More
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Cedars-Sinai Director of Health Services Research Brennan Spiegel spoke about his experiences using virtual reality to help alleviate patients’ pain and allow them to virtually escape the confines of the hospital during their recovery. He also talked about when virtual reality doesn’t work.
“We’ve now done this with well over 300 of our patients and we have been learning a lot about when it works and when it doesn’t work,” Spiegel said. “How effective is this for managing conditions like pain, managing depression, managing anxiety, even managing hypertension?” More
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Children’s Health, a system of pediatric hospitals in the Dallas, Texas area, turned to Proteus Digital Health’s ingestible sensor when other kinds of remote monitoring weren’t quite getting the job done for a population of post-organ transplant teenagers. Julie Hall-Barrow, the vice president of virtual health and innovation at Children’s Health, discussed the project.
“What happens when you’re 15 or 16?” Hall-Barrow said. “You want to start driving, making decisions, you’re independent, your mother is not on your hip 24-7. But the problem with this population is their mother had to be on their hip 24-7. It’s an extreme disease that requires a lot of regimen, and for a lot of kids the transition from Mom or Dad doing these things to doing it themselves is the transition from child to adult.” More
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It may be more challenging to make healthcare consumer-focused and tech-enabled than other industries, but that doesn’t mean some of the same design and usability sensibilities that work so well in other services can’t be applied. In a panel discussion, innovation specialists shared what strategies they have used to make mobile apps, connected devices and other digital health tools work for their organizations, and what they’ve learned from missteps along the way.
“What patients are really telling us is, ‘Make it easier and get out of my way’," Carolinas’s Pamela Landis said. “We sometimes put up a lot of barriers in the process.” More
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Dr. Joseph Kvedar, Partners HealthCare VP of connected health, talked about how far advances like telemedicine and remote patient monitoring have come, how far they still have to go, and how the industry can clear the final hurdles between today’s early adopters and widespread, mainstream adoption.
“I have to look at it and say, maybe this thing is just happening, is it like a snowball rolling down a hill at this point?” Kvedar said “Is innovation required? Because if it is, leadership needs to step in, but if it isn’t, we should get out the way and let it happen.” More
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Chanin Wendling, Geisinger Health System’s AVP of Informatics shared how the physician-led health system, which serves 45 counties throughout rural Pennsylvania and New Jersey and also has a health plan, decided to develop a system-wide plan to bring in customer relationship management software as the core technology to facilitate personalized service at each and every patient interaction.
“What we want to do is be able to look at you and know you and be able to tailor and deliver that care based on what we know,” said Wendling. “Some people like to use technology, some don't. Some prefer a lot of data and analytics from the doctor to take them through their options to their care, some just want doctors to tell them what to do. Some prefer handholding. Some respond better to the drill sergeant approach.” More
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Todd Dunn, director of Innovation at Intermountain healthcare, closed the conference by discussing the key requirements of innovation including empathy, curiosity, and good observational skills. He shared a particular example of innovation at Intermountain: An app for measuring wounds that they worked with startup Tissue Analytics to implement.
“They understood the job to be done because a doctor at Johns Hopkins was trying to innovate around wound dressings to see whether or not they were making wounds better, but then he realized the measurements were so inconsistent and the data was so disconnected, they didn’t have the insights they needed to make inferences,” Dunn said. “So now we have an app on a phone that measures the wound, that colors the wound, that tracks it over time. You can do it at home, at the clinic, at the hospital, so you have a longitudinal record.”
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Haipeng “Mark” Zhang, a clinical informaticist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts, spoke about his experience creating an app to connect local physicians to burn specialists in the area. Although the feature of the app that the team focused on was the ability to page a specialist in Massachusetts, they found that they were getting downloads from all over the country and the information and resources section was seeing a much higher utilization. Now, they are reworking the app to be more focused on resources and to target it to a national audience.
“When we released the burn application, we weren’t expecting the resources to be popular for more than just the local attachment area around the Brigham,” Zhang said. “But they were and it’s really defined our next step, which is to push us out further to a more national stage. So it’s really important to be flexible.”
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Building a patient-centric, interoperable and digitally connected healthcare ecosystem takes a lot of collaboration, and the technology is often the easiest part. Dr. Lynda Chin, who leads the University of Texas System’s Institute for Health Transformation, shared how her organization developed a digital health platform working with a team that included hundreds of different people – local care providers and patients, private companies like AT&T and IBM Watson and research institutions. They built trusted frameworks to establish transparency between partiers and the community and began creating infrastructure for data sharing and analytics. They then launched a program to monitor, prevent and manage diabetes and obesity in Brownsville, Texas, which is a rural, low-income, largely Latino population.
"We started in a place where we had to design system that is applicable and affordable, because that creates commonality where you can take a platform and generalize it,” said Chin. “The idea was to integrate with existing systems and enhance access and value while having data flowing through an open digital ecosystem. It’s more than just a health IT project. It’s not hard to build it, but it is very hard to get it to work together.”
More news from HIMSS
Acquisitions
Patient engagement company Medfusion acquired NexSched, which makes a patient-facing appointment scheduling tool. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Medfusion started out as a patient portal company way back in 2000. The company was acquired by Intuit in 2011 and then re-acquired by its original owner in 2013. It added a payment offering in 2015. NexSched is an appointment scheduling platform that lets patients access a doctor’s schedule in a limited way and set their own appointments, leading to fewer no-shows and a decreased call volume. Medfusion also announced a number of new app updates at HIMSS. The MedFusion app now makes it easier to share data with caregivers, allows users to connect to pharmacies and labs, and makes it easier to switch between account profiles for different members of the family. More
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Clinical cognitive specialist Jvion revealed plans to buy Predixion Healthcare. Atlanta-based Jvion said the acquisition brings the Predixion Healthcare IT practice expertise, expands Jvion’s market presence among providers that are already on the path to implementing cognitive science tools, and adds Predixion’s data pools to the existing information sets that feed Jvion’s machine. Predixion co-founder and CFO Steve DeSantis said the deal will also help Jvion augment its reach to more patient in more care settings. More
Launches and Announcements
Ambra Health, which makes medical data and image management SaaS, launched a cloud development platform for medical imaging. The platform provides new APIs for health system and hospital IT departments to extend imaging and data into other applications like population health or reporting tools, and it also allows third-party developers to integrate Ambra technologies to a variety of healthcare applications.
"The Ambra cloud development platform is a natural next step in the evolution of Ambra imaging services," Morris Panner, CEO of Ambra Health, said in a statement. "Imaging doesn't live in a silo and needs to be closely coupled with other applications in the care continuum. Now, providers and other third parties can build from our best-in-class, open system, to create new solutions that provide better, more efficient patient care.”
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Medisafe, a technology vendor that markets a personalized medication management platform, unveiled a new feature that alerts users of possible drug-to-drug interactions that may cause unexpected side effects and/or alter the way medications perform. The interactions feature also includes disclosures when medications have other lifestyle implications, such as interactions with specific foods or alcohol. With this latest enhancement, Medisafe is aiming to reduce the millions of preventable health emergencies resulting from dangerous medication combinations as well as increase adherence to medications patients are not taking as prescribed, due to side effects related to a known interaction. More
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Xcertia, the new standards body for mobile apps that launched late last year at the Connected Health Conference, held a meeting at HIMSS to explain more about the organization's approach and to extend a plea for more industry voices to join the membership-based organization. The founding members include the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, HIMSS, and DHX Group. Xcertia wants to solve the same problem Happtique did: Help consumers know which health apps to use and help doctors know which apps to prescribe. But rather than building a bespoke app store or a certification scheme, Xcertia's approach is to bring as many industry stakeholders as possible together and create a robust set of standards. More
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HealthTap launched an Amazon Alexa skill called Dr. AI. Though the tools skirts the loaded realm of medical advice, users who ask about health problems are answered with suggestions from a database of doctors’ answers to questions or by offering to schedule an in-person or virtual doctor visit. Update: Although HealthTap announced the skill at the show, it's not yet available in the Alexa store. A spokesperson told MobiHealthNews it was held up on Amazon's end.
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Telmediq, a healthcare communications technology vendor, unveiled a Near Field Communications system that is part of its Healthcare Communications Hub. NFC is a method of uniquely identifying items using radio tags. These so-called “smart” tags enable information to be shared with a simple tap. With its new system, Telmediq is using the power of NFC tags aiming to automate workflows in healthcare. More
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SnapMD, a telehealth technology vendor, announced the expansion of its VCMnexus Developer Program with the availability of new open-source software development kits. SnapMD’s SDKs make it easy, the company said, for developers to quickly build new applications using SnapMD’s source code. SnapMD’s VCMnexus Developer Program is designed to enable developers to leverage the company’s Virtual Care Management technology – a cloud-based, white-label telemedicine platform – to build their own integrations and applications quickly and easily. More
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Healthcare information company Ascom announced the latest version of its North American release of nurse call system Telligence. The touchscreen platform is designed to make nurse workflows more efficient by eliminating steps in daily tasks and improving staff communication.
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Merck announced the launch of ILUM Health Solutions, an enterprise-wide disease management platform that leverages data within existing hospital IT systems to provide clinical decision support tools and an intuitive dashboard to prioritize disease cases and monitoring.
Deals and Customer Wins
Telemedicine provider American Well and Samsung Electronics are collaborating to create a new level of healthcare service in regards to consumer reach, interoperability and accessibility, but they aren’t yet disclosing what that end user experience will look like. While both companies were short on specifics, they described the partnership as one presenting a “tremendous opportunity,” that will leverage Samsung’s leadership position in consumer electronics with American Well’s enterprise telehealth service called the Exchange, which the company launched last year. More
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Teladoc became the latest telemedicine company to incorporate connected devices into its offering via an expanded partnership with FDA-cleared connected thermometer company Kinsa. The Teladoc app will automatically detect the Kinsa app on a user’s phone, and guide the user to Kinsa. Users can also import up to 10 days of temperature readings into the Teladoc platform from the Kinsa app. That data goes into the physician's view of the patient's health record. More
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Healthcare IT security company Imprivata partnered with Connected Technology Solutions to allow self-service, single patient registration at CTS check-in kiosks. Imprivata’s identifier technology is called PatientSecure and enables hospitals to use biometric palm vein scans at CTS kiosks to verify medical information, insurance validation and co-pay collection without the need for doctors or patients to manually enter the information.
“The use of biometric identification at registration kiosks is a great addition to our solutions and helps transform the entire registration and intake process, working directly with the Epic EHR,” Marc Avallone, vice president of sales and business development at CTS said in a statement. “Integrating Imprivata PatientSecure palm-vein biometrics with our kiosks has sped up the patient identification process and assures positive patient identification every time. This improves patient safety, overall registration throughput, and ultimately enhances the entire patient experience.”
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Healthcare IT company Praxify, which makes apps and software to augment EHRs and improve workflow, officially launched following a successful pilot with Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. Praxify’s two products are MIRA, a mobile app designed to improve EHR usability by collecting, analyzing and displaying relevant patient data on an easy to read interface; and SIYA, a care management platform for payers, providers and patients. At Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, doctors tried out MIRA (which also features voice-activated digital assistance and adaptable templates), and reported a 30 percent uptick in their documentation and order creation speed. Praxify is also an Apple Mobility Partner and has worked with the tech giant to design the product to fit specifically for a doctor’s mobile workflow.
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Montreal-based Tactio Health, which makes mobile apps and device and app-connected platforms to enable remote monitoring, is working with wearable company Garmin to develop a telehealth program specifically focused on senior citizens. Garmin and Tactio have collaborated since 2014, and after running some pilots to identify which criteria are most important to seniors (such as a unified user experience and long battery life), the two companies have created a product that directly integrates vivofit 3 wearables with the TactioRPM patient apps. The single, unified offering allows payers, providers and pharma to conduct health and wellness monitoring programs with a single patient-facing app.
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Salesforce is now integrating Validic’s personal health data connectivity platform with its Customer Relationship Management system and Salesforce HealthCloud. The integration adds a “Health/Wellness” application into the CRM, so Salesforce can securely view Validic-provided data from over 400 personal health devices – such as those that track sleep, weight and biometrics from remote chronic condition monitoring – through displays stored natively in the Salesforce interface, allowing for care teams to manage patient populations in near real-time.
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AssistRx, maker of a cloud-based patient access workflow platform called iAssist, announced an integration with Surescripts’ Electronic Prescribing platform. Users will have access to the iAssist platform through the Surescripts network, with the multi-pronged goal of simplifying patients’ access to medication as well as improved medication adherence and outcomes.
Surescripts also announced the expansion of its National Record Locator Service, with four more major health systems taking it live this week. These last few partnerships signal Surescripts' deployment in all 50 states across 10 major metropolitan areas. The NRLS, which was launched in January, equips providers with quick, easy access to clinical records for 230 million patients and four billion nationwide patient visit locations, which includes hospitals, physician practices and community medical clinics.
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The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, the research arm of New York healthcare provider Northwell Health, announced an alliance with GE Ventures to advance bioelectronics research. The collaboration and investment from GE Ventures will focus on discovering, developing and commercializing new diagnostic and therapeutic solutions in bioelectronics medicine for a range of acute and chronic diseases and injuries, including cancer, diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases.
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IBM Watson Health announced a few new partnerships: Massachusetts nonprofit healthcare provider Atrius Health will work with IBM Watson to develop a cloud-based service to improve the doctor-patient experience. Using the Watson Cognitive Insights platform, Atrius hopes to get a holistic view of the myriad influence on an individual’s health, such as social determinants, and subsequently deliver point-of care support through analytics.
The Central New York Care Collaborative also tapped IBM Watson to develop a regional population health management platform to reduce Medicaid costs (primarily by decreasing avoidable hospital visits) throughout the 2,000-plus healthcare and community-based providers in the CNYCC system.
Among IBM Watson Health's many other launches and partnership announcements, the company also debuted the Imaging Clinical Review, its first cognitive imaging offering. The tool employs AI to review medical data and help medical professionals identify cases needing the most immediate attention. The company also announced its suite of Value-Based Care Management tools, a cloud-based offering which is designed to help providers, health plans and employers to better manage costs and quality of healthcare services. Over time, it will integrate the combined capabilities of Watson Care Manager, Truven Health Analytics, Phytel and Explorys (which were all announced at earlier HIMSS conferences) and patient-level data from a variety of sources.
At the same time, MD Anderson reportedly put its partnership with IBM Watson on hold. The collaboration was originally announced in October 2013 and MD Anderson has reportedly already sunk $62 million into the Oncology Expert Advisory project, which used the IBM Watson cognitive computing system to facilitate its fight against cancer. But the project hasn’t met its goal, and MD Anderson has stated it is looking elsewhere in the market for a partner.
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Microsoft and UPMC have partnered to improve healthcare delivery through a series of projects. The health system will work on Microsoft's Healthcare NExT Initiative, which will focus on clinician empowerment and productivity with AI, officials said. The companies will work together to develop new tools that will first be implemented at UPMC before it hits the market. More
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Lenovo Health joined forces with Orbita, a connected home healthcare technology vendor, to unveil a virtual home care system based on two recently debuted products: Lenovo Smart Assistant and Orbita Voice. Lenovo's Smart Assistant, first previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, is a voice-controlled speaker for the home that combines the Amazon Alexa voice platform with Lenovo styling and Harman Kardon speaker technology. Orbita’s Voice is a voice experience manager for healthcare that builds on other voice-assistant platforms like Amazon Alexa to enable intuitive, patient-centric home care experiences designed to improve patient engagement, care coordination and outcomes, the vendor said. More
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Efficacy-focused digital health company Evidation Health partnered with the Shepherd Center, a private hospital in Atlanta, to measure the impact of digital health interventions on clinical and economic outcomes for people with neurological diseases and injuries.
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Cigna teamed up with Microsoft to collaborate on a VR-powered interactive game designed to give insights about personal health. Cigna created the BioBall, a bowling ball-sized device that uses the Microsoft HoloLens glasses. Players hold the wireless ball in a one-minute race to capture images that flash on the HoloLens screen, and the BioBall measures their pulse and movement. When they finish the game, players receive their blood pressure and BMI on the headset and a companion email with health tips.
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AT&T is now providing wireless connectivity for Zywie, which makes a remote cardiac monitoring device called ZywiePro. The device uses mobile and cloud technology to detect cardiovascular arrhythmias and sends doctors detailed diagnostics. The system will run on AT&T Control Center.
Reports and surveys
According to a new study, 81 percent of U.S. healthcare organizations and 76 percent of global healthcare organizations will increase information security spending in 2017. The “2017 Thales Data Threat Report, Healthcare Edition” was released by cybersecurity technology and services vendor Thales and analyst firm 451 Research. More
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HIMSS has woven together two HIMSS research efforts: the annual HIMSS Leadership Survey and the biennial HIMSS Workforce Study, which detail the health IT priorities of key stakeholder groups and their links to various strategic initiatives (for example, employment of select IT leaders) and economic measures (for instance, workforce projections). In an era of maturing EHR adoption, the new study finds health IT leaders continue to report positive market growth metrics. Yet, health IT staffing structures and experiences in provider sites outside the hospital, coupled with their unique clinical IT priorities, point to a need to address the challenges faced by these types of providers in order to propel the sector’s growth. More
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Population health management company Transcend Insights released a survey showing patients have high expectations for medical information sharing, although they don’t necessarily have an accurate understanding of the healthcare industry’s limitations in delivering on that promise. Almost all patients surveyed say it is important for any health institution to have full access to their medical history, no matter what they do or where they are, and 72 percent thought that such sharing was possible. Unfortunately, interoperability isn’t quite there: only a quarter of all hospitals are able to functionally find, send, receive and use clinical information with other providers.
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Accenture released results from a survey examining consumer attitudes toward healthcare data and how much they trust it. Even though 26 percent of consumers have experienced a data breach, most of them believe that payers and providers are working to protect their digital healthcare data Physicians are the most trusted, with 88 percent of respondents saying they trust them with their data, and pharma wasn’t far behind with 84 percent of consumers’ saying they trust them. Payers and labs weren’t far behind at 82 percent each, but government entities lag in having consumers’ trust – only 56 percent of respondents believe their data is secure with them.
