< + > Small health systems add ambient note generation to EHR workflows

PartnerMD and CVFP Medical Group say they’re using Suki's AI-powered voice assistant at several of their primary care practices, diagnostic centers and urgent care clinics to reduce clinicians’ administrative burdens.

< + > Telemedicine and RPM transform care delivery in Alabama, racking up wins

Through its virtual care and remote monitoring programs, University of Alabama at Birmingham has increased census and case mix index of rural hospitals, among other successes.

< + > Why Trustworthy AI is Key to Preventing the Erosion of Trust at Scale

“With Artificial Intelligence we now have the ability to erode trust at scale”

Reggie Townsend, Vice President of Data Ethics at SAS made that statement to a room full of clients, data analysts, AI experts, and media at the SAS Innovate conference. That attention-grabbing line was Townsend’s opening to an engaging keynote on the need for “Trustworthy AI” and thoughtful incorporation of ethics into the AI conversation.

Healthcare IT Today had the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with Townsend to learn how SAS is infusing ethics and trustworthiness into their operations. We also wanted to hear more about the company’s pioneering AI work with Erasmus University Medical Center (Erasmus MC) and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

Trustworthy AI

Townsend’s provocative statement comes from his concern over the potential use of AI to spread misinformation – both intentionally and unintentionally – and how that can erode trust across all industries and throughout society. He used deep-fake technology (where AI is used to generate visuals of people saying/doing things that are realistic in appearance) as an example.

Not long ago a deep-fake photo of the Pope wearing a puffer jacket went viral. That photo was clearly a joke, but it illustrated the power that AI-generated visuals can have on public perception.

“It doesn’t take too many leaps to think about what happens if we can’t trust what we see and hear,” said Townsend. “This is unsettling to me and I think it is important we recognize this and that we start to raise our overall understanding about AI.”

Townsend also strongly recommends that organizations become champions of “trustworthy AI” as a way to prevent this erosion of trust at scale.

“Trustworthy AI is central to us here at SAS,” stated Townsend. “We want to make sure that we are building a platform that is worthy of the trust of our customers so that our customers, in turn, can use our platform to build applications that are responsible.”

Making Ethics a Central Operating Pillar  

To build a trustworthy AI platform, SAS has adopted several internal initiatives designed to help staff become more aware of and deal with ethical challenges when developing or deploying AI.

One of these initiatives was the establishment of a set of six principles of ethical AI use:

1. Human centricity
2. Transparency
3. Inclusivity
4. Privacy and Security
5. Robustness
6. Accountability

These principles help guide the product roadmap and the implementation of new features in the SAS platform.

SAS employees all receive training on these principles. That training is designed to help staff navigate through the “gray areas” that may come up during sales discussions and client engagements. These gray areas can be quite tricky – especially in healthcare.

For example, what is the right action to take if you learn that the AI algorithm that a researcher has been spending months on has an under-representation of women in the training dataset? And yet the preliminary results from the AI show that it has the potential to significantly improve the outcomes of patients.

The training helps staff work through these types of murky situations.

Trustworthy AI in Healthcare  

SAS has established a collaborative partnership with Erasmus MC, one of Europe’s leading academic hospitals, and TU Delft, home of the TU Delft Digital Ethics Centre. Together, these three organizations created the Responsible and Ethical AI in Healthcare Lab (REAHL).

According to a SAS company statement, the REAHL aims to address the ethical concerns and challenges related to developing and implementing AI technologies in health care. This includes ensuring that AI systems are unbiased, transparent and accountable, and used in ways that respect patients’ rights and values. The REAHL seeks to create a framework for ethical AI in health care that will serve as a model for medical centers and regions around the world.

“With REAHL, we have a multidisciplinary group of experts coming together to think about things related to medicine, digital ethics policy, and the use of AI,” said Townsend.

An example of the work emerging from REAHL is the use of AI to identify the length of stay that patients may need post-surgery. For a particular type of surgery, the national standard may be six days in the hospital followed by home monitoring. But what happens if a patient is healing at a faster rater and is able to go home after just two days? Now what if there was an AI algorithm that could identify this type of patient? That would potentially free up 4 bed days. That extra capacity has an impact on patient access.

“Based on the early findings, we can say confidently that we have saved 250 patient days already,” said Townsend. “Not only does this have an effect on the patient, but think about it from an insurance perspective. Not having to pay for another 250 days is a pretty good thing. Even in a single payer system, where the government pays, this is a significant savings.”

Watch the interview with Townsend to learn:

• The challenge Townsend issued to the media with respect to AI news coverage
• Why completely removing bias from datasets that AI algorithms are trained on is impractical and how acknowledging and being transparent about that bias might be a better way forward

Learn more about SAS at https://www.sas.com/

Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.

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SAS covered the expenses for Healthcare IT Today to travel to their conference.

< + > Primary care practices identify needed improvements for telemedicine

New research found that experienced practice leaders most often cited visit triage rules and telemedicine-specific staffing and scheduling protocols as two key areas most needed for telehealth implementation and maturation.

< + > Healthcare Has A Data Resolution Problem

According to Charlie Harp, CEO of Clinical Architecture, even if we solve the interoperability challenge in healthcare, we will still have to work to refine the data to make it useful. The quality of that data needs to be improved and the resolution of the picture it paints of a patient needs to increase. The latter is a hidden challenge that healthcare organizations are not paying enough attention to.

Healthcare IT Today sat down with Charlie Harp at HIMSS23 to unpack healthcare’s data resolution challenge.

Data Resolution

“The picture of a patient that we can create with the data we have today is low resolution,” explained Harp. “You can think of it like a crayon drawing of a patient. When we hand off that picture to an AI engine or any other software, the best it can do is give us answers based on that low-resolution picture.”

This is not ideal.

Harp believes that we need to “dial-up” the resolution on the healthcare data we collect so that we can build 4K pictures of patients. Feeding high-resolution and high-quality data into AI, analytics or other software will result in output that is more tuned to the particular patient.

Consider the example of a patient who sees their family physician about chronic nosebleeds. In the visit notes, the physician records that the nosebleeds last for approximately two hours each time and happen about two weeks apart. However, when that visit is coded, it may only be designated as a “nosebleed”. What started as high-resolution data in the notes, is turned into low-resolution data during coding.

Improving Data Resolution

Improving data resolution is an important part of improving overall data quality, but it does not get enough attention because it is not obvious by looking at the data that it is low-resolution. It takes careful analysis and expert observation to see the data resolution gap.

“I think when we get to the point where we have more interoperability and dial up the quality of what we are transacting today, I think what we [healthcare organizations] are going to realize is that there is still a lack of resolution,” said Harp. “I think we can overcome this challenge. We are making progress.”

Watch the interview with Charlie Harp.

Learn more about Clinical Architecture at https://clinicalarchitecture.com/

Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.

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Clinical Architecture is a sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

< + > ChatGPT Misses the Mark in Healthcare – What It Needs to Succeed

The following is a guest article by Michael Blum, MD, Cardiologist, Co-founder and CEO at BeeKeeperAI and Former Chief Medical Information Officer at UCSF Medical Center

The advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT3 (GPT3) Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot sparked an unprecedented societal appreciation for the power of AI. While AI has been broadly deployed across industries for a decade, it remained mostly hidden from the typical user. The release of GPT3 in late 2022 changed all of that. 

Suddenly, a user with minimal computer literacy and no programming or data science training whatsoever could ask an AI-based application to create a response to a question in simple everyday language, regardless of complexity of the underlying subject matter. It was mind-blowing and ignited a societal interest in the AI space and its potential impact on commerce and society in general. It was not long before patients, clinicians, and researchers began exploring GPT3’s capabilities in healthcare.

The large language model (LLM) that powers GPT3 was trained on the vast array of information and language across the open internet. As a result, it is ready to respond to an almost infinite variety of questions or prompts. However, as researchers began experimenting with ChatGPT’s performance in complex reasoning or analytical tasks in engineering, science, and medicine, lower levels of performance became apparent, and the phenomenon of AI “hallucination” was observed.

GPT Needs to Learn How to Say “IDK”

Chatbots and apps powered by the most recent LLMs have demonstrated impressive capabilities in summarizing vast information and creating natural language text in response to queries in the healthcare domain. ChatGPT4 has been reported to have “passed the Boards,” answering exam questions correctly 90% of the time. However, in real world clinical scenarios, they have also been shown to make important errors, creating significant concerns for their use in clinical practice. 

Given that these GPT base models have been trained on the open internet with limited real-world healthcare data and lack the reasoning capabilities of the human brain, it is unsurprising that they struggle with the complexity and nuance of real-world clinical scenarios which contain edge cases described in patient medical records but not often spoken to in published information such as textbooks, clinical trials, or clinical guidelines.

Additionally, GPT’s tendency to “hallucinate” when unable to answer a question based on prior training is particularly problematic in healthcare. Rather than indicating its inability to provide a recommendation with sufficient confidence, it essentially “makes up” an answer and presents it in very authoritative sounding text − the worst possible scenario for a clinician relying on a technology for support. 

While LLMs will soon play a significant role in addressing highly defined, predictable, and redundant operational and administrative processes in healthcare, they will require significant, additional training on large volumes of high quality, diverse, representative, real-world healthcare data before they can be a trusted clinical partner. 

These data are held by care delivery organizations, patients, payers, academia, and industry (bio pharmas, contract research organizations, healthcare device vendors, etc.). Early examples of additional training of the LLM base models have shown promising results with improved performance. However, these data are exceedingly difficult to access due to patient privacy concerns and regulatory barriers. Importantly, GPTs will also require additional engineering to learn “humility” and to learn when and how to say, “I don’t know.”

GPT Doesn’t Understand the Risk of PHI

By the nature of the LLMs, during the training process, they “memorize” some of the data on which they learn. For publicly available data this memorization is not an issue – however, for extremely sensitive, confidential data, it is a serious legal and ethical challenge. Access to protected patient health information (PHI) during model training, which is then exposed to others without the individual patient’s consent, can result in serious harm to patients and severe legal and regulatory consequences to the healthcare delivery organizations. 

This same concern about exposure and loss of protected health information has hindered the development of clinical AI prior to the arrival of GPT/LLMs and has dramatically retarded the penetration of AI-based technologies into healthcare as compared to other industries. Research reveals that over 90% of healthcare AI remains in research and development due to challenges accessing the real-world data required for regulatory or market validation. 

Approaches such as de-identification (anonymization) and creation of synthetic data sets will be useful in early training exercises, but, at some point, access to real-world, protected health data will be required to develop clinically relevant, generalizable, and reliable models. The concerns over inadvertent exposure of PHI contained in an LLM are not theoretical – user input prompts containing PHI are saved and available to the provider of the LLM, and the LLMs themselves have been shown to memorize complex data during the training process. 

We must also appreciate the more typical cyber risks as a bug in OpenAI code previously exposed not only GPT queries, but also private user account information, including credit card information. Fortunately, contemporary technologies, including secure, confidential computing enclaves and privacy preserving platforms, are now available that allow training and deployment of the LLMs in environments that eliminate these data privacy and security risks.

An Rx for Generative AI to Succeed in Healthcare

Generative AI and LLMs are still in their infancy and rapidly climbing the “hype cycle.” Increasingly large and intensively trained base LLMs will undoubtedly impact healthcare technology and delivery. Apps and applications powered by these technologies hold promise to help clinicians deliver higher quality care more efficiently while simultaneously ameliorating the provider burn-out crisis. They are already employed in ambient conversation recognition applications to automate the note creation process. LLMs will evolve and their output will improve over time as they mature. 

Access to large volumes of real-world PHI will be critical to developing models that can make reliable and accurate clinical recommendations that generalize across populations without bias. While access to the PHI is challenging and will require protecting the data during training and protecting the LLMs themselves during deployment to prevent privacy breaches, new confidential computing platforms that will meet these needs are evolving in parallel. 

Harnessing the immense potential of LLMs in healthcare delivery will require both a robust ecosystem of PHI-accessible data and confidential computing platforms to protect the data and the LLMs. 

About Michael Blum

Dr. Michael Blum is a cardiologist who specializes in preventive cardiology as well as caring for patients with congestive heart failure and valvular heart disease. Dr. Blum worked as the Chief Medical Information Officer at UCSF Medical Center and founded UCSF’s Center for Digital Health Innovation. He is the Co-Founder and CEO at BeeKeeperAI. 

Dr. Blum earned a medical degree from New York University School of Medicine. At Yale School of Medicine, he completed a residency in internal medicine, followed by a fellowship in cardiovascular medicine. Dr. Blum has received numerous honors, such as an excellence and achievement award from the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS) and is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology.

< + > Featured Health IT Job: Director, Application Development and Integrations

We like to regularly feature a healthcare IT job that might be of interest to readers. Today, we’re featuring the Director, Application Development and Integrations position that was recently posted on Healthcare IT Central. This position was posted by New York eHealth Collaborative and is in Manhattan, New York.

Here’s a description of the position:

New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) is a not-for-profit organization working in partnership with the New York State Department of Health to improve healthcare by collaboratively leading, connecting, and integrating health information exchange across the State.

Founded in 2006 by healthcare leaders, NYeC works to help New York State achieve the Triple Aim of improving the patient experience of care, delivering better health outcomes, and reducing costs. On behalf of the State, NYeC leads the Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY), a network connecting healthcare providers statewide, develops policies and standards that support the utilization of health technologies, and assists healthcare providers in adopting and effectively using electronic health records.

NYeC is propelling healthcare forward by facilitating the use of new and innovative technologies that will improve patient care. Healthcare is undergoing an unprecedented transformation through digital health. Do you want to be at the center of it in New York State?

Employees must be fully vaccinated in accordance with NYeC’s policy before beginning employment with NYeC and present proof prior to their start date, unless they have requested and been granted an exemption or accommodation (based on disability/medical condition or a sincerely-held religious belief).

Position Summary

NYeC is seeking a Director, Application Development and Integrations, that is responsible for the design, development, and implementation of cutting-edge healthcare applications. This role is responsible for leading a small team of developers and managing several consultants, ensuring that our technology solutions are robust, reliable, and align with our corporate vision. The successful candidate will foster a culture of excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement within the team.

This role will be based out of our Albany, NY or Manhattan, NY office and report to the Chief Information Officer (CIO). At this time, this role has a hybrid work schedule. All staff are required to work in the office 1 day per week (currently Tuesdays). There are then 30 additional in-person days that are expected each year on top of the 1 day required per week. Stakeholder visits, all staff meeting days, development days, and conference attendance count towards the additional 30 days. This schedule is subject to change.

Responsibilities Include

• Lead and mentor a team of software developers, setting clear expectations, defining roles and responsibilities, providing feedback, and fostering a collaborative and inclusive work environment
• Develop and implement innovative application strategies that align with the organization’s goals and objectives
• Acts as the subject matter expert for platforms under their control
• Ensure that the application systems supported by NYeC are maintained to the highest possible standard with maximum levels of attainable availability and efficiency
• Manage the full lifecycle of application development, from ideation and design to deployment and maintenance, using standards and procedures
• Manage application configuration and upgrades, and problem analysis and resolution for complex application problems in conjunction with development teams
• Manage and monitor security alerts, incident detection, resolution, and coordination of resolution efforts with both customer and internal teams
• Promote and implement Agile development methodologies, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and rapid iteration
• Evaluate and manage relationships with and work of external vendors and partners, ensuring they meet our quality standards and adhere to contractual agreements
• Work on multiple projects concurrently, monitor the status of tasks and escalate issues when appropriate
• Reporting to CIO
• Other duties and special projects as assigned

Experience and Skills

• Bachelors Degree, Management, Computer Science, Information Systems, Information Technology or other related field, or equivalent work experience
• Minimum of 10 years’ experience in software development, with at least 5 years in a leadership role
• Healthcare information exchange (HIE) and/or healthcare information technology (HIT) knowledge desired
• Experience managing departmental vendors and budgets
• Experience developing and managing cloud-based applications preferred
• Exercises independent judgment within defined parameters

We consider a wide range of factors when determining compensation, which may cause compensation to vary depending on your skills, experience, qualifications, and home office location (Manhattan, NY vs. Albany, NY). The annual base salary range for this role for an Albany based candidate is $120,000 – $135,000. The annual base salary range for this role for a NYC based candidate is $145,000 – $160,000. The salary offer will not be based on a candidates salary history at other jobs, and by law, NYeC will not seek information about salary history, and candidates should not share such information with NYeC. All compensation questions and comments should be directed to the HR Department representative during your application, interview, and hiring process.

NYeC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you are excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with everything listed in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

NYeC is an EOE/Minorities/Females/Vet/Disabled.

Looks like a great opportunity for those with experience with developing and integrating applications! If this looks like a position that would interest you, check out the full details for the job and how to apply.

As always, you can search our Health IT job board for a variety of jobs from leading companies in the industry. You can also register for free and post your resume where recruiters search for job candidates regularly.

< + > Outsourcing Clinical Notes to an Expert-Machine Collaboration Using Ambient Clinical Voice

OnPoint Healthcare Partners is the latest ambient clinical voice technology we’ve found that combines expert human authors with AI to take one of the annoying burdens off doctors: writing clinical notes. According to President and CEO Jim Boswell, information is captured from the doctor/patient interaction, uploaded securely to their cloud services, and processed by a team from around the world to generate notes in a time ranging from less than an hour to next-morning delivery. Quick turn-around, according to Boswell, is particularly important for in-patient settings, but this isn’t as true in most ambulatory practices.

ChatGPT is built in to their IRIS Virtual Clinical Assistant and it along with their own technology does 70% of the work of writing the note. To drive accuracy to a high level, OnPoint employs a QA team of physicians, and employs physicians in note crafting as well. In addition to notes, OnPoint can code visits while creating the notes.

The organization is deeply thrust into collecting data. For instance, they check every change a doctor makes to the note they deliver, in order to improve results next time. They track the quality of each of the approximately 600,000 notes they write each year.

The service is also very flexible, covering almost all specialties, a range of settings (in-patient, out-patient, home health, acute rehab), and Spanish conversations as well as English. No requirements are pushed on the doctor to conduct a session a particular way—they are simply encouraged to say out loud everything they’re thinking.

Watch the video for details about how the service works and compare it to other ambient clinical voice related technologies like Nuance’s Dax Express and Ambience Healthcare to name a few.

Learn more about OnPoint Healthcare Partners: https://www.onpointhealthcarepartners.com/

Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.

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< + > Biden Administration calls for feedback on AI safety, R&D

New initiatives launched by the White House include an updated strategic plan for artificial intelligence from the Office of Science and Technology Policy and a new RFI seeking input on  mitigating AI risks.

< + > Where telemedicine is headed now that the PHE has ended

What can be expected in healthcare and health IT? What should CIOs and other health IT leaders be doing to address new virtual care challenges? An expert consultant has answers.

< + > Is AI Eating Healthcare? – Healthcare IT Today Podcast Episode 115

For the 115th episode of the Healthcare IT Podcast, we are talking about the ever growing presence of AI in healthcare! To kick us off, we begin by discussing why we think AI is such a big topic and the goal of AI at this current moment. Next, we share the most exciting things we have seen AI doing in healthcare. But AI can’t be the answer for everything, so we also discuss what areas of healthcare won’t be impacted by AI. And with AI still being so new there’s so many unexplored areas with it. So to finish off the episode we dive into some of those unexplored areas by talking over the different ethical and equity considerations that could be involved with AI.

Here’s a preview of the questions and topics we discuss in this episode:

• Why is AI having a moment right now?
• What are the most exciting things you see happening with AI in healthcare?
• What areas of healthcare do you think won’t be impacted by AI?
• What ethical and equity considerations do we need to think about with AI?

Now, without further ado, we’re excited to share with you the next episode of the Healthcare IT Today podcast.

We publish a new Healthcare IT Today podcast every ~2 weeks. Thanks to our friends at Healthcare Now Radio, you’ll be able to listen to the latest episodes of Healthcare IT Today on their radio station for the first two weeks. Then, we’ll be publishing each episode as a podcast and YouTube video here after it finishes on the radio.

You can also subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today podcast on any of the following platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
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• TuneIn
• Spotify
• iHeartRadio
• Pandora

Thanks for listening to Healthcare IT Today and if you enjoy the content we’re sharing, please rate the podcast on your favorite podcasting platform.

Along with the popular podcasting platforms above, you can Subscribe to Healthcare IT Today on YouTube.  Plus, all of the audio and video versions will be made available to stream on HealthcareITToday.com.

If you work in Healthcare IT, we’d love to hear where you agree and/or disagree with the perspectives we shared. Feel free to share your thoughts and perspectives in the comments of this post, in the YouTube comments, with @Colin_Hung or @techguy on Twitter, or privately on our Contact Us page. Let us know what you think of the podcast and if you have any ideas for future episodes.

Thanks so much for listening!

Listen to Our Latest Episodes:

< + > AI in Healthcare and Life Sciences: Further Adoption Requires Better Data Infrastructure

The following is a guest article by Jon Kimerle, Global Strategic Healthcare Alliances at Pure Storage 

The digital transformation of healthcare continues to accelerate, and technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are predicted to have an increasing impact on efficiency, quality, and scalability of health outcomes. 

At present, AI is already driving high-quality, predictive patient care and better outcomes by making connections humans can’t, adding context, and unearthing new insights. The data generated by AI can facilitate early disease detection, personalized medications and care, the prevention of diagnostic or prescription interaction errors, analysis of treatment risks, and much more. Clinical AI algorithms have already begun to catalyze progress and promise in fields such as image-based diagnosis in dermatology and radiology, patient monitoring and management, and genome interpretation and drug discovery. 

While adoption of AI applications in healthcare is low, a recent study found that more than half of IT buyers are prioritizing AI/Machine Learning technology investments for the next five years, meaning there is a unique opportunity for healthcare and life science organizations to leverage AI for faster, safer, and more impactful outcomes. To succeed, however, organizations need to address critical issues slowing adoption and limiting impact: limitations on data storage, data access issues, and data security and protection.

Rethinking Data Storage and Accessibility

Data is the lifeblood of healthcare and continues to reshape how the industry functions. While the volume of data will dramatically increase, with new data sets like social determinants of health, data from the IoMT, and genomic information, at the same time emerging technologies and AI applications will be accessing and using these larger data sets. The number of algorithms using these data sets will also dramatically increase, all adding up to stress on the entire solution stack, but especially on data storage tech and software. Legacy health IT infrastructure can only do so much to manage the influx of new information. Organizations need to consider where all of this new data is supposed to live, where AI systems and workloads will run, and how they can optimize their workflows and infrastructure to power analytics that genuinely impact outcomes.

With more data comes the need for smarter storage, requiring the underlying IT infrastructure to evolve and meet the new standards of scale and dimensionality previously unheard of. Without a future-proof data storage solution, AI will fail to be useful and provide the necessary support to the healthcare workforce it has promised. Analytics will be slowed, scaling will be stunted, and data silos will continue as a result, further hindering the true impact AI can make in life sciences research and healthcare. 

As healthcare and research become more patient-centric, a shift towards personalized medicine will rely on more data, and AI workflows can reduce the time it takes to go from theory to insight. With a well-established data storage location and a place for these AI applications to operate from, healthcare and research organizations can turn ideas into actionable therapies that could improve patient lives. Teams distributed across different health care sectors, research centers, medical device companies and beyond will need to leverage petabytes of data seamlessly, yet current storage systems bottleneck performance and reduce easy access to the trove of information that AI sorts through or produces. Mining data for timely insights then becomes a task as daunting as the adoption of high-tech tools itself.

It currently takes quite a long time to integrate data and extract meaningful insights, leading to researchers spending more time engineering their data than leveraging it for clinical decisions and improved patient care. IT solutions need to offer data mobility and integration that allow researchers and healthcare workers to access data quickly and efficiently and enable them to know what they are looking at. Seamless data access will support superior AI analytics to enable faster therapeutics, diagnostics, and vaccine pipelines, and will decrease time to insights that affect patient care the most.

Protecting Data from Cyber Attacks 

As more data is continually generated, and emerging technologies get integrated with critical life saving and prolonging operations, questions of data security and safety begin to arise. Ransomware attacks continue to dominate headlines as they’ve become more sophisticated, more frequent with longer times to recovery. At this point, it’s not a matter of “if” an attack occurs, but “when,” and organizations not only have to have the proper precautions in place to prevent and respond to an attack, but also, just as essential, a plan for rapid recovery.

Ransomware attacks prey on the inefficiencies of current complex IT environments filled with outdated data storage components and we cannot afford to increase the amount of patient and diagnostic data being created and sorted through with new emerging technologies and AI applications to be at risk for a cyber-attack. Downtime in a ransomware attack is the most costly and impactful to patient care and organizations should be investing in a more robust disaster recovery plan. Solutions need to look for ways to integrate AI and emerging tech into healthcare and life sciences without compromising the safety and security of patient data and information as we continue to move into the future of healthcare technology.

Upgrading Data Management to Facilitate AI 

To fully reap the benefits of AI adoption in healthcare and life sciences, organizations need to harness insights effectively, which requires a holistic data management strategy. Without being able to quickly visualize and interact with healthcare data, healthcare and life sciences organizations will continue to be data rich but information poor. The underlying infrastructure issue stunting scalability, bottlenecking progress, and inhibiting timely insights can no longer be ignored. High-performing infrastructure is not a luxury but a necessity and will allow healthcare and research teams to have consistent access to vast amounts of data, scale storage capacity on-demand, and run compute-intensive analytics without compromising the security of the data it hosts.

By upgrading IT infrastructures, healthcare organizations have an incredible opportunity to capitalize on the real benefits of AI and other emerging technologies. When it comes to the future of healthcare, the potential of AI and big data to improve health to people demands that healthcare leaders ensure their organizations are data-ready to enable those outcomes.

About Jon Kimerle

Jon Kimerle serves as the Epic Alliance Manager at Pure Storage where he is responsible for managing the relationship with Epic Systems in Verona, WI and contributing on the healthcare solutions team with business development. Jon has 29 years of healthcare leadership experience with the past 20 years in senior healthcare IT leadership roles. His focus has been in taking a more strategic approach to IT and has significant experience in formulating complete, IT-enabled solutions and delivering enterprise-wide transformational projects. Jon led Epic implementations which transformed 20+ hospitals in four states, 3,000 employed physicians practices and 40,000 users. Prior to joining Pure, he served in several senior IT leadership roles including Interim CIO, VP of IT Strategy and Planning, and VP of Clinical Transformation. Jon holds both a BS in Health Administration and a Master of Health Administration (MHA) from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

< + > Personalized Care Company Validic Acquires Trapollo

Validic Inc., a market-leading digital health and personalized care company, has acquired the assets of Trapollo LLC, a connected health, technical support, and device logistics provider that helps healthcare organizations care for patients at home. Trapollo is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cox Communications, Inc..

With the acquisition of these Trapollo assets, Validic rounds out its core capabilities and becomes the company best positioned to make personalized healthcare a practical reality for patients and clinicians. Validic’s EHR-integrated healthcare application ingests remotely collected health data from the world’s largest health IoT platform to help healthcare organizations personalize chronic condition management, remote care, and support for healthy living.

Adding in-house device logistics and technical support to a platform built for scale means that Validic offers the most proven way for healthcare providers to personalize care for their entire patient population. Even prior to the acquisition, Validic and Trapollo were jointly supporting the largest personalized care program in the country at a leading healthcare integrated delivery network on the West Coast, with more than 300,000 patients enrolled and thousands of devices shipped since inception. Now, for the first time, this winning solution is available for healthcare organizations nationwide.

“We live in a time where consumers expect personalized experiences, and they aren’t receiving them from their healthcare providers —  76% of patients are frustrated leaving their medical appointments and 69% would switch providers for better service. Imagine a system that helps clinicians efficiently deliver personalized care for every patient at scale,” said Drew Schiller, CEO at Validic.

“With the Trapollo assets, Validic, which has long been the leader in scaling remote and personalized healthcare programs, is now also a leading connected health and device logistics company, supporting the full range of personalized care programs – from BYO-tech, low-touch programs to high-risk, high-touch, fully kit-based remote monitoring and everything in between,” said Schiller.

Healthcare is not one size fits all. Patients have different goals and need different levels of care at different times. Validic offers healthcare organizations a single, cost-effective, EHR-embedded solution that:

• Enables the creation of remote programs to support multiple clinical applications and patient support needs
• Integrates personal health data as a first-class citizen of the EHR — with program enrollment and visualizations in the patient chart, writing data to EHR flowsheets, and surfacing clinical alerts via the in-basket and in-basket pools
• Helps clinical teams operate more efficiently and effectively; 88% of clinicians say Validic saves them time
• Meets the full scope of patient device and support needs, from BYO-everything to pre-paired kits and phone support
• Eliminates the need to support multiple point solutions with a comprehensive enterprise platform

Former Trapollo and current Validic Senior Vice President and General Manager, Steve Nester, echoed Schiller’s enthusiasm and optimism stating, “We are joining Validic at a pivotal time in healthcare, as patients demand personalized and more convenient healthcare experiences that meet them where they are. We will bring our experience and expertise in device logistics, compassionate technical support, supply chain, and connected health from Trapollo to further Validic’s mission of improving the quality of life by making personal data actionable.”

Validic is headquartered in Durham, NC. Trapollo’s former distribution center, which will now be operated by Validic, will remain in Sterling, VA. With the transaction, Cox becomes an investor in Validic.

For more information about Validic’s EHR-integrated, personalized healthcare solution, visit validic.com or email us at hello@validic.com to have a discussion.

About Validic

Founded in 2010, Validic Inc. is a digital health and personalized care company devoted to our mission of improving the quality of human life by making personal data actionable. With the world’s largest health IoT platform and EHR-embedded remote care application, we help healthcare organizations give every person tailored interventions and personalized care, improving healthcare efficiency and delivery, and empowering people to play an active role in their health and well-being.

Leading healthcare providers, health plans and health IT companies, such as Mass General Brigham, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, CVS Health, and Elevance Health, use our solutions to deliver high-touch and personalized chronic condition management, remote care, and support for healthy living. With a platform intentionally built to support a broad digital health strategy and scale across populations and conditions, Validic supports the largest RPM program in the country, with more than 300,000 enrolled patients since its inception and 7,000 referring providers. Our digital health platform has 540+ supported devices with more than 15 billion annual data transactions. Our remote care solution is available as a standard integration in the Epic Connection Hub and Cerner Millennium^®.

In 2022, Validic received the North American Customer Value Award for the Medical Device Connectivity Industry by Frost and Sullivan and was named Best Overall Connected Healthcare Solution by MedTech Breakthrough. Validic is HIPAA-compliant, HITRUST CSF Certified^®, and ISO-27001 certified for Information Security Management. Visit validic.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to learn more.

About Trapollo

Trapollo is an end-to-end connected health solution provider with a mission of helping extend care outside the walls of traditional healthcare settings and meeting patients/members where they are in their day-to-day lives. Founded in 2010, Trapollo has deep expertise in building, deploying, and scaling remote care programs for providers and payers across the United States through innovative software solutions, devices, logistics, and support services. Cox Communications acquired Trapollo in 2015.

Originally announced May 15th, 2023

< + > Happy Memorial Day!!

Happy Memorial Day to all of you!  At Healthcare IT Today we decided to take the day off from our regularly scheduled content to celebrate the national holiday in the US.  We hope you were able to do the same and enjoy time with your family.

It’s really interesting to think about family and how many people through the years have an impact on your life today.  I’m part of a family history site which recently sent me an email saying that 35 of my ancestors were buried in the city cemetery in this really small rural town.  It’s amazing to think about the heritage of my family and all of those individuals who grew up and lived in that small town.  That’s my favorite part of Memorial Day.  Thinking back on those who came before me and remembering all the things they did to make the life that I have now possible.

If you’re in healthcare and still working today, we thank you for your sacrifice.  Healthcare people are amazing and those who take care of the sick on a holiday like Memorial Day are a great illustration of that.

We hope you have a great holiday and we’ll be back tomorrow with more great health IT content.

< + > Bonus Features – May 28, 2023 – 20+ health systems pledge to use Epic to share info under TEFCA, 84x increase in telehealth for mental health from 2019 to 2022, and more

Welcome to the weekly edition of Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features. This article will be a weekly roundup of interesting stories, product announcements, new hires, partnerships, research studies, awards, sales, and more. Because there’s so much happening out there in healthcare IT we aren’t able to cover in our full articles, we still want to make sure you’re informed of all the latest news, announcements, and stories happening to help you better do your job.

News and Studies

Nearly two dozen health systems have pledged to use Epic to share health information through the TEFCA framework, the EHR vendor announced, adding, “Our plan is to deliver software this year that will help our customers to be among the initial participants in TEFCA.” Notable organizations making the pledge include Johns Hopkins Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, and Mayo Clinic.

The latest report on mental health utilization trends from LexisNexis Risk Solutions shows an 84x increase in utilization of telehealth for mental health in 2022 compared to 2019. The report also indicated that overall telehealth utilization dropped 18% after the height of the pandemic, though telehealth for mental health dropped just 5%.

PCP pay increased 4.41% in 2022 but fell well short of the inflation rate of 6.5%, according to the latest provider compensation survey from the Medical Group Management Association. MGMA also found that, over the last three years, different specialties have seen significant gaps in pay increases, from 0.13% for urgent care to 10.57% for family medicine.

A survey from the Association of Community Cancer Centers found significant support for remote patient monitoring, with 45% of respondents using symptom-tracking technology for the entirety of their treatment. Among providers, 40% said the technology didn’t disrupt workflows, and 24% said it improved workflows.

Partnerships

• Consensus Cloud Solutions and Hyland Software are integrating their respective cloud-based fax and content delivery services.
• Virtual specialty care company Summus is collaborating with Leal Health to access trials and treatments for patients with cancer.
• Care coordination company Quantum Health named Sword Health as a preferred partner for musculoskeletal care.
• Data exchange vendor 4medica announced partnerships with five professional organizations, including HIMSS and WEDI.
• symplr announced the Pledge to Advance Healthcare Operations, with commitments from 12 current and former health system, professional organization, and vendor executives.
• Synapse Medicine and CompuGroup Medical are collaborating to provide point-of-care decision support for prescribing physicians.
• DrFirst and Applied Robotics are partnering to digitally process faxed prescriptions across Canada.

Product and Company News

• Omada Health launched a behavior and lifestyle change program for individuals taking GLP-1s for sustained weight loss.
• Noom announced Noom Med for obesity care.
• Cybersecurity firm Vaultree released an in-use data encryption tool.
• Biometric insight company LifeQ released its 24-hour Sleep Health product.
• OM1 released Prescriber Trends and Comparative Outcomes for analysis of real-world data for immunology and mental health.
• Greenway Health received ISO 9001:2015 certification for its quality management system.
• The cognitive impairment assessment from Linus Health is sensitive enough to identify cases missed by the Mini-Mental State Examination, the company announced.

Sales

• University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire chose AliveCor and Doccla for remote monitoring of patients with atrial fibrillation.
• San Diego area community health center TrueCare chose Rimidi to support hypertension management.
• North Carolina-based Raleigh Radiology implemented Pocket Health for patient-facing image sharing and insights.
• NorthShore University HealthSystem affiliate Northwest Community Healthcare chose Conifer for physician RCM.
• HIE entity Contexture extended its relationship with Verato, an identity management vendor.
• Texas-based New Life Health & Concierge selected eClinicalWorks.

Awards 

• AVIA announced its AVIAwards for Digital Transformation, recognizing seven health systems from across the country. Chicagoland-based NorthShore Edward-Elmhurst Health took home top honors for the second consecutive year.
• Education and engagement vendor Mytonomy had 10 videos recognized at the 44th Annual Telly Awards.

People

• Homecare management service provider HHAeXchange appointed Paul Joiner as Chief Executive Officer and named Jon Lauck as Chairman of the Board.
• Medical imaging provider Intelerad named Jordan Bazinsky as CEO.
• Lab insights provider Avalon Healthcare Solutions named Pamela Stahl as President.
• Consultancy Tegria announced two hires: Jen Morgan as Chief Financial Officer and Prasanna Gunjikar as Chief Growth Officer.
• Senior benefits management firm RetireeFirst hired Michael Yoo as Chief Information Officer.
• Physician messaging platform Doceree named Vijay Adapala as Executive Vice President, Global Supply Partnership.
• EHR vendor CliniComp named Dr. Holly Urban as Vice President, Clinical Product Design.
• CHIME named Nicole Kerkenbush as Vice President of Education.
• HIMSS made two appointments to its Board of Directors: Elena Sini as Chair and Susan Heichert as Vice Chair.
• Analytics and value-based payments platform company Clarify Health appointed Doug Klinger and Mary Lantin to its Board of Directors.
• Acute virtual care vendor AvaSure established a Chief Nursing Executive Advisory Board comprised of health system, professional organization, and vendor representatives.

If you have news that you’d like us to consider for a future edition of Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features, please submit them on this page. Please include any relevant links and let us know if news is under embargo.

< + > Weekly Roundup – May 27, 2023

Welcome to our Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundup. Each week, we’ll be providing a look back at the articles we posted and why they’re important to the healthcare IT community. We hope this gives you a chance to catch up on anything you may have missed during the week.

eClinicalWorks Goes from 0 to 60 with AI. At the recent eClinicalWorks Enterprise Summit, CEO Girish Kumar Navani spent an hour on demos of AI across the eCW EHR, from search to summaries to robotic process automation. Navani compared the surge in AI functionality to the impact of the smartphone in healthcare – only ChatGPT has done it in months, but it took the smartphone years. Read more…

Learning by Listening: A Winning Formula for The Health Management Academy. THMA CEO Renee DeSilva spoke to Colin Hung about gathering insight from more than 2,000 healthcare executives to identify key industry trends such as the impact of AI and process automation and the steps necessary to protect against cyberattacks. Read more…

Looking at Fax As An On-Ramp for Interoperability. The fax machine is the technology that everyone in healthcare loves to hate – but 75% of patient information is still exchanged via fax. Scott Turicchi at Consensus Cloud Solutions told Colin that the ubiquity of fax shouldn’t be ignored as the industry aims for interoperability, especially since faxes can easily be converted to structured, digital documents. Read more…

How Houston Methodist Stood Up a Virtual ICU in Six Months. The organization’s Michelle Stansbury spoke to John Lynn about the benefits of remote monitoring and smart devices in the virtual ICU, along with the need to consider everything from network and security infrastructure to AI and ambient listening when expanding the use of virtual care within the hospital. Read more…

Simple Basics Are Still Needed to Thwart Cyberthreats. Ryan Witt at Proofpoint and Tom Stafford at CDW told John that training against phishing attacks, practicing responses to attacks, and implementing proven technologies are the fundamental cybersecurity steps that all organizations should take. Read more…

The Forgotten Benefits of Multi-Cloud in Healthcare. Fear of the cloud seems to have subsided in healthcare, especially given that the cloud enabled organizations to be flexible in the early days of the pandemic. Listening to a panel at HIMSS23, John heard three health systems explain how a multi-cloud strategy supports scalability, data-sharing, and innovation – priorities for most organizations today. Read more…

It’s Time to Just Get Connected Already. Ten years after CommonWell was funded, and with TEFCA in full swing, John sat down with the organization’s Paul L. Wilder and Liz Buckle and talked about building momentum for interoperability beyond treatment at the point of care to support public health and manage patient healthcare journeys. Read more…

Improving Internal Communications Leads to Better Stroke Outcomes. The sooner a patient with a stroke is treated, the greater the chance of survival. Dr. Will O’Connor at TigerConnect told Colin how instant communication with an emergency shortens door-to-needle time form 60 minutes to as little as 15 minutes. Read more…

Taking a Continuous Approach to Cybersecurity. In the latest CIO Podcast, John and Renown Health’s Steven Ramirez discussed all things cybersecurity, touching specifically on the benefits of zero trust in a healthcare setting as well as looking at cybersecurity as more than check-the-box compliance. Read more…

How Epic Is Working to Incorporate Generative AI. John spoke with Epic’s Erika Koch and Seth Hain at HIMSS23 about Epic’s collaboration with Microsoft Azure AI to make doctor’s lives easier by automating tasks such as organizing inboxes or drafting messages to patients. The conversation also covered Epic’s increasing interest in genomics and life sciences. Read more…

AI Is Transforming the Patient-Provider Relationship. The need for physicians to do administrative tasks before, during, and after visits gets in the way of building better relationships with their patients. Ronen Lavi at Navina described how generative AI can revolutionize how data informs the physician-patient interaction and make more holistic care possible. Read more…

The Goal of RPM is Management, Not Just Monitoring. Remote monitoring is a proactive approach to care delivery, and RPM succeeds when organizations put data to use instead of just collecting it. Dr. Lucienne Ide at Rimidi said getting remote patient management right requires interoperability, data transparency, and decision support. Read more…

Data Sharing Transforms Medicine, So Let’s Make It More Accessible. Timi Leslie at BluePath Health and Gregg Smith-McCurdy at Hill Physicians Medical Group outlined the benefits of complying with California’s Data Exchange Framework, which helps providers and community organizations share information and improve care. Read more…

Your Teams Need the Right Skills to Protect Healthcare Data. New regulations, modern technologies, and heightened risk of data breach make protecting patient data more complex than ever before. Ameesh Divatia at Baffle highlighted the importance of classifying data and keeping tabs on how data is moved and used throughout an organization. Read more…

Choosing Tech That Benefits All Healthcare Stakeholders. Providers are experiencing burnout from complex administrative processes and technology workflows. Holon Solutions’ Jon Zimmerman called for an empathetic approach to designing clinical software that prioritizes the needs of providers while aligning with the expectations of payers. Read more…

Featured Health IT Job: Ambulatory Analyst at a Long Island-based client of Lloyd Staffing posted to Healthcare IT Central.

Bonus Features for May 21, 2023: 82% of wearable users are willing to share data with their physicians, and 81% of Americans trust pharmacists and nurses to diagnose minor illnesses. Read more…

Funding and M&A Activity:

• Care management platform Laguna Health closed a $15 million Series A funding round.
• Pear Suite raised $2.5 million in seed funding; the company is developing services to help community health workers identify and respond to social determinants of health.
• Cost transparency platform Cascade Health raised $1.7 million in venture funding.
• Real-world data marketplace Prognos Health raised $23 million in growth equity.

Thanks for reading and be sure to check out our latest Healthcare IT Today Weekly Roundups.

< + > Healthcare Content and Journal Editors – Fun Friday

We don’t cover the various medical journals on here much.  There’s an interesting overlap that’s happening with healthcare IT and journals right now, but many of the IT products we cover aren’t really lined up with what’s being published in medical journals.  Would a medical journal really be the right place for a discussion of hybrid cloud, virtual desktops, or other IT related topics?  I don’t think so.

With that said, I was intrigued by the news that a number of editors quit a top neuroscience journal in protest of the open-access charges this journal was charging people.  While I get the paid model for content, as you can see from Healthcare IT Today, we don’t charge readers for the content we’re sharing, but I digress.

Since this is an edition of Fun Friday, you may be able to guess what’s next.  That’s right.  A video from Dr. Glaucomflecken about the loss of editors from this journal.

Elsevier is losing editors pic.twitter.com/FDaQFe1eqS

— Dr. Glaucomflecken (@DGlaucomflecken) May 14, 2023

We hope you have a great long weekend.  We’re taking the Monday holiday off as well.  We’ll see you back here on Tuesday.

< + > HIMSSCast: Best practices for health IT implementations, from KLAS Research

Ryan Oliver, research director at KLAS, shows how Best in KLAS status leads to successful implementations. Additionally, he offers a deep dive into some of the most important implementation best practices for provider organizations.

< + > How AI Is Transforming the Patient-Provider Relationship

The following is a guest article by Ronen Lavi, Co-Founder and CEO at Navina

As Paul Starr famously wrote about in The Social Transformation of American Medicine, the healer’s relationship with the patient was historically perceived not unlike a religious leader’s relationship with a parishioner: an opportunity to get closer to a higher spiritual plane. 

Today, with patients routinely “consulting” with online resources, self-diagnosing, or requesting medication they saw on a television ad, the physician-patient relationship has materially changed. That said, the objectives have not: patients wish for their doctors to help them be physically and mentally well.

Well-Being is Being Redefined in Real Time

It’s widely established that clinicians who develop strong relationships with their patients and give a sense that they truly know their patients are more likely to have patients who trust and adhere to treatment and experience better quality of life over time. 

However, achieving this relationship has become increasingly utopic. 

As patients, when we see many doctors across specialties, care delivery settings, and modalities, it becomes very difficult to get a single answer that takes our full clinical context and history into account. Thinking about patients with multiple chronic conditions, accessibility issues, cultural, financial, or language barriers, developing a positive, trusting relationship becomes even more challenging. Our quarterback is our primary care physician, but increasingly, they’re burdened under time and workflow pressure. 

The truth is, our doctors want to spend more time with us. They want to discuss details, but with data streaming in from different sources in real or near-real time, they’re spending more time data mining on the computer than asking questions and discussing treatment options.

Worse still, without the full clinical context, there’s greater risk of missing important information. Add on the operational challenges our healthcare system faces with staff shortages and increasing administrative requirements, the situation feels untenable.

AI isn’t Just the Answer, it is the ONLY Answer

There is a clear need to correct course and bring elements of those early healer-patient relationships back to the exam room. With artificial intelligence, we can give our doctors back that deep understanding they crave. 

Our primary care physicians have limited time to prepare for patient visits. They have dozens of pages of information to wade through, it’s disorganized and non-chronological, and recent data from different sources is often fragmented. These disconnected dots mean clinical misses are inevitable. Unlike physicians, AI cannot be overburdened; it can process a high volume of data across sources. Even if physicians had time to go through all the scanned documents in the EHR, most documents do not have meaningful names, and procedure dates may be listed incorrectly. With AI models trained to classify and handle these inconsistencies, physicians are no longer reconciling or data mining. 

The results are palpable, as formerly stressed physicians, struggling to process acres of patient records, can engage in holistic, proactive care that takes into account a wider clinical and non-clinical, social context. This makes care more effective and realistic for patients to adhere to.

What many of us don’t realize as patients is the amount of administrative work that physicians are responsible for. Many of them are working after hours preparing for visits, documenting earlier visits, and complying with contracts they have with insurance companies.

Generative AI capabilities can revolutionize how data informs the physician-patient interaction. Administrative work can be done faster and burdensome documentation can be offloaded, enabling doctors to spend more time with their patients. Taking this a step further, physicians equipped with a conversational AI assistant can instantly access the information they need, such as legible chart summaries, treatment protocols, and more. Thus, physicians will practice medicine the way they were trained to–by asking the right questions to inform their decisions in the moment of care.

Responsible AI for Patient Safety, Privacy, and Bias Reduction

I understand the risks that AI can surface inherent biases in data through its algorithmic design. But these potential limitations can be purposefully overcome. In fact, AI can view patients more objectively than even the most open-minded physicians, since every patient becomes an n of one. 

When we bring AI to the point of care, our doctors need to work together with the AI, see explanations and source information to ensure they are making the right decisions for their patients.

My vision is that primary care, led by a combination of AI and sensitive, caring physicians – working hand-in-code – will create a new era of patient well-being that creates deeper relationships, informed patients, superior outcomes, and unprecedented equity.

About Ronen Lavi

Ronen spent 24 years in the Israel intelligence corps – including the celebrated 8200 Unit – and in the Prime Minister’s Office. He established and led the AI Lab of Israel’s Military Intelligence. The Lab collaborated with leading tech companies and academia to develop cross-functional platforms that provide insight into areas challenged by diverse and complex data. In 2018, he was awarded the National Security Award. Ronen is now employing his skills and talents to revolutionize primary care – and through that, health care in general.

< + > Laguna Health Closes $15M Series A to Usher in the Next Generation of Care Management

• AI-powered contextual care innovator gives care managers intimate insights into individuals life circumstances, helping identify risk barriers, personalize care plans and improve care manager productivity

• Laguna-supported patients in hospital transitions and complex care settings see superior care plan adherence and outcomes, offering a beacon of light for payers and employers grappling with high-cost members

• Initial close of Series A fundraise heralds next generation of contextual care management, which goes beyond SDOH to consider behavioral, emotional, cultural, financial, and spiritual patient life context

Laguna Health, the AI-powered contextual care management platform, today announced the initial close of its Series A fundraise: a $15 million round co-led by SemperVirens and HC9 Ventures. The initial close brings Laguna’s total raise to date to over $21 million. The company will use the funding to deepen its AI capabilities in the care management context and expand its go-to-market.

35 million Americans are hospitalized annually, with at least two-thirds discharged to self-care at home. To recover, these patients typically receive paper instructions and minimal ongoing clinical oversight. Even if a recovering patient is assigned a care manager, the patient’s medical records rarely reflect their own life context, their caregiver’s life context, or the emotional drivers that may hinder their recovery journey.

Individual life circumstances, which go beyond SDOH, are seven times more costly than medical errors. Arthritic fingers or poor vision might prevent an older patient from taking insulin as directed. A mother with career and family obligations might delay calling her physician about nausea and lethargy, and end up being readmitted to the hospital with sepsis. Single-parenting a toddler might be why a father does not adhere to ‘no-lifting’ instructions.

As a result, care transitions such as inpatient or acute outpatient hospital admissions are woefully underserved. Care managers are further hampered by chronic staffing shortages and overwhelming caseloads.  Built on a proven contextual care model, Laguna’s AI engine integrates medical care plans with social, emotional, and cultural factors to help care managers better support members’ recovery and ongoing care. Armed with care plans personalized to patients’ unique life contexts, care managers are empowered to help members overcome recovery barriers. For a mother with family and career obligations, Laguna’s NLP will identify her anxiety over her recovery and competing life priorities, and offer digital and human interventions, such as personalized content in the app and virtual support with a care manager.

“As employers continue to deal with skyrocketing overall healthcare spend, it’s imperative to address chronically high-cost complex and acute patient populations,” said Robby Peters, Co-Founder of SemperVirens. “The Laguna team understands that employers and health plans require solutions that not only improve patient outcomes, but are easy to integrate, require no plan change and deliver immediate ROI.”

A rocky economy coupled with rising healthcare costs has shifted employer healthcare priorities from ‘nice to have’ employee benefits and perks to managing double digit healthcare cost growth. Offered through health plans and requiring no change in employer health plan design, Laguna’s ability to drive down complex and acute population spend delivers exceptional return on employer investment.

“Driving both impact and scale is usually a painful tradeoff for health plans, post-acute providers and home health providers,” said Richard Lungen, General Partner at HC9 Ventures. “Laguna has proven that AI powered contextual care is both effective and scalable, positioning it as the next-generation care management platform of choice for employers, health plans and integrated delivery networks.”

“We are thrilled to partner with SemperVirens and HC9 Ventures to further the growth of Laguna Health. Their leadership, experience and relationships will help drive accelerated employer and health plan adoption – giving Laguna the potential to make a difference in millions of members’ lives,” said Yoni Shtein, Co-Founder and CEO at Laguna Health.

About Laguna Health

Laguna Health is an AI-powered contextual care management solution scaling personalized care, starting with hospital transitions. The company has built an innovative suite of NLP and AI solutions proven in published randomized clinical trials to drive 50% cost savings and 10X productivity gains for care managers. Laguna is led by a seasoned team of clinical leaders and technology innovators. Customers include health plans, employers and integrated delivery networks that aim to improve member outcomes while increasing care management productivity. To learn more about Laguna, visit lagunahealth.com

About SemperVirens

SemperVirens is a leading US-based ecosystem-driven investment firm focused on companies in the workforce, healthcare, and financial technology markets. The firm has a network of executives, industry analysts, and distribution partners that serve as a proprietary platform for accessing, analyzing, and amplifying the most promising companies in its target sectors.

About HC9

HC9 is an early-stage venture capital firm purpose-built to provide industry-specific expertise to emerging healthcare software and services companies. HC9’s unparalleled, deeply-engaged investor community of leading executives, entrepreneurs, and investors collectively has thousands of years of experience in all facets of healthcare. We leverage the power of that experience to support the founders that are shaping the future of healthcare. For more information, please visit hc9.vc.

Originally announced May 16th, 2023