< + > Weekly Roundup – December 2, 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.

News and Announcements from NextGen UGM 2023. Colin Hung attended the vendor’s User Group Meeting and provided a recap of the event, where NextGen discussed an AI-powered ambient voice assistant and a Luma Health partnership to power patient self-scheduling. Read more… 

How Synthetic Data, LLMs Power Research Assistants. Josh Rubel at MDClone talked to John Lynn about the potential for synthetic data in research, which uses no PHI and as a result can be applied in many places. They also touched on using AI to predict the results of a research hypothesis instead of running a lengthy or expensive A/B test. Read more…

Getting the Patient Into the Office at Sun Life Health. Trey Davis at the Phoenix-area FQHC talked to Colin about ensuring patient data goes directly into the EHR to help physicians close gaps in care and, from there, increase the frequency of reminders and the uptake of patient portal adoption. Read more…

Bridging the Trust Gap One Record at a Time. It’s no secret that data exchange is the key to better care, bur MRO’s Matt Wildman told Colin the trust divide between payers and providers makes this difficult. MRO aims to solve this problem by providing payers with only the information they need while protecting the privacy of patients. Read more…

Policy, Change, and AI – Oh My! At the MGMA conference, Colin caught up with Greenway Health CMO Dr. Michael Blackman to discuss the top challenges facing healthcare, primarily how the rate of change in technology and policy puts a lot of pressure on physicians in their efforts to provide high-quality care. Read more…

Improving Access by Optimizing the Patient and Physician Experiences. Colin talked to Eduard de Vries at Axia Women’s Health about leveraging their EHR to reduce administrative burdens on patients and present up-to-date information to physicians. Read more…

The Health IT Issues That Not Enough People Are Talking About. At HLTH, members of the Healthcare IT Today community told us about the problems the industry isn’t paying enough attention to. Answers included coordinating care, making AI accountable, and collaborating to get more value out of healthcare data. Read more…

Setting a High Bar for Ambient Clinical Voice. Colin spoke with Microsoft’s Peter Durlach about the history of ambient clinical voice technology at Nuance, which stands out in the market due in part to Epic integration and more than 20 years of updates and refinements. Read more…

Health Data Exchange Moves to the Cloud. NextGen’s OSS Mirth Connect is like the “Intel Inside” of healthcare interoperability efforts, and companies such as Innovar Healthcare are aiming to make connectivity even easier with one-click install options available on the AWS Marketplace. Read more…

Healthcare IT Today Podcast: Regulatory Roundup. John and Colin highlight some of the top regulatory changes in store for 2024, including FHIR being part of TEFCA and information blocking penalties going into effect. Read more…

Best Practices for Securing Healthcare Data in AWS. Boris Dzhingarov detailed how AWS supports HIPAA compliance and protects patient information through data encryption and anonymization, access control, network security, and patch management. Read more…

Embracing and Prioritizing Cloud-Based Care in Rural Communities. When replacing legacy software, rural health systems can ill afford the long timelines, security gaps, and siloed environments of client-server technology, noted Nathan Shepard at Azalea Health. Read more…

Featured Health IT Job: MACRA MIPS Specialist, a remote role with Stoltenberg Consulting, posted to Healthcare IT Central.

Bonus Features for November 26, 2023: 85% of healthcare organizations are boosting IT spending in 2024, plus 70% of orgs are actively considering generative AI. Read more…

Funding and M&A Activity:

• Analytics company Health Catalyst acquired Electronic Registry Systems, maker of cancer registry software and services.
• Behavioral health AI vendor Eleos Health raised a $40 million Series B round.
• Medical data analysis vendor AdaptX raised $10 million in funding.
• SEMCAP Health supported the Series C funding round of SafeRide Health, a platform for platform for non-emergency medical transportation.

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

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< + > Big News and Announcements from NextGen UGM 2023

NextGen announced several AI initiatives at their annual User Group Meeting, including the launch of their Ambient Assist product to help with clinical documentation. The company also promised more focus on stability, customers, and patient engagement.

The roller coasters and thrill rides in Orlando, FL were the perfect backdrop for the 26^th edition of NextGen Healthcare’s annual User Group Meeting (#NextGenUGM23). It has been an up and down year for the ambulatory EHR maker and its customers in this ever changing climate. Their UGM was a chance to reset and chart a clearer path forward.

David Sides, Chief Executive Officer and Dr. Bob Murry, Chief Medical Officer did just that during their opening keynote.

Together, the pair made a slew of announcements aimed squarely at improving the lives of customers including: adding AI capabilities, patient engagement features, and more focus on product stability.

Ambient Assist

The big news item from Sides and Murry was Ambient Assist – the company’s new AI-powered ambient clinical voice solution. Ambient Assist runs on NextGen’s mobile platform and “listens” to the patient encounter. Using AI (powered by Nabla) it extracts the relevant clinical information and creates structured SOAP notes according to templates set up by users.

Ambient Assist promises time savings for clinicians who are buried with too much documentation. Several NextGen customers have high praise for the new solution. Candance Lemke, MS, RN, NP-C a Nurse Practitioner at Bowen Health, for example, had her comment enlarged on several signs displayed at the UGM.

Sides had a great term for the company’s push for more ambient clinical voice capabilities: “The Next User-Interface (UI), is no UI.”

Patient Self-Scheduling & Engagement

During the opening presentation, Dr. Murry spent time highlighting the investment the company has made in partnering with Luma Health. Together they are delivering the ability for patients to self-schedule appointments online.

“By partnering,” stated Dr. Murry. “We are helping to meet quickly changing patient expectations faster than trying to build everything from scratch.”

The partnership with Luma is also helping NextGen customers to improve patient engagement through conversational messaging, online forms, and financial workflows.

More Focus

Sides deftly answered the question that was surely top-of-mind for most members of the audience – what is the path forward now that NextGen is a private company after its acquisition by Thoma Bravo?

Using humor, Sides stated simply: “Well, we decided that it was time to join all our other EHR peers as a private company.” He quickly followed that up with a clear statement of what being private means for NextGen customers: “Being a private company means that we will now be able to focus on a few things and do them well, instead of being beholden to the next quarterly earnings call.”

Part of that focus will be on more AI capabilities for the NextGen platform. It also potentially means more focus on platform stability and smoother upgrades – at least that is what customers are hoping for.

Acknowledging Healthcare’s Challenges

Sides ended his presentation by acknowledging the big challenges that NextGen customers are facing. He named five challenges that he has personally heard raised from customers he has spoken with:

1. Staffing
2. Revenue
3. Regulations
4. Technology (specifically the pace of technological change)
5. Meeting patient expectations

Sides said that NextGen was aware that these are significant headwinds and that the company will be doing what it can to help customers meet these challenges over the next year.

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