Health IT Business News – July 29, 2015

Modernizing Medicine, Inc. announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Weston, Florida-based gMed, Inc.The acquisition is expected to increase Modernizing Medicine’s gastroenterology market share with the addition of gMed’s electronic health record (EHR) system, endoscopy report writer, practice management solution, patient portal, data analytics tool and revenue cycle management.Modernizing Medicine’s acquisition of gMed is subject to certain customary conditions to closing. Pending fulfillment of such conditions, Modernizing Medicine currently anticipates closing the transaction in the third quarter of 2015.

Emdeon Inc. announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Altegra Health, a national provider of technology and intervention platforms that combine data aggregation and analytics. The acquisition will combine Altegra Health’s risk adjustment and quality analytics and Emdeon’s Intelligent Healthcare Network™, revenue cycle management and payment solutions, enabling the delivery of products designed to help customers elevate care quality, optimize financial performance and improve the member and patient experience.

Anthelio Healthcare Solutions announced it has acquired Pyramid Healthcare Solutions, an Avantha Group company, a provider of Health Information Management (HIM) and Revenue Cycle Services (RCM). The acquisition expands Anthelio’s footprint in the patient financial services arena and enhances its revenue cycle offerings. Pyramid brings a full suite of revenue cycle management solutions and expertise to the relationship, as well as an established customer base of healthcare facilities.

NantHealth, a subsidiary of NantWorks, LLC, today announced it has completed the acquisition of Harris Corporation’s (NYSE:HRS) commercial Healthcare Solutions business, a clinical systems integration innovator. Harris retained its government healthcare services business.

Kareo, provider of cloud-based solutions for independent medical practices, announced it has closed $55.4 million in additional funding. This investment is led by Montreux Equity Partners with participation from Silver Lake Partners and all of Kareo’s existing investors. This capital will finance the continued development of Kareo’s product line—which enables physicians to manage all major aspects of their practice—as well as expand the company’s market access.

Health Catalyst, provider of healthcare data warehousing and analytics, and Piedmont Healthcare have partnered on a strategic initiative to improve the health of patients using a new data-driven approach to quality and performance improvement. Health Catalyst’s Late-Binding™ Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and Analytics will help leaders and clinicians at Piedmont Healthcare reveal clinical and operational insights from the terabytes of data collected across the organization’s five hospitals and more than 75 primary care and multi-specialty locations.

Continued data breaches and increasing compliance regulations have made protecting data a foremost concern of enterprises and executives. The result has been a market boom in encryption solutions, with industry research anticipating the global encryption software market alone to grow from $1.85 billion in 2014 to $4.82 billion by 2019. To help developers and integrators capitalize on this opportunity DataMotion has announced a comprehensive, new API program, enabling fast and easy integration of its SecureMail into third party solutions and services.

Interoperability — the secure, free-flowing sharing of data among information systems and healthcare providers, patients and payers — is an essential foundation for improving care coordination and both financial and clinical outcomes. But knowledgeable experts in this critical field are often in short supply. Greenway Health™, named one of Georgia’s top 10 most innovative companies by the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), has developed a program that recruits and trains people to become the interoperability experts of today and tomorrow through the new Greenway Interoperability University. The six-week, on-the-job program features a combination of classroom instruction, hands-on exercises, assessments, mentor shadowing and ongoing learning. Students, many of whom are recent college graduates, are trained by interoperability experts who have many years of experience.

Emmi Solutions has analyzed nearly 100,000 HCAHPS surveys from multiple service lines in 29 hospitals across the country and demonstrated that patients who viewed one of the company’s web-based, interactive programs reported higher patient satisfaction scores when compared with patients who had not. Patient satisfaction scores have always been important to providers but now that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are tying reimbursements to HCAHPS scores, increasing scores has become a business imperative. With a growing amount of revenue at stake, hospital leaders are looking for strategies to improve the patient experience and boost their HCAHPS scores.