This Week’s Health IT Business News
At long last HIMSS13 is here. While you’re reading this post I’m probably on a plane, making my way east to New Orleans for the health IT industry’s biggest event. If you don’t attend the HIMSS annual conference or are sitting this one out, there are some online options for you.
Mergers and Acquistions
The Boards of Trustees of The Mount Sinai Medical Center and Continuum Health Partners have voted to approve a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a possible merger. The MOU outlines steps toward creating a new integrated health care system that combines operations of two entities. The next steps involve further due diligence by both parties and the development of a definitive agreement. The final agreement is subject to approval by the boards of both entities and necessary approvals by government authorities. A merger between Mount Sinai and Continuum, which owns Beth Israel Medical Center, St. Luke’s Hospital and Roosevelt Hospital, would create a system with 3,351 bed, making it the largest private hospital in the city.
Oregon-based health IT extension center OCHIN, has acquired Oregon Health Network (OHN), a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit organization. According to the news release, the acquisition is a natural fit, with the two entities determining “their complementary, mission-led organizations could better serve their respective missions and the combined needs of the healthcare and healthcare education community through this organizational alignment” The acquisition will become effective April 1, 2013.
EHR vender Cerner announced this week the company will acquire PureWellness, a provider of online population health management tools, for an undisclosed sum. According to the press release the acquisition will “further position Cerner to help organizations manage the health and care of their populations.” The company will combine the Cerner Millennium, Cerner HealtheIntent, and PureWellness’ health and wellness platforms to create Cerner Wellness.
Free, web-based EHR vendor Practice Fusion announced this week the acquisition of 100Plus, a personalized health analytics prediction startup. According to the news release, the acquisition will “drive forward Practice Fusion’s development of patient-facing tools using clinical data to provide health insights.”
Partnerships
Chicago health IT company EMRapproved announced a new affiliation with CCHIT that cross-promotes access to CCHIT’s online tools for testing and certification preparation with EMRapproved’s certified product listings. The company also announced this week a new collaboration with HealthITxChange, an online community where healthcare practitioners and IT professionals share best practices and lessons learned throughout their electronic health record (EMR/EHR) implementation and ongoing health IT lifecycle. Read both announcements here.
Product Development
In Stage 2 certification news, EHR vendor NextGen announced its ambulatory EHR version 5.8 is now compliant with the ONC 2014 Edition criteria and was certified as a Complete EHR on March 1, 2013 by CCHIT. LDM Group also announced its LDM ConnectSys 3.0 software application has achieved 2014 Edition Ambulatory and Inpatient EHR Module Certifications by ICSA Labs.
DataMotion, a health information service provider (HISP) offering secure data delivery services, announced the release of its DataMotion Direct Toolkit. The Toolkit supports Health Information Systems (HIS) vendors who develop EHR, HIE and integrated delivery network (IDN) solutions to qualify their systems for Stage 2 meaningful use interoperability capabilities.
Health IT services comapny Encore Health Resources, announced this week the launch of its Value-based Performance Improvement (VPI) suite of services and software. According to the press release, VPI features CoreANALYTICS, a set of integrated analytical tools that “helps drive continuous health-system performance improvement.”
Contracts
Greenway Medical announced this week that Evolution Health will deploy Greenway’s PrimeSUITE EHR product nationwide in its home treatment and diagnostic service. Evolution Health has completed the deployment of PrimeSUITE in a Dallas, TX pilot program for Medicare beneficiaries, and will now expand its deployment to commercial markets throughout the United States.
Company Announcements
Nuance Communications announced this week that at the recent IHE North America Connectathon 2013 event in Chicago, the company successfully completed testing for extracting discrete data from paper records and automatically populating appropriate fields in medical documents. According to the announcement, the solution “conforms to the new Consolidated CDA format, and can help hospitals and physicians address certain Meaningful Use requirements for information sharing and exchange.”
EHR vendor athenahealth announced this week the release of athenaClarity, a new cloud-based analytics service for medical groups and health systems to “improve visibility into and management over the complex data that exists across caregiver networks and patient populations.”
EHR and practice management provider iSALUS Healthcare has released its latest generation of OfficeEMR to include a comprehensive Patient Timeline. According to the news release, the Patient Timeline component “converts volumes of discrete patient data into useful information, allowing for a simple, yet concise examination of the patient’s medical record.”
Personnel
Former founder and CEO of HealthGrades, Kerry Hicks, has been named chair of the board at WorldOne, a health care data collection company.