Week-end roundup: more House actions on telehealth benefits, VA EHR; Oracle exec moves to FDA digital health; Angle Health raises $58M; layoffs at Akili, Innovaccer, Athenahealth, Mindstrong

February 4, 2023 | by

Has the House in this 118th Congress acquired a propensity for taking fast action? It seems that under the new Speaker, the House on both sides, though divided, is energized and responding to changes that would benefit worker health–and perhaps find a way out of the VA Tower of Trouble that would ultimately benefit veteran care.

The first is a short (four page) bipartisan bill still in draft, the Telehealth Benefit Expansion for Workers Act, that would amend current law in the Public Health Service Act, the Employee Retirement Income and Security Act of 1974, and the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow employers to provide telehealth to employees as excepted benefits. This allows employers to finance an additional benefit not covered under their primary health plan. Examples of excepted benefits are vision and dental plans. Sponsors of the bill are Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) as lead and co-sponsors  Tim Walberg (D-MI), Angie Craig (D-MN), Ron Estes (R-KS), Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), and Rick Allen (R-GA). This builds upon the Medicare and other plan reimbursement expansions contained in the omnibus budget plan passed in the 117th Congress that extended telehealth in high-deductible health plans with health savings accounts (HSAs). At this point, the bill is not numbered, submitted, or on Congress.gov. HealthcareITNews

Not addressed in this bill or any other is whether the extensions will cover hospital-at-home remote patient monitoring (RPM) that was permitted under waivers during the Public Health Emergency (PHE). With its scheduled 11 May end, the Connected Health Initiative (CHI) believes that CMS will not allow remote monitoring to continue in hospital-at-home programs, under current reimbursement and devices. CHI had sent Congress at the end of January a list of their priorities and they’ve received a hearing, but no action has been taken yet. Healthcare Finance

The second is a House bill that would support solving the issues around the VA implementation of the Oracle Cerner EHR without returning to VistA. This is being proposed by Democrats on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee. According to FedScoop, which broke the story, this is being worked on as an alternative to Rep. Matt Rosendale’s H.R. 608 which would pull the plug on Oracle Cerner and revert back to VistA [TTA 1 Feb]. Exactly how this bill would solve Oracle Health’s issues with Cerner Millenium and support VA in continuing that EHR implementation after June is not specified. FedScoop’s source told them that “the proposal may have a wider scope than prior attempts at legislative oversight and could involve a complete rethink of how other IT projects are conducted within the agency. This proposal is focused at a higher level than just one program.” The lack of specificity in this broad brush is not precisely reassuring, but a bipartisan ‘game on’ by both parties on Veterans Affairs, perhaps a ‘good cop/bad cop’ treatment, could be an effective ‘nowhere to hide’ approach with Oracle. Becker’s

Oracle’s loss, FDA’s gain. Troy Tazbaz, formerly Oracle’s senior VP heading up their cloud transformation efforts, joined FDA as Director of their Center of Digital Health Excellence. In that capacity, he will be in charge of technology evaluation, policy development and strategic partnerships for safe healthcare use of digital technologies that advance public health. Certainly he is tanned, rested, and ready: Mr. Tazbaz  left Oracle last September and used part of that time to achieve a dream of bicycling from Chesapeake Bay in Maryland to San Francisco Bay over 58 days. FierceHealthcare

Employer insurer Angle Health raised a $58 million Series A. Lead was Portage Ventures, along with PruVen Capital, Wing Venture Capital, SixThirty Ventures, Mighty Capital, and several others. Angle’s angle is to act as a fully digital, full-stack insurance carrier that delivers comprehensive healthcare benefits tailored to startups and technology companies on one platform. Their baseline telehealth offering covers primary care, urgent care and behavioral health, outsourced to Included Health. They bundle this with administrative services and care navigation, and use the First Health and Cigna PPO networks according to their website. Angle recently expanded from Utah into Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and South Carolina. Release, FierceHealthcare

Unfortunately, layoffs continue in and out of healthcare as funding and usage go south:

  • Akili Interactive in January cut 30% of staff, or 46 people. Akili has developed cognitive therapies for ADHD and other mental illness, including EndeavorRx, a prescription treatment delivered through a video game. Non-ADHD therapies have been put on hold. They announced going public via a SPAC in January 2022 via a merger with Social Capital Suvretta Holdings Corp. I which closed last August at over $14, and are currently trading at $1.92. Mobihealthnews
  • Innovaccer, a health data analytics company, later in January laid off 15%, or 245 people, in the US and India, to concentrate on their ‘core portfolio’. This is their second layoff round;  90 people or 8% went in September. This was quite a turnaround to their sunny-side up 2021, where they raised Series D and E rounds totaling $255 million backed by Tiger Global, Whale Rock, Mubadala Group, and Microsoft M12, achieving a unicorn valuation over $3 billion.  Mobihealthnews, Inc42.com
  • Athenahealth yesterday released 178, or 3% of its staff, two months after going private. They pointed to overhiring, a sluggish recovery in doctor visits, and inflation. They plan to release or move to less expensive office space in their current cities of Watertown, MA and Austin, TX. Boston Globe
  • In yet another sign that virtual mental health’s boom is deflating sharply, Silicon Valley-based Mindstrong is essentially shutting down. Almost all of its C-suite including the CEO and CFO are gone plus an additional 128 jobs including therapists. It is closing its headquarters and is ceasing patient services as of 10 March, yet is still recruiting on its website. Employees are departing between 24 March and 15 April, when presumably the last one out the door will turn out the lights.  Mindstrong raised over $160 million since 2014 including a $100 million Series C in 2020. Behavioral Health Business

Mid-week news roundup: CVS Health Virtual Primary Care launches, VA’s two-day Oracle Cerner EHR slowdown, and microsampling blood + wearables for multiple tests

January 27, 2023 | by

CVS Health finally has Virtual Primary Care up and running. First announced by CVS last May, Virtual Primary Care provides primary care, 24/7 on-demand care, and scheduled mental health services to Aetna members nationwide enrolled in eligible fully-insured and self-insured commercial health plans. Members in VPC can schedule urgent care, 24/7 on-demand care (that may vary by plan), an in-office primary care visit, Minute Clinic visits, and expanded virtual mental health services. Amwell announced that it would be the provider in August on their Q2 2022 earnings call. The release mentions that board-certified physicians and nurse practitioners will be delivering primary care services through physician-led care teams and coordinating with CVS pharmacists. This applies to virtual mental health services as well. (One trusts that this in-network approach will avoid the problems they experienced with Cerebral and Done Health on their prescribed ADHD drugs.) Health records, lab results, and medications are shareable via the patient CVS Health Dashboard. At this point, there is no mention of further rollouts to other plans. Becker’s.

Somebody threw sand in the Oracle Cerner EHR gears at the VA–and it started at MHS. A report from the Spokane Spokesman-Review seems to be the only report out there (other than HISTalk picking it up) on the two-day slowdown in the Oracle Cerner Millenium EHR rolled out at the VA and the Department of Defense’s Military Health System (MHS Genesis) that covers active duty. On Monday and Tuesday, there was a “major slowdown” that did not abate until Tuesday afternoon.  It affected more than half of all MHS providers, as well as VA clinics and hospitals in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and Ohio. Mann-Grandstaff clinicians reported problems to the Spokesman, which contacted the VA. Their press secretary Terrence Hayes confirmed that changes made to the system by the DOD, which shares a database with the VA, “had the unintended consequence of interrupting services that provide connectivity to the network.” The system slowed down from screen to screen, requiring clinicians to work extra time to make all entries, and was not resolved until configuration changes were made. This is another incident adding to a Very Large Dogpile, including interoperability between VA and MHS versions, 498 outages between September 2020 and June 2022, plus two veteran deaths.

And maybe Stanford, forever associated with Theranos, is trying to get its reputation back–in running multiple blood tests on microsamples. A new paper published in Nature Biomedical Engineering by a group of 17 researchers led by Stanford Medicine determined that valid tests could be run on a microsample (10 μl) of blood that could be drawn from a finger prick at home to test for thousands of metabolites, lipids, cytokines, and proteins. This testing would be paired with data captured from wearables. They tested reactions to food (Ensure shake) and the effects of physical activity on blood with wearables monitoring heart rate and step count, plus a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to profile individual physiological status, including cortisol. Unlike Theranos, it’s not done in a ‘lab in a box’ in a supermarket trying to duplicate (fake?) existing diagnostic tests, and it employs mass spectrometry molecule-sorting technology in a lab. Becker’s.

Oracle proceeds with $7B bond sale to restructure debt funding Cerner buy

November 10, 2022 | by

As expected at end of October, Oracle is refinancing debt incurred to acquire Cerner. Bloomberg reported the bond sale is in as many as four parts. “The longest portion of the offering, a 30-year note, yields 2.55 percentage points above Treasuries after earlier discussions of about 3.1 percentage points, said the person, who asked not to be identified as the details are private.” The bridge loan (revised) of $11 billion was further reduced by $1.3 billion. Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are managing the bond sale.

Oracle has one of the highest debt loads in tech, exceeding $90 billion. Fitch Ratings has downloaded their bond rating from BBB+ to BBB overall, the next to lowest investment grade rating. The new notes were rated BBB by Fitch and S&P Global Ratings. An investment company queried by Bloomberg noted that as recently as 2020, Oracle’s debt was rated high A. Also Becker’s.

J.P. Morgan forms life sciences/healthcare VC group; virtual care Ovatient formed by MUSC Health, MetroHealth; Oracle’s putting lots of KC office space on market

November 2, 2022 | by

Some more good news in healthcare–maybe a bit of spring in autumn?

J.P. Morgan is setting up a new venture capital team to invest in life science healthcare companies. The new group, Life Sciences Private Capital, will sit within J.P. Morgan Private Capital. Investments will be in early and growth-stage companies developing novel therapeutics and technologies in several target areas including genetic medicine, oncology, neurodegenerative disease, rare diseases, autoimmunity, AI/ML platforms, metabolic diseases, and neuropsychology. Heading the group is Dr. Stephen Squinto as Chief Investment Officer and Managing Partner. He joins from OrbiMed Advisors, and previously co-founded and built numerous biotechnology companies including Alexion Pharmaceuticals plus being a scientific founder of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Also joining are Dr. Gaurav Gupta and  Anya Schiess with experience at OrbiMed and Healthy Ventures respectively, as well as a prestige group of advisors. JPM press release, Becker’s. 

The Medical University of South Carolina health system (MUSC Health) and The MetroHealth System (MetroHealth) are partnering in a joint venture for virtual and in-home care. From the press release, Ovatient is designed to improve the care experience by linking patients to the delivery of virtual and in-home care via a platform that connects to health systems and acute or procedural care, eliminating fragmented care experiences. The JV also intends to sell the platform to other providers. Other health systems are either joining forces with virtual care providers and AI platforms or forming their own, such as NYC’s Hospital for Special Surgery with their RightMove virtual MSK spinoff, and Northwell Health. MetroHealth release, Mobihealthnews

And if you’re a company looking for luxe office space, Oracle’s putting a lot of it on the market. Granted, it’s in Kansas City, but it’s two buildings: the former Cerner World Headquarters in North Kansas City and a separately located Realization Campus in KC. Current onsite employees will be consolidated at the fairly new Innovations Center in KC by 30 November, which has a substantial 2 million square feet of space. The health clinic part of WHQ will close as well, but not the data centers–at least for now. (A gargantuan task!) Both WHQ and Realization, according to the Oracle Cerner thread on Reddit, have been largely unused since 2020, the pandemic, and Cerner’s transition to a hybrid workforce. Cerner had from 2021 been reducing KC-area office space which had been funded locally by $170 million in sales tax and revenue bonds. The downside is once moved, how many will remain? Oracle reportedly has been considering $1 billion in cuts and is busily refinancing its debt incurred by the Cerner purchase [TTA 27 Oct]. Ridding itself of empty office space is actually a good start, versus cutting heads–a bad move as Oracle tries to save Cerner at the VA and MHS. HealthcareITNews, HISTalk, KSHB 41

Oracle talks to banks to increase loans funding Cerner buy; VA delays Cerner deployments to June 2023

October 27, 2022 | by

Oracle’s Cerner buy proving to be more expensive–and complicated–than expected. Oracle is reportedly going to its banks to increase their term loan against the Cerner purchase from the current $4.4 billion. The increase would refinance short-term debt and reduce refinancing of the existing bridge loan into longer-term bonds and loans. According to reports, the bridge loan, originally $15.7 billion of debt, was reduced to about $11 billion by the term loan. The bridge loan was originally used to finance the Cerner purchase.

Under the existing agreement, the term loan can be extended up to a maximum of $6 billion. This avoids the dicey situation the bond market is currently in with yields and access by companies.

According to Bloomberg Intelligence, Oracle’s over $90 billion in debt is one of the largest debt loads in tech. Oracle’s credit rating by S&P Global Ratings places it two steps above junk (Baa2/BBB/BBB+) but it may sidestep a downgrade by this action. Yahoo!Finance (Bloomberg), Becker’s 

Oracle announced last week modernizations to Cerner which would have greater interoperability and introduce more cloud-based features. This follows on Larry Ellison’s pronouncements during their September Q1 2023 earnings call. During the Oracle Cerner Health Conference last week, four were announced: Seamless Exchange (eliminating duplicate patient health information), Advance (dashboard), virtual models of care (virtual nurses capturing information), and RevElate (billing). Becker’s

Will the modernizations help Oracle’s VA migraine with the Cerner Oracle Millenium implementations? The prior week (13 Oct), the VA announced that deployments are being pushed from January to June 2023. The release cites the multiple problems with technical and system issues that were uncovered in August (outages), discussed extensively in Senate hearings in July, and the OIG report released in July on the ‘unknown queue’ and more.

Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Donald Remy stated that “VA will continue to work closely with Oracle Cerner to resolve issues with the system’s performance, maximize usability for VA health care providers, and ensure our nation’s Veterans are served by an effective records system to support their healthcare. During this “assess & address” period, we will correct outstanding issues—especially those that may have patient safety implications—before restarting deployments at other VA medical centers.” VA will also concentrate on the existing five facilities already deployed on fixing the multiple issues they have. Veterans treated at these sites will receive letters asking them to call the VA if they experienced delays in prescription filling, appointments, referrals, or test results. One wonders if all the steps Oracle’s Mike Sicilia said Oracle is taking [TTA 28 July] to fix the performance, design, and functionality issues are achievable even in the longer time frame–and certainly in the five live systems.

News roundup: Oracle’s modernizing Cerner’s tech, but VA hedges training with AWS; Redesign Health’s $65M raise; Kyruus buys Epion Health; Zócalo Health raises $5M seed; Cigna Evernorth adds to digital formulary

September 20, 2022 | by

Oracle’s Q1 2023 earnings call (Motley Fool transcript here) wasn’t much of a surprise. Earnings were up 23% to $11.4 billion. Cerner contributed $1.4 billion but was partly responsible for a 34% rise in operating expenses along with their business mix of our business. The Q2 forecast is 21% to 23%. But what should not be a surprise to anyone was the rapid Oracleization of Cerner’s tech. Answering a question about what value Oracle is delivering to Cerner’s products, Larry Ellison outlined that Cerner will have its first “pretty complete” health management product out within 12 months, using the Oracle Autonomous Database that runs itself without human labor, plus an all-new application development tool called APEX, a low-code tool. Ellison claims that the APEX low-code tool has security built into the tool, thus not requiring audits, and if the application fails, it rolls over into another data center and keeps running. In contrast, using standard methods, the product would take three to four years to build. Becker’s Health IT

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is relying on Amazon Web Services for training services in transitioning from VistA to Cerner Millenium. The AWS programs will train VA Office of Information Technology staff in three areas: ENCOR implementation, operating Cisco enterprise network core technologies, architecting Amazon Web Services, and Red Hat System administration. The training will cost $54,000 over a base period of about two months. Becker’s Health IT

Redesign Health’s Series C racks up $65 million from General Catalyst, CVS Health Ventures, UPMC Enterprises, TriplePoint Capital, Eden Global Partners, Euclidean Capital, Declaration Partners, and Samsung Next. Redesign is an unusual enterprise that creates startups from its own research, assembles management teams, brands, and funds them. Since 2018, they have created 40 healthcare startups. The funding will be used not for funding additional startups but to expand Redesign’s capabilities in startup creation. Some of their startups: Ever/body (cosmetic dermatology), Calibrate (weight loss, which brutally lost a quarter of the company in July), Jasper (cancer care), Vault Health (virtual diagnostics), and MedArrive (EMS dispatch). Fast Company, FierceHealthcare.

Kyruus adds patient engagement to provider search with Epion Health buy. Kyruus, headquartered in Boston, connects providers in healthcare organizations with people needing the right care, as well as for organizations to maintain provider information and data management. Epion Health, headquartered in Hoboken NJ (near NYC), developed a platform to connect patients with their providers including services such as online check-in, telehealth, integrated reminders for scheduling, and patient education. The acquisition expands Kyruus to 500 health systems and medical groups. Terms and management transitions were not disclosed. For Kyruus, which acquired patient navigation too. HealthSparq from investor Cambia Health Solutions, this helps them build out an end-to-end provider-patient platform. Kyruus release, Mobihealthnews

Startup Zócalo Health raised seed funding of $5M to launch virtual healthcare in California, Texas, and Washington. Zócalo (Spanish for plaza or town square) will offer in those states “virtual first family medicine service designed by Latinos, for Latinos”. Already operating in California, Texas and Washington will be added by end of year. Promotoras de salud will serve as health coaches to their patients. Mobihealthnews

Cigna’s health services/tech arm, Evernorth, announced that it is adding two digital health apps to its formulary: UK/US Big Health’s Sleepio for insomnia and Daylight for anxiety, Quit Genius’ alcohol use disorder and opioid use disorder programs, and HealthBeacon’s injectable medication adherence tool for inflammatory conditions. They also announced pilot programs for Jasper Health (Redesign Health, above), Zerigo Health for psoriasis and eczema, Hinge Health’s new women’s pelvic health program, and Lid Sync’s medication adherence tool. Mobihealthnews

Oracle in Federal court class-action lawsuit on global privacy violations; Cerner VA EHR had 498 major outage incidents, 7% of time since rollout

August 25, 2022 | by

Oracle’s miseries multiply, both in Federal Court and with the VA. The first is taking place in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Three plaintiffs in a class-action suit charge in a complaint filed on Friday 19 August that Oracle is running a giant ‘surveillance state’ on billions of people. From the complaint, “the regularly conducted business practices of defendant Oracle America, Inc. (“Oracle”) amount to a deliberate and purposeful surveillance of the general population via their digital and online existence. In the course of functioning as a worldwide data broker, Oracle has created a network that tracks in real-time and records indefinitely the personal information of hundreds of millions of people” and sells this information to third-parties, without consent of course.

The complaint, filed 19 August, states that Oracle’s BlueKai Data Management Platform, which includes the Oracle Data Marketplace–likely the world’s largest commercial data exchange–and to the point, the Oracle ID Graph “synchronizes the vast amounts of personal data Oracle has amassed; that is, it matches personal data that can be determined to share a common origin with other personal data.” The charge is essentially that Oracle spies on you and has set up the world’s largest surveillance database of billions of people using the billions of data points most everyone generates online over decades.

All three plaintiffs are privacy-rights advocates: Michael Katz-Lacabe of the Center for Human Rights and Privacy; Dr. Jennifer Golbeck, director of the University of Maryland’s Social Intelligence Lab; and Dr. Johnny Ryan, a Senior Fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), and at the Open Markets Institute. 

Dr. Ryan’s organization, the ICCL, stated that “Oracle’s dossiers about people include names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and a detailed account of online activity: for example, one Oracle database included a record of a German man who used a prepaid debit card to place a €10 bet on an esports betting site.”

No dates have been set for hearings or as requested, a jury trial.

In Europe, Oracle had faced similar action along with Salesforce on privacy violations under GDPR. The Privacy Collective’s case was ruled inadmissible by a judge in the Netherlands last year, but is being appealed.

If the action proceeds, this strikes at the heart not only of Oracle’s data business but also Google and any data analytics or brokerage company. Look over your shoulder…someone’s coming after you.  TechMonitor.ai

Meanwhile, back at the endless tsuris called the VA EHR implementation, Oracle Cerner got more verbal beatdowns from the VA’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs and Senate committee members. FedScoop, through a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request living up to its name, was able to quantify the system outages in the Cerner Millenium system between 8 Sept 2020 and 10 June 2022. Of the 640 days the system was in place, it was out or nearly out for about 45 days, or 7%, when time lost in all of the 498 incidents is calculated.

  • 428 incomplete functionality incidents (930 hours of the system partially not working)
  • 49 degradations (103 hours of degraded performance)
  •  24 outage incidents (40 hours of complete down time) 

Where responsible parties could be identified, Oracle Cerner was responsible for about two-thirds of the incidents. Interestingly, the remainder were attributed to the VA. As to root causes, the VA could not identify them in about 50% of the cases. There’s some squirreliness in VA’s internal reporting on multi-day outages, which are more serious because the longer the outage, the more damage and the harder it is to pin down a cause.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough said to FedScoop: “The bottom line is that my confidence in the EHR is badly shaken.” which has to count as an understatement significant enough to hold off further implementation until 2023. House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernizing Ranking Member Mike Bost, R-Ill., said: “The number of incidents listed in this disclosure is alarming. Some part of the Cerner system has been down more often than not for nearly two years.” 

The Showboat of Misery keeps Rollin’ Down the River: the 4 Aug outage, the Senate hearing with Oracle’s Mike Sicilia, the infamous ‘unknown queue’ 21 July and 21 June

Oracle’s Big Vision will be missing a lot of people; layoffs hit Cerner, customer experience, marketing staff

August 2, 2022 | by

‘Healthcare Transformation’ will ring hollow for the many employees at Oracle and Cerner who will be getting 60-day notices — or less — to depart.

One group is within Oracle in the US customer experience division and marketing, and apparently more. According to Bloomberg, the customer experience area that provides analytics and advertising services had been lagging for some time and has been reorganized, losing in the process junior sales employees, a division sales director, and marketing positions. Numbers are not provided, nor information on severance. Also Becker’s.

On the Oracle thread on TheLayoff.com, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) North America has been substantially downsized effective 15 August, especially those supporting a Startups product. 

More extensive are the Cerner cuts. This Editor has been following postings as they happen on both the Reddit r/cernercorporation and TheLayoff threads (Oracle thread here). Areas mentioned appear to be primarily internal/non-customer facing: technical project management in population health, enterprise change management, enterprise process improvement, multiple VPs, sales engineers, application services/support, marketing (of course), talent acquisition, and other areas. People ranged from new hires who had offers pulled, to those under one year, to highly experienced employees with a decade or two in the company. UK tech site The Register has an estimate from one posting of 10,000 layoffs. Given that Cerner has about 20,000 employees, that is close to 50%.

As is typical of mass layoffs, those at Cerner reported that they were notified en masse by managers on Monday through snap meetings. Their packages were cleverly designed to skate through the 60-day WARN notice to the state in the US, providing for an end date in 60 days, just before the official cutover to Oracle on 1 October. Severance packages without insurance or benefits after the 60 days were two weeks for every year at Cerner, not particularly generous given the uncertain economy and freezes all over tech. If the individual sought and was offered a position at Oracle, the severance package would be pulled, which is the usual maneuver to discourage any internal job-seeking from this group.

There is no indication of any cuts to Cerner outside the US, yet. The Independent, citing The Information, indicated that further Oracle cuts may come from Canada, India, and Europe. Oracle has a goal of saving $1 billion.

In this Editor’s view, Oracle is erasing Cerner as fast as it can [TTA 19 July] and doing internal housecleaning (bloodletting) at the same time. As to the former, Mike Sicilia’s testimony to the Senate committee about Cerner at the VA [TTA 28 July] had a distinct tone of cleaning up the previous regime’s mess–this should be no surprise. Yet Cerner’s tippy-top management remains in place, with generous compensation and separation arrangements in place [TTA 19 July with links to prior articles]. Cerner’s healthcare customers should take note, either way.

Having been there and done that more than once, our best wishes to everyone affected. Remember that you are not your job, pack up your learnings in your kit bag for a new journey, and you will land a good job soon.

Hat tip to HISTalk as well for covering this story and reaching many on the provider and partner side in the industry that we do not.

Oracle’s ‘new sheriff’ moving to fix Cerner EHR implementation in the VA: the Senate hearing

July 28, 2022 | by

Last week’s (20 July) hearing on the VA’s increasingly wobbly EHR transition from VistA to Cerner showcased Oracle’s executive vice president for industries Mike Sicilia. His testimony to the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs had a heaping helping of ‘the new sheriff has arrived in Dodge City’.  As of six weeks ago, after the Transformational Big Vision kvelling faded, Cerner’s painful stumbles became Oracle’s VA Migraine [TTA 21 July, 21 June]. Cerner is now part of the Oracle Global Health business unit that falls under him.

First, the pledge made in his statement: “Unlike Cerner alone, Oracle brings an order of magnitude more engineering resources and scale to this formidable challenge.” After outlining the work that Oracle has done for CDC and NIH on Covid-19, he testified:

You should consider that in effect the VA, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Coast Guard obtained a new, vastly more resourced technology partner overnight to augment Cerner. We also strongly believe in this mission and consider it not only a contractual obligation but a moral one to improve healthcare for our nation’s veterans and their caregivers. We intend to exceed expectations. 

Of the list of 36 issues detailed by the committee to VA Deputy Secretary Remy, Sicilia condensed them into three main areas: performance, design, and functionality. The concrete moves are:

  • Oracle will move the implementation to the cloud and rewrite Cerner’s pharmacy module, completing both tasks within 6-9 months
  • They have set up a ‘war room’ consisting of Oracle’s top talent of senior engineers and developers, working on the entire DoD/VA EHR systems as priority #1, with the first order of work a top-to-bottom analysis. While integrating with the Cerner team, the statement makes it clear that Oracle “brings an order of magnitude larger engineering team than Cerner”.
  • The Cerner EHR system is currently running on a dated architecture with technology that is in some cases two decades old and thus will be moved within 6-9 months to Oracle’s Generation 2 cloud. (That must be reassuring to thousands of hospitals and practices!)
  • Shortly after the closing, Oracle fixed a database bug that caused 13 of the last 15 outages, and as of last week there were no further outages. 
  • Testifying on the status of the “unknown queue”,  he stated it was designed to account for human error rather than to mitigate it, so it will be redesigned–it will be automated more on the front end and on the back end will have a better process.
  • Oracle will “start over” with the Cerner pharmacy module, rebuilding it as a showcase of a cloud-optimized web application.

VA’s EHR leaders also testified at the Senate hearing. Terry Adirim, Executive Director of the Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office at the VA, confirmed that unsurprisingly, Cerner’s next rollouts scheduled for the Boise VA Medical Center and other centers have been postponed indefinitely due to multiple ongoing system stability issues: change control and testing; challenges with increased capacity; basic functionality; its resilience design, and its response in last resort disaster situations. These specific issues overlapped but were more specific than those covered in Sicilia’s statement, which focused on the actions that Oracle would take.

Adirim and Kurt DelBene, the VA’s CIO, were roasted by the senators as painting a “very rosy picture”. The OIG report itemized at least 60 recommendations before going further. Adirim, to his credit, noted that DoD had similar stability issues in its system which was a warning, but the VA’s system is far more complex and care oriented than DoD which presumably exacerbated those issues. FedScoop and especially HISTalk’s Monday Morning Update 7/25/22

VA’s final, troubling OIG ‘unknown queue’ report on Cerner Millenium rollout; Oracle’s Sicilia to testify before Senate today

July 21, 2022 | by

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report on the troubled rollout of Cerner Millenium at the VA continues to reverberate. The final report, revealed last month in draft [TTA 21 June], detailed a flaw in Cerner’s software that caused the system to lose 11,000 orders for specialty care, lab work, and other services – without alerting health care providers that the orders (also known as referrals) had been lost. This was the infamous ‘unknown queue’. The final report identified 149 adverse events related to the lost orders, including a homeless veteran at risk of suicide whose follow up appointment was lost, threatened to kill himself, but fortunately was helped (and hospitalized) outside the VA system. None of these problems surfaced before the go-live at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center, but did four days later–and apparently other end users weren’t informed of the problem until a year later.

In FierceHealthcare’s update published today, “The OIG called it “troubling” that the deputy secretary [Donald Remy] “appears to absolve Oracle Cerner for its failure to inform VA of the unknown queue while placing the blame for outcomes from the unknown queue on VHA end-users.”” and “In a second report (PDF) released last week, the federal watch agency says VA project executives misrepresented its EHR training program” starting with Mann-Grandstaff. Two VA senior staffers responsible for training employees there gave inaccurate data to inspectors.

Cerner Millenium and the VA implementation (and other problems around the DOD implementation) are now Oracle’s headache. Executive Vice President Mike Sicilia was scheduled to testify Wednesday afternoon at a Senate hearing this afternoon to answer the many questions raised about the EHR rollout and safety problems. 

Cerner’s business now consolidated under Oracle Health

July 19, 2022 | by

The internal memo doesn’t say so but doesn’t really have to. The sunsetting of the Cerner brand (logo left) has begun. HISTalk this evening reported on Friday 15 July’s Cerner internal announcement posted on Reddit, vetted by the Kansas City Business Journal (paywalled), and it’s not all that surprising:

  • The business unit is now called Oracle Health Global Industry Unit (GIU) or Oracle Health
  • The chairman of Oracle Health will be David Feinberg, MD, late CEO of Cerner and previously of UCLA Health, Geisinger Health, and Google’s last effort at Health. 
  • Travis Dalton is being promoted to run the Oracle Health GIU as General Manager from running Cerner Government Services as Client Services Officer
  • Cerner’s engineering and product executives will be reporting to Oracle’s Don Johnson who runs all Oracle engineering for all applications and platform services. This includes former CTO Jerome Labat who received a stay deal along with Dr. Feinberg [TTA 21 Jan, 26 Jan]. Mr. Labat has at least 11 million good reasons (and Dr. Feinberg 22 million) to stay for the next year and a day from the closing on 8 June.
  • Cerner’s corporate functions, such as IT, finance, legal, and HR, will move into Oracle’s centralized, global teams, which typically means that pink slips will be the order of the day if they haven’t already been received
  • More disclosed to employees at a town hall on that Friday 
  • No external announcement has been made as of 1845 19 July (Eastern Time)

Our Readers who have been following the acquisition and personally been through acquisitions know the stage was set by Larry Ellison’s Big Pronouncements on Healthcare Transformation at the closing [TTA 14 June]. It was all about what Oracle would be doing in building a national health record database and more, with nary a mention of Cerner. The eventual elimination of the Cerner name should thus be no surprise to industry observers. Cerner was a pearl bought at a great price ($28 billion) to make Oracle the Visionary Leader In Healthcare and provide Mr. Ellison with a Grand Finale.

How this will be received by health system and provider customers–including DOD and the ever-troublesome VA–is anyone’s guess. This Editor has previously speculated that health systems with Cerner EHRs were not going to be enthusiastic about replacing Cerner’s current third-party vendors with Oracle services and technology, especially if they worked well or if Oracle costs more. If the move to OCI–Oracle Cloud Infrastructure–doesn’t go as smooth as brand new glass, another black mark in the copybook. The other would be resentment of Oracle’s announced and completely expected hard sell on other services to make up the cost of the pearl. [TTA 15 June]

Almost an ideal scenario for Epic to sell against, one would think. As for the VA, Oracle needs to fix the Cerner Millenium rollout now under heavy scrutiny–fast and right.  

Facebook Meta Pixel update: Nemours Children’s Health using 25 ad trackers on appointment scheduling site

June 21, 2022 | by

The Meta Pixel tracker study gets a little worse–this time, it’s information on appointments for children. The Markup’s investigation on healthcare use of ad trackers continues with an examination of Nemours Children’s Health, a Delaware-based multi-state health network with 97 locations in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida that serve about 500,000 families. Once again, Meta Pixel and other ad trackers were found to capture personal information and patient/family details entered by an adult on the appointment scheduling site to Facebook that may constitute protected health information.

Meta Pixel was recorded as tracking:

  • IP addresses
  • Scheduled doctor and his or her specialty
  • In some cases, the first and last name of the child being scheduled

It is not this information alone, but in combination with other information that Facebook possesses, that can profile any user’s health conditions, link specific conditions to individuals and parents, and thus constitute a privacy violation. IP addresses are one of the factors that HIPAA cites as when linked to other information, create a violation.

The Markup used a tool called Blacklight to scan Nemours’ websites.

What was Nemours thinking in building their website? In addition to Meta Pixel, the scheduling site is riddled with 25 ad trackers and 38 third-party cookies. These are coded in by Facebook, Amazon, Google, and The Latest Healthcare Transformer, Oracle. Oracle claims it has healthcare data on 80% of US internet users, and one can assume this is how they get it. Ad platforms MediaMath and LiveRamp also captured data. The Markup’s team could detect the trackers, but not determine what information these ad trackers were capturing. 

In addition to the trackers on the scheduling site, Blacklight picked up a session recorder from Mouseflow. This is code that can potentially track what people click on a page. Mouseflow states on its Legal Hub that in order to transmit HIPAA-protected information to a third party, a business associate agreement (BAA) must be in place. Mouseflow did not confirm a BAA agreement to The Markup, but in a statement to them insisted that Mouseflow does not permit the transmission of PII or PHI and masks that information.

Not all health data transmitted constitute HIPAA violations, but capture of appointment scheduling information is right on the line of HIPAA violations, though not 100% conclusive.

Elsewhere on the Nemours website, there were nine ad trackers and ten third-party cookies. 

Even after they were notified by The Markup, Nemours persisted in using Meta Pixel. While many of the trackers on the scheduling site were removed, trackers from Facebook, Google, and Salesforce remained. Facebook’s Meta Pixel was removed after last week’s story.

This is certainly another gap between the suits in the suites and the IT/developers rowing in the galley.

Wednesday news roundup: Oracle scrutinizing outside vendors, cloud change coming for Cerner EHRs, audio-only telehealth can continue after PHE–HHS, Proximie connected surgery raises $80M (UK)

June 15, 2022 | by

Oracle moving quickly to change Cerner’s outside vendors to Oracle products and move their EHRs to Oracle cloud services. Will this fly with health systems and providers? An immediate change that will resonate with current Cerner EHR users is Oracle’s immediate moves to replace Cerner’s current third-party vendors with Oracle services and technology. So if your Cerner EHR has something you like but it comes from a third-party vendor, enjoy it while you can. Do expect that Oracle will be selling other products like Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud, administrative systems, and supply chain into providers and health systems–hard. From the earnings call, CEO Safra Katz: “We remain confident in our ability to grow Cerner’s top line and bottom line faster than they were able to do so on their own as these changes are implemented.”

The major and quickest move specified in yesterday’s Oracle earnings call (transcript) will be to move Cerner to OCI–Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Further down into Mr. Katz’s remarks, Cerner is expected to account for 20 points of their cloud growth in Q1 2023 (starting 1 June 2022). When Cerner has added $15.8 billion of debt to the balance sheets, it’s to be expected.  HISTalk, Becker’s

What happens to audio-only telehealth at the end of the pandemic Public Health Emergency (PHE)? HHS has just issued guidance that will permit telehealth, including audio-only, services to continue. According to the HHS release, “HIPAA covered entities can use remote communication technologies to provide telehealth services, including audio-only services, in compliance with the HIPAA Privacy Rule. ” There are specific requirements such as how the HIPAA Security Rule applies to electronic media and electronic protected health information (ePHI). The full guidance is here.

UK surgical connectivity platform Proximie raises $80 million. London-based Proximie, a system that connects surgeries with pre-operative patient information, collaborative tools, and post-operative content distribution, completed a Series C with participation from Emerson Collective – the impact investor founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, British Patient Capital, Mubadala Investment Company, and the Minderoo Foundation, plus previous investors. The raise is unusually large (in this Editor’s opinion) for the UK, particularly at this uncertain time. Proximie has supported over 13,000 surgeries in 100 countries, contracts with over 35 major medical device companies such as Stryker and Abbott, and has been used in 500 hospitals across 50 countries. The company is a partner with Teladoc and Vodafone Business.  Release.  

Oracle’s Big Healthcare Transformation: it’s all about ‘better information’ (sigh) (updated)

June 14, 2022 | by

“Better information is the key to transforming healthcare,” he [Larry Ellison] said. “Better information will allow doctors to deliver better patient outcomes. Better information will allow public health officials to develop much better public health policy and it will fundamentally lower healthcare costs overall.”

Larry Ellison’s Big Vision, now that Oracle’s acquired Cerner, has a distinct and familiar ring. ‘Better information’ was also the mantra of IBM Watson Health. It’s the meme of every healthcare company, from education to data analytics, that better and more accessible information means better outcomes and lower cost of care. For those of us who’ve hung our caps in healthcare for the past decade, it’s the dawning promise that like Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, is on the top of the beautiful hill, within our sight, yet out of our reach. But we keep trying.

Mr. Ellison is smarter and richer than most of us, so let’s defer to his Vision and what seem to be the most obvious obstacles to interoperability and mass scaling:

  • A national health record database, in an open standards-based system, will be built by Oracle. It will sit on top and pull information from thousands of hospital and presumably practice-based EHRs. Once completed, in the non-defined future, a hospital or practice anywhere would be able to access patient information.
    • Obstacles: data fragmentation, health records not in an EHR, cooperation in providing information, security, Federal/state privacy regulations, and buy-in from other EHRs which were at last count 500 or so with hospitals running at least 5-10 different EMRs/EHRs.
  • From the national database, disease-specific research using anonymized data from it and AI-enabled analysis
    • This is potentially a big winner, as smaller models are already in use, e.g. between Ronin, a clinical decision support solution, and MD Anderson to create a disease-specific AI model for cancer patients in treatment. 
    • Gathering, anonymizing, and securing the data are the main challenges, plus those above

Big Visions don’t thrill us the way they used to because other than the newest among us, the new Big Promises sound all too familiar. It’s not that long ago that first EHRs, then health information exchanges were supposed to be the clearinghouses to make information interoperable. 21st Century Cures, which allowed members/patients to obtain their health information from payers and providers to the individual, was supposed to fix that portability gap in its next phase. The government also has its own national data exchange framework as part of the Cures Act. So what about that?

Updated. Lest this Editor be considered an outlier, a skeptic, and a general killjoy, there are other smart people far better grounded in IT Reality who are equally skeptical. Patrick Murta, who is now with BehaVR but formerly was co-chief architect for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s FHIR at Scale Taskforce (FAST), is quoted in FierceHealthcare. “Saying that you’re going to build a national database and bringing that to fruition is a different story. This particular model is going to face the same barriers that have been there for many years and there’s no easy path to overcome those barriers quickly.” His opinion is echoed by at least three others in the article. In short, Oracle is actually behind other vendors in the data interoperability area and the goal to knit together thousands of systems that don’t talk to each other may be admirable, but is likely to be the classic Bridge Too Far.

Tony Blair and his nonprofit Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, already partners with Oracle to use its cloud technology to tackle health issues.

Oracle did not answer queries on timing, cost, and access. 

The cynics among us will need no reminder that Cerner is having interoperability issues between DOD’s MHS Genesis and VA’s Cerner Millenium, both national systems that Oracle has now inherited.

In the short term, Cerner will be updated to include a built-in voice interface, more telehealth capabilities, and disease-specific AI models. It’s nice to have the short-term needs recognized while the Big Vision is being built. Healthcare Dive, FierceHealthcare

A sneak peek at Oracle’s plans for healthcare prior to 9 June’s ‘The Future of Healthcare’ live

June 9, 2022 | by

Gimlet EyeOracle is all set to heal the healthcare system, now that Cerner’s in the fold. Unlike other companies that have promised (ZocDoc and Change Healthcare come to mind), Oracle may actually have the capabilities to do so in many areas. Oracle has the enterprise infrastructure, the analytics, and IT automation; Cerner brings the entreé into patient records, automation, and clinical expertise that Oracle on its own didn’t have.

For those Readers not able to join the Oracle Live presentation at 3pm Central Time, 4pm Eastern, and 9pm BST (and miss Tony Blair! s/o), some of the highlights of the preview posted by Oracle’s EVP Mike Sicilia, on the Oracle Health blog:

  • The objective is to deliver “secure and reliable solutions that deliver health insights and experiences to dramatically change how health is managed by patients, providers, and payors”
  • Reduce technology-induced administrative burden that’s burned out clinicians through “a toolset that supports clinical decision making and prioritizes the user experience” via an interface that’s easy to use for care delivery organizations to find patient information
  • Make systems interoperable between organizations so that clinicians can access complete medical histories and records are portable by the patient by creating a collaborative ecosystem that breaks down information silos
  • Using their Fusion application to streamline and integrate back-office systems to drive efficiency and reduce costs, as well as reducing administrative costs, the supply chain, and retaining employees
  • Oracle’s 40+ years in securing vulnerable healthcare data to the standards they have in handling large volumes of cloud-based data for financial institutions
  • Combining existing expertise in areas such as clinical trials, health insurance, and public health analysis with Cerner, they will “support the entire lifecycle of healthcare, going beyond traditional health IT to integrate our infrastructure, platform, and applications capabilities for a more fully connected operational, administrative, and clinical system”

Those cynics among us with Gimlet Eyes have heard each and every one of these points before. Panaceas where everything is there for everybody, all wrapped up with a blue bow, if you buy it all at the usual stunning price, have been tried before in healthcare. Another question is the mesh of Middle America Cerner and Silicon Valley Oracle. Nonetheless, the combo should give the industry a little hope. They’ll be feeling their way through as Cerner is an organization used to doing things their way. If Oracle can straighten out the MHS Cerner Genesis and Cerner Millenium rollout in DOD and the VA, it’ll be worthy of applause.

Wednesday AM roundup all about money: $28B Oracle-Cerner closes today, 9 June strategy talk; Teladoc class-action lawsuits begin; Cigna’s look at loneliness

June 8, 2022 | by

As you read this, Oracle has closed on their acquisition of Cerner Corporation. According to the Oracle release, approximately 204,280,589 shares, or 69.2% for $28 billion, have been validly tendered and other conditions, such as passing antitrust approvals, have been satisfied. If there are other loose ends to tie off, they aren’t impediments to the closing.

Interested Readers can register to hear Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman, and other speakers outline Oracle’s strategy to “redefine the future of healthcare” (a song we’ve heard before) on 9 June at 3pm Central Time. If our UK Readers have been wondering what former PM Tony Blair’s been up to, he’ll be on this call. Other UK speakers are David Walliker, chief digital officer of Oxford University Hospitals, and Kevin Jarrold, joint CIO of Imperial College Healthcare. Another outside speaker is Meharry Medical College‘s CEO, James E.K. Hildreth, MD, PhD. Meharry, located in Nashville, is the second oldest medical school founded (1876) to educate black Americans in medicine and dentistry.  

Here we go with class-action lawsuits against Teladoc based on loss of share value and misleading statements. Teladoc, whose stock has taken a long jump off a very tall building (90% loss from the high), is being sued in US District Court for the Southern District of New York by a shareholder, Jeremy Schneider. This is a Federal securities class-action lawsuit (text here) with Mr. Schneider representing shareholders who purchased Teladoc shares between 28 October 2021 and 27 April 2022 (the date of announcing Q1 2022 results). The charges involve materially false statements that Teladoc made on its business, operations, and prospects including minimizing competition leading to increased advertising costs, unrealistic projections for revenue made in the period, and the impact of the Livongo writeoff announced Q1–a noncash goodwill impairment charge of $6.6 billion, or over $41 per share [TTA 4 May recaps Q1].

A lookup on Justia indicates that Mr. Schneider is being represented by Jeremy Alan Lieberman of Pomerantz LLP. The filing names Jason Gorevic, CEO, and Mala Murthy, CFO as individual defendants along with Teladoc. Mr. Schneider is not a large shareholder; his investment was a little over $250,000 from December 2021 to February 2022. Other shareholders may join the suit by contacting Pomerantz.

What usually happens after this is other firms file class-action suits in the same court representing other shareholders. An example of this trolling is this announcement/release from Bernstein Liebhard LLP. 

If you like risk and volatility, TDOC and AMWL shares remain relatively cheap (the latter below $5) and haven’t recovered. TTA reflected on Amwell’s equally shaky Q1 and growing losses in May 

If and when they’ll recover is anyone’s guess, with increased direct-to-consumer competition from retail (CVS, Walmart) and with providers maintaining their own telehealth systems, homegrown and whitelabeled (Bluestream Health, Zipnosis). Healthcare Dive, Mobihealthnews recap much of what led to this point.

If you feel a little lonelier after your Teladoc (or other telehealth) shares tanked, or you feel like life hasn’t gotten back to normal now that the pandemic is really over (despite the hoo-hah over monkeypox), Cigna’s latest research commissioned from Morning Consult will be on point. Isolation is a function of lower income, lower physical and mental health, and being a single parent or mother. Contrary to the usual assumption, young adults 18 to 24 feel lonelier and more left out (79%) compared to those aged 66 and over (41%). (Your Editor speculates that the office and workplace are more necessary for socialization by those starting their careers than those toward the end who’ve built their networks.) What’s also a little surprising is the increased indication of loneliness among racial lines with black/African American (68%) and Hispanics (72%) feeling significantly lonely. The impact at work is less productivity and more unhappiness with their jobs. The study recommends increases in work and community activities, work flexibility, improved benefits, and workplace inclusion. A bit more along with quotes from Cigna’s Evernorth subsidiary in FierceHealthcare.