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
Walmart Health is closing, with 51 in-store clinics in five states closing within 90 days and the retailer’s virtual care offering being phased out over the next year. It’s a big blow for Walmart, which according to Healthcare Dive initially set a goal in 2019 of opening 4,000 clinics by 2029. The complexity and cost of scaling clinical operations didn’t help, though Healthcare Dive suggested Walmart did little to drive adoption of in-store or virtual services.
IoT security vendor Nozomi Networks outlined security flaws in the Merge DICOM Toolkit for processing medical images. Attackers could crash DICOM viewer software – or, worse, network-connected ultrasound, MRI or CT machines that send images. Merge by Merative, maker of the toolkit, has since issued a security patch.
Growth in hospital labor expenses is outpacing non-labor expenses for the first time since late 2022, according to the latest monthly report from Strata. This suggests inflationary pressures of the price of drugs and other medical supplies may be easing.
Partnerships
- Data vendor Veradigm is partnering with MedEvolve to make the company’s Effective Intelligence workforce automation and analytics solutions available to Veradigm clients.
- Personify Health is now offering integrated access to WeightWatchers for Business, a weight health platform for employers. (Personify Health is the result of the Virgin Pulse and HealthComp merger.)
- Concert and Lyric are expanding their partnership to develop a solution for managing laboratory payments.
Products
- GE HealthCare announced FDA 510(k) clearance for Portrait VSM, its portable vital sign monitor.
- At its client conference, TruBridge announced a new analytics suite, an interoperability platform, and integration with Nuance Dragon.
- CLEW released its FDA-cleared intelligent clinical surveillance platform for the inpatient setting.
- Klara introduced its patient intake product, which is designed exclusively for athenahealth and available on the athenahealth Marketplace.
- Truveta expanded its capabilities for extracting concepts from clinical notes to support medication details, family history, and details specific to therapeutic areas such as cardiology and rare diseases.
- Credentialing technology vendor Baton Health unveiled Universal Primary Source, which brings together hundreds of primary source databases.
- Intuity Medical received Medicare Part B coverage for POGO, its automatic blood glucose monitoring system.
- Precision medicine software maker InsightRX announced a premium tier of its Apollo analytics platform.
Sales
- Kaiser Permanente is implementing Innovaccer‘s Healthcare AI platform. The news comes after Kaiser CTO Mike Sutten left in late 2019 to become Innovaccer’s Chief Digital Officer. (He’s currently CTO at Innovaccer.)
- Integrated provider, pharmacy, and medical equipment supplier American Medical Administrators is implementing eClinicalWorks EHR and RCM.
- Upstate New York’s United Health Services tapped pCare for digital displays in the private rooms of its new Wilson Main Tower.
- Virtual primary care vendor LifeMD entered a strategic partnership with Withings to provide remote monitoring devices for its GLP-1 weight-loss patients.
Recognitions
- HSBlox completed renewal of the SOC 2 Type II + HITRUST Attestation report for CureAlign, its platform for value-based program administration.
- Data accessibility vendor Clearsense earned the Validated Data Stream designation from the NCQA Data Aggregator Validation Program.
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. Note that submissions received after the close of business on Thursday may not be included in Bonus Features until the following week.
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