- Northwell Selects Google Cloud: New York’s largest health system Northwell Health has selected Google as its preferred cloud provider to make better use of AI for clinical decision support and predicting future capacity. Although AWS holds a leading 40% of the healthcare cloud market and just announced several high-profile agreements with Tufts Medicine and Geisinger, the Northwell partnership adds to Google’s recent momentum with provider-facing initiatives stemming from improvements to Care Studio and the launch of a Conditions feature geared towards giving physicians a unified view of patient data.
- SAFER and SMARTER: A recent viewpoint from health informatics leaders Dr. Kevin Johnson and Dr. William Stead calls for expanding use of the SAFER guides to support health systems and EHR vendors in enhancing safety and usability, while also pushing for the development of new SMARTER guides to protect the cognitive attention of physicians. The SMARTER Guidelines include 7 dimensions for advancing and measuring EHR cognitive support, including better synthesis of information to improve goal-oriented search and the translation of important user actions into documentation.
- Wysa Series B: Wysa closed a $20M Series B round (total funding now $29.4M) to expand its mental health chatbot into new clinical areas after receiving FDA Breakthrough Device Designation to use its technology with adults who have chronic musculoskeletal pain and related depression. Wysa’s chatbot guides users through CBT for mood-related issues while triaging patients towards higher levels of care or human coaching if more support is needed.
- Turquoise + Komodo: Turquoise Health is partnering with Komodo Health to help patients, providers, and payors better understand the full constellation of costs associated with healthcare encounters. Leveraging Komodo’s Healthcare Map of real-world data for 330M patients, Turquoise will expand its price transparency platform with new features that help identify patterns consistent with specific conditions and establish cost benchmarks associated with the complete patient journey.
- RPM Market Set to Double: Signify Research’s Global Remote Patient Monitoring Report indicates that RPM market revenues are set to double to $3B by 2026 as providers seek to offer more support to patients outside of the hospital and new reimbursement frameworks are implemented. Signify predicts that the shift to value-based-care and population health management models will be the market’s primary long-term drivers, and includes a useful breakdown of the fragmented RPM vendor ecosystem.
- Cuffless BP Monitoring: LiveMetric received FDA 510(k) clearance for its LiveOne cuffless blood pressure monitor that uses a sensor array over the radial artery to produce a waveform that can be used to determine systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Although LiveOne is currently intended for clinical settings, sensor-based blood pressure monitors are a holy grail for consumer-grade smartwatch manufacturers, and the LiveMetric’s new clearance makes it seem like the technology could be getting closer to a mass market debut.
- Adverse Event Improvement: A JAMA study of 244k adult patients hospitalized in 3k US facilities between 2010 to 2019 found significant decreases in annual adverse events for acute myocardial infarction (annual adjusted relative risk, 0.94), heart failure (0.95), pneumonia (0.94), and major surgical procedures (0.93). Although the study showed improving trends for harmful drug reactions and hospital-acquired infections, researchers noted that it also serves as an “unfortunate reminder that adverse events remain unacceptably frequent.”
- No Surprise Act: One in five Americans are still receiving surprise medical bills despite the federal ban that went into effect at the beginning of the year. That’s according to a Morning Consult survey of 2,210 US adults that found 21% have received a surprise bill from an out-of-network provider at an in-network facility (a third of which originated from lab work), and that 22% have had over $1,000 in unexpected medical costs so far this year.
- Canvas Funding: Canvas Medical raised $24M in Series B funding as it looks to build-out its full-stack ambulatory EHR and digital health developer platform that enables providers to launch new patient experiences and business models faster. In addition to the funding, Canvas announced that it received ONC certification to make its customers eligible for value-based reimbursement models in Medicare and Medicaid programs.
- HF Care Costs Billions: The US healthcare system spends $22B on heart failure-related medical services every year, driving the total annual expenditure for adults with heart failure to nearly $180B. UCLA researchers pooled patient data from 2009-2018 (n=250,820) and discovered that the US spends about 5-times more on individuals with heart failure than those without it ($28,950 vs. $5,727 annually). HF-related expenditure increased by 23% over the ten-year period, outpacing expenditure growth associated with other conditions like diabetes and cancer.
