Healthcare Analyst David Johnson for a Fortune cover story… in January 1970.

Digital Health

HIMSS 2024 Recap and Major Announcements

It’s the final day of HIMSS 2024, and although most exhibitors are still either valiantly stationed at their booths or playing hooky at Disney World, the giant wave of announcements has already crashed and it’s time to round up some of the biggest stories from the show.

The topics du jour among the ~35,000 attendees weren’t entirely unexpected. Generative AI was definitely the main course, but with an especially heavy portion of HIMSS’ signature interoperability sauce poured over it following the TEFCA go-live. Cybersecurity was also an even more popular side dish than usual (anyone’s guess as to why).

HIMSS24 major announcements, launches, and partnerships:

• Abridge added UCI Health to its quickly growing roster of health system deployments, and the system-wide ambient AI roll out sounds like it’s already helping out significantlywith “pajama time.” The expansion hits less than a month after Abridge closed its $150M Series C.

• Altera Digital Health showcased Paragon Denali, its cloud-native EHR built on Microsoft Azure that’s designed for rural, critical access, and community hospitals. Paragon Denali’s SaaS model gives smaller hospitals a single platform for managing clinical and financial data without having to do the heavy lifting of on-premises implementations and upgrades.

• Ambience Healthcare is now fully integrated with Oracle’s Cerner Millennium EHR, enabling clinicians to seamlessly interface with Ambience’s medical scribe, coding assistant, and full suite of generative AI products within their standard workflows.

• Caregility presented its new class of adaptive telehealth edge devices that support multiple audio and video streams at the bedside, enabling providers to deploy advanced hybrid care delivery models at scale.

• emtelligent unveiled the next generation of its medical AI platform dubbed emtelliPro+, which uses a custom medical LLM to produce hallucination-resilient outputs that can be used to make safe determinations in even the most complex use cases.

• Google Cloud launched Vertex AI Search for Healthcare, a genAI tool that allows providers, payors, and life science orgs to make better use of their clinical data. Users can search for information across clinical notes, scanned documents, and other data sources to find natural language answers to their questions (e.g. patient medical history).

• Hyro announced a long-term strategic partnership with healthtech consulting firm Disruptive Innovations that’ll see Hyro’s Responsible AI platform and voice assistants help DI’s clients address key challenges such as agent burnout, patient access, and operational efficiency.

• Innovaccer previewed its upcoming provider AI copilot, a portable tablet designed to deliver multi-solution clinical support at the point-of-care. Not to outshine its foray into the hardware game, Innovaccer also announced its acquisition of Pharmacy Quality Solutions to accelerate VBC in pharmacy settings. Stay tuned for a deeper dive on this next week.

• Intermountain Health became the first organization in the world to attain Stage 7 validation of the HIMSS Infrastructure Adoption Model (INFRAM), which basically means it’s the bee’s knees across all corners of care delivery, including clinical outcomes, adoption, sustainability, performance, and cybersecurity. We’ll unpack the newly modernized INFRAM framework in an upcoming issue, and want to give a major congratulations to Dr. Farukh Usmani and team.

• Juno Health demonstrated a range of new features within its modular EHR that enhance its user experience through personalization, including a Clinical Content Builder, Care Planning tool, and Treatment Plan solution.

• Linus Health introduced two huge upgrades to its cognitive impairment detection platform, including Hearing Screener tests to identify signs of MCI and a new Digital Trail Making Test Part B (an FDA Class II medical device designed to capture more data than traditional paper-based exams). The cherry on top? Linus also acquired speech analytics vendor Aural Analytics.

• Microsoft is spearheading the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), a consortium of top tier organizations aimed at operationalizing responsible AI principles in healthcare. The packed announcement also casually included three major deployments for Nuance’s DAX Copilot at Stanford Medicine, WellSpan Health, and Providence.

• Nabla announced that Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (the largest pediatric multi-specialty medical group in the US) has selected Nabla Copilot to streamline clinical documentation after collaborating closely throughout the pilot to tailor specific capabilities for the unique requirements of pediatrics in a hospital setting.

• Philips expanded its partnership with AWS to combine its expertise in digitization and pathology with AWS’ scalable cloud solutions to help pathology labs store, manage, and analyze growing volumes of digital pathology data.

• Salesforce debuted Einstein Copilot: Health Actions, a new solution geared toward letting healthcare workers submit natural language prompts to summarize information, update patient and member data, and automate manual outreach.

• Surescripts put out a gem of a report on health intelligence sharing in the US, highlighting the fact that its network saw a mindblowing 24 billion exchanges of clinical and benefit information in 2023. The report is filled with insights that make it a must-read, including the fact that last year saw 10% growth in e-prescribing among non-PCPs (29% among pharmacists), and a 49% increase in electronic processing of prior auths.

• symplr took the lid off symplrAI, the culmination of its enterprise-level approach to AI/ML integration for accelerating productivity gains in healthcare. symplrAI will leverage genAI services from AWS, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q, to bolster both established and new AI capabilities within symplr’s SaaS portfolio.

• Talkdesk introduced Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare, a generative AI solution built to deliver EHR-integrated self-service experiences to resolve complex needs without burdening human contact center agents.

• Wolters Kluwer Health unveiled its newly unified UpToDate portfolio of Clinical Decision, Drug Referential, and Patient Engagement solutions to improve interoperability and care coordination. On top of that, WK announced that its AI Labs solution now has access to the complete set of UpToDate’s evidence-based clinical content and graded recommendations across over 25 specialties. 

For the first HIMSS meeting since the conference changed hands to Informa ownership, the upbeat show floor still seemed right at home in the Florida sunshine. We hope that everyone had an awesome time if you made it out in-person, and welcome all of our new readers that we met at the show!

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• Wegovy Gains Approval for Heart Disease: The hottest drug class in the world just got even hotter after the FDA approved Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy for cardiovascular event risk reduction, opening new routes for GLP-1 care and coverage. The basis for the expanded approval was the SELECT trial, which showed that Wegovy slashed patients’ major cardiac event risks by an eye-popping 20% over five years. Semeglutide was already approved for diabetes (via Ozempic) and weight loss (via Wegovy), although payors have largely resisted covering non-diabetic patients. Check out Cardiac Wire for all the details. 

• Suki Joins Forces With Amwell: Voice AI platform Suki is joining forces with Amwell to bring the Suki Assistant to Amwell’s Converge telehealth platform that powers the digital care of over 55 health plans and 90 million people. Suki Assistant helps clinicians complete notes 72% faster while also supporting other tasks like coding or dictation, and having it available directly within the Converge platform tucks it straight into the workflows of Amwell providers.

• Biden’s Healthcare State of the Union: President Biden is rounding up $12B for women’s health research, an initiative he touted in last week’s State of the Union. The initiative would have a three-pronged aim to: 1) create a new fund at the NIH for interdisciplinary research on women’s health; 2) launch a nationwide network of women’s health centers of excellence; 3) source private funding for women’s health studies. Although Congress hasn’t been too keen on funding new health research this year, our deep dive on the women’s health gap lays why it might be time to make an exception.

• Docs Negative View on PE: A new JAMA survey came to the not-so-shocking conclusion that physicians have a largely negative opinion of private equity investment in healthcare. Researchers surveyed 525 US doctors, finding that 61% viewed PE negatively, 29% were neutral, and 11% had a favorable opinion. Doctors saw PE negatively with respect to physician well-being (58%), healthcare costs (57%), and health equity (51%). Interestingly, only 5.5% of respondents worked for a PE-owned healthcare entity.

• Amazon Developing Health AI Chatbot: The rumor mill suggests that Amazon is training an AI chatbot to manage incoming patient messages and administrative queries for One Medical. Former employees told The Washington Post that the initiative is partly a response to the surge of telehealth patients Amazon’s seen since pushing the service to Prime members, coupled with reduced front desk roles following recent layoffs. 

• Nursing Homes in the Hot Seat: Nursing homes found themselves in the hot seat after a UCLA study looked into why their operating margins keep drifting into negative territory. In 2019, researchers found that Illinois nursing homes were “tunneling” upwards of 60% of their profits to related parties that just so happened to share the same ownership, primarily by utilizing services at inflated costs. The financial sleight of hand helps nursing homes make the case that they can’t survive potential Medicare cuts, while also shielding revenue from any legal settlements.

• Debunking Care Myths: A great article from Dr. Mick Connors made an effort to debunk some of the most common myths lingering over physician-led care transformation. Dr. Connors whack-a-moles topics ranging from EHR burnout and scope creep to MBA requirements and AI overreliance, providing short-and-sweet summaries of the misconceptions and counterpoints for each issue. 

• February Hospital Flash Report: Kaufman Hall’s February Hospital Flash Report showed more of the same for those that have been following along: average margins ticked up to 5.1% while the leaders continue to separate from the pack. An interesting call out was that net revenue hasn’t risen as fast as gross revenue, which might reflect payors negotiating more aggressively and a further shift to VBC. Total expenses on a volume-adjusted basis improved despite the persistent climb in drug and supply costs, largely due to labor expenses getting reined in. 

• Medicare Enrollees Want Telehealth: A KeyCare survey uncovered a sky-high level of virtual care acceptance among 400 Medicare enrollees, with 69% reporting they’d be comfortable doing annual wellness visits via telehealth. The most cited benefits of telehealth visits were time/transportation convenience (39%), avoiding an office with sick people (31%), and lower expenses (23%). Also worth noting is that 75% of Medicare patients would feel comfortable conducting their annual wellness visits with a provider who isn’t their regular PCP, so long as their medical records could be shared.

• Bodyport Heart Failure Detection: Bodyport’s remote heart failure monitoring system, which features a unique cardiac scale that measures weight and hemodynamic biomarkers, identifies twice as many heart failure events as conventional weight-based approaches. That’s the takeaway from the new SCALE-HF1 study, where Bodyport’s Cardiac Scale and Congestive Index algorithm demonstrated 70% accuracy in predicting HF events, surpassing the weight-based standard of care (35%) while generating fewer alerts (2.58 versus 4.18 alerts per patient-year).

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