It’s been a long, busy week with many of us still rubbing our feet (and heads) from our adventures at HIMSS16 in the city of lost wages. Even though HIMSS dominated the news this week, there were no obvious leading themes this year for a change, but a few interesting stories emerged. There was the interoperability pledge announced by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell to Salesforce’s official debut of its healthcare cloud.
A MedHeads conversation led by MedCity News Health IT Reporter Neil Versel joined by fellow HIMSS16 attendees Jared Johnson of Ultera Digital; Sean Carroll, CEO of Arcadia Healthcare Solutions; and Nancy Fabozzi from Frost & Sullivan. They fleshed out some of the highlights of the conference centered on the best, worst and weird of the conference.
A Personalized Approach to Medication Nonadherence
At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
Here are five stories that resonated with our readership this week:
1. Health Catalyst raises $70M from strategic investors to support product development
“We are evolving from an offline data aggregator and analysis company to a real-time data production and decision support company, integrating the knowledge derived from analytics into the workflow of our clients and their patients, wherever that decision workflow occurs,” said Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton
2. After months of testing, Salesforce releases Health Cloud
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
While some see Health Cloud as competition for EHRs and analytics software, it is one of many products fighting it out in the crowded healthcare data aggregation arena. Dr. Joshua Newman, CMO and general manager of Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences, said that he would love to see EHR vendors become Salesforce partners. However, he said CRM is hard “when the technology is built to keep data in.”
3. Vendors, providers agree on interoperability, consumer access
In all, 17 health IT companies — including bitter rivals Epic Systems and Cerner — signed the interoperability pledge that went live at 5:30 p.m. Pacific time. Among the 16 provider groups to make the pledge include Kaiser Permanente, Hospital Corp. of America, Tenet Healthcare and Catholic Health Initiatives.
4. UPMC Chief Innovation Officer talks about its investment strategy in health tech
UPMC agreed to acquire a majority stake in medCPU, an Israeli clinical decision support software developer. It also led a $35 million financing round to accelerate the company’s expansion in a financing round with Merck Global Health Innovation Fund.
5. Soon-Shiong Q&A: Targeted cancer therapy is doomed to fail
What is not realized is that what you have in your body, you and I sitting here, we have material that we need to harness, so we don’t need drugs from a drug company – we just need to harness the drugs in our own body. We need to activate these molecules and not destroy them.
Photo: Flickr user Tsahi Levent-Levi
