Port Washington, NY — January 11, 2012 — Sandata Technologies announced today the appointment of healthcare technology industry veteran Tom Underwood as Chief Executive Officer, replacing Harold Blue, who will become Vice Chairman of the company’s board. (more…)
We have been told that our weekly feature, “Last Week’s Most Popular Story,” is a popular one. So, to close the year, we thought we
would bring a whole issue in that theme. Below you will find links to the year’s most-read news articles, interviews and opinion pieces. First, some 2011 statistics:
- We ran 201 articles in 2011.
- Collectively, they were read 40,687 times.
- 413 articles from past years were read 16,655 times during 2011.
- HCTR’s 17 advertiser sites were visited 7,047 times during the year.
- Since separating from my late mentor’s company and becoming an independent enterprise halfway through 2009, Home Care Tech Report articles have been read 121,230 times.
Last Year’s 25 Most-Read Stories (in descending order):
Editor’s Corner: Is Paul Ryan Another Tom Scully? Medicare Providers and Beneficiaries, on the Brink, Hope He Is Not – 4/6
Editor’s Corner: From Bedside to Billing (a 3-part series)
Home Health Care Prepares for Accountable Care Organizations and Payment Bundling – 3/2
Breaking News: HEALTHCAREfirst Acquires CareFacts – 1/3
Recovery Audit Contractors Appear to Have Discovered Home Health Care – 8/3
New Device-Free Telehealth System Emerges, Combines Internet with Telephone – 6/29
Accountable Care Organization Advent Elicits Somber Forecast from Healthcare Finance Expert – 3/9
New Portal Technology Streamlines Face-to-Face Paperwork Processing – 7/20
Reading Between the Lines: Is Home Telehealth Moving Away From Home Care Market? – 5/11
Care Continuum Alliance Releases Free ACO Toolkit – 4/27
New Telehealth Company Caters to Needs of Adult Child Caregivers – 2/9
Researcher Explains Slow Software Sales During Home Health Growth Spurt – 5/25
New Intel/GE Joint Venture CEO Challenges Both Telehealth Vendors and Healthcare Providers – 2/16
HomecareCRM Calls Lawsuit ‘Unfounded’ – 6/22
Something is Going On at Delta Health Technologies – 3/30
BREAKING NEWS: Procura Acquires ContinuLink – 6/8
CMS Offers Sneak Preview of How Bundled Payments Will Work; Requests Your Input – 8/24
Intel/GE Spinoff Moving Away From Device-Based Home Telehealth – 6/15
The Growing Importance of Revenue Cycle Management: Introduction to Decade’s Hottest Topic – 4/6
Vendor Watch: Ken Pereira Discusses Mediware’s Acquisition of CareCentric – 6/22
Home Care Technology Report has learned that HealthMEDX will announce today that it has brought Pamela Pure on board as CEO. Pure served in various executive capacities at McKesson Technology Solutions, the Atlanta-based healthcare software division of McKesson Corporation, including President, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, from March, 2001 through March, 2009.
Ms. Pure comes to the Ozark, Missouri-based long term and post-acute care (LTPAC) technology developer as part of a growth equity investment in HealthMEDX by Spectrum Equity Investors and Trident Capital. The new partners will own a majority interest in the company. As part of the transaction, Jim Quagliaroli and Steve LeSieur of Spectrum Equity, Arneek Multani and John Reardon of Trident Capital, and Ms. Pure will join HealthMEDX’s board of directors.
With Ms. Pure, Vince Estrada, former SVP Business Development and CFO of Visicu, Inc. will join as EVP of Business Development and Chief Financial Officer. HealthMEDX Co-Founder Charlie Daniels will remain as President and Co-Founder Dan Cobb will remain as Chief Technology Officer. Co-Founder Jim Atteberry will move from CEO to a new role as Strategic Advisor.
CEO’s story: from McKesson to caregiver to HealthMEDX
We spoke with Ms. Pure this week to ask about the process that brought her to this new position and her plans for HealthMEDX. After leaving McKesson, Pamela Pure was going to take a year off to spend time with her family and do some traveling but events — including a father-in-law’s heart attack right in her driveway — caused her to spend that time as a full-time family caregiver instead. In succession, she brought three different parents, hers and her husband’s, into her home.
“I was a healthcare executive but I found out that does not prepare you to serve from the other side of the equation,” she said. “I was impressed with the whole post-acute world so much, it inspired me to write a business plan about what could be done to improve it.”
Once her family members were living on their own again, Ms. Pure joined a private equity firm. Her goal was to find a company to manage in order to use its technology as the basis for her post-acute care plan. After looking at twenty companies, she found HealthMEDX, with its origins in long term care, to be unique. “Its medical system allows post-acute providers to follow a patient from one care setting to another with a single patient record and offer integrated billing across that spectrum,” she explained to HCTR.
“There is a great culture here, a great team, and they have been growing dramatically.”
She added that she has long known that even the leadership at the home care division of her former company, based in neighboring Springfield, has always shared a mutual respect with the HealthMEDX founders. “Chris Dollar and his predecessors Craig Frazier and Billie Waldo always spoke highly of Charlie, Dan and Jim,” she said.
Post-acute care will be key
“Post-acute providers are becoming strategic players in the healthcare delivery system,” Ms. Pure was quoted in a prepared HealthMEDX statement. “They serve as the cornerstone of care for senior Americans recovering from significant health incidents, for frail and elderly people requiring ongoing management, and for the millions of people working to manage chronic conditions. HealthMEDX provides a highly differentiated technology platform to facilitate organized, proactive post-acute care delivery. The system design inspires team-based care and can provide health systems and post-acute providers with the tools required to align incentives and foster collaborative care. Working with a world-class management team and two outstanding financial partners, we will continue to expand and augment the platform to enable long term and post-acute organizations to prepare for value based payment, support blended payment and actively participate in Accountable Care Organizations.”
It would seem from our conversation with her that she intends to stand behind those words as she eases into her new role. Look for HealthMEDX to move into a supportive role for its software customers that are heeding the call to take an active part in the movement toward coordinate post-acute care. “Sharing patient data across the care continuum, proactively moving patients to the proper locale — which is always the lowest cost locale for which they are appropriate — and managing chronic conditions to achieve improved quality of life, not just to reduce avoidable hospital admissions. These are healthcare’s goals for a future that has already started,” she concluded.
HealthMEDX Co-Founder and President Charlie Daniels could not agree more, “HealthMEDX works with skilled nursing facilities, continuing care retirement communities, home care organizations, rehab centers and hospice providers who aspire to use technology to increase quality of care, improve patient safety, reduce costs and dramatically impact the patient experience. As many LTPAC providers are diversifying, we see home care agencies expanding their service offerings to provide rehab and hospice services and many skilled nursing facilities are acquiring home care agencies. The HealthMEDX platform is uniquely designed for our customers who are extending their reach.”
Commenting on the Spectrum and Trident investment, Daniels added, “This transaction will support our efforts to rapidly expand our footprint. Pam’s experience in delivering innovative solutions to large and small health systems and managing growth in evolving markets will be a great asset to the team.” The company release said that the transaction provides liquidity to the Company’s founders, as well as access to additional capital for investment in new products and future acquisitions. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Investors understand post-acute importance
Arneek Multani, Senior Managing Director of Trident Capital, added, “We are excited to invest in a company that is addressing the needs of patients and providers in one of the fastest growing areas of healthcare. The long term and post-acute care continuum is an essential and growing component of healthcare delivery. We are excited to partner with Spectrum, Pam, Vince and the team at HealthMEDX.”
Spectrum and Trident were advised by Brian Lenihan and Rees Hawkins of Choate Hall & Stewart LLP. HealthMEDX was advised by Dennis Gallitano and Robin Bergman of Gallitano & O’Connor LLP.
About HealthMEDX
HealthMEDX offers an interoperable SaaS platform to skilled nursing, assisted living and independent living facilities; continuing care retirement communities and rehabilitation centers; and to private duty home care, certified home care and hospice providers with a software application that supports integrating them all. The HealthMEDX Vision Platform is currently used in more than 3,000 locations across the country.
About Spectrum Equity Investors
Spectrum Equity Investors is a private equity firm focused on investing in growth businesses. Spectrum’s current and historical healthcare investments of note include Passport Health Communications, a provider of patient access solutions for hospitals and physicians; and QTC Management, the nation’s largest provider of outsourced disability evaluations (acquired by Lockheed Martin). Spectrum has been an active investor in software and information service providers including iPay Technologies (acquired by Jack Henry & Associates), RiskMetrics Group (acquired by MSCI), Seisint (acquired by LexisNexis/Reed Elsevier), and World-Check (acquired by Thomson Reuters), as well as digital media franchises including Ancestry.com (NASDAQ: ACOM), Demand Media (NYSE: DMD), NetQuote (acquired by Bankrate), Seamless, and SurveyMonkey. Founded in 1994 with offices in Boston and Menlo Park, Spectrum has raised $4.7 billion in capital across six funds.
About Trident Capital
Trident Capital is a leading venture capital firm with more than $1.9 billion of capital under management, including its most recent fund, Trident Capital Fund VII. Trident invests in software, internet and business services companies across multiple stages, from startup to growth equity. The firm has helped build large numbers of successful companies within its areas of focus since firm inception in 1993. Trident is broadly recognized as one of the leading investors in cloud computing, IT security, health care IT, online advertising and outsourcing. Current and former health care IT investments include: Acclaris, a SaaS based software platform and services company that manages the administration of employee reimbursement accounts, including consumer directed healthcare accounts; Advanced ICU Care, a telemedicine company focused on delivering outsourced intensive care to hospitals; Teladoc, a telemedicine company that provides patient care through a nationwide network of board-certified doctors; Resolution Health, a health care informatics company (NYSE: WLP); and Chamberlin Edmonds, a revenue cycle management company focused on eligibility management (acquired by Charterhouse Group and MTS Health Investors).
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Like many in their age group, my parents, at 91 and 87, still live in the house they bought shortly after they married. Though the fact of that is not constantly front and center in my awareness, its significance hit me squarely between the eyes earlier this year when I visited my childhood home for a few days to give my mother, Dad’s primary caregiver, a few days off.
As I helped Dad navigate his morning routine — bed to walker to bathroom to walker to the table in the extended kitchen he built with his own hands — the bathroom, admittedly an odd place for deep meaning to present itself, spoke to me. Modern cabinets and fixtures faded from my view as 50s-era linoleum and sinks reappeared and the shadowy figure of a very familiar-looking little boy appeared, perched on an antique training seat atop the toilet.
Shaking off the vision, I removed a soiled pair of the “special pants” we had to force on Dad last year and replaced them with clean ones. As I guided his halting footsteps toward the commode, the boy said, “He used to do the exact same thing for you in this very room.”
The realization transcended mere memories of the days when Dad was big and I was small. It was more important than that. Here I was, caring for my frail, incontinent father, not just in any bathroom but in sacred space, the same room where he had cared for me, given me baths, bandaged my knees and taught me to shave.
Dad does not often speak today and, this time, it was just as well. If he noticed the redness that was surely visible in my eyes, the redness that returns as I write this, he did not mention it.
Dad’s legs barely hold him up today, partly from age, partly from living 68 years with some kind of primitive cement-based compound that was inserted in his right shin in 1943 to replace a 4-inch piece of bone that had been shattered by a sniper’s tracer bullet. According to a hometown news report at the time, he had apparently run screaming and waving his arms down a Belgian hillside to draw the sniper from his nest, where the sniper was holding a company of G.I.s at bay. The small band of brothers did finally take the town; one small, forgotten component of the Allies’ victory at the Battle of the Bulge. “My buddy got the guy who shot me,” was the legend I grew up with.
His actual brothers once pointed out to me a three-story Pennsylvania house where they had lived, three-to-a-bed, during the Great Depression, apparently anxious to ensure I knew my heritage fell somewhere between courageous and nuts. “Your father used to do handstands on the top of that chimney,” they claimed. It was not fraternal joking; the story turned out to be true.
These are the kinds of memories that make tolerable the work of the family caregiver, a person continually aware, “This is a human being who, though approaching the end, was once young and self-sufficient, a breadwinner and parent, who coached Little League and met his life partner at a square dance, who was capable only a couple years ago of cradling his great-grandchild in his arms.”
Certainly, family caregivers work hard and grow weary, sometimes short-tempered. Yes, they often compromise their own health by putting someone else’s health needs first. Of course, they save the Medicare Trust Fund millions, perhaps billions, of dollars every year. I have written about these things with an air of “this is newsworthy” but, it turns out, they are secondary to the family caregiver experience.
What is primary is that ever-present awareness, “This shrinking body and slowing mind are not the full story of who this person is.” It would be a great gift if they could put across the full story to people who meet him at age 90 for the first time, people such as home health nurses, therapists and aides.
Family caregivers do not see a 90-pound 90-year-old, they see the soldier, the square dancer, the Little League coach. Whether dressing him or cleaning him or reminding him of his grandchildren’s names, there is no moment when the feats and legends of his youth are not vividly present, living not only in what is left of him but in the people who inhabited the house he built and made sacred by more than 60 years of memory-making.
Every time I walk him from the bathroom to the kitchen, I steal a look over my shoulder at the seemingly ordinary suburban bathroom. A little boy smiles up from his comic book at me and says, “Take good care of him. He’s my Daddy.”
Tim Rowan
December 7, 2011
What technologies are in use by home health care providers today? How will technology shape the home health care industry over the next few years? What technologies are helping home health care providers compete now and remain competitive in the future?
These are important questions for home health care organizations. While it may be safe to assume that all home health care professionals need to stay abreast with technologies that can promote their organization’s success, it is not always as obvious that they also need to learn to differentiate among products that promise to improve care quality, patient and employee satisfaction and the ability to effectively compete.
This summer, Home Care Technology Report (HCTR) invited readers to participate in the Home Care Technology Report 2011 Technology Utilization Survey in order to learn what technologies are currently in use and what near-term acquisitions are planned across the industry. (more…)
A new report summarizes results of a one-year clinical trial of mobile application coaching for diabetics, conducted by the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. (more…)
In the sixth in a series of working papers from the UnitedHealth Center for Health Reform & Modernization, according to Chairman Simon Stevens, the insurance conglomerate examines the impact of telehealth systems in rural communities.
“Telemedicine and telehealth have the potential to transform aspects of rural health care, improving accessibility, quality and affordability,” the summary of the paper’s sixth chapter declares. “This working paper discusses the current technological frontiers and likely advances, together with new survey data on current usage of telemedicine by rural and urban doctors, and what they perceive as barriers that need to be overcome.”
Continuing from the synopsis of Chapter 6: “To make full use of telemedicine’s potential, a number of practical changes are now required. These include: building on work by the Federal Communications Commission and others to expand rural broadband capacity (estimated at around 60 percent of rural areas versus 70 percent of urban areas); introducing new public and private payment models for telemedicine, perhaps linked to the move away from traditional fee-for-service reimbursement models; and continued action by the Food and Drug Administration and others to remove outdated regulatory barriers to adoption.”
The complete, 84-page report is available for download from unitedhealthgroup.com/reform. The rest of the Executive Summary contains additional insight into the report’s scope and conclusions.
Three quarters of rural U.S. residents live in the South and Midwest, compared to only one-quarter in the Northeast and West.
Though five million people live in isolated and remote locations, around 31 million people who technically live in rural counties actually live close to an urban area.
Chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes are more prevalent in rural populations than in urban or suburban areas. This is worst in the South, especially among rural minority communities, for whom obesity rates and other risk factors are markedly elevated.
The paper sets out to answer five questions:
- What are the health challenges confronting rural Americans?
- How is the care delivery system currently organized to respond?
- What do we know about the quality of rural health care?
- What will the expected Medicaid and insurance coverage expansions from 2014 mean for rural areas?
- Are there practical solutions to these health, access, and quality challenges?
In remote rural areas there are fewer than half the number of primary care physicians per 100,000 population than in urban areas, yet there are slightly more hospital beds per 100,000 residents in rural than urban areas. Nevertheless, about a third of hospitalizations for rural patients occur at urban hospitals.
The paper also includes:
- new empirical research on rural versus urban quality of care
- new projections for rural Medicaid and insurance exchange 2014 coverage expansions
- new state-by-state and county-level analysis of future pressure on primary care capacity
- new models for rural care delivery and care coordination
Outcome quality evidence is mixed
This paper finds new research suggesting that quality scores for urban and suburban areas are higher than those for rural areas in 75 percent of the hospital referral regions (HRRs) for which representative data are available. In a further 20 percent of HRRs there is no statistically significant difference in rural/non-rural measured performance, and in 5 percent of HRRs rural quality scores are higher.
Both rural consumers and rural primary care physicians rate the quality of local care lower than do their urban and suburban counterparts. For example 49 percent of rural consumers rate the quality of local care as ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’, compared to 64 percent of non-rural consumers who do so. Twenty-four percent of rural consumers think their local care is only ‘fair’ or ‘poor’, compared to 12 percent of urban and suburban consumers who believe that.
Healthcare reform
UnitedHealth finds that, by 2019, there could be an increase of around eight million rural residents in Medicaid and state insurance exchange plans, compared with what would have happened without the ACA legislation.
Five million rural residents already live in designated ‘shortage areas,’ defined by the federal government as counties with fewer than 33 primary care physicians per 100,000 residents. Attempting to identify locations where the pressures will be greatest, this paper finds that these areas tend to be in the South, and often have some of the tightest scope-of-practice restrictions on nurse practitioners and other non-physician health professionals.
A range of approaches are discussed that states and the federal government can take to confront the question of how to ensure there are enough high quality health plan choices and rural provider networks to serve rural residents.
These include: recognizing the role that nurses and other suitably qualified health professionals can play in meeting network adequacy standards, alongside mobile and telemedicine-enabled providers where appropriate; taking care in designing insurance market and exchange rules explicitly to recognize the distinctive population and provider characteristics of more rural parts of each state; using the state’s purchasing power to provide incentives to participation by rural providers, as states such as Georgia have done; driving greater transparency on quality; and ensuring new federal initiatives on Medicare reform are tailored for rural communities.
The paper concludes that the next few years will be times of considerable stress on rural health care, but also times of great opportunity. “Across the country there are already impressive examples of innovative new care models providing high quality care, tailored to the distinctive needs of their local community. The challenge for all involved in rural America now is to build on that track record of innovation and self-reliance, so as to ensure that all Americans — wherever they live — can live their lives to the healthiest and fullest extent possible.”
Last week we reported that longtime home care and home medical equipment software vendor CareCentric had been acquired by Mediware. Knowing many readers are likely to be unfamiliar with both names, we spoke with division leader Ken Pereira to gather additional insights into the meaning of the acquisition. (more…)
On June 8, we received an unsigned email from an apparently phony email address, “HomeCareNews@ vistomail.com,” which seems to be the name of a non-existent publication. It included a link to a Pennsylvania court document, a lawsuit filed by Camille M. Miller of the Philadelphia law firm Cozen O’Connor PC on behalf of Health Market Science, Inc. (HMS), a Pennsylvania market data research firm.
Apparently someone had an interest in our knowing about the lawsuit. (more…)
