CPSI, a community healthcare solutions company, announces that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Get Real Health. Based in Rockville, Maryland, Get Real Health delivers technology solutions to improve patient outcomes and engagement strategies with care providers. Their broad set of cutting-edge products have garnered awards for the company and its clients and earned them a reputation as a vanguard in the healthcare information technology (IT) industry.
Get Real Health has established a presence in both domestic and international healthcare markets. Collaborating with organizations like TELUS Health, the University Hospital Southampton NHS Trust and KeyHIE, Get Real Health delivers solutions to government and private organizations in Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States.
In addition, earlier this month, Get Real Health launched its latest product, Lydia, when it was identified by Microsoft as a destination for HealthVault users to transition their existing data after the pending retirement of HealthVault. Lydia is a trusted place where people can organize, store and share their health information with family and healthcare providers.
Boyd Douglas
“The demographics and population make-up of the communities we serve support the growing demand for strategies and tools to address the on-going management of chronic care conditions, which are prevalent in these areas,” said Boyd Douglas, president and chief executive officer of CPSI. “Helping our customers secure the future of community healthcare is what we focus on each and every day. By acquiring Get Real Health, we can continue this effort as providers evolve to a value-based care delivery model.”
Get Real Health’s line of innovative patient-facing products will complement CPSI’s existing offerings. CPSI acute and ambulatory customers will be able to use InstantPHR and CHBase to engage their patients in a much deeper way than traditional patient portals. The company’s Ellie app will allow CPSI customers to improve their patients’ health outcomes while strengthening their own bottom lines. Get Real Health also brings a decade’s worth of international business experience and connections, opening potential new markets for CPSI’s existing offerings. Conversely, CPSI’s greater resources and capabilities will help Get Real Health scale to serve existing and new customers and markets.
CPSI anticipates that this acquisition will yield approximately $1.0 million in annual cost synergies, primarily from the replacement of CPSI’s existing patient engagement solutions. Additionally, the acquisition is expected to be accretive to Adjusted EBITDA for 2019.
Robin Wiener, president, chief executive officer and founding partner of Get Real Health, said: “When we met the CPSI management team, there was an instant realization that we could do something amazing together. In addition to the opportunity to bring our solutions to hundreds of communities across the United States already serviced by CPSI, we will continue to empower patients around the world.”
Transaction Summary
The contemplated total aggregate consideration to be paid by CPSI is $11 million, payable in cash, subject to certain adjustments at and after closing, as provided for in the purchase agreement, plus an earn-out payment of up to a maximum of $14 million, depending on the EBITDA performance of Get Real Health during 2019. The completion of the transaction is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, and is targeted to close in the second quarter of 2019.
To finance the transaction, CPSI will use a draw of approximately $11 million under its existing senior secured revolving credit facility.
One of the most antiquated processes in American healthcare is credentialing. It’s essentially been done the same way for decades and it’s extremely inefficient and costly.
This has to be done every two years and takes anywhere from a few weeks to six months. Even worse, each facility has its own way of doing it, collecting the same exact information and not sharing this information with each other in any meaningful way.
If this process could be expedited, American healthcare would improve in three major ways.
The industry saves billions of dollars
With postponed physician start dates comes lost facility revenue. Lots of it, too.
Currently, a physician earns a facility an average of $2,378,727 a year. If credentialing takes a worst-case scenario of six months, that’s $1,189,363 in lost revenue. Even if credentialing only takes a few weeks, they still lose around $150,000.
That’s only one physician for one facility. Imagine the overall savings faster credentialing can bring the entire healthcare industry, which already wastes half of the $361 billion a year it spends on healthcare administration. We’re talking several billion dollars in savings that can be used to significantly lower healthcare costs for patients.
Doctors see patients sooner
Physicians didn’t get into medicine to become bureaucrats. The reason most doctors enter the field is to help people. Slow credentialing prevents that, adding administrative stress on someone who could be out saving lives. It’s a lose-lose for everyone. It also puts them in limbo for weeks or even months, making them unsure what they should or shouldn’t do. Do they buy that house? Should they wait on that car? Should they move to the city the job’s located in now or wait until the process is finalized? It can be very unsettling.
On top of that, physicians can lose a lot of income during the credentialing process. If they earn the average physician annual income of $299,000, waiting a few weeks to get credentialed would cost around $25,000 in lost income, and waiting six months would cost around $150,000 in lost income. Unless they’re able to work elsewhere during this time, they’re looking at losing as much money as the average American makes in a year—something many physicians can’t afford because of med school debt averaging $192,000.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) applies to all companies in the United States. Healthcare providers, covered entities and their business associates should understand HIPAA and take compliance steps to avoid monetary fines and even prison time. HIPAA violations in the workplace can occur in any organization but especially those that provide healthcare benefits to their employees or require health information to process disability benefits or workplace compensation.
Understanding HIPAA violations in the workplace
HIPAA was enacted in 1996 and aimed to protect the health information of individuals as they moved from one job to another. Since then, the Act has been refined to include more coverage and protections.
In 2003, the Privacy Rule, which defines Protected Health Information (PHI), was passed by the US Department of Health and Human Services. In 2005, HIPAA was updated with the Security Rule, which focuses on electronically stored PHI (ePHI). Today, employers must adhere to HIPAA and related regulations, including the Security Rule and the Privacy Rule, as required by industry regulators and the federal government.
What information qualifies as PHI or ePHI
The Privacy Rule defines PHI as any health information that concerns the payment of healthcare, provision of healthcare or health status of an individual, which is held by a covered entity.
In the workplace, any employee health plans or medical records that are collected by the employer for the purposes of administering healthcare plans are PHI or ePHI information. Health information that is gathered but not intended for use in administering healthcare plans is not considered PHI or ePHI.
When an employee provides health information to document workers’ compensation or sick leave, the information is not considered PHI or ePHI. On the other hand, if you contact an employee’s healthcare provider, the information that the provider will give you falls under the Privacy Rule. Employment records do not fall under PHI or ePHI even they may include health-related information.
What HR should know about HIPAA
If your organization offers employees a covered health plan, it’s critical to determine whether you need to be HIPAA compliant.
In recent years, medtech innovation tends to be more iterative than disruptive, though every so often we see a truly game-changing new device or modality of treatment. After closely monitoring the medtech market, a recent report by Decision Resources Group (DGR) finds a wave of transformative technologies will likely break over the next five years. More specifically, the report identified four medtech innovations forecasted to shake up the treatment landscape.
Selections were restricted to only include either technologies that were approved in 2018 or were likely to receive approval in the coming few years. The report avoids focus on technologies that were promising solely in terms of revenue generation as well as so-called “me-too” technologies, limiting submissions to unprecedented innovations, significant therapeutic expansions, and drastically improved technologies.
Based on in-depth analysis of the level of innovation, potential patients and potential revenue, the report finds neurostimulation, regenerative medicine; CAR T-Cell therapy; AI and machine learning in interventional cardiology; and transcatheter mitral valve implantation/replacement (TMVI/TMVR) will have the greatest potential impact in terms of sales and patient outcomes over the coming years, and here’s why:
Why it made the cut: After a decade of development, TMVR is finally close to becoming a commercial reality. The complex and difficult anatomy of the mitral valve and the critical nature of the treatment make this an immensely exciting development.
Details: Mitral valve patients who have heart failure are poorly served by extant solutions, including repair or replacement surgeries; as a result, many companies are attempting to develop a solution similar to transcatheter aortic valve replacement (a percutaneous catheter-based solution for patients with stenosed aortic valves who are too frail to undergo surgery) for the much larger population of mitral valve disease patients.
AI and machine learning in interventional cardiology
Why it made the cut: This development paves the way for robotics in some of the most complex and common surgeries. Aside from procedural concision, this technology holds the potential to significantly reduce costs to health care systems.
Details: AI and machine learning are increasingly being incorporated into surgical robots in the cardiovascular space. For example, Corindus Vascular Robotics has developed the TechnIQ, an intelligent robotic arm with an algorithmic assist; the CorPath GRX may be able to perform “autopilot” percutaneous coronary interventions in the near future by relying on image detection/recognition, 3D construction, and force sensors.
Moreover, data collected from such devices can lead to digitized motion information, which can be translated into best practice guidance and further incorporated into software to optimize techniques.
Due in large part to the HITECH Act and the meaningful use incentive program, electronic medical record (EMR) initiatives have dominated the IT efforts of healthcare providers for the better part of the past decade. Most of the focus over this time has been placed on simply implementing the technology and getting clinicians to embrace it.
Now that more than 95 percent of hospitals in the U.S. are currently using EMRs*, it seems the focus is beginning to shift. However, the move isn’t away from EMRs to some other groundbreaking technology. Instead, the focus is transferring from simply implementing EMRs to optimizing the software in order to squeeze more value out of it.
You see, most healthcare providers aren’t very happy with the ROI they are currently getting from their multimillion-dollar EMR investments. In fact, only 10 percent believe they are getting a positive or superb return from their EMRs, according to a recent survey of 1,100 healthcare professionals by Health Catalyst.
The remainder describe the ROI as terrible, poor or mediocre.
As a result, healthcare providers are turning their attention to enhancing their existing EMR systems. According to a recent Black Book Market Research survey, 61 percent of healthcare respondents say technology optimization is the highest priority IT engagement for their organizations by the end of 2020. Not surprisingly, EMR software and revenue cycle management systems are the primary targets of these optimization efforts.
By Janak Joshi, senior vice president, chief technology officer and head of strategy, Life Image.
Janak Joshi
In December 2018, the FDA announced its new framework for the real world evidence (RWE) program, which would require including imaging data alongside claims, electronic health records (EHRs) and other datasets in clinical research. In issuing this new framework, regulators underlined the continued importance of using contextualized, quality datasets to make drug development faster, safer, more efficient and less expensive.
Because of this move to include authentic patient data in the drug development process, imaging data has become an essential part of RWE as it can accelerate the development cycle and improve the confidence in the final clinical arguments in support of drugs going to market.
Imaging data plays such a leading role in clinical decision-making because it is the most advanced diagnostic evidence for several diseases, and it can clearly show disease progression and drug impact across a variety of therapeutic areas, among other reasons. While EHRs and medical claims are the predominate sources of data, because they were initially designed for billing and payment purposes they do not have the depth and breadth needed to accurately capture the nuances of a patient’s full clinical history – nor do they contain imaging information.
Clinical researchers looking to achieve a holistic view of each patient’s healthcare journey by incorporating medical imaging into their RWE programs should avoid these three things.
Biased data
Institutional bias stems from using data from a single health system, which tends to follow a uniform set of treatment protocols, leading to homogenous evidence data. A diverse dataset includes variation, for instance in geography, which can influence socioeconomic and environmental factors, level of education, healthcare access, payer mix and demographics.
The most effective RWE incorporates medical data, including imaging, from varied populations that include both research and non-research settings, AMCs and community hospitals, publicly and privately funded institutions, and a mix of highly insured and uninsured patients. The ultimate goal of RWE is to be representative of any and all patients across the globe.
A limited, siloed data pool
Small datasets do not accurately reflect the “real world,” therefore RWE requires very large databases with various datasets in order to ensure data integrity and credibly match patients to appropriate clinical trials. This poses a challenge since much of today’s data is siloed. To make RWE representative of outcomes and context, clinical researchers must break down siloes to achieve a large, interoperable pool of quality data from a breadth of sources, which they can normalize and match across sets for optimal results.
Take, for example, a new drug trial that needs to involve 500 individuals meeting specific real-world data standards. For each participant, researchers may require four years of prescription details, four years of imaging data, five years of blood test results, as well as genomics and other relevant data. However, consider that over the years many of these patients likely went to various pharmacies, switched health plans and/or providers, and had imaging and blood tests performed at various facilities or out-of-network sites. As a result, each patient’s information may be spread out over multiple EHR systems and may even be in non-digital, fax or CD formats.
Ivanti today announced, during Ivanti Interchange 2019 in Nashville, Tenn., the results of a survey of 400 IT professionals that captures the challenges faced by IT when it comes to silos, data and implementation.
Among its findings, the research revealed that when dealing with silos in IT and departments, three key priorities suffer the most, including: automation (46 percent), user productivity and troubleshooting (42 percent) and customer experience (41 percent). The findings did show that onboarding/offboarding suffers the least (20 percent) because of silos – so it appears that IT and HR have one of the better working relationships.
When looking for real-time insight, security is still king. Seventy percent of IT professionals said they wanted to know most about security status versus other priorities. Respondents were least interested in real-time insights around warranty data.
Other noteworthy findings of the survey include:
15 percent of IT professionals say they have too many data sources to count
More than half of IT professionals (51 percent) report they have to work with their data for days, weeks or more, before its actionable
Only 10 percent of respondents said the data they receive is actionable within minutes
One in three respondents said they have the resources to act on their data but more than half (52 percent) said they only sometimes have the resources
Getting an SD card formatted is probably one of the worst things to happen to anyone, especially when such devices contain important or sensitive data. It doesn’t matter if you have formatted your SD card by mistake or had to do it to resolve a critical issue. Doing so can end up in unexpected data loss in one way or another. While it might seem like the end of the world, you can easily recover formatted SD card content by following the right approach. In the following, we will discuss a step by step solution to perform SD card recovery using a Mac or Windows application.
SD card classification and types
Before we discuss the working of a Mac data recovery tool in detail, it is important to cover the basics. For instance, you should know the type of SD card that you own so that you can easily perform SD card recovery on Mac or Windows. Ideally, SD cards can be classified on the basis of the following parameters.
By Capacity
This is the most common way to classify SD cards as it plays a crucial role in determining their cost as well. Most of the common capacities are 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, 128 GB, 1 TB, and so on. These days, even two or four TB SD cards are also available.
By transfer speed
This is the second most important characteristics of SD cards. The ultra fast cards are of either class 1 or 3. On the other hand, normal SD cards can be of class 2, 4, 6 or 10 (2 is the slowest while 10 is the fastest).
By size
A lot of people prefer smaller cards due to their compactness. Ideally, SD cards can be available in standard, micro or mini sizes. Standards cards have the dimension of 32x24x2.1 mm and are mostly used for PC. Mini SD cards (of dimension 21.5x20x1.4 mm) and micro SD cards (of dimension 15x11x1 mm) are mostly used in phones, digital cameras, and other compact devices.
Recoverit SD card data recovery for Mac and Windows
Recoverit Data Recovery is developed by Wondershare and supports all the above-listed SD cards. It also supports every major card manufactured by popular brands like Sony, SanDisk, Kingston, Patriot, HP, Samsung, etc. The recovery software supports all the major data types like photos, videos, audios, documents, compressed files, and more. It also provides a preview of the extracted content, letting us select the files we wish to recover.
The file recovery software for Mac and Windows features an intuitive interface and a simple click-through process.
It can recover all kinds of data from a formatted SD card. Some other data loss scenarios that it supports are corrupt storage, accidental deletion, malware attack, and more.
It supports more than 1,000 different file formats and every major data type.
The desktop application is available for free and supports macOS 10.6 or any later version (as well as Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 10)
It supports all kinds of SD cards including standard, micro and mini cards of all the major brands. Apart from SD cards, you can also perform data recovery on USB drives, external hard disks, and other sources.
CPSI, a community healthcare solutions company, announces that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Get Real Health. Based in Rockville, Maryland, Get Real Health delivers technology solutions to improve patient outcomes and engagement strategies with care providers. Their broad set of cutting-edge products have garnered awards for the company and its clients and earned them a reputation as a vanguard in the healthcare information technology (IT) industry.
