Inanovate, Inc., a life science company specializing in the development of blood tests for cancer and autoimmune diseases, has secured an initial closing of $3.1million on a Series C financing round.
The investment, led by South Dakota Equity Partners, Mr. T. Denny Sanford, and Sanford Frontiers, a corporate affiliate of Sanford Health, will help speed the development of Inanovate’s breast cancer blood test, which aims to identify false positives from screening mammograms and reduce costly, stressful, and unnecessary follow-up imaging.
The test is part of a larger plan from Inanovate, which also includes a second test that aims to monitor the progress of breast cancer patients through therapy and beyond, and identify a recurrence event in its earliest stage, when it may be more effectively treated and cured.
“We are excited to have secured investment that will allow our company to implement our development plan through the next 18 months,” Inanovate CEO David Ure said. “We’re pleased to have partnered with investors who share our vision for improving cancer diagnosis and treatment through technology innovation. Our partners bring both expertise and passion to our investment team as we align to the needs and goals of one of the leading hospital networks in the country.”
The most recent investment builds on a strong year for Inanovate, which included a $2 million Phase 2 SBIR grant from the National Cancer Institute, along with a licensing and collaboration agreement with Sanford Health that provides access to intellectual property relating to a set of breast cancer biomarkers, in addition to patient recruitment and sample access for Inanovate’s trials.
Kim Patrick
“Improving breast cancer care is an important goal of ours,” said Kim Patrick, chief business development officer for Sanford Health. “This protein-screening technology aims to improve the diagnosis of breast cancer and its recurrence.”
The Inanovate blood tests work by detecting antibodies in a patient’s blood that have been associated with breast cancer. Because the antibodies circulate in the blood, a simple blood draw can be evaluated to discover if the disease might be present. To analyze this blood draw, Inanovate uses their patented biomarker analysis platform: The BioID-800. The machine is compact, fully automated, fits on a bench top and uses disposable test cartridges.
“This is a highly sensitive but low-cost instrument that can recognize the presence of multiple different biomarkers from a small sample of blood in one low cost easy to use test,” Ure said.
For the third year in a row, Christiana Care Health System has earned the Most Wired designation from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, recognizing healthcare organizations that exemplify best practices through their adoption, implementation and use of information technology.
Christiana Care is the only healthcare organization in Delaware and one of only 5 percent of U.S. hospitals to receive this designation.
The recognition is the result of years of strategic planning with a focus on how technology can break down barriers to access and coordinate high-value care. For example, Christiana Care has introduced Health Records on iPhone, which brings together hospitals, outpatient services and the existing Apple Health app to make it easy for patients to see their available medical records from multiple providers whenever they choose.
Randall Gaboriault
“Technology touches every single interaction we have with our patients, and it creates an efficient way for us to connect with our neighbors and deliver the world’s best care, powered by a foundation of technology and empathy,” said Randall Gaboriault, MS, chief information officer and senior vice president of Innovation and strategic development at Christiana Care.
Christiana Care’s place on the forefront of IT trends and best practices is the result of both a long-term investment in culture and a reimagining of IT processes, creating an environment in which good ideas can rapidly progress from concept to impact.
Lynne McCone
“Our Clinical and IT teams have developed and persistently iterate a model of shared thinking, shared learning and shared working to deliver projects that expand our capabilities to serve our neighbors in ways we had hardly imagined a few years earlier,” said Lynne McCone, vice president of IT application services for Christiana Care.
Christiana Care’s use of transformational technologies to improve patient care includes:
Video monitoring to help protect hospital patients from falls.
Telemedicine advancements, including video visits.
Direct access by patients to the physician notes in their electronic health record, and the ability to contribute to their record through an online patient portal.
Online express check-in at Christiana Care’s six Medical Aid Units.
Christiana Care’s Patient Portal, already recognized as a secure way for patients to stay informed about their health records, now offers patients a chance to enter their problems, allergies, medications, immunizations and surgical history. Upon physician review, these data flow directly into their electronic health record. Anyone who’s ever forgotten to mention a health issue to their doctor or nurse can appreciate the value of a convenient way to add to their record, thereby informing their care team.
Amid the latest security breaches at well-known companies like Facebook and Marriott, cybersecurity has never been at the forefront of conversation more than it is today. No other industry knows the dangers of information vulnerability better than the healthcare sector, where confidential patient data is stored and shared across often obsolete systems on a regular basis. Although advancements in technology are allowing hospitals and clinics to digitally transform their networks, maintaining a high degree of security continues to be a challenge, which is why it’s important for organizations to carefully evaluate their current processes and decide which networking models to implement for the future.
Why legacy-oriented architectures can’t defend against cyberattacks
Today, many medical providers have networks built on legacy-oriented architectures that run a broad range of enterprise applications. While legacy EHR systems have performed positively in protecting patient records, legacy networks have not historically protected patient information flowing across a variety of applications used by staff and providers.
Legacy networks, which primarily offer only border protection, do not adequately protect the enterprise applications and data existing outside of a medical records system. This type of environment is vulnerable to cyber hacks. Think back to the numerous cyberattacks on credit card information in the last few years, including Equifax’s data loss. As internal applications are not protected to the same extent as EMRs, networks built on legacy technologies are not designed to defend against users on cloud applications or internal vendors, patients and customers/business partners that may occasionally gain access.
The rise in zero-trust, session-based networking
In today’s digital landscape, modern healthcare networks must utilize zero-trust models to truly secure sensitive data. Session-based networking models are designed to use an exclusive two-way exchange of information between two specific endpoints. This type of model is context-aware and scalable across network boundaries, making the design more secure than overlay networks of the past. In addition, zero-trust networks are rooted in the principle of “never trust, always verify,” and work to treat internal and external access the same. They are designed to address lateral threat movement within the network by managing access enforcement based on user, data and location. But even as modern healthcare networks adopt these new models for enhanced security, challenges still remain.
Challenge #1: Packet-level authentication
A common challenge for legacy-oriented architectures is ensuring that all data within the network is automatically encrypted. Zero-trust models, on the other hand, require authentication for every packet in a provider’s network. These models have a unique ability to thwart malicious intents directly from the network layer. This next-generation feature secures networking while simultaneously increasing performance by using standard compute utility infrastructure (no different than servers) to replace proprietary and legacy networking devices.
Challenge #2: Maintenance and updates
Updating modern networks requires continuous work, and the healthcare industry is struggling to maintain network access rights. As IoT-connected devices continue to permeate the industry, it is becoming necessary to secure these new access points on a daily basis. In fact, by 2020, 40 percent of IoT technology will be health-related, making up a $117 billion market. As modern waiting rooms are flooded with patients opting to kill time on their mobile devices rather than flipping through magazines, sensitive information is increasingly at risk of being accessed on these networks.
Challenge #3: The cultural mindset within organizations
The implementation of a modern network model impacts the entire healthcare organization. Since deploying network security can involve team members from all levels within the organization, it is crucial that all members are educated and aware of security and policy advancements. Unfortunately, according to an AT&T Cyber Security Insights report, roughly 78 percent of all employees fail to comply with their organization’s security policies and procedures. Creating a sense of personal responsibility and motivation to adhere to security policies within an organization can make all the difference in the fight to protect confidential data. Moreover, since zero-trust networks require cloud-based infrastructures, selecting the right partnership with a secure vendor can prove difficult.
While cutting-edge technology presents an array of opportunity for the healthcare industry, which has infamously been slow to adopt system changes, it also poses unique challenges for network security that healthcare organizations will need to work to surpass in the coming years.
By Christopher Maiona, M.D., SFHM, chief medical officer, PatientKeeper, Inc.
Christopher Maiona, M.D.
The news on physician burnout lately has been mixed. A 2018 Massachusetts Medical Society/Harvard report received considerable attention – it proclaimed physician burnout has become a crisis, widespread in the medical profession, driven by rapid changes in health care and physicians’ professional environment. Yet last month a study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings found that physician burnout actually declined more than 10 percentage points from 2014 to 2017, though the rate for doctors was still considerably higher than for U.S. workers at large. And just last week, an American Academy of Family Physicians survey reported that 71 percent of practicing physicians are happy, albeit frustrated by the extent to which administrative and clerical tasks have become part of their daily work.
What to make of all this seemingly contradictory data?
When I began practicing as a hospitalist in the 1990s, the administrative burden on physicians was much less than today, owing in part to the regulations and routine processes of the day and the typical patient caseload. Back then I saw 12 patients per day. With that caseload, you could break even on billing while still having plenty of time to interact with patients and colleagues. While it would not be feasible to return to that volume today, the point is that the hospital afforded a much more professionally rewarding environment. There was time to discuss interesting cases with colleagues. There was time to revisit patients and dig deeper into their records. You had time to sit at a patient’s bedside and hold their hand. The pace today does not afford this opportunity, much to the dissatisfaction of physicians. The resulting isolation from patients and peers is a contributing factor to the burnout seen among physicians.
Then there’s the technology component. EHRs are widely regarded as a significant cause of physician stress and a distraction from patient care. For example, when hospitals installed computerized order entry (CPOE), it eliminated the order clerk and created an additional job for the physician. The evolution of the clinical note is another example of unintended clinical burden, with roots in the evolution of medical practice and the emergence of EHRs.
Take a step back and consider what the original purpose of a physician’s note was: to advance patient care. The note would be updated on a visit-to-visit basis by the same physician or perhaps another physician in the same group covering a weekend. Then shift-based medicine came into play, and the note became a vital mechanism to facilitate care transitions. Then, as malpractice suits became more commonplace, lawyers began requiring physician documentation to support their legal case. From there, we saw the note transform from a clinical and legal document to a billing document and a check for RAC audits.
Given these trends, the pressure on provider organizations (and physicians individually) to document extensively and bill correctly for every service performed has grown over time. Concurrently, the practice of regularly reconciling clinical notes and charges also has grown in importance, both to identify missing charges (for revenue enhancement) and to identify missing notes (for compliance). In order that this process doesn’t become another straw on a physician’s administrative back, many organizations prefer to automate charge-note reconciliation within the revenue cycle management workflow.
For a variety of compelling business reasons, not limited to concerns about physician burnout, healthcare systems must attend to their physician experience with the same level of care and intention as their patient experience. Here are three ways that improving physician experience can help to bolster a hospital’s bottom line:
By Abhinav Shashank, co-founder and CEO, Innovaccer.
Abhinav Shashank
U.S. healthcare is nowhere near what technology made us dream of a decade back. Healthcare technology was meant to act as a means of reducing costs, eliminating burnout, and making care delivery patient-centric. Cut to today, where a broken leg can cost a patient as much as $7,500, seven out of 10 physicians do not recommend their profession to anyone, and we rank poorly among other developed countries in terms of the number of preventable deaths.
Why did technology fail?
While disruptive technology solutions did flood healthcare in the last couple of decades, many of them required physicians to go the extra mile to comprehend those sophisticated systems. Today, physicians are still crunching large data files day in and day out, nurses are doubling up as technical executives, and patients are perplexed by the fact that their providers hardly have time for them.
It’s time for technology to care
If a technology solution is not assisting organizations in improving care quality, reducing costs, and optimizing utilization levels, then its very relevancy is questionable. Healthcare organizations need technologies that can help them actuate their data, realize their strategic goals, and bring patients closer to their providers.
Health IT solutions should make the lives of providers easier. Any health IT solution that puts an additional burden on providers is unjustified and unacceptable. Providers are not data analysts, and expecting them to train tirelessly to understand an IT system and spend a couple of hours each day navigating through complex interfaces can drastically reduce physician-provider time and pave the way for physician burnout.
In with ultimate integration. We need to bring together EHRs, PHMs, payer claims and HIEs and put it all in the palm of the providers’ hands. Whether it’s quality management or data management, it should be simple.
In with relevant insights right at the point of care. Providers are tired of wading through complicated EHRs and excel sheets. What we need now is to seize the nanosecond and realize truly automated care delivery that helps boost the clinical outcomes.
In with 100 percent transparency and bi-directional interoperability. Healthcare providers are often forced to access bits and pieces of electronic healthcare analytics and referrals on disparate applications. Physicians need to capture real-time care gaps, coding opportunities, patient education opportunities, and more; the only problem is that they don’t know how exactly to accomplish this. Providers should be able to capture the gaps in patient care right when they need to and enhance the patient experience of care.
In with true patient-centric care. Healthcare is not just providing episodic care to patients, it is about building relationships with them. In a world where the quality of care directly influences the financial success of an organization, providers should look forward to aligning the needs of their patients to their treatment procedures.
Healthcare of the 2020s needs reliable data activation platforms
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” — Albert Einstein
Buzzwords like innovation, intelligence, and analytics make sense in today’s time; however, unless the user experience is seamless, the charisma of back-end development does little good for healthcare professionals.
We’re moving into an age of intelligence, and in this age, successful organizations do one thing right- they know the worth of their data. This is the same thing that we need to do in healthcare. Organizations have to switch from a makeshift approach to engage patients and find a concrete strategy that is suited to their advantage, but this needs to be done with the support of data.
By Scott E. Rupp, publisher, Electronic Health Reporter.
Prior authorizations are hurting practices, the American Medical Association contends. According to the organization, prior authorization requirements have increased in the past five years, and 85 percent of physicians say the practice interferes with continuity of care. This is according to a new survey from the organization.
Prior authorization (PA) is a process requiring healthcare providers (physicians, pharmacists, medical groups and hospitals) to obtain advance approval from health plans before a prescription medication or medical service is delivered to the patient. While health plans and benefit managers say that PA programs are important to controlling costs, providers often find these programs to be burdensome and barriers to the delivery of necessary patient care.
The AMA’s report was conducted in partnership with the American Hospital Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, American Pharmacists Association, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and Medical Group Management Association, releasing the “Consensus Statement on Improving the Prior Authorization Process.” The statement “reflects agreement between healthcare providers and health plans on key reforms needed to reduce PA hassles and enhance patient-centered care.”
According to the 1,000 physicians interviewed, more than two-thirds of these fine folks said it’s difficult for them to determine whether a prescription or service needs prior authorization.
Alternatively, fewer than 10 percent of the physicians said they contract with a health plan that allows programs that can exempt providers from the requirement. Additionally, prior authorizations are primarily obtained by phone or fax, with just a bit more than 20 percent of physicians saying they are able to complete the requests through their electronic health records — which can be most efficient when that capability is allowed.
In a statement released with the survey findings, AMA charged insurance companies with a “year of foot-dragging and opposition” to prior authorization reforms.
According to the study, the AMA is encouraging the use of programs that selectively implement PA requirements based on stratification of healthcare providers’ performance and adherence to evidence-based medicine, but the results from the study show that only 8 percent of physicians report contracting with health plans that offer programs that exempt providers from PA. Likewise, the AMA wants an overall revision of PA requirements, including the list of services subject to PA, based on data analytics and up-to-date clinical criteria. A majority (88 percent) of physicians report that the number of PAs required for prescription medications and medical services has actually increased over the last five years.
From the payer’s point of view, prior authorizations serve as a cost control that limits unnecessary care, and the practice has supporters in high places. For example, a Government Accountability Office report released in 2017 found that prior authorization in Medicare saved as much as $1.9 billion through March 2017. The Trump administration’s proposed budget also includes expanded prior authorization measures for Medicare. The fight over them doesn’t appear head for anything but an ugly stalemate.
Life Image and swyMed announce a new strategic partnership to enhance telestroke capabilities. This engagement will improve the ability for physicians to collaborate and coordinate care while using swyMed’s offering by seamlessly integrating relevant clinical and imaging data into the telemedicine encounter. The agreement also deepens swyMed’s ability to connect to neurologists and primary stroke centers, which are already part of the Life Image network. Life Image is currently supporting more than 140 stroke centers within its U.S. network.
This new partnership will advance swyMed’s telestroke solution by combining the exceptional bandwidth management capabilities in its videoconferencing platforms, which are highly beneficial for rural area hospitals, with access to all relevant medical records, diagnostic imaging, and other critical clinical data.
This data is made available through the Life Image clinical image exchange, which is integrated into the workflows of 80 percent of all large health systems and academic medical centers in the U.S. The engagement will also provide Life Image hospital customers with a value-added telestroke solution as part of the Life Image Interoperability Suite, to extend neurology departments’ reach beyond the walls of the organization and deliver timely, high-quality care for patients affected by stroke.
Evie Jennes
“Despite widespread knowledge that every moment counts when it comes to treating acute ischemic stroke, a majority of stroke patients do not receive adequate treatment in time due to lack of access to primary stroke centers and appropriate specialists,” said Evie Jennes, CCO, swyMed. “We have dedicated extensive efforts to innovating solutions to overcome these challenges and optimize outcomes among stoke patients. By engaging with Life Image, we can now provide immediate access to imaging and clinical data to speed up diagnosis and treatment, as well as connect swyMed users to premier neurology centers and leading research facilities through Life Image’s extensive provider network.”
There are several access-related challenges associated with acute stroke treatment, which are further compounded by the fact that diagnosis and treatment are incredibly time-sensitive and require a specialist. Unfortunately, research shows a severe lack of stroke specialists in the U.S.: only 55 percent of Americans reside within 60 miles of a primary stroke center, and there are only an estimated 1,100 neurologists specializing in stroke nationwide.
This new strategic partnership between swyMed and Life Image will address these data access and specialist shortage issues by offering immediate connectivity, even in the most bandwidth-challenged areas, to stroke specialists across the U.S., and integrating all relevant medical data into the telemedicine encounter to allow diagnosis and treatment to begin before the patient arrives at the hospital.
atthew A. Michela
“Providers have long struggled with interoperability and data-integration issues across systems and locations, and these issues come to a head when caring for a stroke patient. Paramedics and emergency room doctors especially need to immediately reach stroke specialists and provide them with the patient’s neurological exam and other imaging and clinical data in order to achieve the best-possible outcome for the patient,” said Matthew A. Michela, president and CEO, Life Image.
“We see this partnership with swyMed as an important opportunity to advance the clinical practice of telestroke. Whether it’s a rural hospital with poor bandwidth or a hospital without stroke specialists, this new engagement will benefit all providers dealing with stroke management by uniting swyMed’s cutting-edge telemedicine platform with our powerful global network of data and integration into thousands of provider workflows nationwide.”
Life Image’s interoperable solution, which integrates into existing workflows, orchestrates the flow of more than 10 million clinical encounters per month. The network connects 1,500 U.S. facilities, 8,000 affiliated sites, 150,000 U.S. providers and 58,000 global clinics with a broader ecosystem of patients, life sciences, medical device companies and telemedicine companies.
DirectTrust announces that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Direct Messaging has joined the association’s Accredited Trust Anchor Bundle, allowing VA personnel access to the full national network of 1.8 million Direct endpoints. DirectTrust is a health care industry alliance created by and for participants in the Direct exchange network used for secure, interoperable messaging of protected health information (PHI) between provider organizations, and between provider and patients, for the purpose of improved coordination of care.
Participating in DirectTrust’s trust anchor bundle means VA providers and staff will be able to seamlessly engage in interoperable Direct Messaging and exchange of patient information with thousands of their counterparts in community hospitals and clinics in all 50 states and US territories, through the use of the providers’ electronic health records (EHRs). Use of the DirectTrust trust framework enables a single trusted “on ramp” for providers exchanging health information across a network that currently connects over 1.8 million providers using over 350 certified EHRs nationally.
Scott Stuewe
“Admission to the DirectTrust Accredited Trust Anchor Bundle certifies that an organization has established and upheld a superior level of trust for its stakeholders, which is a significant distinction. Kudos to VA’s commitment to maintaining the highest standards in privacy, security, and trust in identity,” said DirectTrust president and CEO Scott Stuewe.
Margaret Donahue, M.D., Director of VA’s Veterans Health Information Exchange (VHIE) Program said, “VA Direct Messaging’s participation in the DirectTrust Accredited Trust Anchor Bundle will open significant new opportunities for VA personnel to securely share Veterans’ health information through Direct Messaging in every community in the country. This is a major step to increase care coordination with community (non-VA) providers who also provide care for our Veterans.”
DirectTrust Accredited Trust Anchor Bundle has as participants Health Information Service Providers (HISPs), Certificate Authorities (CAs), and Registration Authorities (RAs) that have achieved accreditation either through the DirectTrust HISP Accreditation Program for HISPs or the DirectTrust-EHNAC Trusted Agent Accreditation Program for CA/RAs (DTAAP-CA/RA).
The key value proposition of the DirectTrust Accredited Trust Anchor Bundle is to facilitate interoperable Direct Messaging between HISPs in a uniform and scalable manner that is consistent with industry best practices for security and trust, thereby avoiding the need for further one-off negotiations between relying parties who are participants in the bundle.
Inanovate, Inc., a life science company specializing in the development of blood tests for cancer and autoimmune diseases, has secured an initial closing of $3.1million on a Series C financing round.
For the third year in a row, Christiana Care Health System has earned the 
Prior authorizations are hurting practices, the American Medical Association contends. According to the organization, prior authorization requirements have increased in the past five years, and 85 percent of physicians say the practice interferes with continuity of care. This is according to 
