Bernie Monegain

The vendors, as well as organizations like HIMSS and AHIMA, will support standardized APIs and will make patient access easier, the HHS secretary says.

The forum brought together women in various management, technology and clinical roles to discuss how best to create community, resources and content to address the interests of women.

UPMC says it will take a majority interest in New York-based medCPU, become a customer of the company and also will co-develop new products to take to market. UPMC Enterprises, the commercialization arm of UPMC, has offered to purchase stock from existing non-employee medCPU shareholders, and executives expects UPMC will hold majority ownership in the privately held company when the offer is completed. [Also: Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC wins Davies Award] Also, planned for the second quarter of this year, UPMC will lead an investment round of $35 million in new capital to accelerate expansion of medCPU. Existing medCPU shareholder Merck Global Health Innovation Fund is also participating in this round. “Our partnership with medCPU will provide UPMC with technology and solutions that will be immediately valuable to our clinicians and patients,” said Tal Heppenstall, president of UPMC Enterprises. Longer term, he added, the technology would enable the development of other data-dependent applications in areas such as care management, population health and consumer engagement. The customer and co-developer model is one that UPMC has also employed with data analytics company Health Catalyst. MedCPU counts more than 60 hospital facilities among its clients. It will open a Pittsburgh office, hire more than 20 engineers and other staff to work with UPMC to co-develop additional products and to improve existing solutions. MedCPU’s technology addresses the healthcare IT challenges of interoperability, capturing all relevant patient data, and understanding free text, dictation and structured data from EHRs and ancillary systems, MedCPU CEO and co-founder and former helicopter pilot Eyal Ephrat, MD, said. Twitter: @HealthITNews

Health Catalyst has raised $70 million in its fifth round of funding, bringing the total of venture capital it has attracted to $235 million. Norwest Venture Partners, the lead investor in three previous rounds of funding, and UPMC Enterprises, the commercialization arm of UPMC, co-led the round. UPMC is also a Health Catalyst customer and technology development partner. Also contributing are Health Catalyst customers MultiCare Health System and OSF Healthcare, new investor Leerink Capital as well as existing investors Sequoia Capital, Sands Capital, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, CHV Capital (an Indiana University Health Company), Partners HealthCare, EPIC Venture Partners, Leavitt Equity Partners and Tenaya Capital. [Also: Eyeing IPO, Health Catalyst lands $70M] The company will use the new capital to expand its product line. “Our new products, funded by this round, will enable better, faster decisions, from the population level to the individual patient level,” Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton said. Areas of particular interest, Burton said, are population health management, care management and costing – “precise costing such that you really know what it costs to deliver specific procedures in specific locations.” There’s no standing still for Health Catalyst, a company inspired by the analytics that were being honed at Intermountain Healthcare back in the day when that kind of analysis was done on spreadsheets. Today, Health Catalyst is redefining what it means to improve healthcare outcomes and keep the lid on cost. It is also shaking up how a health IT enterprise does business, having persuaded many of its high-profile clients – Allina Health, Partners HealthCare and UPMC, among them  – to not only work with the company to develop new products, but also to invest big time. “Their investment is very, very meaningful to the company, and their involvement fits within the construct that has really served the company well for many years,” Burton said. “We have found that having mix strategic investors along with pure financial investors provides a healthy balance and complementary strengths. It opens the doors for collaboration and co-development that you wouldn’t normally see being pursued between a health system and a vendor.” Last year Health Catalyst increased the number of patients served by its customers to more 65 million, doubled its bookings backlog, doubled its revenue, nearly doubled its customer footprint and increased the number of employees nationwide from about 230 to more than 400. Burton has been open about Health Catalyst’s plans to go public – though no formal decision has been made. The board will make that decision, he said, and he is only one member. “But, I believe that’s the path that we’re on,” he said. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] “The decision to go public will not be because we need funding,” he added. “This round of capital is designed to give us the balance-sheet strength to get to the cash flow-sustainable territory on our own. As a cash flow sustainable entity, we will not be required to raise capital through the public markets.” Judy Hanover, research director for IDC Health Insights' Healthcare Provider IT Strategies practice, told Healthcare IT News, there are many steps in the data warehousing/analytics process that can fail “even if the tools are great, the implementation is stellar, but the folks in the hospitals that make decisions don’t use the information.” But what Health Catalyst seems to do well, she said, “is that last step of turning the results into reasonable and productive and beneficial decision making at the hospital.” Twitter: @HealthITNews

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute announced a plan to make it easy for individuals to access data in their electronic health records and share it for research that could improve care for their conditions.

McKesson is expanding its footprint in the oncology field with a combined $1.2 billion acquisition of two companies – Vantage Oncology and Biologics.

Deal puts focus on mobile population health, chronic care management.

Israel-based artificial intelligence startup MedyMatch Technology has launched with an artificial intelligence product that it hopes will improve performance in healthcare through its real-time decision support tools. MedyMatch also announced earlier this month that former Philips Imaging Systems CEO Gene Saragnese joined the company as chairman and CEO. Company officials said they would soon open the company’s first U.S. office in Boston in order to provide support for the startup’s rapidly expanding list of clinical trial partners, machine and deep learning collaborations and product development. MedyMatch uses advanced cognitive analytics and artificial intelligence to provide real-time decision support tools that, together with standard emergency room imaging platforms, helps the radiologist or emergency room physician recognize what is often the hardest to see or most obscure conditions. Despite advancements in medical imaging technologies, the medical imaging misdiagnosis rate in the emergency room has remained unchanged for 30 years, executives point out, with misdiagnosis occurring in approximately 30 percent of cases. [Poll: What topics will define HIMSS16?] The American Heart Association and American Stroke Association estimate that by 2030, there will be approximately 3.4 million stroke victims annually in the United States, with a total cost of $240 billion. Moreover, 42 percent of that cost – about  $183 billion – is attributed to the annual direct medical and extended care expenses. MedyMatch officials say the startup can help reduce the cost because of its accuracy in the treatment window, which in turn can help lower the number of people with long-term chronic conditions. As Saragnese sees it, MedyMatch’s technology and artificial intelligence-based image classification will provide physicians with the deeper insights they need to make the right diagnosis and do so quickly. Before Philips Healthcare, Saragnese headed up the CT, molecular imaging and image processing divisions within GE Healthcare. Prior to that, he served as GE Healthcare’s chief technology officer and the general manager of GE's MRI business. Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Massachusetts General Hospital and Cogito have partnered on a National Institute of Mental Health-funded project aimed at addressing depression and bipolar disorder. MGH is the largest hospital in the Bay State, and serves as the teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School. Cogito, a startup spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializes in behavioral analytics. "We focus on automatically measuring behavior and understanding behavior," said Cogito CEO Joshua Feast. "We're interested in the way people move and react. On the healthcare front, Cogito technologies are aimed at helping organizations understand, manage and care for patients. [Also: Behavioral health data 'burdens EHRs'] In its work with MGH, Cogito will deploy Cogito's Companion app, designed to analyze voice patterns to detect emotions. When you look at depression or bipolar disorder, one of the key goals is to prevent people from relapsing, said Thilo Deckersbach, MD, who is leading the new study and is associate professor, Harvard Medical School. "One of the ways to do that," he said, "is to keep an eye on their mood. You have to make sure they pay attention to it to make sure it doesn't creep in because the sooner you can intervene, the better your chances are to prevent a recurrence of depression or to prevent a recurrence of mania. So, it's all about prevention." However, Deckersbach said that humans – with or without behavioral disorders –  are good at tracking at the beginning, but as time goes by, they forget. [Also: $1.3 million in EHR grants for behavioral health] "It's where Cogito and the Companion as a platform come into the game," he said. "If you can devise a method that a smartphone does the job for you, and you do not need to track your mood every day, then you have achieved something that is highly sensitive, highly reliable that you can detect your mood early and prevent depression or mania." MGH's MoodNetwork is a nationwide patient-powered system and a critical engine to help power the new research initiative, which is funded through a $1.8 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Worldwide, about 350 million people suffer from depression, according to the World Health Organization, and bipolar disorder affects more than 5.7 million American adults. [Also: 11 essential quotes from notable HIMSS keynotes] The project, which is open to 1,000 MoodNetwork participants, will provide real-time mood feedback to patients based on daily audio diaries recorded via Cogito Companion, an application on patients' mobile devices. The initiative will track key behavioral indicators, such as physical isolation, social connectedness and fatigue – the major symptom groups for mood disorder. The intent is to create health data set aimed at improving the experiences of people with depression and bipolar disorder. "While many expect that physical disorders would solely account for disability, major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder are among the top causes globally," Andrew A. Nierenberg, MD, director of the Bipolar Research Program at MGH, and principal investigator of MoodNetwork, said in a statement. "The goal of this initiative is to understand symptom relapse over the lifecycle of these conditions and offer long-term care and support options for patients. With the yearly combined annual cost of depression and bipolar disorder at greater than $200 billion, we hope to bend the care and cost curve with the help of behavioral analytics synched to this patient population." Twitter: @HealthITNews

Medsphere Systems, maker of the OpenVista electronic health record, and MBS/Net have merged, adding physician practice services and proprietary applications to Medsphere’s existing healthcare IT tools and services for acute and inpatient behavioral health settings.  Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but officials said MBS/Net will retain its name and operate as a division of Medsphere.  Medsphere’s OpenVista EHR is derived from the VistA system developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Service. [Also: Health Partners New England taps Medsphere for behavioral health] The addition of Cleveland-based MBS/Net expands Medsphere’s products and services to include an ambulatory physician suite of products that includes a physician practice management system, ambulatory EHR, document management system and a scheduling app. It also includes the company’s outsourced revenue cycle management and practice hardware management services, officials say. The Medsphere-MBS/Net merger follows the March 2015 merger of Medsphere and Phoenix Health Systems, which provides a range of healthcare IT services, including systems implementation, compliance project management and more. MBS/Net’s products and services coupled with Medsphere’s OpenVista platform will further interoperability between Medsphere’s hospital clients and their affiliated physician communities, Medsphere President and CEO Irv Lichtenwald said in a statement. "We’ve seen the benefits the practice management and revenue cycle solutions have created for MBS/Net clients, in some instances boosting individual practice revenue by more than 100 percent," he said. "The focus of MBS/Net solutions on physician practices and the recent addition of Phoenix Health Systems’ consulting and services enables Medsphere to meet the needs of providers across the spectrum of healthcare." Twitter: @HealthITNews