Bernie Monegain

Medtronic and IBM applied cognitive analytics to 600 anonymous patient cases using data from Medtronic insulin pumps and glucose monitors.

With 900 care locations and a 1,200-member IT team, Carolinas HealthCare System is sprawling and complex. That’s just how Chief Information Officer Craig Richardville likes it. Complexity creates excitement, Richardville, who was recently named the 2015 CHIME-HIMSS John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year, tells Healthcare IT News. “It’s just so dynamic that it creates the energy.” CHIME and HIMSS give the CIO of the Year Award jointly each year. The groups selected Richardville for the 2015 honor, they said, for “pursuing an aggressive and effective approach to employing technology to help provide better care.” Q: What do you view as your primary mission as CIO? A: To best serve our patients by engaging the optimal use and investment of technology and information for our patients and providers to improve their health and enhance care. Q: What is your proudest achievement? A: First and foremost, my family – watching my three sons grow and develop into fine young men and assets to our community. Professionally, the team – the complete CHS Team coming together to address and develop new and exciting ways of improving our services and connecting to our patients. Q: What has been the biggest challenge you¹ve had to face as CIO? A: Change management – ensuring that we lead the transformation of healthcare delivery. Q: How has your work changed over the years, and what factor has most contributed to the change? A: The biggest change is the addition from an executor of a plan, in with the development of the strategy. There are many ideas in and outside of healthcare that are applicable for us to evaluate and appropriately implement, so being part of the discussion over the last several years has allowed an opening of all minds, mine-included, to what the future possibilities are. Q: How has meaningful use changed the way you work? A: Meaningful use accelerated our plan and provided a discount to automate the clinical record and processes and to build a foundational platform for many other key initiatives to be built upon it, such as interoperability, patient engagement, mobility, virtual care, care management, etc. In that way it was beneficial, but the requirements and timeline and maturity of the service offerings has led to some of the frustration. To ensure we communicate our success and future progress, MU needs to be clearly identified as service and outcome-oriented for ensuring our work clearly puts the patient first. Q: Looking ahead, what challenges do you see coming in health IT? A: Interoperability. True interoperability based upon secure standards is absolutely necessary if we are to achieve the vision all of us share regarding making sure patients have access to their health information, and it’s easily accessible to their providers. Unlocking the data in our systems to share with providers and patients is crucial to creating a seamless health information system. It requires that we agree upon standards and safe transport protocols. It’s absolutely vital though that in order to serve our patients, we provide them and their providers with the health data they need to lead full lives. Also, patient engagement. Providing solutions that are easy, accessible and integrated into people’s lives is a challenge. Healthcare is good at building and deploying very feature-rich and complex software systems. What’s harder though is to deliver that sophistication into solutions that are consumer-grade, easy to use and accessible to consumers. It should be as easy as hailing a car on Uber, ordering a pair of shoes from Zappos, downloading a movie from Amazon or making a dinner reservation on Open Table. These solutions have to be integrated into the lives of people in a way that is not obtrusive but still help them manage and improve their health status. Q: What challenges are unique to Carolinas HealthCare? A: Carolinas HealthCare System has a level of complexity that may be similar to some but different from others. We are a multi-state health system with a large portfolio of combined assets, but also, in various markets, we have regional relationships that are a mixture of managed services, leased services and shared services. This complexity has allowed us to be very similar to other communities in that we have in some cases, like EMR for example, where we have been able to build core competencies around the higher layer services, such as health information exchange, patient engagement, data warehouse and analytics that contain a multi-faceted number of systems, products and solutions as opposed to a single platform like many others. Q: What new technology developments on the horizon have you enthusiastic? A: Mobility – placing the patient to be accountable for their health and wellness by providing the apps and connectivity for them to do so. Virtual care and it’s continued quick advancement and acceptance as a delivery model holding us accountable to the existing standards, yet improving access and lowering cost. Interoperability. FHIR appears to be very promising and we’re looking at ways here at Carolinas HealthCare System to use it to better build and deploy solutions for our patients and providers. Q: Where will health IT be five or 10 years from now? A: I would expect that we will be leading many other industries and that those in financial services, retail, etc., will look at healthcare IT for advancing their companies and industries, similar to how we are modeling some of our services offerings in comparison to them. There is a tremendous amount of talent within healthcare. We have arguably evolved quicker in this transformation that any other industry. With the management of the tight budgets that we hold ourselves to, we will inevitably be the one to lead the industry pack as we continue to help the business develop and deploy solutions that make it easier for patients and clinicians at a competitive price point. One of the things we’ve learned over the last 20 years, particularly here at Carolinas HealthCare System, is we’ve gotten very good at deploying solutions that are on time, on budget and deliver great value. Our teammates have great insight into how things work. We listen to and continue to better understand our patients, and how we can best optimize solutions and deliver value. I am very fortunate to be with a health system with a visionary board, and feel blessed to be part a group of colleagues that thrive upon teamwork and successful execution of our plans. Healthcare IT is not only playing the support role that we always have, but also leading and being a key component of many of our strategic initiatives. Twitter: @HealthITNews

NantHealth on Tuesday announced plans to acquire Boston-based NaviNet, wrapping up what it called a 10-year plan for the tech firm, CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, said. Under terms of the deal, NantWorks, a holding company, and its majority-owned subsidiary NantHealth, are buying NaviNet for an undisclosed sum. The deal gives NantHealth entry into the payer market and strengthens its personalized medicine goals. NaviNet is known for its payer-provider collaboration technology. NantVentures, the private equity arm of NantWorks participated in the financing. “The acquisition of NaviNet completes our 10-year vision at NantWorks and NantHealth to integrate and coordinate our complex healthcare ecosystem from the knowledge domain, to the care delivery domain and now to the payer domain, as a single sign-on, seamless, cloud-based, secure adaptive learning system for patients, payers, and providers,” Soon-Shiong, founder and CEO of NantHealth, said in statement. The billionaire entrepreneur is quoted in the Los Angeles Business Journal as saying a public offering for NantHealth, which had been planned for last year, had been delayed pending the acquisition and integration of NaviNet. The acquisition continues NantHealth’s vision of delivering on whole health systems integration and revolutionizing the patient-clinician experience by bringing real-time molecular and evidence-based insights to the point of care, he said. NaviNet has a customer base of more than 40 health plans and nationwide network of more than 450,000 users. Its All-Payer Access provider portal connects more than 450 commercial and government plans via NaviNet Open, its payer-provider collaboration platform. “This cloud-based system allows provider access to over 90 percent of covered lives in the United States and will serve as a transformative platform for the communication of cutting-edge knowledge to all,” said Soon-Shiong. “By combining NaviNet Open’s applications – eligibility and benefits from more than 450 commercial and government plans, referrals, authorizations, document exchange, claims management, and more – with NantHealth’s interoperability, decision support and connectivity platforms and with NantOmics supercomputer predictive modeling platforms, we are now poised to be the nation's leading healthcare collaboration network by transforming the payer-provider relationship to evolve from transactions to interactions and finally to collaboration,” he added NantHealth will be able to leverage NaviNet’s nationwide network across more than 170,000 active provider offices and 2,000 hospital settings to reach more doctors with genomics, decision support and connectivity solutions to enable better care coordination at lower costs for patients. “Our dream was to address the cognitive overload that faces clinicians today especially in the complexity of cancer, and support community oncologists as well as major academic centers,” he said. “Finally, we have the infrastructure in place to make this a reality.” Twitter: @HealthITNews

Healthfinch, which owns the prescription refill application Swoop, has landed $7.5 million in its first round of funding to bankroll the development of its new practice automation platform "Charlie." Investment firm Adams Street Partners led the funding, with participation from JumpStart Ventures, Chicago Ventures, OCA Ventures, Abundant Ventures and a private investor. This funding round takes healthfinch's total raised to more than $10 million since the company, founded by CEO Jonathan Baran and Chief Medical Officer Lyle Berkowitz, launched in 2011. "The rapid adoption and demand from health systems for Swoop is a clear indication that automating routine and repeatable tasks is the future of healthcare delivery,” said Baran in a statement. “To this end, we're moving beyond individual applications in favor of a robust practice automation platform that can handle many more tasks beyond prescription refill requests including visit planning, patient communication and much more."   Investment firms such as Adams Street Partners have been quick to recognize healthfinch's vision and its ability to execute for customers, said Tom Bremner, partner at Adams Street, in a statement. "Healthfinch represents a very strategic and promising addition to our investment portfolio,” he said, “They have what we deem to be a winning trifecta: strong clinical and executive leadership, a compelling product roadmap that will bring clear value to the healthcare system, and most importantly, clients who have been using healthfinch products to achieve up to 5X efficiency and financial ROI." Baran and his executive team, including Chief Operating Officer Sanaz Cordes, and Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Broad, will use Series A funds to add to their technical and clinical teams to accelerate development of the Charlie platform and expedite delivery to health systems, they said. Baran first made his pitch for automating physician tasks in September 2012 at athenahealth’s annual MDP (More Disruption Please) Conference in Northport, Maine. "Half of all primary care physicians are burnt out," Baron told the audience. "So this is on us” to "automate and delegate." “We’re burning out the doctors. And we can’t have happy patients and good health systems if we don’t have happy providers, said Cordez, speaking at the Venture+ Forum at HIMSS15. Twitter: @HealthITNews

Avera McKennan Hospital and University Health Center, the largest private employer in South Dakota, has reached Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model. By achieving Stage 7, the highest level on the EMRAM scale measuring healthcare organization implementation and use of EHRs, Avera McKennan joins an elite crowd. During the second quarter of 2015, only 3.7 percent of the more than 5,400 U.S. hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics Database reached Stage 7.  “Our staff have been working diligently to implement a fully integrated electronic medical record across the Avera system,” Dave Kapaska, regional president and CEO of Avera McKennan, said in a statement.  Avera McKennan is an integrated health system composed of more than 330 locations in 100 communities in a five-state region and employs 6,000 staff and physicians.  Calling the health system “an incredibly innovative organization that is truly enabling their broad mission with information technology,” HIMSS Analytics executive vice president John Hoyt pointed to Avera McKennan’s e-health outreach practices, HIE connections spanning 40 states, and cutting-edge use of pharmacogenomics as some of the factors making it a leader in the field. HIMSS Analytics developed the EMR Adoption Model in 2005 as a methodology for evaluating the progress and impact of electronic medical record systems for hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics Database. The validation process to confirm a hospital has reached Stage 7 includes a site visit by an executive from HIMSS Analytics and former or current chief information officers to ensure an unbiased evaluation of the Stage 7 environments. Avera McKennan will be recognized at the 2016 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition, which runs from Feb. 29 to March 4 at the Venetian – Palazzo – Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas. Twitter: @HealthITNews

Platform mimics an in-person interaction between clinician and patient, company executives said.

The Massachusetts eHealth Institute at MassTech, known as MeHI, has awarded more than $1.3 million in grants to 25 behavioral health providers to improve patient care, reduce healthcare costs and ensure appropriate privacy and security protection of behavioral health patient data.

The Commonwealth Fund has released "Aiming Higher," its 2015 scorecard measuring the performance of health systems state by state.

Whether you love it, hate it or fall somewhere in between, the Verona, Wis.-based EHR vendor and its Baby Boomer founder Judy Faulkner are guaranteed to generate lively discussion. Here are 11 Epic news stories from 2015 we think you'll find still compelling the second time around.

Evariant, which offers a CRM platform for healthcare providers, raised $42.3 million in a Series C round of financing. Goldman Sachs led the funding.