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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

New college graduates entering the lucrative mobile app economy earn about $99,000 per year on average, more than double the average salary that a typical new grad earns, according to a new report from ACT/The App Association. As a result, the booming market is giving healthcare professionals a steadily increasing number of new and potentially lucrative job opportunities. “Changes in the regulatory landscape have created new opportunities for connected health companies,” said Morgan Reed, executive director of ACT/The App Association, in a statement. “With healthcare providers shifting from fee-for-service to value-based payments, growth will continue in key areas including chronic condition management, personal fitness and wellness, and remote patient monitoring.” Mobile apps are poised to have a profound impact this year on the $3 trillion healthcare industry, the report titled “State of the App Economy” found. For example, 86 percent of clinicians say mobile apps will be central to patient health by 2020; the connected health market will reach $117 billion by 2020; and the remote patient monitoring market will reach $46 billion by 2017. The so-called app economy is a $120 billion ecosystem worldwide. While 74 percent of app companies are in the United States, 82 percent are startups or small businesses and 82 percent are located outside of Silicon Valley in both urban and rural areas. The research also determined that 68 percent of app companies have unfilled positions – and that number is growing. App businesses typically start out very small. Those that achieve success suddenly are in need of various types of professionals to manage and take the business to the next level of growth. Top skills in demand are: developer, marketing, engineering, business development, human resources, customer service, finance and legal expertise. These professionals can be seasoned executives or new college graduates. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT

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.

Lancaster Regional Medical Center said it has seen big drops in readmissions and emergency room returns, with the Pennsylvania hospital giving much of the credit to a referral management platform from par8o.

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.

In 2015, heath IT got BIG: Big data. Big data breaches. Big EHR contracts. Big M&A deals. Big anticipation about ICD-10. Big plans for (and frustrations with) meaningful use. Big fears about cybersecurity. Big hopes for the future of connected care and population health.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, in tandem with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, issued a request for information this week -- wanting to hear from providers and vendors as the agencies look to reduce the burden of reporting clinical quality measures.

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

After spending the past year reporting on loopholes and lax enforcement of the federal patient-privacy law known as HIPAA, ProPublica reporter Charles Ornstein has come to realize that it's not just celebrity patients who are at risk. We all are.