Amazing that the takeaway is that its easier to buy a gun than to get credentialed as a physician is…
Weekender 2/25/22
Weekly News Recap
- Teladoc Health’s Q4 results beat expectations, but its share price takes a wild ride.
- Allscripts announces Q4 results that beat Wall Street expectations for revenue and earnings.
- A study notes that while telehealth visits spiked during the pandemic, the reason seems to be lack of in-person visits rather than patient preference.
- The DOJ sues to block UnitedHealth Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Change Healthcare, citing anti-competitive concerns related to UHG’s health insurance business.
- Virtual chronic care management company Omada Health raises a $192 million Series E funding round.
- WellSky announces its intentions to acquire TapCloud.
- Health Catalyst announces its acquisition of KPI Ninja.
- Cerner’s Q4 results beat analyst expectations for earnings, but fall slightly short on revenue.
- Spok announces layoffs, the retirement of its cloud-based Spok Go product, and its continuing search for an acquirer.
Best Reader Comments
Hats off to Epic and Judy for supporting their client and directly going after that patent troll. Too many companies just roll over as they don’t want to deal with the hassle, thereby leaving these patent trolls free to roam. (Trollbeater)
Neither Whole Foods nor Amazon has been greatly improved by the union. This would at least partly undermine Jain’s contention that Amazon entering the food business is some kind of model for tech in healthcare. (Brian Too)
I once had requested additional Epic certifications and had a manager tell me that the industry didn’t really look at Epic certifications. I really had to try hard not to laugh at her, but I’m sure she knew that I knew she was lying to me. Epic still makes certifications hard and expensive to get oth as revenue, and to try to support their Epic Boost boondoggle. Customers, meanwhile are okay with preventing the FTEs from getting additional certs because then they can go out the door for more money. (Fourth Hansen Brother)
[The CEO interviewing the final job candidate before they are hired] is to give all employees a personal face of the CEO. All companies, no exclusions, sometimes do stupid things. In a culture where employees do not dare to speak out to top management about this, it may linger for far too long. My idea is that if everyone has seen me personally, they will also dare to call or email me personally if there is something stupid going on that I need to know about in order to fix it. And lastly, it shows that we value all people in the company. (Torbjörn Kronander, CEO, Sectra)
Watercooler Talk Tidbits
Readers funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Mr. E in Muskegon, MI, who asked for a digital microscope for his middle school charter academy class. He reports, “Thank you for your support of our science lab and for believing in our young scientists! Because of your support, our middle school science classroom is beginning to resemble a real science lab! Our scholars are loving the lab coats and the microscopes. They say things like, ‘When I grow up I’m going to get me one of these lab coats, with my name on it right here.’ They are learning all about lab safety and how to use science tools safely and accurately. Most importantly, their enthusiasm for learning science is growing more and more every day! THANK YOU!”
The parents of a newborn sue MercyOne Des Moines Medical Center after a stranger enters the NICU , feeds and changes their baby, and then asks nurses “inappropriate questions” about the baby’s care.
A Washington, DC program in which 911 medical calls are triaged by nurses has diverted 17,000 of 47,000 callers away from the ED, with 24×7 RNs reviewing their symptoms and offering to schedule a clinic appointment and arrange Uber rides both ways for non-emergent situations.
A psychiatric registered nurse practitioner faces 22 felony charges of prescribing prescriptions illegally and for billing an insurer for the time she spent having sex with a patient. And in Michigan, a prison nurse is charged with a felony for allowing inmates to touch her sexually while she provided medical services to them, which staff discovered from the number of inmates who requested her personally.
A New York ophthalmologist sues a meat shop that wouldn’t sell him a steak because he refused to wear a mask as state law required at the time. David Kwiat, MD also wants the store’s proprietor brought up on charges of committing a hate crime and practicing medicine and law without a license. Asked by a reporter if he wears a mask while performing surgery, the doctor admitted that he does, but it gives him a headache.
In Case You Missed It
- News 2/25/22
- EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/24/22
- HIStalk Interviews Patty Hayward, VP, Talkdesk
- News 2/23/22
- Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/21/22
- HIStalk Interviews Amihai Neiderman, CEO, Nym
- Monday Morning Update 2/21/22
Get Involved
Sponsor
Report a news item or rumor (anonymous or not)
Sign up for email updates
Connect on LinkedIn
Contact Mr. H
The CEO interview thing still makes me uneasy. I’ve had managers go out of the way to say you could tell them anything and they have an open door policy etc. But in practice, that was mostly used to keep information from flowing through the company. The rug would get pulled over the problem so other departments couldn’t see it. It also doesn’t work to encourage employee initiated skip level communication, because you can only do that once before your direct manager hates you for going behind their back. You need good middle managers and you can’t get good middle level managers if you micromanage them and their employees.
Also, there are literal space and time constraints for everybody at a mid sized company having direct access to leadership. It literally is not possible in 40 hour work weeks. IMO what you really want is to have your formal power structure mapped closely to your informal power structure. A problem at a technology company might be a sales person is having trouble getting the internal resources lined up to make a sale, support can’t get development to focus on an issue that matters to their customers, or R&D can’t get necessary info from stakeholders. One way to solve these problems is the informal suction based approach that goes like this: you have problem, you find the person who has pull with the person who can get people to solve your problem, you exert pressure through this informal chain to get people to fix problem. For example, account manager gets tenured sales guy to get senior VP pal to bully software manager into sitting down with support guy to fix the issue. This is an incredibly efficient organizational structure for companies under 100 people. I’ve seen incredible amounts of work get done using this structure. This structure hits 500 people and suddenly nothing gets done. Or only a couple things get done like the things that enrich the people with pull and fighting the fires that bubble up to senior management. You have to actively work against this pull based structure – big orgs that have it are rightly called corrupt.
As someone who isn’t ideologically connected to their work, there’s a few types of companies where I’ve had the best individual or line manager experience. Very small growth companies pay well for high output and have low BS, very large mature companies that pay high salary for not much work bc they get things done via process, poorly managed companies about to IPO that pay equity. There’s a lot of miserable, poorly compensated jobs at companies that have slowing growth and immature management. People who have the means avoid working there.