The first quarter of 2021 has been one of investor optimism as the vaccine rollout continues ahead of expectations and economic activity begins to accelerate in response. Within the Health IT industry, the already strong investment and M&A trends seen in 2020 have only accelerated. Over the course of the quarter, we observed $7 billion in private equity and venture capital investment across 158 companies. By comparison, Q1 of 2020 saw $3.2 billion and 127 investments. Health IT
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Time and Goals Should Drive Your Post-COVID-19 Care Management Strategy
COVID-19 forced many health systems to reassess and reconfigure their care management processes and staffing models so that clinicians could better manage more of their acute, complex, and otherwise healthy patients remotely to limit in-person care. During this time, health systems likely learned quite a bit about remote care management and discovered that they could still deliver high-quality care without their patients needing to visit their providers in-person as often. With two
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AKASA Raises $60M to Automate Revenue Cycle Operations for Health Systems
What You Should Know: - AKASA (formerly known as Alpha Health), a South San Francisco, CA-based Unified Automation™ company for revenue cycle management in healthcare, announced it has raised $60 million in its series B round of funding. - Founded in 2018, AKASA uses the same machine learning approaches that made driverless cars possible to provide health systems with a single solution for automating revenue cycle operations. AKASA’s unique expert-in-the-loop approach combines modern
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Nuance Acquires Ambient AI Assistant for Physicians Platform Saykara
What You Should Know: - Nuance acquires ambient AI healthcare voice assistant Saykara, Inc. to bring complementary AI technology and engineering talent to conversational AI and ambient clinical intelligence market leader. - Kara’s AI-powered healthcare voice assistant can be used during a physician-patient encounter without any voice commands, promising to eliminate up to 100% of after-hours charting and records entry Nuance Communications, Inc. today announced the acquisition of
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Evaluating COVID-19’s Behavioral Health Impact on the Economy
We’re now in a new year and new presidential administration. At least three companies are producing effective COVID-19 vaccines, which are being administered to healthcare workers, teachers, and the elderly. By summer, hopefully a large majority of the population in most countries will be vaccinated. From where the world now stands, we can see an end to prolonged isolation, trauma, fear, grief, and economic torpor. But out of the woods, we are not. The virus mutates, perhaps
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MetroHealth System, CareSimple Launch Remote Patient Monitoring Program
What You Should Know: - CareSimple and MetroHealth System announced that they have entered into a strategic remote patient monitoring integration partnership. - Under the terms of
the agreement, CareSimple will empower the Cleveland, Ohio public health system
with simple, patient-friendly RPM solutions to improve health outcomes for
their high-risk senior and chronically ill populations. The MetroHealth System, a nationally recognized public health care system located in
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Tyto Care Launches FDA-Cleared Fingertip Pulse Oximeter Medical Device
What You Should Know: - Tyto Care announces the launch of its fingertip Pulse
Oximeter device, allowing users to measure their own blood oxygen saturation
level and heart rate from the comfort and safety of home. - Expanding its clinic-quality remote capabilities, TytoCare users will be able to perform a remote blood oxygen exam, allowing clinicians to better monitor patients with COVID-19 and chronic lung or heart conditions. Tyto Care, a New York City-based all-in-one modular
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To Beat COVID-19, We Need A Modern Approach to Public Health Data
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken 270,000 American lives to date, has shined a light on another crisis — the U.S. currently has no standardized system for reporting public health data. Health departments all over the country resort to using paper, fax, phone, and email to transmit and receive critical information, and essential healthcare workers are spending precious time retyping data into systems from printed reports and PDFs. At the heart of this lack of a centralized infrastructure
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DaVita & RenalytixAI Partner for Early Risk Identification to Help Slow Kidney Disease Progression
What You Should Know: - RenalytixAI and DaVita announce a program partnership that
aims to slow kidney disease progression and improve outcomes for the nation’s
estimated 37 million adults with chronic kidney disease (CKD). - This is the first clinical-grade program that delivers
advanced early-stage prognosis and risk stratification, combined with
actionable care management to the primary care level where the majority of
kidney disease patients are being seen. - The program will use
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For Better Patient Care Coordination, We Need Seamless Digital Communications
A recent Advisory Board briefing examined the annual Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Readmission penalties. Of the 3,080 hospitals CMS evaluated, 83% received a penalty for payments to be made in 2021, based on expected outcomes for a wide variety of treated conditions. While CMS indicated that some of these penalties might be waived or delayed due to the impacts of the Covid pandemic on hospital procedure volumes and revenue, they are indicative of a much larger
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