NASHVILLE—ViVE 2023 hit Music City on Sunday, following its launch in Miami last year. Focused on digital health innovation, the conference, sponsored by HLTH and the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), had 5,000 attendees in 2022.
The conference expects around 7,500 attendees this year, according to conference officials.
Senior editor Paige Minemyer, staff writer Dave Muoio and I are on the ground in Nashville bringing you the latest news and trends at ViVE. Be sure to track our coverage.
On Monday morning, a heavily armed attacker entered a Christian school in Nashville and fatally shot three 9-year-old children and three adults.
In a joint statement from conference co-organizers CHIME and HLTH, the organizations said they have committed to a combined $50,000 donation "on behalf of ViVE for the victims and their families of today's tragic Covenant School shooting.
The organizers have also launched a GoFundMe page for attendees, 100% of which will be given directly to "designated relief funds."
March 28, 3:30 p.m. CT
Employee healthcare navigation company Transcarent has tapped CareJourney as its provider data partner and will be integrating the latter's cost and quality insights data into the Transcarent platform.
The licensing deal will give Transcarent access to a collection of healthcare provider profiles, physician classifications, episode cost benchmanrks and quality measures, the companies said in their announcement.
The goal, Transcarent CEO Glen Tullman said in the announcement, is to give consumers a real-time bead on their options as they make care decisions.
"We selected CareJourney as our trusted partner to help us deliver relevant information on healthcare quality and value to empower consumers," Tullman said. "Healthcare is, at its heart, an information business and we're putting consumers back in charge of their care. We have confidence that, with the proper information, health consumers can make the right decisions for themselves and their loved ones."
The data set includes multiple provider specialties including primary care, pediatrics and cardiology. It also has scores for individual physicians, their practices and facilities in supported U.S. commercial markets.
“We’re excited to put our best-in-class health data analytics to work on behalf of Transcarent and the consumers they serve to help people make the best choices possible when accessing affordable, high-quality care," CareJourney President and Cofounder Aneesh Chopra said in a release.
March 27, 1:55 p.m. CT
Hallway conversations and show floor networking at ViVE 2023 were sidelined Monday morning by the news of the mass shooting at a nearby Nashville elementary school.
Local media citing the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department report that at least seven people were killed after the shooting at The Covenant School, three of which were children.
One of the deaths was the suspected shooter, who police said was fatally shot by responding officers. The other adults were employees of the school.
The children and at least two adult staff members were transported to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt with gunshot wounds and were pronounced dead after arrival, according to a statement from a Vanderbilt University Medical Center spokesperson given to press.
The private Christian school teaches children from pre-kindergarten to the sixth grade. It is approximately seven miles from downtown Nashville and the conference center hosting ViVE 2023.
In a joint statement from conference co-organizers CHIME and HLTH, the organizations said they have committed to a combined $50,000 donation "on behalf of ViVE for the victims and their families of today's tragic Covenant School shooting.
The organizers have also launched a GoFundMe page for attendees, 100% of which will be given directly to "designated relief funds."
"Gun violence continues to be a systemic issue that cannot be ignored as it is the number one cause of death in children in the U.S. according to the CDC Wonders and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (HME), outpacing disease and cancer," the groups said in the statement. "We will continue to partner together with our digital health leaders around the world, to be constant advocates for change powered by support, kindness, and most all-love."
March 27, 10 a.m. CT
Brentwood, Tennessee-based Trilliant Health unveiled a new health plan price transparency analytics tool for doctors.
The company claims it is the only analytics solution that connects any facility or physician with the negotiated reimbursement rate for any payer for services rendered at any location.
Negotiated rates for in-network providers have long been the most closely guarded trade secret of health insurers, protected by confidentiality clauses and antitrust regulations, according to Trilliant Health executives. Because of this information asymmetry, health systems, ambulatory care providers, physicians, medical device companies and life science organizations have lacked the information to negotiate effectively based on the volume and quality of care delivered.
“For decades, both providers and payers have lacked the data to negotiate reimbursement rates based on a comparative analysis of volumes and total cost of care delivered within a specific market. Likewise, employers have lacked the data to assess the recommendations made by health insurance brokers,” said Hal Andrews, Trilliant Health CEO, in a press release.
The analytics and market research firm developed the tool by combining its proprietary provider directory and market analytics solutions with data from health plan price transparency files.
Trilliant Health has a directory of more than 2.7 million providers, longitudinal patient journeys for more than 300 million Americans and hundreds of millions of data points from health plan price transparency files, according to the company.
Health plan price transparency data will enable value-based competition, Andrews said.
In response to a question via email, Andrews told Fierce Healthcare that the new health plan price transparency analytics solution will initially be available to the company's traditional customers – providers, payers and life science companies.
"Trilliant will consider adding a consumer-facing solution if the opportunity arises," he said.
"Phantom billing" is an ongoing challenge in the healthcare industry, which refers to providers submitting a bill to insurance companies or even the government for healthcare treatments that never occurred.
"Having a dynamic provider directory is the single-most important element in eliminating phantom rates," Andrews said via email. "By understanding the details of every physician, clinic, surgery center and hospital – the location, as well as the type and volume of services rendered at each location – it is easy to filter to the applicable rates. Without a dynamic provider directory, it is impossible to eliminate phantom rates at scale."
March 27, 6 a.m. ET
In November, Amazon Web Services launched a new AWS Healthcare Accelerator focused on workforce development to use technology to address training, retaining and deploying healthcare workers.
The 2023 AWS Healthcare Accelerator: Global Cohort for Workforce is a technical, business and mentorship program to help startups advance their digital health solutions and accelerate their growth using the cloud.
On Monday, AWS unveiled the 23 startups selected for the accelerator, from hundreds of applicants worldwide. These startups offer solutions the healthcare industry needs in three core areas: retention, deployment and training, company executives said.
The healthcare workforce shortage and burnout crisis continues and the World Health Organization estimates a shortfall of 10 million health workers by 2030. As a result, patients are at risk of dangerous gaps in care.
Key causes of burnout include daily overload and time spent on frustrating and manual tasks. Nine startups are focused chosen for the accelerator are focused on helping to reduce individual workloads by removing friction in day-to-day processes, streamlining clinical workflows, reducing documentation burden, outsourcing basic tasks to AI-enabled solutions and supporting well-being and flexible work arrangements.
Those startups are New York City-based Momo Medical, which developed a BedSense App to provide caregivers insights into the needs of memory care and nursing home residents; London-based eConsult, a digital triage and consultation platform to help physicians across primary and emergency care and Oxforshire, UK-based Navenio, which developed location-based solutions to help optimize the utilization of supporting teams that underpin patient flow throughout a hospital, like porters, cleaners, and allied health professionals.
That same cohort includes babblevoice, a practice-wide telephony solution with primary care-specific functionality; California-based RxPlace, a business-to-business marketplace that helps manage pharmacy operations; L.A.-based Dropstat, an AI-powered staffing solution that automates needs prediction as well as open shift and contingent staff management; Ontario, Canada-baed Hypercare, which offers a mobile suite of collaboration tools to automate manual processes; SQUID iQ, a platform that integrates siloed data, automates manual workflows, and employs analytics to deliver real-time operational and medical equipment insights and Doc Abode, a workforce management software that autogenerates healthcare staff schedules.
Another nine startups are working on solutions that enable secure information exchange, remote monitoring, and interoperability to safely deploy a mobile workforce and patient-empowering tools.
These startups include Rose Health, which developed a clinically validated behavioral health patient monitoring solution to support mental health providers; IoT Solutions Group, which developed technology to monitor elderly and vulnerable people’s activity patterns via a care sensor; Salt Lake City-based PathologyWatch, a company that helps dermatology practices digitally optimize pathology workflows via AI-assisted tools that interface directly with EHRs; The TeleDentists to provide acute, chronic, primary, and specialty dental care virtually.
This cohort also includes Visionable, a platform that aims to connect fragmented health systems by providing real-time, multi-streaming video solutions from initial consultation, to hospital treatment, to at-home care; Munich-based InformMe, digital patient communication via mobile devices; Mytonomy, a video-based patient engagement company; mobile dentistry company Kare Mobile and Supportiv, which facilitates peer-to-peer emotional and social support to supplement professional care.
The last five startups are focused on making healthcare training more customized, engaging and effective: Grapefruit Health utilizes clinical students for cost-effective patient engagement; MOONHUB, an interactive, virtual reality platform for training; Proximie, a platform that allows clinicians to ‘scrub in’ virtually to operating rooms and cardiac catheterization labs; Compassly, a mobile application to manage comprehensive clinical competencies and Florence, a platform to support virtual training as well as the ability to connect long-term care homes and hospitals with background-checked nurses and support workers.
"After stepping up to care for more than 6 million COVID-19 patients the last three years, our healthcare workforce is depleted. Today, we face a true crisis—simply put, hospitals and health systems cannot function without caregivers, and solving this crisis must be a priority for us all," Chris DeRienzo, M.D., chief physician executive, American Hospital Association (AHA), said in a statement. "To better lift up the workforce of today and grow the workforce of tomorrow, we must bring together both experts and innovators, and we must do it now. I’ve seen firsthand how technology can improve care processes, allowing both clinicians and support team members to spend more of their time improving patient outcomes. That's why the AHA is excited to be a part of advancing new solutions like those incubated by the AWS Healthcare Accelerator—our members need their support now more than ever."