Health Catalyst gets $70M investment, Philips offers ICU dashboard

The first full day of HIMSS16 brought a number of vendor announcements of new products and services. Here is a snapshot:

• Aided by a $70 million rounded of new funding from Norwest Venture Partners and UPMC, analytics firm Health Catalyst launched its largest technology update since 2008. The nine new product lines cover population health and accountable care, care management and patient relations, clinical analytics and decision support, research informatics, precision medicine, financial decision support, comparative effectiveness solutions and the flagship Health Catalyst Analytics Platform.
• Philips Healthcare launched a cloud-based clinical decision support dashboard for workflows in the ICU, called IntelliSpace Console Critical Care. The system also supports enhanced patient monitoring and tracking of quality metrics. Ambient Clinical Analytics and Mayo Clinic collaborated on the project.
• Health information management vendor Healthport has changed its name to CIOX Health. The move comes the acquisition of four companies in 2015. CIOX Health serves more than 18,000 provider sites, 100 health plans and 1 million unique requesters of patient information.
• Salesforce announced general availability of its Salesforce Health Cloud for patient relationship management. Features supporting personalized care include complete patient views by putting all patient information in one place, along with family information and a diagram of the extended care team, a single console for managing patients, and enabling caregivers and patients to send and receive messages, get reminders and complete surveys from any device.

TigerText has integrated its secure messaging software with the Salesforce Health Cloud, enabling cloud customers to embed the messaging service into their cloud portal. Among other uses, this will enable clinical staff to streamline care coordination and patient hand-offs in a HIPAA-compliant manner, according to the vendor.

• Analytics firm Faros Healthcare is among the new vendors announcing its entrance into the health information technology arena. The company is a spin-off from Centerstone Research Institute, which focuses on improving behavioral healthcare. It uses artificial intelligence technology licensed from Indiana University Research & Technology Corp. Centerstone Research co-owns the company.

Faros provides a cloud-based platform that integrates with existing EHR and population health software to aid clinicians in achieving the best patient outcomes at an optimal cost,” said Jim Stefanisc, MBA, PhD, president and co-founder of Faros. Software tools on the analytics platform recommend a course of treatment, while also considering treatment costs.

• Hospital vendor CPSI has a new program, called nTrust, enabling providers to switch their electronic health records to CPSI with no upfront costs. “With nTrust, we help providers in acute and post-acute settings improve business operations via our TruBridge management services, while at the same time funding the purchase of their EHR with no advance payment required,” says Boyd Douglas, president and CEO.

Under the program, hospitals and senior care facilities outsource revenue cycle management operations to CPSI’s TruBridge business services. Proceeds are allocated to finance the purchase and ongoing support of either the Evident EHR for acute care providers or the American HealthTech EHR for post-acute care facilities.

• PatientKeeper, which sells a range of software products to physicians including CPOE, has integrated with National Decision Support Company, which has a guideline content delivery engine to enable physicians to access appropriate use criteria when ordering medical imaging tests.
• Aventura, a vendor of situational awareness software to secure and personalize clinical desktops, will use the single sign-on software of HealthCast. The Aventura software knows who the user of a desktop is, their location and the patient being cared for to authenticate and provide access to the electronic health records.
• Medisafe, which operates a cloud platform for medication management, has a new product called Medisafe Providers, enabling physicians, care teams and pharmacies to track patients’ medication adherence between visits. Providers also can track biometric measures such as blood pressure, glucose, and weight, among others.