What You Should Know: 

– Access Healthcare, a provider of revenue cycle management (RCM) and healthcare services, announced the acquisition of Envera Health, a market leader in patient engagement services. 

– This acquisition, a testament to Access Healthcare’s focus on providing innovative and superior revenue cycle solutions, broadens its service portfolio to include enhanced patient engagement capabilities.

Acquisition Stregthens Access Healthcare’s RCM Services

By leveraging Envera’s patient engagement capabilities, Access Healthcare will strengthen its end-to-end RCM services delivery and further enhance its proprietary workflows and process intelligence platform. This unique combination will deliver progressively improved outcomes to customers. With delivery capabilities across upstream and downstream processes, Access Healthcare is uniquely positioned to unlock insights derived from operational processes to prevent claim denials, maximize collections, and enhance the overall patient experience.

What You Should Know: 

– NextGen Healthcare announced the availability of NextGen™ Ambient Assist, an ambient listening solution that interprets patient-provider conversations in real time to summarize appointments and document care plans at unprecedented speeds. 

– Ambient Assist delivers AI-generated subjective, objective, assessment, and plan (SOAP) notes directly into the electronic health record (EHR) for provider convenience.

Fully Automated Ambient Listening Solution Summarizes Patient Visits Directly into EHR

Ambient Assist does not circumvent the provider by inferring medical conditions or making medical judgments. Once the provider reviews the note and makes any necessary edits, it is delivered seamlessly into the NextGen Enterprise EHR for inclusion in the patient’s medical records. 

Features of Ambient Assist include:

• Intelligence: familiarity with natural, conversational speaking and immediate recognition of medical acronyms
• 100% technology-based: zero reliance on scribes or additional personnel
• Complete automation: no copying and pasting into the EHR for the provider
• Auto-deletion: to preserve patient privacy, audio and transcripts are never stored or saved

“Far beyond a transcription service, Ambient Assist is an intelligent ally that helps providers reclaim their time and serve patients more effectively,” said David Sides, president and CEO of NextGen Healthcare. “This innovation is in response to the well-documented epidemic of physician burnout.”

What You Should Know:

• Elation Health, the clinical-first technology company powering innovation in primary care, today announced general availability of the industry’s first unified EHR and billing solution built to support high-value primary care. 
• In an industry of overly complex software, Elation’s all-in-one technology is already delivering beyond the clinical experience to financial success in support of strengthening America’s fragile primary care system. For the growing list of over 100 customers using the unified solution, practice benefits include seamless time-saving clinical and billing workflows, comprehensive functionality designed for primary-care needs, and a simple, modern interface compared to competitors. 

Efficient Billing Solution to Support High-Value Primary Care

“Elation’s EHR and billing system creates a seamless process for you to provide great care and get paid in a timely fashion while staying connected to your patients’ claims and payments. Elation Biling is a no-brainer switch.” Heather Nielsen Horacek, LPC and Director of Clinic Operations, Health and Happiness with Healthy Connections Hood River. “As providers and admin support, it’s easy to stay busy with key tasks and not stay connected to the income, but it’s crucial for the success of any small practice to stay on top of the insurance claims. With Elation Billing, it’s easy to know which balances to bill and we can quickly send patient statements. We’re getting paid faster since switching plus now everything is connected and transparent!”

Elation was created with the knowledge that high-quality, effective primary care relies on strong physician-patient relationships that are nurtured over time. In Elation’s work to ensure every person in America has access to high-quality primary care with a physician they trust, solutions that facilitate connection are paramount. Today, Dr. Bowker, founder and practitioner of Snohomish Valley Holistic Medicine, spends less time focused on administrative work because of her solution. Over the last year, practitioners have confirmed they require a thoughtful and innovative EHR platform that supports, rather than disrupts, their practice of medicine. Elation is proving that this approach is not only physically healthy, it is financially healthy. 

Elation Health’s award winning, clinical-first design, intuitive charting, and seamless integrations provide point-of-care workflows that are purpose-built for high-value primary care. Its powerful developer platform and robust API, which responds to more than one million calls daily, also empower tech-enabled organizations to integrate with Elation’s strategic partners and build custom solutions.

In theory, electronic health records (EHRs) have the potential to transform the healthcare landscape. They were expected to provide a digital hub that would enable seamless communication and information sharing between providers, boost efficiency, improve the quality of care, and foster optimal patient and clinician experiences. 

The reality, unfortunately, has not matched the possibilities. 

While well-intentioned, the Federal Government’s 2011 Meaningful Use Mandate program—to incentivize physician practices to adopt EHRs—did not specify detailed standards for EHR systems. The result was a fragmented landscape of multiple vendors offering poorly designed EHRs that met the certification requirements at the expense of the provider and patient experience. 

And because early EHRs lacked user-centric design, many unintended consequences followed. One of the biggest issues and strongest dissatisfiers for providers has become the amount of time they spend using the EHR system during patient visits versus interacting with the patient face-to-face.  

When EHRs were being widely adopted in the 2010s, technology was also entering a new phase with mobile devices and cell phones—triggering a permanent shift toward more user-friendly and always-connected devices. The contrast between the user experiences of the siloed EHRs and the modern mobile apps could not have been more striking. 

In addition, the “data dump” nature of these systems makes it difficult for physicians and other caregivers to parse out meaningful, actionable information regarding patients’ health. And exchanging data across practices or other systems such as hospitals and labs is manual and time-consuming (requiring faxes and phone calls), or expensive (often requiring custom point-to-point interface development).  

Ultimately, the patient-provider relationship suffers, as does the quality of care. Implementing these EHRs is viewed by many as a box-checked, not a medical asset—and rightly so. 

With value-based care contracting becoming increasingly inescapable, EHRs need to do better. In fact, value-based care may finally drive everyone to demand that EHRs deliver on their original promise.  

Value-based care is centered on the premise that tying reimbursement to better patient outcomes can improve patient health and drive down costs of care. However, quality and value are very difficult to measure, much less create.  

Payers recognize this and are empowering providers and practices to take on that risk. This ultimately sets providers up to have more ownership and accountability in the care delivery decisions and to operate at the high end of their license. 

To do this effectively, practices and providers need—and should demand— a customizable, smart, capable and efficient EHR that supports them in this paradigm shift toward enhancing the quality of care and improving patient outcomes. Here’s how: 

Intelligence 

While the general premise of value-based care is consistent, there are numerous models with different mandates. Each health specialty will have its own quality measures too.  

Take nephrology, for example. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has established several lofty goals to move more people to home dialysis, increase organs available for transplant, and reduce the number of Americans developing kidney failure in the first place.   

There is a multitude of value-based payment models and partners focused on achieving these goals, and nephrology practices need an EHR that specifically supports what’s applicable to them. This can happen at an individual and population level.  

An EHR oriented to value-based care should discern and identify population trends and risk factors, using multiple data sources, empowering providers to take proactive action that heads off more serious health issues. For instance, a robust EHR may identify a population that is driving up costs because there are few healthcare options nearby other than the emergency department or have a high prevalence of diabetes because they reside in a food desert.  

Though it isn’t widely expected today, the ability of an EHR to recognize trends and prompt intervention is critical to value-based care. Ultimately, success in value-based care requires providers to change behavior to deliver care through the right intervention, to the right patient at the right time.

Finally, as providers come to participate in multiple value-based care agreements, an intelligent EHR must clearly identify which patients are attributed to which value-based care program, and their associated health and financial metrics.  

Integration 

Another pillar of value-based care is that it enables “whole-person care.” So, while an effective EHR should support the nuances of a specialty, it should also seamlessly collaborate and communicate with other providers. Eliminating duplicate tests and exams, as EHRs were intended to do, and preventing negative treatment interactions, requires visibility of all patient activity.  

Nephrologists come to function as principal care providers for those with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD). 

They need to be acutely aware of details gathered from outside their office, such as hospital visits, dramatic changes in blood pressure, medication changes, and more. And these details cannot simply be displayed during the patient’s next nephrology appointment, the EHR must proactively alert the provider so action can be taken immediately.   

Efficiency 

A prime promise of EHRs is efficiency—reduced paperwork, better patient engagement, and streamlined staff workflows. At the same time, good value-based care demands more time. So, every minute of administrative work saved is an extra minute the care team can spend on patient care and service.  

Value-based care will drive providers to expect their EHRs to deliver on their time-saving promise in ways like never before.  

EHRs of the value-based care era automate standard processes, such as assigning a staff member to follow up with the patient in a timely fashion and enable seamless visibility of the variety and status of extended care patients receive outside the in-office appointment.  

EHRs also have a role in analyzing the quality outcomes of patient interventions. Only by doing this is it possible for a provider to reasonably measure the effectiveness of each initiative undertaken to both improve patient health and reduce costs.  

Why Now? 

EHRs should be a net benefit to the provider, the practice, outside practices and the patient. They should be more than just a tool and serve as a digital partner enabling improved patient care and more satisfied employees operating at the top of their license.  

Most providers likely don’t feel that way about their EHR today, which can understandably create reluctance to invest more time and money into adopting a new system.  

However, with the quickly rising prevalence of value-based care agreements, it’s important that practices consider if they have the technical infrastructure to take that leap.  

Clinical charting and billing are table stakes. Practices need to critically assess whether their EHRs have robust interoperability, advanced data analytics capabilities, and strong patient engagement features that deliver on the keys to success in value-based care. And because selecting and deploying an EHR can take 12-18 months, moving forward now is likely the best time. 

About Sam Gopal 

Sam Gopal serves as President for Acumen Epic Connect, a division of Interwell Health, a leading kidney care management company. Gopal has more than 25 years of experience in management consulting, strategy, and product management, and leads the nation’s best-in-class EHR for nephrology practices.  Sam has specific experience launching and scaling startup service lines inside of large enterprise organizations, which he brings to bear for Acumen’s transition to Acumen Epic Connect and Value-Based Care offerings. Sam holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University and a master’s degree in management from Harvard University Extension School.

What You Should Know:

– COTA, a real-world oncology data and analytics company announced the launch of Vista, a large-scale automated EHR dataset to accelerate cancer research and the deployment of trusted generative AI in cancer care.

– Vista will provide biopharmaceutical companies with timely insights from real-world data sources to bring life-saving therapies to market faster. Vista uses automated data abstraction techniques, machine learning algorithms, and medical expert oversight to glean clinically relevant information from electronic medical records at scale.

How Vista Works

Unreliable data is the single largest barrier to unlocking generative AI as a breakthrough tool to transform cancer therapy for millions of patients. Vista sources data directly from the electronic medical record and COTA oncologists provide programmatic oversight of the data to ensure the information is clinically precise and relevant. This transparency is critical to power trustworthy AI tools. That information provides better insights into the holistic journey of cancer patient populations, with the goal of not only powering retrospective analyses but also enabling patient matching into clinical trials.

“Real-world data that tells a more complete story of a patient has accelerated our understanding of cancer and the development of lifesaving and life-extending therapies,” said Miruna Sasu, CEO of COTA. “Generative AI has even more potential to advance treatment options for millions of people if we can build trusted large language models for oncology. That means first curating and validating data at a fundamentally different pace and scale. That’s what we are doing with Vista.”

What You Should Know:

• Suki, the leader in voice artificial intelligence (AI) technology for healthcare, and MEDITECH, a leading electronic health record vendor, announced today a partnership to bring the power of Suki’s ambient listening and generative AI to MEDITECH users.
• Suki will integrate its flagship product, Suki Assistant, into MEDITECH Expanse, the industry’s first EHR designed for the native web. Suki Assistant combines ambient note generation along with dictation and commands in one seamless experience, giving users tremendous flexibility in their clinical workflows.

AI-Driven Models to Incorporate Ambient Listening and Note Generation for Smooth Consumer Experience in Clinical Settings

Suki is enhancing its renowned application suite, encompassing mobile, web, Windows, and Mac apps, with the addition of a new Chrome extension. This extension seamlessly integrates with MEDITECH Expanse, enabling users to effortlessly access information within the Suki platform and transmit completed notes directly to the Electronic Health Record (EHR).

Suki utilizes cutting-edge voice and AI technologies to assist healthcare professionals in streamlining clinical documentation and managing various administrative tasks. Recent research reveals that 63% of physicians are grappling with burnout, with a significant portion of this burden attributed to administrative responsibilities. Suki employs ambient technology to capture and analyze clinician-patient interactions, harnessing generative AI to automatically propose note content. These suggestions can be readily reviewed, accepted, rejected, or modified using voice commands.

“Generative AI is demonstrating tremendous potential to transform clinician workflows for reducing clinician burnout and for the betterment of patient care,” said Rebecca Lancaster, MEDITECH’s Director of Product Management. “We recognize the meaningful contributions Suki’s clinician-focused ambient listening technology is already delivering to the industry and are excited to partner with them to provide our customers with the latest innovations in Generative AI.” 

Suki helps clinicians reduce documentation time by 72%, based on a study conducted by the American Academy of Family Physicians, giving them more bandwidth for patient care and personal interests, thus delivering positive ROI for healthcare systems. The U.S. spends nearly $4 trillion on healthcare annually, with physician burnout contributing an estimated $4.6 billion in yearly costs. With such economic pressure on health systems and documentation burden driving clinicians out of medicine, Suki helps organizations tackle these issues in a meaningful way. Suki is used by 125+ health systems and clinics across the country, supporting clinicians across 30+ specialties.

What You Should Know:

– Intermountain Health, one of the largest not-for-profit healthcare systems based in Salt Lake City announced the implementation of Epic’s enterprise EHR platform across the organization by the end of 2025. Intermountain’s current contract with Cerner is slated to end by November.  

– The deployment will establish a single, unified EHR platform across 33 hospitals and 385 clinics across seven states to optimize cost savings, patient experience, and interoperability.

What You Should Know:

– Thoma Bravo, a private equity software investment firm has acquired NextGen Healthcare, Inc, for over $1.8B in cash.

– Under the terms of the agreement, NextGen Healthcare shareholders will receive $23.95 per share in cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth calendar quarter of 2023

– Upon completion of the acquisition, NextGen Healthcare’s common stock will no longer be listed on any public stock exchange and will become a privately held company.

Impact for Shareholders

The acquisition is expected to enhance shareholder value and maximize NextGen Healthcare for future growth and success.

“Under the terms of the agreement, NextGen Healthcare shareholders will receive significant immediate cash value for their shares. In addition, with Thoma Bravo as a partner, the Company will benefit from increased capital, expertise and strategic flexibility to accelerate the Company’s leadership in providing healthcare technology solutions,” said David Sides, President and Chief Executive Officer of NextGen Healthcare. “Thoma Bravo has a 20+ year record of investing in premier companies in the software and technology sectors. We look forward to joining forces to deliver on our mission of Better Healthcare Outcomes for All.”

What You Should Know:

• UPMC announced it is replacing Oracle Cerner with Epic’s enterprise EHR platform to create a unified platform across its health system, representing more than six million patient records. UPMC previously deployed Epic in its outpatient space, Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports.
• UPMC cites lowering operational costs, optimizing security, and improving patient engagement as reasons for the EHR replacement.
• Migration of all UPMC patient records to Epic’s EHR platform is expected to be completed by mid-2026.

What You Should Know:

• WellSky, a leading health and community care technology company, announced today that it has acquired Experience Care, an innovative technology company offering a suite of software solutions for post-acute and long-term care providers.
• Experience Care has a proven track record with its leading electronic health record (EHR) platform NetSolutions, serving 150 long-term care clients with 850 facilities. The combination of the two firms will enable more providers to increase operational efficiencies, improve financial performance, and turn data into meaningful information that advances resident care—further establishing WellSky as a top technology partner for post-acute and long-term care providers.

Software Driven Solutions for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Providers

“This is a transformational time for post-acute care providers. Workforce shortages, regulatory shifts, and changes to reimbursement can have a profound impact on care delivery,” said WellSky CEO Bill Miller. “But it’s also a time of great potential in our industry, and that’s why it’s important providers have a single, trusted technology partner with solutions that offer full visibility into the patient journey. With the addition of Experience Care, WellSky becomes a well-resourced and scalable intelligent care management partner for long-term care providers.”

Seven out of 10 seniors who reach the age of 65 are projected to need long-term care before the end of their lives—meaning approximately 24 million Americans will require long-term care by 2030. Experience Care has built a powerful financial and clinical software solution that is integrated to streamline data management, save time, and deliver high quality care for skilled nursing, assisted living, and other long-term care facility residents. By joining with WellSky, Experience Care clients will be able to leverage WellSky’s broad suite of solutions, leading network of providers, and tech-enabled services to better collaborate, facilitate seamless care transitions, and achieve successful outcomes for complex patient populations.

WellSky’s deep experience in post-acute care is a natural fit with Experience Care’s clinical and financial management capabilities. Together, the companies will further invest in care coordination, analytics, and interoperability to improve care and deliver advanced revenue cycle management solutions to strengthen reimbursement and overall financial performance. This better positions clients for success with value-based care models. Over time, Experience Care clients will also be able to connect to WellSky’s network of more than 2,000 hospitals and 130,000 providers to improve collaboration and increase visibility to patients across care settings.

Barrett will lead the Experience Care team, and Experience Care clients will see no immediate changes to the services, insights, or support they are accustomed to receiving. WellSky and Experience Care will combine their expertise in post-acute and long-term care software and solutions to better serve the long-term care industry through enhanced solution innovation.

What You Should Know:

• Today, Epic, Microsoft, and Nuance announced an expansion of their strategic initiative to bring generative AI to healthcare at scale, integrating conversational, ambient, and generative AI technologies across the Epic EHR ecosystem.
• This initiative will expand secure access to AI-powered clinical insights and administrative tools within a wide range of Epic modules to enhance patient care, increase operational efficiency, improve healthcare experiences, and support the financial integrity of health systems globally.

Expanding AI-Powered Clinical Insights

Epic and Microsoft’s expanded collaboration will build upon our recently announced integrations, including Azure OpenAI Service into Epic’s EHR to automatically draft message responses, as well as a solution that will bring natural language queries and interactive data analysis to SlicerDicer, Epic’s self-service reporting tool. Microsoft and Nuance also recently collaborated to integrate Nuance® Dragon® Ambient eXperience™ Express (DAX Express™) solution into the Epic platform with a comprehensive approach to incorporating a broader array of AI-powered capabilities for clinical and administrative users.

Epic UGM Meeting Showcase

Epic is showcasing many of these new capabilities that build on MS Azure OpenAI Service and Nuance DAX Express solutions at its annual Users Group Meeting today, including:

• Enhancing clinician productivity with note summarization: Building on the previously announced AI-assisted Epic In Basket, the new solutions are targeted at increasing clinical efficiency for physicians and nurses, helping them become more productive in their daily clinical workflow. The solutions will help support faster documentation through suggested text and rapid review with in-context summaries.
• Enhancing clinician productivity with embedded ambient clinical documentation: Leveraging Nuance’s Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) technology, which is already deployed with hundreds of Epic customers and currently supporting thousands of physicians, Epic will showcase this DAX Express AI technology embedded into the native Epic Hyperdrive platform and Haiku mobile application, further enhancing a seamless workflow experience for users. In addition, Nuance has been named by Epic as one of the first Partners in Epic’s Partner and Pals third-party vendor program.
• Driving administrative efficiencies through reduction in manual, labor intensive processes: Revenue cycle management is one of many areas where generative AI can meaningfully improve efficiency. For example, Epic will demonstrate an AI-powered solution that provides medical coding staff with suggestions based on clinical documentation in the EHR to improve accuracy and streamline the entire coding and billing processes.
• Advancing medicine for better patient outcomes: By using Azure OpenAI Service, Epic is now delivering generative AI exploration for an initial set of users via SlicerDicer to fill gaps in clinical evidence using real-world data and to study rare diseases and more.

What You Should Know: 

• Safety net hospital Nashville General Hospital today announced a strategic partnership with Oracle Health to implement its CommunityWorks EHR platform. 
• Oracle Health’s CommunityWorks will replace multiple systems with one united EHR that will enable clinicians to access patient records from the 150-bed hospital and more than 20 outpatient and clinic settings across the county. 

CommunityWorks EHR Implementation Benefits

Oracle Health’s CommunityWorks provides a comprehensive, integrated user experience for both patients and clinicians to meet the specific needs of smaller hospital operations. The ability to share information across facilities and the continuum of care helps to keep hospitals connected to their patients and provide a higher standard of care. Today, more than 300 hospitals in 46 states are more effectively and efficiently treating patients closer to home using CommunityWorks.

“We are so pleased to work with Oracle Health on this very important project,” said Nashville General Hospital chief executive officer, Dr. Joseph Webb, D.Sc., FACHE. “This collaboration will not only enhance patient care, but also reduce health inequities in our community, improve the caregiver experience and increase profitability for the hospital.”

What You Should Know: 

• Microsoft announced that Epic clients, starting with Mount Sinai Health System can use Microsoft Azure Large Instances to run the large Epic electronic health record (EHR) database at up to 50 million database accesses per second. 
• Through close collaboration with Accenture, Mount Sinai continues to migrate many of its workloads to Azure and now has the largest production instance of Epic running on Azure in the world. 

Cloud-First Computing Healthcare Model

As healthcare organizations manage an increasingly complex care landscape and challenging economic conditions, there is a growing desire to reduce the complexities of infrastructure management and control costs with a secure, scalable and agile public cloud solution. Azure offers opportunities for agility, cost management and risk reductions by offloading the data center and hardware management to Microsoft. With faster time to value from current investments in the cloud and opportunities to innovate quickly, organizations can rethink how they utilize data and AI and take a digital health platform approach.