| |  By Casey Ross, Katie Palmer, Mario Aguilar, and Mohana Ravindranath | | | Health tech execs bring home sky-high payouts  Chart: J. Emory Parker - Source: STAT analysis of SEC filings As the pandemic continued to take its toll on Americans and the fragile health care system last year, health executives brought in lavish pay packages, as shown by a sprawling new STAT special report. Hundreds of financial filings revealed that compensation for CEOs topped $4.5 billion in 2021. And despite being relatively new on the scene, health tech executives were no exception.
With several recent IPOs in the broadly-defined sector — which includes everything from telehealth companies to traditional health IT to patient data miners — vested stock increased several CEOs’ total compensation by double digit millions, with GoodRx CEO Douglas Hirsch bringing in more than $42 million. Read Mohana’s full story on trends in exec pay in health tech, and make sure to explore the full database of 2021 compensation data at the bottom. | VA finds safety problems with Oracle-Cerner EHR A monthslong inspection by the VA’s Inspector General found that a software glitch in a new Oracle-Cerner electronic health record system resulted in significant harm to patients. The inspection revealed that the Oracle-Cerner’s EHR failed to deliver more than 11,000 requests for clinical orders. Those requests were instead routed to an “unknown queue” in the software because they did not match a known location within the EHR, in many cases causing orders for follow-up services to go undetected by caregivers.
The VA’s inspector general reported that the software glitch resulted in 149 adverse events for patients, including two instances of major harm. Among the most severe cases involved a patient who was homeless and at risk for sucide. An order for follow-up psychiatric care was sent to the “unknown queue,” resulting in a failure to deliver the requested services. The patient was later hospitalized after contacting a VA crisis line and reporting a plan to kill himself. | Developing better search tools for medical records As the Oracle-Cerner inspection shows, finding patient information in byzantine electronic health records systems can be time-consuming and frustrating for busy clinicians. But researchers are making progress in building search tools to help with that problem. A new study by researchers at IBM and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology describes an AI tool that can automatically generate questions designed to help clinicians quickly find information to help treat their patients. They trained the model with data supplied by medical experts who were asked to devise questions — like when the patient was diagnosed with a disease, or whether they’ve already been prescribed antibiotics — after reading 100 patient discharge summaries. Testing of the model showed that it generated good questions 63% f the time, as judged by human reviewers, compared to existing models that only generated good questions about 25% of the time. The new tool still needs a lot of work, but it is one step closer to the ultimate goal: Building a product capable of automatically answering thousands, even millions of questions, within seconds. | July 26 | A conversation with Admiral Rachel Levine Admiral Levine has used her position to prioritize the challenges that members of the LGBTQ+ community face when trying to access health care. Join her as she takes the virtual stage to share her story, and more about what she hopes to achieve, as part of our STATUS List Spotlight series. Register now. | A smattering of series As and more layoffs -
Canvas Medical, the developer of EHR software designed to eliminate clunky dropdowns, raised $24 million in a Series B round led by M13. The EHR is designed to help a broad array of caregivers track information on patients by auto filling documentation instead of requiring dropdowns that often prove wonky and ineffective. -
LetsGetChecked, a Dublin-based virtual testing and diagnostics company, confirmed an undisclosed number of layoffs, part of a wave of job cuts to hit health tech companies. The firm attributed the layoffs to its acquisition of a string of genomic start-ups. -
Moving Analytics, a telehealth provider for heart disease prevention programs, raised $20 million in a Series A round co-led by Wellington Access Ventures and Seae Ventures. -
Eko, a company building AI tools for cardiovascular care, received FDA clearance for a product designed to detect and characterize heart murmurs in adult and pediatric patients. The technology aims to differentiate between benign murmurs and valvular disease. - Nutrisense, which pairs data from continuous glucose monitors with dietician coaching, raised $25 million in a Series A round led by 1315 Capital. Founded in 2019, the company has about 120 employees and thousands of subscribers.
| Health tech gets some first financial execs -
PathAI, which builds AI tools for pathology, scooped up Brandon Eldredge as its first chief financial officer. He was most recently Mass General Brigham’s chief clinical business officer. -
Digital pharmacy platform Truepill named Paul Greenall as its new chief business officer, another first. Greenall most recently served as chief strategy officer for consulting firm Prophet. - Health care analytics company CareJourney has appointed Mah-Jabeen Soobader as its chief analytics officer. She has previously held the same role at Archway Health and Oncolign.
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